Vanderbilt Business

Category: Issue

Evolving, Serving and Having Fun

As Owen’s website says it, the approximately 40 members of the Alumni Board “serve the community through the promotion of and support for the school’s strategic priorities and initiatives.” Ask Erika King, MBA’99, the board’s new chair, and she’ll tell you that description leaves out an essential detail: “It’s fun.”

During alumni board meetings, members divide into smaller groups and provide insight on matters concerning the school. Nancy Lea Hyer, associate dean for academic programs, facilitates one such session last fall.

For King, who has been involved with the board since 2011, some of the enjoyment in serving comes from getting to know other alumni and comparing their experiences. “It’s fun to learn what Owen was like before I got there (it started in an old funeral home, after all), and to hear from people who came after me,” King says.

But even more, as the board’s role has evolved, serving is not just a way to stay connected but a way to continue to shape the school. Board members, like other alumni, help recruit students, share expertise with current classes, and assist in internship and job placements. In what is a very instrumental role, the board helps shape the school’s strategic direction, Johnson says.

The board meets on campus twice a year. At those sessions, Alumni Board members break up into small groups of four or five and, with the help of a facilitator, apply their expertise to questions that bear on Owen’s planning for the future. For example, King says, “we might talk about the future of campus-oriented education. Should Vanderbilt continue having MBAs in residence? Should we grow our health care programs? Should we have a program in technology?

“These are things that the dean is generally pondering,” she says. “We get to bring our collective experience to bear on his thinking.”

The advisory role for the board, King notes, is relatively new. “For the person who simply wants to check board experience on their résumé, this is not the board for them. It’s work. But we get to be consultants to our alma mater. How can that not be fun?”

December 18, 2014
What I Did on My Summer Vacation

It wasn’t really summer vacation—it was work. All 163 first-year Vanderbilt MBA students who wanted an internship were hired for one—and took off for businesses around the country armed with new knowledge to use and a willingness to learn. Here are photos they sent back to Owen with a “Wish you were here.”

Tyler Narveson, Allyson Mariani and Hillary Carroll

Tyler Narveson (human and organizational performance), Allyson Mariani (strategy) and Hillary Carroll (finance) in front of the DaVita gondola at the company’s headquarters in Denver. They received Three Musketeers hats and swords at the DaVita academy. DaVita’s CEO is known to roam the halls wearing the same, they noted.

Veronica Barnes

Veronica Barnes (general management) was a human resources pathways intern at Honeywell Aerospace. The staff of Owen’s Career Management Center voted this their favorite intern photo of the summer.

Becky Murphy

While working as a marketing intern for Johnson & Johnson, Becky Murphy (human and organizational performance) participated in Global Surgery Day at the company’s subsidiary Ethicon. Here she demonstrates one of their products.

Haque Sheik

Haque Sheik (operations management) volunteered at Habitat for Humanity in Silicon Valley during his internship with Cisco.

Turhan Jesrai

All work and no play wasn’t what Nestle Purina intern Turhan Jesrai (brand management) experienced. He’s on the left participating in the company’s Marketing Field Day.

Allie Cowan

Allie Cowan (general management) worked as a customer marketing manager intern at Mars Petcare. She also was able to visit the Mars Chocolate plant in Cleveland, Tenn., where they make M&M’s.

Kristen Smithson

Kristen Smithson (general management) worked for SecondMuse, a boutique consulting firm, on an event that culminated at a White House Champions of Change event. She’s standing before the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in D.C.

Solvig Gentile

Solvig Gentile (human and organization performance) interned with Hewlett-Packard. She demonstrates how easy it is to use her HP laptop anywhere—including on location in California’s wine country.

Carolyn Griffin

Carolyn Griffin (marketing) interned in the marketing department at Hershey company headquarters in Hershey, Penn. One of the most tantalizing things about Hershey is that the whole town smells like chocolate.

Megan Eberhard and Sharde Miller

Megan Eberhard (health care) and Sharde Miller (general management) attended a Dodgers game in Los Angeles, courtesy of Eberhard’s internship with biopharmaceutical leader Amgen.

Aaron Gaddie

Aaron Gaddie is on the left, with Gentleman Jack on the right. Gaddie (finance, marketing and strategy) worked in business analytics with Brown-Forman Corp., the spirits and wine company behind the Jack Daniel’s brand.

Thomas Mante

Thomas Mante, business operations intern for baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers, dressed as the Italian Sausage (No. 3) to run the Daily Sausage Race held during home games. Mante (marketing) reports that he actually won the race in that costume.

Anjelica Amable

Anjelica Amable didn’t leave her heart in San Francisco, but she did visit there while a human service development program intern at Chevron in San Ramon, Calif.

Maulik Handiwala

His Medtronic health care marketing internship took Maulik Handiwala (general management) to Switzerland and Italy for a week. Handiwala stands in front of Lake Geneva and the Swiss Alps.

Matt Merrick

Matt Merrick (general management) spent the summer in Cincinnati as a leadership development intern with Fort Washington Investment Advisers, a subsidiary of Western and Southern Financial Group.

December 9, 2013
True Brew

Linus Hall is the Owner of Yazoo Brewing Co., which produces several different beers, including the Pale Ale pictured here on the bottling line.

Running a craft brewery requires a personal touch, but few pour themselves into the job like Linus Hall. His Nashville-based Yazoo Brewing Co., which has expanded its reach across the Southeast since opening in 2003, is as much a testament to his handcrafted approach to beer making as it is to the larger aesthetic and philosophy that guide his decisions as a business owner.

“You go down the beer aisle of any grocery store, and it’s mostly run-of-the-mill brands in boring metallic blue cans,” he says. “We try to go in the opposite direction with our brewery by being offbeat and memorable.”

Named for the river that winds its way past Hall’s hometown of Vicksburg, Miss., Yazoo produces nine different types of beer, including a rotating seasonal variety. Several of them have labels featuring paintings by his wife, Lila. “Even though we ended up in Nashville, we wanted to reflect our Mississippi roots in our name and image,” he says. “It’s about capturing that Delta folk-art feel.”

Distinctive as it is, the branding explains only part of Yazoo’s growing popularity. From the outset Hall knew that success hinged not only on the quality of his beer, for which he turned to the American Brewer’s Guild for a craft-brewing course, but also on the quality of his business plan. For the latter he enrolled in the Vanderbilt Executive MBA program, which he says gave him a strong foundation in strategy and operations, as well as a better understanding of what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

Nearly 10 years into it, Hall still gets a heady feeling from being in charge of the business he’s built from the ground up. It’s not unlike the warm sense of satisfaction that his patrons feel after sampling one of Yazoo’s fresh drafts.

“If you don’t get a thrill from what you’re doing, you’re not going to make it,” he says. “For me that thrill is walking into the taproom on a busy night and seeing customers enjoying our beer and having great conversations.

“Beer brings people together, but good beer makes them happier.”

May 14, 2012