Lloyd Tanlu to Deliver Lecture in Honor of His Appointment to the Ehrick Kilner Haight Sr. Term Professorship Tanlu’s discussion, “Designing Control Systems: How Structure and Syntax Impact Organizational Outcomes,” will be held Jan. 14 in Northen Auditorium.

By Brian Laubscher
December 10, 2025

Lloyd Tanlu, associate professor of accounting at Washington and Lee University, will present a public lecture to mark his appointment to the Ehrick Kilner Haight Sr. Term Professorship.

Tanlu’s talk, “Designing Control Systems: How Structure and Syntax Impact Organizational Outcomes,” will be held at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 14, in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library. The discussion is free and open to the public and includes a reception immediately following the talk.

For his discussion, Tanlu will draw from several of his research papers to show how the design choices organizations make regarding their control systems — both structural and linguistic — significantly impact organizational outcomes. Spanning corporate governance and performance management, the results of Tanlu’s research demonstrate that seemingly technical (and sometimes even innocuous) design decisions have profound consequences for organizational performance and employee behavior.

“I’m honored to receive the Ehrick Kilner Haight Sr. Term Professorship,” said Tanlu. “I hope that in the next three years, I can continue to deepen my contributions to the school by advancing my scholarship and teaching. At the very least, it provides me with a wonderful opportunity to present accounting research to a broader audience.”

A member of the W&L faculty since 2018, Tanlu serves as faculty adviser for the Washington and Lee Student Consulting Group (WLSC). His research examines various issues in managerial accounting, including budgeting and forecasting, management control systems, incentives, corporate governance and performance measurement and evaluation. His work has been published in various academic journals including The Accounting Review, the Academy of Management Review and the Review of Accounting Studies.

Tanlu currently serves as co-chair of the General Education Implementation Committee at W&L, and he is also a member of the Faculty Executive Committee and Courses and Degrees Committee.

Before W&L, Tanlu taught at Northeastern University, the University of Washington and the University of Michigan, among other academic institutions. He also currently teaches summer school at Harvard University. Prior to becoming a full-time academic, he was the assistant director for budget and planning at Brandeis University and a finance and accounting manager at Procter and Gamble Philippines.

Tanlu holds a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and a Bachelor of Science in management from Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines), a Master of Arts in international economics and finance from Brandeis and a DBA in accounting and management from Harvard Business School.

The Ehrick Kilner Haight Sr. Term Professorship, established in 2008 by Richard Allen Haight ‘84, is a permanently endowed fund at Washington and Lee University providing support for a faculty member in the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics. The award recognizes a different professor every three years and is administered by the provost or her designee in consultation with the dean of the Williams School.