9 minute read
Fitting the Need
Jones College’s Industry Supported Learning Experience (ISLE) program embeds problem-solving students at Fortune 500 companies
by Skip Anderson
Greg Nagel, a decorated associate professor of Finance in MTSU’s Jones College of Business, approaches the inner workings of businesses in novel ways. Take, for instance, how he explains analyzing a business model to a C-suite neophyte.
“Sometimes you are dealing with data that doesn’t make sense,” said Nagel, who holds an M.S. in Engineering, an M.B.A., and a Ph.D. “It’s like planning a major family vacation. There may be information missing about lodging specifics or details on your itinerary. But even knowing this you decide to go anyway, trusting yourself to figure out the rest as you go.”
Nagel says it’s just this type of confidence and adaptability that corporate leaders are looking for when hiring and promoting. (Amazon is a prime example.) Leaders who can adapt to an ever-evolving array of dynamics that can—and will—pop up. This includes the mundane— say, a broken supply chain of raw materials that slows production at a factory—to game-changers such as a new technology that can render existing technologies archaic overnight. “Adapt or die” is a mantra for the fast-changing, internet-driven world of business leadership. The often-chaotic ecosystem of the corporate world requires leaders to, as Nagel puts it, “nimbly adapt to unknowns.”
“One hundred years ago, the business world was comparatively stable,” Nagel said. “But today’s world calls for professionals who can respond quickly and effectively to change. That’s the gold standard of hiring today.”
Greg Nagel, associate professor
Nagel and Greg Merriman (‘92), a private equity investor, MTSU alumnus, and adjunct instructor of Accounting, co-teach a graduate-level course titled Decision Making in Accounting and Finance. It focuses on Industry Supported Learning Experience (ISLE) projects. These projects enhance the Master of Business Administration students’ educational experience by using real company data and having students interact with company executives. Together, Nagel and Merriman instill in their students that adaptability is not a gear reserved for times of crisis. Rather, it is a muscle for modern-day executives to engage daily.
Students get depth of knowledge on their ISLE projects and breadth of knowledge by examination of the accounting and financial tools used in 30 prior projects.
“Greg Merriman and I set out to design a curriculum for this course that would not only equip students for success but also respond to the needs of the business community,” Nagel said. “Nashville business leaders uniformly told us they wanted employees who could nimbly adapt to unknowns. They want candidates who can demonstrate the successful completion of real projects in their world, not just theoretical problems or cases. Real projects require pivoting to adapt to real-time information, collaborating well when stressed, team building, valuing diversity, critical thinking, learning skills on the fly, being directly accountable to executives, and rapid network building.”
Launched in fall 2020, the ISLE program pairs teams of three to five M.B.A. students with “coaches” who have significant executive experience in their respective industries. The focus for the teams is to seek innovative solutions to real-world challenges facing businesses. The businesses participating in the ISLE program vary in size, from locally owned single-location storefronts to global companies that employ tens of thousands of people.
Merriman’s background in private equity makes him a known quantity in executive offices across the globe. As such, he’s made multiple connections to business leaders, which has made many projects possible. Further, MTSU’s Jennings A. Jones College of Business engaged the services of an executive-in-residence to help recruit more client companies and coaches.
“The liaison within each of these companies matches the effort of our coaches, and they really commit to these projects,” Nagel said. “The rest is up to the students.”
CASES IN POINT
In the ISLE program’s first year, teams of M.B.A. students worked with two local Fortune Global 500 companies: Nashville-based Healthcare Corporation of America (HCA) and Schneider Electric, with its American headquarters in Franklin.
The project with global health care giant HCA involved emergency room follow-up. The company had been having trouble connecting with patients seen in its ERs who were discharged with a referral. The goal was to identify an effective and efficient follow-up communication with patients after ER referrals.
M.B.A. students Jessica Bekar and Diana Skordallos (r) worked with HCA’s Ryan Richardson to help solve a company concern.
Photo by James Cessna
One of the M.B.A. students working on that project was Jessica Bekar, an 11-year veteran of the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, where she serves as special project coordinator. Bekar is also executive assistant to Col. Dereck Stewart of the Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP). In those roles, she manages a multitude of projects for the THP, including the trooper hiring process, special events, awards, and recognition. Working alongside the men and women of the Tennessee Highway Patrol and seeing their dedication to impaired driving enforcement inspired Bekar to join the Tennessee State Advisory Board of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).
Bekar said her ISLE group analyzed “millions of lines of data” and made recommendations for improving hospital operations in contacting patients after discharge.
“Our team identified specific ER referral patient segments with areas of opportunity in follow-up communication,” Bekar said. “We identified efficient forms of communication to follow up with patients within these areas of opportunity.”
According to Bekar, the project provided students an opportunity to apply the skills they had learned in business school to a real-life challenge.
“We had been told businesses want employees who can nimbly adapt to unknowns, and the M.B.A. ISLE program tests your ability to do that,” she said. “Seven weeks is a short amount of time to analyze data, conduct hours of research, make viable recommendations, and prepare a product that can be used by the sponsoring company.
“To be successful required collaboration of individuals who had never worked together collectively. We had to quickly learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses, build trust in one another, and work as a team. Owning this real project from start to finish helped build our confidence in our problem-solving abilities and decision-making skills.”
Bekar has been in the workforce for more than 20 years, but that is not the case for many Jones College of Business students. Thanks to the ISLE program, less-experienced students gain valuable time working on real-life projects that they can reference when interviewing for a job.
“This is important to students with less work experience as well as more experienced students such as me who have never worked in the private sector,” Bekar added. “I am hopeful that this experience will help me prepare for future career opportunities.”
One of Bekar’s team members was fellow M.B.A. student Diana Skordallos, who now works for HCA as a staff accountant at its Sarah Cannon Cancer Research Institute. Previously, she was a supervisory recreation specialist with the U.S. Air Force managing a military outdoor recreation center at Arnold Air Force Base in Tullahoma.
“The project was an excellent way to take the skills we had learned in previous classes and apply it to a ‘real world’ issue,” Skordallos said. “It also gave us an opportunity to interact with professionals from a different industry than most of us had previously worked in.”
On the Schneider Electric project, the challenge facing a different group of students was to find a way to address the churn in Schneider’s customer base. The students pored over recent customer satisfaction surveys, assigning each respondent a Net Promoter Score. The higher the score, the more likely the person is to remain a Schneider customer and recommend the company to others. In the group’s final presentation, they recommended Schneider focus only on winning the hearts of the median group—those who might not be enthusiastic about promoting Schneider for reasons that might be fixable.
“Churning customers means losing money,” Nagel said. “Trying to win back the customers who are least satisfied with you might not be a great investment. This team advised Schneider to focus on the middle group. That’s a moveable needle. A personal response from the company to show interest in them and their experience and apologize when appropriate and make it up— that’s a proven strategy for success.”
Kyle Hamm, Schneider’s North American vice president of customer transformation, indicated they had not examined the churn problem from that perspective before, so the recommendation was illuminating to Schneider in a meaningful way.
“The MTSU M.B.A. students’ recommendation for increasing our Net Promoter Score has become part of our global strategy,” Hamm said.
Kim Sokoya, professor and associate dean for graduate and executive education
What sets Jones College of Business’ ISLE program apart from other reputable programs with similar industry-supported projects?
“The difference is the coach we connect our students with,” Nagel said. “They all are successful in their respective industries, and they are really good at what they do. They know the questions to ask, but they’re not going to provide the answers. Some other universities’ programs don’t even have coaches. It’s great to have students who are fired up, but that’s not enough. They need a coach who can teach these students to lead and to identify problems quickly and figure it out. And sometimes they need to learn the lessons of failure, too. Taking risks is what business leaders do. Our coaches get the students out of student mode, which is to follow. These experiences teach our students to lead.”
To date, 30 groups have participated in the ISLE program, some in other M.B.A. courses. As in business, many M.B.A. teams provided value to the businesses they engaged, but not always. The goal is to continue improving MTSU’s capability to deliver both a great education and valuable support for businesses. ISLE projects are now carried out across Jones College graduate programs to help students get an immediately relevant as well as conceptual educational experience.
“We aim to produce the type of employees that business leaders want,” Nagel summed up.
BECOME A PARTNER
Jones College of Business seeks additional partners for our Industry Supported Learning Experience program. Join us and work with graduate students skilled in marketing, business analytics, management practices, and more. You can benefit as a business or give back as a mentor.
CONTACT:
• Barney Zeng, Executive in Residence BarneyZeng@SourceKeySolutions.com
• Carolyn Tumbleson, Development Director Carolyn.Tumbleson@mtsu.edu
• Kim Sokoya, Associate Dean for Graduate and Executive Education Kim.Sokoya@mtsu.edu
