Owen Dean M. Eric Johnson congratulates Founder’s Medalist Aaron Dorn as Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos looks on.
Owen Graduate School of Managementcelebrated Commencement May 12. All told, the Class of 2017 received 173 MBAs and 39 Executive MBAs, 48 master’s of science in finance, 47 master’s of accountancy, and 14 master’s of marketing. Members of the 2016 master’s of management in health care and EMBA programs also participated.
After a welcome from Dean M. Eric Johnson, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman, MBA’93, gave the Commencement speech. She urged graduates to follow careers that “will carry you through the many twists and turns that your life and your career will inevitably bring you.”
Graduates gather in their regalia.Zheng “Prince” Huang, MBA’17, proposes to Jie “Jessica” Su, MBA’16, after the Commencement ceremony. She said yes!Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman, MBA’93, and Dean M. Eric Johnson pause before the Owen Commencement ceremony.Soon-to-be graduates gather outside before the ceremonies begin.The 2017 EMBA class documents its status as the first EMBA class to participate in Commencement.
As the inaugural member of a new corporate partnership program at Owen, Cardinal Health’s relationship with the school has moved beyond year-to-year hiring
Read McNamara, MA’76, (left)assistant dean for corporate partnerships at Owen’s Career Management Center and Sam Samad, senior vice president and treasurer at Cardinal Health and a member of Owen’s Board of Visitors. Photo Credit: John Russell
Just over a decade ago, when Jeff Greer, BA’94, MBA’00, decided to leave the world of management consulting, he called a contact at Cardinal Health, one of the world’s leading global health services and products companies, to explore new career opportunities. Having worked on past engagements at the Dublin, Ohio-based company, he’d come to appreciate Cardinal Health’s rare combination of maintaining a collegial, collaborative feel within the setting of a company consistently ranked in the top 25 of the Fortune 500.
“One of the things I’ve loved about Cardinal Health is that it reminds me of the atmosphere at Owen,” says Greer, who is now vice president of enterprise architecture and IT strategy at Cardinal Health, and believes he was the first alumnus from Vanderbilt’s MBA program to land at the company. He has been a member of the Owen recruiting team ever since.
“In business school, I never felt like there was cutthroat competition among classmates, nor were there barriers to getting access to the people or resources you needed,” he says. “I find that things are very much the same at Cardinal Health.”
Greer isn’t the only one who has recognized the similarities between Cardinal Health and Vanderbilt’s Owen School. This fall, Cardinal Health became the inaugural member of a new corporate partnership program at Owen designed to deepen ties between the school and companies that recruit Vanderbilt business talent.
“This partnership formalizes a lot of what we were already doing with Owen, but takes it to the next level,” says Sam Samad, senior vice president and treasurer at Cardinal Health and a member of Owen’s Board of Visitors. “It puts the things we’re doing together in a bit more of a strategic context.”
Read McNamara, MA’76, assistant dean for corporate partnerships at Owen’s Career Management Center, says Cardinal Health is an ideal company to help launch the new initiative—a program he hopes to grow to about 25 companies. The genesis for the idea came in 2013 around the time M. Eric Johnson was named dean of the business school.
“I’d begun to network with my peers at other top-25 business schools and learned about engagement programs they had with corporate recruiters,” McNamara says, citing Harvard Business School’s longstanding partnership with P&G as an example. “There are many different routes a program like this could take, but Dean Johnson and I decided that developing qualitative engagements—things like mentoring opportunities with executives, speaker opportunities, case competitions, joint research projects—would be the cornerstone of our partnership program.”
The primary goal is to attract companies to campus in a way that goes “above and beyond” the cyclical, transactional nature of simply recruiting graduates, McNamara says.
That’s a trajectory Cardinal Health has followed since the company began recruiting Owen graduates on campus in 2011, Samad says, noting that the lone Vanderbilt graduate who went to Cardinal Health that year, Eric Messinger, MBA’12, continues to thrive at the company.
In the years since then, Cardinal Health has extended its ties to Vanderbilt in numerous ways that go beyond hiring—though that role is growing too as the company has augmented its internship program and broadened its MBA recruiting pool from strictly finance majors to graduates concentrating in areas like strategy and marketing.
Some of those nonrecruiting activities included former Cardinal Health CFO Jeff Henderson joining the Board of Visitors (Samad has taken over his place on the BOV); Cardinal Health CEO George Barrett delivering a keynote address in 2014 for the student-run Vanderbilt Health Care Conference; and Cardinal Health partnering with Vanderbilt’s Executive Development Institute to develop courses for high-potential executives within the company.
“The foundational element in all of this is that you need people who enjoy working with each other,” Samad says. “Once we started working with the team at Owen, we realized we had a very strong cultural fit. We saw that from day one.”
A Good Deal for Both Sides
The partnership between Owen and Cardinal Health is not just about mutual admiration, however. Like any good business deal, both sides stand to gain.
Samad participates in his first Owen Board of Visitors meeting with Dean Eric Johnson in November. Photo Credit: John Russell
One big advantage for Cardinal Health’s involvement with Owen is that it helps sell the students on the company. That’s important, Samad says, because in the next year alone he hopes to double the number of interns from Owen, as well as the number of graduates coming into full-time roles at Cardinal Health.
Another critical benefit: diversity. “Cultivating a diverse and inclusive work environment is crucial to our success,” says Samad. “In our efforts to ensure diversity in the workplace, Cardinal Health strives for a workplace that accurately reflects the communities where we live and do business. As I look at the list of Vanderbilt MBAs that we’ve hired, there is a lot of gender and ethnic diversity, which helps us thrive as an organization.”
Internally, Cardinal Health has been exploring ways to put more structure around its internal leadership development efforts to foster a pipeline of homegrown executive talent, and MBA recruiting plays an important role in that. “If we attract somebody into finance, if we attract somebody into strategy, we want them to have the expectation that they’ll be rotating,” Samad says. “They need to understand that they’re not coming into a strategy firm. At the end of the day, they’re joining a health care company.”
The other key area for Cardinal Health is tapping into Owen’s teaching and research. Samad says the company wants to continue to develop customized learning programs for the company’s internal use, as well as access to cutting-edge research around the health care industry, especially now that Cardinal Health has operations in Nashville that include a distribution center and a recently acquired health care services company, naviHealth.
For Owen, having high-quality companies on campus regularly recruiting graduates is a key motivator for entering these kinds of partnerships, McNamara says. Developing a stable group of top companies with which Owen has formalized partnerships helps recruit students for admissions, and ideally helps guard against severe hiring dips during economic downturns.
These partnerships also create opportunities for students and companies to get a much better feel for working together before either side commits to a full-time job.
McNamara says case competitions offer a good example. “They are perhaps one of the most productive forms of the kind of qualitative engagement we have in mind,” he says. “Over a two-day period, the company—which ideally provides the judges for the competition—will get a really good look at our talent.” Even watching how the students organize, market and run the competitions offers employers valuable insight, McNamara says. Similarly, case competitions let students get a good feel for a company’s culture and values in a way that an hourlong interview in a library conference room can’t replicate.
McNamara says Deloitte’s annual Human Capital Case Competition, hosted at Owen, has been a great success for students in the Human and Organizational Performance track. He’d like to see those efforts replicated with other companies in different management concentrations, such as finance, health care, marketing and operations.
Summer interns and current MBA students Mark Fergason, BA’08, Kartik Varma, and Sid Shetty, join Cardinal Health CEO George Barrett (third from left) for a group photo. Fergason and Shetty will join Cardinal after graduation, while Varma is joining American Airlines, another company that enjoys a strong Owen alumni network. Photo Credit: Sid Shetty
One other key outcome Vanderbilt hopes to see emerge from the corporate partnership program is the creation of an executive-in-residence position. McNamara and Melinda Allen, executive director of the Owen School’s Leadership Development Program, are putting the final touches on that initiative. “This would involve a senior executive from a corporate partner spending anywhere between 48 and 72 hours here on campus meeting with small groups of students, faculty and administrators,” McNamara says. “That would give the company a terrific look—at a very senior level—at the range of talent and research Vanderbilt has to offer.” For students it would also help reinforce the school’s close-knit, collaborative culture.
McNamara says each organization that becomes a corporate partner should include a few common components, such as a history of recruiting Owen students in good times and bad; a willingness to hire international graduates; a leadership development program at their organization; and a willingness to engage with Owen through things like speaker series or case competitions.
In exchange, companies designated as corporate partners will receive preferential timing for on-campus interview and information sessions; priority for event sponsorship; and invitations to participate in an annual dean’s dinner for corporate partners that will offer an inside look at Owen’s plans and priorities.
“Companies like Cardinal Health—and many others Owen has had fantastic relationships with over the years—have expressed a real desire to be involved with the school, whether it’s related to curriculum, hiring students, or working with faculty on teaching and research projects. Usually it’s all of those things and more,” Johnson says. “Read and the executives he is talking to for this corporate partnership program have done a wonderful job putting a structure and strategy around a set of mutually beneficial engagement activities. I look forward to seeing this grow into a meaningful, productive program that leads to long-term success for everyone involved.”
Editor’s note: As this issue of Vanderbilt Business magazine was going to press, Sam Samad was named senior vice president and chief financial officer of Illumina, a global leader in the field of genomics.
Vanderbilt MBA graduates are helping lead Rover on a path of quick growth, but it’s not always easy to keep up
(Left to right) Rover Vice President Megan Teepe, MBA’11, Chief Operating Officer Brent Turner, MBA’99 and summer intern Sarah Eaton. Photo Credit: Brett Israel
When you walk into Rover’s office in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, the first friendly face to greet you belongs to Dublin. She’s a 6-year-old Chiweenie (part Chihuahua, part Dachshund), whose owner smiles from behind the reception desk in the lobby. It’s a nice welcome to one of the hottest companies in tech.
Rover, whose business involves matching dog sitters, walkers and caregivers with dog owners, might seem a little canine-crazy to outsiders; a lap around the office reveals about a dozen dogs of various breeds displaying various levels of enthusiasm for office life. Yet, the office is quieter than you’d think it would be for a space filled with dogs. There’s little barking or roughhousing. For the most part, dogs lie on pillows near their owners’ workspaces. The humans, for their part, are focused on computer screens, perfecting Rover’s code or resolving issues between sitters and owners.
Rover has pioneered the on-demand dog sitting business, and propelling the company forward are graduates from the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management. Led by Brent Turner, MBA’99, Rover’s chief operating officer, Owen alumni are shaping Rover’s culture on the fly as the company grows at breakneck speeds.
Rover works like this: Dog owners set up a profile for themselves and their pet on either the Rover website or the mobile app. When they need someone to watch or walk their pooch, they search for available sitters in their area who can either drop in for a quick visit, take the dog for a walk, or watch the pet overnight in either the owner’s house or at the sitter’s house. Sitters can send updates to the owners throughout the stay, including text messages and pictures, or report any incidents to Rover’s support team. After the stay, sitters and owners give each other starred ratings and can provide further feedback.
Anyone can sign up to be a sitter or dog walker for Rover, but Rover requires background checks, screens potential candidates for red flags, and spends a lot of time educating sitters on how to be successful while pet-sitting. Sitters set their prices, preferences and availability. Anyone familiar with online dating services will quickly recognize Rover’s user interface; it’s a matchmaking service, but for dogs and caregivers.
Pet pictures abound at Rover’s Seattle headquarters. Photo Credit: Brett Israel
Since its founding in 2011, Rover has become the largest marketplace in the U.S. for pet-sitting services, with over 65,000 registered sitters. It has raised $90 million in total venture funding after closing an investment round in October that was co-led by Foundry Group and Menlo Ventures, whose other investments include Uber, Siri and Roku.
Rover has also been shaped by Vanderbilt grads, with Turner leading the way as COO. His job is to make sure Rover pursues its annual plan. On any given day, he attends to the business rhythms of Rover, checking in on the company’s teams, which include sitter success, marketing and operations among others. The Rover annual plan is broken down into a set of key performance metrics that departments and individuals are trying to hit. Turner can quickly see who is ahead and who needs help. He then turns his attention to pursuing his own projects in support of people on his team or his boss, Rover’s CEO.
Rover is a five-year-old company, and Turner has been COO for the last three, during which time Rover has made a name for itself on the tech scene. The company has experienced greater than or equal to 200 percent growth in revenue every year that Turner has been COO. “It’s the first legitimately hypergrowth business that I’ve been a part of,” Turner says. “With past businesses, my role had been to get everyone aligned in the right direction to push the company uphill. At Rover, it’s more like holding on for dear life and trying not to let anything come apart.” He’s focused on looking at the demands of Rover’s steep growth curve and identifying potential hurdles.
“Between March 1 and the end of July in 2016, our business doubled,” Turner says. “When you’re looking up at the start of March and you say our company will be twice the size in terms in terms of revenues at end of July, you have to start thinking about what we need to work on now to meet those scale challenges.”
At the moment, Turner is focused specifically on the marketing challenges facing the company. For example, most tech companies rely on the power of search engines to drive customers to their platforms. The problem for Rover is that not many people actually search the internet for dog sitters; they’re more likely to call a friend, neighbor or nearby kennel. So, instead of search engine advertising, Rover relies on mid-funnel or up-funnel channels, such as their blog, Facebook videos, TV and other local ads. That leads to many channels, so Turner is trying to tackle the complexity of this kind of marketing approach as the company grows.
“You hear a lot of people talk about not boiling the ocean, meaning you can’t work on all of your problems at once,” Turner says. “But when you’re growing so fast and all your known problems are going from immaterial to material so fast, and in the meantime unknown problems are coming out of the woodwork, you have to boil the ocean.”
The first person Turner hired to help him chart Rover’s course and define its values was fellow Vanderbilt grad Megan Teepe, MBA’11. Today she’s Rover’s vice president of sitter success and safety, charged with building out Rover’s junior and midlevel leaders. That means helping them develop the skills that will help Rover scale up by staying focused on performance and outcomes—and helping these leaders maintain their humanity at the same time.
At Rover, Teepe tries to identify with a strong set of soft skills that are harder to measure on paper. She’s looking for aptitude. “One of the most important things I’ve learned is how important it is to get the right people in the right roles from the beginning, and to learn your lessons quickly if you didn’t,” Teepe says.
“At Rover, if I’m hiring you for a leadership role where you’re going to be managing people, I want to know if you live and breathe leadership,” Teepe says. “I see that in the way you talk about why you want to lead people. Can you articulate that or is it just something you think you need to do to build your career? I’m eagle-eyed about that.”
And more Vanderbilt MBA talent may be on the way to help Rover grow.
This past summer, Sarah Eaton, MBA Class of 2017 and Owen’s student government president, interned at Rover, helping shape the educational aspects of the company’s sitter success program. She was charged with developing videos for social media that help explain to sitters what to do in in potentially sticky situations that arise during dog sitting. Hiring the right people is so important at fast-growing Rover that the company has painted its core values on a wall in the office. One of Turner’s most important values is a ban on personal agendas in the workplace. Pathological honesty and bias toward action are others.
“Errors of inaction are always unacceptable,” Turner says. “If you’re trying to solve a problem and you make a mistake, that’s OK, but don’t be intimidated by failure. If you don’t screw up something every month, I’m going to wonder if you’re trying hard enough.”
Owen student Sarah Eaton poses with a pooch during her summer internship at Rover. Photo Credit: Brett Israel
These values are especially important to Turner in his role as COO. He’s talked about them during a recent Taco Tuesday series held at Rover where a different employee presents to the team on a topic of their choosing. His main responsibility, after all, is to keep Rover plowing ahead without losing the characteristics that helped the company achieve success in the first place.
“Defining and living our values is important to me because Job No. 1 is to get the right people in the right roles,” Turner says. “We’re doing that here at Rover.”
In the next five years, Turner thinks $1 billion in revenue across the platform is realistic, along with a multinational presence and a rollout of other services. “When I got here almost three years ago, the idea that Rover would have revenue of $200 million across the platform seemed like it would be so amazing,” Turner says. “Now, we’ll roll right through that, and who knows where the top is?”
Vanderbilt faculty and alumni are exploring new innovations to raise health care quality while lowering costs
What is the right price to put on a child’s life?
That may be a deeply unsettling question, but to start to fix the U.S. health care system, we have to begin to think in ways that confront uncomfortable realties, says Larry Van Horn, executive director of health affairs at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management.
For renowned pediatric cardiac surgeon Dr. Devi Shetty, such a question is hardly theoretical. In a presentation to this year’s class of Nashville Health Care Fellows—an invitation-only program for health care executives co-founded and co-directed by Van Horn and former U.S. senator Dr. Bill Frist—Shetty described the reality of caring for India’s poor.
When he tells a mother that her child needs a surgery that costs 80,000 rupees (about $1,200), but knows she can’t pay that, “the way I solve that family’s problem is by getting the cost from 80,000 to 40,000,” says Shetty, founder of Narayana Health, which operates 23 hospitals and seven heart centers across India. To cut costs, Shetty must find innovations that will help strip away every medical step that isn’t absolutely essential to providing the best result for the patient.
American doctors are going to have to start factoring affordability into their protocols, too. Sweeping changes in the health care landscape are already challenging the business models of many current health care companies. As they do, Van Horn believes a new class of businesses will rise to meet the challenge.
To help these companies and organizations find new ways of working, this summer Vanderbilt launched the Center for Health Care Market Innovation. Van Horn and Vanderbilt marketing professor Steve Hoeffler will run the corporate-funded, research-driven center with the goal of investigating the disruptive forces facing health care companies today.
Owen professors Steve Hoeffler (left)and Larry Van Horn. Photo Credit: Daniel Dubois
Rather than focus on government policy, however, Vanderbilt’s center “is focused on the 180 million Americans with commercial insurance, the way their financial exposure is changing, and the way that’s translating into how they consume medical care,” Van Horn says.
He explains that the private sector—not government agencies—has a history of developing innovation that ultimately reaches the masses. “This is why I’m hopeful about what the private sector will do,” Van Horn says. “We’ll solve the problem and we’ll keep innovating. We’ll bring the cost structure down so that at some point, we can provide these services to everybody.”
The roots of the new health care landscape in the U.S., with steadily rising health care premiums and the advent of more high-deductible plans, go back nearly two decades. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, employer-sponsored health coverage premiums skyrocketed 203 percent between 1999 and 2015. Over that same time, workers’ contribution to their premiums increased by 221 percent. Their earnings, by contrast, have only increased by 56 percent. The Affordable Care Act, signed into law in 2010, accelerated these trends.
“The consumer hasn’t historically been involved, because health care has been a business-to-business transaction,” says Michael Burcham, who has led several successful startups and teaches health care innovation and entrepreneurship at Vanderbilt’s Owen School. “Consumers today are paying about one-third of all their medical costs, so they should have a seat at the table. We’re entering a market where the consumer has freedom to choose.”
Incentive to Innovate
These changing dynamics have shifted the way people understand health care. Take the recent controversy surrounding the price of an EpiPen, a device manufactured by pharmaceutical company Mylan used to treat severe allergic reactions. Since 2007 the price of the standard two-pack of EpiPens has risen from $100 to $600. Patients and parents of children with allergies, newly clued into the cost increase, are furious.
Alex Tolbert, JD/MBA’07
Much of the price furor is a direct result of patients paying a higher deductible, says Alex Tolbert, JD/MBA’07, founder of Nashville-based health care advisory company Bernard Health. “We never would have read about that in the age of the $20 co-pay.” Patients will not only demand price transparency, he adds, but they will also demand better health care services. He bases this on his personal experience. “I don’t feel intimidated in very many settings, but I do when I’m in a medical provider setting,” he says. Part of that feeling, Tolbert adds, comes from having past unpleasant experiences.
He cites one notable exception: his local dermatologist who recently stopped taking insurance. She now answers directly to her patients, the people who cut the checks, Tolbert says. In her office, “I’m treated like a human.”
Tolbert founded his company, in fact, to bring a little humanity back to the health insurance business. He and his Bernard Health team members help people sort through the many confusing health insurance products to select the one that will give them the best coverage for their money. The best product differs depending on the person.
Other Vanderbilt graduates are already addressing consumer needs on the provider side. Travis Messina, MBA’08, is the CEO of Contessa Health, a home hospitalization startup that aims to redesign delivery and payment for specific episodes of care.
Contessa changes the consumer experience because it enables patients with certain conditions, such as congestive heart failure or pneumonia, to leave the hospital after an acute episode and receive hospital-level treatment in their own homes. This puts patients at ease—most people do not want to stay in a hospital longer than necessary—and it provides patients the high-touch, one-on-one care that helps prevent readmissions. Low readmission rates benefit the patient and look good for the hospital, which also shares in Contessa’s cost savings and quality scores.
When managed right, Contessa’s method offers a win-win. But even solutions that should work in theory can be difficult to roll out. “Health care is a system that is somewhat set in its ways,” Messina says, “but people want these change agents. Hopefully, we can be the change agent for a lot of different communities.”
Contessa, which received its first round of seed funding in January 2015, launched in its first market in Marshfield, Wisconsin, this summer. Messina is currently in conversations with other provider networks. Those conversations can be tough, he says, but, “it’s a lot of fun when they realize that this is the way we should deliver care. That’s been the most fulfilling part.”
Contessa’s is just one of many patient-centered health care models to come. Another, according to Bernard Health’s Tolbert, is one that enables people to purchase a subscription to a primary care provider rather than paying per visit. In this model, doctors would answer patient questions via text and email, often avoiding a more expensive in-person exam. They would also quarterback interactions with specialists. Tolbert says, “I think ultimately, the healthiest market won’t be consumers on their own, but consumers coupled with their primary care doctors.”
The means to the healthiest, happiest health care consumer is exactly what Van Horn and Hoeffler’s new center will explore. “Sometimes academia gets accused of creating research that isn’t tied to real managerial problems, but in this industry, we can get past that,” Hoeffler says.
He and Van Horn are in conversations with seven local health care companies who want to participate in the center’s new research effort. Ultimately, the two directors want to collect data from willing companies and share it in ways that, without risking proprietary information, shed new light on consumer behavior.
Michael Burcham
Because of its location in Nashville, Vanderbilt is primed for collaboration, says Burcham: “It’s a city built on health care services. What better place is there to take these services and fuse processes and technology to innovate?”
The new generation of health care problem solvers are already coming up through the ranks. Ahead of much of the industry, students and professors at Vanderbilt are thinking in new ways about patients with purchasing power.
“I’m teaching a health care marketing elective at Owen,” Hoeffler says. “Today’s topic is: Patient as consumer—how does this change the world?”
In 1976, less than a decade after the first 10 students enrolled at Vanderbilt’s new Graduate School of Management, Amy Conlee began her business education.
“I was at Owen at a very early stage,” recalls Amy Conlee, MBA’77. Our class size was only about 40 students, and offered some diversity. We had about five women and perhaps five to eight students who would be considered underrepresented, including international students.”
When Lisa McKinnon, BA’78, MBA’87, began her studies a decade later, student diversity at the Owen School was still relatively the same. This is partly why both women recently decided to establish scholarships at Vanderbilt. McKinnon’s fund, the Davidson McKinnon Scholarship, which is named after her and her parents, supports women studying at Owen. Conlee’s fund, the Cecil and Amy Jorgensen Conlee Diversity Scholarship, is named after her and her husband. It supports women from underrepresented groups. In 1990 Conlee also created a scholarship at Vanderbilt to support women in the MBA program.
“In talking with Dean Eric Johnson, I sensed a strong interest in addressing diversity at Owen right now,” Conlee says. “I am very impressed with his commitment to this issue—knowing that more diversity would benefit the school and the students.” For both women, their business careers also proved the need for these scholarships.
“I started out in banking in 1978 and about 1980 I became the first female commercial lender that my bank ever had,” McKinnon says. “I’ve been in banking ever since, and even today I see that once you start migrating to the very top, to the C-suite or executive suite, I see it still being largely male. This is interesting because banking is a service industry. Whereas manufacturing is more male dominated, it was just an expectation that the service industry would be more equal. But it’s 2016, and it still is not.”
“There are glass ceilings that remain,” she says. “The only way we will break them is if we have more and more qualified women in the pipeline. One of the ways we do that is to make sure women are equivalently educated to everybody else.”
Conlee has a somewhat different story to tell through her career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley’s New York office. Though she started out among the first women at the firm, which was actually on the forefront of bringing women to investment banking, over her 17-year career she saw a dramatic increase in diversity as Morgan Stanley became a more international firm. She was among the first female managing directors at the firm.
“Having been in business so many years, I believe every organization—whether it’s a business or a university—is significantly improved by diversity,” Conlee says. “It brings together different opinions, provides better answers by virtue of those different opinions and experiences, and yields a greater ability to achieve your objectives.
“Personally speaking, diversity has also enriched my life as well. One my biggest regrets from my time at Owen is that I didn’t take advantage of the diversity. I think I felt uncomfortable enough being one of the few women that fitting in was my priority rather than getting to know the other diverse students and exploring the viewpoints of others who were different from me,” she says.
“That’s one of the reasons I feel so strongly about diversity today.”
Both women also received scholarships as MBA students, making their Owen educations possible, providing a major motivation for giving back today.
“I’ll never forget what Owen did for me, allowing me to go back to school and approach my MBA as if it were my full-time job,” McKinnon says.
Conlee echoes this sentiment. “I didn’t have any financial resources, nor did my family. My scholarship made the difference in which business school I attended.”
Looking back on her education, Conlee cannot imagine a different path. “I give Owen great credit for everything I was able to do at Morgan Stanley. I learned so much about finance, working with a team and a lot about my own objectives for my career. Basically, I learned about myself.
“One person who was a major influence on me was my finance professor at the time, Jim Davis. Because of him, I felt totally prepared to work at Morgan Stanley and compete with the top people from the top schools.”
Owen’s Diverse Connections
Conlee’s time at Vanderbilt also helped her get her foot in the door of the investment banking world. During her second year at Owen, the school got a new dean, Sam Richmond, who came from Columbia University. At the time, investment banking firms did not recruit at Owen. He gave her names of industry people in New York so she could write letters and get interviews with them.
“I hope my support inspires others to establish similar scholarships, but there are other ways to support underrepresented women, too. I had a successful career because someone helped connect me to important industry contacts,” Conlee says. “It’s important that we, as alumni and friends of Owen, continue to refer diverse candidates for job openings and make those important introductions.”
Lisa McKinnon, BA’78, MBA’87. Photo Credit: Jessica Scranton
McKinnon’s time at Owen played a pivotal role in shaping her as a businesswoman as well. “In my second year I took the strategy class that was taught by Bruce Henderson, who had founded the Boston Consulting Group,” she says. “I thought the class would be easy because I had seven years of experience under my belt and exposure to multiple companies across various industries. It was not. Bruce did not make it easy. He was there not necessarily to give us answers, but he wanted us to think.
“What I learned from Bruce was that the goal is not that you ace every exam,” McKinnon says. “It was less about what is exactly right and more about how to think strategically—and to be exposed to these different strategies because there’s no one strategy that works in all cases. I’ll never forget it.”
Now 30 to 40 years later, both of these alumnae are helping a new generation of women create their own un
forgettable experiences at Vanderbilt.
For more information, please contact Erik Kahill, associate dean of development and alumni relations for Owen, at (615) 343-4072 or erik.d.kahill@vanderbilt.edu.
Professor Kimberly Pace speaks to MBA students about the art of business communications.
More than ever, employers are seeking candidates who can work in teams, adapt to new situations and think fast on their feet
When Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management began developing a strategic plan two years ago, alumni and employers felt confident that MBA graduates excelled in their majors, from marketing to finance. But as anyone in the working world knows, there are often many more factors that make for career success beyond the narrow confines of a single discipline.
“We want our folks to be ready to hit the road running,” says Jon Lehman, director of Vanderbilt’s Executive Development Institute and instructor for Learning to Thrive, an elective course which requires MBA students to take a deeper look at themselves. In a recent blog post, Dean M. Eric Johnson cited Learning to Thrive and Professor Kimberly Pace’s Advanced Management Speaking as courses designed to strengthen students’ business communication and presentation skills.
Brian McCann
Another class being piloted is Associate Professor Brian McCann’s Managerial Decision Making. Critical thinking skills are important for any professional, but a key finding from the strategic planning process was their growing importance for MBA students. McCann’s course is designed to provide an opportunity for students to improve their analytical thinking skills in the context of solving managerial problems and making better decisions. The class starts with the topic of developing, understanding and evaluating arguments supporting managerial decisions. It also covers topics like the definition of managerial problems and a comparison of intuitive and rational decision making processes.
“A significant goal of the class is to have the students leave as more reflective thinkers,” says McCann, MBA’04. “But even more importantly as more effective decision makers.”
Emily Anderson, MBA’99, director of Owen’s Career Management Center, agrees. “We do a recruiter survey every year, and being a smaller school we have a lot of avenues and forums,” she says. “There’s a lot of conversation around expectations and how they actually perform once they’re there.”
What those conversations identified is a need to equip Vanderbilt MBA graduates with the ability to do things like deliver formal presentations, work effectively in teams, and quickly draw on their grasp of facts and figures to make a cogent business case. “It’s not just technically being smart and having book knowledge. It’s how that is applied in an organization and how that makes them more successful,” Anderson says. “That’s the stuff employers are paying a premium for—managers who can make an impact in their organization.”
Finding that right combination of skills is not easy. In a recent Wall Street Journal survey of nearly 900 U.S. executives, 92 percent of them said soft skills—like teamwork, adaptability, creativity and sociability—are equally or more important than technical skills. Yet 89 percent of that same group said finding people with those skills, no matter what age or gender, is difficult.
Recent graduate Hudson Jones, MBA’16, says the training he received during his time at Vanderbilt has already proven beneficial. “I was coming from a small boutique consulting world,” he says. “So things like building political capital and traversing the bureaucratic red tape of a publicly traded company were things which Owen prepared me for that I probably otherwise would have been worried about.”
BEGINNINGS
The training in communication begins before MBA students even arrive on campus. “As soon as the MBA candidates are accepted, they have to write a personal brand pitch,” Pace says. “We have five professional writing coaches who meet with every student one on one for 30 minutes to give them feedback before school even starts.” Giving effective and persuasive presentations is also a must. Pace teaches a core course on management speaking and also an advanced class. About 30 percent of students dislike public speaking, and she says that 5 to 10 percent experience “true fear” at the thought of doing it.
“They do four presentations within seven weeks,” Pace says. “They’ve got to do their own personal pitch—how they would pitch themselves in a real career situation. They also have to give an impromptu speech, where we give them a topic and they have to do a speech based on the topic.
“And the final one is a true business pitch, an executive summary. So if you’re a strong presenter, you become an advanced presenter. If you have stage fright, we at least want people not to know you have stage fright.”
The importance of being a competent presenter is reinforced during internships, Pace says. “Many times at the end of an internship, they have to do a presentation to the executives about the internship,” she says. “And basically it is a job interview.”
SOFT SKILLS
MBA student Chris Culver says he values the soft skills he’s learning at Owen.
“The softer skills are along the lines of asking good questions, knowing how to collaborate with people, and really working in an environment where there’s not a lot of guidance and always a lot of work to be done,” Culver says.
Jon Lehman
The Learning to Thrive elective course can help students put it all together, and also assist with transitions down the road, Lehman says. “I don’t want to call it soul-searching, but it’s getting at deeper stuff. It’s not an accounting class.” The curriculum includes writing poetry, self-reflection and a private session with Lehman. “Executive coaching is part of what I do,” Lehman says. “I sit down with them and talk to them about my perception of them as individuals and what it’s going to take [to succeed].”
Learning to Thrive is best taken “as your last mod before you go in the big world,” Jones says. “I think it’s even more helpful if you take it once you’ve settled on your career path, or at least your job.”
The class helped Jones, a business strategist at Cerner Corp. in Kansas City, Missouri, deal with an early career dilemma. “Part of my transition out of business school was moving my wife, who is a Carolina girl, out West. I was trained in Learning to Thrive to stop and think about what that portends for her, and make sure I’m not just dragging her down my career path—that we’re embracing this change together.
“So it helps personally and professionally, which is different from most business classes.”
IDEAS, NOT EGO
There’s another quality prominent at Owen that sets its students apart. It’s a message seen on a banner hanging in the lobby of Management Hall: “Ideas, Not Ego.”
“There’s a general bias that MBAs are going to be full of themselves,” Pace says. “You don’t see it so much at Vanderbilt. From a recruiter standpoint, they love that, because it means you’re more coachable in a team. If you’re willing to listen and you’re relatively self-aware and don’t have a huge ego, then you can move up maybe quicker than others.” Being humble and amiable is also taught by participation in clubs at Owen.
“I think one of the more important things you learn is your leadership style,” says Sarah Eaton, president of the Owen Student Government Association. “Before I was president, I was a member of the Tech Club. I still am. And there’s also the Cork and Barrel Club—the more fun clubs.
“It’s nice having the mixture of professional clubs that help you with recruiting and getting opportunities to practice through alumni that are in the field. For example, they brought in some alumni and we did case competitions with the Consulting Club.” A NEW DIRECTION Like many MBA students, Chris Culver came to Owen pursuing a change in career direction. “I was doing engineering before this, and I’m using this as a way to transition my career with the idea of getting more into the business side of the company,” Culver says. “Most people at Owen are trying to make a transition into a different industry than they worked in before.”
Eaton is moving from education and “looking to go into a more-profit sector,” adding that “at Owen, my background is valued, and I feel supported every day.”
The evolution of skills, hard and soft, never really ends as long as a career is in motion, Lehman says. “Work environments change along with the stress and pressure. A lot of it follows economic cycles. I don’t think you’re ever done in these areas.” Lehman should know: He’s writing a book based on his Learning to Thrive class and hopes to see it published this year.
Vanderbilt Business asked five of this year’s MBA graduates what they learned about leadership—and themselves—because they took key roles in student organizations.
Paul Whitmire, MBA’14
“I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, but I’ve often been called relentless. That’s a quality that showed up as part of the Leadership Development program. I think in the past it could have been a negative, but I’ve learned to use it in a productive way. For example, I think people would say I was relentless in asking them to vote for the Project Pyramid video in a contest sponsored by Johnson & Johnson last year. But it paid off. We won second place and $5,000.”—Rachel Taplinger, MBA’14, president of Project Pyramid, 2013-2014
If I could share three things, it would be
People pleasing isn’t worth it: One of the best leadership lessons I learned was to tell the difference between the squeaky wheels and the people who provide solid advice. It’s important to be able to distinguish between the two, and to build relationships with both.
It takes a team: Much of what OSGA has accomplished this past year would not have been possible without my incredible EVP Marley Baer or our dedicated team of workers. Having this strong foundation of people who shared our vision and knew what steps we wanted to take to get there really made the leadership process easy and allowed us to do some incredible things.
Take blame, give credit: One of the best lessons I learned this past year was to take blame for failures, and give credit to your team when you found success. It sure makes things a lot easier, and helps build your network when people know you as a humble leader who gives credit for successes, but takes the blame when failures happen.—Paul Whitmire, MBA’14, president of Owen Student Government Association, 2013-14
“Listening is a skill that is easy to do, but most often omitted from conversations. As a leader, it is very important to spend extra time consciously listening to those you are leading.”—Carolyn Griffin, MBA’14, president of the Owen Black Students Association, 2013–2014
“I learned most about leadership by simply stepping up to co-lead the health care conference and actually doing it! Sometimes you need to be willing to take risks, then dive in and start trying. Owen—and the conference in particular—provided the perfect opportunity to develop my leadership skills in a low-risk environment.”—Megan Eberhard, MBA’14, co-president, Vanderbilt Health Care Conference, 2013
“The conference was a great opportunity to develop confidence as a leader, and I am hoping to find a full-time position that allows me to take on similar levels of responsibility and ownership over various projects. I also discovered a fondness for working across functional teams. As a result, I have been focusing my job search on positions within a startup environment, hoping that a fast-growing company will provide me with both the variety in job functions and increased opportunities to step up and demonstrate my abilities.”—Kristen O’Neill, MBA’14, co-president, Vanderbilt Health Care Conference, 2013
Your master’s degree from Vanderbilt is in Latin American studies. How did you become interested in that?
I was born and raised in a small town in rural Connecticut. I hadn’t seen much of the world by the time I got to college but found that I had a facility for languages and actually became a modern languages major at Colgate. Like so many liberal arts graduates, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do in life. I knew I wanted to work internationally because I had that wanderlust that so many 22-year-olds have, but I had no idea if I would channel that interest into the business world or into the public sector. The perfect way for me to find that out, albeit an expensive way, was to get myself into a nonterminal degree at the graduate level, and Vanderbilt had a wonderful—and still does—master’s program in Latin American studies.
International opportunities have played a big role in your career. Where have you lived and worked, and what have you learned from those experiences?
My family and I lived in Guatemala, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela, and later in Hong Kong for three years. In Hong Kong I grew to have a tremendous appreciation for what you and I would call consensus management. The Asian way of attacking a problem is so much different from the way we do it in the West. In Latin America what I took away was an appreciation for a more emotional approach to business. In some ways it is the antithesis of what I found in Asia. I remember that my boss at Pillsbury told me, “You’ve spent enough time in Latin America. I’m going to send you someplace where you’re going to have to do things totally differently.” He was right. The two things I grew to appreciate are different approaches to solving the same problem. Also another key difference I noticed was the pace at which business and social life are done. In Latin America the pace is deliberate and methodical—often with detours. However, in Hong Kong, the pace my wife, five children and I experienced was breakneck. People had to prod me along because everything happened so fast. I’m glad, though, that I spent time in both parts of the world, as different as they are.
You mentioned your wife and children. What did they think about moving around to all of those places?
My long-suffering wife of 38 years has been through 15 moves. She is the real champion. The five children—four boys and a girl—are appreciating what they experienced more and more as they age. I just recently had a conversation about this with my eldest, who is 34. It was a very different conversation from the ones I had with my kids when they were teenagers being uprooted from one country to another. In fact, one of my kids is now involved in international work.
Speaking of change, you’re in the middle of making a big transition from the corporate world to academia. Where did you work before Owen?
Before this, I started a general management consulting practice in 2003 with four friends. I had always looked upon owning my own business as something to do in the “presunset” years. It was a wonderful experience. And before that I was in the consumer packaged goods industry at companies like Gillette, Revlon, Pillsbury and more recently Bausch & Lomb in Rochester, N.Y., where we just moved from.
How did you become interested in career management?
I’m very fortunate to have been involved in a pro-bono capacity with career services at Colgate. When I was on the alumni board there, I headed the career services committee and found that I really enjoyed it. In fact, I spent three or four years after my term was up volunteering one day every month in the career services office. That’s how I got a taste for it.
It’s a tremendous differentiator when we can point to alumni who are very active in helping our students showcase their talents in person.
—Read McNamara
Did you envision yourself doing this for a living at the time?
Yes, my wife and I decided in 2004 over the dinner table that my last career move would be getting involved in a top-tier MBA program in a career management position. And here I am. This didn’t happen by chance. I’m just fortunate enough that Vanderbilt came to me.
What was so appealing about this particular opportunity at Owen?
Being part of a team that is absolutely committed to achieving top-tier status. In my conversations with Jim Bradford, I found that we are kindred spirits in that Jim is determined to make Owen a top 20 program. I love that challenge. I think we have all the tools in place. I did a great deal of research into where the school’s been and where it wants to go, and I wanted to be part of that.
What are some of the challenges facing the Career Management Center this academic year?
A very difficult economic environment has to be at the top of the list. It’s a challenging market for MBAs right now. Also things are changing very rapidly after a long period of relatively stable best practices. When I graduated from Wharton with an MBA degree in 1973, they were using essentially the same practices in career management that had been used 20 or 30 years before. Today, though, employers have the luxury of doing what we call “just-in-time” hiring, which means our students sometimes sit on the edge of their seats until May or June. Supply and demand factors allow employers to do that. It’s no longer so common for companies to come to campus—for the man to go to the mountain, so to speak. Of course, we have very loyal employers who come here, but that number goes down every year. And that’s not just at Owen; that’s at all of our peer schools. We have to use technology and be creative in getting the mountain to the man and putting our great students in front of these companies in different settings.
Would you say that’s the most important part—getting one’s foot in the door and being face-to-face with employers?
Absolutely. And the key to that is our alumni. I can’t stress that enough. One of the things that attracted me to Owen is the loyalty of the alumni and the great success of those individuals. We’re not that old as a school, relatively speaking, and we don’t have as many alumni as some of the schools we’re competing with. It’s a tremendous differentiator when we can point to alumni who are very active in helping our students showcase their talents in person.
If there’s one message you could convey to Owen alumni, what would it be?
Connectivity is the word of the day. To me, it’s a reality at Owen. I’ll give you a concrete example. In last year’s class, all the members of the student government association sent me a welcoming email and offered to do anything they could to help. Whether they had started their jobs or not, they said, “I’m here for you. Please let me be part of this connectivity.” That’s very gratifying. Words like collegiality and collaboration take on special meaning here. This place is different, and that’s coming from someone who has been around a bit.
Your master’s degree from Vanderbilt is in Latin American studies. How did you become interested in that?
I was born and raised in a small town in rural Connecticut. I hadn’t seen much of the world by the time I got to college but found that I had a facility for languages and actually became a modern languages major at Colgate. Like so many liberal arts graduates, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do in life. I knew I wanted to work internationally because I had that wanderlust that so many 22-year-olds have, but I had no idea if I would channel that interest into the business world or into the public sector. The perfect way for me to find that out, albeit an expensive way, was to get myself into a nonterminal degree at the graduate level, and Vanderbilt had a wonderful—and still does—master’s program in Latin American studies.