A Semester in Argentina. A Century of Political Turmoil.
One Ross student had quite the adventure in Argentina this semester.
By Joanna Herrmann, MBA/MS ’16 | Many in the country have high hopes for a comeback, but there are still a lot of lessons to be learned.
Another reminder that we have some pretty impressive alumni!
Learn more about the Ross alums working as a futurist at Hershey, a VP at Universal Pictures, a scientist at Eli Lilly, and more in our latest alumni magazine.
What’s the link between positive leadership and performance?
Becoming a Positive Leader to Accelerate Change …
Patricia Francis, IESE IAB: “Women represent a $28 trillion opportunity in the global economy”
How Do We Stimulate Global Growth?
Time flies! KPMG and RSM have partnered up to reward outstanding research for the 10th year. “We desperately need a next generation of well-educated leaders with a new mindset, vision, and high standard of ethics, integrity, and moral compass taking a pro-active approach to tackle the most pressing issues in society,” said Jan van den Herik, KPMG’s director of strategy and innovation. Read about this finalists: http://www.rsm.nl/about-rsm/news/detail/5294-kpmg-rsm-sustainability-award-for-cross-sector-coffee-partnerships-thesis/
MSc graduate Tirza Voss from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) has won the annual KPMG-RSM Sustainability Master Thesis Award...
Since first getting engaged in the impact investing movement several years ago, I’ve participated in hundreds of dialogues ranging from one-on-one conversations, to college and business school classes, to large, institutional and conference gatherings in the thousands. From these experiences, two mo…
THANK YOU Class of 2016! This year marks the first time that the MBA, MBA for Executives (EMBA), and Master of Advanced Management (MAM) programs each achieved 100% class participation.
EMBA co-chairs Jillian Jweinat ’16, Roger Boehler ’16, and James Coogan ’16 call the class’ response inspiring.
“Our results—100% participation and more than $200,000 in pledges—are one powerful signal of the amount of pride and support that our classmates have for Yale University and the School of Management," Jweinat says.
We all have a past. Watch a barefoot 21-year-old Mark Zuckenberg discuss his website, aka Facebook, in his gym shorts - http://esade.me/22PSpli
Owen Dean Eric Johnson is doubling down on what makes the school’s MBA program unique
It’s not unusual for a new business school dean to take over the job and immediately begin working with faculty to change the institution. The change agenda usually starts with a strategic study that includes surveys and focus groups of employers, alumni and students as well as one-on-one sessions with a business school’s professors. And then there is a good bit of lobbying with faculty to shake up the curriculum, pressure admissions to hike GMAT scores of the incoming class, and possibly increase the scale of the MBA program to more quickly build and strengthen the alumni network.
Shortly after M. Eric Johnson became dean of Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management three years ago, he hired Huron Consulting Group to guide the strategic study of the school and its positioning in the marketplace. They surveyed more than 1,400 alumni from class years 2006 to 2012 as well as MBA recruiters on their needs and views of Owen MBAs. He liked what he heard from employers. Owen MBAs, they told the consultants, are “every bit as sharp as the Wharton and Booth kids without the attitude.”
This time, however, the research didn’t urge a dramatic upheaval at all but rather a reaffirmation of the school’s size and culture. “The key ah-ha was that for much of the school’s life, it was often trying to create something different and special,” explains Johnson. “But we are like the Boston Pops. We are 50 faculty and we will never be 200. So how do we compete in a world where we will never rival Northwestern in marketing or Wharton in finance?”
DOUBLING DOWN ON ‘PERSONAL SCALE’
The conclusion: To double-down on what makes the school already distinctive. “What makes us unique is our culture and our size so the bottom line is to stop looking longingly at Northwestern hoping that we can beat them at marketing. It’s about creating unique, personalized experiences that students can’t get elsewhere.”
Those findings gained reinforcement when Johnson unearthed an old video of a lecture by the late consulting legend Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting Group. Johnson had been an assistant professor at Owen when Henderson, in his last year of life in 1992, taught strategy at the school and maintained an office inside the faculty lounge. Though Henderson had earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, he gained his undergraduate degree in engineering from Vanderbilt. When he retired from BCG in 1985, Henderson returned to Vanderbilt to become a management professor.
In the black-and-white video from the late 1980s, Henderson holds forth on how organizations gain competitve advantage. In his short-sleeved white shirt and tie, Henderson lectures passionately that competitive advantage dervices from “a particular mix of characteristics with some particular elements in the environment. No two species can coexist and make their living in an identical fashion.”
For Owen, Johnson views those characteristics as a combination of culture, size, quality and attributes, while the environment is a richly creative city known as a music capital. It all adds up to what Johnson calls “personal scale,” a high-touch MBA program that is young, small, well-funded and at a university and in a city that has witnessed a resurgence. The strategic study found that alumni and employers identified the school’s five core strengths as its highly collaborative and positive student culture, its small learning environment, the strength and quality of its alumni network, the authenticity of its students who are described as genuine teamplayers who are “curious, bright and a little bit scrappier,” and finally, Owen’s location in Nashville, a highly livable and vibrant city.
ADDING MORE ‘IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES’ TO HELP CUSTOMIZE THE MBA
To Johnson, doubling down on these attributes largely means staying small, creating a nearly customized MBA experience filled with more s0-called “immersive experiences” and leveraging the school’s location in Nashville. “We really are taking this personal scale idea across everything we do,” he says. “The faculty started looking at the things we do and came up with a number of new ideas.” One example: An entrepreneurship immersion in conjunction with Nashville’s thriving new Entrepreneurship Center.
Another example is to turn what many other schools do, the annual career trek to Wall Street, on its head. For years, roughly 30 first-year students out of the entering class of 170 would venture to New York every fall to meet with executives at the top firms. But as newbies in the MBA program, they barely knew the difference between the buy side and the sell side.
So a member of the finance faculty—Craig Lewis, formerly the chief economist of the Securites & Exchange Commission—built an entire class around it, a deep dive into the functions of Wall Street from wealth management and investment banking to the buy side and sell side. “We have a chaired faculty member go to Wall Street with the students, have dinner with them every night to help them understand what they heard and saw during the day,” says Johnson. “When I tell other deans that we get a tenured professor to do that, they can’t believe it.”
Similarly, 28 Owen students led by one of the school’s other economists went to Washington, D.C., for a sitdown for Federal Reserve Board Chairman Janet Yellen. “There are some who would pay a fortune to have that opportunity,” gushes Johnson.
Vanderbilt University, Owen Graduate School of Management
A NOVEL COURSE THAT BRINGS TOGETHER MBAS, JDS & PHDS
The school also has launched a pilot course called Innovation Realization, an offering that brings together MBAs, JDs and PhDs in biomedicine and bio-engineering. The 20 students are divided into four teams who then spend nearly every week for a full year exploring how to commercialize technological inventions and ideas. The four teams are designing a diverse array of potential products from a device to prevent vein failure in dialysis patients to a 3D imaging system for lumpectomies.
Sadly, one of the school’s longer running immersive experiences—a week visiting with Israeli tech entrepreneurs–led in early March to the tragic death of a 28-year-old, first-year MBA student. Taylor Force, a West Point graduate who hoped to use the MBA to transition into a civilian career, was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist along a popular seaside boulevard in Jaffa. Johnson first learned of the incident in a text message while leading another student trip in Guatemala City.
By the time his flight touched down in Houston, on his return to Nashville, he found out on a phone call that Force had died from his wounds in a Tel Aviv hospital. Though obviously shaken by the tragedy, Johnson says he has no intention of ending the annual student pilgrimmage to Israel for MBAs to gain the experience and knowhow of tech startups there. Short of bombs falling every day in Israel, he maintains, the trips will go on. The faculty member who led the excursion was back in Israel within a month of the stabbing.
SIMILARITIES WITH THE TUCK CULTURE
Johnson had something of an apprenticeship for his role as dean. During a 14-year stint at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, he oversaw Tuck’s MBA program and its nine centers and initiatives as an associate dean reporting directly to long-time Tuck leader Paul Danos. His appointment as Owen dean represented a return to Nashville for the 53-year-old academic. Johnson taught at the Owen School for eight years from 1991 to 1999 before departing for Hanover, New Hampshire. At Owen, he twice won awards for teaching excellence and left the school as a tenured associate professor of operations management. He joined the Owen faculty after getting his Ph.D. in industrial engineering and engineering management from Stanford University.
As a result, he returned to Owen with a wealth of pragmatic experience at a similarly small MBA program with a highly collaborative culture–and no undergraduate students. The biggest differences between Tuck and Owen is location and history. Owen is coming on only 45 years as a business school, while Tuck was founded in 1900 as the world’s very first graduate school of management. As such, Johnson is a true believer in a high quality, two-year, residential MBA program which he firmly believes provides the best chance for a truly transformative experience.
“The MBA is such a uniquely American concept,” he maintains. “It’s the idea that at the age of 28 you can reinvent yourself. You can change and recreate yourself into something new and different. That notion is entirely baked into the two-year MBA. There are many schools where you can get your MBA in the basement of your parents’ home in your underwear. But that is not transformative.”
Of course, another core attribute at the school–also in common with Tuck–is the superb outcomes for graduates of the school. Last year, the average starting base salary, which has gone up for four consecutive years, hit an all-time high of $108,255, a 7% increase from a year earlier. Job offers—with 92% of the class accepting their positions three months after graduation—were very close to record highs.
‘THE JOB MARKET FOR MBAS HAS BEEN ALMOST TOO GOOD’
“Two-thirds of our second-year MBA students have offers in December now,” he says. “Those used to be great numbers in May. The job market for MBAs has been almost too good the last couple of years because that creates all kinds of behavorial changes in the market. Companies are getting to students earlier and earlier, trying to get kids locked down on a decision before they’ve had a chance to really think about what they want to do.”
Unlike many business schools, a larger group of Owen MBAs go into healthcare, which took 12% of last year’s class. “We have a robust healthcare focus,” emphasizes Johnson. “Nashville is the for-profit healthcare epicenter. One out of six hospital beds in the U.S. are managed out of Nashville and the ecosystem that creates in the city and surrounding area is huge. Millennials like healthcare in general because it feels like they’re doing the world some good in it.”
Ranked 29th best in the U.S. by Poets&Quants, Vanderbilt’s MBA program is in a competitive set that includes UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, Emory’s Goizueta, Washington University’s Olin School, and Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, according to Johnson. But the school also sees applicants who have applied to the University of Virginia’s Darden School and even at times Tuck “for people who want to be in a smaller school,” adds the dean.
Owen Graduate School of Management
Dean Eric Johnson
– Vanderbilt photo/Daniel Dubois
‘WE DON’T RUN OUR PROGRAM AS A CASH COW FILLED WITH CHINESE STUDENTS’
“We have a fundamentally different view of this market than most schools,” he says. “We don’t run our program as a cash cow filled with Chinese students. We came to these programs with an MBA mindset and very much treat it like an MBA program, with dedicated admissions and career management teams. We hold our own feet to the fire on placement with a diverse yet predominantly domestic student population.” Owen annually receives 800 to 1,000 applications for the 50 available seats in the classroom. “The story,” insists Johnson, “isn’t so much about the applications. It’s about the quality of the applicants.”
Owen also boasts a master’s of accountancy, with CPA pass rates that are among the highest for any business school, as well as a master’s of management in healthcare for mid-aged career professionals who want to remain in the healthcare sector. This fall, the school is launching a one-year master’s of marketing for pre-experience students. Asked how many students he hopes to enroll in the first cohort, Johnson says, “We’ll be happy with ten students. We have the resources to do it right from the beginning so we want to cohort to be fantastic out of the gate with 100% placement.”
To Johnson, all of these plans jive with Henderson’s notions of how a successful organization creates competitive advantage. After Henderson suffered a stroke and died at the age of 77 nearly 24 years ago, Johnson remembers the day he stopped by Henderson’s office to comfort his wife Bess as she cleaned out his books. To this day, he remains in touch with her and believes his strategy for Owen has achieved a posthumous blessing of sorts from the late strategy guru.
Clearly, Henderson must be smiling from above.
DON’T MISS: MEET VANDERBILT’S OWEN MBA CLASS OF 2017 or OWEN DEAN OPENS UP ON THE TRAGIC DEATH OF AN MBA STUDENT
The post Vanderbilt Dean Doubling Down On ‘Personal Scale’ appeared first on Poets and Quants.
We’re counting down the days until we release our new animated video on 18 April. Here’s another teaser to whet your appetite:
We salute the participants in Operation Blue Devil!This bi-annual event takes Daytime MBAs out of their comfort zone and to the U.S. Army’s Special Warfare Center and School in nearby Fort Bragg to learn alongside military experts.
“An amazing experience. One of my best memories at Fuqua so far. We were challenged both physically and mentally and learned a lot about leadership and teamwork.” - Elle Xie, Daytime MBA ‘17
We congratulate #MerageAlumni Jeanine Jones for her appointment as the Regional Vice President of 2-10 Home Buyers Warranty® (2-10 HBW®). Jones will be responsible for leading the field sales team in the central region to reach new heights of success in all areas of the business. http://bit.ly/23zlK9k #UCIMerage #MerageAchievement
Denver, CO (PRWEB) April 13, 2016 -- 2-10 Home Buyers Warranty® (2-10 HBW®), an industry-leading provider of new home structural warranties and systems and appliances coverage for new and existing homes, announced today the new appointment of Jeanine Jones as the Regional Vice President for the new…
U.S. News & World Report (blog) | 3 Reasons for Rejection From a Dream MBA Program U.S. News & World Report (blog) Firstf, all of the top MBA programs are notoriously selective. It may be that out of every 100 people who submit materials, only seven to 12 are accepted. Harvard Business School – ranked No. 1 among MBA programs by U.S. News – rejected more than 8,000 ... |
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