Category: Features

Leadership is as much art as science. Its components can be studied, but to see it in practice is to develop an appreciation for the intangibles that turn those components into success. In training not just executives but leaders, Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management has long provided both practical and personal lessons.

Vanderbilt was pivotal in the lives of each of these alumni. What they drew from their experience is as varied as their personalities and backgrounds, but all built on their time at Owen while advancing careers that are challenging and successful.

Flight Plan on Course

Paul Jacobson, MBA’97
Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Delta Air Lines

Career Path Milestones:
Senior VP of Finance, Treasurer, Financial Analyst, Delta

The best career decision Paul Jacobson ever made, he says, was “ignoring Peter Veruki’s advice.”

There may be a touch of humor in Jacobson’s statement about the legendary former head of Owen’s career center, but the story is indicative of the way Jacobson has always dealt with roadblocks to his dreams. New at Vanderbilt, he met with Veruki and the placement staff “to tell them that my goal was to get a job with an airline. Peter spent two years trying to talk me out of it, saying I should think about Wall Street.”

But Jacobson had dreamed of flying since boyhood, and when childhood asthma and a lack of resources grounded that goal early on, the goal of working for an airline took its place. By the time he got to Owen, he had earned his pilot’s license and a degree in aviation management from Auburn. When the closest aviation job he could find was with McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis, he decided, “getting an MBA would open some doors.”

Owen did just that.

“I learned a lot about finance and accounting, but most important, how to think critically,” he says. “On the softer side, with such a small class and collaborative culture, I learned a lot about working in teams. That’s not a skill everyone has.”

He also learned from Clinical Professor of Management Fred Talbott’s communications class. “To this day,” he says, “the most nerve-racking project I have ever undertaken was his five-minute stand-up comedy routine. I’ve never felt more exposed.”

Lifelong overcomer

While Veruki’s warning had some merit (“I still owe him one for bringing down the average salary from that class at first,” Jacobson says), Jacobson landed at Delta, starting as a $40,000-a-year financial analyst. He was the firm’s treasurer at 33 and its chief financial officer at 40.

His rise to CFO, he says, came in part because he followed a passion for capital markets, learning enough to make himself invaluable and a natural for the post. “I like to say that they promoted me by default,” he says.

As a lifelong overcomer, he is grateful for the bad as well as the good the job has offered.

“It’s not about achieving perfection,” he says. “It’s about getting things done and steadily improving. I spend a lot of time with the new MBAs at Delta each year. I try to instill patience into them. Everyone is looking for rapid advancement and is often chasing titles. I try to tell them that it is the experience you are getting that is going to get you ahead in the long term, and to try to stay focused on that.”

Major challenge

“The stakes were never higher than when we were taking the company through the bankruptcy process,” Jacobson says. “I was fortunate to be part of a laser-focused team with a clear strategy for turning the company around. I came out of the process with a much deeper sense of capital stewardship, and it has helped fuel our desire to change the history of this company and the industry that it is in.”

These days, when he talks about Veruki’s advice and his own humble start at Delta, he adds a qualifier—“I graduated first in my class for getting exactly what I wanted out of a Vanderbilt degree.” The lessons of his life figure prominently in his worldview and the things he passes along to those setting out on their own paths.

“There’s just something about following your passion,” he says, “that will always lead to happiness.”

The Thing That Gets You Excited

Adena Friedman, MBA’93
President, Global Corporate, Information, and Technology Solutions, NASDAQ

Career Path Milestones:
Chief Financial Officer, The Carlyle Group
CFO/Vice President for Corporate Strategy, NASDAQ

“The key to great leadership is that you don’t pretend to know every answer,” says Adena Friedman, president of global corporate, information, and technology solutions, NASDAQ in Washington, D.C. “If you’ve got the right voices around you and you’re listening to them, you don’t have to feel alone in making decisions, even when they’re staring at you.”

That mix of discernment and experience were part of her Vanderbilt education, reinforced particularly, she says, by Professor of Management David Rados. “He was our case study professor in marketing and he was a very hard teacher—just cutthroat—and I loved it. You had to be prepared. We did product management, which I ended up doing for the vast majority of my career.”

It was a key component of a period made all the more important by the fact that she was fresh out of college.

“What Owen got was a very enthusiastic, somewhat opinionated, higher-energy person,” she says, “and what they pushed out the door was a business-oriented thinker able to turn soft skills into hard skills and apply them to an industry I really wanted to go into.”

From researcher to CFO

Friedman joined NASDAQ, rising from researcher to CFO in 18 years. Key challenges came when she was given NASDAQ’s $100 million data business (which grew to $250 million) and then oversight of corporate strategy as well.

“Suddenly I’ve got to find a way to bolster the trading business and expand in new ways. I started looking at merger and acquisition candidates on the trading side, which I’d never done before,” she says. “Our CEO, Bob Greifeld, put a lot of faith me and it was a lot of fun.”

She was key in the acquisition of Brut, a relatively small but important electronic trading system, and of INET.

During her time there, NASDAQ failed in attempting a hostile takeover of the London Stock Exchange, which she views as a key learning experience. “We learned a great deal about political and cultural sensitivities in addition to the structural complexities,” she says. “That helped us do better the next time around when we purchased OMX, which was a far more strategically aligned asset than London would have been.”

Chaos and decisions

She faced trial by fire when NASDAQ realigned its business following collusion charges after a 1994 study by Owen professor Bill Christie and Notre Dame’s Paul Schultz indicated that the exchange’s market makers inflated trading profits. Friedman was among seven of 14 vice presidents retained in the reorganization in a period marked by increased workloads and chaos.

“I asked my mentor what I should do. Should I stay?” she says. “He said, ‘You’re a survivor. Why would you leave now? The best days are in front of you.’ He was totally right.”

She did stay at NASDAQ and rose to CFO. She left NASDAQ in 2011 to serve as CFO of The Carlyle Group, but recently returned to NASDAQ. As president of the exchange’s information services, technology solutions and corporate client group business segments, Friedman directs strategy and operations, as well as has financial responsibility for those businesses.

Her experience prompts two pieces of advice for current students.

“Take a chance,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to try something new and different even without a clear understanding of the path it might take you down. Find the thing that gets you excited and it will probably take you in the right direction.

“And don’t be too greedy too young. Don’t turn down an opportunity because it doesn’t give you enough money right away. I probably took down the salary average for Owen in my early years with NASDAQ, but I never regretted it because the opportunities that came my way were terrific.”

Making a Business Leader from an Engineer

Steve Gruver, Executive MBA’01
Co-CEO/Owner, Orchid International

Career Path Milestones:
Manufacturing Engineer, Grumman Allied

Steve Gruver knew the value of mixing school and work. He’d worked for the local Grumman factory while attending high school and the Pennsylvania College of Technology. While earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he worked for Grumman through a co-op program.

It was eight years later that Gruver, now running his own business in Mt. Juliet, Tenn., discovered a different mix of school and work. Gruver allowed a group of Vanderbilt Executive MBA students to use his company, Orchid International, as the subject of its final strategy project. He wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

“I worked closely with them,” he says. “I was impressed with them and the tools they were using to analyze our company. The group’s final presentation blew me away. After that experience, I was sold. I needed to try to get into that program.”

Gruver’s 2001 Vanderbilt MBA for Executives turned him from an engineer into a business leader just at the right time.

Irresistible opportunity

After graduation from RIT in 1989, Gruver had overseen manufacturing engineering at Grumman’s South Carolina plant, but was looking for something more.

He found it when he met Grant Bibby, an engineer who had recently started a small automation company. Gruver left Grumman, the two joined forces, and six months later, he was operating Orchid’s U.S. sales office out of his apartment.

“Looking back,” he says, “it does seem like it was a big risk, but at the time, it didn’t. I could not resist the opportunity to grow a business from the ground floor.”

Orchid originally provided custom automation. The firm designed and built quick die change systems for smaller presses and tooling, primarily in the appliance industry, then moved into other automation for metal stamping.

“Soon we were designing, building and installing large-scale automation systems for major automotive manufacturers,” he says. In 1994, the firm acquired a metal stamping operation and moved it to Tennessee. The facility attracted the team of Owen students and led to Gruver’s own Executive MBA.

Immediately applicable

When he applied to Owen, Gruver’s metal stamping and automation company was dealing with investors, acquisitions and an eventual realignment. “The majority of my time was spent growing and managing the business,” he says. “An executive MBA program made good sense.” Eventually, three other Orchid executives earned Vanderbilt business degrees as well.

“It was challenging to balance the workload, but immediately applying what I learned made the process very enjoyable and rewarding,” he says of his Vanderbilt education. “The class was divided into small groups. As a team, we worked very well together and the team provided a support system to get us through the difficult and challenging times.”

He says the knowledge gained through Ray Friedman’s Organizational Behavior, Germain Böer’s Cost Accounting and a strategy project with Rick W. Oliver was especially valuable. “Understanding accounting principles was extremely important as a business owner,” he says. “Germain had a way to teach this in very simple and basic terms that made sense.”

In 2004, Orchid sold its automation business to focus on metal stamping. The 2008 economic downturn further focused its business and prompted use of the skills and teamwork Gruver had polished at Owen.

“It forced us to consolidate and get very lean,” he says. “We had reached $180 million in sales with 800 employees. We scaled back and consolidated work to just two locations in the U.S., with $70 million in sales and three hundred employees.” Today Orchid is more product-focused and further diversifying its customer/industry base to be less affected by industry economic downturns.

“My biggest takeaway on my career journey is my appreciation and recognition for the people I met along the way and for the people who support our business,” Gruver says. “There is such power within a group of people working together toward a common goal. People have ideas and ambitions and want to contribute and make a difference.”

The Leader She Chose To Be

Cindy Kent, MBA’99, MDiv’01
President and General Manager, Drug Delivery Systems Division, 3M Health Care

Career Path Milestones:
GM and Vice President Gastro/Uro Therapies, Medtronic,
Marketing Manager, Eli Lilly

Cindy Kent was prepared to begin work on dual post-graduate degrees in law and business when her career services director at Eli Lilly called her into his office. Kent had turned her industrial engineering degree into early success with Lilly and now she was ready to take a big step forward. The meeting came after the company put her through a battery of assessments.

She recalls that he said her tests showed she had all the right skills to succeed in their executive program, but that her empathy component was off the charts.

“Have you ever considered the seminary?’” he asked.

There’s no way I can do three degrees, she thought. So she decided to set aside law school.

The senior vice president of human resources later told her, “We think this MBA/divinity combination will nurture your leadership. People follow you and we believe your religious leanings will make you a better leader overall, not just a better business leader.”

Kent looked at several schools before choosing Vanderbilt. “When I visited other campuses, everyone told me how competitive they were, how cognizant they were of the rankings,” Kent recounts. “We didn’t have that as much at Owen. It was a nurturing environment where I could learn and thrive as it shaped me as a business leader.”

She calls the workload of pursuing dual degrees “maddening”—and says she regrets missing out on socializing—but the workload made her the first ever to earn the dual MBA/divinity degree at Vanderbilt.

No casualties

She is proudest not of her rapid advancement at Lilly and then Medtronic, but rather that her success was “never because I left casualties in the wake. I think my dual degree and the fact that I was at Owen at all was a reflection of the type of leader I have chosen to be.”

Always one to embrace work-related challenges, Kent wrestled instead with career changes.

“Some of the hardest and best decisions I ever made involved leaving jobs and companies I absolutely loved to take new jobs and get new skills in my toolbox,” she says. “I didn’t leave because I was mad or because I wasn’t getting what I wanted or needed. I just realized I was way too comfortable (or perhaps even a bit bored at times), and that’s my signal that I’m probably ready for a change. Part of that is, ‘Do you want to be a good leader in that specific setting or do you want to be a great business leader in general?’ If it’s the latter, then it may require different experiences that your current role cannot provide.

That wider calling has taken Kent into the community and prompted her to nurture the leadership potential in others.

Balance of business and divinity

“I spend significant amount of time mentoring others,” she says. She got involved with the Girl Scouts, high school mentoring and STEM programs in her 20s as an opportunity to lead and mentor girls and young women. Currently, she and her husband are establishing a charitable giving fund, and Kent remains active in the ministry as well.

She is looking always for the kind of balance she was able to bring to the seemingly disparate degrees of business and divinity, balance she began practicing at Vanderbilt.

“Metaphorically, at least, I kept my Bible close at hand when I was in business school,” she says. “Then, when I was in the Divinity School, I’m there with my calculator. Leadership means being a balanced citizen. Every day we see examples of business leaders who’ve made ethically poor decisions. First on my list of guiding principles—a list that I have kept since my first manager role—is ‘Integrity above all else.’ I have honestly never had to compromise my ethics and personal values. I feel like I’ve been more rewarded and personally satisfied for not compromising.”

Turnaround Man

Geoff Walker, MBA’94
Executive Vice President, Fisher-Price Global Brands Team

Career Path Milestones:
Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mattel Europe
Vice President-Marketing, Wheels, Entertainment and Games divisions, Mattel

As a young marketing executive at Mattel, Geoff Walker found himself heading cross-functional brand teams with senior-level representatives of design, engineering and packaging, among others.

“You don’t have direct authority, but you have the responsibility to drive the business,” he says. “How well you do that defines how successful you’ll be. I was able to develop unique management skills while at Owen; much of your success there is based on how well you work with teams, since the case work and projects are mostly team-based.”

Hot Wheels to Europe

That was just one of the ways Owen helped prepare Walker for a career track that now has him leading worldwide strategy and development for Mattel’s Fisher-Price division. The turning point in his career was an international assignment. Following success in turning around the Hot Wheels brand, he was given a major new challenge and moved to Europe.

“Even though it was considered a lateral move, going there was the best decision. The role really stretched me,” he says. “I dealt with the nuts and bolts of running a business from core, developed markets like the U.K. to opening Russia and growing emerging markets in Eastern Europe. It got me out of my comfortable marketing zone. Ultimately, it taught me a lot about owning who I am as a leader.”

The task was as challenging as anything he had ever undertaken, but it suited his personality.

“I’m aggressive,” he says. “I make bets, and while I don’t mind failing, I love to develop a culture of winning with people who will also take risks. Some people want to work on the brands that are growing. I want to be on the turnaround brands. They are a lot more rewarding and fun.”

Beyond child’s play

His current position pulls together the marketing and product development culture from Mattel headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., and the cross-functional leadership he practiced in Europe. With Fisher-Price in a turnaround mode, Walker has already set in motion three key strategies for the company: designing more innovative products, making the Fisher-Price brand more meaningful to the millennial mom and globalizing the brand. “About 65 percent of the company’s sales now come from the U.S., but the majority of growth is going to be fueled outside the U.S.,” he says.

Walker’s career has included successes in virtually every aspect of the company’s toy and game businesses. He cites the business basics he learned at Vanderbilt as an asset he has applied throughout his career.

“You have to deal with a wide variety of situations when running a business,” he says, “and as you encounter complex problems that require clear or creative thinking, you’ll find yourself drawing from the strong foundation you acquired through the coursework and classmate interaction at Owen.”

His advice? “Seek as many experiences as you can.”

We invited five alumni across four decades to participate in a roundtable discussion about leadership. We asked one question: What did you learn about leadership at Owen? The conversation went like this:

On collaboration

Jim Rodrigues: Effective leadership is almost an intangible of being able to get people—whether it’s your peer group or people who report to you—to follow you, follow instructions and understand. In my opinion, it’s got to be collaborative, not a directive.

Erika Bogar King: Right, you want leadership to be effortless. You want it to be collaborative, for it to be a team effort versus a power effort.

Derek Young: From my standpoint, the best leaders are those who really are able to take their entire teams and feel like they’ve got them all behind them with everything they’re doing in every way.

Corbette Doyle: It doesn’t matter what your role is. I think that leaders are at all levels of the organization and they influence people to achieve something.

Erika Bogar King: All of us come to MBA school wanting to learn how to conquer the world and how to be CEO one day. You show up and one of your first classes is Leading Teams and Organizations. What that course really teaches you is that there’s such a thing as leadership at all levels. A lot of that, frankly, played out in our two years as we worked with the different people on different teams in each of our different courses.

On trust

Mario Avila: What came to mind were, obviously, influence and being authentic. I think that as leaders we’re constantly challenged—especially when we’re talking to our teams—to make sure that what we ask them to do is authentic. I think the critical point is trust. It’s building trust, having those directives come from an honest place. It’s coaching, and working with people to make sure they’re understanding.

Derek Young: The thing I love about Owen is that we’re a school that, at the end of the day, really puts leaders out there who are trusted. From my standpoint, it’s part of the personality of the school.

Mario Avila: I think it’s also the way this whole program has been structured. You can’t hide here. Talk about trust and building trust! When you’re in a school that only has 170, 180 students within that MBA class, you can’t hide. You have to be yourself so people can trust you so you can all get through.

Corbette Doyle: I think one of the reasons Owen has been able to build that kind of culture is that it “discovered” the importance of groups long before it became the buzzword in most B-schools. Owen’s always had a strong focus on group work and succeeding as a team. Well, it takes a lot of work to learn how to be an effective group member, and learning how to influence without authority is a real skill.

Jim Rodrigues: The theme that I’m hearing is that (the trust and the relational nature of the Owen experience) has given us all confidence. It’s contagious. It allows us to be better at what we do and bring our teams up and foster that kind of similar environment as we had here.

On listening

Jim Rodrigues: Communications is a big part of that—listening to what people want and reaching out. I was given some advice years ago and now I follow it almost to a T: Take your employees out to lunch once a quarter. You learn so much more about your team and what they really need in just listening through 45 minutes, an hour. … You really get your pulse on what’s going on in the organization. To me, it’s not a leadership thing, it’s just listening.

Corbette Doyle: I think listening is a big part of leadership. We talked earlier about the importance of building trust: Well, how do you build trust? As a leader, that’s not an easy thing to do. So taking people out to lunch and having casual conversations is one way to try to bring those barriers down.

On reflection

Corbette Doyle: One of the things that I’ve learned since I left here—and I think current Owen students are learning—is the power of reflection. It’s not just managing down and up if you actually want to be successful. It’s taking a step back and saying, “What did I learn from this, good or bad, and what am I going to do about it going forward?”

Jim Rodrigues: When you are able to reflect, you are able to better communicate and coach your team—whether it’s peers, those working for you or those managing you. I really take it to heart that a leader is one who really looks at the big picture. I think Owen does a really great job of making sure that we do take that step back, look at the big picture and what’s best for you and your progression.

On doing it all

Jim Rodrigues: The higher you go up, the more diverse your skill set has to be because you’re ultimately a sales person for your vision, for the product, for people to believe in themselves at work. You’ve got to be able to do all of it to manage those people. That’s where the diversity of coursework has really made us a stronger alumni group when we go into the workforce.

Erika Bogar King: Recognizing as a leader what your strengths are and then surrounding yourself with people who have the things you don’t is so huge.

Corbette Doyle: As a leader, it’s becoming increasingly critical that we not only have all the things we’ve talked about, but that we also value differences. And I think that learning agility, that ability to be resilient, to be reflective, to learn from your experiences, to be open to other experiences, is critical.

Jim Rodrigues: To be a real leader, you can’t have an ego because you have to communicate with so many people and transition your message to make the same point but make sure it’s heard by every level.

Mario Avila: Until you mentioned this, I didn’t really think about it, but you talk about these circles that are created within Owen. We build these bonds as almost family and we take it to the workplace. We know that’s an effective way to lead an organization.

Derek Young: I do feel like there’s a diversity in what we do here at Owen that makes us unique … it’s a different approach. There’s not an entitlement that comes from graduating from Owen. It’s every day you get out there and you earn it. You earn the respect of those that work for you.

Watch video at vu.edu/owen-leaderrt

Editor’s note: The roundtable discussion was edited for space.

There’s a leader within us that is at odds with our inner elephant. That conflict impacts our growth and ability to lead, says Richard Daft, the Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Professor of Management, Emeritus.

The leader is objective, rational and responsible, while the elephant is emotion-driven, impulsive and habitual. Daft believes that successful leaders must recognize both sides of themselves and use them to be effective.

Daft has studied leadership and business for decades. Going on what he calls a type of spiritual journey to India in 1995, Daft returned with the concept of the inner elephant and inner executive. He explored the tension between the two in his book, The Executive and the Elephant: A Leader’s Guide for Building Inner Excellence. He’s also used it to prepare students for leadership and to help executives looking to vault their leadership skills forward.

In addition to his emeritus role, Daft continues that work in Vanderbilt’s Executive Development Institute, where he teaches the bulk of the courses that make up the Certificate of Leadership Excellence, a popular series of four programs.

An elephant doesn’t forget . . . and that’s bad

Daft says the elephant literally grows from almost the time we’re born.

“When we start interacting with the world, these interactions make an impression on the nervous system, and over a long period of time, we develop a way of responding,” Daft says. “How we respond—that’s the elephant. The other part of us is the executive—our higher consciousness that can see and offer guidance to this elephant and go higher, above the elephant, to have better experiences with people.”

Our inner elephant never forgets—and there lies part of the problem. “We avoid what we’ve found painful and go toward things that we found loving and what feels good,” he says. “Our memory bank guides us. … But what about that person who avoids conflict because he had bad experiences early on? Unfortunately that’s a decent amount of people.”

Leadership begins within

So how do we become more of the executive and less of the animal within?

Daft offers some simple exercises that can help anyone become a better leader. The first is to simply calm your mind. “I tell people to breathe and think clearly,” he says. “They usually have their mind wander within a few seconds. Then they breathe again. Now it takes a little longer before they wander. They try to breathe again … Throughout, it’s the elephant that keeps them from concentrating.”

Another aid is self-talk. “It’s a self-hypnosis,” Daft says. “Take someone who is quiet and doesn’t participate in meetings. You say to yourself 20 times in the morning, ‘I am becoming more outgoing and participating in meetings.’ Then, in the evening, do it 100 times. Lo and behold, in a few days you are rewiring your elephant and participating more. It’s amazing how well it can work.”

Living with the elephant

As much as anything, being a better leader is also about avoiding common blind spots. “The biggest may be when a person is negative to others,” he says. “Some speak strongly and don’t realize how they’re pushing people away. They also tend to want to fight things out. You need to resist this or you’ll have a hard time motivating people.”

Although some change can happen quickly, you can’t expect to transform all your negative traits overnight. Daft has even wrestled with a few of his own.

“For example, I would have sometimes liked to have been more visible on campus,” he says. “I became better at this as time went on, but I know firsthand change doesn’t happen easily. … The funny thing is many executives I’ve met know what they need to do but they find it hard, too.”

One of the world’s most highly cited authors in the fields of economics and business, Daft held the Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Chair in Management and focused on teaching leadership and change management at Owen before being named to emeritus status last year. A fellow of the Academy of Management, he frequently works with corporate executives (his clients have included Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Ford Motor Company) and tested many of the ideas and techniques in The Executive and the Elephant on them. He continues to share his leadership expertise in a series of popular courses in Vanderbilt’s Executive Development Institute.

When students in Vanderbilt’s one-year programs—the master of accountancy, master of finance, and master of accountancy valuation—graduate, they don’t just enter the workforce with business skills and expertise in accounting, accounting valuation or finance—they also leave with powerful leadership skills.

To prepare for what awaits in a rapidly changing workforce, students participate in Owen’s Leadership Development Program, which provides robust assessments of their strengths and weaknesses plus sessions with an independent, certified executive coach.

“We would like to differentiate our program by seeing it not just providing skills for your first job, but providing you with skills that will last over the course of your career,” says Kate Barraclough, the MS Finance program director.

Proven

Part of that success requires being able to lead projects, people or both, regardless of job title. Already, master’s program graduates are demonstrating that they have the skills needed to make a difference in the workplace.

Karl Hackenbrack, associate dean and director of accountancy, points to Amelia Emmert, MAcc’08, who was just promoted to manager at EY—the first MAcc graduate to do so. He believes she will quickly be joined by others. “Her class is the first one to have the tenure to earn the rank of manager,” Hackenbrack says. “No one will ever question her technical, teaming or managerial skills. She’s proven them to earn the position of manager. I see leadership potential in all students or they wouldn’t be in the program.”

In the international public accounting firms, recent hires have an opportunity to showcase skills at the earliest stages of their career.

“Someone has to do the blocking and tackling,” Hackenbrack says of new public accounting hires. “The willingness to be a contributing member of a larger team and knowing your place within that larger team is extremely important.”

“Who is going to do that the next year? That year’s new hire. That’s where the traditional definition of leadership kicks in with public accounting: You’ll never do this task again. You’ll train someone to do the task that you did last go-round. These teams are structured so that an important part of your job is training the person coming in behind you.”

It’s apparent in the workplace that Vanderbilt MAcc graduates possess those abilities. Hackenbrack recounts a story told to him by a student whose father is a partner at a Big Four firm. She said that during her internship, she could recognize other Vanderbilt MAcc alums by the way they acted on the job.

Vanderbilt MAcc alumni, Hackenbrack notes, are characterized by their professionalism, strong client and team skills and maturity. “The career development program is recognizable in the workplace,” Hackenbrack says. “I’m sure some of that is recruiting the right people in the first place, but a lot has to do with the professional development programming that occurs on campus.”

A world of possibilities

Barraclough says that the leadership and career development work for Vanderbilt MS Finance students includes building skills that can be applied to jobs in different facets in the industry. “With MS Finance, we’re helping them identify what they want to do and what makes it a good career choice,” Barraclough says of the intensive nine-month program. “We help them understand who they are as professionals and how knowing their strengths helps them be more effective and successful as team members and as leaders in the workplace.”

An individualized approach runs throughout Owen’s Leadership Development Program, no matter the degree, says Amy Lambert, MBA’04, senior manager of the program. Lambert works with students in the young professional tracks directly.

“The way that we have approached leadership development at Owen in general has been to meet each student where they are as an individual, no matter where they are in their career path,” Lambert says. “Regardless of where they are headed, we help them capture the building blocks to start working toward to that long-term future.”

It’s a four-minute walk down 21st Avenue South from Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management to the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

While the two schools once seemed worlds apart, an increasingly vital partnership has resulted in degree programs, hands-on learning and collaborative research projects that seek to educate the health care leaders of the future and help answer the burning question for today’s medical providers: How do we do more with less?

Massive challenges face health care systems across the country. The Vanderbilt University Medical Center alone has been challenged to make $250 million in budget cuts in less than two years, yet still maintain the high quality of care, innovation and research for which it has become known.

“The future of health care is going to be in answering the question, ‘How do we effectively deliver the care that’s needed to an aging and growing population and do it with less resources?’” says R. Lawrence “Larry” Van Horn, associate professor of management and executive director of health affairs for Owen. “The answer to that is not a silver bullet. It’s the blocking and tackling of running a business efficiently, and that’s an opportunity for a business school and a medical school to partner together.”

Owen has already built a foundation in helping future health care leaders understand the science behind health care management. Dr. Oran Aaronson, a neurosurgeon who just completed Owen’s master of management in health care in May, is putting that business science to work as the new director of the Vanderbilt Spine Center.

“You know the joke, this is not brain surgery? Well (management) is, and it’s different and it’s hard,” Aaronson says. “These are very specialized skills that you need and they are very important skills to have now. Health care is one of the most complicated systems out there.”

Productive agents for change

Challenges in health care management are not going away. Neither is the Affordable Health Care Act, something practitioners and politicians alike should “accept and move on,” Van Horn says.

A desire to more effectively train the next generation of clinician leaders among the already time-strapped health care professionals at Vanderbilt University Medical Center led to the formation of Vanderbilt’s Master of Management in Health Care program in 2008.

“We started about five or six years ago knowing we needed to develop a training program for midlevel managers to improve their knowledge and their sophistication,” says C. Wright Pinson, MD’80, deputy vice chancellor for health affairs and CEO of the Vanderbilt Health System. “We had always sent a lot of employees out of Vanderbilt for coursework. Creating the MMHC was a way for us to invest in our own management team as well as our employees’ personal development.”

“The amazing thing is that we had a conversation in October, and by the following June, we had our first class enrolled,” Pinson marvels. “It’s a statement of the need that we had and a statement that both the Medical Center and Owen were very responsive.”

The master of management in health care is a one-year graduate degree program designed especially for managers, health care practitioners and executives in health care organizations. Through intensive classes one night a week and one weekend a month, the program delivers the fundamentals of business with a focus on developing interdisciplinary leadership and robust management skills.

The program has graduated five classes with an average of 30 students in each. Many are Vanderbilt employees, but an increasing number of students in each class—as much as a third—come from outside health care organizations. That diversity contributes to the richness of the classroom experience.

“As more years pass and as more have the experience, the better it gets,” says Pinson, who earned his MBA in 1976 before entering medical school, an unusual path for those times.

“We’re not only investing in ourselves but other people’s future,” he says. “We are looking for people who can make innovative changes and resolve difficult issues. Some of those may be huge and dramatic and major, nationally. A lot of it will be small and incremental. We are asking these individuals who take an interest in business training to shape the future.”

Clinician leaders

Receiving her master of management in health care was “a dream come true” for Barbara Sanders, MMHC’12, who worked as a nurse for many years before jumping into MMHC classes.

“Returning to school after being in the workforce for many years, you wonder if you’re going to be able to keep up, but honestly, it was the most fun and challenging year of my life,” Sanders says. As director of perioperative administration for Vanderbilt University Medical Center, she is involved in capital and strategic planning, operation redesign, and construction and renovation project management.

Sanders says she found immediate benefits to the Owen coursework by using a more analytical and leaner thought process to solve problems and achieve results in real time.

“When we renovate or create ORs, I’m now looking at projects in different ways,” she says. “What are the things we can standardize? How can we have what we need and remain cost-efficient? How do we create an experience that is streamlined for the patient?”

Recent graduate Aaronson is also associate professor of neurological surgery and residency program director for the Department of Neurological Surgery.

“My message that I’m already delivering to my residents is: ‘We are working toward a common goal. It’s not us against them,’” Aaronson says. “We have to consider whether we are really delivering care to the patient that’s not just good for the patient but also cost-effective.”

Today’s health care delivery is exceptionally complex and medical professionals need to understand better those complexities. Physicians will need to learn to work in teams and learn from all disciplines, including management, he says. “The people who are driving this today have to communicate clearly. They have to get people on board. Otherwise, it’s not going to happen,” Aaronson says.

The business of health care

MBA students who want to focus on the vibrant and growing business of health care benefit from Vanderbilt’s medical excellence and Nashville’s status as a health care capital. The full-time Health Care MBA provides the basics of business education along with immersion coursework and experiences specific to health care management. Launched in July 2005, it graduates about 29 students each year.

A new facet of the degree is the Health Care MBA Residency program, which provides opportunities for Vanderbilt MBA students to engage in actual problem-solving situations for local health care organizations.

The residency provides the organizations with students who plan and develop in-depth projects. The Health Care MBA students work with the health care organizations on a weekly basis during the spring and then full-time in the summer. If needed, they perform follow-up work through the fall months.

The program started with a phone call between Van Horn and Derek Anderson, director of transformation and innovation for Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt.

“We had this talent pool sitting there,” Anderson says. “That was really the motivation. We felt we could give them an opportunity to really sink their teeth into something.”

Current residency partners include Community Health Systems, Heritage Group, Quorum Health Resources, Vanderbilt Transplant Center, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Vanguard Health Systems and the Children’s Hospital.

On-time surgery improvement

Cody Schmits, MBA’11, was one of the first residency interns. His project centered on surgical scheduling for outpatient services at the Children’s Hospital, working with physician and nurse leaders to get the first patients of the day into surgery suites more quickly.

Schmits laid the procedural groundwork that led to on-time, first-case starts improving to nearly 95 percent. Previously, they had been about 15 percent, Anderson says. Improving on-time first-case starts saves money, increases efficiency and reduces delays for other patients throughout the day.

Schmits enrolled in the Health Care MBA program to help transition from a career in engineering and construction. He now works in health care consulting through Atlanta-based North Highland Worldwide Consulting.

Anderson points out that the residencies are not shadowing. “This is hands-on,” Anderson says. The residencies also allow the students to learn if health care is truly a match for them. “They just don’t come and analyze data. We’re interested in making change happen. And that’s work.”

Both physician and MBA

Within the past three years, Vanderbilt’s MD/MBA program has seen increased interest among students. Designed to train the next generation of physician leaders in the science of business, the program graduates new physicians who are also MBAs.

Future doctors increasingly recognize the need to know more than just the science of medicine, which may explain the heightened interest in joint degree programs, including the MD/MBA, says Dr. Bonnie Miller, senior associate dean for health sciences education at Vanderbilt School of Medicine.

“To lead in academic medicine, I think we will increasingly find that additional formal training will be necessary to augment clinical training,” Miller says.

“If you’re really interested in leadership, maybe there’s not a better time. We’re really turning the Titanic. We’ve got an unsustainable system and we’re trying to rapidly change it into something more effective and more efficient, and we need people to take leadership roles.”

An average of four students complete the MD/MBA program at Vanderbilt each year. Miller would like to see that trend continue, with more students entering the program with the intent to pursue the joint degree.

MD/MBA students become “a cohort within a cohort,” taking an extra year between the third and fourth years of medical school to concentrate on business disciplines. Their electives, research projects and outside interests gear toward business offerings as well.

Different perspectives

First-year emergency medicine resident Ryan Fritz admitted he never considered pursuing a joint degree when he first entered medical school. Fritz, MD’13, MBA’13, worked in management consulting for several years after college. “I felt like I already had that experience,” Fritz says.

But during medical school clinical rotations, he became interested in the inefficiencies of health care. “It doesn’t take long to see there’s a ton of waste and a ton of inefficiencies. It’s understandable, but it exists,” he says.

“As a medical student, you learn a lot of basic sciences and pathology and how to treat patients, but little of economics and policy. I began to see there would be a lot of value in understanding that,” Fritz says. “You don’t need to have an MBA to be a better leader in medicine, but it certainly is a great start.”

Alon Peltz, who received his dual medical and MBA degrees from Vanderbilt in 2012, says his business training has already transformed his approach to clinical work.

“My viewpoint now is, ‘How can we, in the context of improving clinical care for this patient, also think of the systems issues behind it?’” says Peltz, now in the second year of a three-year pediatrics residency at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center.

“I sometimes wonder how I would have perceived this (residency experience) had I not had the business education I had at Owen. And I wonder what that lens would have looked like, because this one is so different. In a way, I don’t think I could go back to the old one,” he says. “It’s fair to say my approach to medical care is very much shaped by my experience in business school.”

At Boston, Peltz has embarked on a quality improvement study, working with a group of medical students conducting a root-cause analysis to determine why certain patient populations do not adhere to follow-up appointments.

“This is a small part of many quality improvement initiatives here but it is nice to contribute clinically as well as administratively,” he says.

In addition to classes, medicine and business students have the opportunity to explore outside research with professors, something that Peltz and Fritz pursued. The university also has numerous organizations, such as the student-run Medicine and Business Interest Group and Vanderbilt Health Care Club, as well as the Vanderbilt Health Care Improvement Group, an interprofessional community of Vanderbilt education, management, medicine and nursing students.

Having business-minded students in medical school classes contributes a great deal to the learning atmosphere, Miller says.

“Students learn from each other so much,” she says. “We talk about diversity a lot in the School of Medicine. What we really want are diverse skill sets and interests. Maybe not everyone can get an MBA, but everyone else can benefit from those who do.”

Core expertise

The strength of the overall Owen, School of Medicine and Medical Center partnerships is also buoyed by faculty who delve into the complex issues of the day with research projects.

Research ranges from improving quality of care by reducing inefficiency to the impact of industry consolidation on health care. Other projects consider patient satisfaction as well as the Affordable Care Act’s effect on implementation of electronic records (see sidebar, Researching Health Care).

It’s not surprising that Owen faculty are drawn to issues regarding health care. The region has a robust health care industry—one of the first for-profit hospital corporations was birthed here—and Vanderbilt ranks in the nation’s top 10 in National Institutes of Health funding.

“Nashville is the capital of health care delivery. That’s very much what we market and sell here,” Van Horn says.

The core expertise from Vanderbilt’s medicine and management partnership is spilling out into the Nashville community. This year marked the inaugural class of Nashville Health Care Council Fellows, co-directed by Van Horn and Dr. William H. Frist, a physician and former U.S. Senate majority leader. The annual initiative is designed to identify, nurture and engage Nashville’s next generation of health care leaders.

“Nashville couldn’t be a better environment for this kind of training,” Pinson says. Owen’s degree programs and partnerships between Vanderbilt’s business and medical sides challenge tomorrow’s leaders to devise new ways to solve current and future issues.

Dean Eric Johnson, who researches how information technology can improve health care quality and reduce cost, sees endless opportunities for future partnerships between management and medicine. Discussions with his colleagues in the Medical Center began almost immediately after his arrival at Owen.

“They rightly realize there is a lot of opportunity and it’s time to seize it,” he says. “We’re already dreaming about the next big thing we can do.”

What would you do if you were out with your family one day and suddenly you found yourself in the middle of a personal horror and an international news story? Where would you be, physically and reflectively, nine months later?

Kevin White, MBA’10, can tell you.

Kevin and his parents were enjoying the day at the Boston Marathon on April 15 when bombs exploded and 264 people were severely injured—tragically, some fatally. All three Whites were injured and hospitalized. Kevin’s father, 72-year-old Bill White, ended up losing his right leg. In the days to come, they experienced media attention, interviews and even a visit from President Barack Obama.

Today, the family—with the support of their neighbors and friends, the people of Boston and the Owen and Vanderbilt communities—is moving forward. Kevin White says they believe that this year’s events have put their lives in different perspective. While they are still adjusting to challenges, they are positive about their future and are making great steps in recovery.

“This experience has given me the opportunity to step back from what I was doing, and ask if this is what I want to continue doing,” he says. “It’s like someone asking you, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’

“If we were five feet in another direction that day, we might not be here. If we were five minutes earlier or later, none of this would have happened,” he says. “But you can’t dwell on all the ifs in your life.”

Healing and reassessment

Recognizing that other families have been devastated by the event, that lives were lost, and the best must be made out of a terrible situation, Kevin says, “we have to reassess our goals and priorities and who we are as people going forward.”

Prior to the bombing, Kevin worked for a private equity firm in Chicago (focused, ironically enough, on distress situations). Feeling the need for a change, he left the firm in late 2012, and returned to Massachusetts, where he grew up. In the days leading up to April 15, he had been doing some private equity consulting work.

Kevin, who was the least injured of the family, sustained damage to his arms, shins and thighs. He tore ligaments in his hips, and still has pieces of metal in his system that will work their way out over time. His mother, Mary Jo, broke a wrist and rib, and also sustained damage to her legs, but her main injuries have healed.

As for his father, Kevin says, “he’s walking around pretty good right now” with a new prosthetic leg. “His progress is pretty astounding, in terms of getting comfortable with it. He’s getting to know his limits and boundaries and navigating walking again. Mentally, he’s very sharp,” the younger White says. “I wouldn’t say he’s excited, but he’s very happy to be home from the hospital. He was getting very tired of the food … He’s very engaged in starting ‘Life 2.0.’”

Now after his own recovery and helping his parents regain their health, Kevin is re-evaluating. “I’ve kind of had to reassess my career, and think about, ‘What makes you happy?’ contrasted to, ‘What are you good at?’” he says. Those are questions he’s still considering.

Focused on positive outcomes

Kevin won’t say much about the media coverage of the event or the bombers, stating only that his family is more focused on the future and the other survivors. When he thinks of positive experiences, he notes a few that stand out.

First is the way his parents’ community of about 2,500 people sponsored a 5K fundraising run to help with medical expenses for those injured. “It was a way for the town to express its support, not just for our family but for those who have been impacted by any type of hardship. The community realized it was one of them that was hurt. My father used to coach soccer in town, and all the people my age knew him because he had coached them,” Kevin says. “I think it was a way for people to understand that this could happen to any of us.”

Second, he says, was a realization of how truly special the Owen community is. Of all the well wishes and donations, Kevin was particularly floored by the response from those connected to Owen and his time here.

“One of the things Owen really fosters is the sense of community,” he says. “While that phrase can sometimes be a cliché, I can be a testament to the reality. The outreach from my class, the class above me, the class below me, from people connected to Owen and Vanderbilt I’d never even met was remarkable.”

Vanderbilt taught Kevin White much about working with others in pursuit of the same goal, he says—but also about options, responsibility and looking ahead, wherever the next road may lead.

“I’ve learned that there’s more to life than what you think there is,” he says. “But sometimes you have to go out and find it. And if you’re given the chance to find it, you should.”

When David Owens set out to teach a massive open online course (MOOC) with 52,000 registrants across the globe, he knew he was charting new territory. What he didn’t know was that the territory would also include his classes right here at Owen.

Owens, professor of the practice of management and innovation, was one of four professors asked to pioneer Vanderbilt’s participation in Coursera, an online learning platform through which higher education institutions offer MOOCs. Students take the equivalent of a university-level class for free but do not receive credit.

He taught the Coursera class in spring 2013. The class, which will be offered again in 2014, aligns closely with the professor’s Mod 2 Innovation Strategy class as well as his book, Creative People Must Be Stopped.

Owens, who is also faculty director of the Accelerator— Vanderbilt Summer Business Institute, says that what he learned in teaching 52,000 students online has changed how he teaches his in-person Vanderbilt class of 67 students.

Not the usual MOOC

On the surface, the methods of teaching a MOOC are simple. Prepare slides to be the visuals and then digitally record lectures to be viewed online by MOOC participants on their own time. Class interaction happens in online forums. The number of students and their geographic locations vary.

Owens started by trying the basic MOOC tack—recording his lectures, both in class and in a makeshift studio—but found that boring. So the professor of innovation found his own way of improving the online course.

“I went with more high-quality production. It made more work, but made it more interesting and fun,” he says. “It was all-consuming.”

And that was just the creation of the video lectures, which he then edited, incorporating music and slides; a teaching assistant created original artwork. Since Coursera is a for-profit company, the same copyright laws that allow fair use of creative works in the classroom did not apply.

After each Coursera lecture posted, he and teaching assistants would participate in forums with the students. “Every time I went into the forums, I’d see something and go, ‘Wow that’s interesting.’”

Project work was another area in which Owens veered from usual MOOC practice. The Coursera students were offered two options. The first was to view the lectures, participate in forums and take quizzes to receive a certificate. But those who completed an additional project received a certificate with distinction. The tiered certificate—Owens’ idea—was a first for Coursera. About 1,000 students completed the project.

The classroom profits

Understanding how online students applied the course material and built upon insights shared in the forums led Owens to make a change in his MBA classes.

For his on-campus fall Mod 2 course, he assigned students to view his video lectures outside of class. They also read material and took quizzes online. Class time was devoted to working on projects.

“I can tend to projects—which is more my stronger skill—during class time rather than trying to fit them in between classes,” he says. Students benefit from the focused classroom time to work on projects.

Based on the success of the Coursera students’ projects, Owens has also raised his expectations for what Vanderbilt MBA students can accomplish.

Owens says that the Coursera students who chose to do extra work ended up doing amazing projects. “It makes me believe that I’m not challenging students enough. We’ll push ourselves to do more complex projects,” he says. “On the other hand, the goal of the project is the application of the material. It was interesting to see that the problems people in China were having were the same as in the U.S. People in Tierra del Fuego have the same issues of pushing projects ahead. In that way, it was reassuring.”

The international cooperation carried out in the Coursera program has led to another requirement for Vanderbilt MBA students: Each project team now includes at least one international student. Owens says this allows students to “work on the skill of being able to bring people to your problem or issue and getting them committed to it.”

Powerful online discussion

He’s also gained a new appreciation for the power of discussion boards; he had used them previously at Owen but without success. “I’d use one, and two people would post, so I’d stop it. In the online course, all the action was there,” he says. “I saw that it can be powerful if I enforce the use of it, build etiquette around it and tend to it myself.”

Requiring students to participate in the forums is better than inviting them into the classroom discussion, Owens believes.

“Requiring people to post and respond to posts, you can’t hide. I may cold-call a student in class once, and if I see I have made a horrible mistake, I tend to not do that again because of the emotional effect it will have on the class,” he says. Some students are shy, haven’t read the material or are in a bad mood, he says. “In the online forums, when they feel like doing it, they can.”

Owens also believes teaching through Coursera has transformed his lectures forever.

“I’m more careful and aware that there is a lot of power in the slides. If I do a lot of slides, any one slide is a throwaway. But through Coursera, I had to look at every slide to make sure that there was nothing copyrighted and knowing that thousands of people would be looking at it,” he says. “Now I’m aware of the power in that, and in the image, and that I can use it very powerfully or very poorly.

“I think more about using video and audio in class,” he says. “Those are things that help bring classes alive.”

When Owen wanted to expand its global perspective, the school turned to its alumni and corporate clients to discover what their needs were. What they found was right in their own backyard: the Western Hemisphere.

“We spoke with alumni and recognized that they have made their operations go across the Americas. We saw a need to give people a perspective of how it is to operate across North and South America,” says Juli Bennett, MBA’93, executive director of the Executive MBA and Americas MBA for Executives programs. “We responded to a business need.”

The Americas MBA is a focused, optional track in the Executive MBA program. Participants spend their first year in step with students in the traditional program. The second year, they focus more heavily on international business, working on international capstone projects and attending 10-day residential immersions at participating schools: Fundação Instituto De Administração in São Paulo; Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México in Mexico City; and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C. The students from those programs join the Owen students for another nine days at Vanderbilt. When the students graduate, they have a deep and relevant understanding of international trade, particularly within the four largest economies in the Americas: Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the U.S.

“Mostly when you look at executive MBA programs, they do the same thing we used to do: take their students and their faculty and go to a different location,” Bennett says. “With this model, when you go to Simon Fraser you’re taught by the top cross-cultural experts at Simon Fraser. The four schools’ faculty are experts at things like family businesses in Mexico. They know the people who are excellent at emerging markets in Brazil. It’s not us trying to be everything to everyone. It’s leveraging the expertise of those four schools.”

It’s also leveraging the expertise of their peers. Working across borders with students from the other schools, Americas MBA students benefit from their peers’ insights and experiences—something that will be invaluable in their future careers.

Have Americas MBA, will travel

A dozen students graduated in 2013, comparable to those who are expected to earn their degrees in 2014. Bennett believes the ideal student is one who is “looking for an expat assignment, looking to expand ability to communicate across cultures, who has always had an interest in different ways of thinking.”

Jon Haworth, AMBA’13, was vice president, plant operations and innovation at Des-Case. His company, which manufactures contamination control products for industrial lubricants, does about a third of its business outside the United States. That led Haworth to consider gaining international experience. He consulted with Des-Case President and CEO Brian Gleason, who earned his Vanderbilt Executive MBA in 1997.

“I remember asking for his opinion on which one of the programs I should pursue and him saying I should do the Americas program,” Haworth says. “I want to do more in emerging markets. That program was perfect for that. The other side is that I’ve lived in South America and am fluent in Portuguese.”

Across time zones and cultures

Des-Case also was used as a yearlong Americas MBA capstone strategy project, which the students must complete while working with counterparts at the three other universities.

“We’ve already seen nice growth in Latin America,” Des-Case’s Gleason says. “As well as we’ve done there, we all recognized there was a tremendous upside that we’ve not come close to tapping. Jon and his group did a nice job in shaping an argument for what we ought to be doing and creating a framework by which we’ll make future decisions in other markets globally. We’ll make the same kinds of decisions for Europe and for Asia at some point.”

The cross-cultural experience of the project teams provides excellent preparation for the future.

“They have to figure out how to work virtually, through different time zones, to get through the cultural and language barriers and to figure out how to get it done even though they’re not at a table and face to face,” Bennett says. “That is the most challenging part of the program, but if you can figure out how to do that, you will be the one targeted as a leader in these organizations.”

Tough and challenging, the Master of Accountancy Valuation program was developed in conjunction with Owen’s five partner accounting firms to fill a real business need. It is the second of two, one-year Master of Accountancy programs developed by the school to serve accounting firms and recent undergraduates. The first MAcc Valuation class graduated in May.

Kevin Moss, global managing director, valuation services for Deloitte, served on the MAcc advisory board. “What I liked about what MAcc was doing was talking to the clients, getting input from the community that they provide people to. A lot of programs do not do that,” Moss says.

In recent years, companies have tried to put a value on intangibles like intellectual property, goodwill and incentive-based compensation. Such valuation expertise is driving the need for a program like MAcc Valuation, says Karl Hackenbrack, associate dean and director of accountancy. “This is the nexus of accounting and finance. Valuation practices are in large part these days staffed by people who started their careers in a more traditional finance area and have to learn the accounting.”

The one-year program is intense; students take required coursework, complete a 10-week internship with one of the partner firms—Deloitte, EY, Grant Thornton, KPMG or PricewaterhouseCoopers—and then graduate. Even then they don’t leave Owen; they receive intensive preparation for the Chartered Financial Analyst and Certified Public Accountant exams.

The 13 members of the first graduating class all took the CFA and CPA preparation courses. They take the first of three CFA exams pre-graduation, and then take the next two exams over the next few years. Of the 2013 graduating class, 11 passed the level one CFA exam.

On the four-part CPA exam, the recent graduates scored a 90.2 percent first-time section pass rate—the highest first-time section pass rate of the top 25 graduate MAcc programs in the nation. Hackenbrack is proud to point out that the pass rate for the CFA exam nationwide is 37 percent while the percentage of those who pass the CPA exam on the first try is in the low teens.

Aptitude, attitude and bedside manner

“Whenever I recruit, there are three buckets that I look for: aptitude, which is probably going to get you into most one-year graduate programs; attitude: Do you understand what you’re getting into, in terms of Vanderbilt MAcc Valuation, and are you well-informed to what the programs are about? It is an immersion experience and that’s not for everyone,” Hackenbrack says. “The third is what I call bedside manner, client-facing skills. You have to pass all three to get in.”

Those who are accepted into the program, however, are well prepared for a career in valuation. After graduation, most are headed for a large public accounting firm in a junior-level position.

“That’s part of the value proposition from the firms’ perspectives,” Hackenbrack says. “Think of an audit service line. The bottom of the pyramid is junior staff and the top is partners. In valuation, up until about 10 years ago, those services were provided by professionals who were brought in as manager, director or partner. The pyramid is upside down relative to the audit service line. They need the capability to flip it. We’re first movers in helping them fill the junior service ranks so that they can internally identify the talent.”

The firms get a head start on that identification through the internship programs, which occur in January and February, typically a firm’s busy season. Deloitte, Moss’ company, hired six.

“They did an outstanding job,” he says of the interns. “They were well trained in technical skills. He’s (Hackenbrack) recruited people with good people skills. If you’re going to succeed outside of school, you need to have more than academic training, you need to be able to work with people.

“When the students came into the program, they integrated well into teams and … had the technical background that we were looking for,” Moss says. “The students were firing on all cylinders when they came through the door. Normally you’ll have to teach students something. They have all the bases covered as opposed to a few of the bases.”

Tough by intention

The internships provide something of a trial by fire. “I want you in the firms when it’s tough,” Hackenbrack says. “If it’s not for you, come back and say, ‘I don’t want to work that hard.’ It’s intentional to have (the internships) in what the firms traditionally view as their busy season because so many companies have the Dec. 31 year-ends.”

While Hackenbrack says it’s too early to tell what kind of students will be ideal for the MAcc Valuation program, he believes those who receive their bachelor’s degree in economics will be naturals. “They are taking course work and thinking about issues that they honestly care about and enjoy studying. But let’s face it: What jobs are they going to take at graduation? They’re prepared for graduate school.”

Which can prepare them to fill key roles in booming new areas of business like valuation.

Management students in health care tracks at Owen have the advantage of taking courses from professors who not only know their subject but are also adding to best practices and the national policy discussion. Here are just a few examples of faculty researching health care issues, particularly those that focus on improving efficiencies.

How does health care consolidation affect pricing?

With Luke Froeb, the William C. Oehmig Professor of Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, Larry Van Horn is working to quantify and evaluate industry consolidation in health care. Froeb and Van Horn measure how consolidation influences market power and pricing.

A key concern, explains Van Horn, associate professor of management and executive director of health affairs, is whether increasing consolidation results in undue market power for providers or greater efficiencies that lower costs, a question that any merging or consolidating delivery system must face. That concern is of particular interest to the Federal Trade Commission in evaluating market power versus efficiency in health care consolidation.

Van Horn is also collaborating with two Vanderbilt University Medical Center physicians, Dr. Matthew Resnick, assistant professor of urologic surgery, and Dr. David Penson, the Paul V. Hamilton, M.D. and Virginia E. Howd Professor of Urologic Oncology, to investigate how Medicare coverage potentially affects the likelihood that patients receive treatment.

“What we find very clearly is that patients or patients and providers hold off addressing certain medical issues until age 65, when there is a precipitous spike once Medicare is in place,” Van Horn explains. The challenge is to determine how to change incentives so that patients seek care when it is clinically appropriate, he says.

The research team also has studied outcomes among prostate cancer patients treated with surgery versus radiotherapy.

Encouraging compassion reaps benefits

Tim Vogus, associate professor of management, looks at compassion practices and their impact on patient perceptions of their care experience.

“You might think compassion and cost effectiveness would be incompatible. But the two drive in the same direction,” he explains.

Compassionate practices, or care, represent the extent to which a hospital recognizes and rewards compassionate acts by its caregivers—and supports its employees in coping with the stresses and traumas experienced at work. Vogus has found that compassionate care leads to higher quality and more personalized care, which in turn leads to incentive payments from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) value-based purchasing program.

“When hospitals implement support for compassion practices, they are actually associated with patient perceptions of higher quality care and a greater likelihood of recommending that hospital to others,” he says. In addition, overall ratings of quality of care improve, and both of those markers are criteria for determining the incentive payments awarded under the CMS program.

Just recognizing people who have gone beyond the call of duty—something that costs hospitals little or no money—significantly improves the ability of the entire organization to offer compassionate care, Vogus has found.

Interacting compassionately among caregivers themselves—by providing forums of support when they have personal issues, lose a patient or need pastoral care—improves overall quality as well, he explains.

“It’s about thinking differently about how we do the work we do in ways that help us deliver higher quality care,” Vogus says. “It’s not costly. It’s just smart management.”

Vogus also has a stream of work, some with Bruce Cooil, the Dean Samuel B. and Evelyn R. Richmond Professor of Management, on “mindful organizing,” or how people best work together to detect and correct emerging errors and unexpected events. A continuous improvement mindset, he says, is linked to a higher performing team. And a higher performing team is more likely to retain higher quality employees, saving money in hiring, training and team integration.

His research, he explains, is all about “shifting the way people think about work and managing work. We want to drive things that grow revenue and reduce cost.”

Reducing inefficiencies improves quality of care

Research spearheaded by Ranga Ramanujam, associate professor of management, looks into the notion that reducing inefficiencies and waste is an important measure of quality that is not necessarily in conflict with the goal of improving patient outcomes.

“The key is to facilitate active, ongoing, real-time involvement of employees on the front lines detecting problems and using their skills to fix problems on the go,” he says.

“Health care is a very complex distributed system that cannot be controlled from the top down. It has to be managed in real time at the point of care. To do more with less, it is important to get your employees more engaged and empowered,” he says. “A lot of my work centers on employee voice and encouraging the voluntary expression of ideas.”

Several studies have looked at the conditions that encourage nurses to speak up. Ramanujam has found that much of it has to do with the behaviors and managerial qualities of the nurse manager.

The implementation of many efficiency-enhancing practices, he discovered, depends on effective coordination between and across various professional groups—nurses, physicians, pharmacists and other health care workers.

Ramanujam is currently examining hospitals that consistently deliver quality care even while keeping costs and inefficiencies low. He says the U.S. system can potentially learn from the experience of hospitals in other countries, such as the Aravind Eye System in India that performs high-quality cataract surgeries at a fraction of the cost in the West.

Lessons from other industries improve efficiencies

After years spent studying learning curves in organizations, particularly the airline industry, Michael A. Lapré, the E. Bronson Ingram Research Professor of Operations Management, turned his attention to health care.

Lapré’s recent research focus has been on improving efficiencies among surgical teams in operating rooms—the most expensive unit in a hospital—as an important potential cost-saving area for hospitals.

Specifically, he has looked into whether individual, team and organizational experience improved efficiencies. The research showed that when an experienced surgical team works together regularly and effectively, it is able to perform surgery faster when more cases were on the schedule.

IT can impact quality of care

Eric Johnson, the Ralph Owen Dean and Bruce D. Henderson Professor of Strategy, is newest among the active health care researchers at Owen. He is part of a recently announced multiuniversity National Science Foundation grant focused on trustworthy information systems for health and wellness.

The work springs from the large financial incentives provided by the Affordable Care Act for hospitals to adopt electronic medical records. The project’s multidisciplinary team has studied 3,500 hospitals making IT investment decisions and found that hospitals meeting the government’s requirements for the use of electronic medical data and related technology (reaching what is defined by the government as “stage one meaningful use”) do have measurably better results. Even so, those usually follow a predictably difficult first year of implementation, he says.

He says that while it’s difficult to alleviate all agendas or bias, Owen can function as a more impartial observer of the health care landscape.

“Since we’re not in the health care business, we’re able to have these conversations about these vexing issues that health care faces without having any perceived agenda or goals,” he says.