48 minute read
CONTRIBUTORS
Lisa Carricaburu
Lisa Carricaburu is managing editor of Informatics Decision Support at ARUP Laboratories. Before joining ARUP, she spent more than 25 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, most recently in the role of managing editor of The Salt Lake Tribune. Lisa earned an MBA from the David Eccles School of Business.
Katie Drake
Katie Drake is the Communications Manager for the Eccles School Marketing + Communications team. When she’s not doing Facebook Live or arranging faculty interviews, she can be found cheering for the Utes and the Oilers, on stage at one of Salt Lake’s community theaters, or planning her next trip with her husband and two daughters.
Stephanie Dunn
Stephanie Dunn’s passion for photography results in a unique ability to capture spontaneous moments and natural expressions that translate a story to the viewer. She is a graduate of Iowa State University and a Freelance Photographer for BW Productions in Salt Lake City.
Derek Jensen
Derek Jensen is the Director of Communications at Judge Memorial Catholic High School. He spent 20 years as an award-winning journalist covering sports, politics, urban planning and malfeasance at The Salt Lake Tribune, NPR affiliates and for Reuters. You can find him with his active family exploring Utah’s mountains, canyons and red rock as well as Salt Lake’s cultural and sports scenes.
Thad Kelling
Thad Kelling is the director of marketing and public relations at the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute. He has a master’s degree in communication from the University of Utah and diverse experience in fields including advertising, design, journalism, digital media, and project management. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter @thadkelling.
Leentje Klingensmith
Leentje Klingensmith is an Alumni Events and Marketing Specialist at the David Eccles School of Business and host of the Eccles Business Buzz podcast. She graduated with a B.S. in Marketing from the Eccles School and enjoys the opportunity to connect with and share alumni stories around the globe through a variety of mediums. Connect with her on LinkedIn @ leentjeklingensmith.
Paige Lichtenwalter
Paige Lichtenwalter is a Content Marketer at 97th Floor. Previously, she spent several years in a variety of communications fields and industries including alumni relations, B2B marketing, and franchising public relations. Paige is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of Texas Tech University with a B.A. in Public Relations.
Heather May
Heather May is an award-winning freelance writer based in Salt Lake City with 20 years of experience, including 15 years covering education, politics, health, and food at The Salt Lake Tribune. She is a graduate of the University of Utah in mass communication. Contact her on Linkedin @HeatherMaySLC.
Sheena McFarland
Sheena McFarland is the Director of Marketing + Communications at the David Eccles School of Business. Before joining the M+C team in 2015, she was a reporter and editor at The Salt Lake Tribune for more than a decade. She is an avid traveler and a rabid Real Salt Lake fan. Connect with her on LinkedIn or on Twitter @sheena5427.
By Heather May
GUTS, RESILIENCE, INITIATIVE, TENACITY
The COVID-19 pandemic has been unlike anything Nicholas and Company has faced in its 82-year history as the Intermountain West’s largest independent food distributor. It has proved worse than the downturn after the 9-11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 Great Recession. Perseverance is at the heart of one of the Eccles School’s core values, Entrepreneurial Grit. ey are values needed more than ever by students, faculty, and alumni to weather a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that has upended the world’s economy and work and school cultures. But despite the disruptions, the school and its alumni have found ways to flourish in the new normal.
But despite initial plummeting demand from its clients when restaurants and schools closed down, leading to Nicholas’ first company-wide layoff since its 1939 founding, the Utah-based company has rebounded and is set to thrive. Co-CEO Nicole Mouskondis BS’05, a University of Utah alumna and member of the Eccles Advisory Board, credits an ethos fundamental to her company, as well as to her alma mater: perseverance. at’s not to say it has been easy: “What we’re doing right now is going to be the basis of the business cases that we teach for the coming years,” said Teresa Pavia, faculty president and associate professor of marketing. “ is is managing through a crisis. We don’t have to talk about what happened when Enron collapsed. Instead we can ask, how did companies react during the pandemic?
“When you think about the founding of our company, my husband’s grandfather coming to America at age 17 as an immi- “ at’s something we need to hold onto when it feels uncertain grant from Crete, Greece. He didn’t speak the language. He and it feels chaotic: is is what history feels like.” hardly had two pennies to put together,” she said. “He had to be scrappy. It’s part of our DNA: We have grit and determination and perseverance. We always have.”
e business school itself had to manage the crisis when college courses went online in March after schools and most businesses were shut down. Classes mostly remained online over the summer and into the fall and winter. ( e University recently announced that classes would return to in-person in Fall 2021.) “You can’t pause for three weeks and extend the semester,” Pavia
said. “It was a lot of learning on the fly to make sure we were ready to go the next morning. It was an extraordinary amount of work for the faculty in March when everything came to a screaming halt basically overnight to start teaching in a completely different format.”
While the school has a highly ranked online MBA program, those courses are designed to be online, with lectures produced and recorded in a production studio. Other professors weren’t used to presenting their in-person work via Zoom. e turnaround was a huge technical challenge for the college’s IT staff — but one they met with aplomb. IT’s heavy lifting continued in the spring and summer once the University decided to offer a hybrid schedule in the fall. Mark Fowles, the Eccles School's technology integration engineer, researched the best way to allow professors to teach like they did pre-pandemic, but with technology to allow full integration of students logging in from home so they could hear not only the professor but also other students. He and his staff upgraded technology in 40 classrooms for $800,000. e faculty practiced dry runs, and the Eccles School took the unique step of hiring technology teaching assistants to ensure the classrooms ran smoothly.
“You can imagine if you’re a professor and you’re trying to teach a class and now you’re monitoring all the content shared on Zoom and monitoring all the participants,” said Fowles. “ at’s going to put a kink in your normal teaching style.”
Pavia said the IT work was vital to the faculty’s success. e school didn’t lose any faculty or students due to the pandemic; in fact, enrollment went up. “It’s not the social experience it [school] used to be but the education is there,” she said. “ e faculty I’ve talked to are just exhausted. ey are working so hard to try to live up to their own standards of what education should be.”
Faculty and students worked on a list of best practices (including being more flexible on deadlines, having more breakout sessions so students can get to know each other and keeping students in one group for projects to make it easier for remote coordination) for the spring semester to ensure students are getting the best education and to take into account the reality that hybrid school is 24/7.
“You do have to keep persevering,” Pavia said. “Learning to teach while wearing a mask, that is still a work in progress for all of us. Learning to teach to students who are spaced out in an auditorium with masks — you can’t see anybody’s face. You’re not getting any feedback.
“You have to keep climbing up the mountain. It’s just nothing like it used to be. We’re all trying to figure out what works best together.”
Nicole & Peter Mouskondis, Co-CEOs, Nicholas and Company
It would have been easy for the staff in the school’s Business Career Services & Corporate Outreach to use the pandemic as an excuse for not placing as many graduating students into jobs last spring. After all, Utah’s roaring economy sputtered to a halt, and students who had multiple offers for internships and jobs found those options rescinded in the midst of a market of massive layoffs and hiring freezes.
Instead, the team worked harder than ever. Assistant Dean Katie Hoffman Abby said they called all 1,200 “portfolio” companies — those with a strong track record of hiring from the U — to determine their hiring capabilities. It also analyzed the market to determine which industries were growing and then expanded their outreach to those new markets, such as telehealth and entertainment.
e attitude was, “We still have an obligation to help these students to find the best positions and the best career possible,” Abby said. “I was hoping to have similar results as [the 2018-19 year]. We ended up doing better. In fact, we had the highest salaries in the Spring Semester in the midst of COVID. e team just rolled up their sleeves and dug in and didn’t stop until the work was done.” e Eccles Alumni Network stepped up, too, she said. ose who could hire reached out to help. “ e fact the Eccles community is so strong just provided additional arms to wrap around our students to make sure they were going to be OK,” Abby said.
e job placement rate was nearly the same as pre-pandemic: 93% compared to 95%. And the average undergraduate salary was higher, at $54,000, with the specialty masters salary averaging nearly $69,000.
Crucially, the office worked one-on-one with graduating students to bolster their negotiation skills so they could advocate for what they are worth to the company, instead of simply being grateful for a job offer. Students with the applicable skills needed to know “they have the right to be compensated appropriately for that role,” Abby said.
ose workshops on negotiations and job analysis, along with online mock interviews, paid off.
Telehealth was one industry that skyrocketed during the pandemic, and Eccles alum Brandon Welch BS’07 PhD’14 was poised to take advantage with the company he co-created while at the U in 2013: Doxy.me. e company, based in Salt Lake City and Charleston, South Carolina, says it is the top telemedicine solution that healthcare organizations are relying on through the pandemic. e platform, which offers a free and secure virtual clinic experience, grew from hosting 80,000 healthcare providers pre-pandemic to 700,000 providers, who saw 90 million patients last year. Put another way, that’s five years of growth in less than one year.
What started as a way to help pregnant women in rural Utah avoid long trips to the doctor when in-person visits weren’t necessary became pivotal during a pandemic in which patients avoided doctor visits because of the coronavirus. e crush of interest forced the company to quickly boost its staff by a factor of 10 at the same time it was helping the hordes of healthcare providers use the platform, all while working remotely. It sought out talented employees who were laid off in foodservice and hospitality to do customer service and also individuals with backgrounds in user experience on the tech side who could manage large volumes of customers. “Our mission is to break down barriers to healthcare and deliver telemedicine for all,” said Doxy.me spokeswoman and partnerships manager Maggie MacMillan.
e pandemic was a spark to reveal telemedicine’s value, she said. But the technology will remain necessary even when the pandemic ends, particularly for rural residents. “We’re saving people valuable time and resources and money,” she said. “ ere’s no going back.”
Nicholas and Company learned from its past mistakes and moved quickly to right size the company, cut back on delivery days, add direct-to-consumer gourmet products and work with retail partners to meet the changing and increased needs of their shoppers. Half of its business comes from national accounts, largely fast-food companies whose customers have felt comfortable visiting because of drive-through windows. It added new national accounts in the Las Vegas market. Altogether, that has meant sales are down by just 15 percent.
Dylan Turner MBC'20 and Brandon Welch BS'07 PhD'14, Co-Founders, doxy.me
Attitude was as important as the hustle. Mouskondis said leaders decided they would get through the crisis and be stronger for it. ey note a lot of “COVID silver linings”: using technology to forge closer connections with far-flung staff, exercising empathy as the company emphasizes mental health, and the importance of looking out for each other. She’s confident that her sector’s hardest hit businesses, local fine dining, will come roaring back when vaccines are widespread.
“As with any crisis, the cream rises to the top. at’s what we’re feeling about ourselves,” Mouskondis said. “ at grit, that determination, that perseverance is what is going to allow us to emerge stronger.”
BORROWING BRAINS
FROM BIG TECH POSITIONS U GRADS ATOP THE SILICON SLOPES
By Derek P. Jensen
Surveilling the expanse of the Silicon Slopes in Utah, Heather Kahlert and Curtis Morley diagnosed a disconnect: the speed of tech was lapping our workforce—threatening to cost University of Utah graduates a shot at cracking the world’s most innovative industry as it staked ground right in our backyard. “I saw this huge gap in terms of the talent we’re putting out and the demand of these tech jobs,” says Kahlert, whose eight-figure investment to erect Kahlert Village is designed, in part, to position U. students atop the Slopes’ cutting-edge terrain. “We’re doing a disservice to students if we’re not educating them in 21st century jobs.”
In response, the Kahlert Initiative on Technology (KIT) launched just before the pandemic, offering an interdisciplinary Digital Literacy Certificate Program at the David Eccles School of Business. e mission: create the most digitally literate students on the planet, regardless of degree.
What sets KIT apart is its powerfully connected faculty. Stakeholders didn’t want university professors learning the material on the job, they needed to tap real-world experience. Perhaps the inventor of the Bitcoin exchange? Or what about the Chief Technology Officer at Ernst & Young in New York City — one of the globe’s top three companies working on blockchain technologies? Since students take the 21-credit, seven-course program online, KIT can connect them with the world’s most wired minds.
“It’s not just cutting edge, it’s bleeding edge,” says Curtis Morley, an entrepreneur from the Silicon Slopes whom Kahlert recruited to run KIT. “How cool is that? It’s like taking physics from Einstein or Impressionism from Monet.”
Undergrad Tyler Doman colors his time with KIT as the “differentiator” in his college experience. “We live in a digital world,” Doman says, “and weaving tech into my finance degree will set me apart in the competitive world of business.”
Morley, who started five separate tech companies in Utah, says contemporaries will often complain that they can hire accomplished business students who have “no clue” about tech. New hires would bedazzle with a business plan but stare blankly or bristle when asked to create a mobile app.
Professor Chong Oh and KIT Director Curtis Morley
To better equip so-called “Kahlert Scholars” for the jobs of the future, KIT introduces them to web and app development, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, predictive analytics, voice tech, cryptocurrency, blockchain, big data and the internet of things.
“Having that hybrid skill set opens up a lot of opportunities,” says Chong Oh, Director of Undergraduate Information Systems for the Eccles School, and a key KIT faculty member, who developed the curriculum. “You don’t have to have a computer science degree but if you can develop a website, hey, you’ve got a job.” KIT consists of seven classes but no prerequisites. And while the titles seem technical, Oh insists they remain accessible to students of all disciplines — from sociology to communications to dance.
ere are roughly 175 students in the certificate program, which has plenty of room to grow. And now that vaccines are plugging arms, more digital scholars will have a shot at landing big tech internships — paused throughout the pandemic — which KIT helps arrange.
Eccles student Annika Tanner
e timing couldn’t be better, as Oh points out the tech sector consistently has more available jobs than qualified candidates to fill them. “ is will really help our students and our companies grow,” says Kahlert, the primary donor. “It’s kind of like a classic Stephen Covey No. 4: ‘win-win.’”
But how do students in such a relatively short time acquire the competencies for real-world application — especially when many will be gunning for jobs that don’t yet exist? In a word, Hackathons. Intense contests, where students are given a technical objective, Hackathons at KIT have included the creation of a website, complete with digital marketing plans and social media, to help administer sustainable water sources to 170 million people in developing countries. e initiative, sponsored by Adobe and run in conjunction with WHOlives, created a business model to give ownership of wells to individuals, who then charge a small fee for water. All WHOlives wells are currently still operating.
In another session, students may develop mobile apps so they can pull their phone out in a future job interview to show off that skill set. ey also dove into the effectiveness of Super Bowl ads, using predictive analytics. And during the upcoming “Cyber Summer,” KIT scholars will notch four credits at once through an intensive program that employs coding, artificial intelligence and efficiencies in design.
Morley argues that while digital literacy today is “a completely new beast,” KIT can deliver the following five C’s: curriculum, credit, certificate, competence and career. “ ey do need to understand digital security and how it affects the workplace,” Morley explains. “It’s not education for education’s sake, it’s education for an accelerated business experience.”
KIT is one leg of an innovative and physical living-learning space — built with purpose — south of the Eccles Legacy Bridge known as Kahlert Village. e three components of the village include the Gail Miller Community Engagement Tower, the Patricia W. Child Health & Wellness Tower, and the Heather Kahlert STEM Tower. e latter can house up to 1,000 freshman and features a modern, modular main floor with high-tech learning spaces.
What KIT insiders emphasize is that the certificate program is wide open to undergraduate students of all majors. Since tech is so inextricably intertwined into our lives, a certificate in digital literacy, they predict, should pay dividends, regardless of the industry. To date, private donors have funded the scholarships to pay for every student enrolled. Kahlert, who hails from a family of engineers, began working on the U. project in 2017. She expects KIT will continue to mushroom, building bridges at every juncture to big tech. “Especially in terms of digital literacy and this era of Covid,” she says, “it couldn’t have come at a better time.”
Photos by Stephanie Dunn, BW Productions
e motivation for Kahlert, runs deeper. She sees her brainchild as a tangible tool to help solve a lifelong passion: empowering young women to success through the high-paying prism of STEM.
It may already be working. Marketing major Annika Tanner was the first graduate to earn a KIT Digital Literacy Certificate. And she’s keenly aware of that paper’s value. “KIT has been the highlight of my undergraduate studies,” Tanner says. “ ese courses have allowed me to connect my marketing degree with technology to become a more qualified candidate in a high-tech job market.”
Whispers about KIT’s potential have now extended from the Wasatch Front to California tech conferences to South Bend, Indiana, where Morley says officials have inquired about modeling a program at the University of Notre Dame. “ ese kids are getting the best in the world. It’s crazy.” Geography, everyone involved admits, plays an outsize role. After all, a slalom skier on a snowy I-15 probably faces higher odds of ricocheting off a tech business than glancing a gate in a race.
“No question about it,” Morley smiles. “Because we have the Silicon Slopes here, we’re able to tap into this talent pool that just isn’t anywhere else. Not only is Utah truly leading the nation in new business and entrepreneurship, but there really is a goodness about the people. ey really love to share. It really couldn’t happen anywhere else.”
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the FUTURE of WORK
by Lisa Carricaburu e COVID-19 pandemic has taught us plenty – painful, life-changing lessons drilled into us because we have had no other choice. We are agonizingly aware that business is not as usual.
As office work migrated home at the start of the global health crisis, technology companies predicted we would never work with one another in person again. “ ey weren’t talking about next month or next year, they meant for the rest of our lives, and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, is that really true? Will we forever be completely isolated from one another and just go to the store when necessary and wear masks all the time as if we were going into surgery?’” asked Derek Miller, president and CEO of the Salt Lake Chamber and Downtown Alliance. “I’m so grateful this has not come to fruition.”
e pandemic has accelerated trends that were already in motion, said Natalie Gochnour, associate dean of the David Eccles School of Business and director of the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. Technology-enabled services – online learning, e-commerce, telemedicine, telecommuting, etc. – that already were gaining acceptance became ubiquitous virtually overnight. We had no choice but to change our behaviors without a second thought.
“Our new experiences opened up new ways of doing things and it’s human nature to keep doing the things that work,” Gochnour said.
Of course, warp-speed change has many implications with which we must reckon. Primary among them is how dramatically our response to COVID-19 has widened the digital divide between those with access to and training in technology and those without, Gochnour said, but many other challenges also run deep.
“As we come out of the pandemic, the opportunity gap between urban and rural areas, between different industries, betwen genders and between those of varying socioeconomic status has gotten much wider,” she said. “ at’s the challenge for state and national leaders. You have to make sure there’s opportunity for all of society.”
Tech-Enabled Services’ Economic Toll
All employees felt an immediate impact from COVID-19, whether they worked in health care, in a hard-hit service industry, or in an office setting where they immediately found themselves working from home.
For the latter group, remote work turned out to be more feasible and productive than many had believed it could be. It also offered employees greater flexibility and other benefits, but it wasn’t long before many also realized something was missing.
“ e short-term solution of having everyone work remotely all the time is just that: a short-term solution,” said Chad Ariss, chief operating officer of Temkin Holdings LLC. “Face-to-face interaction is invaluable, and there will always be a need for it.”
Ariss, whose company owns and manages seven office buildings on three properties in Murray and Lindon, initially feared for the worst, but he and others did what business leaders do: ey adapted, and will continue to adapt and innovate.
What does this mean?
Cubicle farms will give way to spaces more conducive to collaboration, with room for ample physical distance for safer interaction. Flexible scheduling will be more commonplace as employees seek to retain some of the benefits they see through at least partial remote work, resulting in more “hoteling,” or sharing of workspaces by employees on different schedules.
“A lot of companies believe they may actually need more office space as they eliminate cubicles and rearrange to provide greater distances between employees,” said Mike Roderick, president and owner of Roderick Enterprises, a commercial real estate developer, brokerage, and property management company.
Roderick’s real-estate holdings total 2 million square feet, about 60% of which is industrial space and the rest retail space. He believes retail will remain the hardest-hit aspect of real estate as stores right size their footprints to survive the pandemic’s blow to their business.
“Strong, well-located Class A retail properties are going to get stronger and anything that is more marginal will go away,” he said, adding that this may create space and opportunity for badly needed residential development, particularly affordable housing, as Utah continues to grow.
In contrast, industrial real estate will continue to boom as e-commerce thrives and more companies develop onshoring solutions and pursue redundant supply-chain strategies. Utah is positioned well for this growth, he said. “We’re in a good location, with strong transportation hubs and a great airport,” Roderick said. “Even though prices have gotten crazy, we’re very competitive on a national basis.” Looking more broadly at the post-pandemic economy, Gochnour and Miller say business and government leaders have identified a path forward as they collaborate to help Utah emerge from a public health emergency while also working to re-energize the economy.
Commitment by Gov. Spencer Cox and Utah lawmakers to invest in digital equity will be key to expanding opportunity in both urban and rural areas, as will an emphasis on workforce retraining.
rough initiatives such as Talent Ready Utah, Miller sees retraining resources becoming more readily available to help ensure that those seeking work have skills that match available jobs. e value of private/public partnerships in this endeavor cannot be overemphasized, he said.
“Many programs already exist, through the technical colleges, Salt Lake Community College, and the David Eccles School of Business, and we want to be smart and help individuals with financial resources so they can avail themselves of great programs that we know are already working," Miller said.
Leaders see promise in the pandemic’s normalization of remote work as a way to help bolster opportunity in rural Utah, where there is potential for economic expansion that can help ease some of the Wasatch Front’s growing pains.
ey’re also optimistic about the opportunities that accompany any economic challenge, and see the Eccles School well-poised to contribute.
“ e complexity of the challenges and the opportunities we face will reward people who have the types of leadership, management, operations, and strategy skills we hone,” Gochnour said. “One thing we should never lose sight of is that we teach a lot of young people how to be successful entrepreneurs, and small business will have amazing opportunities moving forward.”
Miller believes that may be the pandemic’s silver lining.
“ ere will be some interesting things that come out of this in the way of innovation that we have no idea what they are,” he said. “It’s actually what excites me the most because it’s going to be a surprise to all of us.”
Photos by Stephanie Dunn, BW Productions campus pandemic education online hybrid growth students
success
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Optimizing Learning Opportunities
If you ask Associate Dean Brad Vierig which field he is in, he may reply, “customer service.” That label applied during the many years he spent as an executive for a national retail food and drug chain, but it also applies in his role as the person who directs all David Eccles School of Business Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) programs and Executive Education, which is made up of more than 25 nondegree courses and certificate programs. Vierig drew from his impressions as a student in the Executive MBA (EMBA) Program and his many years in the corporate world to help reshape MBA offerings to optimize every moment busy professionals spend learning. Here, he shares some insights with writer and Eccles alum Lisa Carricaburu on both his history with the Eccles School and the future of business education.
Lisa Carricaburu Describe how you came to the David Eccles School of Business. You’re not a career academic, correct?
Brad Vierig Correct. I was a certified public accountant at Ernst & Young, then I went to work as a senior financial officer at American Stores Co., a retail food and drug chain with headquarters in Salt Lake City. At one point, while I was a student in the EMBA Program, I told Dave Dungan, the program director at the time, “If you ever consider leaving your job, I'd like to have it. You work with smart people. You get to take students to learn on international experiences. It sounds like a really fun job and I enjoy teaching, so I'd be interested." ree years after I graduated, he called and said he was retiring and asked whether I would be interested in interviewing with Dean Jack Brittain for the director position. Initially, I thought I’d be here for just two or three years as I transitioned out of the corporate world, but here I am nearly 20 years later. Of course, my team grew with time and so did our responsibility. We took on the Professional MBA Program, then launched the MBA Online, and finally brought the Full-time MBA under our umbrella in 2015. I've really enjoyed my change of career and change of industries.
LC
Over the course of your career at the Eccles School, what factors do you think contributed to such success and growth in the programs?
BV My background and my history with the program helped. When I came in, I brought with me a desire for improved academics as well as what I thought was missing in education: customer service, a culture of innovation, and a willingness to try new things. ese concepts were new in education back then, and it was really something fun for me to jump into. I talked to other schools and listened to my students about what really would make a difference for them, and then we implemented changes. I had a list of about a hundred things coming in that I wanted to change, and we just started whittling away at the things that I thought were important. Some examples: In the early years of my time with the EMBA Program, we added new classes and implemented an iPad and a laptop program to make sure all the students were using the same technology. We started providing food so students could continue to collaborate and work with faculty rather than leaving for lunch.
I recognized early on that if you're going to have students come to class (in-person or virtually), regardless of which program they’re in, you have to make sure there is value in every minute they’re investing. Keep them engaged. Keep them networking. I came in with my vision of how I thought students should be treated and what they needed to learn. We have students from professionals with young families to high-level executives, and they’re all very busy. We want to take all the noise away so they can focus on their learning.
We have taken what we've learned and started branching it out into all of our degree programs, and our nondegree Executive Education programs as well. We were able to get our EMBA Program a top 20 ranking, our Professional MBA to top 50, our online MBA to top 10, and our full-time MBA to top 50. e top-three factors in our success are customer service, strong academics, and the culture we’ve built.
LC
What did you see happening in higher education that led you to believe that the Eccles School needed to be more prepared for online education?
BV I came from a brick-and-mortar retail chain, and we saw the Amazons of the world coming, so when I came to work here, I had come from that environment where I was always asking who the next competitor was and how they could really impact our opportunity to be successful. Sometime around 2013, MBA programs from around the country had started putting billboards along Interstate 15. ey were doing information sessions down the street from our campus. Dean Taylor Randall, Bill Hesterly (who holds the Dumke Family Presidential Chair in Strategic Management), and I talked about the need to offer online education to compete, and we decided to move really quickly. One of the things we did that led to our success is that we chose to develop our program ourselves. We hired instructional designers. We hired videographers. We hired editors. Within nine months, we had two faculty members who were behind us, and we launched our first online class. Before we knew it, within two years, we were a top 20-ranked online MBA program.
When we launched it in 2014, our very first semester, we had 17 students. is past fall, we admitted 90 online MBA students. e program has grown slowly but since the pandemic started, it's grown significantly. Enrollment across all four MBA programs is increasing with students who want to retrain and retool in response to this once-in-a-lifetime shock, but online in particular is growing. at’s because we have a highly ranked program that mirrors the quality of our on-campus programs. e same faculty members teach in all our MBA programs, and that's a very important quality indicator that not many schools can claim.
LC
Talk about when the pandemic hit. What did your team do to prepare?
BV We were fairly well-prepared, thankfully. We had the new Robert H. and Katharine B. Garff Building, which was built for executive education, MBA programs, and online-education facilitation. We had the faculty that we’d trained and developed; our faculty members had started to adopt technology in almost all of their classes. When the pandemic hit, we knew on a ursday afternoon that by Friday morning, we couldn't have class. Within less than 24 hours, we had four classes online on Zoom. We had successful classes the next day and the day after that. We were very fortunate. We also had the resources to help the rest of the business school. We had an online development team, and we could train faculty and staff who had never been online very quickly.
LC
Is there anything that you would have done differently when the pandemic hit?
months. It’s great for our future to really have everybody online so we can work together to figure out what works, what translates, and what doesn't. Apart from that, we hadn't really thought about having hybrid classes, with half your class in front of you and half of your class online. So over the summer, we had to make some changes to a building that was only 2 years old to accommodate a hybrid model. BV Had we known what was coming, we also would have pushed harder to get the faculty who had not previously worked with us online. Putting a camera in front of a professor and hopping on Zoom does not guarantee a successful online class. Our MBA online courses take months of preparation and development, so that’s really tough to compress to a matter of days. We thought we had five years to get it done in a way that met our standards, but obviously we ended up really accelerating our efforts. I’m grateful we have the resources to go online along with a very talented online development team that could train faculty and staff very quickly. What the pandemic has done for us in a positive way is that it has moved up the timeline for our five- to 10-year strategy to three or four
LC
Is there anything you’ve learned during the pandemic that you expect to stick?
ere are a lot of things that we're doing now that we BV wonder why we never did them before. One is our online alumni events. In the past, we would have faculty members present research once a quarter and we would get 20 or 30 students coming into the classroom on a Friday morning or at lunch. Now that we’re pushing the livestream option out, we're getting more than 100 people from around the globe. Our alumni outreach has really exploded. Of course, networking and getting to meet people is important, and we will always have on-campus learning. Faculty and staff and students, we all want to have connection. at will look different depending on the format students choose, but there's going to be a nice balance that will evolve between what we do online and what we do on campus.
LC
How are the students dealing with it now? Which problems have come up, and how have you solved them?
BV is has been hard on the students who weren’t used to online classes prepandemic. Many of our students never would have tried online learning, but once they did it, a lot of them really found that they could learn and liked the benefits that online brought. Obviously, many students will return to campus once they have the option, but online learning provides students with an opportunity to learn in different ways according to their style. If you’re a visual learner, watch the
lecture. If you learn best by reading, read the transcript. If you’re unclear on something, go back and rewatch a section. ere are some unique benefits to online.
We had a few students who elected to defer when presented with the option of online learning, but many students realize the world is changing and they need to stay in their programs. ey want to be well prepared to deal with both the positive and the negative impacts of what’s going to happen in the next year or two.
LC
What do you see as the future of online education?
BV We're going to always have a fully online program, and we're going to have fully on-campus programs as well. But I think that middle space, the hybrid learning, is going to grow. We're going to have to re-evaluate all of our classes and programs in the business school to really assess what percentage should be online and what percentage should be on campus. We’re going to keep the best parts of what we're learning and adapt and adopt.
LC
Speaking of your students, which qualities are you trying to create in business leaders? How do you define success?
BV We’re all wondering what’s going to happen in the next few years and how it will impact us. We want students to draw from our strategic leadership, finance, accounting, and other classes to build the problem-solving and decision-making skills they need to establish their strategies and vision for the future while remaining flexible in a changing world. I define success as seeing students accomplish what I say to all of them coming in: Learn, then go back and apply it. at's the real benefit of an MBA or executive education: applying what you learn. Don't learn and absorb it and never use it. Use it, apply it, and make a difference in this world. Go out and change things. Improve things. Take care of your people, whether those are customers, patients, employees, whomever. Do whatever that might be to affect positive change.
OUTGAMING RISK
How Companies Learn To Avoid Disasters
By Katie Drake
The Titanic. Chernobyl. Hurricane Katrina. Plenty of people are obsessed with these types of disasters. But for Nitin Bakshi, Associate Professor of Operations and Information Systems, the near miss (a close call) is far more compelling.
Often we tend to think of disasters as black swan events for which there is absolutely nothing that could have been done. Yet in reality, they often leave tell-tale clues in the form of near misses in the build-up to the disaster. Th ese near misses embed valuable lessons on how improve processes that help contain the risk of disaster.
“Each disaster can be thought of as a sequence of steps,” Bakshi said. “While the culmination of such a sequence into an explosion or pandemic is extremely rare, the probability of the intermediate steps, or near misses, that lead to the larger event can be much higher.”
Strong companies are alert to these precursors and near misses, and they work to gather information that allows them to mitigate those risks. But oftentimes, management is too far removed from processes, does not observe these small faults or oversights, and seemingly insignifi cant issues can escalate into a major disaster. An example that illustrates these challenges is the explosion at BP’s
Texas City oil refi nery in 2005, which killed 15 people, injured 180, and caused losses running into billions of dollars. Contractors had overfi lled a distillation column during a startup procedure and also applied excessive heat, releasing a vapor cloud that was then ignited by a nearby idling engine. Th e disaster investigation determined that operators had overfi lled the distillation column during startup on 18 occasions in the previous fi ve years, but without adverse consequences (i.e., near misses); the excess crude was consumed in the production run. Th e contractors did not report these violations to management. Unable to investigate the incidents to determine their root cause, the fi rm lost the opportunity to implement safety improvement measures such as installing an automatic cutout to prevent overfi lling or installing a fl are to safely burn escaping hydrocarbons.
In more recent events, new viruses may develop, but often they die out before spreading to the human population. In the current coronavirus pandemic, the virus managed to escalate from the intermediate steps (near misses) and become a global pandemic.
So, how can companies fi nd these issues and weed them out? Bakshi believes the solution lies with empowering employees down the line.
First, companies need to foster a safe environment for employees to report issues. Employees may be concerned about repercussions for mistakes or problems, even if they were not at fault, and that can lead them to choose safeguarding themselves and their teams instead of reporting.
Employees also require appropriate incentives to help improve processes. Many times, fi rms entirely retain any profi ts or gains discovered through process improvements. Bakshi suggests sharing the gains by incentivizing employees through long-term safety bonuses that encourage reporting of near misses while at the same time discouraging negligence.
Even with these safeguards, disasters are bound to happen, but Bakshi believes their incidence can be reduced and their outcomes mitigated by fi nding those near misses. He points to the current pandemic as an example. Epidemiologists can predict that these new virus outbreaks will occur, but through diligent reporting and process improvement (e.g., in the “wet markets” that sell fresh meat and fi sh), most won’t make it out into the general population. We need to examine where the breakdown occurred, and fi nd those opportunities to improve.
— Nitin Bakshi
NITIN BAKSHI
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF OPERATIONS
Dr. Nitin Bakshi focuses his research on the management of disruption risk in operations and supply-chain management, with an emphasis on “low-probability high-consequence” events. Topics he has studied include how to design and manage resilient supply chain networks; operational and communication policies in the face of terrorism risk, and structuring incentives for after-sales service of new aircraft engines that incur rare but costly failures. He is currently investigating how to manage reporting of accident precursors to enhance safety in dangerous operations. His work has been published in top academic journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, and Production and Operations Management. He holds a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay; an M.S. in Management Science from Stanford University; and a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
INVESTING IN FAMILIES
How Paid Family Leave Ultimately Benefi ts Business
By Katie Drake
Paid family leave seems like a simple solution to narrowing the gender gaps in pay and employment. In fact, many academics and policymakers have advocated for paidfamily-leave policies with just that in mind. But the real-world impacts of leave policies may be more of a mixed bag, according to research by Elena Patel, Assistant Professor in the Business Economics Group in the Department of Finance.
While the policies extend leave-taking practices, they also seem to nudge some new mothers out of the labor market, Patel and her co-authors found in an extensive review of the 2004 California Paid Family Leave Act (CPFL). For example, fi rst-time mothers taking advantage of the CPFL saw a 7% reduction in employment and an 8% reduction in annual wage earnings over 10 years. On the other hand, the policy had little impact on employment or wage earnings for mothers who have subsequent children.
Determining whether the negative impact of CPFL on women’s careers is driven by discrimination by employers or whether new mothers were simply opting out of the workforce, however, is challenging.
“Given the relatively moderate increase in paid leave with the 2004 act, particularly in comparison to European policies, we were surprised to see that new mothers seem to be nudged out of the labor market,” Patel said. “It’s diffi cult to imagine that employers systematically discriminate against new mothers but not against mothers with young children. For this reason, we look for clues that mothers with access to paid family leave invest more in their children.”
California law had previously aff orded mothers in the workforce six weeks of partially paid leave to bond with their newborns. Th e CPFL increased the available leave to 12 weeks after July 2004.
In the study, researchers compared mothers who gave birth after July 2004 with full access to CPFL to mothers who gave birth just before July 2004 and were technically eligible for paid leave but constrained in their ability to use it. Th e research centered on a decade’s worth of IRS tax fi lings, wage fi gures, and U.S. Census surveys. Patel had unique access to this data from her previous position at the U.S. Department of Treasury.
All in all, the team estimates “the annual wage earnings of new mothers taking up paid leave were $1,600 to $2,600 lower in the short term and $2,500 to $3,700 in the long run.” Some of this wage loss may have been off -set by self-employment income
— Elena Patel
as mothers sought more fl exible work arrangements, Patel said. Mothers in California appeared to have stronger relationships with their kids following the introduction of CPFL, according to the study’s analysis of U.S. Census data. In fact, working mothers who took advantage of the act read to their kids more often, eat breakfast with them more frequently, and take them on more outings.
Participating mothers also tend to have fewer children, generally fostering stronger bonds within a smaller family. Patel and her co-authors Martha Bailey of the University of Michigan, Tanya Byker of Middlebury College, and Shanthi Ramnath of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago hope the fi ndings will promote and inform policy discussions over paid family leave.
ELENA PATEL
ASSISTANT FINANCE PROFESSOR
Elena is an Assistant Professor in the Finance Department at the University of Utah. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2013. She spent six years working as a Financial Economist in the Department of the Treasury’s Offi ce of Tax Analysis, where she worked extensively on issues of optimal corporate taxation. As an applied microeconomist, her main research interests are in the fi elds of industrial organization, health economics, regulatory economics, and public fi nance. Her research agenda focuses on the behavioral responses of businesses to the U.S. tax system. In addition, she has done work developing a greater understanding of the competitive interaction between nontraditional organizational fi rm structures, including associated antitrust issues. Finally, she works on issues of female labor supply and responses to paid family leave policies.
INVESTING INTERNATIONALLY
SEC Regulation Simplifi es Across Borders
By Katie Drake
Although many academics point out the many benefi ts of diversifying portfolios globally, investors tend to overinvest at home and underinvest abroad — a phenomenon known as “home bias.” Why do investors forgo the benefi ts of international diversifi cation? It turns out that investing in foreign markets is risky business — in part, because if fraudsters take advantage of foreign investors, it’s diffi cult for regulators to investigate and prosecute wrongdoers. For decades, these problems seemed insurmountable for securities regulators. But recently, regulators have made monumental advances in their cross-border capabilities.
Roger Silvers, Assistant Professor of Accounting, is the world’s leading expert on the topic of cooperation between securities regulators and recently won FESE’s prestigious de la Vega prize for his study of regulatory cooperation and global market integration. In the article, he shows a boost in foreign investment — to the tune of roughly $1.8 trillion — at the diff erent times that various pairs of securities regulators begin to cooperate.
“Cross-border investment and market integration depend, in large part, on regulators from both countries working together to extend legal and institutional capacities across their borders,” Silvers says. Silvers’ insights are not purely academic … they also leverage his time as a senior economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and extensive consultation and interaction with securities regulators and international bodies around the world (including the CFTC, World Bank, IOSCO, World Federation of Exchanges, and securities regulators in Israel, the Netherlands, and Singapore).
Recently, geopolitical events have thrust Silvers’ expertise into the limelight. Th is summer, the failures of U.S.-listed Chinese companies led Congress to take action. Pending legislation threatens to delist from U.S. markets any fi rms that do not comply with U.S. fi nancial regulations. “Th e law would put a target squarely on China, which for years has been unable or unwilling to cooperate,” Silvers wrote in an op-ed in Barron’s. “Management at the SEC changes every few years, and new blood brings renewed optimism about the prospect of negotiating with China. Previous failures get chalked up to staff -level shortcomings — U.S. offi cials simply didn’t make the right arguments, create the right incentives, or negotiate hard enough to be successful.”
But Silvers argues that the pursuit of legislative proposals suggests that it’s actually not possible for the SEC to secure China’s assistance through conventional negotiations. In fact, he submitted a comment letter to the SEC’s Roundtable on Emerging Markets Risks (July 9, 2020) that outlines a proposed path toward better cooperation with China and beyond.
— Roger Silvers
ROGER SILVERS
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ACCOUNTING
Roger received an undergraduate degree in accounting from Lynchburg College in Virginia and has several years of experience working as a cost accountant in a small manufacturing company and as an analyst at DuPont. Before joining the David Eccles School of Business, Roger received a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. His current research program focuses on the enforcement of securities laws and international cooperation between regulators. His work has been published in the Journal of Accounting Research.
STRATEGY AT STAKE
Confl ict Between People and Profi ts
By Katie Drake
Should fi rms maximize the wealth of their shareholders or address the interests of all their stakeholders? Th is debate has raged for some time, and has often been couched in these two extreme positions. But according to recent work by Jay Barney, Presidential Professor of Strategic Management at the David Eccles School of Business, both these extremes are diffi cult to defend. Barney’s work on this debate — along with his research in many other areas — has made him a world-renowned expert in strategy, with more than 170,000 citations — the most citations of any scholar at the University of Utah and among the top in the fi eld of strategic management.
According to Barney, a fi rm that focuses only on maximizing the wealth of its shareholders eff ectively makes the following off er to its non-shareholder stakeholders: “You work like crazy, demonstrate loyalty and commitment, and make the kinds of investments in us that are necessary for our fi rm to generate economic profi ts — and all the profi ts you help us create will go to our shareholders.”
Most rational self-interested non-shareholder stakeholders will say “no deal” to this off er. Th ere is no reason for these stakeholders to provide a fi rm access to profi t-generating resources if they do not have the opportunity to share in some of the profi ts these resources may help create. Firms that strictly implement a “shareholder supremacy” policy cannot expect their non-shareholder stakeholders to provide them access to profi t-generating resources. And without these resources, where do these fi rm profi ts come from?
Most fi rms get this, and already reward stakeholders that help generate economic profi ts — critical employees, scientists, engineers, suppliers, and customers — in ways that enable these stakeholders to share in some of the profi ts they help create.
But fi rms that reward these critical non-shareholder stakeholders need not jump to the other extreme and try to make decisions that address the interests of all of their stakeholders. Confl icts among stakeholders in how they would like to see a fi rm managed almost always emerge. And sometimes, these confl icts are impossible to resolve. Assertions that a fi rm will try to address the interests of all its stakeholders, without recognizing that these interests will often confl ict, ring distinctly hollow.
But Barney’s research has found a middle ground. It begins by recognizing that not all stakeholders have the same claim on a fi rm’s profi ts. Some stakeholders provide resources that enable a fi rm to continue its operations, but are not the source of economic profi ts. While these stakeholders must be compensated fairly, they do not have a claim on a fi rm’s profi ts because they do not provide the fi rm with profi t-generating resources. However, stakeholders that do provide profi t generating resources do have such a claim. Indeed, if this claim is not recognized, fi rms will not be able to attract these profi t-generating resources.
Ultimately, one of senior management’s most critical strategic tasks is to identify and assemble resources that have profi t making potential. Th is will usually involve gaining access to profi tgenerating resources from non-shareholder stakeholders. At the same time, stakeholders that provide resources that are not likely to generate economic profi ts need to be compensated fairly and treated with respect and dignity.
— Jay Barney
JAY BARNEY
PROFESSOR OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
Jay Barney is a Presidential Professor of Strategic Management and the Pierre Lassonde Chair of Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. He previously served as a professor of management and held the Chase Chair for Excellence in Corporate Strategy at the Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business. He has served as an offi cer of both the Business Policy and Strategy Division of the Academy of Management and the Strategic Management Society and has served as an associate editor at the Journal of Management, senior editor for Organization Science, and co-editor at the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal.
