Poole Pack Profile: Get to Know Richard Warr

In high school, Poole College administrator and professor Richard Warr was fascinated by buildings and construction — framing, shaping and producing a high-impact project. But he ruled it out as a career.  

“I didn’t think I was creative enough to be an architect or good enough at math to be an engineer,” Warr says. 

In his own way, though, he has been an architect and engineer with the major Poole projects he’s been involved with over the years. His inclination toward invention and innovation extends off campus to his hobby crafting acoustic guitars.

“I like building things, creating things, whether it’s new initiatives or programs. I like to build something and see it through to completion,” says Warr, associate dean for faculty and research.

His current Poole projects include vital initiatives, from restructuring a department to writing the college’s accreditation report.

One project, like his high school passion, even involves the bricks and mortar of a real building: Poole’s eventual new home on campus. Warr is on a planning team that is working with design and construction firms for the five-year project. “It’s pretty exciting to be on the front end of designing a state-of-the-art business school,” he says. 

Another plan that will raise Poole’s stature is the restructuring of the business management department into discipline-specific areas. “That will align it with our peers and competitors and provide a more strategic focus…to create incentives and strategies to better market the disciplines,” says Warr, who is helping lead the effort. “With our national reputation, we should be structured accordingly.” 

“It’s pretty exciting to be on the front end of designing a state-of-the-art business school.”

He’s also working with the college’s Communications Office to upgrade Poole Thought Leadership, which showcases real-world applications and relevance of faculty scholarship. The new site will include collaborative multimedia projects that pair NC State science researchers with Poole faculty to highlight trends in everything from risk management to taxation and the economy.

“This elevates the role of Poole and NC State’s reputation to show we’re addressing the issues of the future,” says Warr, a researcher himself who teaches finance. The thought leadership site “is a major differentiator for a school of our level.”  

The Business Analytics and AI Initiative (BAI) that Warr and Poole professor Bill Rand developed also helps differentiate the college. The BAI has raised Poole’s profile in rankings of undergraduate business analytics education. “It was the right thing at the right time,” Warr says.

America and Academia

How the York, England, native wound up in the United States also arose from the right thing at the right time.

He met his eventual wife Karen — an American — when she was an undergraduate study-abroad student in England. A couple years later, when she started a master’s program in Wilmington, North Carolina, he joined her and they married.

Besides marriage, another big change followed after Warr came to the U.S.: He left the finance position he had with a London real estate company to pursue an academic career. He started teaching finance at Poole in 2002.

Why academia?

“It’s a lifestyle choice,” Warr says. “You can set your hours and pursue projects you think are interesting as an academic, rather than being an investment banker where you’re focused on trying to beat the last quarter’s numbers.”

Whatever his eventual career plan, he thought he’d always live in England. There, his image of the U.S. was based on such 1970s and ’80s television fare as the police show Starsky and Hutch, the family dramas of Dallas, and the Southern adventures in The Dukes of Hazzard.

Ultimately, it was a good change for Warr. “I love it here now. I’m quite happy here,” he says.

Richard Warr, Luthier

One hobby that makes him happy is crafting guitars.

He used a kit to make the first one with his daughter in 2019. “We muddled through it. It turned out to be a nice little guitar,” Warr says.  

The muddling became mastery.

Warr now builds the instruments from scratch as he cuts, sands, bends and glues the wood. The back and sides are usually rosewood, the top Sitka spruce, and the neck a combination of ebony, mahogany and rosewood.

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He gives some guitars away and makes others on commission. 

“There’s an artistic element to it. You have to make design choices,” Warr says. “It’s really nice working with your hands. You can spend hours just carving a guitar’s braces,” the diagonal wooden pieces inside the instrument.

Warr, whose son and daughter are now graduate students, is also a yoga teacher who has led online lunchtime sessions at Poole. “Yoga is a way to get out of your head, like guitar building,” he notes. “You’re just focusing on the task at hand, not other things.” 

On some level, the guitars may satisfy Warr’s thwarted interest in buildings and construction from his high school years. He describes it this way: “I’m excited when I’m working on something, when I’ve got some project to tackle.”

Such as crafting a guitar, so the tones ring out like a bell. “It’s very tactile, careful work,” Warr says. “It’s interesting building something that’s useful.” 

This post was originally published in Poole College of Management News.