Vanderbilt Business

Tag: employment

  • The ties that bind

    The ties that bind

    As the inaugural member of a new corporate partnership program at Owen, Cardinal Health’s relationship with the school has moved beyond year-to-year hiring

    Read McNamara, MA’76, (left)assistant dean for corporate partnerships at Owen’s Career Management Center and Sam Samad, senior vice president and treasurer at Cardinal Health and a member of Owen’s Board of Visitors. Photo Credit: John Russell

    Just over a decade ago, when Jeff Greer, BA’94, MBA’00, decided to leave the world of management consulting, he called a contact at Cardinal Health, one of the world’s leading global health services and products companies, to explore new career opportunities. Having worked on past engagements at the Dublin, Ohio-based company, he’d come to appreciate Cardinal Health’s rare combination of maintaining a collegial, collaborative feel within the setting of a company consistently ranked in the top 25 of the Fortune 500.

    “One of the things I’ve loved about Cardinal Health is that it reminds me of the atmosphere at Owen,” says Greer, who is now vice president of enterprise architecture and IT strategy at Cardinal Health, and believes he was the first alumnus from Vanderbilt’s MBA program to land at the company. He has been a member of the Owen recruiting team ever since.

    “In business school, I never felt like there was cutthroat competition among classmates, nor were there barriers to getting access to the people or resources you needed,” he says. “I find that things are very much the same at Cardinal Health.”

    Greer isn’t the only one who has recognized the similarities between Cardinal Health and Vanderbilt’s Owen School. This fall, Cardinal Health became the inaugural member of a new corporate partnership program at Owen designed to deepen ties between the school and companies that recruit Vanderbilt business talent.

    “This partnership formalizes a lot of what we were already doing with Owen, but takes it to the next level,” says Sam Samad, senior vice president and treasurer at Cardinal Health and a member of Owen’s Board of Visitors. “It puts the things we’re doing together in a bit more of a strategic context.”

    Read McNamara, MA’76, assistant dean for corporate partnerships at Owen’s Career Management Center, says Cardinal Health is an ideal company to help launch the new initiative—a program he hopes to grow to about 25 companies. The genesis for the idea came in 2013 around the time M. Eric Johnson was named dean of the business school.

    “I’d begun to network with my peers at other top-25 business schools and learned about engagement programs they had with corporate recruiters,” McNamara says, citing Harvard Business School’s longstanding partnership with P&G as an example. “There are many different routes a program like this could take, but Dean Johnson and I decided that developing qualitative engagements—things like mentoring opportunities with executives, speaker opportunities, case competitions, joint research projects—would be the cornerstone of our partnership program.”

    The primary goal is to attract companies to campus in a way that goes “above and beyond” the cyclical, transactional nature of simply recruiting graduates, McNamara says.

    That’s a trajectory Cardinal Health has followed since the company began recruiting Owen graduates on campus in 2011, Samad says, noting that the lone Vanderbilt graduate who went to Cardinal Health that year, Eric Messinger, MBA’12, continues to thrive at the company.

    In the years since then, Cardinal Health has extended its ties to Vanderbilt in numerous ways that go beyond hiring—though that role is growing too as the company has augmented its internship program and broadened its MBA recruiting pool from strictly finance majors to graduates concentrating in areas like strategy and marketing.

    Some of those nonrecruiting activities included former Cardinal Health CFO Jeff Henderson joining the Board of Visitors (Samad has taken over his place on the BOV); Cardinal Health CEO George Barrett delivering a keynote address in 2014 for the student-run Vanderbilt Health Care Conference; and Cardinal Health partnering with Vanderbilt’s Executive Development Institute to develop courses for high-potential executives within the company.

    “The foundational element in all of this is that you need people who enjoy working with each other,” Samad says. “Once we started working with the team at Owen, we realized we had a very strong cultural fit. We saw that from day one.”

    A Good Deal for Both Sides

    The partnership between Owen and Cardinal Health is not just about mutual admiration, however. Like any good business deal, both sides stand to gain.

    Samad participates in his first Owen Board of Visitors meeting with Dean Eric Johnson in November. Photo Credit: John Russell

    One big advantage for Cardinal Health’s involvement with Owen is that it helps sell the students on the company. That’s important, Samad says, because in the next year alone he hopes to double the number of interns from Owen, as well as the number of graduates coming into full-time roles at Cardinal Health.

    Another critical benefit: diversity. “Cultivating a diverse and inclusive work environment is crucial to our success,” says Samad. “In our efforts to ensure diversity in the workplace, Cardinal Health strives for a workplace that accurately reflects the communities where we live and do business. As I look at the list of Vanderbilt MBAs that we’ve hired, there is a lot of gender and ethnic diversity, which helps us thrive as an organization.”

    Internally, Cardinal Health has been exploring ways to put more structure around its internal leadership development efforts to foster a pipeline of homegrown executive talent, and MBA recruiting plays an important role in that. “If we attract somebody into finance, if we attract somebody into strategy, we want them to have the expectation that they’ll be rotating,” Samad says. “They need to understand that they’re not coming into a strategy firm. At the end of the day, they’re joining a health care company.”

    The other key area for Cardinal Health is tapping into Owen’s teaching and research. Samad says the company wants to continue to develop customized learning programs for the company’s internal use, as well as access to cutting-edge research around the health care industry, especially now that Cardinal Health has operations in Nashville that include a distribution center and a recently acquired health care services company, naviHealth.

    For Owen, having high-quality companies on campus regularly recruiting graduates is a key motivator for entering these kinds of partnerships, McNamara says. Developing a stable group of top companies with which Owen has formalized partnerships helps recruit students for admissions, and ideally helps guard against severe hiring dips during economic downturns.

    These partnerships also create opportunities for students and companies to get a much better feel for working together before either side commits to a full-time job.

    McNamara says case competitions offer a good example. “They are perhaps one of the most productive forms of the kind of qualitative engagement we have in mind,” he says. “Over a two-day period, the company—which ideally provides the judges for the competition—will get a really good look at our talent.” Even watching how the students organize, market and run the competitions offers employers valuable insight, McNamara says. Similarly, case competitions let students get a good feel for a company’s culture and values in a way that an hourlong interview in a library conference room can’t replicate.

    McNamara says Deloitte’s annual Human Capital Case Competition, hosted at Owen, has been a great success for students in the Human and Organizational Performance track. He’d like to see those efforts replicated with other companies in different management concentrations, such as finance, health care, marketing and operations.

    Summer interns and current MBA students Mark Fergason, BA’08, Kartik Varma, and Sid Shetty, join Cardinal Health CEO George Barrett (third from left) for a group photo. Fergason and Shetty will join Cardinal after graduation, while Varma is joining American Airlines, another company that enjoys a strong Owen alumni network. Photo Credit: Sid Shetty

    One other key outcome Vanderbilt hopes to see emerge from the corporate partnership program is the creation of an executive-in-residence position. McNamara and Melinda Allen, executive director of the Owen School’s Leadership Development Program, are putting the final touches on that initiative. “This would involve a senior executive from a corporate partner spending anywhere between 48 and 72 hours here on campus meeting with small groups of students, faculty and administrators,” McNamara says. “That would give the company a terrific look—at a very senior level—at the range of talent and research Vanderbilt has to offer.” For students it would also help reinforce the school’s close-knit, collaborative culture.

    McNamara says each organization that becomes a corporate partner should include a few common components, such as a history of recruiting Owen students in good times and bad; a willingness to hire international graduates; a leadership development program at their organization; and a willingness to engage with Owen through things like speaker series or case competitions.

    In exchange, companies designated as corporate partners will receive preferential timing for on-campus interview and information sessions; priority for event sponsorship; and invitations to participate in an annual dean’s dinner for corporate partners that will offer an inside look at Owen’s plans and priorities.

    “Companies like Cardinal Health—and many others Owen has had fantastic relationships with over the years—have expressed a real desire to be involved with the school, whether it’s related to curriculum, hiring students, or working with faculty on teaching and research projects. Usually it’s all of those things and more,” Johnson says. “Read and the executives he is talking to for this corporate partnership program have done a wonderful job putting a structure and strategy around a set of mutually beneficial engagement activities. I look forward to seeing this grow into a meaningful, productive program that leads to long-term success for everyone involved.”

    Editor’s note: As this issue of Vanderbilt Business magazine was going to press, Sam Samad was named senior vice president and chief financial officer of Illumina, a global leader in the field of genomics.

     

  • Owen sharpens career-skills courses

    Owen sharpens career-skills courses

    Professor Kimberly Pace speaks to MBA students about the art of business communications.

    More than ever, employers are seeking candidates who can work in teams, adapt to new situations and think fast on their feet

    When Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management began developing a strategic plan two years ago, alumni and employers felt confident that MBA graduates excelled in their majors, from marketing to finance. But as anyone in the working world knows, there are often many more factors that make for career success beyond the narrow confines of a single discipline.

    “We want our folks to be ready to hit the road running,” says Jon Lehman, director of Vanderbilt’s Executive Development Institute and instructor for Learning to Thrive, an elective course which requires MBA students to take a deeper look at themselves. In a recent blog post, Dean M. Eric Johnson cited Learning to Thrive and Professor Kimberly Pace’s Advanced Management Speaking as courses designed to strengthen students’ business communication and presentation skills.

    Brian McCann

    Another class being piloted is Associate Professor Brian McCann’s Managerial Decision Making. Critical thinking skills are important for any professional, but a key finding from the strategic planning process was their growing importance for MBA students. McCann’s course is designed to provide an opportunity for students to improve their analytical thinking skills in the context of solving managerial problems and making better decisions. The class starts with the topic of developing, understanding and evaluating arguments supporting managerial decisions. It also covers topics like the definition of managerial problems and a comparison of intuitive and rational decision making processes.

    “A significant goal of the class is to have the students leave as more reflective thinkers,” says McCann, MBA’04. “But even more importantly as more effective decision makers.”

    Emily Anderson, MBA’99, director of Owen’s Career Management Center, agrees. “We do a recruiter survey every year, and being a smaller school we have a lot of avenues and forums,” she says. “There’s a lot of conversation around expectations and how they actually perform once they’re there.”

    What those conversations identified is a need to equip Vanderbilt MBA graduates with the ability to do things like deliver formal presentations, work effectively in teams, and quickly draw on their grasp of facts and figures to make a cogent business case. “It’s not just technically being smart and having book knowledge. It’s how that is applied in an organization and how that makes them more successful,” Anderson says. “That’s the stuff employers are paying a premium for—managers who can make an impact in their organization.”

    Finding that right combination of skills is not easy. In a recent Wall Street Journal survey of nearly 900 U.S. executives, 92 percent of them said soft skills—like teamwork, adaptability, creativity and sociability—are equally or more important than technical skills. Yet 89 percent of that same group said finding people with those skills, no matter what age or gender, is difficult.

    Recent graduate Hudson Jones, MBA’16, says the training he received during his time at Vanderbilt has already proven beneficial. “I was coming from a small boutique consulting world,” he says. “So things like building political capital and traversing the bureaucratic red tape of a publicly traded company were things which Owen prepared me for that I probably otherwise would have been worried about.”

    BEGINNINGS

    The training in communication begins before MBA students even arrive on campus. “As soon as the MBA candidates are accepted, they have to write a personal brand pitch,” Pace says. “We have five professional writing coaches who meet with every student one on one for 30 minutes to give them feedback before school even starts.” Giving effective and persuasive presentations is also a must. Pace teaches a core course on management speaking and also an advanced class. About 30 percent of students dislike public speaking, and she says that 5 to 10 percent experience “true fear” at the thought of doing it.

    “They do four presentations within seven weeks,” Pace says. “They’ve got to do their own personal pitch—how they would pitch themselves in a real career situation. They also have to give an impromptu speech, where we give them a topic and they have to do a speech based on the topic.

    “And the final one is a true business pitch, an executive summary. So if you’re a strong presenter, you become an advanced presenter. If you have stage fright, we at least want people not to know you have stage fright.”

    The importance of being a competent presenter is reinforced during internships, Pace says. “Many times at the end of an internship, they have to do a presentation to the executives about the internship,” she says. “And basically it is a job interview.”

    SOFT SKILLS

    MBA student Chris Culver says he values the soft skills he’s learning at Owen.

    “The softer skills are along the lines of asking good questions, knowing how to collaborate with people, and really working in an environment where there’s not a lot of guidance and always a lot of work to be done,” Culver says.

    Jon Lehman

    The Learning to Thrive elective course can help students put it all together, and also assist with transitions down the road, Lehman says. “I don’t want to call it soul-searching, but it’s getting at deeper stuff. It’s not an accounting class.” The curriculum includes writing poetry, self-reflection and a private session with Lehman. “Executive coaching is part of what I do,” Lehman says. “I sit down with them and talk to them about my perception of them as individuals and what it’s going to take [to succeed].”

    Learning to Thrive is best taken “as your last mod before you go in the big world,” Jones says. “I think it’s even more helpful if you take it once you’ve settled on your career path, or at least your job.”

    The class helped Jones, a business strategist at Cerner Corp. in Kansas City, Missouri, deal with an early career dilemma. “Part of my transition out of business school was moving my wife, who is a Carolina girl, out West. I was trained in Learning to Thrive to stop and think about what that portends for her, and make sure I’m not just dragging her down my career path—that we’re embracing this change together.

    “So it helps personally and professionally, which is different from most business classes.”

    IDEAS, NOT EGO

    There’s another quality prominent at Owen that sets its students apart. It’s a message seen on a banner hanging in the lobby of Management Hall: “Ideas, Not Ego.”

    “There’s a general bias that MBAs are going to be full of themselves,” Pace says. “You don’t see it so much at Vanderbilt. From a recruiter standpoint, they love that, because it means you’re more coachable in a team. If you’re willing to listen and you’re relatively self-aware and don’t have a huge ego, then you can move up maybe quicker than others.” Being humble and amiable is also taught by participation in clubs at Owen.

    “I think one of the more important things you learn is your leadership style,” says Sarah Eaton, president of the Owen Student Government Association. “Before I was president, I was a member of the Tech Club. I still am. And there’s also the Cork and Barrel Club—the more fun clubs.

    “It’s nice having the mixture of professional clubs that help you with recruiting and getting opportunities to practice through alumni that are in the field. For example, they brought in some alumni and we did case competitions with the Consulting Club.” A NEW DIRECTION Like many MBA students, Chris Culver came to Owen pursuing a change in career direction. “I was doing engineering before this, and I’m using this as a way to transition my career with the idea of getting more into the business side of the company,” Culver says. “Most people at Owen are trying to make a transition into a different industry than they worked in before.”

    Eaton is moving from education and “looking to go into a more-profit sector,” adding that “at Owen, my background is valued, and I feel supported every day.”

    The evolution of skills, hard and soft, never really ends as long as a career is in motion, Lehman says. “Work environments change along with the stress and pressure. A lot of it follows economic cycles. I don’t think you’re ever done in these areas.” Lehman should know: He’s writing a book based on his Learning to Thrive class and hopes to see it published this year.