Fa rm er S c h o ol of Busi n es s
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P6 – Still Going Beyond – HIGHLIGHTS:
P18 MEET THE DEAN
P21 BIG DREAM MAKES BIG IMPACT
M i a m iO h .e d u /f s b
P24 WHAT’S YOUR BRAND
P32 CLASS OF 2020 PLACEMENT DATA
In This Issue Still Going Beyond. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Keeping the Experiences Real…in a Virtual Environment . . . . 6
Editor/Writer/Designer Addie Rosenthal ’80 MBA ’85
Students, Faculty and Staff Rise to the Challenge. . . . . . . . . . . 9
Writer Jay Murdock
Behind the Mask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Photographers Jay Murdock Miami University Historic photos supplied by their owners
Maintaining Closeness While Keeping Your Distance. . . . . . . 16
Issue Design Val Hoffman Design, LLC
Big Dream Makes Big Impact. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
External Relations 513-529-4221 Kirk Bogard Associate Vice President for Development and External Relations Farmer School of Business bogardks@miamioh.edu
What’s Your Brand?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Meet the New Dean. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
From Dorm Room to Board Room. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Class of 2020 Placement Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Faculty in the News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Have a story to share? deanofbusiness@miamioh.edu The Journey is published twice a year by the External Relations department of the Farmer School of Business at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Copyright ©2020, the Farmer School of Business. All rights are reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without written permission is prohibited.
Excellence In and Beyond the Classroom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Named Professors & Endowed Chairs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Special thanks to proofreader Megan Langhals
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– welcome – It seems so appropriate that I introduce myself to you in a magazine called “The Journey,” because that so perfectly describes what my first few months as dean have been. I’m certain the same is true for most of you. But, if there’s one thing you remember about the Farmer School, it’s our faculty and staff ’s dedication to providing transformative experiences for our students. Even a pandemic didn’t diminish that.
In the middle of March, when the governor mandated that in-person classes switch to remote learning, we didn’t miss a beat. As you will see, our faculty pivoted overnight, delivering their courses in ways that ensured continued, active student engagement. Classes that were in the middle of client projects continued – and students quickly devised solutions to “meeting” with their teams and interacting with faculty and their clients. Interactive online presentation skills were seamlessly integrated, impressing their clients (and their dean)! Signature Farmer School programs, including international study and career fairs pivoted as well. Read about it all in our special “Still Going Beyond” section.
As I get to meet our alumni, I am impressed by how they continue to excel and have a positive impact, like young alumni Allie Pearson (Engelhart) and Esther Ladipo who prioritize giving back, and Brandon Cruz and Clint Jones whose friendship has spanned the decades from first year roommates to founders of a public company – hiring Miami students all along the way. Finally, you know that our faculty are outstanding teachers, but did you know that they also publish in some of the most rigorous academic journals? Because of their scholarship and the reputations they build, they are often sought after as subject-matter experts by public media and organizations.
The result is that our graduating seniors are even more beyond ready for career success. Even though many companies were negatively impacted by the economic ramifications of COVID-19, employers actively competed for our students and we’re pleased to share hiring statistics on the Class of 2020.
In a challenging environment, I can not think of any place I would rather be. b
Love and Honor,
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Jenny Darroch Dean and Mitchell P. Rales Chair in Business Leadership
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– Still Going Beyond – Even under COVID-19 restrictions, our students, faculty and staff pivoted, finding new ways of connecting and creating exceptional experiences.
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Keeping the Experiences Real... IN A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT during a challenging time. WCIW made a big difference in people’s lives this year, all while being virtual.”
Even in a pandemic, Farmer School faculty and students found innovative ways to incorporate experiential learning opportunities into their experiences, starting within days of Miami University’s move to online learning in March.
Much like Creativity City, the Miami University Blockchain Club’s planned 2020 conference also had to make sudden changes due to the pandemic. But also much like Creativity City, it gave organizers the opportunity to take the conference to a global level. Instead of 10 speakers, the conference hosted nearly 60 on its virtual platform, talking about blockchain’s impact in enterprise, banking and finance, government, supply chain logistics, healthcare, social impact, and digital currencies topics.
Normally held on the front lawn of the Farmer School, Creativity City instead went worldwide with an online platform.A celebration of World Creativity and Innovation Week, Creativity City News allowed visitors to take part in a series of daily-changing creative activities, much as they would have if they visited the traditional Creativity City.
The club’s members wove the speakers’ livestreams through Whova, allowing participants to network, ask questions, and interact with each other. Making the conference virtual also allowed nearly five times as many people to attend as originally planned.
“The week went better than I ever could have imagined because of the amazing students running it. It really exemplified how the students could deal with the changes, challenge, and ambiguity that was continuously being thrown at them,” senior ISA and entrepreneurship major Jordyn Zahoransky said. “People around the world joined in to celebrate - making a bright week of memories
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“I thought it was a great accomplishment given the environment we were in at the time. This was a huge undertaking to coordinate and shift to a virtual platform,” advisor and panelist Adam Koehler, owner of the Reversed
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The competitions virtually brought in more than 120 industry and entrepreneurship leaders to act as judges, including many who could never had taken part in the event if it was in person. “This is really a case study in what entrepreneurship is, really pivoting and adjusting and dealing with the unknowns. And I just continue to be in awe of everything that you guys do with the resources that you have,” Jeffrey Kadlic, founding partner of Evolution Capital Partners, noted.
Out agency, said. “The team did an excellent job with the pivot and finding technical solutions to make it happen. Also, their ability to get the quality speakers during this time was impressive.” A pair of annual pitch competitions, the Business Case Road Test and the Venture Pitch Competition, moved to virtual events in May, bringing a whole new learning experience for students taking part. “My biggest takeaway from this experience is maintaining a strong team connection while working completely isolated and virtually. Right off the bat, we established each of our strengths and weaknesses and were transparent about them. This helped us to delegate tasks to “ MAINTAINING certain members of MEANINGFUL the team while playing AND HONEST to our strengths,” Road Test participant COMMUNICATION Nebraska WAS ENCOURAGED Emily noted. “Maintaining AS WE SPOKE meaningful and honest OFTEN IN OUR communication was GROUP MESSAGES encouraged as we ABOUT CLARIFYING spoke often in our DEADLINES AND group messages about clarifying deadlines RESPONSIBILITIES. WE ALSO ALL KEPT and responsibilities. AN OPEN MIND AND We also all kept an open mind and POSITIVE ATTITUDE positive attitude WHEN IT CAME when it came to TO ACCEPTING accepting feedback and brainstorming.” FEEDBACK AND
Inside the virtual classrooms, students adapted quickly to the new world of learning in a pandemic. Gillian Oakenfull’s marketing capstone class moved to remote learning the day before they were to meet with Procter & Gamble executives to get their project client brief. Students met in group chats on Zoom with Oakenfull to continue to deep-dive into complex marketing concepts, discuss their progress with the projects are going, ask questions, and made periodic practice presentations, which required some coordination among the group members located states apart. They also checked-in virtually with the client team once a week to simulate a real-world client/vendor relationship. “Dr. Oakenfull made the transition seamless. Immediately, she was prepared with various online tools that allowed us to still get face time with her as well as time with our teams,” Brianna Woods explained. “The ease of this class’s transformation really helped when transitioning four other classes all at once. She turned this somewhat-negative experience, especially as a senior, to a positive, relatable work life experience.”
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Dr. Jay Shan’s ISA 414/514 course on managing big data challenged students to work on any analysis they chose using any type of tools or models they wanted. Those analyses later formed projects for the students to submit to the worldwide Teradata Analytics and Data Challenge over the summer.Three teams from Miami made the finals of the analytics portion of the competition, and one team won the challenge. “We decided to analyze COVID-19 cases because we began the project in the middle of last semester, when there were a lot of unknowns and a big media frenzy,” Claire Galberg explained. “We tried to build a regression model to predict COVID-19 deaths based on other variables like population and a time series analysis of the number of cases and deaths to predict what those numbers would be for a two-week period.”
“I am very proud with the performance of all three Miami teams who were selected as finalists in this prestigious competition, with a special congratulations to the team finishing on top. Our teams tackled a diverse set of interesting, important, and globally relevant issues,” Shan said. “All of our teams brought forth great passion and creativity along with their strong analytical skills. It is another testament to the experiential learning in our curriculum.” b
“We kept our team motivation up and continually pushed the project forward. We had good communication within the team, which kept everyone being productive,” Toby Yang said. “We were still communicating while finalizing the presentation even though I was six hours ahead in Switzerland.”
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Students, Faculty and Staff
Rise to the Challenge
He noted that remote learning can be disruptive for students, but also presented an opportunity for tangible benefits. “We’ve tried to position this as
The COVID-19 pandemic created many challenges, but it also created many opportunities for those willing and ready to help. Farmer School students and faculty rose to the challenge in many different ways over the course of 2020.
‘Here’s another opportunity to learn, to develop skills to work remotely, because most of the time, you’ll have some sort of remote interactivity with either staff or customers,’” McGlothin noted. “So I’ve kind of
Visiting assistant professor Justin McGlothin used his knowledge of technology to create a series of videos to help other faculty prepare for the change to remote learning and to help students and faculty learn to communicate effectively.
positioned it as a really good thing to add to their skillset.” Meanwhile, accountancy professor Brian Ballou became a familiar face for hundreds of KPMG interns in the United States this summer as he led them through parts of their virtual training sessions. Ballou and Auburn professor emeritus Rick Tabor developed and recorded portions of the KPMG Virtual Internship Experience.
“The first couple of videos I put together were staff- or faculty-facing. Then a switch went off in my mind to not do just faculty-facing videos, but to do them in a way that could help students too,” McGlothlin recalled.“One of the videos I put together was how to do a team presentation on WebEx. The idea there was to help educate our faculty on how it could be used, and then also in the same format, be able to share it with students so that they could learn how to use it as well.”
“In a normal summer, we’ll go around to a number of offices and do workshops for interns on how to think about clients from a risk-based perspective,” Ballou said. “This year, obviously, we couldn’t do that.”
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– Still Going Beyond – “What we were able to do is convey some of the leading skills and abilities that accountants need to be successful in today’s environment. We used publicly-available information to convey different areas of knowledge and expertise that should be useful to them in public accounting,” Ballou explained. “So they can get a sense of When I called, she told the residents about it and they were so excited,” Speelman said. “If you want to see something done, you’re more than capable of doing it and anyone can make an impact. It doesn’t even have to be something big. I’m sure I got a couple hand cramps here and there, but that’s the most minor inconvenience,” Speelman explained. “Seeing
the smiles when I do these letter dropoffs it just makes it so worth it. It’s very easy to make an impact, so I would just emphasize to do what you can.”
how things work in public accounting and then what they might want to work on while they’re still in school before they go back to the firm.” Lauren Speelman, a sophomore marketing major, decided to bring some happiness to healthcare workers and patients dealing with the pandemic. “I had seen people collecting letters and delivering them to hospitals, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s such a great idea,’” Speelman recalled. “And for about a week, I was waiting around, seeing if someone in my community would do it. And when I didn’t see that happening, I asked myself, ‘Why don’t I do that?’”
Some Farmer School students took on a more direct role in finding solutions to pandemic problems, even if they didn’t know it when classes began. Entrepreneurship professor Tom Heuer’s Corporate Entrepreneurship students were tasked with finding alumni-founded UVC The Light Force a go-to-market strategy and ways for the company to be socially responsible. Heuer’s Enterprise Consulting class was doing consulting work with Gravity Diagnostics at the same time. Both companies suddenly found themselves on the front-lines of the fight against COVID-19.
From her home near Columbus, Speelman reached out to organizations, groups, and friends, asking them to contribute to a program she called Stamps of Support. More than 200 letters later, she was delivering them to Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Mount Carmel St. Ann’s Hospital, and a senior citizen home. “The woman that came to the door to meet me, she was almost in tears.
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Seven teams of students were assigned to tackle the two concepts sought by UV-C The Light Force. The day after the company explained their anti-microbial UV-C light system to the students, Miami University moved to remote learning due to the coronavirus.
Ted Knauf, director of business operations at Gravity Diagnostics, wrote. “Your students have demonstrated an immense capacity for understanding how a business can succeed by building an understanding of the market, stakeholders, etc. — no doubt this will serve them well in any entrepreneurial endeavors they pursue.”
“It was pretty remarkable that it happened to be this particular client that we had gotten at this particular time,” junior entrepreneurship and English literature student Nick Murphy said. “I think it made our research definitely more applicable, but also just more engaging. It was so topical and we could feel like we were really contributing something that was relevant to a massive issue on a global scale.”
Information systems and analytics professors Maria Weese and Waldyn Martinez helped chemistry and biochemistry faculty in their search for possible treatments for antibiotic-resistant secondary infections common with COVID-19 by using technology tools to help the effort. “To find a potentially useful compound, a laboratory would have to test millions of possible compounds — making the search much like finding a needle in a haystack,” Weese said. “This is where a machine learning model can help.”
“There was not a group of students on this project from which we didn’t pull something we could use from their presentation,” company founder Rick Rechter II said. “We felt so privileged to be part of the program, and it was a fun experience to work with the students and get their input. They’re all much smarter than I am. So it was very beneficial.”
Weese and Martinez worked with Center for Analytics and Data Science interns on the project, which continued into the fall. “The CADS students extracted thousands of measurements about each chemical compound (structure, bond strengths, etc.) and related those structural measurements to whether these compounds are likely to be a good inhibitor or not using a machine learning model,” Weese said.“The machine learning model is able to rank the compounds from most likely to be a good inhibitor to least likely and can be applied to any compound’s structural characteristics.”
Meanwhile, Gravity Diagnostics was tasked by the state of Kentucky with providing 48-hour turnaround times for COVID-19 tests. The students worked closely with the company throughout this semester to assist them with some of their strategic growth goals. “We helped them define their Unique Value Proposition so they can show people how special their testing really is,” student Molly Zilch said. “We have learned that it is more than just a test, it is about that individual person who they are helping whether it be drug addiction or they are severely sick.”
Time and again in 2020, the faculty and students at the Farmer School of B It is creative problem solving, at its core Business rose to the occasion to take advantage of the opportunities presented during the global pandemic, ensuring that they would be Beyond Ready for whatever the future holds. b
“This group is incredibly professional and have produced quality content for Gravity. They definitely get an A+ from me,” 11
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CAN YOU GUESS WHO’S BEHIND THE MASK?
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BEHIND THE MASK ...revealed!
ALLISON JONES-FARMER Van Andel Professor of Business Analytics & Professor Information Systems & Analytics
ANNE FARRELL PricewaterhouseCoopers Professor of Accountancy & Professor Accountancy
AUSTIN SMITH Assistant Professor Economics
BRIAN BALLOU EY Professor of Accountancy, William Isaac and Michael Oxley Center for Business Leadership Faculty Fellow & Professor Accountancy
JOSEPH KOONTZ Director of Information Technology FSB IT
CHANELLE WHITE Assistant Dean & Director of Divisional Advising Academic Advising
LISA ELLRAM James Evans Rees Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management & Professor Management
HENRY JIN Associate Professor Management
JAN TAYLOR Senior Lecturer & Director of FSB Honors and Scholars Program Marketing & Office of the Dean
JENNY DARROCH Dean and Mitchell P. Rales Chair in Business Leadership & Professor Office of the Dean & Marketing
JING LI Associate Professor Economics
KIRK BOGARD Associate Vice President for Development and External Relations Office of the Dean
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MARY ELIZABETH THOMPSON BADGETT Assistant Professor Finance
MICHAEL MCCARTHY Professor & Chair Marketing
MICHAEL GOWINS Instructor Information Systems & Analytics
ROCCO MANZO Senior Clinical Lecturer Management
SCOTT DUST Dr. John F. Mee Professor in Management & Assistant Professor Management
JOHN “SKIP” BENAMATI Professor & Chair Information Systems & Analytics
MELISSA THOMASSON Chair and Julian Lange Professor of Economics Economics
TIMOTHY GREENLEE Senior Associate Dean & Professor Office of the Dean & Marketing
TIM HOLCOMB Chair & Director, John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship & Endres Associate Professor Fellow & Associate Professor Entrepreneurship
JONATHAN GRENIER Professor & Miami PRIME Director Accountancy
EMILY AKIL Assistant Director of Global Business Programs Global Studies
BELINDA CROSS Administrative Assistant Information Systems & Analytics
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Maintaining Closeness While Keeping Your Distance about his internship with China-based BitBoom Fund Management. “I am also learning a lot about Chinese business culture and how it compares/differs from that of the US. Overall, the experience has been valuable!”
One of the challenges that Farmer School faculty faced in 2020 was to make remote learning as personal and connective an experience for students as possible, and with no lead time.
The popular Miami PRIME summer program, designed to provide a base of business knowledge to non-business majors, was especially popular when it became virtual, welcoming the second-highest number of students in the program’s history. “I wanted every professor to interact with the students. I didn’t want it to be, ‘OK, we just posted videos and here’s some assignments.’ The students felt like they got to know the professors,” program director Jon Grenier said.
As students found their study abroad plans canceled by the pandemic, the Farmer School’s Global Studies program rolled out a Virtual Global Internship program. The program guaranteed placement with a company based on either the country a student was interested in or their preferred area of study. More than two-dozen students took part over the summer. “Students work 10 hours per week, and most of those hours are project based and unstructured time. So they’ll overlap a couple hours with their supervisor, or maybe join in on team meetings, but then they’re working on projects often on their own,” Assistant Director of Global Business Programs Emily Akil explained. “So it takes a lot of individual skills to be able to work through the experience successfully. It requires that our students are flexible and adaptable, but also really self-sufficient.”
“In comparison to my expectations, PRIME far exceeded them. I was beyond impressed with the organization, communication, and work that all professors and director had put into this program to make sure we still got the PRIME experience but in a virtual setting,” student Olivia Giles remarked. “I remember at the very beginning of the program feeling very overwhelmed just looking ahead at the things I had to do. However, everything was so clear about what needed to be done and when. The structure was exceptional for this program being all online for the first time.”
“I am quickly learning a lot about international finance specifically in regard to blockchain and private equity funds,” junior accountancy major Alex Stan remarked
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physical connection. During COVID, it is really difficult to get that same experience, so we could feel a gap in what we were about to be able to deliver and felt that we needed to find some ways to use tools so that students still feel connected,” entrepreneurship instructor Geoff Zoeckler explained.
Whether the class was remote or hybrid, Farmer School faculty rose to the challenge of making the experience the next best thing to being at FSB for students. b
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The faculty of the First-Year Integrated Core classes faced what seemed like an immense challenge – to find a way to help hundreds of first-year students build a sense of community as they started their college experience. “The FYIC is really founded on a lot of group experiences and
“It is creative problem solving at its core,” entrepreneurship instructor David Eyman said. “What we’re providing them is repetitively giving them opportunities to solve problems. And at the end of all of this, we turn around and say, ‘Hey, look at all the problems you solved this semester.’”
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PROFESSOR TO INTERACT WITH THE STUDENTS. I DIDN’T WANT IT TO BE, ‘OK, WE JUST POSTED VIDEOS AND HERE’S SOME ASSIGNMENTS.’ THE STUDENTS FELT LIKE THEY GOT TO KNOW THE PROFESSORS.”
“Going into a virtual career fair experience,you anticipate that there will be a number of challenges and technical difficulties. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how seamless the technology and overall experience ran. While I would have loved more than 10 minutes to get to know each student, I still felt engaged and was able to connect well with candidates,” Deloitte Consulting’s (and 2018 FSB marketing grad) Marilyn Zubak said. “While nothing can replace the value of inperson interactions, I was overall satisfied with the setup and effectiveness of the virtual career fair.”
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“It was really interesting going through a lot of the submissions and hearing people give feedback on them in the class next day,” student Sam Rogers said. “It was great getting to know people and seeing them stretching out of their comfort zones, because usually you can see some pretty interesting aspects of people when they’re pushed like that.”
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“Students would register for the event, and then when participating employers created a schedule, students would pick the companies and time slots that worked for them,” student Morgan Pohl explained. “So it was like a one-onone virtual Zoom room. There were also group meeting options as well.”
The solution was GooseChase, an adaptable scavenger hunt phone application. “The first challenges that we did were centered around some divergent thinking exercises, getting outside your comfort zone,” Zoeckler explained. “You could just see the smiles, you could see the excitement.We weren’t just going for fun, though that was certainly part of it. But we saw the connection to the actual material we were trying to teach while they were heavily engaged and enjoying themselves in that moment.”
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As fall arrived, a major yearly event, the Fall Career Fair, had to make a transition to virtual as well. Thanks to some creativity and hard work by the Center for Career Exploration & Success and the Farmer School Career Services team, students were able to “meet” with more than 200 employers who were actively seeking to hire students for internships and full-time positions.
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Grenier remarked that the program went so well virtually that he expects some portions to remain virtual in future years.
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the New Dean she remarked. “I think we’ve got a service
If you ask new Farmer School dean Jenny Darroch why she chose to accept the role, she’ll explain, “I was looking for a place that had a point of difference in a very competitive and crowded market - experiential learning, high-touch faculty, academic rigor - and that’s what I see at Miami.” And she couldn’t wait
obligation to other disciplines across the university. So I would like to find a pathway to collaborate even more with other divisions and departments.” One of the challenges Jenny faced immediately was how to ensure that the hallmarks of the Farmer School educational experience – personalized attention, close faculty-student relationships, multiple opportunities for experiential learning, international study and leadership skills – could continue with COVID-19 restrictions. It was a challenge she, our faculty and staff met head on. “In my role, I often talk to industry leaders who believe that a blend of face to face and remote interaction represents the future of work in a post COVID-19 world. What this means is that we are helping our students better prepare for their future, by requiring them to move between face to face and remote modalities, learn how to log into a video conference and how to log in on time, how to participate in an online discussion, how to give presentations online, how to contribute as a virtual intern, and how to interview and secure a job without necessarily meeting anyone face to face.
to experience it all in person. “I think Zoom and WebEx were fantastic, because I was able to work from California when I started on July 1, but there’s a lot that you don’t quite get with video conferencing. So I’m really happy to be here, in the building, meeting with students, and really getting that rich feel of the place.”
And Jenny hit the ground running! Since arriving in Oxford, she has been meeting with faculty, staff, alumni and members of the school’s Business Advisory Council and Board of Visitors, getting a feel for what is working and what can be improved. “We absolutely, without question, have to pay attention to the salaries that the students are earning when they leave the Farmer School. We need to continue to focus on diversity and inclusion,”
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“I do not want to trivialize the catastrophic impact COVID-19 has had on individuals, families, communities or the economy but I do believe COVID-19 brings with it many life lessons - e.g., how our actions impact others, how to live in the present, how to work with ambiguity, the importance of evidence-based decision-making, and how to be more resilient. So rather than fight the constraints COVID-19 has imposed, why not celebrate the changes we are all forced to make?” “Most of our faculty say that the courses they are delivering now are better than any course they have delivered prior because they have been forced to challenge everything they do in order to create a positive learning environment. I also hear faculty comment that the technology enables them to do things they couldn’t do before – e.g., have speakers participate via video conference from anywhere around the world, or get better student participation by using break out rooms (a feature of some video conferencing platforms).” “Now that I’m here, I’m really looking forward to putting the shine on the school because I think there’s just so many assets to leverage and I truly believe this is a tremendous opportunity for the school, and for me as an incoming dean.” “What I want us to do as a school is to be the best undergraduate business school in the country, and put a fire under ourselves a little bit. Our challenge is to push boldly to be the best undergraduate business school in the country, with selected graduate programs that support our core mission. And that’s what we’re going to drive toward.”
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“Our core mission is to work with our students so that they are beyond ready leaders who are ready to launch their careers. What we have to do to get there is make sure
we understand what employers want. We’ve got some incredible insights and initiatives, but it’s sort of a moving target,” she explained. “We just need to be really tuned in and challenge ourselves all the time to make sure that our students are always beyond ready.” Employers will say that they seek out Miami graduates because there’s something special about a Miami graduate. They want to get first dibs on our graduates because there’s something special about them that they can’t quite put their finger on beyond putting it down to the fouryear fully immersive experiences our students have.”
But how will the Farmer School get to that goal? Jenny has some ideas about that. A
“We can’t assume our greatness. None of this can be taken for granted. So the challenge that I’m going to lay out on everything we do is that every time we look at a part of our business, we should be scanning the environment, looking at our top competitors, seeing what makes them best in class, understand what that means, and figuring out how to outmaneuver them,” she noted. “What do we consider to be best practices, how we measure up against it, and how do we make sure we’re meeting and exceeding that on the key things that are important to our brand?”
While there is always room for improvement, she said, the Farmer School already offers great opportunities to its students.“I think what we offer is an incredible opportunity to grow up intellectually, socially, and emotionally. Students make lifelong friends, relationships that endure and they learn about who they are. When people come to Miami, there’s an incredible transformation that goes on.”
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Prior to joining Miami, Jenny Darroch served as the dean of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. She earned her doctorate in marketing from the University of Otago in New Zealand. She has a master of commerce degree in marketing and international business from the University of Auckland, an honors degree in applied economics from Massey University and a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics from the University of Waikato, all in New Zealand, which is her native country. She moved to the United States in 2004. While at Otago, Jenny was the inaugural Director of Entrepreneurship and launched New Zealand’s first masters program in entrepreneurship. Jenny has authored three books, including “Why Marketing to Women Doesn’t Work: Using Market Segmentation to Identify Customer Needs” (2014, Palgrave Macmillan), and “Marketing Through Turbulent Times” (2009, Palgrave Macmillan). Jenny has published more than 30 refereed publications. Her research — focused on looking at innovation strategies from the customers’ point of view — has been cited more than 4,600 times, appearing in marketing, management, innovation and entrepreneurship journals. Jenny serves on the boards of Redgate Software, Cambridge UK, and Kent Business School, UK. She is the outgoing chair of Women Administrators in Management Education (WAME), an AACSB affinity group (201920), a Fellow of the International Academy of Management and a member of the American Marketing Association. b
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BIG DREAM
makes a Big Impact
The Make It Miami Accountancy Program is designed to introduce top multicultural high school students to the accounting profession and to a college career at Miami University’s Farmer School of Business. The hope is that some of them will chose to come to Miami for college. In Esther Ladipo’s case, it worked perfectly. “I did that program the summer before entering my senior year of high school and I fell in love with the Farmer School of Business, fell in love with Miami,” she recalled. “I applied as an accountancy major, and came to campus super wide-eyed and excited to make a difference in the Farmer School.”
faculty members Jan Taylor and Pat Lindsay gave her a lot of career advice.
By any standard, Esther certainly made a lot of her time at Miami. “I just had a fantastic experience while I was there. I learned a lot. I traveled a lot. I studied abroad twice, once in Cuba, once in Southeast Asia,” she explained. “I was involved with the Multicultural Business Association. I founded the Miami chapter of NABA, which is the National Association of Black Accountants, interned at Ernst and Young twice.”
She also decided to take part in something she’d never done before – Startup Weekend. “I had always seen it when I was at Miami, but I was just like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to do it, I don’t know if I’m going to do it.’ Then it was my senior year. I had changed my major. I had just experienced so much change. I just said ‘Esther, put yourself out there and do it.’ I ended up pitching Connexer, an idea of having a platform that connected people to nonprofits and connected people to social organizations that were doing things in their community,” Ladipo said. “I don’t think we placed, but I got the Rock Star award for having a very compelling pitch.”
But during her senior year, she made some big decisions.“I actually ended up changing my major, entering my senior year, to marketing because I decided I just didn’t want to do accounting full time. I wanted to do something a little bit more creative. So took the leap of faith and changed my major, and it ended up being one of the best things I could have ever done,” she said, noting that marketing
Ladipo said that experience and that idea stuck with her after the weekend ended. “I just couldn’t shake the idea. It just resonated so deeply with me. I saw that there was a need -- I could see in my peers that people wanted to give back, people wanted to volunteer, but there was no way for them to be able to do it easily and straight from their phone.”
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“So I actually went to the Black World Studies department to ask for grant money to study homeless shelters across America, specifically homeless shelters that are within black and Latinx communities, because I just wanted to understand if this was actually a problem that nonprofits have,” she said. “The shelter directors all told me, ‘Money, money, money, we need money.’ And I would always ask them, ‘Why do you need money?’ Because what I learned in my entrepreneurship classes and as an entrepreneurship minor is to really try to get to the root answer. You can never ask ‘Why?’ too many times. So I would ask and ask and ask and basically it came down to the fact that they needed the money in order to do things or to get things.”
She applied for a job at Facebook and was accepted, but others encouraged her to keep working on her idea. “Graduation day, Mark Lacker literally put his hand on my shoulder. He said “Esther, you have to do this. We are going to make this happen. Please let me know if you need anything.You have to promise me that you’re going to stick this out.” She began working on Ranowo again in 2018, pivoting from her idea of a SAAS platform for nonprofits to one that would allow donors to purchase items and donate them directly to the nonprofits that needed them. Ladipo said that traditionally, more than half of people who donate to nonprofits don’t actually know where their money goes, something Ranowo works to change. “We saw that people were taking to the idea and were donating and seeing the exact items that the nonprofits needed. The nonprofits liked being able to record thank you videos that we then would send to the donors. And then it just turned into an organic thing of asking the nonprofits, ‘Hey, tell us what you’ve done with your items,’ and providing those insights to the donor and then seeing donors coming back to give again. We have been able to provide thousands of dollars’ worth of goods to non-profits within the last few months. It’s been beautiful to see Ranowo.org flourish within the last year.”
Esther came back to the Farmer School determined to find a way to bring her idea to fruition. Her next step was taking Mark Lacker’s ESP 401 New Ventures capstone class. “It’s basically a build-a-business-from-scratch class. We drove to the Brandery in Cincinnati every Monday and spoke to different startup founders, people that ran accelerators, and they would mentor us as we were going through the makings of our business,” she explained. “I changed the name to Ranowo, which means “to give” in the Nigerian language Yoruba. We pitched Ranowo at the end of the semester, and we got first place.”
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And Ladipo took Lacker up on his offer, becoming a client for his ESP 321 Agile Development course. “Mark has a class of students that are helping us on the business for the entire semester. Their goal is helping Ranowo.org scale for this upcoming giving season,” she said. It’s been great working with them and I’m really looking forward to seeing how we’re able to just scale out Ranowo and be able to help more people within these communities.” This year, Esther was honored as one of two Farmer School alumni named as part of the 18 of the Last 9 by the Miami University Alumni association. “It was a great honor and I am among such great company. They’ve inspired me so much,” she said. “It was very humbling. I want to be able to make Miami even more proud, so I’m delighted that I have the opportunity to continue to do so.” “I would love to be working on Ranowo full time and having enough support and enough funding to be able to build on it, to revolutionize giving to Black and Latinx communities and to make giving feel good. I want to be able to have the resources to be able to do that at scale.” Looking back on her time in Oxford, she said that the biggest thing she learned was not being afraid to fail. “It’s a tough skill to learn because you have to fail and
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build yourself up from that failure in order to keep going. But I know that’s something that Jim Friedman and the entrepreneurship department preached a lot, something that I got from Michelle Thomas and the business school, to not be afraid to go after things that scare me,” she remarked. “Even if I were to ‘fail,’ I would have Mark Lacker to go to talk about the learnings. I would have Friedman to drop some knowledge on me. I’d have Michelle who would be able to pat me on the back or wipe away some tears if I was crying.” “It’s something that’s helped me within my professional life. It’s something that’s helped me within my personal life. And it’s just something that I try to tell my team,” she said. “Let’s not be afraid to dream big and set audacious goals for ourselves.” Esther Ladipo is a partner manager at Facebook, living in Austin, Texas. “I work with medium-sized agencies and I consult with them on Facebook best practices and I help them ensure that their clients are going to be successful,” she explained. “It feels great because a lot of these folks are able to put food on the table practically because of their Facebook advertising, and they’re able to hire more people. I just got off the phone with an agency that has grown 300% over quarantine because they lean heavily on their Facebook ads and their clients were able to hire additional people as well.” b
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WHAT’S You r Brand? It sounds like a simple question. You are familiar with hundreds of brands. It’s impossible to go through a day without seeing, touching or hearing about them. Their names conjure up images, memories and opinions. What comes to your mind when you see Apple? Coke? Miami University? But a personal brand is different. It isn’t aspirational. It isn’t what any one person thinks it is. It’s deeper than that. It’s your core … your essence ... your true center. And it’s complex. Your brand isn’t what you say it is … your brand is what other people say about you.
“One of the projects I assign every semester involves personal branding. Allie struggled with it, as many students do. She was dedicated, determined to finding THE right answer. What she didn’t realize is finding any right answer is rare. Allie struggled and struggled and by the end of the semester she essentially turned in nothing.”
Test it out – ask three good friends what your brand is … next ask a co-worker … then a family member. Ask them to be honest, because they will want to only say positive things about you. Chances are, their answers will all be different. We present ourselves differently and show different parts of our selves to different people, and in different settings. The “you” out with your friends is very different than the “you” giving a board presentation.
JIM FRIEDMAN White Family Associate Clinical Professor Entrepreneurship
Jacob Shwirtz, head of social partnerships at WeWork, provided this insight, “My quick tip on personal branding is to remember you are your brand, no matter what your current job is, what project you happen to be working on at any one time or whatever the priority happens to be today... always keep in mind the impact you leave on others and remember all we have is our own reputation and that’s our brand.”
For Allie to answer that question, she had to examine all the things that made her unique. With so many different facets, it was a difficult but enlightening task. To her family, Allie was Independent
Working through an example of the process might make it easier to understand.
Growing up in Cincinnati, she was an exemplary student, giving her many options for college selection. One thing she knew for certain – she couldn’t wait to leave Ohio and expand her horizons when she graduated from high school. “I applied to nearly a dozen colleges and universities. Miami was the only in-state school that I applied to and I had
Allie Pearson (Engelhart) graduated from Miami with three degrees. In her sophomore year, that question was posed to her as part of ESP 366 – Creativity and Leadership.
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nearly ruled it out solely based on its residence in Ohio. I was certain that I wanted to explore someplace else.” Her father asked her to at least consider Miami, and reluctantly, she agreed. “I remember coming on campus for the Make it Miami program. It felt like the typical college tour until we arrived at the Farmer School of Business – it was the first year the building had been open and it was magnificent. I still remember walking in the doors for the first time and being floored that this was where I could learn for the next four years. As I made my way around the building I met professors and students who told me all about their programs, projects, classes, internships, student organizations, and study abroad opportunities.. The possibilities felt endless. I remember walking out of the Farmer School of Business knowing that it would soon be my school – on the ride home I accepted my offer to be a student at Miami University and then express shipped the first of many Miami sweatshirts to my house. I didn’t visit another school after that.”
To her professors, she was Persistent Allie had joined Igoodea Creatives, a (student run) entrepreneurship organization, in her freshman year and wanted to take ESP 366 – Creativity & Leadership, immediately. But the course was extremely popular, so sophomores rarely made the cut. “Back then Friedman made it known that he did not teach freshman or sophomores – because of the popularity, there was no room in entrepreneurship 366 for underclassmen. I didn’t want to wait that long so the whole summer between my freshman and sophomore year I wrote Friedman an email once a month and said, ‘Friedman, 212 days and 14 minutes until we start class together. Friedman, 112 days until… and he’d say, ‘I’m not teaching you, you’re not getting in this course now.” And I’d respond, ‘I’m going to keep emailing you.’ I think Friedman appreciated the persistence so eventually he let me in and I was able to start engaging with entrepreneurship content my sophomore year. I loved it.”
To university administrators, she might be called Brash Her second week on campus, Allie was already making herself known. She went to the Dean’s Suite, introduced herself to Dean Roger Jenkins and peppered him with questions. She remembers the conversation well. “Dean, how am I going to do everything that you have to offer here at the Farmer School of Business? What am I going to major in? When will I study abroad? And he said, ‘Don’t worry, there will be plenty of time for plenty of experiences.’” That was the first of many pivotal moments for Allie – understanding the value of patience and the creative process and that sometimes the best decision is not to make a decision.
To her fellow students, she was Collaborative “It started in high school and translated to college. I was always passionate about unique projects that I was able to work on with my talented peers. I think high school and college are both excellent spaces to try everything, to experiment and to fail and find what you’re good at and what you’re not good at.
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sales and marketing projects that were instrumental in the Chapter winning the Lewes F. Gordon Top Chapter award at the 2014 Convention in Miami. In fact, Miami swept nearly every significant award that year.”
“I started at Miami as a finance major. My first interview for a student organization was with the investment banking club in the fall of my freshman year. I was extended an invitation to join and accepted it. That same semester I made it into PSE (Pi Sigma Epsilon, the national professional fraternity for marketing and sales and I hit the ground running. PSE became the first place outside of the classroom where I was able grow and build friendships.
DON NORRIS PSE Advisor Professor Emeritus Marketing
“I found great value in being in that organization so early on in my college career– I was able to have all sorts of diverse experiences. I looked up to the older students in PSE and they shared their brilliance, perspective, passions, and tenacity with me- I learned from the examples they set. With their guidance, I gravitated over to marketing and found an excellent fit there.
To all who know her, she is a Life-Long Learner In addition to her involvement in many clubs and organizations, internships and international study, Allie graduated with three majors in four years.
“Dr. Don (chapter advisor Don Norris) was a hands off advisor, the organization is truly student run. He was always present and he knew what was going on in the chapter, but he gave students the space to teach each other, to learn, and to fail. By building relationships with upperclassmen, I learned how to lead and how to manage projects which equipped me with the skills to lead the chapter my junior and senior year. During my time in PSE I built a lot of confidence as a leader and as a mentor which are both skills that I still use today.”
“I spent a semester in San Francisco working for astartup called Pilot 44, a summer in London, England consulting for the American Peanut Council, and I had internships in Chicago (BuiltIn) and Cincinnati (Procter & Gamble). “I was thrilled that P&G offered me an internship after my junior year- I couldn’t wait to engage with best in class people, resources, and brands. The experience so far exceeded my expectations. I met brilliant business leaders, led two projects, and influenced Charmin strategy. I remember seeing my recommendations on shelf during my senior year in Oxford and it was a surreal experience.”
“Allie was a positive force in the success of the Miami chapter of PSE. In addition to being a very active member from the time that she was initiated, Allie served as manager for several projects. Among her most significant contributions was managing market research project the Chapter completed for Schneider Electric which not only earned several thousand dollars in revenue; but also, resulted in her receiving the 2013 Top Project Manager at PSE’s National Convention in San Diego. Then, after leading by example, she was elected by the Chapter to the critical exec position of VP of Marketing. In that capacity she oversaw several
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“After switching from finance to marketing, I found interactive media studies (IMS) by wandering into Glenn Platt’s Social Media Marketing class that took place in FSB at 7:30pm on Tuesdays. I was immediately energized by the professors, students, and content in the IMS program. I wasn’t much of a coder or developer like some of my talented IMS counterparts but I did enjoy classes like design thinking, digital branding, user experience, and social media analytics. While I was working through my Marketing and IMS courses, I always made room for at least one entrepreneurship course each semester. It wasn’t until I was a senior when I discovered that with one more class I’d also be an entrepreneurship major.
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“I have always loved school, so upon graduating from Miami a potential MBA was always in the back of my mind. I continued to stay in contact with Dean Jenkins, and he is a big proponent of higher education. He advised, ‘You should go back and get an MBA, it will serve you well and you’ll continue to grow through that experience.’ I was excelling at P&G and was passionate about my role and my business so I started to explore part time and online MBA options. The Kelley School of Business quickly rose to the top of my list as it is a top 20 business school and their online program is ranked #1 in the country. I applied and was fortunately accepted a week later- it turned out to be a perfect fit.”
In the community, she’s a Giver Allie and her family (both two- and four-legged) are involved in their community, seeking ways to enhance the lives of all the people they can. “We love the Cincinnati community. We have a Great Dane named Knox and together we serve as a Canine Volunteer Team at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. We feel very grateful to get to visit the extraordinary staff, brave patients, and their strong families. Additionally, my husband, Patrick, is an Army veteran so we also like to volunteer at veteran related events and activities.”
To her friends, she is Relationship-Oriented “I am still close to many of the friends that I made at Miami University – I stay at their houses when I travel and they stay at mine, I’ve written character references for MBA and law school applications, and I’ve had a blast at countless weddings. While we may live in different cities, our friendships still stay very much intact.
“We spend a lot of time with our Crossroads Church community here in Cincinnati.Through Crossroads we’ve built meaningful friendships and have found invaluable mentors who are ahead of us in life stages. They also lead by example and are big supporters of our marriage, aspirations, and vision. Most notably, they lead us towards adventure – we say yes nearly every new experience we’re invited into and we’ve grown a great deal as a result.”
“I also stay in touch with my professors. I enjoy catching up with Friedman and going to his “duck” dinners, earlier in the year I texted Glenn Platt because I saw he was speaking at one of P&G’s largest conferences (Signal), I occasionally grab lunch with my school dad, Mark Lacker, and I really enjoy phone calls with Brett Smith. They are all still my biggest encouragers and are valuable sources of wisdom.”
“Since quarantine we have done our best to be intentional about connecting with our community in safe ways. We try to check in often via text/phone calls, we like to drop gifts/dinner off on porches, and we’ve gone on many socially distant dog walks so we can hear how our friends are doing.”
“I come back for Startup Weekend as well to see my friends and to help mentor students. I love spending time with my Miami family and I’m always inspired by the students’ work.”
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in my office, Allie stated that she wanted to add a third major. A student sitting next to her said ‘You have three majors and you’re involved in four student orgs - how do you do it all?’ I responded, “It’s because she works all 25 hours a day.” Allie’s eyes lit up. She said, ‘That’s it. That’s my brand.’ And from that moment on, students have referred to her as 25 hours. It’s even her license plate.”
To co-workers and business associates, she’s Purposeful “I just made a switch at P&G. In October, I moved from the consumer and market knowledge function, which is responsible for representing the consumer voice in the company, to the brand management function where I am responsible for building the brand strategy. During that cross functional transfer, I also moved business units - from Baby Care to Hair Care. I’ve been at P&G for five years, and am very fortunate to have been afforded such a diverse set of experiences in both role and category. In the coming years I am looking forward to honing my brand management skills and learning how to develop strategy for P&G’s iconic portfolio of brands.
JIM FRIEDMAN White Family Associate Clinical Professor Entrepreneurship
The secret is - once you know your brand, you can live it. Live in integrity. Know your values and be that person in every situation. b
So now that you know more about Allie, back to the question… how do you sum up all of that into one succinct word or phrase? Not surprisingly, Allie struggled with that. “When I was in 366 working on my personal branding, I remember spending hours searching for the perfect depiction of my personality, values, and character traits. I wanted to deliver something excellent to Friedman. However, my efforts were inconclusive- I did not submit a polished personal brand. Instead all I had to turn in was a bunch of messy slides and scrap paper documenting my process. When Friedman said, ‘A+, this is excellent work.’ I was shocked. He continued by saying, ‘Your process and approach are really good, and I believe that you’re moving in the right direction.’
“Allie is one of the most motivated and driven people I have ever met. She even had her own brand - called 25 hours, which was a perfect example of her daily work ethic. She is a one in a million student who wouldn’t just exceed expectations, but completely obliterate them for the next decade of students to come after her.”
It wasn’t until months later that the “aha moment” occurred for her.
“The next semester Allie took my next level class. During that class she took another run at her personal branding. She picked up where she left off and continued her struggle. During an advising conversation
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BRETT SMITH Cintas Endowed Professor of Entrepreneurship Founding Director, Center for Social Entrepreneurship Research Director, L.I.F.E. (Leading the Integration of Faith & Entrepreneurship)
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From Dorm Room...
TO BOARD ROOM
One of the biggest challenges a startup faces is hiring the right employees. Clint and Brandon knew just where to look. Brandon recalled, “Miami was our pipeline of people for our company and for the first five, six, seven, eight years.” Clint added, “
Clint Jones and Brandon Cruz met their freshman year at Miami, living across the hall from each other in Wilson Hall. Clint didn’t have a lot in common with his roommate, and Brandon’s roommate made the decision to leave school. Brandon recalled, “Either I was going to get a random new roommate or Clint could move into my room. So we shared a room the second semester.”They quickly became friends, and that friendship evolved into creating business ideas together.
I’d say that when we went to 50 employees, 35 of the 50 probably were from Miami.When we first started, we had a couple buddies, or brothers or sisters of friends we went to school with and were looking for jobs and we hired them and they just kept referring. I think at one point in time, literally our entire sales department was probably 90% from Miami.”
Clint started as a marketing major, adding information systems after talking with Brandon, an IS major, and deciding the job opportunities were better with the added degree. Both convinced their parents to let them stay at Miami an additional semester – Clint for the second major, and Brandon because he wanted to take the only entrepreneurship class offered at the time.
“ I FEEL LIKE WE’VE PIVOTED DOZENS OF TIMES. IT’S PROBABLY ACTUALLY FIVE LARGE PIVOTS, BUT IT FELT LIKE WE WERE PIVOTING IN THE EARLY DAYS A LOT.”
They started their first business together, CheapShotz. com, in 1998 while still students. The business involved taking photos at bars and parties and selling prints of them. After graduation, both moved to Chicago, where Brandon grew up, taking “real” jobs. Brandon as a software engineer, and Clint in sales. They never stopped thinking about creating another business. Soon they collaborated on a website creation and management company. While searching for insurance for themselves, they identified an opportunity that became the basis for GoHealth, a marketplace that helps people find insurance.
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Fast forward to 2020. GoHealth now employs nearly 2,500 people and is repeatedly named one of the best places to work in Chicago. The company completed an initial public offering and on July 15, rang the NASDAQ opening bell (virtually). The company’s valuation on that day was nearly seven billion dollars.
But the path from their dorm room brainstorming certainly wasn’t a straight line. A key was their ability to pivot. Clint remembered,“I feel like we’ve pivoted dozens of times. It’s probably actually five large pivots, but it felt
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like we were pivoting in the early days a lot. I think that anytime you start a company, your initial vision or business plan is probably not what you’re going to end up with. I think we realized that early on and we just remained opportunistic. And when things came up or we had to change, we looked at it more on the opportunistic side versus being pessimists and just found the opportunity to build really good connections and we had really smart people we were working with.”
“Right now, we’re evolving into a marketplace that not only helps people find insurance, but helps them find the right doctors to do the right procedures, take the right medications, get access to telemedicine, health risk assessments and a whole variety of other things.” As the future of health care evolves, Brandon and Clint’s entrepreneurial spirit combined with their optimistic attitude will help them chart a path – for their clients and their company. b
KEYS TO GO HEALTH’S SUCCESS “Number one, we built great relationships from the very beginning. We stood by what we said and we did what we said we were going to do for the insurance executives, for employees that we hired, for partners that we worked with. “Number two, be efficient with your capital. I remember back in the day, we’d have to pay with physical checks because we needed the float of three days for the money to come in from our customers. So we were very efficient with our capital.
Brandon agreed, “What we know now is your business is never what you expect it to be when you embark on creating a company. You think you’re going in this direction, and then you have to move and go in in another direction as opportunities or challenges arise. And you need to have that never quit attitude, always find the opportunity. I would encourage people not to have the perfect plan. We had an 80 page business plan we had put together and we were going to sell content management systems for websites. An insurance agent walked into our office one day and everything changed. So I think it’s important to be flexible.
“Number three - and most importantly, this is everything - we hired amazing people out of the gate. We had this network of people from Miami that we had known for years and we knew their passion and their work ethic and their intelligence.”
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CLASS OF 2020 PLACEMENT DATA TOP EMPLOYERS
COMPENSATION
INTERNSHIP EXPERIENCES
For students who reported salary information, the average total compensation was:
More than half of the students who received a full-time offer, reported a signing bonus whch averaged:
$61,759
$5,543
Accounting
CPG
Financial Services
Banking
TOP
INDUSTRIES
Completed at least one internship while studying at Miami
Completed more than one internship while studying at Miami
Consulting
Technology/ Science
As of October 1, 2020, 87% of the Class of 2020 had accepted full-time positions or were continuing their education.
Graduates reported employment in 29 states, China, Turkey & United Kingdom with Chicago being the most popular destination outside of Ohio.
Data as of October 1, 2020
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FACULTY IN THE NEWS Our faculty are renowned for their excellence in the classroom, and they also are prolific researchers who are often called on by popular media for their expertise. James Zhang, Tim Eaton, and Snigdha Porwal (EY undergraduate scholar) had their paper “Data preparation for accountants: Extract, transform and load” accepted at the Journal of Accountancy.
Accountancy Timothy Eaton and Jake Swyers, master of accountancy student, had their co-authored paper,“10 Tips for New Accounting Professionals in the Pandemic Environment” accepted for publication in New Accountant.
Billy Brink’s co-authored paper “The Effects of Minimum-wage Increases on Wage Offers, Wage Premiums and Employee Effort under Incomplete Contracts” was accepted for publication at Accounting, Organizations and Society.
Annie Farrell has been named an Associate Editor at Management Accounting Research and has joined the editorial board of Contemporary Accounting Research.
Po-Chang Chen’s co-authored paper titled, “Analyst Underreaction and the Post-Forecast Revision Drift” was recently accepted for publication in Journal of Business Finance and Accounting. Great job!
Dan Heitger had his co-authored paper “Driving Performance in the Retail and Banking Industries: The Consequences of Dysfunctional Management Control Systems at W. T. Grant and Wells Fargo,” accepted for publication by Issues in Accounting Education.
Karen De Meyst had an aritcle in Financial Management titled “6 ways to increase learning in the workplace.” Karen De Meyst and Andrew Reffett had their paper “Factors Affecting the Outcomes of Legal Claims against Auditors” accepted at Current Issues in Auditing.
Jon Pyzoha had his co-authored paper “The Influence of Perspective Taking Encouraged by the Audit Committee on Auditor and Client Judgments during Accounting Disputes,” accepted at Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory.
Bill Moser’s co-authored article “Firm Prominence and Financial Conditions: Risk Factors for 21st Century Corporate Financial Securities Fraud in the United States” has been conditionally accepted at the Justice Quarterly.
An Excel-based case study, co-authored by Harshini Siriwardane and Karen DeMeyst, won first place in the IMA Educational Case Journal’s Spring Short Case Study Competition.
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James Zhang’s paper co-authored with former MAcc student BriAuna Keys titled “Introducing RPA in an Undergraduate AIS Course: Three RPA Exercises on Process Automations in Accounting” has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting (JETA).
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AMONG SCHOOLS WITHOUT DOCTORAL PROGRAMS Pub t lic Ac por counting Re
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Economics
Entrepreneurship
Jing Li recently had his paper, “Block Bootstrap Prediction Intervals for Parsimonious First-Order Vector Autoregression,” accepted at the Journal of Forecasting.
Brett Smith with Bergman, B. (2020). The other side of the coin: Investor identity and its role in resource provision. Journal of Business Venturing Insights
Melissa Thomasson’s coauthored study on the effects of school closures during 1916 polio outbreak was featured in this article on Bloomberg.com.
Brett Smith with Giudici, A., Combs, J., Cannatelli, B. (2020). Successful scaling in social franchising: The case of Impact Hub. Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice
David Lindequist was interviewed for a Miami Student story about the university’s move to a cashless campus.
Brett Smith with Knapp, J. & Cannatelli, B. (2020). Entrepreneurship at the Base-of-the-Pyramid: The moderating role of person-facilitator fit and poverty alleviation. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship
John Bowblis had three co-authored papers recently: “Shortages of Staffing in Nursing Homes During the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Are the Driving Factors?” accepted in JAMDA, “Prevalence of COVID-19 in Ohio Nursing Homes: What’s Quality Got to Do With It?” accepted in Journal of Aging & Social Policy, and “COVID-19 Pandemic: Exacerbating Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Long-Term Services and Supports” in Journal of Aging and Social Policy. Mark Tremblay had his co-authored paper “Platform Competition With Endogenous Homing” published in International Economic Review. Nam Vu was interviewed by Vietnam TV about economic implications of American actions. Melissa Thomasson recently had her co-authored paper, “Votes for Women: An Economic Perspective on Women’s Enfranchisement” published in the spring issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Melissa Thomasson was interviewed for an NPR article on when and how schools might reopen during the pandemic. Melissa Thomasson and Greg Niemesh recently had their paper, “Medical Education Reforms and the Origins of the Rural Physician Shortage,” published in Cliometrica.
Michael Conger with Gras, D., Jenkins, A., Gras, M. (2020). Wicked Problems, Reductive Tendency, and the Formation of (Non-)Opportunity Beliefs. Forthcoming at Journal of Business Venturing Michael Conger with Jones, J., York, J. G., Vedula, S., Lenox, M. J. (2020).The Collective Construction of Green Building: Industry Transition Toward Environmentally Beneficial Practices. Academy of Management Perspectives
Finance Haim Kassa Gebeyehu had op-eds published by the Brookings Institute and Africa Business Magazine. Feifei Wang, “Should mutual fund investors time volatility?” Financial Analysts Journal coauthored with Sterling Yan and Lingling Zheng. David Yin, “Hiring Retirement-age CEOs”, European Financial Management coauthored with Emma Wang. David Yin, “The Real Effects of Short Selling in an Emerging Market” Journal of Corporate Finance coauthored with Xiaoran Ni. David Yin, “CEO Non-Compete Agreements, Job Risk, and Compensation” Review of Financial Studies coauthored with Omesh Kini and Ryan William. David Gempesaw, “Information Choice, Uncertainty, and Expected Returns” Review of Financial Studies coauthored with Tim Simin and Charles Cao.
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David Gempesaw, “Corporate governance and product market competition: Evidence from import tariff reductions” Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting.
Fadel Megahed had his co-authored publication,“A Data Analytic Framework for Physical Fatigue Management using Wearable Sensors” accepted in Expert Systems with Applications.
David Shrider, “Are Mutual Fund Investors Loss Averse? Evidence from China” Financial Review coauthored with Wenting Huang, Jie Jinag and Yanran Wu.
Dougla Havelka and Jeffrey W. Merhout, “The Decision to Major in Information Systems: Critical Factors for Students,” Issues in Information Systems, v21.
Tyler Henry, “Arbitrage vs. Informed Short Selling: Evidence from Convertible Bond Issuers” Journal of Corporate Finance coauthored with John Hackney at the University of South Carolina and Jennifer Koski at the University of Washington.
Joseph K. Nwankpa and Jeffrey W. Merhout, “Exploring the Effect of Digital Investment on IT Innovation,” Sustainability. Stoel, M.D. and Havelka, D. “Evaluation of factors that impact IT auditing.” Accepted at the Journal of Information Systems.
ISA
Ozdemir, Z and Benamati, S. “Information Privacy, Cultural Values, and Regulatory Preferences,” in the Journal of Global Information Management (JGIM).
Zhe Shan had his co-authored paper, “Predicting Shareholder Litigation on Insider Trading from Financial Text:An Interpretable Deep Learning Approach” accepted for publication by Information & Management.
Fang, X. and Rajkumar, T.M. “Recovering Troubled IT Projects: The Roles of Transformational Leadership and Project Complexity” accepted for publication in Information Systems Frontiers.
Fadel Megahed had his co-authored paper,“Empowering the Workforce in Post-COVID-19 Smart Manufacturing Systems,” accepted to appear in Smart and Sustainable Manufacturing Systems.
Arthur Carvalho and Jeff Merhout had their coauthored paper “When Good Blocks Go Bad: Managing Unwanted Blockchain Data,” accepted in the International Journal of Information Management.
Fadel Megahed and Allison Jones-Farmer had their co-authored paper “A Forecasting Framework for Predicting Perceived Fatigue: Using Time Series Methods to Forecast Ratings of Perceived Exertion with Features from Wearable Sensors”, accepted to appear in Applied Ergonomics.
Management Lisa Ellram had her manuscript titled “Cost Avoidance: Not Everything that Counts is Counted” accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Logistics.
Gabe Lee had his co-authored paper, “How IT wisdom affects firm performance: An empirical investigation of 15-year US panel data” published in Decision Support Systems.
Scott Dust’s article, “5 overlooked ways business leaders can support remote workers”, was published in Business Insider.
Fadel Megahed had his co-authored paper “A TwoStage Machine Learning Framework to Predict Heart Transplantation Survival Probabilities over Time with a Monotonic Probability Constraint” accepted in Decision Support Systems.
Tim Krehbiel had his article, co-authored with Miami colleague Andrea Hulshult, entitled “The need for agility in a VUCA pandemic world,” accepted in the American Journal of Business.
Arthur Carvalho had his co-authored paper,“A SurveyBased Assessment of How Existing and Potential Electric VehicleOwners Perceive Range Anxiety,” accepted by the Journal of Cleaner Production.
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Lisa Ellram was profiled for an article in Supply and Demand Chain Executive.
Marketing
Bryan Ashenbaum was quoted in a Bloomburg article about the demand for hand sanitizer and disinfectants during the coronavirus pandemic
Gillian Oakenfull had her post “Calling All Female CMOs - We Need a Shero!” published on Forbes.com.
Megan Gerhardt wrote an article for Biz Ed on “Higher Education’s Crucible Moment” during and after the pandemic.
Gillian Oakenfull had her post “U.S. Brands Can Save America” published on Forbes.com.
John Ni’s paper, “Product Positioning and Pricing Decisions in A Two-Attribute Disruptive New Market,” has been accepted for publication at IISE Transactions.
Peter Nguyen had his co-authored paper “Reviewing Experts’ Restraint from Extremes and its Impact on Service Providers” accepted for publication by the Journal of Consumer Research.
Bryan Ashenbaum was interviewed for an article in USA Today about the short supply of disinfectants.
Gillian Oakenfull had her post “Bridging the Empathy Gap” published on Forbes.com.
Megan Gerhardt had her article “Coronavirus and Zoom have marked a generation. Let’s call them Zoomers” appear in NBC Think.
Gillian Oakenfull had her post “Are Marketers Equipped For The New Empathy Brand Mandate?” published on Forbes.com. b
Laurens Steed was interviewed for the HuffPost article “There Are 2 Types Of Work-From-Home Personalities. Which Are You?” Scott Dust had his manuscript titled “Leader selfenhancement values: curvilinear and congruence effects” accepted for publication in the Leadership and Organizational Development Journal.
TOP
Scott Dust’s article, “A Letter To My Students During The Pandemic”, was published in BizEd.
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UNDERGRADUATE
John-Patrick Paraskevas had his co-authored paper: “The Impact of Buyer-Supplier TMT Misalignment on Environmental Performance” was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Operations and Production Management.
S U P P LY C HAI N P R O G R A M Gartner, Inc.
Lisa Ellram published a Sage Business Case entitled: Show Me the Money: Managing Cost Savings Lisa Ellram and Yao Jin wrote the article “To prepare for the next ‘black swan’ event, supply chains should rethink ‘lean’” for Supply Chain Dive earlier this year.
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Excellence
IN & BEYOND the Classroom
DR. ARTHUR CARVALHO, Dinesh & Ila Paliwal Innovation Chair and Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Analytics Richard K. Smucker Teaching Excellence Award as the Outstanding Junior Professor
DR. MICHAEL CONGER, David F. Herche Endowed Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship James Robeson Junior Faculty Award for Research Excellence
DR. ALLISON JONES-FARMER, Van Andel Professor of Business Analytics and Professor of Information Systems and Analytics Richard K. Smucker Teaching Excellence Award as the Outstanding Professor
DR. JON GRENIER, Professor of Accountancy Farmer School of Business Senior Faculty Award for Research Excellence
MR. ROCCO MANZO, Senior Clinical Lecturer, Department of Management Service Excellence Award
DR. ERIC MARINICH, Assistant Teaching Professor of Accountancy Richard K. Smucker Teaching Excellence Award as the Outstanding Clinical Professor
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Farmer School of Business
NAMED PROFESSORS & ENDOWED CHAIRS
DR. BRAD GOLDIE Frank H. Jellinek Jr. Endowed Assistant Professor Chair
DR. BRIAN BALLOU EY Professor of Accountancy DR. LEE BIGGERSTAFF Armco Endowed Assistant Professor
DR. DAN HEITGER Deloitte Professor
DR. THOMAS BOULTON Lindmor Professor
MR. THOMAS HEUER Forsythe Chair in Entrepreneurship
DR. ARTHUR CARVALHO Dinesh & Ila Paliwal Innovation Chair
DR. TIM HOLCOMB Endres Associate Professor Fellow
DR. PO-CHANG CHEN Endres Associate Professor Fellow
DR. XIAOWEN HUANG Bill Moeckel Business Professor
DR. ROBERT DAHLSTROM Joseph C. Seibert Professor
MR. MARK LACKER John W. Altman Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship
DR. JENNY DARROCH Dean & Mitchell P. Rales Chair in Business Leadership
DR.YOUNG (GABE) HWA LEE C. Michael Armstrong Business Chair
DR. DEVON DELVECCHIO Raymond E. Glos Professor in Marketing
DR. XI LIU Ohio Casualty Professor
DR. SCOTT DUST John Mee Endowed Assistant Professor of Management
DR. MONIQUE MURFIELD Richard T. Farmer Endowed Assistant Professor
DR. LISA ELLRAM James Evans Rees Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management
DR. GLENN PLATT C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Network Technology & Management
DR. ALLISON JONES-FARMER Van Andel Professor of Business Analytics
DR. JON PYZOHA PwC Endowed Assistant Professor in Accountancy
DR. ANNE FARRELL PwC Professor of Accountancy
DR. JOSEPH RODE George and Mildred Panuska Professor in Business
DR. JIM FRIEDMAN White Family Clinical Faculty in Entrepreneurship
DR. BRETT SMITH Cintas Chair in Entrepreneurship DR. MELISSA THOMASSON Julian Lange Professor of Economics
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800 EAST HIGH STREET, OXFORD, OH 45056
th e Farm er S ch o ol of Bu si n e s s
