Professor Ron Jelinek

Professor Ronald Jelinek didn’t set out to become an academic. After starting his career in the private sector, he realized that what energized him wasn’t so much the work itself, but the relationships it fostered. That insight led him to pursue an MBA focused on trust in business, and eventually a PhD in marketing. His academic work centers on the idea that sales is not transactional, but relational — a human exchange grounded in mutual respect and dignity.

“Many people think of sales as transactional,” he explains. “I see that as antithetical to what actual sales is. The best salespeople are those who understand there is a problem and ask, ‘What can I do to help the other party solve it?”

For Jelinek, this approach aligns naturally with a Catholic vision of economic exchange. “Embedded within any economic exchange is an interpersonal relationship. The person across the desk from you is a person created by God, with inherent dignity and worth. Never see them as a means, but as an end.”

In the classroom, he encourages students to explore how faith and business can inform one another. “Students are trying to discover who they are and who God made them to be,” he says. “I’ve been happy to be a part of teaching that – that business can be a noble vocation.”

A key part of that discovery, for Jelinek, is helping students understand what it means to live a full life. He shares a simple but profound framework: labor, leisure, and love. When rightly ordered, he says, they form the foundation of a meaningful life.

Through initiatives like Catholics in the Marketplace, he creates space for students to reflect on this powerful vision of integration. They consider their gifts and talents and a deeper sense of vocation. His goal isn’t to provide answers, but to foster reflection and openness to the work of the Holy Spirit.

Students see in him not just a professor, but a person living out his faith and vocation in everyday ways — as a husband, a father, and a teacher. In him, they see a faculty member striving after well-ordered labor and leisure in love. Here, professional training finds its home in vocation.