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There are a few things all graduates from a top MBA program will pick up in the course of their studies, including accounting skills, a class or two on business strategy, and at least some instruction in leadership.

While accounting and strategy are pretty straightforward, leadership can be anything but. Great minds, stretching from Aristotle to Steve Jobs, have come up with a variety of different ways to define the essence of leadership. And there’s certainly no shortage of books on the topic, ranging from the truly inspirational to absolute junk.

So how does Vanderbilt set about teaching a topic that has so many different meanings for so many different people?

It comes down to three important pillars: A classroom curriculum designed to transform natural leadership instincts into systematic, smart decision making; a highly personalized leadership development program offering a Korn Ferry-based skills assessment followed by one-on-one executive coaching; and a small, supportive environment where student leaders have the opportunity to make a big impact.

Then there’s Owen’s size. The school is small enough to be able to “invest in students at an individual level,” says Eric Johnson, dean of the Owen School. But it’s also a top institution offering the kinds of opportunities available at its elite peers. “For example, we have many of the same clubs and student organizations that Wharton does,” Johnson says.

This multidimensional, hands-on approach to leadership offers students a robust platform from which they can continue to hone their leadership skills long after they’ve left school.

In the classroom

All full-time MBA students start with the class Leading Teams and Organizations, a required course that is taught in the first mod each year.

And every year, Associate Professor Tim Vogus, who has taught the course for the past decade, braces for an onslaught of generalizations and vague leadership platitudes coming from students.

“One of my primary goals is to get students thinking in terms of specific decisions they’d make in tough situations,” Vogus says.

Among the cases and simulations the class examines is one that imagines students serving at the helm of Mission Control at NASA. The scenario says that after many hours carrying out grueling, mindless tasks ordered by commanders on the ground, a group of astronauts in midorbit demands to conduct a few scientific experiments of their own. If they’re denied, the astronauts say they’ll go on strike.

Vogus says responses to the astronauts’ demands vary—with one student going so far as threatening to cut off the ship’s oxygen supply—but at the very least he wants to force students to consider the crew’s perspective. “These astronauts are all highly trained scientists and they’re being given about as much autonomy as a fry cook at McDonalds,” he explains. “What makes their work meaningful? How do we keep them motivated? They just want to be treated as individuals with autonomy, not robots.”

While there is no correct answer for how to handle this simulated strike in space, Vogus says the goal is for students to understand how to transform their gut reactions into thoughtful decisions executed in a systematic way. This involves developing not only a sense of self-awareness about how a person reacts in certain situations, but also understanding how a decision’s consequences ripple far beyond one’s immediate field of vision.

Vogus also tries to get students to think about leadership as something beyond the traditional notion of a Jack Welch-styled executive barking out orders from behind a wood-paneled desk. “Leadership comes in many different forms,” Vogus says. “It’s not just about where you are on the corporate ladder.”

Leading is learning … and vice versa

For Associate Professor Ranga Ramanujam, leading is inseparable from learning. This is the primary message in his popular leadership course, Organizational Learning and Effectiveness, developed in 2011 after years of teaching Leading Teams and Organizations.

“How do you intentionally and continuously learn to be a better leader? You learn from experience, from others, from experiments and from failure. It’s ultimately not an academic exercise,” Ramanujam says. Nevertheless, he says, there are three key areas that a person must continuously learn to manage to become an effective leader:

1. Yourself—How do your actions help achieve results?
2. Information—What data can you harness to make better decisions?
3. People—How do you influence others in a way that gets the job done?

“This is management in the true sense of the word,” Ramanujam says. “I tell MBA students not to shortchange the degree they’re getting by defining themselves narrowly in terms of a function. First and foremost, you are a manager, no matter what area you specialize in. Being a manager is a multifaceted and complex role.”

Even seemingly trite tasks such as forming teams and splitting work assignments can offer opportunities to learn about effective management, Ramanujam says. In class, he instructs students to group themselves into two sets of non-overlapping teams and then observes how they select team members. Students typically group themselves with others in their same areas of concentration or with whom they have worked previously, forgoing opportunities to expand their networks. “At one point, I developed a map of the class to show the students what was happening,” Ramanujam says, pointing out that it was also an example of how he tries to find actionable data in everyday situations.

He is surprised, too, by the tendency of students to divide project work among team members in equal portions out of a sense of fairness without also considering what will produce the best final outcome.

“What makes an effective leader is defined by what you pay attention to,” Ramanujam says. “There are so many things that affect an organization. So how you allocate your attention makes a significant difference because you can’t pay attention to everything.”

Leader, know thyself

If leading does come down to learning, Owen students have ample opportunity to delve deep into their own leadership strengths and weaknesses through the school’s highly rated Leadership Development program.

Over the years, the program has added strategic partnerships with global talent management firm Korn Ferry and Hogan Assessments. MBA students begin by taking Hogan LEAD Assessments, a diagnostic tool used by a majority of Fortune 500 companies. It offers students a detailed roadmap of their working styles and points out unique capabilities, as well as challenges and areas for potential development. “We believe that self-awareness is the key to long-term leader success,” says Melinda Allen, executive director of LDP. “That’s why the assessment serves as an instrumental starting point.”

Students can tailor their LDP experience from a range of different approaches. The program includes an individual approach, which provides students with four one-on-one sessions with a vetted executive coach as well as a full 360-degree assessment. A shared approach that includes group coaching sessions and assessment tools is available for students who prefer working in groups. Alternatively, students can pick a flex option that provides two one-on-one coaching sessions at the timing of their choice in the first year. Students can also simply choose programming on an a la carte basis to best suit their needs. Nearly 80 percent of the most recent class of first-year MBAs participated in one of these approaches.

“For me, LDP defined the term ‘self-aware’ in a whole new way. We are all self-aware—I thought. How much could there be about myself that I don’t know already?” says Fazulul Haque Sheik, MBA’14. “But a few sessions into the program I realized that I knew very little about myself. LDP helped me identify my shortcomings, built a structure to help me overcome challenges, and most important, taught me the skills to replicate this structure anytime, anywhere to sustain the learning process.”

Allen says the program offers the type of personalized, in-depth leadership training normally reserved for rising corporate executives who have been identified as having high leadership potential. “Our students come out of school having completed the same program many people wait years to have access to,” she says.

Vogus says LDP adds a complementary layer to what he and others are teaching in the classroom. “In both LDP and in the classroom, we are able to meet the students where they are in terms of developing their leadership abilities,” he says.

Leadership as contact sport

As anyone at Owen—and elsewhere—is quick to point out, there’s only so much one can learn about leadership in the classroom or even an LDP program. Johnson likes to say that leadership is a contact sport, and that it’s Owen’s obligation to provide students with opportunities to lead in an environment that’s both safe and supportive.

“We want to figure out and expand ways to empower students to take ownership of things related to the school. We want to be there to support them, and if needed, to help pick up the pieces when things don’t go right,” Johnson says.

As a prime example, he points to the annual student-run Vanderbilt Health Care Conference, which has attracted top speakers and health care recruiters for the past eight years. While members of Owen’s staff, as well as faculty members like Larry Van Horn, executive director of health affairs at Owen, lent their support and contacts for the conference, it is ultimately the students that pull the event together.

“The two women who ran last year’s conference—Megan Eberhard and Kristen O’Neill—they absolutely owned that conference,” Johnson says. The dean says he sees similar examples all around Owen, from the roles taken on by student government and club leaders to those involved with service organizations like Project Pyramid and 100% Owen.

“Leadership, in the end, is about being able to positively influence and achieve objectives through other people,” Johnson says. “Many MBA students haven’t had that opportunity before coming to business school. Sure, we can teach about leadership—and we do that well—but we must also provide opportunities to get real experience.”

Leadership across Owen

Students in Vanderbilt’s full-time MBA program aren’t the only ones to benefit from the school’s Leadership Development Program. All degree-seeking students experience LDP programming in a manner relevant to their professional goals. Read on for executive program details —information for those just launching a career is here (lead and succeed)

Executive MBA
Vanderbilt’s MBA for Executives program takes a four-prong approach to honing an executive edge in leadership. This involves interactive leadership workshops; resources and support designed to help students learn from their cross-functional C-team group experience; leadership assessments and coaching sessions with experienced executive coaches; and support to help the students develop individualized leadership development plans.

Master of Management in Health Care
The Leadership Development Program is woven throughout the MMHC program. It includes both an executive coach, who helps students develop a personalized leadership development action plan, and a team coach who supports teams throughout their capstone projects when they manage real-world projects for health care organizations.

Recommended reading from Owen classes

Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
by Adam Grant

Lift: Becoming a Positive Force in Any Situation
by Ryan W. Quinn and Robert E. Quinn

Managing
by Henry Mintzberg

When Dean Eric Johnson thinks about Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, pianos are not far from his mind. Not just any pianos, that is, but those made by Steinway & Sons—the 160-year-old brand played by 98 percent of the concert pianists around the globe.

Odd as the pairing seems, Johnson believes there is more of a similarity between the school and the world-renowned piano manufacturer than what their disparate business models would suggest.

“At Steinway, they’ll bring the very best lumber from all over the world. They’ll go through this very long process—it takes them two years actually, kind of like getting an MBA,” Johnson told a group of incoming students in June. “But their whole thing is this personal scale; they’re going to take that wood and they’re going to make the very best piano that they can.”

Johnson, who serves as the Ralph Owen Dean and the Bruce D. Henderson Professor of Strategy, left Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business to succeed Jim Bradford in July. He has written two case studies about Steinway in his research and points to the company’s “intense focus on detail and personalization” as the key to its longevity. He sees those traits as the key to Owen’s success as well.

Johnson taught at Owen from 1991 to 1999. “I chose to come back to Owen for some really specific reasons,” Johnson says. “Yes, I love Nashville. It’s a great city and a great place to live. But it’s really the excitement of being at a school like Owen, at this place and time, that brought me back. Part of that has to do with the size of Owen.

“At Owen, we still have the luxury of working at this personal scale, and it’s that scale where I think real transformation occurs—a breakthrough kind of scale.”

In short, Johnson expects big things from Owen’s small community. He believes the school’s close-knit culture can help students live up to their potential by encouraging more collaboration not only with each other but with alumni, faculty and staff as well.

Johnson says an Owen education should reflect each of these groups’ hard work and attention to detail, and in this regard the learning process at the school is a lot like what goes into making a Steinway. There are no shortcuts, and neither one can be mass-produced.

And like a Steinway, an Owen education is attuned to something greater than the sum of its parts. A calling in business may not conjure the same feelings as a piano concerto, but it can be heady and inspiring in its own way—especially in the hands of someone like Eric Johnson.

Curious and interesting

Early on in his career, Johnson was an unlikely candidate to teach at a business school, much less be the dean of one. In fact, working in academia was the furthest thing from his mind when he was earning his Ph.D. in industrial engineering and engineering management at Stanford University in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

“I had no plans at all to go into academia,” he says. “And if I had, it probably would have been in engineering rather than business. If you look at my C.V., you’ll see I don’t have any degrees in business. Well, not quite—I have an undergraduate degree in economics—but all the others are in engineering.”

While finishing his Ph.D., Johnson worked for Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Calif. He was part of a team developing an automated vehicle for health care that was designed to deliver drugs to patient rooms and navigate hospital hallways. “It used an HP calculator as its brain, if you can believe it,” Johnson says with a grin.

Johnson’s interests and abilities made him a natural for Silicon Valley, but his career took an abrupt turn in 1991. That was when he received an unexpected phone call from Gary Scudder, an operations professor at Owen.

“I had been introduced to Gary through a friend of a friend, and one day he called me out of the blue,” Johnson says. “He said, ‘Eric, have you ever thought about teaching at a business school? And would you consider coming to Nashville?’”

Johnson and his wife, Nancy, had thought about settling down in a more affordable part of the country, and Nashville presented an intriguing possibility. If anything, it was the unfamiliarity of the situation—with Nashville, with Vanderbilt, even with just being in a business school itself—that convinced him to consider the job.

“The whole thing was curious and interesting. So I decided to come for an interview,” he says. “After I spent a day here, I fell in love with the place. I thought it was a neat opportunity. At the time Owen felt a lot like a startup company to me. It was really young and vibrant.”

Passion for teaching and learning

Once Johnson accepted the job as assistant professor of operations management, he never gave a second thought to his decision to enter academia. “I found that I actually loved teaching. Being in business school was nothing that I’d really expected,” he says.

In particular, teaching operations to MBA students provided him with an exciting challenge.

“Most MBA students come to business school having no idea what operations is. They don’t have a lot of feelings about the subject, either good or bad,” he says. “But by the end of that core class, many are considering a career in an operating role. They see that operations is really the guts of executing business. It isn’t marketing it or accounting for it or financing it. It’s actually running a business.”

Johnson quickly became a widely admired professor, winning the Dean’s Teaching Excellence Award twice in eight years and becoming one of the youngest faculty members ever to receive tenure at Owen. “Eric was an excellent teacher and had a great rapport with the students. He is still in contact with many of the alums from that time period,” says Scudder, the James A. Speyer Professor of Production Management. “He also has one of the best laughs of anyone I know and enjoys life to its fullest.”

Anyone who has spent time with the dean knows the distinctive laugh Scudder is referring to. It is as infectious and genuine as Johnson’s own passion for learning.

“Other than his laugh, which I’m sure is well documented by everyone who knows him even a little bit, what I remember most about Eric is his passion for his subject,” says Paul Stanley, MBA’94, vice president for marketing at Mercury Intermedia. “For his simulation course, I would see him in the computer lab (where I worked) at odd hours testing new ways of simulation and ways to teach it. His examples, often gleaned from personal experience, always hit home and made the theoretical a practical tool for students.”

Former students also recall the importance that Johnson placed on experiential learning. For example, Emily Anderson, MBA’99, remembers a field trip to FedEx Corp. headquarters in Memphis, Tenn., that former FedEx vice president Mike Janes, MBA’84, helped coordinate.

“Eric wanted us to really experience operations,” says Anderson, who now serves as director of internal operations and coaching for Owen’s Career Management Center. “At FedEx in Memphis, we saw how the planes came in around midnight and how all the packages were sorted, moved and transferred in like a 3- or 4-hour window. It was amazing to watch.”

Janes, who today serves as CEO of FanSnap, adds, “I hosted Eric and his student groups several times at FedEx, and I was always impressed by his passion and ability to aggressively bridge the classroom and the outside world.”

Importance of vision and time

In 1999, then Associate Professor Johnson departed Owen for the Tuck School of Business in Hanover, N.H. It was by no means an easy decision. His two oldest children—Wesley, 20, and Hannah, 18—were born and raised in Nashville (his youngest, Nathan, is 13), and he had grown attached to the city, and Vanderbilt in particular.

However, the opportunity at Tuck was too great to turn down, especially since the school was similar to Owen in many ways. “When I first went to Tuck, it was the same size as Owen is today,” he says, “and that was one of the things that attracted me there.”

During the 14 years that followed, Johnson continued to win respect not only as a teacher and researcher but as an administrator, too. In addition to being the Benjamin Ames Kimball Professor of the Sciences of Administration, he served as associate dean for Tuck’s MBA program and faculty director of the Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies.

“Eric was a comprehensive contributor to the Tuck School in his superb teaching, his departmental leadership, his research and the many contributions his Center for Digital Strategies provided students, alumni and the corporate world,” says Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School.

“Eric was a trailblazer,” Danos adds, “with activities such as the center’s roundtables for corporate leaders where chief information officers, their staffs and academics gathered around the world and engaged in dialogue about the challenges they all confront in today’s digital environment. He brought to campus the latest in technology through the center’s Tech@Tuck days, where the latest innovations were highlighted.”

In return, one of the things Johnson learned from working with Danos is the importance of having not only a long-term vision for a school but also the time and resources to implement it. Johnson attributes much of Tuck’s success to the fact that Danos has had 18 years at the helm to execute his strategy.

“Continuity in this kind of environment is particularly valuable,” Johnson says. “Many times people will look at business schools and think of them as a business—and they are in a way—but there are some very big differences. With business schools you’re really talking about a community, and communities and cultures don’t change quickly.”

That feeling of community

As Johnson embarks on his own tenure as dean, he is mindful of keeping Owen’s community central to the school’s mission. One example where he says it is already in effect is the young professional programs, like the master of accountancy and master of finance, which Jim Bradford and others helped build.

“Many times business schools can get distracted by creating so many different peripheral programs where the students don’t really interact at all,” he says. “Maybe the same faculty is servicing them, but the students themselves are not really enriched by each other’s presence.”

“What Owen has done so well with these young professional programs is that they’ve found a way to ensure not only that they’re successful for those groups but that those groups themselves add to the overall MBA experience by bringing really bright, talented folks into the community.”

Likewise, Johnson sees a similar role for the school’s research centers. “The thing we found successful at Tuck is this notion of a center that has a research core but is also a key part of the life of the school,” he says. “It’s about creating activity that’s not separate or independent but that really builds on the synergies of the school itself and brings ideas, innovation, curriculum and speakers back into the community.”

Even the Owen building itself plays a role in that sense of community. “One of the things I’ve always viewed as a huge asset is the very unusual architecture of the building that we’re in,” Johnson says. “I travel to other top business schools that have built large new buildings, but many of them are soulless—just long hallways and offices with doors that are shut. The openness of Owen’s building, on the other hand, focuses all of the activity into the lobby or the courtyard outside when the weather’s nice.”

“As we think about anything, whether it be growth in our physical structure or growth in faculty, staff and students, it’s something we will constantly be attentive to—how do we maintain that feeling of community?”

One answer to that question, Johnson says, is technology. Given his background, it should come as no surprise that digital learning is a key interest for him. It also happens to be one of the university-wide initiatives being promoted by Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos as Vanderbilt plans its future.

“What’s exciting about digital education for a school like Owen is not so much trying to change whom we target or how we interact with the world, though we can do that,” Johnson says. “It’s really more about enhancing the education that we offer right here in Nashville. Technology can enable us to transform the educational experience from something that’s historically static to one that’s much more dynamic, interactive and experiential.”

Johnson also sees digital technology as a tool for engaging the school’s most important audience—its alumni. “Owen students don’t often think about this when they come on the first day, but they become part of the Owen family at that moment, and it’s something they will carry the rest of their lives,” he says. “Technology enables us to take a lot of the neat things we’re thinking about and doing here and share them with alumni in ways we never could have before.”

“Those are areas we’re experimenting in—real breakthroughs.”

On our toes but looking forward

Asked how it feels to return to Owen after all these years, Johnson lets his daughter, Hannah, do the talking—or texting, as it were. After packing up their belongings this summer, he and the rest of the family piled into two cars and made the 1,200-mile trip from New Hampshire to Tennessee. As they neared Nashville’s city limits, he says Hannah texted an old family friend:

“Two words: We’re home.”

This sentiment—that Owen is as much a home as it is a school—is a common refrain among its community, and there is a shared feeling that Johnson will be an excellent steward of the culture.

“I still think the best feature of Owen is that it felt like it was my family, not just a school,” Paul Stanley says. “Eric has the ability to keep that intact while continuing to improve the academic, scholarly and job-performance reputation of Owen. If you know Eric’s family personally, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Owen is in good hands.”

Brent Turner, MBA’99, chair of the Owen Alumni Board, points to alumni relations as one area that can benefit from Johnson’s experience at Tuck. “Eric is a longtime friend of Owen, and he has spent several years at a school that has built fantastic relationships with its alumni,” says Turner, president at Code Fellows. “I look forward to applying the lessons that he learned to our community and family.”

Anderson, who is both an alumna and Owen staff member, is excited about Johnson’s hiring for several reasons. “From the standpoint of the Career Management Center, we’re very excited about Eric’s ties to the corporate world through his research, case studies and consulting, and we’re anxious to have him meet our recruiters,” she says. “I think he’ll help us make even more connections.”

Anderson also believes Johnson will push the school itself to think and grow alongside its students. “I think he’s going to have some new ideas and maybe challenge us about the way we do things and how we can share and cooperate,” she says. “He’ll keep us on our toes but also looking forward.”

It should come as no surprise that those who know Owen best frequently use words like “cooperate,” “community” and “family” in talking about the school and Johnson’s vision for it. These concepts are more than just buzzwords; they are a way of life at Owen, exemplifying the personal scale of business that Johnson described to incoming students over the summer.

This personal scale is a difference maker, Johnson argues, whether one is looking at business schools or, yes, even pianos. Ultimately it boils down to one question: How much care goes into this product?

“What Steinway figured out is that there’s a market, an important market, way up there at the top, where no two pianos are alike. But they’re the best pianos in the world,” Johnson told the students in June. “And pianists will sit down and play on two or three or four of them and they’ll find the one that they love and then they’ll keep that thing for the rest of their lives.”

In a way, Johnson could just as easily be talking about the connections that exist between Owen and the members of its community. As he himself can attest, the school never really loosens its hold on the people who value it most. Owen has a way of bringing its community close together even when time and distance intervene, and it is through these relationships—the ones operating at a personal scale—that great things are accomplished.

See video of Dean Johnson at vu.edu/deanjohnson-welcome

The man the crowd knows as Deacon from the popular television show Nashville takes the stage at the Grand Ole Opry to screams of recognition. He starts with a sensitive ballad, and women of all ages stream past the lip of the stage and take his photo before being urged by ushers to make way for the next in line. Charles Esten looks to be having the time of his life. Is he a country music star, an actor playing a country music star or something in between?

Who knows, and really, why would it matter? Everybody is having a good time. Esten segues into a drinking song. “Pour, pour, pour some more,” he sings, “just like the four you poured before.” The crowd eats it up.

Off to the side of the stage, a low-key, conservatively dressed man looks on. The man is Steve Buchanan, BS’80, MBA’85, president of Opry Entertainment and co-creator and executive producer of ABC’s nighttime TV drama, Nashville.

At Ryman Hospitality Properties, Buchanan is also a music business executive, a type represented on Nashville as the heartless and manipulative character Marshall Evans, head of fictional Edgehill Records. But Evans, Deacon, Rayna, Juliette and the rest of the television Nashville world exist only because of the vision of this real-life executive with a heart for the music and a business sensibility forged at Vanderbilt University and Owen Graduate School of Management.

Scientific Beginnings

Raised in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the son of a nuclear engineer and a chemist, Buchanan first enrolled in Vanderbilt as an undergraduate in the engineering school, intending to become an environmental engineer.

“I loved music and I very quickly got involved in the concert committee as a freshman,” Buchanan says. “In fact, that and the fact that engineering school was very challenging contributed to less than stellar academic performance for me.”

Buchanan and his cohorts brought many memorable shows to campus. Some of his favorites include Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt, Muddy Waters, Pat Metheny, Lester Flatt, David Bromberg, George Thorogood and Karla Bonoff.

“We were freshman hallmates in 1975 at Vanderbilt and immediately became best friends,” remembers Ken Levitan, now an artist manager whose clients include Kings of Leon and Emmylou Harris. “We were both involved on the concert committee and Steve was unbelievably hardworking at everything he did.”

“Steve brought Bob Marley to town,” Levitan says, still sounding astounded decades later that the reggae legend played Vanderbilt. Buchanan shakes his head, calling the Marley concert “an amazing experience.”

Buchanan says a course with Vanderbilt’s legendary cultural sociologist Richard “Pete” Peterson led him to transfer to the College of Arts and Science and major in sociology and psychology.

But it was really his extracurricular activities promoting music shows that allowed Buchanan to discover his vocation. “It was enlightening for me because despite my complete love for music, I had never necessarily thought of it as being a business,” Buchanan says.

First Job on Music Row

Upon graduation, Buchanan rejected suggestions that he move to Atlanta or New York, where he was told he could probably find work at a promoter or record label. Instead, he placed his bets again on Nashville. Levitan had already graduated and gone to work at Buddy Lee Attractions, a booking agency on Music Row.

“I helped Steve get a job at Buddy Lee,” Levitan says. “At that time there were still a lot of independent booking agencies in Nashville and you could make a mark there.”

At Buddy Lee, Buchanan was in a position to meet music industry people in Nashville, New York and Los Angeles.

“Two of the agents I worked with had played with Hank Williams (Sr.),” he recalls. The two, Jerry Rivers and Don Helms, still worked weekends as the Drifting Cowboys. “So I was both learning the business and learning the history of the business.”

Still, Buchanan had a nagging feeling that there was too much he didn’t know. He questioned if he even wanted a career in the music industry.

Once Again, Vanderbilt is the Answer

“I made the decision to quit my job and go back to school full time because I wanted to do a specific concentration and immerse myself,” he says.

Buchanan entered the MBA program at the Owen Graduate School of Management, focusing on marketing and gaining a strong foundation in the fundamentals of management.

Like his undergraduate career, getting started was rough.

“It was a rocky start, because it’s very difficult to just disconnect yourself when you’re still in the same playground that you were in before,” he says. “You’re still in your mid-20s and you still like to go out and listen to music, and your friends are still around and you’re supposed to be totally bathed in academics. It finally kicked in second semester.”

At Owen, Buchanan learned to be disciplined in his approach to business. “It really made me focus,” he says. “I learned to be methodical and strategic about things.”

Coming out of Owen, Buchanan faced a crossroads between a managerial training program at Northern Telecom and becoming the first marketing manager in the history of the Grand Ole Opry.

Today, sitting in his office dominated by a picture-window view of the Cumberland River, Buchanan explains what made him choose the Opry. “You want to know what it was?” Buchanan says. “I just loved Bill Monroe.”

Monroe, for those who don’t know their bluegrass, is the legendary musician whose band, the Blue Grass Boys, put together the high lonesome elements that became bluegrass music in the 1940s. By the time Buchanan crossed paths with Monroe in the 1980s, the master was in his 70s.

“Buddy Lee booked Bill Monroe. I would come out to the Opry to see Bill and I developed a deep appreciation of what the Opry is,” says Buchanan, casual in jeans and blue sweater. “That was a passion that would only grow.”

“It ultimately wasn’t a hard decision to pass on the Northern Telecom job,” Buchanan says. “Yes, it was a better paying job and had a more defined career path. But I thought that the Opry job offered me the opportunity to be in a more traditional business environment while at the same time being engaged in the entertainment and music industry.

“It felt like it was the perfect fit, especially because Bill Monroe, who I’d grown to love booking at Buddy Lee, was a member of the Opry as well,” he says.

Marketing from Scratch

Buchanan found himself walking into a unique situation.

“The Opry had never had a marketing manager, meaning it had never had a marketing budget,” he says. “Most freshly minted MBAs don’t really want to go to work for a place where they don’t have a budget. That doesn’t fit in with the typical scenario.”

Hal Durham, then general manager of the Opry, put aside a modest amount for an advertising budget. Buchanan created a small, simple campaign, which started to address the identity problem his market research showed was holding the country music institution back.

First broadcast in 1925 as a radio show and for many years a national broadcasting powerhouse, the Opry was part of Gaylord Entertainment, today Ryman Hospitality Properties. By the 1980s, the Opry was overly dependent on Gaylord’s Opryland USA theme park and hotel for its audience. Both brought thousands of tourists to the area regularly, which translated into tickets sales for the Opry.

Buchanan’s efforts to revitalize and separate the image of the Opry from the theme park were successful business strategies, which was fortuitous as the park closed in 1997.

“We were also dealing with a much more competitive marketplace from a destinations perspective,” Buchanan says. “Branson, Missouri, became a major competitor. There was huge investment in the ’80s and ’90s in Orlando and then there was the proliferation of casinos around this country. That is still what we deal with today.”

The Ryman Auditorium

If there’s a proudest moment in Buchanan’s early Gaylord career, it would have to be the revitalization of the historic Ryman Auditorium. Along with much of downtown Nashville, the legendary building—former church and for years home of the Grand Ole Opry—had fallen into disrepair during the 1960s and ’70s. The Opry itself had left the building in 1974 for a new facility on the grounds of the Opryland theme park.

“I had never even been in the Ryman Auditorium, and suddenly it was part of my responsibility to market it,” Buchanan says. “This was way before it was fixed up. We charged a couple of bucks and people could tour through it. You could go stand on stage and there was a little gift shop in the back.”

Buchanan was captivated by the Ryman, even though it was in obvious physical distress. It had sat empty for almost 20 years and had been recommended for demolition several times. The building was rundown and the downtown area in which it sat was decidedly seedy.

In 1992, the centennial of the building’s construction, Buchanan was instrumental in arranging for the Ryman to be used for a series of concerts and a live album by Emmylou Harris, her landmark At The Ryman.

He also organized a one-man play with musical performances that included Bill Monroe performing “Working on a Building.”

“Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill went on just before Bill doing ‘Drifting Too Far from the Shore’ and did such a great job that I think Monroe wanted to one-up them,” Buchanan says. “He did. He was outstanding.”

The two events were fortuitously timed. Downtown Nashville was about to undergo urban renewal, and Gaylord and Buchanan had the vision to lead the way.

“It was life- and career-changing for me because I was appointed general manager of the Ryman and got to develop the first business plans to oversee the renovation of the Ryman Auditorium,” Buchanan says. “There was a companywide belief that it was a worthy investment regardless of what it took, that it would be a meaningful and impactful undertaking for the company and city.”

Under Buchanan’s direction, the old building came back to life. Structural issues were addressed. High-tech sound, lighting and engineering were installed, along with the addition of a proscenium for the stage. Central heat and air were added to the now 102-year-old former church. A 14,000- square-foot support building was attached to house ticketing, offices, restrooms, concessions and a gift shop; proper dressing rooms were built (previously, a sole ladies’ room backstage had done double duty as a dressing room for the Opry’s female performers). The building’s original wooden pews were refinished and stenciled artwork on the balcony was faithfully recreated. The Ryman reopened in 1994 to public and performer acclaim, quickly earning a reputation as one of most prestigious performance halls in the world, esteemed for its astounding acoustics.

“We’re sitting here and that was basically 20 years ago and it’s great to be able to look back and see what a visionary decision that really was for (former Gaylord Entertainment CEO) Bud Wendell to make that $8.5 million commitment and investment,” Buchanan says. Gaylord also built the Wildhorse Saloon on Second Avenue in downtown Nashville during that era.

“Both of those investments were critical for the redevelopment of downtown Nashville,” Buchanan says.

Television’s Nashville

What might be remembered as the opening of the second act of Buchanan’s career began with a meeting in late 2010 between the Gaylord executive and some West Coast talent executives. Buchanan was then president of the Grand Ole Opry and senior vice president of Gaylord Entertainment. Again, like in the 1980s, he faced the need to draw people to Nashville and the Opry.

“The first thought was film opportunities,” Buchanan says. “We were kicking around maybe a period piece that captured a moment in time of the Opry’s history and building something around the characters that made up the Opry.” That led to discussions about other film projects, television and theatrical ideas. Rejected concepts included a 30 Rock-like take on the Opry.

“In looking at shows like American Idol, where country artists were sometimes winning, and shows like Glee and Smash—there was an acceptance of performance within a scripted show,” Buchanan says. “It was my feeling that with country music, so many of the barriers had fallen by the wayside. Younger generations are not as identified by genre. They’re interested in artists and songs.

“And it just felt like Nashville was really being accepted and regarded as a cool place, a very strong creative community and a place where the popular music of the day is being created.”

After finding a production partner with Lion’s Gate and a writer in Callie Khouri (Thelma and Louise, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood), they pitched Nashville to all three major networks and received offers from ABC and NBC. They chose ABC.

“I really didn’t fully understand about the Nashville vibe until later,” says Loucas George, a producer of Nashville, who says he had misgivings initially about filming the show in its namesake city—mostly because of the lack of film industry infrastructure. It took Buchanan in his role as one of the show’s executive producers to demonstrate how and why Nashville itself was an important character in the series.

“I didn’t understand about the (important songwriter’s showcase) Bluebird Cafe being in a strip mall. That didn’t make sense to me,” he says. “Steve took me to the Grand Ole Opry and all these other places and I started to realize that it was important to film here.

“When I first came here, I thought Steve was going to be a silent extra production partner. He’s been anything but. He’s been the salt of the earth. He is Nashville. He constantly reminds us of the niceness of the people here.”

Khouri says that Buchanan helps to keep it real.

“He is so well-versed in Nashville that we would be very unwise not to call on his knowledge,” she says. “Personally, Steve is an absolute joy. He’s thoughtful, famously low-key and soft-spoken but with a tremendous sense of fun. He’s a fantastic ally.”

Actor Charles Esten, who plays the show’s Deacon Claybourne, calls Buchanan “the face of connectivity and the face of kindness to all of us.”

“From the start, he made everyone involved in the production feel instantly welcome in Nashville. He handles what could be an extremely demanding and stressful job with ease and grace,” Esten says.

People in the fictional Nashville are not always so nice. “It’s not a documentary, after all,” Buchanan says. “It’s important to realize that you are creating a drama for network television. You have got to be able to do something that is compelling and captures people and the genre is that of a prime-time soap opera, so that means that things are exaggerated and a bit over the top.

“But it can still have heart, passion and emotion, and the city and music community don’t have to be disappointed in the portrayal from the perspective of the characters being stereotypes that are inaccurate or dated,” Buchanan says.

Putting the characters aside, almost everyone in Nashville agrees that the cinematography of Nashville represents the city beautifully. “One of the most common comments I hear from people is that they love the way the city looks,” Buchanan says.

That’s no accident. Millions of music fans, tourists and now television viewers have been influenced to see Nashville the way Buchanan sees it—as a deep musical wellspring, a must-visit destination, and now the hip town where the cast of Nashville spins webs of deceit and music each week.