When Owen wanted to expand its global perspective, the school turned to its alumni and corporate clients to discover what their needs were. What they found was right in their own backyard: the Western Hemisphere.
Juli Bennett
“We spoke with alumni and recognized that they have made their operations go across the Americas. We saw a need to give people a perspective of how it is to operate across North and South America,” says Juli Bennett, MBA’93, executive director of the Executive MBA and Americas MBA for Executives programs. “We responded to a business need.”
The Americas MBA is a focused, optional track in the Executive MBA program. Participants spend their first year in step with students in the traditional program. The second year, they focus more heavily on international business, working on international capstone projects and attending 10-day residential immersions at participating schools: Fundação Instituto De Administração in São Paulo; Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México in Mexico City; and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C. The students from those programs join the Owen students for another nine days at Vanderbilt. When the students graduate, they have a deep and relevant understanding of international trade, particularly within the four largest economies in the Americas: Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the U.S.
The inaugural Americas MBA class consisting of 52 students representing 10 countries spanning the globe from Brazil to Vietnam.
“Mostly when you look at executive MBA programs, they do the same thing we used to do: take their students and their faculty and go to a different location,” Bennett says. “With this model, when you go to Simon Fraser you’re taught by the top cross-cultural experts at Simon Fraser. The four schools’ faculty are experts at things like family businesses in Mexico. They know the people who are excellent at emerging markets in Brazil. It’s not us trying to be everything to everyone. It’s leveraging the expertise of those four schools.”
It’s also leveraging the expertise of their peers. Working across borders with students from the other schools, Americas MBA students benefit from their peers’ insights and experiences—something that will be invaluable in their future careers.
From left, Mark Mathiasen, Luciano Greggio, Beth Bernier, AMBA’13, Paulina Villasana and Agustin Eugenio Caballero Ortiz Rubio at Nashville’s Entrepreneur Center during their 10-day residency.
Have Americas MBA, will travel
A dozen students graduated in 2013, comparable to those who are expected to earn their degrees in 2014. Bennett believes the ideal student is one who is “looking for an expat assignment, looking to expand ability to communicate across cultures, who has always had an interest in different ways of thinking.”
Students came from top companies and organizations, including American Express, Bridgestone Americas, BMW, Citi, Embraer, Johnson & Johnson, Mars Petcare, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Tennessee Valley Authority and Unilever.
Jon Haworth, AMBA’13, was vice president, plant operations and innovation at Des-Case. His company, which manufactures contamination control products for industrial lubricants, does about a third of its business outside the United States. That led Haworth to consider gaining international experience. He consulted with Des-Case President and CEO Brian Gleason, who earned his Vanderbilt Executive MBA in 1997.
“I remember asking for his opinion on which one of the programs I should pursue and him saying I should do the Americas program,” Haworth says. “I want to do more in emerging markets. That program was perfect for that. The other side is that I’ve lived in South America and am fluent in Portuguese.”
Across time zones and cultures
Des-Case also was used as a yearlong Americas MBA capstone strategy project, which the students must complete while working with counterparts at the three other universities.
“We’ve already seen nice growth in Latin America,” Des-Case’s Gleason says. “As well as we’ve done there, we all recognized there was a tremendous upside that we’ve not come close to tapping. Jon and his group did a nice job in shaping an argument for what we ought to be doing and creating a framework by which we’ll make future decisions in other markets globally. We’ll make the same kinds of decisions for Europe and for Asia at some point.”
“They have to figure out how to work virtually…to get through the cultural and language barriers and to figure out how to get it done. ”—Juli Bennett, executive director, Executive MBA programs
The cross-cultural experience of the project teams provides excellent preparation for the future.
“They have to figure out how to work virtually, through different time zones, to get through the cultural and language barriers and to figure out how to get it done even though they’re not at a table and face to face,” Bennett says. “That is the most challenging part of the program, but if you can figure out how to do that, you will be the one targeted as a leader in these organizations.”
Tough and challenging, the Master of Accountancy Valuation program was developed in conjunction with Owen’s five partner accounting firms to fill a real business need. It is the second of two, one-year Master of Accountancy programs developed by the school to serve accounting firms and recent undergraduates. The first MAcc Valuation class graduated in May.
Kevin Moss, global managing director, valuation services for Deloitte, served on the MAcc advisory board. “What I liked about what MAcc was doing was talking to the clients, getting input from the community that they provide people to. A lot of programs do not do that,” Moss says.
Hackenbrack
In recent years, companies have tried to put a value on intangibles like intellectual property, goodwill and incentive-based compensation. Such valuation expertise is driving the need for a program like MAcc Valuation, says Karl Hackenbrack, associate dean and director of accountancy. “This is the nexus of accounting and finance. Valuation practices are in large part these days staffed by people who started their careers in a more traditional finance area and have to learn the accounting.”
The one-year program is intense; students take required coursework, complete a 10-week internship with one of the partner firms—Deloitte, EY, Grant Thornton, KPMG or PricewaterhouseCoopers—and then graduate. Even then they don’t leave Owen; they receive intensive preparation for the Chartered Financial Analyst and Certified Public Accountant exams.
The 13 members of the first graduating class all took the CFA and CPA preparation courses. They take the first of three CFA exams pre-graduation, and then take the next two exams over the next few years. Of the 2013 graduating class, 11 passed the level one CFA exam.
On the four-part CPA exam, the recent graduates scored a 90.2 percent first-time section pass rate—the highest first-time section pass rate of the top 25 graduate MAcc programs in the nation. Hackenbrack is proud to point out that the pass rate for the CFA exam nationwide is 37 percent while the percentage of those who pass the CPA exam on the first try is in the low teens.
The one-year Master of Accountancy Valuation program is intense but teamwork helps. From left, then-students Becca Stone, Allison Buterbaugh and Cory Thompson. All three MAcc Valuation graduates are now employed with partner firms in valuation or assurance.
Aptitude, attitude and bedside manner
“Whenever I recruit, there are three buckets that I look for: aptitude, which is probably going to get you into most one-year graduate programs; attitude: Do you understand what you’re getting into, in terms of Vanderbilt MAcc Valuation, and are you well-informed to what the programs are about? It is an immersion experience and that’s not for everyone,” Hackenbrack says. “The third is what I call bedside manner, client-facing skills. You have to pass all three to get in.”
Those who are accepted into the program, however, are well prepared for a career in valuation. After graduation, most are headed for a large public accounting firm in a junior-level position.
“That’s part of the value proposition from the firms’ perspectives,” Hackenbrack says. “Think of an audit service line. The bottom of the pyramid is junior staff and the top is partners. In valuation, up until about 10 years ago, those services were provided by professionals who were brought in as manager, director or partner. The pyramid is upside down relative to the audit service line. They need the capability to flip it. We’re first movers in helping them fill the junior service ranks so that they can internally identify the talent.”
Kaylen James, BA’12, MAccV’13, spent her 10-week internship with PricewaterhouseCoopers. She’s now a valuation professional in the firm’s Dallas office.
The firms get a head start on that identification through the internship programs, which occur in January and February, typically a firm’s busy season. Deloitte, Moss’ company, hired six.
“They did an outstanding job,” he says of the interns. “They were well trained in technical skills. He’s (Hackenbrack) recruited people with good people skills. If you’re going to succeed outside of school, you need to have more than academic training, you need to be able to work with people.
“When the students came into the program, they integrated well into teams and … had the technical background that we were looking for,” Moss says. “The students were firing on all cylinders when they came through the door. Normally you’ll have to teach students something. They have all the bases covered as opposed to a few of the bases.”
Tough by intention
The internships provide something of a trial by fire. “I want you in the firms when it’s tough,” Hackenbrack says. “If it’s not for you, come back and say, ‘I don’t want to work that hard.’ It’s intentional to have (the internships) in what the firms traditionally view as their busy season because so many companies have the Dec. 31 year-ends.”
Owen’s first-ever MAcc Valuation class poses with Dean Jim Bradford at Commencement in May 2013.
While Hackenbrack says it’s too early to tell what kind of students will be ideal for the MAcc Valuation program, he believes those who receive their bachelor’s degree in economics will be naturals. “They are taking course work and thinking about issues that they honestly care about and enjoy studying. But let’s face it: What jobs are they going to take at graduation? They’re prepared for graduate school.”
Which can prepare them to fill key roles in booming new areas of business like valuation.
Management students in health care tracks at Owen have the advantage of taking courses from professors who not only know their subject but are also adding to best practices and the national policy discussion. Here are just a few examples of faculty researching health care issues, particularly those that focus on improving efficiencies.
How does health care consolidation affect pricing?
With Luke Froeb, the William C. Oehmig Professor of Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, Larry Van Horn is working to quantify and evaluate industry consolidation in health care. Froeb and Van Horn measure how consolidation influences market power and pricing.
A key concern, explains Van Horn, associate professor of management and executive director of health affairs, is whether increasing consolidation results in undue market power for providers or greater efficiencies that lower costs, a question that any merging or consolidating delivery system must face. That concern is of particular interest to the Federal Trade Commission in evaluating market power versus efficiency in health care consolidation.
That concern is of particular interest to the Federal Trade Commission in evaluating market power versus efficiency in health care consolidation.
Van Horn is also collaborating with two Vanderbilt University Medical Center physicians, Dr. Matthew Resnick, assistant professor of urologic surgery, and Dr. David Penson, the Paul V. Hamilton, M.D. and Virginia E. Howd Professor of Urologic Oncology, to investigate how Medicare coverage potentially affects the likelihood that patients receive treatment.
“What we find very clearly is that patients or patients and providers hold off addressing certain medical issues until age 65, when there is a precipitous spike once Medicare is in place,” Van Horn explains. The challenge is to determine how to change incentives so that patients seek care when it is clinically appropriate, he says.
The research team also has studied outcomes among prostate cancer patients treated with surgery versus radiotherapy.
Encouraging compassion reaps benefits
Tim Vogus, associate professor of management, looks at compassion practices and their impact on patient perceptions of their care experience.
“You might think compassion and cost effectiveness would be incompatible. But the two drive in the same direction,” he explains.
Compassionate practices, or care, represent the extent to which a hospital recognizes and rewards compassionate acts by its caregivers—and supports its employees in coping with the stresses and traumas experienced at work. Vogus has found that compassionate care leads to higher quality and more personalized care, which in turn leads to incentive payments from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) value-based purchasing program.
Vogus
“When hospitals implement support for compassion practices, they are actually associated with patient perceptions of higher quality care and a greater likelihood of recommending that hospital to others,” he says. In addition, overall ratings of quality of care improve, and both of those markers are criteria for determining the incentive payments awarded under the CMS program.
Just recognizing people who have gone beyond the call of duty—something that costs hospitals little or no money—significantly improves the ability of the entire organization to offer compassionate care, Vogus has found.
Interacting compassionately among caregivers themselves—by providing forums of support when they have personal issues, lose a patient or need pastoral care—improves overall quality as well, he explains.
“It’s about thinking differently about how we do the work we do in ways that help us deliver higher quality care,” Vogus says. “It’s not costly. It’s just smart management.”
Vogus also has a stream of work, some with Bruce Cooil, the Dean Samuel B. and Evelyn R. Richmond Professor of Management, on “mindful organizing,” or how people best work together to detect and correct emerging errors and unexpected events. A continuous improvement mindset, he says, is linked to a higher performing team. And a higher performing team is more likely to retain higher quality employees, saving money in hiring, training and team integration.
His research, he explains, is all about “shifting the way people think about work and managing work. We want to drive things that grow revenue and reduce cost.”
Reducing inefficiencies improves quality of care
Research spearheaded by Ranga Ramanujam, associate professor of management, looks into the notion that reducing inefficiencies and waste is an important measure of quality that is not necessarily in conflict with the goal of improving patient outcomes.
“The key is to facilitate active, ongoing, real-time involvement of employees on the front lines detecting problems and using their skills to fix problems on the go,” he says.
“Health care is a very complex distributed system that cannot be controlled from the top down. It has to be managed in real time at the point of care. To do more with less, it is important to get your employees more engaged and empowered,” he says. “A lot of my work centers on employee voice and encouraging the voluntary expression of ideas.”
Ramanujam
Several studies have looked at the conditions that encourage nurses to speak up. Ramanujam has found that much of it has to do with the behaviors and managerial qualities of the nurse manager.
The implementation of many efficiency-enhancing practices, he discovered, depends on effective coordination between and across various professional groups—nurses, physicians, pharmacists and other health care workers.
Ramanujam is currently examining hospitals that consistently deliver quality care even while keeping costs and inefficiencies low. He says the U.S. system can potentially learn from the experience of hospitals in other countries, such as the Aravind Eye System in India that performs high-quality cataract surgeries at a fraction of the cost in the West.
Lessons from other industries improve efficiencies
After years spent studying learning curves in organizations, particularly the airline industry, Michael A. Lapré, the E. Bronson Ingram Research Professor of Operations Management, turned his attention to health care.
Lapré’s recent research focus has been on improving efficiencies among surgical teams in operating rooms—the most expensive unit in a hospital—as an important potential cost-saving area for hospitals.
Specifically, he has looked into whether individual, team and organizational experience improved efficiencies. The research showed that when an experienced surgical team works together regularly and effectively, it is able to perform surgery faster when more cases were on the schedule.
IT can impact quality of care
Eric Johnson, the Ralph Owen Dean and Bruce D. Henderson Professor of Strategy, is newest among the active health care researchers at Owen. He is part of a recently announced multiuniversity National Science Foundation grant focused on trustworthy information systems for health and wellness.
The work springs from the large financial incentives provided by the Affordable Care Act for hospitals to adopt electronic medical records. The project’s multidisciplinary team has studied 3,500 hospitals making IT investment decisions and found that hospitals meeting the government’s requirements for the use of electronic medical data and related technology (reaching what is defined by the government as “stage one meaningful use”) do have measurably better results. Even so, those usually follow a predictably difficult first year of implementation, he says.
He says that while it’s difficult to alleviate all agendas or bias, Owen can function as a more impartial observer of the health care landscape.
“Since we’re not in the health care business, we’re able to have these conversations about these vexing issues that health care faces without having any perceived agenda or goals,” he says.
Steve Buchanan may be the only Owen graduate responsible for saving music history twice.
As general manager of the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville, revered as the Mother Church of Country Music, Buchanan oversaw the building’s million dollar renovation and reinstatement as one of the world’s premiere music venues.
Flood waters at the Opry stage door, May 3, 2010
On May 2, 2010, the momentous flood that destroyed parts of Nashville also devastated the Grand Ole Opry House at Opryland in Donelson, the home to the Grand Ole Opry since the 1970s. In the hours when floodwaters entered the building and rose, Buchanan and a team of 10-15 workers courage-ously stayed in the flood zone to protect and preserve instruments, historic recordings and other artifacts by moving them to safety. Even so, not everything could be saved.
When the rain stopped, the ground floor of the 4,400-seat Opry house was covered with muddy water up to its back four rows. Forty-six inches of water covered the stage. Almost everything would need to be replaced: seats, retail store, lobby, dressing rooms, green room, control booth, stage, stage curtains and rigging, along with the mechanical and power systems.
Buchanan once again found himself charged with restoring another cherished building. “It breaks your heart, but it’s our responsibility to be sure that that building comes back to life, and it will,” Buchanan told USA Today.
In addition to overseeing the physical renovation of the building, Buchanan immediately hired restorers, conservators and luthiers (specialists in string instruments) to care for the historic artifacts, photos, tapes, costumes and instruments impacted by flood damage.
“After the flood waters receded, Steve led the recovery of the property—literally and figuratively,” noted Dave Kloeppel, BS’91, MBA’96, former president and COO of Gaylord Entertainment Company. “Importantly, Steve insisted the Opry never miss a show—and it didn’t. Using venues all over Nashville, the Opry never missed a beat.”
Steve Buchanan on set of Nashville series. (John Russell/Vanderbilt University)
Five short months later, Buchanan and the cast of the Grand Ole Opry stood on a new stage in a renovated Opry House and welcomed audiences back with a celebration dubbed “Country Comes Home.” Backstage, performers marveled over 17 dressing rooms, facilities, instrument lockers and a comfortable, cheery green room that featured a new artifact—a marker showing how high the waters reached in the historic flood.
In recognition of his resilience, courage and dedication to excellence, Owen honored Buchanan with the school’s inaugural Distinguished Service Award at Owen’s annual alumni dinner in 2012.
It’s a classic case of supply and demand, with Vanderbilt meeting the demand for sharp human resources professionals with a supply of MBAs trained in human resource. The crunch is driven equally by changes in the corporate world and the reputation of Owen’s Human and Organizational Performance program.
The HOP concentration is among the highest ranked programs at Vanderbilt’s Owen School. Financial Times, for instance, named it No. 4 in specialty MBA programs in the U.S., and No. 7 globally.
That reputation creates competition to land Owen grads for the working world.
“Employers want to get here before anyone else and skim off the cream of the crop, find those qualified students and lock them up for internships,” says Read McNamara, executive director of the school’s Career Management Center. “They feel if they can lock them up for an internship, they have a pretty good chance of having that particular student convert the internship to a full-time offer and a good chance of the student accepting that offer. Companies will push us as hard as they possibly can to get to campus as soon in the school year as they can.”
Case in point: By January 2013, every second-year HOP student had accepted a full-time position. About 60 percent of them came back from their summer internships in the fall with offers for jobs. Vanderbilt’s rate for all MBAs is 40 percent receiving offers after summer internships.
HOP has virtually caught up with other MBAs in salaries, too; McNamara says that the average starting salary for a Vanderbilt MBA grad with a HOP concentration is about $90,000, just shy of the $92,000 average for all MBAs. He expects HOP to be on par with other MBAs by 2015.
“It’s not just the salary. The number of offers per HOP person and the credentials of the people applying to Owen with the stated goal of HOP are certainly on the rise,” McNamara says. “We’re delighted with that and if we keep doing the things we’re doing, there’s no limit to what we can do.”
And no limit to the need, either. Changes in corporate America have shifted views of the workforce. Technological improvements that handle typical HR functions have created opportunities for HR professionals to claim a seat at the table of the upper echelon of company management.
Barry Salzberg, CEO of Deloitte Touche Tahmatsu Limited
“The HR function has been elevated,” says Barry Salzberg, chief executive officer of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and a former member of the Owen Graduate School of Management Board of Visitors. “Ten to 15 years ago, human resource directors in large organizations reported to COOs or CFOs; today chief talent/HR officers report directly to CEOs, reflecting the increasing importance of talent. While leading a winning organization looks radically different today versus five years ago, business still relies on people to succeed.”
New demands on HR professionals include using predictive analytics to identify high performers early in their careers or to identify which employees may be likely to leave, Salzberg says. “This model allows for overall workforce planning, which is just as critical to a business’ bottom line as financial planning. Human resources has become a broad and strategic driver in business. This has not only helped us identify and cultivate careers of high-performers, but shifted our development approach from reactive to proactive.”
Reflecting Current Business Needs
Whether a company is growing rapidly, winding down a segment of its business or trying to do more with less to remain competitive, people issues are at the forefront and HR professionals are finding sometimes that seat at the table means at the head.
When Virginia “Ginger” Barnes, EMBA’91, began her career as a contracts administrator at Boeing, she recalls that “empowerment and encouragement thoughts existed only in small pockets and they certainly weren’t popular.” In her first program management job of overseeing early phases of Boeing’s involvement in the International Space Station, she began to understand the importance of people management as she worked closely with Russian counterparts. “That was a real people kind of epiphany,” she says. “We didn’t look alike, but we had the same values.”
Barnes
As CEO of United Space Alliance (USA), Barnes has had the unenviable task of retiring NASA’s space shuttle program. At the peak, USA—an alliance between Boeing and Lockheed Martin—employed 10,500. That number now stands at less than 2,000.
“What I’m most proud of is that we’ve done that with an intense focus on taking care of our people,” Barnes says. “Before I got here, USA benchmarked other companies that had shut down big programs. We didn’t find good examples of people who did it well. We went out to the workforce and said, ‘What do you need from us?’ I have an 11-by-17 spreadsheet of all the initiatives that we have implemented, and I have to say, we have been wildly successful. People come back and thank us for the ways that we helped.”
In 2011, when the shuttle flew its final mission, USA garnered five perfect performance scores from NASA; it marked the first time that USA had received even one perfect score. “I’ve been criticized by some for focusing more on people than I did on profits,” Barnes says. “But at the time that I did, we received the 100 percent award. As hard as this job is, and as unglamorous as it is, it’s the most rewarding experience of my career. Part of that has to do with the people I’m doing it with. We’ve made deliberate decisions about the people that we kept on board to finalize the closeout. In every case, each of those employees has come to me and said, ‘I will take on more, and do whatever you need me to do.’”
Crises, especially over the last five years, have certainly influenced the importance of staffing in companies, whether navigating external challenges or internal issues. “Those kinds of reactive developments have made companies, at the board level, look at the alignment of their own human capital, the importance of human capital and the importance of succession,” McNamara says. “And they’ve reached the conclusion that human resources is no longer a compliance function, but an absolutely essential element in the quiver of a company in terms of the elements it has available to ensure its own success. Visionary companies that recognize the importance of human capital and human capital deployment and planning are way ahead of the curve.”
“Attracting and retaining game-changing talent is at the top of the CEO agenda, as companies and clients expand exponentially in key markets—particularly in Asia and the Middle East.”
—Barry Salzberg
Those visionary companies are using their human relations personnel for entirely new functions. “Attracting and retaining game-changing talent is at the top of the CEO agenda, as companies and clients expand exponentially in key markets—particularly in Asia and the Middle East,” Deloitte’s Salzberg says. “In our global knowledge economy, the right employees make or break organizations, and we’re in the midst of a talent paradox: While layoffs continue and unemployment is high, many jobs still go unfilled because of skill shortages.
“For instance, in the United States alone, 3.6 million jobs were unfilled as of December 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even though the unemployment rate was at 7.8 percent,” Salzberg says. “Globalization and the proliferation of new technologies have forced companies to radically reconsider traditional talent and organizational models to distributed, crowd-sourced models.”
A Need to Understand
As HR gains visibility in upper management, it’s equally important that HR professionals know and understand all facets of business just like their peers with MBAs.
King
Erika Bogar King, MBA’99, began her career as a recruiter before moving into more of an HR generalist role, where she found herself recruiting those with graduate degrees to fill banking positions. “I hadn’t really thought of it before, but one turned to me and said, ‘So when are you going (to graduate school)?’ I looked at Owen because the professionals that I knew came from there were more accessible, more balanced in their approach,” says King, now talent director for Deloitte Consulting. “I liked the cultural sense that I was getting from the talent as well as the quality. I knew it fit would me.”
She also was attracted to the business background that embodied the HOP concentration. “I knew I wanted to stay in professional services and Owen’s HOP program was not from a psychology or people basis, but from a business basis first with the people element,” she says.
Nancy Abbott, EMBA’91, wanted to change fields and move out of the IT function at her company, GE. Her undergraduate degree in behavioral science made human resources the logical choice. “I wanted to immerse myself in areas I hadn’t studied in undergrad. I needed to know how to read a balance sheet, get better grounded in economics and learn the language of business,” she says. “That was my goal in choosing Owen. In the job that I had, I realized I didn’t truly understand finance, business metrics and key drivers. I wanted to build my skills to be a credible business partner. We continue to have a strong relationship with Owen and recruit here every year because of the talented, business-focused HOP graduates.”
“I think I’ve been lucky to be in a company where it’s assumed that HR has a seat at the table,” says Abbott, who leads organization and talent development for GE Capital. “Although it’s expected that you have a seat, you have to understand how the business works and contribute broadly to the business’s success, or you’ll lose that seat.”
When Abbott worked on an acquisition, one of the biggest learning curves was helping the new employees to understand the role of HR. “They viewed HR as very tactical, more about benefits and payroll transactions,” she says. “They had no vision of the value we could add, such as attracting, growing and developing terrific talent.”
Abbott
Abbott sees traditional human resource functions such as payroll and benefits as activities many companies are outsourcing to specialists or centralized centers of excellence. “That’s an evolution that has allowed HR people at GE to focus on the most critical and strategic needs of the business,” she says.
In her role, Abbott must have a clear understanding of the company’s worldwide business goals. “Without really knowing the needs of a particular business unit, and its plans for the future, I can’t help to identify the best possible talent to help it reach its goals. In my role, I’m one of the few people in GE Capital who looks across the top performers in all our businesses to see where in the world they might be matched with a great new opportunity,” she says.
Success Secrets
In business, timing is everything and Vanderbilt has a strategic advantage: It’s growing its HOP concentration at a time when other business schools have eliminated programs. “A number of premier programs either de-emphasized or dropped human resources,” McNamara says. “I think they’d love to have that one back and do it again.”
McNamara
Vanderbilt has a strategic advantage: It’s growing its HOP concentration at a time when other business schools have eliminated programs.
While others may have stepped out of the HOP studies, Vanderbilt has stepped up. McNamara sees the possibility of doubling the number of students specializing in HOP to as much as 15 to 20 percent of its MBA class. The secret to the success? “No. 1 is faculty,” McNamara says. “If you look at the accomplishments of our management department faculty, and specifically people who teach HOP, these are folks who have gained a reputation inside the classroom and out, in terms of research and recognition. The kind of people who come to study HOP do their homework and understand the value of the faculty.”
McNamara also cites Owen’s forward-looking curriculum and association with Peabody College of education and human development, which is widely recognized for its organizational performance programs. “There’s a spillover effect of the wonderful reputation of Peabody on Owen,” he says. “We’re recognized as having two of the premier organizational programs. Finally, it’s the self-perpetuating excellence in that our HOP people go on to great careers in corporate or consulting, and they’re people who come back and get involved. The alumni involvement will not permit this great program to slip.”
Transforming the Future
Human capital has risen in importance along with other corporate functions, but it is not without unique challenges.
“Because people associate HR with the touchy-feely things, it does not get the respect that finance does,” King says. “I do think there are probably HR organizations that still are the people who organize the company picnic and other events. It’s hard to pull away and tell your clients that you’re not going to do this anymore.”
At Amgen, the transactional aspects of HR have been moved back to the staff level, and human resources has shifted to coaching and advising. Centers of excellence handle recruiting and scheduling job interviews, says Joe Parise, MBA’10, Amgen human resources manager. “Having a business background helps you speak the client’s language much faster. Transactional work is not what our clients need,” he says. “Clients come to me for decisions on what they want to do. My job is really to hold a mirror up to them, to explore unintended consequences, to be a sounding board.”
Parise
And to be a sounding board requires a strong understanding of the issues, the kind of understanding gained through an MBA.
“It’s doubly important here at Deloitte,” King says. “My clients have the degree. My clients are advisers to their clients. They expect that I have the ability to manage change, to be able to craft a vision, to understand project management and how we extract value from our practitioners.”
When all the elements come together, the role that HR professionals play in their corporations can—and will continue to—be a formula for success. “When an organization becomes known for cultivating and developing talent, the market brand is strengthened,” Salzberg says. “This ultimately increases their ability to attract and retain high performers. When a company attracts top talent, it can quickly fill new and open positions without missing a beat. Keeping unfilled positions to a minimum can lead to increased productivity and profitability, greater innovation and faster time to market.”
Just because you’re a business professor doesn’t mean you have to be all business, all the time, and Owen faculty are no exception. Among them are a champion trick water-skier, charcutier, screenwriter, barkeep (and builder) and owner of a multimillion-dollar company. They shine in the classroom—why not out of it? Meet five professors who are doing just that.
Going Green
Fifteen years ago, Bob Whaley and his wife, Sondra, MBA’82, visited Ireland and fell in love with the people, food, countryside and culture. Over the years, they have returned numerous times to visit, but going back just wasn’t enough. So they decided to bring a bit of Ireland to Tennessee.
“When you go into the Irish pubs, the people are so friendly and charming—they talk to you like they’ve known you forever,” says Whaley, the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Finance and professor of management. “We wanted to create that kind of atmosphere for ourselves and our friends, and so we did.”
Whaley, who is also co-director of the Financial Markets Research Center, used his carpentry experience and the help of his college-age son to transform his home’s entire lower level, including the garage, into a 1,500- square-foot Irish pub dubbed Whaley Tavern. Just like the ones in the Emerald Isle, this watering hole has Irish brews like Guinness and Smithwick’s on tap, game tables and dartboards to keep patrons occupied, and Irish flags adorning dark wood paneled walls.
The Whaleys entertain year around, but they go all out on St. Patrick’s Day. Around 100 or so fellow Hibernophiles crowd the place to feast on Guinness stew and shepherd pie, shoot pool and sing shanties over a pint (or two). While he won’t name-drop, Whaley says more than a few popular singer-songwriters have been known to stop by and perform (signed guitars on the walls are proof).
With all this talk of Ireland, one has to wonder if Whaley has some Irish blood in his veins.
“I did some searching and I think my parents’ lineage is English, not Irish,” he says. “I found a Jerusalem Whaley—I’m not sure I’m a descendent, but you never know. I may have to go over there and do some digging.”
Different Strokes
Jennifer Escalas isn’t an enthusiastic swimmer, but that hasn’t stopped the associate professor of marketing from launching and running what has become a $3 million-a-year swimwear company.
She is married to swimmer Rafael Escalas, who competed in the 1980 and 1984 Olympic games for his home country of Spain. The two met during their undergraduate years at University of California, Los Angeles, where she was studying Spanish and he was an engineering major competing on the university swim team.
“When we started dating, his swim schedule was just something I put up with,” Escalas says. “I didn’t realize how much dedication it took.”
After they married and moved to North Carolina and she entered the Ph.D. program at Duke University, they decided it was time to start their own company. He quit his engineering job and together they launched Agon Sport, a competitive swimwear company. He set up the factory in Spain and she took on the marketing and the books.
“We didn’t have a stash of money,” she says. “We maxed out credit cards and took out a second mortgage to get the business off the ground.”
The gamble paid off. In 2012, they created custom swimsuits for more than 1,800 swim teams—including their 16-year-old daughter Elena’s high school team. “Nike doesn’t create custom suits, so we fill a really important niche,” she says.
In the classroom, Escalas often uses examples of challenges encountered in her business and that has given her credibility with her students, she says.
“I don’t just write articles about how to run a successful, profitable business, I am actually doing that,” she says. “I think my students are far more impressed with that than my Ph.D.”
Writing the past
By day, her world is black and white—debits and credits, columns in a spreadsheet, numbers in a row. But by night Debra Jeter’s world is sepia-toned and dreamlike, as she weaves words into short stories, screenplays and novels that draw on her life as a child in rural Kentucky.
“I’m happier when I’m writing,” says the associate professor of accounting. “I’m more productive if I’m preparing for class or interacting with my students if I’ve got a project going. It makes my whole day go better.”
A recent project brought her talents to the national stage. The prestigious Sundance Film Festival chose Jess + Moss, an art-house film she helped pen and executive produce with her son Clay, as an official selection. It’s a bittersweet coming-of-age story about two cousins spending the summer at their grandmother’s house for the last time.
“We shot Jess + Moss in a very short time period at my grandmother’s abandoned farmhouse in Lynn Grove, Ky.,” Jeter says. “It was shot on aged film stock to give it that grainy quality—grainy the way my memories are of spending all my summers there.”
The film was well received by critics, which she attributes to Clay, a former child actor, who directed.
“It was unbelievable for us at Sundance, seeing people lined up to see our film—for the first time it was real,” Jeter says.
Jeter juggles numerous writing projects, including a script for a TV pilot about a real estate office in a small Southern town that is based on the lives of her father and sister.
“Their stories could fill several books,” she says. “I just don’t think I’ll ever run out of stories to tell.”
The Art of the Meal
Craig Lewis has a secret identity. Students and fellow Owen faculty know him as the Madison S. Wigginton Chair of Management and a finance professor. His colleagues at the Security Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C., know him as the SEC’s chief economist. And his family knows him as husband and father. But many don’t know he is also a charcutier—a curer of meats—a process he has mastered to create his own private-label sausages, pancetta, lardo, salami and coppa.
It all started after a particularly delicious meal at Nashville’s F. Scott’s restaurant in 2005.
“They served a nice duck prosciutto and I thought it was interesting,” he says. “I am an amateur chef, and I thought, ‘I can do this.’ Then I found this book called Charcuterie, by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, and it just went from there.”
To dry cure meat, he starts with a piece of farm-fresh pork, which he rubs with a special combination of curing salts over a period of weeks. Then the meat is wrapped in cheesecloth and hung to dry in a cool, humidity-controlled curing chamber for several months.
“Our house in Nashville doesn’t have a basement, so at one point I bought a large dorm fridge, and rigged it up with a thermostat like microbrewers use,” he says. “I also wanted to be able to monitor it during the day so I put it in my office at Owen.”
There is no curing chamber in his office at the SEC, but Lewis admits to the occasional pork shoulder hanging in his coat closet in his D.C. home. When he returns to Nashville after his two-year appointment and leave, he looks forward to sharing his gastronomic skills with his colleagues and students once again.
“I enjoy getting my smaller classes together at the end of the semester for a nice meal,” he says. “Culinary experiences are such a wonderful way to bring people together.”
A Need for Speed
Growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, Miguel Palacios never set out to be a competitive water-skier. But Columbia’s warm, year-round climate makes water activities popular. One summer, 7-year-old Miguel went with his father to a nearby sports club and signed up for a water-skiing lesson. Before long, he was skimming across the water at electrifying speeds and performing gravity-defying jumps, spins and flips.
“It is the most awesome feeling in the world—and it’s only a little bit dangerous,” says the assistant professor of finance with a grin, later explaining that it raises adrenaline without danger.
Palacios quickly rose in the sport and earned a spot on Colombia’s national water-skiing team. He continued to ski when he could while earning three degrees—a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia; an MBA from the Darden Business School at University of Virginia; and a master’s in economics and Ph.D. in finance from the University of California, Berkeley.
Competitive water-skiing requires very specific man-made lakes on which to perform and practice, so it’s not convenient to train just anywhere. But even with a full course load at UC Berkeley, he managed to pull off a third-place ranking in the West Coast men’s division for trick skiing.
“I like speed,” admits Palacios, who is also an instrument-rated pilot. “It’s so different from what I try to achieve in my academic life, which takes a lot of focus and patience. When I ski, I can let go of everything that’s on my mind.”
Palacios, who came to Owen in 2009, says he doesn’t get out on the water as often as he would like. But when he does, it’s at a competition-ready lake in nearby Manchester, Tenn.
“For me it’s just pure fun,” he says, “but water-skiing is also a good lesson for life. When you try, you may fall, but if you want to learn, you have to get back up and try again.”
After nine years as dean of the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, Jim Bradford is stepping down from his position at the end of the academic year in June. Jim recently discussed some of the highlights of his time as dean with
Vanderbilt Business magazine. He also laid out some of the broad areas he thinks will shape Owen in its next era of leadership. Here’s Jim in his own words.
On Passages
When we were writing the announcement that I’d be stepping down, it felt at times like crafting my own obituary. What do you say about a 40-year career in both the private sector and academia in just a couple of paragraphs? It reminded me of the book Tuesdays with Morrie.
What’s been great fun and interesting is visiting with alumni. My message to them is simply that this is an incredible school worthy of their time, energy and support. And in that process, I’ve greatly enjoyed hearing how Owen has influenced people’s dreams and how appreciative they are of the education they received here.
Of course, anytime there’s change you’ll find pockets of worry. But I tell people this is a team sport, that whatever course a new dean charts, the intimate, collaborative culture of Owen will carry the school forward. That’s one of the most valuable lessons the alumni taught me when I started my tenure: Make whatever changes are necessary to help the school thrive, but don’t lose the culture.
On Strategy
I believe the school—or any organization—has to be guided by two things. First, it needs a mission or a vision that works for it. What are we about? What are we doing? Second, there needs to be a sustainable business model that allows for smooth functioning. If those two priorities get out of whack, it doesn’t matter how great the mission is if you can’t make it work financially. Likewise, if you are rudderless and just go where the wind blows, you might get through in good times, but if you forget who you are and what you’re doing, you won’t be able to make it through in hard times.
For me personally, it has been gratifying to see the Leadership Development Program reach the levels it has. It’s sustainable and it’s something that we’re now being noted for by incoming students, employers and peer schools. We’ve also been fortunate that—starting with the Accelerator program in 2004, the Health Care MBA and MS Finance degree in 2005, then adding a Master of Accountancy, Master of Management in Health Care and the Americas MBA—all these new programs continue to thrive. They may need to morph over time to accommodate what the global economy demands. But I feel like we have met an obligation to build programs that business wants.
On Priorities for the Last 100 Days
The last 100 days are a wonderful time to look back at what has been accomplished and what’s still left to do. When I began thinking about this notion of the last 100 days, I remembered when I sent my own kids off to college. As a parent, you want to impart every article of wisdom that you can. Of course, you can’t do that in the last hour—the morals and values you instill have to begin at a very young age.
So while I certainly can’t plot a strategy for Dean Johnson, I want to do whatever I can to leave Owen in the best condition I possibly can. Right now that means communicating just how strong this school is. You can see that in the quality of our faculty, our students, and our staff. The rankings have all validated our strengths as well.
Bradford (center) joined students for the last Thursday Social at Owen in April. He also presented the 100% Owen Clash of the Class Trophy to the Class of 2014.
Second, I feel confident that as some optimism comes back into the economy—and we at least know that we’ll see some interest rate stability—our base of giving will continue to grow. It’s important to keep raising money for scholarships as a way to help recruit the best students possible.
I also have an eye on the faculty recruiting process. We have three major faculty members taking emeritus status this year—Germain Böer, Dick Daft and Hans Stoll—and I want to ensure that we are supporting and identifying the next generation of stars.
On Areas for Growth
The levers are there to ensure the continuing quality and vigor of the faculty. Along with that, you want to have the resources and facilities to attract the best students and stay plugged in to the employment market. Those types of levers can be pulled to guarantee our continued status as a highly ranked, intellectually robust school.
And when I talk about facilities, I don’t just mean a new building or additional classrooms. I also mean technology. What is Owen’s role in the world of MOOCs (massive open online courses)? Vanderbilt University and Owen have already taken a lead in this. So while technology may ultimately help lower the cost of providing an education, we want to make sure we protect the quality of what we offer. How, for example, do you stay in control of a classroom with 40,000 students? The school will need to understand those hurdles and be able to jump over them.
I think you’ll also see the nature of global education change. We’ve already come down that path somewhat with the Americas MBA, where students are having more immersive experiences and working with teams across borders, for example.
In addition to being dean of the Vanderbilt Owen School of Management, Jim Bradford is the Ralph Owen Professor of Management. He plans to take a yearlong sabbatical before returning to Owen, where he will once again teach strategy.
— Ryan Underwood
One of the integral parts of the Executive MBA program is a weeklong group immersion experience outside the United States. These international residencies, which take place during the spring of the students’ second year, include in-depth corporate visits that help explain the complexities of doing business in the global marketplace. This past April the Executive MBA Class of 2012 traveled to China, where they toured Beijing, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Macau. What follows is a collection of photos and observations that capture their experience.
A section of the Great Wall near Beijing
April 29: Beijing
Although the buildings were beautiful, what struck me most on this part of the visit were the Chinese people. The younger people clamored to have their pictures taken with us. Parents would bring their small children to say hello, and we were obvious objects of attention. ~Sherie Edwards
The Great Wall
April 30: Beijing
Today marked the first day of visits to businesses—the true reason for the trip. I joined the health care group since my career for the past 19 years has been in risk management and medical malpractice. Our first stop was Peking Union Medical College Hospital. It was well-equipped, clean and similar to hospitals in the U.S. ~Sherie Edwards
Peking Union Medical College HospitalApple StoreStreet foodHong Kong skyline
May 1: Hong Kong
Once we landed in Hong Kong, it quickly became apparent that there was an entirely different mentality here than in mainland China. Buildings towered into the clouds, and the influences of British rule were starkly felt. We took a tram up a near 45-degree slope to the peak of the island, where hot and humid jungle trails were interspersed with shops and eateries. ~Brett Wade
Victoria Peak
May 2: Hong Kong
We started our first full day of business tours in Hong Kong with a visit to the American Chamber of Commerce. We were presented information on business challenges facing both Hong Kong and the mainland. It was interesting to learn how high the cost of living is in Hong Kong and the amount of lavish wealth there is in turn. ~Brett Wade
View from JPMorgan officeVictoria HarbourAmerican Chamber of CommerceChina International Marine Container headquartersHuawei headquarters
May 3: Shenzhen
Huawei is developing cutting-edge communications products to integrate into all aspects of a person’s life. It was fascinating to see the products that will be launched in the next year. It was also unnerving to realize the potential applications of such technology and the implications these applications could have on individual privacy. ~Sherie Edwards
May 4: Macau
With more than six times the gaming revenues of Las Vegas, the casinos of Macau are immense, impressive structures. The Venetian is no different. We were given time to explore its casino, shops and restaurants before a quick Q & A and a behind-the-scenes tour of the kitchen, the built-in stadium and an impressive 6,000-square-foot “high roller” suite. ~Brett Wade
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and economics in 2011, Tim Maloney decided to stay at Vanderbilt for one more year. Having a master’s in finance, he believed, would be an important differentiator in a difficult job market.
Turns out he was right.
“It’s definitely a really tough job market, but the master’s helped me get the job I wanted,” he says. This past summer Maloney, BS’11, MSF’12, began working at Morgan Stanley as an Analyst. His focus is largely in fixed income, foreign exchange and emerging markets.
Preparing students to enter a variety of finance jobs is at the core of the yearlong Vanderbilt MS Finance program—a goal made all the more important after the financial sector was hit particularly hard with job losses during the recession.
“What we aim to do is give students a broad-based skill set so that they can go into almost any area—banking, investments, corporate finance—and start tackling real problems right away,” says Kate Barraclough, Senior Lecturer of Finance and Faculty Director, MS Finance. “We want them to be able to deal with any type of problem that comes up and deal with it quickly and effectively. They may be starting at entry level, but they should be star performers.”
MS Finance versus MBA
For Maloney, the MS Finance program was not merely a stepping stone to an MBA. “In my field, sales and trading, it may not help to have an MBA,” he says. “Even if I do eventually become a manager, I don’t think I’ll pursue an MBA.”
He’s not alone. Students in the MS Finance program are “seeing it as a terminal degree and they’re not coming back for an MBA,” Barraclough says. “In the six years of the program, there have only been a handful who have come back.”
When compared to MS Finance students, those on the MBA track typically have a bit more job experience, with most pursuing the degree about five years into their careers. MS Finance students, on the other hand, tend to come with fewer than two years’ experience. “There is the benefit with the MS Finance that students don’t have to take two years off to go to business school and then come back to the job market,” Barraclough says.
While the comparisons to the MBA program may be obvious, there’s no sibling rivalry between the two. Students in both programs take classes together, and the MBA students often mentor those in MS Finance. In fact, the MBA program was somewhat responsible for MS Finance being developed in the first place.
“One of the benefits of going to a school like Vanderbilt is that the alumni are so great. Staying connected and keeping the program successful is an important way to give back, but I’m doing it because I think it adds value to my degree.”
—Zach Eskelson
“Having a smaller MBA program allowed us to expand our offerings through a portfolio of one-year master’s programs, including the MS Finance,” Barraclough says.
Besides filling an important niche among specialized postgraduate programs, a one-year degree in finance makes sense because Owen is well-stocked with professors who are among the world’s leading experts in the field. The close alignment with the MBA program, however, causes some confusion over which degree a student should pursue.
One rule of thumb for deciding is the student’s career goal: “If someone comes to us with a few years of work experience wanting a less specific finance education or a job in consulting, we’ll typically suggest the MBA path,” Barraclough says. “Do they want a more generalist business education so that they can move into a higher position, or a targeted master’s and an entry-level position? That’s usually the determining factor.”
The MS Finance program also can be useful in switching career focus. Zach Eskelson, MSF’07, Assistant Vice President at Redwood Trust near San Francisco, had worked in account management but found that he wanted a more quantitative finance role. “I started looking at job opportunities and educational options and decided, based on what I wanted to do and my experience, that MS Finance was a better fit for me,” he says.
Master’s degrees in finance are growing in popularity at colleges and universities throughout the country. “It seems like every week we’ve got a new competitor,” Barraclough says. Yet Vanderbilt made Eskelson’s list even though he graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. He had visited Nashville several times before, and all it took was an official visit to campus to help him make up his mind.
“My decision was made,” he says. “The program is part of the business school. I wasn’t attracted to programs where they were part of the math or engineering schools. The fact that some of the classes were MBA classes—that attracted me. I’d be getting that exposure. There were only a few schools that had that.”
Access to the Very Best
Most students who enroll in the MS Finance program have received their undergraduate degrees elsewhere. In fact, only five of the 41 in last year’s class had attended Vanderbilt for their undergraduate studies.
“Our students tend to come from all over,” Barraclough says. “Students are attracted to the Vanderbilt brand and the strength of our alumni network.”
Kate Barraclough, Faculty Director of MS Finance, has helped the program fill a niche among specialized degrees offered at Owen.
In addition to Vanderbilt’s overall reputation, it helps that students have access to professors who have authored landmark studies on virtually every aspect of finance. For example, the faculty includes Bob Whaley, the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Management in Finance and Co-director of the Financial Markets Research Center. Among his many industry innovations is the development of the Market Volatility Index (VIX) for the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
“The classroom was generally a really interactive environment,” says Tony Cox, MSF’09. “It was really challenging, so we had to have a lot of interactions outside normal class hours or just talking to faculty in their offices. That kind of interaction was helpful. Being able to pick their brains whenever I wanted was definitely a great part of the experience. Bob Whaley’s class was one that I wanted to take just because he was teaching it. Having the opportunity to be around those people every day made Vanderbilt stand out.”
For Cox, a Financial Analyst with Goldman Sachs, another valuable benefit of a Vanderbilt education is access to the alumni network. “I know I wouldn’t be at Goldman without it,” he says. A graduate of the University of Kentucky, Cox connected with a fellow Kentucky alumnus who had received a master’s from Vanderbilt. Though the two had both schools in common, it was the Vanderbilt alumni network that connected them. “That’s how I was introduced to him and to Goldman and the office here in Atlanta,” he says. “Without that, I don’t think I ever would have had the opportunity to get the job here.”
“The program is a really short runway. Students can come out of undergrad pretty green, and in a short time they have to become accustomed to grad school and be ready to go into the job market.”
—Kate Barraclough
Cox represents his class as an Owen Alumni Council representative to ensure that the network remains helpful for those who follow. “Coming in, one of the things that I heard about Vanderbilt was the alumni network was really strong, and not just that they had a lot of alumni at great places, but there was a huge sense of community and people willing to return your calls,” he says. “The alumni network was a big drawing point for me, and I think it will be a big selling point going forward. If someone’s looking at any number of great schools, being able to show that you have an alumni network that’s willing to help you out, that’s something that you can use to compete against anyone. That’s the best resource you can have. It helps to keep the school strong and helps the school recruit.”
Eskelson, an Alumni Council representative for the Class of 2007, agrees. “One of the benefits of going to a school like Vanderbilt is that the alumni are so great,” he says. “Staying connected and keeping the program successful is an important way to give back, but I’m doing it because I think it adds value to my degree.”
Pursuing a master’s degree in what amounts to nine months creates an intensity, with every minute made to matter. It also forges deep relationships that carry on for years after graduation. “At University of Kentucky, it was easy to go through and not make a lot of connections,” Cox says. “Part of it was that you went from semester to semester and may never have had another class with someone. At Owen we had classes with the same people all the time. You really had to rely on your fellow classmates to make it through.”
Exposure to MBA students also makes a big difference, both inside the classroom and in extracurricular activities like the Owen Finance Club, which offers programming specifically for MS Finance students. Since many of the MBA students have had several years of work experience, their insight as mentors and career coaches is particularly valuable.
“Coming out of an undergraduate program and into a master’s is a different teaching environment,” Barraclough says. “Being in a classroom with a group of people who have, on average, five years under their belts is a wonderful experience for MS Finance students. They get a different style of learning, and they’re exposed to people with some background in their areas of interest.”
Ready for the Working World
Students in the MS Finance program usually fall into two categories: economics and finance undergraduates who want to differentiate themselves in the job search, or liberal arts majors wanting to home in on a career. The first semester follows a core curriculum, while the second allows a student to specialize in an area of finance based primarily on where they’d like to work, such as in corporate finance or at an investment firm.
Much of the academic year is devoted to the job search process. In fact, for many the job search often begins much earlier. Owen’s Career Management Center is in contact with students before they arrive on campus, and quite a few pursue internships the summer before classes start.
Sheila Swedberg landed a position as a Financial Analyst at Caterpillar Financial Services more than six months before graduation.
Sheila Swedberg, MSF’12, didn’t start quite that early, but might as well have. After receiving a bachelor’s in business from Boston University, she worked in accounting at a university for two years—long enough to determine she didn’t want that as a career. Arriving at Vanderbilt in mid-August 2011 (MS Finance students come two weeks early to plan for courses and career preparation), she immediately set to work on finding a job.
“We were told that there has to be an equal balance of school work, personal life and job search,” she says. “You can’t put too much effort in one area. That approach was new to me. When I’ve been in school, the message has been, ‘Focus on school work. Everything else will work out later.’”
Swedberg took advantage of the exposure to MBA students and the Owen Finance Club. She also participated in mock interviews through the club and set goals for herself, which she then emailed to the CMC’s career coach assigned to MS Finance students.
By November 2011—more than six months before graduation—she had landed a position as a Financial Analyst at Caterpillar Financial Services in Nashville. “There’s a lot of emphasis on networking, which was somewhat new to me,” Swedberg says. “I was terrible at it before, but it became a process of learning how to talk to people, making connections, reaching out and hoping that something will materialize from it.”
The MS Finance program is perhaps best described as a “really short runway,” says Barraclough. “Students can come out of undergrad pretty green, and in a short time they have to become accustomed to grad school and be ready to go into the job market.”
With such a rapid turnaround, every interaction with students matters—and translates into the working world. For Cox, it was the emphasis on communications. “The curriculum stressed it so much early on, from orientation and all the way through the first set of classes,” he says. “It was one of the biggest insights I got.”
He also gained technical skills, like something as simple as using Excel, which has helped him in his work. And then there is the intangible aspect that comes with the confidence of being able to engage in high-level discussions with fellow students and professors. “Because it was such an interactive and dynamic environment, being able to take the things that we were learning and turn them into a conversation was hugely helpful,” Cox says. “I interact with clients every day where I’m able to take what we see in the markets and distill it.”
For Eskelson, working at a small boutique firm has required virtually every aspect of his degree. For instance, the accounting courses have provided a high level of understanding about financial statements. “That has probably been the one single skill that lots and lots of people with high titles don’t have. Understanding complex financial instruments and being able to talk intelligently helped me get the job. It’s not that I can come into the job and do it immediately, but it is valuable being able to understand what, to most of the world, is very opaque.”
Vanderbilt MS Finance graduates may not be ruling the world of finance just yet, but they’re working their way up the ladder, reaching a hand behind to help those a few rungs below on the alumni network.
“Most of the people in my class have been lucky and have had some success in their careers over the last couple of years,” Eskelson says. “If I were to look for another job, that would be one of the first resources I would reach out to. I know people keep in touch and let each other know when they’ve moved. If someone came to me, I’d try to help them out, and other people would do the same.”
Experiential learning has long been a point of pride for Owen. Case competitions, extracurricular club activities and in-class simulations are just a few of the opportunities afforded students throughout the academic year. Each fall, though, students can go a step further by signing up for an intensive hands-on experience in one of several disciplines. Immersion Week, as it’s known, gives students a competitive edge by exposing them to real-world situations outside a traditional classroom setting. This past October’s Immersion Week encompassed health care, finance, marketing and global education, all of which are highlighted in the photo essay that follows.
Health Care Immersion
[DDET Click to expand!]
“The Health Care Immersion is a valuable start to the Vanderbilt Health Care MBA program. It leverages our unique position in Nashville as the nation’s hub of health care delivery. During the week, students gain many different perspectives on the challenges facing the health care delivery system and leave with a better context for the business education that follows.”
—Larry Van Horn
Larry Van Horn, Associate Professor of Management and Executive Director of Health Affairs, and Scarlett Gilfus, Program Coordinator for Health Care, organized this weeklong course for students pursuing Health Care MBAs. The course examined the real world of U.S. health care delivery through the perspectives of physicians, nurses, patients, scientists and administrators. On day one, students changed into scrubs and headed into the operating rooms at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where they stood next to doctors and nurses and watched surgeries being performed. Other activities included visits to the LifeFlight Operations Center, which manages Vanderbilt’s critical-care helicopter service, and the Mass Spectrometry Research Center, which provides laboratory support for researchers across the university.
“It was a one-of-a-kind experience that prepared us for the rest of our curriculum at Vanderbilt,” says Garrick Berberich, an MBA candidate for 2013. “We got to see all aspects of the health care industry and discuss the front-line interactions between providers and patients.”
[/DDET]
Wall Street Week
[DDET Click to expand!]
“Wall Street Week is the primary mechanism for introducing careers in financial services to first-year MBA students. When they meet alumni and other firm representatives, it brings a sense of reality to career paths they may have only read about. Students come back much better educated about their options and what it takes to get to Wall Street from Owen.”
—Emily Anderson
The Career Management Center’s Executive Director Read McNamara, MA’76, and Senior Associate Director Emily Anderson helped coordinate this weeklong trip to New York for 34 first-year MBA students exploring careers in finance. The group met with representatives of 11 different financial services firms: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, Citi Commercial Banking, Citi Investment Banking, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Guggenheim Partners, JPMorgan Chase, Paulson & Co., Petrus Partners and UBS. Representatives of the firms gave presentations about the economy and discussed MBA career paths within their organizations. Students gained additional insight into Wall Street from alumni who joined Dean Jim Bradford for the annual Wall Street Week Alumni Reception at the Union League Club.
“Wall Street Week was very important for my internship search,” says Neena Sinha, an MBA candidate for 2013. “Not only did I learn more about the banking industry, I gained a valuable network that will help support my career in the future.”
[/DDET]
Brand Week
[DDET Click to expand!]
“The key to a good immersion experience from a pedagogical perspective is to foster interaction between business leaders, such as our presenters from Brown-Forman, Papa John’s, GE and Mars Petcare, with bright students who work on problems that matter—like understanding the ROI behind social media marketing activities.”
—Steve Hoeffler
Associate Professor of Marketing Steve Hoeffler and Jack Kennard, Principal at White Oaks Brands, a Louisville, Ky.-based brand strategy firm, organized this three-day event for marketing students. Executives from spirits and wine company Brown-Forman, pizza restaurant chain Papa John’s and appliance manufacturer GE gave talks on issues such as social marketing and consumer engagement. The highlight of the experience was a team case assignment for pet food manufacturer and veterinary care company Mars Petcare.
“It was exciting when our team was voted by Mars Petcare as having the winning strategy,” says Ashley Welnhofer, 2013 MBA candidate and President of the Vanderbilt Marketing Association. “We were invited to research and assemble a social media ambassador program for the company as an independent study during mod 2. Working hand-in-hand with their brand management team definitely enhanced my education.”
[/DDET]
Global Business Association Trip to Turkey
[DDET Click to expand!]
“There were many eye-opening experiences for our group. One of my favorites was learning firsthand about socially conscious initiatives at Turkcell and seeing how those initiatives reinforce the company’s mission as well as its bottom line. Of course, the generosity of the Turkish people and Vanderbilt alumni who helped plan our visit also made lasting impressions on us all.”
—David Parsley
The Global Business Association, a student club focused on international business, helped plan this weeklong trip to Istanbul to learn about the Turkish economy. Accompanying the 18 students on the trip were David Parsley, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Economics and Finance, and Assistant Professor of Operations Mumin Kurtulus, a native of Turkey. Among the highlights were tours of the Istanbul Stock Exchange; Turkcell, the leading mobile communications company in Turkey; and MyNet, the largest Internet company in the country. The group also had time for a few cultural stops, including a cruise around the Bosporus and visits to architectural landmarks like the Hagia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque.
“I didn’t know much about Turkey before going there (except that I liked Turkish coffee),” says Aaron Fung, an MBA candidate for 2012. “The trip gave me a great deal of insight into Turkish thinking. It’s partly European, Asian and Middle Eastern—just like its geographic location.”
For David Owens, innovation on a personal level can be hard-wired.
“I am genetically an engineer,” he says. “My wife remarked one day as we were traveling, ‘Why do you always have a bag full of wires when we go on vacation?’ It’s just always been part of my identity.”
On a business level, innovation is a much slipperier commodity, says Owens, who studies the subject as Professor of the Practice of Management and Innovation at Vanderbilt. Although all businesses rely on timely innovation, most of them too often block it, according to Owens’ latest book.
Creative People Must Be Stopped: Six Ways We Kill Innovation (Without Even Trying), published in 2011 by Jossey-Bass, takes a clear-eyed look at six levels of stumbling blocks we unintentionally place in front of new ideas and their implementation. “I believe that everyone is creative, that everyone can and will move toward positive change given the opportunity,” Owens says. “My interest is understanding ways we stop people from doing that.”
At each of those six levels—self, group, organization, industry, society and technology—innovation faces resistance. “Take the organizational level,” he says. “Imagine the monumental courage it would take at Kodak in the ’80s to say, ‘Guys, I think we should stop doing film.’ It would be hard even for those people who knew that film’s days were numbered.”
He cites the Segway, a two-wheeled electric vehicle, as an invention whose potential on paper hit the brick wall of societal realities. “The Segway was too fast for the sidewalk and too slow for the streets,” he says. “That’s not a technical problem. They didn’t need the battery to last longer or to make the handlebars more comfortable. It was the societal restraints that they failed to address.”
Fighting the roadblocks that we and others throw in front of our own and each other’s creativity is at the core of Owens’ work as a teacher, mentor and consultant to organizations like NASA and the Smithsonian Institution. His is an almost counterintuitive approach.
David Owens
“It’s not, ‘Here’s how to be creative,’ but rather ‘Here’s how to stop your existing creative ideas from being blocked or killed,’” he says. “The punch line of the book is that there are at least six different ways to look at innovation, and you should pay attention to all of them because each one has the power to help you find the hidden barriers your innovation will face. What I find is that it’s the one perspective you ignore that ends up biting you.”
He sees creativity and innovation play out in real time as a mentor at the Entrepreneur Center, a Nashville-based nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs with investors and resources, and as Faculty Director of the Vanderbilt Accelerator Summer Business Institute for undergraduates and recent college graduates.
“Projects in the Accelerator,” Owens says, “touch all aspects of business—marketing, finance, operations, HR, manufacturing, strategy, design—and the program allows these students to experience the entire span of what happens in business in just a few weeks.”
He has watched any number of students carry ideas generated, refined or actualized at Owen into careers. He points to students who have gone on to do innovative work at places like Apple, Mattel, Microsoft, Google and Nissan. Another he cites is Jerome Edwards, MBA’04, Founder, President and CEO of Veran Medical Technologies, a St. Louis-based company that has developed cutting-edge imaging technology for surgical procedures.
Surgical Precision
Before earning his MBA at Vanderbilt, Edwards worked for Medtronic, one of the world’s leading medical technology companies. There he built a voltage-based navigation system that guided catheters inside the heart to burn tissue and regulate heartbeat. That technology, however, was spun off into another company and ultimately acquired by a Medtronic competitor in a $273 million deal. It was then that a frustrated Edwards decided to start a new chapter in his career.
“I wasn’t going to let that happen again,” he says. “Medtronic had been a great company to work for, but I decided to leave and go back to business school.”
“For us, innovation is about getting people into the field,
having them see surgeries, and coming back and sharing ideas
without barriers and without process.”
—Jerome Edwards
A Dean’s Scholar, Edwards enrolled at Owen in 2002 because he says, “I felt at home and felt the entrepreneurial spirit.” That feeling was shared by fellow student Evan Austill, BS’93, MBA’04. The two teamed up and started writing business plans for the type of technology Edwards developed at Medtronic, but for different organs. Edwards and Austill were encouraged by Germain Böer, Professor of Accounting and Director of the Owen Entrepreneurship Center, as well as former faculty member Bruce Lynskey, MBA’85. Edwards says Owen’s center “kept putting me in great opportunities in terms of business plan competitions and showcasing the plans to alumni.”
After receiving $65,000 in grant money, Edwards and Austill founded Veran Medical Technologies and paid for the first patent, which was written in the 810 Café at Owen. That patent was for a device that acts like a GPS system for the human body. An electromagnetic field and sensors are used to steer the device inside the body and then help sample or excise tissue that is suspected of being cancerous. The innovation is in making the device work in the lungs, which continue to move during surgery.
“With cancer,” Edwards says, “it’s about diagnosing as early as possible. In this case, we can get to the deepest, darkest regions of the lungs, get tissues from suspect lesions and progress to therapy if it’s cancerous.”
With just 28 people on staff, Veran is a small company where, Edwards says, “everybody participates in R&D—everybody does everything.” The company’s small size and flexible approach have helped it overcome the types of adverse group dynamics and organizational missteps that, according to David Owens, hamper innovation.
“One engineer in a small company can do the same amount of work as three in a big company because you’re freer,” Edwards says. “Process is good but it can be burdensome. Here, rather than meeting after meeting after meeting, you just walk in and ask a question, then go back to your desk and get to work again.
“For us,” he adds, “innovation is about getting people into the field, having them see surgeries, and coming back and sharing ideas without barriers and without process. Once you get to a level where it’s going to be turned into a real product, then you fold it into effective process.”
Renter’s Paradise
Adam Albright is helping RentStuff.com get a foothold in the marketplace with an unconventional business model.
For a small number of students, innovative ideas and an entrepreneurial spirit lead to the business world prior to graduation. That has been the case for Adam Albright, BE’10, an MBA candidate for 2012. Albright is Co-founder of RentStuff.com, which he describes as “a marketplace similar to eBay for renting rather than selling household items.” He teamed up with his two fellow co-founders when they needed someone with a technical background. Albright, who has been doing freelance software and website development since he was 10, earned his bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering.
Participation in a summer-long incubator program at the Entrepreneur Center provided RentStuff.com with $15,000 in seed capital, mentoring and networking, and the chance to refine their presentations with the help of Michael Burcham, Lecturer of Entrepreneurship and President and CEO of the center. The program also gave them temporary office space.
“We have a couple of desks and white boards, and we make a lot of to-do lists and brainstorm ideas,” Albright says. “Part of my job is to explain the technological complexities behind what we want to do.”
The RentStuff.com model takes advantage of a fundamental shift in the way people access everyday goods. Albright cites a phenomenon called “collaborative consumption,” which he says is when “people try to own less stuff and rethink how they consume assets.” He and his partners have drawn inspiration from Zipcar, a membership-based car-sharing company, and Airbnb, which matches people needing short-term lodging with those offering everything from sofas to castles.
RentStuff.com handles payment transfers and security deposits, and offers reviews of people who use the service and the items rented, which include bicycles, cameras and even cocktail dresses. Recognizing that the target demographic skews younger means part of the innovation lies in finessing potential backers.
“Someone making six figures is not going to be renting golf clubs for $20 a day,” Albright says. “You have to explain to investors how it would work and who would be interested because it’s a new model and the math doesn’t add up for them. The investors aren’t the ones using it, but they’re the ones we need on our side.”
In other words, Albright and his business partners have faced some of the societal innovation constraints that David Owens writes about in his book. Society’s adherence to a conventional way of doing business sometimes prevents more creative approaches from gaining traction.
In the case of RentStuff.com, part of the solution lies in bringing small stores on board and offering to link them to potentially large audiences through the website. “We can emphasize the rental business side of RentStuff.com to investors, and then add that individuals can do it, too,” Albright says.
He finds that as a businessman, youth can be a mixed blessing. “Being young, you get a lot of helpful advice,” he says. “People are very willing to tell you about experiences they’ve had and pitfalls they’ve faced, and it speeds up the learning process. But when you go to an investor looking for half a million dollars, maybe they’d feel better if you were 50.”
Nashville, he adds, has been a good place to get attention and work out the kinks before carrying the concept to a larger city, where high-density neighborhoods and apartments concentrate the potential market for rental items like carpet cleaners and sporting goods.
Albright also attributes their early success to the company’s domain name. He believes that it has been crucial in driving people to their website. “RentStuff.com is a pretty identifiable name,” he says. “It’s easy to figure out what we do.”
Wallet Allocation
A great name is also the capstone of a highly regarded customer loyalty measure developed by Bruce Cooil, the Dean Samuel B. and Evelyn R. Richmond Professor of Management, and alumnus Tim Keiningham, MBA’89, with marketing research firm Ipsos Loyalty.
The Wallet Allocation Rule, as it’s known, came about because traditional metrics gauging customer satisfaction and loyalty “do a terrible job of linking with the share of category spending that customers allocate to the brands they use,” says Keiningham, the firm’s Global Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President.
Bruce Cooil and his co-authors won the Next Gen Market Research “Disruptive Innovation” Award for their work on the Wallet Allocation Rule.
That need prompted a two-year study in collaboration with Lerzan Aksoy, Associate Professor of Marketing at Fordham University, and Alexander Buoye, Vice President of Analytics at Ipsos Loyalty. The study examined more than 17,000 consumers in nine countries and covered purchases in more than a dozen industries. A key datum was the number of brands being considered along with relative rank.
In the end, Cooil and his collaborators found that companies would be better served paying attention to how well they rank in comparison to rivals, rather than concentrating on achieving high customer satisfaction levels. According to their research, being a customer’s first, rather than second, choice can have a significant financial impact.
“What we found shocked us,” Keiningham says. “Our research uncovered a heretofore unknown relationship between customers’ perceptions of the brands they use and their share of wallet that could be easily calculated using a simple mathematical formula: the Wallet Allocation Rule.”
The rule makes it simple for managers to determine the financial implications of rank and of moves up or down, he says. Its implications include the fact that customer satisfaction is best understood in the context of competition, since it can rise even while per-customer spending declines.
“We looked seriously at alternatives,” says Cooil, who analyzed the data. “You see other papers that look at converting ranks to market shares using industry-specific parameters. We were expecting to have to go that way, but Alex suggested this other approach, and more complicated methods couldn’t do any better.”
Tim Keiningham
It’s an approach that breaks through the kind of industry constraints and societal barriers that David Owens studies. “We all start out with an idea of how things work,” Keiningham says, “and this view causes us to seek out information that supports that view and discount information to the contrary. As a result, we get a lot of ‘motivated’ research to prove what we want to believe.”
Keiningham and Cooil have become close friends through the years: Cooil was a best man at Keiningham’s wedding in Istanbul and has collaborated often with Keiningham and Aksoy, who are husband and wife. Their collaboration plays off their differing approaches and personalities.
“They get me interested in projects I might not find interesting otherwise,” Cooil says. “I have very different talents from Lerzan and Tim. They’re much more organized, much more focused on what industry really needs to know about, what would really help companies—and they get projects started.
“They’re the ones asking the questions and telling me what the current theory is. I go through and see how the models are working. Then they ask, ‘What can we do? We have this really interesting data. Can we come up with another approach or do something different with the data or clear up an issue that everyone’s convinced they understand but we’re convinced they don’t understand?’ They’re pretty demanding. They want answers and they keep projects going.”
Their four-way collaboration with Buoye on the paper “Customer Loyalty Isn’t Enough. Grow Your Share of Wallet,” published in the October 2011 Harvard Business Review, earned them the Next Gen Market Research “Disruptive Innovation” Award. It’s a major acknowledgement, although Cooil laughingly dismisses one of the accolades that went with it.
“They called us ‘thought leaders,’” he says, “It’s a mixed blessing because I’ve always hated the phrase. Doesn’t it sound Orwellian? But they did give us these really artsy trophies. I can’t even put mine in my study because my wife wants to put it on the mantel as an art piece.”
Special Resonance
Cooil’s and Keiningham’s work is another example of the worldwide impact of innovation with Owen ties. It is a key to what makes Nashville a city with special resonance as a business center for David Owens.
“I feel a real energy here once again,” he says, “with new startups and tech companies and a level of creativity in Nashville that really make it exciting for me.”
His work in breaking through innovation barriers is aimed at helping to keep the Owen School in the thick of that creative energy, as a meeting place of education and innovation that is as good for human development as it is for business development.
“With Accelerator, as with everything else,” he says, “we want to help students find that part of the wide spectrum of business that talks to them. I try to expose them to a lot of things to do, to give them enough diverse projects and experiences that they find something that makes them say, ‘I like marketing’ or ‘I’m good at managing teams.’
“I want to offer a perspective on business’ role in society, one that often gets lost,” he says. “It’s so much more than making money. It’s about feeling good about what you do and helping make the world an amazing place. How can you be a contributing member of society? Business is a great way to do that.”
From left, Faith Rhoades, Carol Slivka, Kelli Powers and Nat Richardson
Few people get to witness the evolution of a brand new hospital from an insider’s perspective. Even fewer get to play a hand in how it takes shape. Yet, thanks in no small part to Vanderbilt’s Master of Management in Health Care program, four health care administrators from Huntsville, Ala., have had just such an opportunity.
Kelli Powers, Nathaniel “Nat” Richardson, Faith Rhoades and Carol Slivka—all members of the MM Health Care Class of 2011—spent the better part of the yearlong program collaborating on a capstone project to evaluate a new facility being built by their employer, Huntsville Hospital. Their project has continued to influence decision making in the organization well after graduation, but it isn’t the only part of their studies that has left a lasting impression. During their frequent trips up Interstate 65 to the Owen School, the four forged deep bonds with each other and their classmates, and the resulting friendships and experiences they’ve taken back with them on the southbound return have been life-changing.
“I haven’t felt so pumped about a program and the educational experience in a long time,” says Richardson, Vice President of Operations at Huntsville Hospital. “What’s been energizing has been the number of individuals in the classroom who are so spread out across the health care spectrum. We sit in a room with so many dynamic minds.”
Richardson was the first from the Huntsville team to commit to the MM Health Care program, which is designed to provide students with the business fundamentals and skills to manage people, programs and processes within health care organizations. While firmly entrenched in his present position, he wanted to further his education through a degree that would have direct benefits for his current job and career trajectory.
Jeff Samz, who had previously worked at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, brought the MM Health Care program to the attention of his colleagues at Huntsville Hospital.
Richardson heard about the MM Health Care program from Jeff Samz, Chief Operating Officer of Huntsville Hospital and former CEO of the Vanderbilt Heart and Vascular Institute. “He knew I was seeking the next level in my career,” says Richardson, who aspires to a C-level position at a large hospital system. “This program seemed to provide the most value and also aligned with where I am in my career.”
Samz’s and Richardson’s enthusiasm soon caught the attention of Slivka, Huntsville Hospital’s Director of Finance; Rhoades, Director of Medical Staff Services; and Powers, CEO of Athens Limestone Hospital, which is affiliated with the Huntsville system. Rhoades had begun graduate work elsewhere but readily switched gears for the chance to study at Vanderbilt with her colleagues.
“When the human resources director asked me if I was interested in changing to Vanderbilt, I said, ‘In a nanosecond,’ because of the reputation of the school and because I had a chance to take it with three other people from my organization. That’s life support,” Rhoades says. “The other contributing factor was the health care focus.”
Slivka shares this sentiment. “I don’t see myself doing something outside of health care. If you’re going to do this at this point in your life, you want to have some immediate take-away and provide some real-life value back to your company,” she says. “Huntsville Hospital has been willing to make an investment in me for knowledge I’m going to bring back and use. I really like that part of it.”
Huntsville Hospital enthusiastically backed the team approach to graduate education as it naturally aligned with the organization’s succession planning. “They’re interested in advancing their careers, and it’s a way for us to retain some of our top people,” Samz says. “Investing in them, we think, will pay off not only in the skills they learn in the program but it will keep them with us.” Samz also believes the fact that the four formed a “working pod” will continue to benefit the organization in the long term.
The program was appealing to Huntsville Hospital in other ways, too. There was Vanderbilt’s stellar academic reputation to consider, as well as the MM Health Care program’s flexible format, which is geared toward working professionals. Plus, the students were exposed not only to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which is widely regarded for its patient care, research and biomedical education, but also to Nashville’s dynamic health care business community, which includes Hospital Corporation of America and a variety of other health care companies.
“There’s just nothing else like the Nashville market,” Samz says.
The Future of Health Care
“What the world needs is changing,” says Dr. Mark Frisse, MM Health Care Faculty Director, Professor of Management and Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt. He explains that the MM Health Care program helps students see way beyond the limits of their institutions to the future of health care.
“First we expose them to a radically broader view of the world,” he says. “Then we bring the world into the classroom. This can only be done a few places in the country.”
Larry Van Horn played a key role in launching the MM Health Care program.
Larry Van Horn, Associate Professor of Management and Executive Director of Health Affairs at Owen, adds, “The cost, quality and access problems facing the U.S. health care system are monumental. The clinician who understands the science of medicine and the science of business is in a position to create more value for our health care system.”
MM Health Care students attend classes every Thursday night and one weekend each month. Traditional B-school classes—such as marketing, finance, accounting, logistics, operations and leadership—are taught on weeknights, while the weekends are dedicated to health care. Frisse believes the classroom experience serves as a great leveler for everyone in the program. “You can’t tell the doctors from the administrators,” he says. “They have a uniform identity. They’re all students.”
The classroom benefits the faculty as well, he adds, noting that the high caliber of students helps energize the instructors. “The best teachers want to run these classes because they learn from these experiences,” he says.
Mark Frisse
During the course of the year, students develop close friendships, becoming sounding boards for one another. “Every day we’re texting or Skyping or emailing. Everyone relies on one another. Everyone wants everyone to succeed,” says Rhoades, who came into the program with a bachelor’s degree in health care management.
Richardson echoes that sentiment. “There’s a wealth of knowledge in that room. Everyone is from different walks of life and different regions of the country,” he says. “You can’t put a price on that much mind value.”
For Rhoades, the lessons of the classroom often can be implemented at work on Monday morning. She credits the high-quality instructors. “That started from Day One in the very first class. That is what knocks the socks off me. They are beyond experts,” she says.
Powers agrees. “It could not have been timelier. I’m looking at productivity and wait time [at Athens Limestone], and I’ve been able to bring what I’ve learned back to work,” she says. “It’s wonderful to be able to discuss ideas with people who don’t necessarily report to me.”
Meanwhile Slivka’s co-workers noticed a positive change in her right away. “I have a different set of eyes and I analyze things a little bit differently,” she says. “My boss said he can tell a difference in the way I look at things and in the comments I’ve made.”
“First we expose [students] to a radically broader view of the world. Then we bring the world into the classroom. This can only be done a few places in the country.”
—Mark Frisse
The degree is perfectly suited for students like the four from Huntsville, says Sarah Fairbank, MM Health Care Program Director. “I tell prospective students we are designed for two kinds of people,” she says. “It’s for people who have been ‘siloed,’ who are working in a narrow field with lots of specialization. That might be a contracts person, a supply chain specialist, someone from the finance side or a physician with a narrow specialization in medicine. These are people who need a broader view of health care, along with management tools.
“The other type of person we see is someone who is coming into the health care field with a generally technical background—an operations specialist or IT specialist who has worked in other industries and is now in health care.”
Students range in age and experience. Some are young professionals preparing for a future in health care, while others are midcareer and ready to move up the ladder. There are also physicians who later in their careers want to use their accumulated wisdom in new and different ways.
A key element of the curriculum is personal coaching since the students are often transforming their own roles within their organizations. “The coaching was phenomenal,” Powers says. “It has helped me get on track and be more productive. I’m a very organized person, but I’ve learned that I need to devote specific time to reading articles and delegating.”
Sarah Fairbank
The average time commitment outside the classroom for the MM Health Care degree is at least 10 to 15 hours per week, though the initial learning curve may be steep at first for students who have been out of school for many years. In addition to these hours, the Huntsville students had to shoulder the extra commitment of traveling further than most students—approximately 100 miles each way. The routine is intense, Rhoades admits, but still very doable. “It’s such an achievable goal, so it takes the pain out of the travel,” she says.
Rhoades says it helped that members of the Owen community were standing ready to ensure their success throughout the whole process. This was no more evident than when deadly tornadoes ripped through northern Alabama last April. Staff, faculty and fellow students rallied to assist the Huntsville team and their communities.
“The support has been incredible. They pay such close attention to the needs of the students,” Rhoades says. “We in Huntsville have especially realized that. In bad weather, when it became clear we couldn’t get there, they quickly rounded the wagons and got some technology together. We had a live class by tapping in electronically.”
Breaking New Ground
As professionals make their way up the ladder, Fairbank explains that the challenge becomes, “How do you get people to look at you differently?” An integral part of fast-tracking that change in perception is another key part of the curriculum: the capstone project, an eight-month consulting engagement during which a team, usually of four people, takes on an institutional problem as if they were professional consultants. Through the project, the students are able to demonstrate immediate economic value by tackling important organizational issues.
“We seek to ensure that everyone coming out of our program projects a dramatically enhanced identity within their organization,” says Frisse, who oversees the teams’ work.
For the Huntsville team, their capstone project’s focus was evaluating the potential impact of a brand-new hospital in Madison, Ala., a community outside of Huntsville. The Madison area is growing, vibrant and affluent, with an average household income of $90,000. Many residents are scientists and engineers working for NASA, the defense industry or technical firms.
“When the human resources director asked me if I was interested in changing to Vanderbilt, I said, ‘In a nanosecond,’ because of the reputation of the school and because I had a chance to take it with three other people from my organization. That’s life support.”
—Faith Rhoades
The group concentrated specifically on how to position obstetrics services in Madison. “This is the first hospital to be built in Alabama in many years,” Rhoades says. “Not very many people get to participate in building a hospital from scratch. But we also had to consider that we belong to a hospital system with other hospitals that we need to be concerned about. It’s not all about us. This is about creating the best business for everyone so that we’re all successful.”
The Huntsville system first built a wellness center, physician office building and urgent care center on the property in Madison. The success of those ventures demonstrated the viability of a hospital. “Owen helps you think strategically, and that’s what [the new hospital in] Madison is all about,” Rhoades says. “Many years ago, the strategic planning began with a purchase of land. It began with a vision and a goal. Everything you gain from Owen classes and programs ties into that kind of scenario. I put it into practice every day in my job.”
For Powers, the capstone project was particularly interesting since the new hospital in Madison had the potential to impact her facility, Athens Limestone Hospital, the most. While some factors will remain unknown until the facility is up and running next year, Powers says the planning process helped alleviate undue concern about the new hospital’s potential impact and shifted the focus to the strategic side.
Richardson adds that building obstetrics services around the strategic mission of each of the hospitals makes sense, since the birth of a child often provides a family’s first exposure to a medical facility. “We have to get it right so that the mother and the child have the absolute best experience,” he says. “And we have to make sure that we design it so we don’t hurt the other hospitals. We may eventually find that it’s best to provide those services primarily at one hospital. It’s a very delicate situation, and we have to get it right.”
Besides generating practical ideas for Huntsville Hospital to implement, the project also helped the students learn how to work together as a team. “The strength of our team is that we’re coming at the project with different knowledge skill sets. We all come from diverse areas that are all important to the outcome we seek,” Richardson says. “I love writing and doing the research and pulling things together. Kelli has a global perspective on what other organizations are thinking. Carol looks at everything from the financial standpoint: What’s the bottom line impact from the standpoint of income statements or the balance sheet? Faith brings the whole physician perspective to the table.
“Now I appreciate my team members at a whole different level.”
Richardson also appreciates just how far he himself has come during a year’s time. It has been a journey marked not so much by miles logged on the odometer or hours in the classroom, but rather by immeasurable moments of progress. In the end, the MM Health Care program delivered him closer to his lifelong goals and gave him something that should pay dividends the rest of his career—confidence.
“I know I’m ready for my next project,” he says, “no matter where or what that’s going to be.”
Bappa Mukherji is the CEO of Gics Foods, which packages food into convenient microwaveable retort pouches.
Ashoke “Bappa” Mukherji is no stranger to pressure. Soon after graduating from Vanderbilt with both an MBA and a law degree, he was thrust into one of the more challenging roles a budding young attorney could ask for—sitting second chair in a first-degree murder trial. It was his first trial ever.
When asked about the stress he was under, he laughs, “It could have been worse. At least I wasn’t the one on trial.”
Mukherji spent the ensuing years at a Nashville law firm, where he concentrated mostly on mergers and acquisitions. Advising clients on these deals suited his Owen School background, but he always wondered what it would be like to “move to the other side of the table,” as he puts it, and go into business for himself.
In 1997, with the help of two business partners, Mukherji did just that, launching a startup that manufactured recycled toner cartridges. That idea eventually blossomed into Guy Brown Products, a Brentwood, Tenn.-based office products distributor that had revenue close to $200 million in 2010. Mukherji served as CEO of the company until he stepped down last fall.
“At Guy Brown we differentiated ourselves from competitors by focusing exclusively on selling to large, geographically dispersed organizations and doing it better than anyone else,” he says. “It’s similar to what I’m doing today—studying the market and figuring out where our company has room to operate.”
The company he’s referring to is Gics Foods, a food packaging business in Greenville, S.C. Appropriately enough, this latest venture is all about pressure—albeit a different sort from what Mukherji is used to.
Under his guidance as CEO, Gics packages food into retort pouches, which are plastic laminate and metal foil containers that can withstand the high temperature and pressure used to cook what’s inside them. Convenient microwaveable bags of rice are just one example of this growing technology that’s revolutionizing not only how food is preserved but also how it’s prepared.
“We’re the first company focused solely on retort packaging,” he says. “That’s what makes us stand out.”
In chemistry, if you want to get a reaction, you have to find a way to bring the right molecules together and have them bump into each other with sufficient force. Sometimes you need a catalyst to get things started.
It turns out that the process of encouraging entrepreneurship is remarkably similar, according to Germain Böer, Professor of Accounting and Director of the Owen Entrepreneurship Center. “One of the best ways to stimulate a lot of entrepreneurial activity is to create occasions for entrepreneurs to bump into one another,” says Böer. (Watch Böer’s video about entrepreneurship.)
These days entrepreneurs in Middle Tennessee have lots of opportunities to rub elbows, thanks to Vanderbilt and its collaborations with two local organizations: the Nashville Capital Network (NCN) and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (NEC). NCN supports entrepreneurs and startup companies by providing feedback on business plans and assistance with raising capital. NEC, on the other hand, is a 501(c)(3) public-private partnership that gives its members access to training classes, mentoring resources and networking events.
In addition to the school’s own classroom offerings and funding opportunities, Owen students can get a taste for entrepreneurship by participating in internship programs at both organizations. These internships give them direct exposure to the process of refining a business plan, securing financing and getting a new venture off the ground. Meanwhile the organizations (and entrepreneurs they serve) benefit from the intelligence and enthusiasm that the students bring to analyzing business plans and improving presentations or pitch materials. In sum, it is a winning formula for everyone involved, and at the center of the equation is the Owen School, providing just the right catalyst to spark business growth in Middle Tennessee and beyond.
Germain Böer
NCN: Matching Entrepreneurs with Angels
Getting a business off the ground is always a challenge, particularly for first-time entrepreneurs without the network or connections to raise capital. That is where NCN comes into play. Started as a joint initiative between private investors and the Owen School, NCN maintains close ties with Vanderbilt. Its Executive Director Sid Chambless, BA’96, MBA’03, and Director Chase Perry, MBA’08, are both Owen alumni. Dean Jim Bradford and Professor Böer sit on its board of directors.
NCN has an interesting hybrid structure. The organization is structured as a taxable nonprofit but also manages two venture capital funds: NCN Angel Fund and a TNInvestco Tennessee Angel Fund. The first fund pools the resources of angel investors who also invest individually in NCN-supported companies. The second fund represents the proceeds from $20 million in tax credits that NCN accessed through Tennessee’s competitive TNInvestco program, which seeks to foster entrepreneurial “innovation clusters” across the state by awarding tax credits to a select group of venture capital funds. In addition to the economic development benefits, the state also shares any profits from TNInvestco investments.
To ensure that worthy entrepreneurs have access to an enthusiastic network of angel investors, NCN must provide those angel investors with high-quality, well-vetted investment opportunities. Interning as NCN associates, Owen students work with entrepreneurs to refine their presentations and clean up their business plans. The interns also participate in meetings where experienced local advisers give the entrepreneurs feedback on their ideas. Meanwhile, on the other side of the deal, the students provide deal context and analysis to help angel investors assess the quality of a potential investment. Since its founding in 2003, NCN has helped 23 early-stage companies secure financing, with NCN angel investors providing more than $20 million in funding.
Alumni Chase Perry (left) and Sid Chambless direct the Nashville Capital Network, which supports entrepreneurs by providing feedback on business plans and assistance with raising capital.
Chambless credits Professor Böer and Dean Bradford with forging a strong partnership between NCN and Vanderbilt. “For Owen students who may want to start their own businesses, an NCN internship provides a great opportunity to learn all about the process of capitalizing and growing a business,” Chambless says. “The real benefit for students is to be in the room with entrepreneurs as they pitch to investors, to see the kinds of questions that investors ask. I really think this program is one of a kind in the way it enables business school students to work on live venture capital funds and influence the deployment of those funds while simultaneously working with entrepreneurs in the community.”
NEC: Students in the StartUp Studio
Founded in fall 2009, NEC has met with more than 150 companies and helped 13 of them raise $3 million in angel financing. Four of those companies have since officially launched their businesses. “That’s a pretty good hit rate,” says NEC President and CEO Michael Burcham, who has firsthand entrepreneurial experience himself. Burcham founded three separate venture-backed health care companies before taking on the leadership role at NEC. Burcham also serves as Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship at Owen, teaching classes about health care innovation and launching ventures.
Michael Burcham
From formal internships and independent study programs to extracurricular volunteer projects, Owen students are involved at NEC in numerous ways. As part of its mission to promote entrepreneurship and economic growth in Middle Tennessee, NEC evaluates new business ideas and offers a series of popular classes and coaching sessions on basic topics, including starting a business, raising capital and building a leadership team. Students assist with these services by organizing classes, delivering training, assessing business plans and offering feedback.
Burcham says there are typically several Owen students working at any one time with the entrepreneurs in NEC’s StartUp Studio incubator space. This temporary work arrangement gives the highest-paying members a business address, access to meeting rooms and classrooms, and face-to-face time with mentors. Students also help organize and run NEC’s technology microfund, which invested in seven new technology startups in 2010, including a company founded by Mark Harris, BS’03, PhD’09, an MBA candidate for 2011.
“A lot of these students either want to work in a startup company or have some interest in moving into investment banking or venture capital,” Burcham says. “By working with NEC, the students gain valuable experience that can give them a competitive advantage when they graduate.”
Learning Entrepreneurship in the Classroom—and Beyond
Henry Oehmig, an MBA candidate for 2011, used his summer stipend to develop a business plan for an environmentally friendly charcoal lighter fluid.
“Our goal in teaching entrepreneurship is to create wealth in the region,” Germain Böer says. “We want to help lots of startups and ultimately create a lot of very successful companies.” In the Vanderbilt MBA program, a lot of this learning takes place inside the classroom in courses such as Launching the Venture, Business Plan Development, Product Design & Innovation, and Accounting & Finance for Entrepreneurs.
Many Owen students, however, learn just as much if not more about entrepreneurship through the aforementioned internships with NCN and NEC. The school also offers its own Summer Enterprise Development internship program. Instead of taking a typical internship in a corporate environment, students can apply to receive a stipend of $15,000 to work on their own startup ventures during the summer between the first and second years of their studies.
Henry Oehmig, an MBA candidate for 2011, was one of three Owen students to receive a stipend last summer. He entered the process with a business plan for an environmentally friendly charcoal lighter fluid made from recycled restaurant grease. Oehmig had been thinking about building a business around a green lighter fluid product for a couple of years, but the Walmart Better Living Business Plan Challenge provided the impetus to build a true business plan around the idea. The annual competition encourages students to invent sustainable products or develop sustainable business solutions and present them to a panel of Walmart executives, suppliers and environmental organizations. The plan developed by Oehmig, fellow 2011 classmate Ian Prunty and three other Owen students won the regional level of the 2010 competition and made it to the national semifinals at Walmart’s headquarters.
After the competition, the other students peeled off to pursue their own summer plans, but Oehmig felt the lighter fluid idea had potential, so he revised the business plan and prepared to make his pitch to the panel of Owen professors, alumni and local businesspeople, including investment bankers and marketing analysts, who were awarding the summer stipends.
“The application process was a great learning experience,” Oehmig says. “Going through the process of pitching our businesses and trying to convince potential investors gave all the applicants a taste of what it is really like to try to raise money when starting a business. There was a lot of camaraderie among all the students who were pitching business plans, and I really enjoyed hearing the other pitches.”
It’s actually pretty easy to get in front of C-level people at almost any company in Nashville. In fact, I believe that the entrepreneurial environment in Nashville now rivals almost any place in the country.
—Chris Rand
A couple of days later Oehmig was thrilled to learn that he had been awarded one of the stipends. “If you have a business idea that really excites you, there’s no better situation than to be given $15,000 in seed capital without having to give up any ownership stake in the company,” he says. “As a student, it’s terrific because it really gives you a chance to practice entrepreneurship with a safety net in place. If the business does not work out as you’d hoped, you can still go back to your second year of business school with valuable skills and experience, plus a great story to tell recruiters.”
Of course having that safety net did not mean that Oehmig rested on his laurels. To the contrary, Oehmig dove wholeheartedly into making his business a success. He ended up plowing all of the stipend into the venture and then even supplemented it with his own personal funds. During the course of the summer, his vision for the business evolved. Where Oehmig had originally planned on setting up his own manufacturing facility to create the lighter fluid, his talks with biodiesel marketers and manufacturers convinced him that he could launch his venture more quickly and more cost-effectively by outsourcing manufacturing to third-party manufacturers.
His biggest change in direction, however, came when Germain Böer introduced Oehmig to Nashville-based consultant Rick Neitz, who suggested that Oehmig consider licensing the intellectual property behind the product rather than attempting to produce and market the product on his own. For Oehmig, who had a provisional patent on a green lighter fluid formula, the licensing idea had several attractions: He could launch his product faster with less upfront capital and earn revenue from sales royalties. When Oehmig saw that Clorox, which dominates the lighter fluid market through its Kingsford brand, was soliciting ideas for an eco-friendly lighter fluid, he made the decision to pursue the licensing route.
The bulk of the stipend money went toward hiring a professional chemical development lab that could formulate a biodiesel product that closely matched Clorox’s environmental and performance considerations. Although the product formulation was originally supposed to take only six weeks, it ended up lasting more than four months, teaching Oehmig a valuable lesson that product development can take longer than anticipated.
With the product in hand at the end of November, Oehmig has since been in serious discussions with representatives of Clorox and the senior management of other manufacturers. He recognizes that the success of his company will ultimately hinge on whether he can land a licensing deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m definitely interested in working with venture capital or private equity firms on investing in early-stage companies,” says Oehmig, who recently interned with Nashville-based venture firm Mountain Group Capital. “I also think I would really enjoy working for a startup company, but a venture capital job might give me a bit more stability while also providing an avenue to stay plugged into the world of entrepreneurship.”
A Great Place to Be an Entrepreneur
As recently as 2009, Christopher Rand, MBA’04, was working in Vanderbilt’s Office of Technology Transfer and Enterprise Development (OTTED), helping the university create and invest in companies based on its faculty’s intellectual property. Today Rand is a Partner at TriStar Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that focuses on health care innovation including biotech, pharmaceuticals, personalized medicine, medical devices, health care information technology, and health care services. Both of Rand’s partners have Vanderbilt connections too: Dr. Harry Jacobson, former Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, and Brian Laden, former Assistant Director in Vanderbilt’s OTTED.
Like NCN’s Tennessee Angel Fund, TriStar is a recipient of TNInvestco funds. During the past year TriStar has used the proceeds from its sale of TNInvestco tax credits to invest in five health care companies. Four of them were already local and one—VenX—relocated to Nashville from Florida to receive funding from TriStar. (TNInvestco rules mandate that companies receiving TNInvestco funds must have their headquarters and at least 60 percent of their staff based in Tennessee within one year of receiving funding.)
“We have seen a great number of opportunities from companies outside the state that are willing to relocate to Middle Tennessee,” Rand says. “Not just in order to receive our investment, but also to take advantage of the strategic value that our group can bring, particularly the connections of someone as well-known and respected as Dr. Jacobson.”
Alumnus Christopher Rand is a Partner at TriStar Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that focuses on health care innovation.
Rand and his partners may no longer work at Vanderbilt, but they are still more than willing to invest in great ideas that come from Vanderbilt researchers. One of TriStar’s other portfolio companies is Pathfinder Therapeutics, a company that has developed a trademarked image-guided device called Explorer to help physicians deliver ablation therapy within soft-tissue organs. The technology behind Pathfinder came from the lab of Robert L. Galloway Jr., Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt. In the company’s early stages, Rand worked with Pathfinder’s current Chief Operating Officer Jim Stefansic, MS’96, PhD’00, who happened to earn his doctorate working in Galloway’s lab.
Rand also represents the close ties between Vanderbilt, Nashville’s venture capital community, and groups like NCN and NEC. While working at the university, Rand joined NCN’s board as a Vanderbilt representative and collaborated with Sid Chambless to get promising Vanderbilt-based entrepreneurial concepts in front of NCN investors. Now Rand looks at NCN’s deal flow more from the perspective of a potential co-investor. In his spare time he also serves on NEC’s finance committee and tries to be a resource for that organization’s members.
Rand would like to encourage more involvement between Owen students and Vanderbilt researchers looking to commercialize their ideas and build business plans. He acknowledges, though, that the students already have plenty of entrepreneurial opportunities— not only through Owen’s efforts to promote entrepreneurship, but also thanks to the exciting business climate that has taken shape in Middle Tennessee in recent years.
Before attending Vanderbilt, Rand worked in Atlanta during the dot-com boom, and that experience has afforded him insight into Nashville’s stature as a business hub. “Atlanta had a pretty entrepreneurial environment back then, but I think Nashville is still a much easier business climate to maneuver in,” Rand says. “It’s smaller, more open and more welcoming. It’s actually pretty easy to get in front of C-level people at almost any company in Nashville. In fact, I believe that the entrepreneurial environment in Nashville now rivals almost any place in the country. With TNInvestco, NEC, NCN, the angel investor community … and other programs at the state level, Nashville and Tennessee overall are simply great places to be an entrepreneur.”
Professor Gary Scudder, who was diagnosed with aggressive stage IV mantle cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in August 2009, has been cancer-free for more than a year.
This article and the accompanying sidebars discuss cancer from the perspective of two patients—Professor Gary Scudder and alumnus Michael Oyler—and a caregiver, student Sarah Burfitt. All three express gratitude for the help and encouragement they have received from Owen’s close-knit community, and they hope their stories provide solace for others facing similar journeys.
Imagine going to see your dermatologist and leaving her office knowing you have several swollen lymph nodes. That is exactly what happened to me in early August 2009. I was told “run, don’t walk” to my primary care physician, which I did—the dermatologist’s office even called to make sure I had followed their directions. My physician quickly ordered a CT scan, and it verified that my numerous swollen lymph nodes were likely a sign of some form of lymphoma. It actually took 20 more days until we had the final diagnosis: aggressive stage IV mantle cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
When any cancer is diagnosed, the words “stage IV” and “aggressive” are not what you want to hear and serve to raise anxiety levels to new highs. Immediately my mind jumped to scary questions like “How long do I have to live?,” “Is this kind of cancer curable?,” and so on. These questions and fears became an everyday part of my life for the next nine months.
At the beginning of September, my wife, Marti, and I met with our hematologist/oncologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center for the first time. He spent almost two hours explaining my particular disease and his treatment plan: six 21-day cycles of intense chemotherapy. In addition, at the end of these six treatments, I would be having a stem cell transplant, which would renew my immune system with cancer-free stem cells. My chemo regime showed great promise in clinical trials—which, incidentally, weren’t completed at the National Institutes for Health until last month.
During my first month of treatment, it was necessary to identify possible stem cell donors. If I was in total remission, I would be able to use my own stem cells, but if not, a matched donor would be necessary. Transplant recipients have a fatality rate of 15 percent or more, so this was a very anxious time for us. Both of my sisters were tested to see if either was a match and could be a donor. We were overjoyed when the call came that my younger sister was a perfect match! This was the first really encouraging piece of news on our journey.
Scudder with wife, Marti, at home
Thankfully I was spared the extensive side effects of chemo during my treatments. I believe one of the major reasons why was prayer. Yes, I had to deal with low blood counts, increased risk of infection, fatigue and other issues. I also ended up in the hospital twice during my stem cell transplant, going in both times late at night for high fevers. But overall I had little nausea, and my symptoms were not as bad as they could have been.
My first post-chemo scans were not until Nov. 23, or 11 weeks after the start of my treatment. We teach Owen students in our operations courses about managing waiting times and reducing anxiety, but I must admit it was very difficult to wait a week for the results. I felt like I had started a class, so to speak, when I was diagnosed back in August and there had been no feedback on my progress until those tests. It was as if all the weight was on the final exam.
On Nov. 30 we received news that most of my scans were clear, but there was one final result needed before I could be declared “squeaky clean.” My nurse practitioner had told me not to expect anything until the next day, but during her drive home she received the great news that my final scan was clean and called me from her car.
Having determined that I was in total remission, we proceeded with the stem cell collection and transplant. I was thankful that I was able to use my own cells and not those of my sister. The transplant occurred in March after two more rounds of chemo and a final, more intense round to kill my existing immune system. This last one was the hardest to tolerate, but we knew it was necessary for my future health.
As I write this, I have been in remission for more than a year, but doctors do not use the term “cured” for this disease. I am instead “cancer-free” and taking little medicine—a miraculous outcome given where I started in August 2009. I finally came back to Owen full time at the start of the 2010–11 school year, after missing an entire year for my treatments.
Every type of cancer is treated with its own protocol, but the journey for every patient and caregiver has similar highs, and especially lows. The hardest part for me was waiting for and receiving the initial diagnosis. Another low came when the doctor told me about the treatment. I had gone into the meeting with expectations of spending one day every three or four weeks receiving chemo (very typical for lymphoma patients), not four days in the hospital every three weeks. It also took a major change of mindset to adjust to the length of the treatment. There is no such thing as instant gratification when you get chemo—you can’t pay for a next-day cure!
I felt like I had started a class when I was diagnosed and there had been no feedback on my progress until those [post-chemo scans]. It was as if all the weight was on the final exam.
—Gary Scudder
How did I cope throughout the process? It took a lot of support of family, friends, our church, colleagues and the medical community. In particular, my wife and I relied on our Christian faith and took solace in the stories of the many folks who had taken this journey before us.
We want to thank everyone for the outpouring of love we have received. Many of you visited me while I was in the hospital, sent notes through CaringBridge, mailed cards, gave me rides to my semiweekly appointments, and brought us wonderful meals. We were well cared for by the Owen community, including current and past students, faculty and staff. Alums visited from as far away as California and Montana. Another alum sent me a hat to cover my bald head. (Speaking of bald heads, it has been interesting to observe how many men starting chemo are really concerned about losing their hair!)
In addition, I would be remiss not to express our overwhelming gratitude to the Vanderbilt nursing staff on 11 North, and my nurses and doctors in the hematology and stem cell transplant clinic. My care was exceptional!
Finally a special thanks is due to Dean Jim Bradford for his continuous support during this trying season of our lives. He kept me updated on major initiatives during the year, so when I returned to the faculty full time in June 2010, I was still knowledgeable about various aspects of the school.
A fellow mantle cell “journeyer” once wrote to me about blind turns in the cancer treatment process—we know the turns are coming but have no foreknowledge of what is around the corner. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” The first set of scans, the results of the stem cell donor testing, my semiweekly blood tests, my reactions to my treatments—many areas of our journey were filled with these blind turns. We received favorable news at each turn, but that is not guaranteed.
Trials like this change one’s perspectives on what is important in life. People become more important, daily tasks much less so. Trials are used to strengthen us for future trials and enable us to assist others who are suffering. My wife and I are already reaching out to several others making this journey (including Michael and Sarah, who wrote the accompanying sidebars). Please continue to keep us in your thoughts and prayers in the coming months as we pray for a durable remission—one that lasts five, 10 or even 20 years!
Gary Scudder is the Justin Potter Professor of Operations Management and the Faculty Director of International Programs.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and economics in 2011, Tim Maloney decided to stay at Vanderbilt for one more year. Having a master’s in finance, he believed, would be an important differentiator in a difficult job market.
In chemistry, if you want to get a reaction, you have to find a way to bring the right molecules together and have them bump into each other with sufficient force. Sometimes you need a catalyst to get things started.
