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Former Apple executive Mike Janes, MBA’84, still remembers the message Sam Richmond, former dean of Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, delivered to students on their first day of classes.

“You’re going to work really hard and you’re going to learn a lot of stuff—and within five years it’ll all be obsolete,” Richmond told the students assembled in Averbuch Auditorium. “We’re not here to teach you facts: We’re here to teach you to be efficient absorbers of experience.”

Janes took the dean’s words to heart. When he joined FedEx after graduation, the company was just starting to track packages digitally. Little more than a decade later, as its first VP of e-commerce, his division had emerged as one of the company’s fastest growing segments.

By 1998, Apple snatched him away as the first VP and general manager of the tech giant’s global online retail operation, working for now-CEO Tim Cook. After Apple, he moved on to senior executive roles at StubHub, FanSnap, and is now chief marketing officer at the startup Vacatia, which has attracted significant Silicon Valley investment to launch an AirBnB-like resort marketplace for vacationing families.

For all his success in the tech industry, Janes says he continues to enjoy innovating, disrupting and creating value. “I like to lay the tracks. I don’t want to drive the train,” he says.

In many ways, Janes’ career path has also foreshadowed today’s explosion of interest in tech jobs, both among Vanderbilt business school graduates and vast new companies that either didn’t exist, or barely existed, a generation ago.

In 2015, Amazon hired more Vanderbilt MBAs than any other company, and a full 19 percent of the class reported going into the technology sector with salaries roughly equal to financial services. By comparison, 11 percent of Vanderbilt graduates accepted technology jobs in 2007, often at lower starting pay than other fields.

Dean Eric Johnson, himself a well-known presence in Silicon Valley, says Vanderbilt’s management programs are well-positioned to teach the skills necessary to thrive in the tech sector. “Technology is changing not only how business is conducted but how it’s taught,” Johnson says. “The learning styles of millennials are pushing them toward experiential, immersive curricula.”

The school has added curriculum including marketing analytics and optional seminars where students can learn to use developer tools, like the popular Ruby on Rails, to create their own web apps. And this year, Vanderbilt is offering a class called Innovation Realization, which brings together students from law, engineering and business to develop a commercialization strategy around a new technology that’s been developed at the university.

Outside the classroom, an annual Tech Trek—a whirlwind week of visits to Google, Amazon and other tech titans on the west coast—has been growing more popular each year, often leading students to first-year internships, and ultimately, full-time jobs.

 

Future focused and full speed

Despite the move to help prepare students better for a career in tech, it’s impossible to fully keep pace with the industry. “You’re always innovating, trying to be on the cutting edge,” says Brad Rosenfeld, MBA’13, general manager of Amazon’s publishing venture. “In tech, you’re building and launching rather than sustaining and maintaining.”

Speed is one trait that sets technology apart from other industries. There’s always pressure to be ahead of the curve, says Keith Whitman, MBA’11. He says he forecasts multiple industry outcomes about the future of tech on a regular basis in his job as a manager in long-range planning at Intel.

Intel maintains massive portfolios of intellectual property—game-changing technologies still years away from turning into tangible products. “There’s a huge risk that you will miss a major find, which may not become apparent until years, decades even, after it’s missed,” Whitman says. At Intel, he is constantly looking out for the impact of global trends on technologies that aren’t even to market yet. “For better or worse, I think we’re always looking forward.”

Along with the fast pace and future focus of the tech industry, it is uniquely diverse, Whitman adds. Companies that build hardware versus those that create software, for instance, differ tremendously in their day-to-day operations. Also, he says, overlap within the industry is common. Fortune 500 tech companies are enmeshed—Apple is one of Intel’s largest customers, for example.

 

Constant adaptation

While many tech companies are intent on speeding towards the future, their organizations often have to play catch up in traditional business functions like finance and HR—sometimes putting their own twist on things.

That’s what led Latia Harris, MBA’13, to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where she jumped into human relations work in the company’s new customer advocacy department. Harris says she’s essentially a storyteller—communicating how HPE can strategically solve problems for customers. “There aren’t clear-cut answers,” she says, since each customer brings unique challenges to the table. To be good at her job, she says she must be comfortable doing what she calls “living in the gray.”

Harris credits her Vanderbilt education for helping her navigate this role. “I didn’t learn ‘how to do HR,’ I learned how to think through messy things,” she says. “I apply that every day in this role because we’re learning it as we go.”

HP’s customer advocacy department is an example of a major player in tech reinventing itself internally. In fact, tech companies of all sizes must constantly adapt—though blue-chip companies like Intel, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard do so differently than Box, Pinterest, Salesforce and Snapchat.

“Tech’s kind of a monster on its own,” Intel’s Whitman says, adding, “in a good way.”

The common thread is people. Amazon’s Rosenfeld says the most important skill in the industry is the ability to connect well with others who see the world differently. Vanderbilt is very good at developing those traits in students, he adds, because the school is fundamentally collaborative rather than cutthroat. “In the tech space, it is critical to be able to relate to individuals who have different incentives. To reach a common goal, you must have that ability to form human connection,” he says.

Frank Lawrence, MBA’99, chief compliance officer at Facebook and an alum of Google and Coinstar, says at most tech companies you’ll never be in some office by yourself clicking away on a computer. “Everything happens though relationships and collaboration. At any of the Silicon Valley giants, you have got to get that skill set down.”

Lawrence says top minds at tech-centric companies understand how to leverage the strengths of a diverse team. “Leaders in tech are not very hierarchical. They think in flat terms,” he says. “They want input from people no matter what level they are.”

A strong team, he says, is a diverse one, which is why graduates from Vanderbilt, with its collaborative culture, do so well in these flat organizations. Good companies like Facebook and Google are looking for diverse employees who solve problems in unique ways.

 

Data-driven with human heart

The ability to communicate and work well, and quickly, with people from many different backgrounds, makes Vanderbilt graduates stand out, says Dean Johnson. The school’s long-established collaborative culture develops graduates well-suited to thrive in the massive, unusually diverse and breakneck-paced technology industry.

“The skills we teach and the way we live here are centered on collaboration, which fits in well in the technology sector,” he says. “Those companies all live and breathe that—it’s very much the way they see the world.”

Google, for example, is famous for its collaborative culture. They really do walk the walk, according to Heather Webb, MBA’07, who moved to Google as a human relations manager nearly a year ago. Much of her career has been spent at GE, and throughout it, her job has involved coaching corporations through major transformations. She says that one of the tools from business school that sticks with her and remains on her desk is The Heart of Change, a book Professor Dick Daft assigned to read at Vanderbilt.

The trick to change, she says, is to understand that people are driving it. “I think people will tell you they’re very data-driven, but at some point, you have to have add a human heart and touch to everything,” she says. “At the end of the day, people are people, and they want to know there’s someone there to listen to them.” ■

PHOTOS BY DANIEL DUBOIS AND JOE HOWELL

Like the stock market and the world economy, the marketplace for MBA talent is in constant flux. For Vanderbilt and its students, preparing for the future means keeping a constant eye on hiring trends, technological developments and geographical shifts, among a dozen other parameters. With employment figures in for the Class of 2015, Vanderbilt Business decided to look at job placement and trends in the years before and after the 2008 financial crisis.

This year’s economic environment is still evolving, but Vanderbilt’s 2015 full-time MBA graduates entered a business world viewed as stronger than any since before the recession. In fact, Bloomberg Business Week called it “the best job market in a decade.”

One sign of the rebound, according to Emily Anderson, MBA’99, director of Owen’s Career Management Center, was visible in the internships that are such a key part of the MBA program at Vanderbilt.

A full 100 percent of the Class of 2015 looking for internships had offers during the summer of 2014. Those impressive figures correlate to employment stats. “In 2010, less than 20 percent of internships turned into full-time job offers,” Anderson says. “In 2015, it was more than 50 percent.”

Where they’re going

Job offers for the Class of 2015 reveal interesting shifts and the results of where grads are accepting employment.

Individual companies help drive those geographical trends, and the most obvious takeaways in the recent list of top-hiring companies for Owen grads are the No. 1 hiring position of Amazon and the presence of firms like AT&T, Citi, Deloitte, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Johnson & Johnson as the ultimate destinations of many Owen grads.

“We are impacted by individual company hiring needs and expansion,” Anderson says. “The most obvious example for Owen is Amazon’s expansion. Amazon has multiple MBA-level management development programs and is able to provide a lot of geographic flexibility for the students. They certainly have corporate functions in Seattle, but other opportunities throughout the U.S. as well because of their extensive distribution footprint.”

 

PLACEMENT BY INDUSTRY (2007: blue | 2011: gold | 2015: white)

 

Top hiring companies

Let’s begin with geography and a growing shift westward for Owen grads. Nashville remains the top city for Vanderbilt MBAs (as is typical for any national MBA program, the largest alumni base is always in its own region). New York and Atlanta have jockeyed for second place as employment destinations throughout the past decade, and San Francisco has become a steady top-five presence. Now with Los Angeles and Seattle both making the top 10, the pull in that direction is obvious.

TOP DESTINATIONS FOR CLASS OF 2015 GRADUATES

TOP HIRING COMPANIES IN ORDER OF NUMBER OF GRADS HIRED

2007

• Bank of America: 6
• Citigroup: 6
• Deloitte: 6
• Capgemini: 3
• General Electric: 3
• Harrah’s Entertainment: 3
• Johnson & Johnson: 3
• PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP: 3

2015

• Amazon: 12
• Deloitte: 9
• AT&T: 4
• Citi: 4
• The North Highland Company: 4
• American Airlines: 3
• General Electric: 3
• Hewlett-Packard (HP): 3
• Johnson & Johnson: 3
• KMPG Consulting: 3

Trends in operations and tech

The Amazon connection figures prominently in the visibility of operations management as a job function.

“Employment in operations has increased primarily because we are a major partner in recruiting with Amazon and they have hired a lot of students over the past three years—mostly in operations roles,” Anderson says. “There are a few other firms as well, especially in technology, that have increased hiring, but the majority of the impact comes from Amazon. They became our largest employer three years ago and will be again this year.”

Technology is, of course, a prime driver of economic growth and change, and it has had an increasing role in employment decisions. The field saw dramatic change over the past decade, with employment for graduates falling by half between 2007 and 2009, and then climbing—first slowly, then dramatically—between 2011 and 2015.

“The growth and excitement in technology has certainly led to increased interest in the tech sector, and we see more of our students heading to tech hubs in Seattle and San Francisco,” says Owen Dean M. Eric Johnson. “Our annual tech trek to visit companies keeps growing, with this year’s trek being the biggest—both in terms of the number of companies visited and students participating.”

Consulting blossoms

Gaining new skills was key to the career plans of second-year MBA student John Von Euw. A Massachusetts native who taught in New Orleans with Teach for America, Von Euw moved into administration and then decided he needed to expand his quantitative and technical skills.

“Once I got to Owen,” he says, “I decided to pivot away from education and focus my job search on strategy consulting in the private sector. I think what really motivated me was the opportunity to work for a consulting firm on projects in a number of different industries.”

Consulting, in fact, has seen a strong uptick among Owen grads after a downturn during the recession.

“Economic downturns impact consulting first,” Anderson says. “Companies shift discretionary spending away from projects they would normally use consultants for—like big software implementations. Consulting hiring out of business schools decreases.”

The bounce back was just as dramatic. By 2015, a quarter of all Vanderbilt MBAs were going into the consulting field.

“Coming out of the recession,” Anderson says, “we have changes in the regulatory environment that impact how companies do their business and may cause them to seek outside help to understand and react. I believe the Affordable Care Act in health care and the financial reform bill did impact and increase hiring for consulting firms.”

SALARY BY INDUSTRY

Health expectations

With an aging population with increasing medical needs, health care is expected to be the fastest-growing industry in the next decade. Owen’s expertise in health care management makes its students attractive to established firms and startups alike.

“The rise and growth of new firms in the industry has also increased hiring,” Anderson says. “These are not hospitals hiring, but firms like McKesson, DaVita, Cardinal Health and Medtronic, which provide products and services to the health care industry.”

Health care hiring at Owen spiked as the recession hit—perhaps because health care is seen as recession-resistant—going from 8 percent in 2007 to 19 the following year. It dropped again dramatically in 2012 and 2013, then rose in the past two years.

Attraction of finance

“We still have many students heading into finance and accounting,” Johnson says. “Wall Street beckons many students, and we had a solid group of first-year students visiting the banks this fall. Even so, fewer are focused on traditional Wall Street firms. Rather, we see more students taking finance roles in technology and health care.”

In parsing the numbers since 2007, Anderson adds, “I think the core number of those interested in investment banking was stable. In my observation, student career aspirations did not change that dramatically due to recession. Students continued to seek MBAs and use the degree to redirect their careers in line with their interests.

“Financial services recruiting decreased during the last downturn,” she says. “That was due to slower recruiting but was also impacted by graduates deciding to look elsewhere.” Those students who were marginally interested or for whom finance was a second choice chose other industries and functions, she says. “I believe Owen, like most MBA programs, has seen those students gravitating to technology and consulting.”

SALARY BY GEOGRAPHY

What’s ahead?

Like the class before them, the Class of 2016 saw a full 100 percent of those seeking internships accept one. Approximately half of those students returned to campus in August having received full-time job offers from their internship companies. By graduation, that number had soared. (In 2015, nearly 90 percent of the graduating class had received job offers.) Current trends in location, hiring companies, metro areas and industries are expected to continue for the Class of 2016.

Belinda Grant-Anderson, BE’83, MBA’90, earned a Vanderbilt School of Engineering degree and is in leadership at one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. So what does the engineer say is her company’s top advantage? People. “People are the greatest asset we have,” she says, “and diversity makes us a stronger, more competitive company. Research has shown that a diverse workforce is more innovative and able to come up with better solutions to problems.”

As vice president for diversity and inclusion at AT&T, Grant-Anderson works both to create a supportive environment for employees from a variety of backgrounds and to help the company build a heterogeneous pipeline of talent.
“Diversity helps us recruit the best workers,” she says. “Look at how the world and the demographics of our country are changing. People come here and see a lot of employees like themselves. We want our leadership to reflect a variety of backgrounds, and we hold them accountable for diversity and inclusion initiatives in their areas.”

Starting with students
“All companies use technology and need their employees to be computer-savvy,” she says. As a Fortune 500 telecommunications company, AT&T also needs employees with technical skills or aptitude. That can be a challenge when seeking people of diverse backgrounds. STEM jobs (science, technology, engineering and math) are in demand throughout the nation, but interest in technical careers is low among women, people of color and others who make up a diverse workforce.

“The good news is that AT&T is able to attract talented people from different backgrounds because of our record of inclusion. We’ve been on the journey since 1968,” she says.

Her job includes partnering with groups such as the Society of Women Engineers, the National Center for Women and Informational Technology, INROADS and other organizations for African-American, Hispanic and Asian students and those with disabilities.

“We’re also investing in our future employees in middle and high school through organizations like the Girl Scouts and Girls Who Code,” she explains. “In addition, AT&T has a mentoring program called ASPIRE, which helps to keep at-risk students from dropping out of school.”
The company also invests in its current, nontechnical employees to move them onto the tech track. “We help employees transform themselves through certification programs, online learning platforms and online master’s degrees in technology,” she states.

Path to decision maker
A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Grant-Anderson followed her father’s advice to study engineering, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Vanderbilt. Following graduation, she worked for Proctor & Gamble’s research and development division in Cincinnati for five years. Realizing that she needed an MBA to become a decision-maker who could influence a company’s future, she decided to return to her alma mater and enroll in Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management.

“I looked at a lot of programs,” she remembers. “Owen had a great reputation, and they focused on team work. That’s what I wanted—to be part of a team, learning from my peers in a cooperative environment.”

With her MBA in hand, Grant-Anderson became a consultant with the Atlanta office of McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm. During her eight years with McKinsey, she rose from associate to senior engagement manager.

In 1998, she joined the former Bell South, which later merged with AT&T. She has served as executive director, division president and vice president in several different areas, including people development, regulatory and external affairs, operator services and strategic management.
Her current role includes partnering with company business units to achieve their annual diversity goals, overseeing the diversity and inclusion awards submission process and managing AT&T’s relationship with external research partners.

“My personal formula for success includes consistently exceeding expectations, taking measured risks, being a team player and helping others develop,” she says.

Outside measures of diversity
During her tenure, AT&T has received numerous awards, including being named a Top Company for Diversity by DiversityInc, No. 1 Company for Diversity by Hispanic Business Magazine, a top 40 company by Black Enterprise, DiversityMBA’s Company of the Year and a top company for executive women by the National Association for Female Executives. It also has received a perfect 100 percent score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index for 12 consecutive years.

Grant-Anderson credits the company’s top leadership with making those accolades possible. “You absolutely have to have support at the top of the company,” she says. “Our chairman and CEO, Randall Stephenson, and his officer team understand the value of diversity. They drive the support throughout the organization.”

Grant-Anderson and her staff of 10 oversee a dozen employee resource groups (ERGs) composed of 110,000 employees. The groups support African-American employees, Hispanics/Latinos, Native Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders and Asian Indians. There also are groups for military veterans, people with disabilities, the LGBT community and employees of different generations. All ERGs are open to all AT&T employees.
She also manages nine domestic and international employee networks (15,000 memberships) focused on particular business fields (for example, AT&T Women of Finance) and professional development matters. One employee network supports international employees who have children under age 13. All of the networks are open to all employees.

Currently a resident of Dallas, Grant-Anderson and her husband of 21 years are the parents of two daughters. As a 10-year survivor of breast cancer, she stresses the importance of annual mammograms and encourages others facing the disease. She is a member of the Owen’s Board of Visitors and a past member of Vanderbilt’s alumni board.

“I think Vanderbilt University is one of the best schools in the country,” she says. “I had a great education in a supportive, win-win environment at Owen. Whatever I can do to help the school, I’ll do it.” ■

When Michael Scanlon accepted an internship, and then a job, with Apple Computer in 2001, his friends and relatives thought he was making a big mistake. The dot-com industry had just crashed, the job market was tight and then 9/11 happened. Apple had just introduced the iPod and the iPhone was another six years away.

“They told me I was going to be out of a job in a year or two if I chose to stay with Apple. But working there that summer made me feel otherwise,” Scanlon says. “I fell in love with the company and couldn’t see myself going anywhere else.”

Today Scanlon, MBA’02, is senior manager of worldwide store operations for Apple. As such, he oversees a team of managers and employees at centers in London, Shanghai and Cupertino, California.

During his internship, Scanlon worked on the company business plan for 2002, which came to $6 billion for the entire year. “Recently we announced quarterly revenue of close to $50 billion,” he notes by way of contrast.

All Vanderbilt MBA students, except those whose employers are paying for their education, are required to do a paid 10-week internship between their first and second year. Finding the right fit that leads to a full-time position, as Scanlon did, is one of the major benefits of the internship program, says Emily Anderson, director of the school’s Career Management Center.

“I fell in love with the company and couldn’t see myself going anywhere else.”—Michael Scanlon, MBA’02

“We help the students figure out possible career avenues and understand the longer-term career progression,” Anderson says. “For the past two years, 50 percent have come back with job offers right after their internship.”

For every Michael Scanlon who finds the perfect fit, others find what they don’t want to do. Anderson says those experiences lead them to better decisions about companies for the job hunt during their second year.

A good deal for recruiters

Internships are a good deal for the recruiting company, too. “A lot of companies would like to do full-time recruitment through internships and fill three-quarters of their recruiting class that way,” Anderson says.

John Kingston, MBA’07, former director of the Global Industries Group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says he preferred to hire most of his associates through internships. “An internship is like a 10-week job interview,” he says. “What better way to feel confident about a hire?

“Interns gave us a new pool of valuable resources. They were part of our team,” he says. “By the end of the internship, some were operating at a higher level than our full-time associates. That momentum carried over when they were hired. In a fast-moving, competitive job, it makes a real difference.”

When interviewing interns, Kingston looked for certain traits: “First, a high level of comfort with numbers; second, the ability to organize and prioritize; and finally, a good attitude and real interest in the job.”

Right fit, right company

“An internship is like a 10-week job interview.”—John Kingston, MBA’07

Recruiting is part of the job for Janet Nelson, MBA’07, senior human resources manager of Procter & Gamble’s North American Feminine Care and Baby Care division. Although her first responsibility is providing HR support for her vice president, she also has recruited Vanderbilt MBA interns for P&G for the past eight years.

“We’ve had great success,” she says. “Owen is one of our core recruiting schools for the HR function.” Vanderbilt MBA alumni currently hold five HR management positions at the company.

Nelson, whose MBA focus was human and organization performance, became interested in P&G during her first year at Owen, when the school encouraged her to attend the National Black MBA Conference. After an initial interview at the conference, she had a second interview at the company’s Cincinnati headquarters. She completed an internship in 2006 and joined the company after graduation in 2007.

“What drew me to P&G is the same thing I look for in interns,” she says. “We want ethical people who can win by doing the hard, right thing, rather than the easy, wrong thing.

“As a recruiter, I look for someone who has a track record of delivering results in a collaborative way, someone who works well with others but also takes initiative. Since P&G builds from within, we want people who not only have drive and ambition, but also feel a sense of obligation to build those around them.”

During her internship, Nelson worked in product supply operations and helped with P&G sponsorship activities at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. While working on the latter, she had the opportunity to interact with P&G’s current and former CEOs, A.G. Lafley and John Pepper, respectively.

“It’s not often that interns get to engage with company leaders at that level,” she observes.

As a single mother, Nelson found the company’s commitment to work-life balance and job flexibility very attractive. “The level of trust, support and responsibility are what drew me to P&G, and they are what keep me here,” she says.

Developing leadership

Hillary Carroll Jeffries, MBA’14, entered the career development program at DaVita Inc. following her internship with the company, which is one of the largest providers of dialysis services in the United States.

Jeffries and 18 other graduates of the nation’s top business schools participated in DaVita’s nine-month Redwoods Resident Leadership Development Program based in Denver.

“During the first three months, we explored different aspects of the business,” she says. “I traveled to all the corporate departments in the U.S. and was exposed to many company leaders. For the next six months, I worked as the facility administrator of a dialysis clinic, responsible for running the clinic.”

Today, Jeffries is on track to become director of business relationship management for DaVita’s IT organization.

“I support three vice presidents of clinical enterprise who are responsible for major clinical changes. I help develop the right IT solutions for initiatives they are working on,” she says.

Jeffries secured the DaVita internship through Vanderbilt’s recruiting process. “DaVita has a close relationship with Owen,” she says. “It’s a core recruiting school for the company. Two other Owen students were recruited for internships with DaVita my year, and all of us accepted job offers.”

During the fall semester of her first year at Owen, Jeffries spoke with a Career Management Center career adviser. “My adviser helped me decide between the two internship offers I received,” she recalls. “I chose DaVita because it has a collaborative culture like Owen’s.”

Unsure whether to go into finance, IT or some other aspect of the health care field, Jeffries appreciated being introduced to companies with a leadership development program.

Anderson says the CMC helps students like Jeffries understand how their career aspirations and skill sets fit into different companies’ cultures. The center coaches students on how to interview and make a positive impression, holds career fairs, and helps students network with alumni, faculty and visiting companies.

“We’re going to have 80 companies on campus throughout the year,” Anderson says. “We currently have 617 job postings for interns and full-time positions. We like to have relationships with companies that will recruit year in and year out, and our students gravitate toward them.”

Consulting and international business

As a senior consultant in strategy and operations at Deloitte Consulting, Peter Attwater, MBA’14, has a variety of responsibilities. “My job includes analyzing data, conducting interviews, synthesizing information, mentoring junior staff, and developing materials to provide insights, analysis and recommendations to our clients,” he says.

“I worked on a project in St. Paul, Minnesota, for a four-hospital health system that needed to implement its new electronic health-record system in time to meet the federal deadline,” he recalls. Because of his pre-Owen background in revenue cycle consulting for hospitals, he was given the opportunity to lead a client workgroup during the project. “It was a great opportunity to leverage my past work experience and accelerate learning all the steps required to implement a new technology solution,” Attwater says.

“I left knowing exactly what kind of client I wanted to work with.”—Mary Hsu

Internships are not limited to MBA programs. As part of Vanderbilt’s one-year Master of Accountancy, Mary Hsu, MAcc’09, completed a winter internship with PricewaterhouseCoopers that led to a job offer after graduation. Today she is on her second multiyear international rotation, based in Geneva as an assurance manager in audit practice.

“I primarily serve large U.S. multinationals,” she says. “I help oversee our audit teams, work with clients on various accounting issues, and act as a liaison between different client service teams.”

Hsu met PwC and other big accounting firms through the MAcc program’s campus recruiting events. She spent months networking—even before classes started—and then had formal interviews during the program’s Immersion Week.

“The internship was a good chance to see what a typical ‘busy season’ was like for a public accountant,” she says. “I left knowing exactly what kind of client I wanted to work with.”

During the past six years, Hsu has lived in the U.S., Singapore and Switzerland. She has done stints in China, India, Canada, France, Belgium and Northern Ireland.

Multiple advantages

In addition to securing a job offer at the end of their internships, alumni point to other advantages of the experience.

“I got to meet a ton of new people that I am still good friends with today,” Attwater says. “Whether it was the Owen alums that came back to campus to recruit, the members of my project team, or the other MBA students in my internship class, I had significant opportunities to meet new people and expand my network.”

Hsu agrees. “I still work with a client from my internship today,” she says. She also works in Switzerland with the PwC associate who was assigned to be her peer buddy during her internship.

Scanlon says that his Apple internship allowed him to apply what he learned in school to a real-world environment. “It helped me understand if I was going in the right direction with my MBA,” he says. “It validated my career goal.” ■

Ask alumni to describe the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management and you’ll hear terms such as collaborative, family and personal. Query students, faculty and staff and they respond with words like individualized and caring. Team leader and collaborative show up in feedback from employers, recruiters and business leaders.

Which is why when it came time to begin strategic planning for Owen’s future, Dean Eric Johnson and his team made developing the plan a collaborative effort that kept focus on Owen’s key stakeholders—students, alumni, recruiters and faculty. During the past year, Johnson and others in the Owen community researched and discussed the future of the business school. The result is an ambitious and practical strategic plan that enhances the core personality of the school while encouraging it to excel and achieve in authentic, smart and game-changing ways. 

We had an opportunity recently to talk with Johnson, the school’s Ralph Owen Dean and Bruce D. Henderson Professor of Strategy, about the plan, its objectives and the foundation under it.

What was the impetus behind this plan?

Dean Eric Johnson: I began my academic career at Owen in the early 1990s. When I arrived back here for good nearly two decades later, I couldn’t help but reflect on how much had changed, not just on campus but everywhere. Nashville is now a much more diverse, dynamic city. Technology and creative destruction have reshaped business. Students are evolving, too. The learning styles of millennials are pushing them toward experiential, immersive curricula. Technology is changing not only how business is conducted but how it’s taught.

What had not changed here are attributes that many students and alumni have always found most distinctive and valuable, like the collaborative culture and individualized approach. As we approach our 50th anniversary in 2019—can you believe it?—we needed a plan that helps us use these fixed stars to navigate a changing landscape.

How was the plan developed?

Johnson: To no one’s surprise, the process reflected the school’s collaborative culture. We reached out to everyone from alumni and students to corporate recruiters. We engaged Huron Consulting, a nationally known specialist in educational strategy, to help gather input from our stakeholders and think through strategies. Faculty and staff explored issues the school faces. The Alumni Board and Board of Visitors participated at an early stage, when they could be of greatest benefit. Our student government leadership played an important role and all students could offer ideas and exchange views in town hall meetings.

Drawing on data we collected and all these conversations, we found consensus that, among the school’s strengths, our personal scale and collaborative culture really stand out. That shared understanding led to the creation of a new mission statement.

I’ve heard you use the term personal scale before. How do you define that?

Johnson: We cultivate a distinct competitive advantage by concentrating on individual needs.

Our size and focus give us the ability to interact with students, alumni and recruiters on a personal level. Recognizing that students come here with many different backgrounds, we seek to provide the highest-quality learning experience by tailoring the academic experience to individual student development. Our faculty-to-student ratio promotes a close-knit community with exceptional access to faculty and staff.

“The ‘me first’ style has never been part of the Owen fabric.”
—Derek Young, MBA’91, Alumni Board

Our personal-scale advantage extends beyond graduation, as we support our alumni throughout their careers. Likewise, we invest in partnerships with hiring organizations to better meet their unique needs.

Can you give a capsule summary of the strategy?

Johnson: The overall strategy rests on three pillars.

1. Enhance the personal-scale advantage of both the traditional and Executive MBA programs
2. Expand and balance the portfolio of programs offered to build synergies and increase impact
3. Develop and leverage a world-class faculty

We have developed key initiatives and tactics under each pillar. There are things on the drawing board that we are still considering.

What’s ahead for the MBA program?

Johnson: The MBA will always represent the core of Owen’s programs. A key part of the strategic plan involves continuing to improve both the MBA and Executive MBA programs.

We are deepening the immersion experiences that have become an Owen hallmark. We’re adding more short, intensive (both for credit and noncredit) courses that students can complete over a few sessions or in a weekend. For the Executive MBA, we’ve reconfigured the coursework, leveraged online components and added an abbreviated week-in-residence. We worked on an expedited timescale and the revamped program was launched in August with curriculum changes and enhanced use of distance technologies. It will allow EMBA students to complete the degree in 20 months instead of 24. These innovations are also aligned with changes we have been implementing to make the program more attractive to women. The approach is working—this fall’s incoming EMBA class was 37 percent women, which is the highest in history.

In both programs, we are introducing innovation in our successful Leadership Development Program. In the MBA Program, we’re increasing the Leadership Development program experiences during the second year, with a focus on better preparing graduates to hit the ground running. For example, since many second-year students already know by mod four where they are headed after graduation, we piloted a new course in the spring called Learning to Thrive, which involves thinking about leadership in the specific context of the job they’re going to. Shaping according to the industry and strategies of the company links back to personal scale.

As highlighted in our mission statement, we are also focused on initiatives to enhance diversity across all of our programs. First we joined Forté—the premier women’s leadership consortium designed to help women launch meaningful careers. Then, we joined Management Leadership for Tomorrow, an acclaimed talent development program for high-potential minority students. We are also investing in recruiting a broader group of international students and ensuring that they succeed at Owen. Students from 33 countries were represented in our incoming classes this year.

A key thing that came out of our research with Huron, and from recruiters and alumni, was the importance of critical thinking. Bruce Barry (the Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Professor of Management) is leading a committee to strengthen critical-thinking skills. The work is still in process, but they’re looking at something that builds on either side of the internship, helping students better prepare for the experience and then drawing on what they learned there. We are excited about it. I don’t know that other schools are talking about this the way we are.

What’s the strategy behind beefing up the portfolio of other programs?

Johnson: There is growing demand for career-launching programs like one-year master’s programs in accounting and finance and for targeted programs for established professionals, like the Master of Management in Health Care. For its first 30 years, Owen was a one-product company—MBA in two flavors. Responding opportunistically to the marketplace, we started developing new programs in the past decade without an overarching strategy. Now we’re being more intentional.

Our Master of Science in Finance has received significant recognition and reached a 100 percent placement rate for the Class of 2015. So it made strategic sense for us to expand that program by 25 percent this year. Likewise, our No. 1-ranked Master of Accountancy programs (Assurance and Valuation) also place 100 percent of graduates each year, so we’re investing to grow those programs. Both programs create synergies by supporting more classes, activity and impact in finance and accounting.

Demand for entry-level marketing talent offered another opportunity to develop a unique professional master program. Marketing is an area where we have significant depth and strength, and it’s our second largest faculty group after finance. A study of competitor offerings and market needs led us to conclude that we should work toward launching a new Master of Marketing degree next fall to leverage our strength in that area and expand Owen’s impact.

How does the Executive Development Institute fit in?

Johnson: We are making a robust—and highly strategic—expansion of the EDI, whose offerings have great upside potential. We created a new executive director position for EDI and attracted Skip Culbertson from Darden to lead it. He has reorganized the group, hiring new staff and launching new initiatives, with the goal of doubling the institute’s business in five years. Traditionally, Vanderbilt’s relationships with companies focused mostly on helping students land jobs. Now we’re taking a more holistic view of building long-term strategic partnerships with top companies such as Nissan. In addition to sending our students to them, we’re encouraging them to send employees to us for EMBAs or EDI courses. We also want to involve companies more in the academic centers and research engines of the school. To lead this effort, we promoted Career Management Center Director Read McNamara to assistant dean of corporate partnerships and elevated Emily Anderson, MBA’99, from director of internal operations and coaching to head the CMC.

How is faculty development a pillar of the plan?

Johnson: The heart of any university is its faculty. We must redouble our investment in their career growth to ensure a world-class program. We’re doing that in several ways. The Financial Markets Research Center, which has become a thought leader in the research world, brings Nobel laureates to Vanderbilt every year. We have expanded the center’s activities with more research seminars and conferences. Enabling our junior faculty to interact with some of the most distinguished professors in the world is valuable. So we want to establish new centers that have both faculty development and student program missions.

For example, we recently established the Turner Family Center for Social Ventures to provide a focus point for research on market-based solutions to poverty and to expand student opportunities in social entrepreneurship. Likewise, we have launched what will become an annual peer conference in which our marketing faculty focus on a particular topic with scholars from other institutions. Over the next five years, we will expand this concept to other areas as well and launch new centers.

Teaching is also an important part of faculty development. Associate Dean Nancy Lea Hyer is leading an effort to help faculty incorporate best practices regarding technology—we’ve recently integrated a lot of new technology into our classrooms.

How does building up a postdoctoral program impact faculty development?

Johnson: Having five to eight postdocs spend one to three years with us after completing their Ph.D.’s helps us build a larger community of scholars here, and that interaction benefits all parties. It also increases the reach and influence of our own faculty, as young scholars carry their experience at Vanderbilt into the wider academic world.

How does Owen’s plan align with Vanderbilt’s strategic direction?

Johnson: No plan is developed in a vacuum. We worked to ensure that elements in our blueprint not only serve Owen’s goals but dovetail with the strategies of the larger university: trans-institutional initiatives, residential experience, health care solutions and educational technology.

The recently launched J.D./M.S.F. degree, for instance, adds to Owen’s portfolio while also advancing Vanderbilt’s focus on creating more trans-institutional initiatives and leveraging the strengths of various schools. Our faculty are also involved in several cross-disciplinary research and teaching projects that have received funding from the university’s Trans-Institutional Program initiative (see Owen News).

This year, we began a new, interdisciplinary research seminar on health care that brought in top speakers and included others from the Vanderbilt community who are dedicated to health care solutions. The research seminar, as well as the annual student-run Vanderbilt Health Care Conference, add to Vanderbilt’s—and Owen’s—role as a national hub for identifying solutions in health care delivery and policy. This emphasis contributes to the health care component of Vanderbilt’s overall academic plan.

Another key goal of Vanderbilt’s academic strategic plan is ensuring that every undergraduate engages in an immersive creative and independent project while at Vanderbilt. Lessons learned from Owen’s immersion experiences serve as models for creating and maximizing immersion experiences for all Vanderbilt students.

How do all these initiatives fit together?

Johnson: It all comes back to our mission statement. We’re viewing everything through the prism of delivering world-class education on a personal scale. That’s our identity and also our competitive advantage. It’s how we plot our course and how we measure success. ■

Transitioning into your fourth job is a wholly different proposition than landing your first.

“Graduating students have recruiters come to the school to hire them, but as an experienced hire, you have to motivate yourself to go through the job search process,” says Lacy Nelson, MEd’89, Owen’s associate director of Executive and Alumni Career Services.

That’s one reason why the Owen Alumni Career Services office under Nelson has expanded its services. It wants to ensure that it is just as helpful when veteran executives undergo transition as when graduating students enter the job market.

“I often say that our goal at Owen is not simply helping students find that first job, but rather helping them navigate a career,” says Dean Eric Johnson. “It is the successful transitions between jobs two, three, four and onward that define the overall arc of a career.”

Expansion of alumni career services began with a mandate from Johnson and the arrival of Nelson in January 2014. Nelson is the former proprietor of her own career and leadership development coaching firm, Now2planB, which had been utilized by Owen’s Leadership Development Program to work with first-year MBA students for several years. She filled in during two leaves of absence of employees from the Vanderbilt Owen Career Management Center and also worked with students from Vanderbilt Law School privately before being recruited to Owen permanently.

“Since learning career development theory in graduate school at Peabody, I’ve been fascinated by the intersection of people and work,” Nelson says. “I listen when alumni talk about what they love and what they naturally do well. I believe that everybody has that sweet spot where their interests, abilities and personality intersect and I like to help our alumni find what that is.”

A special dynamic

When Nelson joined the center, she also gained an experienced ally in Associate Director Sylvia Boyd. The dynamic between Nelson and Boyd lends Alumni Career Services a combination of stability and coziness balanced with state-of-the-art industry smarts.

“Generally people in a career transition are overwhelmed.”
—Lacy Nelson

“My passion and what makes me tick have been the alumni and this place, Owen,” Boyd says. “I’ve been here for 23 years. I’m a familiar face, so many alumni were already coming to me in some form or fashion for many things. Now it’s all things Alumni Career Services.”

Boyd is much-loved among alumni, Nelson says. “She is a calm influence when they first reach out, because generally people in a career transition are overwhelmed,” Nelson says. “She makes them feel cared for.”

As well as expanding services, Alumni Career Services was also tasked by the dean with scaling its programs and serving alumni around the world. It also was charged with working with current Executive MBA students, a group that needed additional career services programming.

Some reorganization to improve efficiency was the first step. Boyd designed a triaging process to assist alumni who need immediate access to career services. Nelson began doing more phone consultations, which increased the number of alumni who could be served daily.

In addition, the office emails job search tips and career information every Friday via its newsletter, Subjects for Seekers, and Boyd and Nelson keep up with and learn the latest in job search techniques, including the use of LinkedIn and other social media.

“Our goal is to provide a bank of resources that alumni can access anytime, day or night,” Boyd says. “Our resources include résumé samples, interviewing tips, a salary calculator and many other helpful tools.”

A happy alumnus

Avery Fisher, MBA’11, returned to the job market a few months ago, seeking a corporate position after a deal between his company and a hospital holding company fell apart.

“It had been 10 years since I’d had a boss who was not a board of directors or a client,” Fisher says. “Making the move into a corporate environment was a big switch.”
The skills it takes to run a small company can be hard to define on a résumé, he says.

“Running a small company, you get a keen sense of how to cope with and navigate ambiguity, which is desirable but hard to present to an employer,” he says. “Lacy and Sylvia helped me tailor my story for this new environment.”

Two weeks after starting the job-hunting process, Fisher landed “a really great role with a growing company,” signing on as director of product management for Cognizant, a leading provider of information technology, consulting and business process outsourcing services.

“Lacy and Sylvia are warm, friendly and great at boosting your confidence,” Fisher says. “Getting that tangible support is so helpful in undergoing that process.”

New website

“Our goal is to provide a bank of resources that alumni can access anytime, day
or night.”—Sylvia Boyd

Part of the support that the Alumni Career Services team offers comes in the form of an updated website (owen.vanderbilt.edu/alumni/careerservice)  to match its enhanced services.

“It’s designed so an alumnus can go to any stage of a job search or career development and get help and resources right away,” Nelson says. The site contains assessment and research tools, resources for veterans, do’s and don’ts for the critical period after losing a job and much more.

The website, along with the expertise of Nelson and Boyd, are free services to alumni. And on the opposite end of career service, the office also communicates job leads for employers for free.

“If you were to go out into the market to buy career coaching services compared to what we’re providing, it would cost thousands of dollars,” Nelson says. “We want alumni to know we’re here to serve you, and these particular services are here for you as a privilege of earning a degree at Owen.” ■

Need someone to staff an MBA fair in Tokyo? Call Heiki. Want to meet with top Japanese executives about hiring (or sponsoring) Owen students? Call Heiki. Trying to connect with Japanese alumni from other Vanderbilt schools? Call Heiki.

Anyone who’s spent time around the Owen Graduate School of Management in recent years will know that Heiki Miki, MBA’96, is a globe-trotting force to be reckoned with, the type of uber-alumnus who steps off a 24-hour flight from Asia to Houston and instinctively starts organizing a gathering of local Vanderbilt graduates. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” says Dean Eric Johnson. “Heiki is better than the best networker, even one on steroids.”

Asked what fuels his enthusiasm for Vanderbilt, Miki, recipient of Owen’s 2015 Distinguished Alumni Award, replies with a mixture of gratitude for his business school experience and concern that Vanderbilt’s name is not as well-known as it should be outside the U.S., particularly in Asia.

“People in Japan know Harvard and they know schools that have their location as part of the name, like UCLA,” says Miki during an early morning (for him) Skype chat from his Tokyo apartment, decorated, naturally, with Vanderbilt pennants. “But Vanderbilt isn’t well-known here. People ask, what is Vanderbilt?”

Miki, who manages global business for Shinagawa Refractories, a leading refractory manufacturing company in Japan, says he’s on a mission to raise Vanderbilt’s profile abroad. That was one of his chief concerns while serving for more than 10 years on Owen’s Alumni Board. Recently, he organized and inaugurated Vanderbilt’s first Alumni Association chapter in Japan, bringing together graduates from across the university. Beyond his formal roles within the university, Miki looks for any opportunity to help his alma mater, whether it’s mentoring international students—he recently convinced an Indian friend’s daughter to attend Owen—or organizing sushi dinners for Vanderbilt faculty and staff as they pass through Tokyo.

Discovering Owen

Miki discovered Vanderbilt in 1994 when he was part of a wave of Japanese managers coming to top U.S. business schools to help fill a shortage of homegrown managerial talent. Miki, who was only the fifth Japanese student to graduate from Owen when he received his MBA in 1996, wanted to attend a small program but one that was ranked in the top 25. The school also needed to have a great marketing faculty. Vanderbilt matched his criteria perfectly.

“I didn’t want to go to a big city with a lot of other Japanese students,” says Miki, who had spent six years in Los Angeles as a child. “My wife and sons—who were 2 and 6 at the time—were coming with me, so I wanted a place that would be right for them.” (He didn’t realize Japanese automaker Nissan had such a significant presence in the Nashville area until after he arrived.)

The cultural shift may have been more dramatic than in more cosmopolitan cities, but Miki says everyone at Owen was very generous in welcoming his family and helping them get settled. Inside the classroom, Miki says the MBA curriculum helped him expand upon and connect the dots in areas where he’d already had some experience, like finance, marketing and operations.

His true education, however, came from interacting with classmates on teams carefully assembled by professors to expose students to a wide variety of people from different professional and cultural backgrounds. That tight-knit atmosphere—fostered by regular social events, including Thursday afternoons sipping beers together—also gave Miki and other international students a chance to practice their multilingual schmoozing skills, something that has been integral to his internationally focused sales career in the manufacturing sector.

Reconnecting

Once Miki left Nashville, staying connected to Vanderbilt became much harder, if for no other reason than the logistics of travel. Even following the Commodores in sports proved difficult given the time-zone difference. In 1999, however, an Owen representative contacted Miki about helping to arrange a Vanderbilt delegation’s visit to Japan. That experience, which turned out to be a great success, inspired him to reconnect with the school. A year later he joined Owen’s Alumni Board, the same year he and his family moved from Japan to Connecticut. Today, Miki splits his time between the U.S. and Japan.

“It’s one thing to attend Owen as a student,” Miki says. “But after working with the Alumni Board, you look at the school in a completely different way. How do we market the brand name Vanderbilt? What is our global reputation? You’re always looking for ways to convey what’s unique about Vanderbilt.”

His experience with the Alumni Board also gave him the opportunity to work alongside fellow alumni that he’d never known in school, people such as Nancy Abbott, EMBA’91, the global HR leader at GE Capital Real Estate; Smoke Wallin, MBA’93, founder and CEO of Taliera, which invests in new food and beverage brands; and Brent Turner, MBA’99, chief operating officer of Rover, an innovative provider of dog boarding, sitting and walking services. After rolling off the board for a term, Miki recently was asked—and agreed—to serve on it again.

He continues to stay in close contact with Owen alumni, faculty and staff. Kim Killingsworth, director of international recruiting and relations at Owen, says his work has been invaluable to her efforts in Japan to recruit students and open doors at companies. On one of her recent trips through Asia, Killingsworth traveled from Tokyo to Seoul for a recruiting event. Miki made the same trip. “As soon as he landed he came straight to the MBA fair and joined in, recruiting Korean candidates while he was there on a business trip,” says Killingsworth, noting that Miki often helps guide international students through the MBA admissions process. “He really goes above and beyond. I joke with him that he even beats us to the punch posting photos to Facebook, usually before an event is over.”

Most recently, Miki has focused on expanding the Vanderbilt network in Japan, which led to the June launch of the first official Japanese Alumni Association chapter. That first event drew about 50 people from nearly 200 who have been identified throughout that country as having a Vanderbilt affiliation. Plans are in the works for the chapter to host other events including a holiday party in December.

It was at the first gathering, however, that Miki knew his work was paying off. “I got to the venue a couple of hours early and saw an older gentleman sitting near the door,” Miki says. “He approached me and said ‘I graduated from Vanderbilt Medical School 40 years ago and have been waiting for something like this for a long time.’”
Miki looked at him and replied, “Me too.” ■

This academic year, Vanderbilt business students could be found in briefings with executives on Wall Street, making presentations to the senior marketing executives of Fortune 500 corporations, working directly with management of companies outside the United States, studying the workflow in a hospital or examining a LifeFlight helicopter. They could also be found in Silicon Valley conference rooms, on the scene observing how business gets done in South Korea, or even launching their own businesses beside experienced entrepreneurs at Nashville’s Entrepreneur Center.

In each instance, the students’ presence was an expression of business immersions that, per-haps more thoroughly than in any other top-tier business school, are integrated into learning at the Owen School. First conceptualized more than 20 years ago as Wall Street Week immersion trips to New York, Owen’s immersion week activities have expanded to other trips, times and kinds of experiential offerings.

“Intensive learning immersions,” says Dean Eric Johnson, “have become a hallmark of the Vanderbilt Owen experience. They provide context and texture for traditional classes, giving students real-world experiences on which to process and interpret other parts of their learning experience. They represent a key element in our strategy to create a unique and personalized business education.”

“Intensive learning immersions have become a hallmark of the Vanderbilt Owen experience.”  Dean Eric Johnson

In recent years, the business school has elevated opportunities for experiential learning in a number of ways. “The immersion experiences are blowing up around the school,” says Steve Hoeffler, associate professor of marketing. “I think we’re at the absolute forefront of this. Other schools don’t do it to the extent we do because it takes too much time and effort.”

Learning by experiencing—going far beyond the classroom to complement theory and case studies through direct engagement with organizations in their own environment—is growing in popularity in the world of business education.

A different type of immersion is also a key element in Vanderbilt University’s newly announced Academic Strategic Plan. The Immersion Vanderbilt Initiative calls for undergraduates to immerse themselves in creative independent projects that give them the opportunity to engage, question and forge change.

Starting with Owen’s founding as the Graduate School of Management, real-world learning has been part of what it means to be a Vanderbilt business student—so much so, in fact, that it could be considered part of the school’s organizational DNA.

Travel to where the industry is

Central to Owen’s stance that learning shouldn’t be limited to classrooms, Vanderbilt MBA students have travel opportunities to experience the workings of an industry from an insider’s perspective.

During Wall Street Week, students specializing in finance or banking head to New York for three schedule-packed days. Those pursuing careers in consulting can join an intensive, one-day trip to Atlanta that features visits to three consulting firms. Students interested in the Dallas area have their own trip. Still others can take the relatively new Tech Trek, which involves four days and two cities on the West Coast to visit technology firms.

Though the groups of 20-30 participants may differ by area of specialization, the trips feature several common elements. They involve visits to firms that are active recruiters for MBAs; meetings in which students interact with executives and engage them in conversations about the company or industry; and seeing a presentation on how MBA talent is used in the firm. In addition, an immersion can last only one day or up to 10. Most, but not all, occur during the fall break between Mod 1 and Mod 2. Three immersions, BrandWeek, Health Care and Entrepreneur Week, take place in Nashville.

“The trips really kick-start the recruiting process,” says Emily Anderson, MBA’99, director of internal operations and coaching, who helps put the trips together. “They introduce students to people who can be helpful in the process and improve their interviewing skills. From the employer’s standpoint, if the students have taken enough time to come visit them, it helps them stand out.”

As one Wall Street Week participant noted, “It’s really important to get face time with these banks, and this is the best way to do it.”

Soak up company culture

Especially in recent years, alumni have become more integral to the immersion trips. Companies on the itinerary generally employ Owen alumni—sometimes alumni even initiate the process—and the school’s team works to schedule alumni receptions whenever possible in cities that student groups visit. “We couldn’t do this without alumni support,” Anderson says. “The trips keep us in touch with some of them, and they really look forward to the visits.”

After she joined Seattle-based online retailer zulily in 2013, Allison Matheson, MBA’10, worked with the school’s Career Management Center to include her company on the November 2014 Tech Trek. The afternoon-long visit to the 5-year-old startup included a presentation, tour and a Q&A session about the company’s business model, challenges and plans. Students also met with the company’s senior managers, along with zulily’s director of retention marketing and vice president of business development.

“I think the company visits are a really good opportunity for both the students and the company,” Matheson says. “The feedback from students was that it was interesting to learn more from an inside perspective. [Since the trip], I already have students reaching out to me and making connections with the appropriate people from our organization.”

On the Tech Trek, says Ryan Shepherd, MBA’15, “we had the opportunity to meet with Owen alums such as Brennan Mullin [MBA’00], the director of Google’s hardware business in the Americas. Shepherd, who holds the E. Bronson Ingram Scholarship, says it was amazing to experience the individual business cultures. “It was particularly insightful to see what it takes to be an industry leader like Amazon, Microsoft or Google versus a scrappy startup just out of Y Combinator,” he says.

Valuable hands-on experience

Closer to home, MBA students pursuing careers in marketing or brand management can take part in BrandWeek, an on-campus immersion event. Over three days, student teams apply their classroom knowledge, research and thinking to devise solutions for actual challenges that specific companies face. In October, for example, they helped Louisville-based Brown Forman develop social media marketing strategies for revitalizing the company’s Southern Comfort brand. On the event’s final day, teams formally presented their ideas to a panel of judges comprised of senior marketing executives from Brown Forman, who chose the winners and offered feedback to each team. To add to the real-time pressure, the students also worked on several minichallenges for Papa John’s and GE at the same time.

BrandWeek, says Hoeffler, who helps orchestrate the event, “gives first-year students hands-on experience that augments what happens in the classroom. Many are career switchers thinking about marketing as a career. When they meet with recruiters, they have a BrandWeek story to tell about their ideas and how they’ve approached the problem. Often, recruiters are facing similar challenges in their own companies, so they’re interested in learning what the students did.”

The immersive approach extends to summer offerings for undergraduates and to one-year, career-launching programs. In the 30-day Accelerator Vanderbilt Summer Business Institute, teams of college students and recent grads—like their MBA-candidate counterparts during BrandWeek—take on real projects for real companies and present their ideas to the organization’s executives. And in Vanderbilt’s MAcc, MAcc Valuation and MS Finance programs, students undertake immersions in the form of internships that are built into the academic year.

Scrubbing in

But nowhere are immersion experiences more fully realized than in the school’s distinctive Health Care MBA program. During fall break, new students in the program go through an intensive immersion week at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The 35 to 40 Health Care MBA students split into shifts to see multiple facets of health care operations firsthand. They may spend a shift in the emergency room, observe a surgery in progress, interview LifeFlight teams, visit the catheterization lab, or shadow nurses to understand how they spend their time. Among other experiences, students may engage in roundtable discussions with panels of nurses and physicians to get their perspectives on the field today and how it has changed. They’ll go into Nashville’s dynamic health care community to meet with executives at major companies such as Community Health Systems.

“Very few businesspeople step back and look at health care processes through the eyes of a patient or provider,” says Larry Van Horn, associate professor of management and executive director of health affairs. “So for our students we compress into one week as much as we can before they formally begin studying the business.”

Students also journal throughout the immersion and go through several debriefs during the week on what they have experienced. “We challenge students to observe from a business viewpoint—tracking medications and devices, interacting sometimes with medical staff,” Health Care Program Director Scarlett Gilfuss says.

“It’s a busy week, but it’s a terrific experience,” Van Horn says. “I’m not aware of any MBA program among the top 50 that has anything like this.”

Van Horn could be speaking not just about the Health Care MBA but the totality of such experiences at Vanderbilt, which remains well ahead of the curve in providing immersion opportunities. Johnson points out that Owen’s modular course structure allows for many short, immersive experiences. Even so, the deeper advantage, he suggests, involves consistent intentionality.

“Immersions are an important element of all our programs,” he says, “because we’re focused on building leaders.”

 

After she earned her undergraduate degree, Cincinnati native Sarah Berhalter worked in the equestrian industry in Virginia, training horses and managing a stable. There she was surrounded by people “who were very passionate about what they did, but were at risk of failing simply because they didn’t know business,” she says.

Berhalter decided to pursue an MBA and focus on consulting so she could develop the tools to better help people do what they love.

“To me, ultimately, that’s what consulting is—working with clients and helping them face whatever challenge they’re presented with, or helping their business to grow,” she says.

Kristen Stieger’s journey followed a different path. After earning her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, she worked two years in a project management role at an energy company in her native California. “But I also wanted to explore the different opportunities that existed with an MBA,” she says. “I got interested in consulting because it’s fast-paced, uses analytical skills to solve problems, and allows you to work with clients in a variety of industries.”

Both Berhalter and Stieger are now second-year students and officers in the Owen School’s Consulting Club, a student-run organization whose mission is to help students gain a better understanding of the work culture, required skills and career opportunities available in consulting-related fields. Though the club has existed for about 20 years, it’s currently seeing a record level of participation, with more than 100 members.

“Since the economic recovery in 2011, we’ve seen an increase
in the percentage of our graduating student body go into the
consulting area.”—Emily Anderson

“Since the economic recovery in 2011, we’ve seen an increase in the percentage of our graduating student body go into the consulting area,” says Emily Anderson, MBA’99, director of internal operations and coaching for the Career Management Center. “As companies have more money for discretionary spending, they hire more consultants to do things like work on special projects, change out software systems and help develop corporate strategy.

“Consulting is also a classic MBA function,” she explains, “because it incorporates everything students are learning in the program—whether it’s marketing or finance or operations—and how they all work together to strengthen a company or provide competitive advantage.”
 

Perfecting the case interview

As a result of this popularity, the Consulting Club is sponsoring more activities than ever before, from facilitating networking opportunities for its members to preparing them for careers in consulting through workshops and case practice sessions.

At the start of the academic year, the club invited eight alumni from the consulting industry to campus to share their experiences and meet one-on-one with students. The group regularly co-sponsors social events with consulting firms and hosts lunch-and-learn sessions featuring guest speakers as well as faculty.

The club teams with the CMC to organize a consulting trek to Atlanta each fall for students to visit consulting firms. It also produces weekly newsletters featuring information on upcoming events, job opportunities and deadlines.

“The Consulting Club serves as a resource where students can start to get information about consulting,” says Stieger, the club’s president. “It also provides us second-years who have been through the interview and internship experience with a platform to share our knowledge with first-years.”

At the heart of the club’s efforts is preparation and practice for the case interview, a hallmark of the consulting interview process.

“A case tests your ability to take a hypothetical problem with a limited amount of information, prioritize the key elements, and organize your thinking so that you not only find a solution but communicate it effectively to the interviewer,” explains Berhalter, the club’s vice president of communications. Berhalter, who is the recipient of the Ingram Scholar Award, Virginia Banks and Fred W. Lazenby Honor Scholarship and Beta Gamma Sigma scholarship, says that in addition to being a core business skill, the ability to solve a case knowledgeably and with confidence increases one’s stock as an internship or job candidate.

Since practice makes perfect, the Consulting Club gives students many opportunities to do so. A dedicated group of first-year members holds weekly walk-in practice sessions, and about 20 second-year members make themselves available for one-on-one case prep or to discuss careers in consulting. The club also has built a robust online resource of cases and frameworks that members can access to prepare on their own.
 

Experience under pressure

These resources are a boon not only to club members, but to a growing number of other students for whom solving cases has become a common element of the interview process.

“Companies come into schools like Vanderbilt assuming the candidates are smart, so it’s not as much about testing raw intelligence as it is about seeing how a candidate can apply it,” Anderson says. “When they conduct a case interview, they’re getting to see in real time how a candidate can think through a problem. It gives them insight into the way a candidate acts under pressure. And it allows them to view how students are putting together all the pieces they’re learning in the MBA.”

This year, the Consulting Club has partnered with the other professional student organizations at the school to offer individualized case practice.

“When [recruiters] conduct a case interview, they’re getting to see in real time how a candidate can think through a problem.”—Emily Anderson

“Being able to organize your thoughts is critically important, not just in interviews but in any type of presentation you may have,” says Matthew McCall, a second-year student from Austin, Texas, who is president of the Owen Operations Club and a Bruce D. Henderson scholarship recipient. “The case method—those techniques that the Consulting Club has been using for years—are extremely useful. I’ve found that the first-year students I’ve spoken with this year are much more comfortable with case-type questions and have performed better in interviews on the whole.”

Anderson says her data supports this observation. Internship offers are up 8 percent from the same time last year, and these opportunities often develop into full-time positions. Berhalter will join Boston Consulting Group in Atlanta after graduation, and Stieger will go to work at Chevron in a rotational leadership development program. “Across the board, the feedback we’re getting from companies is that students are performing well in their interviews,” Anderson says.

“I think the leadership of the Consulting Club has been exceptional this year in their organization and outreach across the Owen School,” she says. “I hope this translates, and the first-years who are benefiting from it will be inspired to continue it next year.”

Call it buzz. Call it sizzle. Call it Music City mojo. By almost any measure, Nashville is an It City. Publications from The New York Times to GQ, Southern Living to Rolling Stone and Bon Appetit to Business Insider have sung its praises.

Our branding may still have country music at its core (and given the long, loving establishment shots airing weekly on the ABC series that bears its name, who’s complaining?), but it now includes professional sports, the health care and automotive industries, world-class education, fine dining, upscale downtown living and an explosion of entrepreneurship. Combine those with a reputation for safety and civility, and you’ve got everything any convention and visitors bureau might want.

“We have all the assets of a growing, vibrant city,” says Country Music Association CEO Sarah Trahern, EMBA’04, “and we’ve been able to hold onto the intimate business environment we had before.”

Owen Dean Eric Johnson, who returned to the city after 14 years at Dartmouth College, says the changes were almost like Rip Van Winkle falling asleep. “In coming back, everything was dramatically different,” he says. He cites the Nashville Predators and Tennessee Titans, both of which began play in Nashville in 1998, as well as the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, opening five years later, as among the keys to a re-emergent downtown. The 1994 lifting of a ban on most downtown residential development contributed to transformations like that of 12 South, which Johnson saw go from “a pretty unsavory place” into “the hottest, coolest thing ever.”

Johnson came back to a business school whose people and programs are an integral part of the city’s transformation. After all, while affordability, climate, far-sighted governance, and attractiveness to a young, upscale demographic all play a part, a great business climate is crucial. A recent Gallup poll ranked Nashville in the nation’s top five metro areas for job growth, and CNN Money called it one of the five “best cities to launch a startup.”

Nation’s health care manager

A key component is health care, and there are few stronger examples of synergy than Bernard Health, conceived by Alex Tolbert, JD/MBA’07, in a health law class. The Nashville-based company offers health care planning and advice to individuals and corporations.

Attracted to the city while visiting his brother, who attended Vanderbilt, Tolbert “got really passionate about the misalignments in health care” while at Owen. He focused on health savings accounts, and when someone asked how he could start a business without raising initial outside capital, “I said I would get my insurance brokerage license and start calling on employers in Nashville to help them understand how HSAs might work for them and their employees,” he says. Bernard became a reality during his last year at Vanderbilt, and he is quick to praise the school’s atmosphere.

“I don’t think it should be discounted, having an environment that really encourages entrepreneurship and experimentation,” he says, “and having cheerleaders among the professors, who bring students together with entrepreneurs who tell stories about how they did it. That’s a really big deal.”

The Nashville area is home to more than 300 health care companies that extend the city’s reach nationwide, Johnson says. The dean, who also is the Ralph Owen Dean and Bruce D. Henderson Professor of Strategy, says, “Many cities have world-class health care, but what’s really different about Nashville is that we’ve become a city that manages health care for the whole country, in a quiet way that the average person in Columbus or Kansas City really wouldn’t think about.”

Health care strategy is a must for businesses and individuals alike, and the Owen School’s role in preparing industry leaders since launching its Health Care MBA in 2005 makes it a key player.

“We fundamentally believe that health care has become a topic that’s important for all managers to understand,” Johnson says. “Whether you work at GE, Exxon or Amazon, you’ve got to know something about it because the health care equation in the U.S. and what it means for corporate America is changing.”

The industry’s reach and buzz help feed Nashville’s attractiveness to the best minds, Tolbert says. “Interesting people like to work on interesting problems. We’re attracting and keeping people here, and I like to think our growth and success are a good thing for Nashville.”

(Continued below slideshow.)

Power of connectedness

The possibilities of a wider back-and-forth between industries are part of the approach of Van Tucker, EMBA’96, a consulting strategist and entrepreneur with a background in banking and finance. She’s now CEO of Fierce Company, which helps creative companies build business infrastructure around their products or ideas.

“The CEO of a young clothing company can learn from a health care CEO running a multimillion-dollar company,” she says, “and that health care executive can learn from that young clothing company about connectedness and authenticity.”

Tucker is also CEO of the Nashville Fashion Alliance, a trade association for the city’s burgeoning fashion industry—an industry driven by the city’s attractiveness to young, educated professionals. She cites yet another example of synergy in the way the group draws inspiration from the music industry.

“In the 1950s, entrepreneurial visionaries like Owen and Harold Bradley and Chet Atkins believed the creative spirit could be nurtured in Nashville and an industry outside the chaos of New York and Los Angeles could thrive,” she says. “They started publishing companies, world-class recording studios, record labels, the CMA. We’re the largest concentration of music industry jobs in the U.S. because of their vision. That’s our vision for the Nashville Fashion Alliance—to nurture the infrastructure necessary to support and sustain fashion industry companies.”

Business and music

The CMA’s Trahern can attest to the success of the Bradley/Atkins model. Nashville’s history as a seat of government and education goes back to the 19th century, but country music is the foundation of its reputation. While the economics are tricky in an era of downloading, the brand has never been stronger. The genre is played on 2,200 radio stations, and the CMA’s three major network television specials get great ratings. Those, along with the series Nashville and the presence of Blake Shelton and Keith Urban on The Voice and American Idol, respectively, all contribute to the city’s image. Extending that reach is among Trahern’s main goals.

“I love being able to spend time anchoring the CMA and country music into the fabric of the community as a whole,” says Trahern, who is also a board member of the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. She cites the work of Dr. Jeff Balser, Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and Dean of the School of Medicine and Vanderbilt Medical Center in helping the CMA create Instrumental Health Care, which gives musicians and songwriters the opportunity to get health insurance.

“That town-and-gown kind of thing, unique strategic partnerships, is a Nashville strong point,” she says. “What’s more, banks support Music Row No. 1 parties, and the CMA has, in turn, created our foundation and given over $8 million dollars to get instruments back in Metro schools. It’s a way we give back to the community that’s given so much to us.”

Success draws talent

Like Tucker, Vic Gatto, MBA’02, CEO of Jumpstart Foundry, a health care business accelerator, and a partner in Solidus, an investment partnership, sees the city’s future in youth and creativity—places where Vanderbilt is well-positioned.

“Nashville is the place every talented, highly mobile person wants to move to these days,” he says. “I think startups also migrate to where the ecosystem is most conducive to success. In Nashville, we have a very strong mix of creative talent, established industries and capital sources. While it is likely true that San Francisco and New York have more assets, Nashville has grown to be in the next tier of three or four cities that are slightly smaller and friendlier but almost as supportive of startup companies.”

The city has, in fact, reached a point of critical mass, he says. “All of this talent flowing into our city creates a self-fulfilling dynamic in which great startups are able to hire very strong people, have success and then attract more talent into Nashville.”

It’s a dynamic that established companies appreciate as well. Bridgestone Americas, long a Nashville presence, announced last November that it would relocate its headquarters and move three out-of-state businesses to a new facility downtown, ultimately installing more than 1,700 employees in the vibrant, growing SoBro district.

“The fact that many bright, capable professionals call Nashville home is an advantage as we look to expand our workforce and recruit new talent across all of our business lines and support functions,” says Andrew Honeybone, MBA’04, the company’s vice president of talent acquisition. “Between now and the end of 2017 when we move into our new headquarters, we will be filling several hundred professional positions, so having an educated talent pool locally is very beneficial to our overall recruiting efforts and long-term talent strategy.”

It helps that so many regional firms weave themselves into the structure of secondary and post-secondary education. Jennifer Hill, a 2015 MBA for Executives graduate, is manager of process control engineering at Nissan North America in Smyrna, Tennessee. Hill is adamant about reaching out, particularly to young women and encouraging STEM careers.

“I am fortunate to work for a company that supports the ecosystem of fostering good talent,” she says. “I believe Nissan understands it is important to start in the community and influence the upcoming generation.”

The It City appellation is one that resonates strongly with her.

“It’s well-deserved,” she says. “I am a firm believer in the power of diversity, and that is an essential characteristic of Nashville. Focusing on higher learning initiatives and career opportunities is essential to the city’s success, and we are on the right track.”

Absolutely on fire

The confluence of industry and culture and the influx of people that makes Nashville a truly multidimensional and rapidly growing city provides challenges along with the opportunities.

“For the hospitality industry, it’s a challenge to keep up with the growth,” says Rich May, EMBA’87, a food and hospitality consultant and investor whose M Street Entertainment and JHS Holdings represent some of the city’s best local restaurants, including Amerigo, Frothy Monkey, Whiskey Kitchen and Virago. “Although the market invariably finds equilibrium over the longer term, the pool of entrepreneurs is absolutely on fire.” May says that will abate somewhat as the hit rate inevitably subsides, but “it currently provides a refreshing and invigorating jolt of life to the city’s growth and reputation.”

Helping companies negotiate those challenges is something Johnson sees as a clear part of Owen’s role. “We see tremendous opportunity partnering with companies to supply their management needs,” he says.

He points to the Nashville Entrepreneur Center as a great vehicle to build the school’s entrepreneurship offering. “In a uniquely Nashville way, we do a very good job of partnering with the venture community, the startup community and many of the large companies in town to build a great ecosystem our students can participate in,” he says. He cites, too, the school’s immersive experiences, “where MBA students may spend a week on Wall Street, or in surgery suites or insurance companies, gaining a thorough understanding of what the business means where the rubber hits the road.” (Read “Being There” for more about immersion.)

Organizations like the Nashville Health Care Council’s Fellows Program, Leadership Music and Leadership Nashville provide educational and networking opportunities, and Johnson says, “really leverage the strengths of what’s here in Nashville and enable us to fight way above our weight class as a city.”

The ties between Owen, the city and the wide-ranging industries and demographics that comprise it seem to undergird the sound basics behind Nashville’s image.

“Cool is fleeting,” Tucker says. “Well-run businesses stick around and have a sustainable economic impact. Someone said to me recently that the thing about being an It City is that you have to keep coming up with ‘Itness.’ I’m proud of all of the press Nashville is garnering, and it’s certainly warranted, but the real quality has always been the genuineness and connectedness we all share to make Nashville a great place to live and work.”

May echoes her words. “Owen is neither the largest nor the oldest B-school out there, but it may very well be among the most tightly knit,” he says. “Its conscious effort to promote and maintain engagement augurs well for both the school and the city.”

Tolbert says he’s extremely bullish on Nashville. “We’ve got so much going for us, and I think our motto at this point ought to be, ‘Just don’t screw it up.’”