“We continue to develop principled and impactful leaders and entrepreneurs, foster innovation for a data and technology driven world, and grow a global presence fueled by local synergies,” said Gareth James, John H. Harland Dean. “I’m proud of our faculty and staff – and energized about the future of our school and students.”

Impacting Business & Beyond

Faculty and staff contribute to the Goizueta and Emory community, but also have significant impact on society and the broader business world. External awards include:

Karen Sedatole, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Accounting, was named as an editor to the Accounting Review. Sedatole was also elected to the position of president elect for the Management Accounting section of the American Accounting Association.

Emma Zhang, associate professor of information systems & operations management, was named an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. Zhang was also named an associate editor to the Journal of the American Accounting Association.

Ruomeng Cui, associate professor of information systems & operations management, was a finalist for the 2022 Management Science Best Paper Award in Operations Management for her paper, “Learning from Inventory Availability Information: Evidence from Field Experiments on Amazon.”

Panos Adamopoulos, assistant professor of information systems & operations management, was named as an associate editor at Management Science.

Giacomo Negro, professor of organization & management, was appointed as the senior editor of Organization Science and also received an honorable mention for the Robert K. Merton Award for his paper, “What’s Next? Artists’ Music After Grammy Awards.” Negro additionally served as the principal investigator for the 2022 LGBTQ Southern Survey.

Erika Hall, associate professor of organization & management, was named as an incoming associate editor at the Academy of Management Discoveries.

Dan McCarthy, assistant professor of marketing and Marina Cooley, assistant professor in the practice of marketing were recognized by Poets&Quants’.” McCarthy was also a finalist for the Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award.

John Kim, associate professor in the practice of organization & management, was designated as one of the top instructors by Coursera for Management Consulting courses.

Vilma Todri, assistant professor of information systems & operations management, was named an associate editor to the Management Information Systems Quarterly Journal, one of the top three leading Information Systems journals.

Tonya Smalls, assistant professor in the practice of accounting, has been appointed to serve on the Inaugural Advisory Board for Make-A-Wish Georgia (MAWGA).

Leading the Future Of Emory and Goizueta

Goizueta Business School and Emory also honor academic professionals and leaders for their dedication to excellence through teaching, content development, experiential learning, scholarly inquisition, and commitment.

“We could not be prouder of our exceptional faculty and staff for their remarkable work and dedication throughout the past year,” says Anandhi Bharadwaj, who will step down as vice dean for faculty and research this summer as Professor Wei Jiang prepares to take on the role. “It has been an honor to work alongside our faculty and staff in developing the school and its programs.”

The recipients of these prestigious honors and awards are listed below:

Rajiv Garg, associate professor of information systems & operations management, was awarded the Provost’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Education. Garg was also honored as the MSBA Distinguished Core Educator.

John Kim, associate professor in the practice of organization & management, was awarded Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Giacomo Negro, professor of organization & management, received the Keough Faculty Award. Negro also received the Jordan Research Award.

Marvell Nesmith, associate dean of academic affairs & instructional design, received the Keough Staff Award.

Marina Cooley, assistant professor in the practice of marketing, was honored as the BBA Distinguished Educator and was also recognized for MBA Teaching Excellence (One Year).

Omar Rodríguez-Vilá, professor in the practice of marketing, was awarded the Evening MBA Distinguished Core Educator and was also recognized for MBA Teaching Excellence (Two Year).

Charles Goetz, associate professor in the Practice of organization & management, was awarded Evening MBA Distinguished Elective Educator.

Ray Hill, associate professor in the practice of finance, was recognized for MBA Teaching Excellence (Classic Faculty).

Alvin Lim and David Sackin were awarded MSBA Distinguished Elective Educators.

Rob Kazanjian, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Organization & Management, was awarded Executive MBA Distinguished Educator (Core).

Kevin Crowley, associate professor in the practice of finance and Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Dean’s Distinguished Chair of Finance, were awarded MAF Distinguished Educators. Crowley was also awarded Executive MBA Distinguished Educator (Elective).

Giacomo Negro, Melissa Williams and Panos Adamopoulos received Goizueta research awards at the levels of full, associate, and assistant professor, respectively.

Goizueta Business School is proud to present the accomplishments of these and other faculty members within our institution. To learn more about the teaching, specialized research, and core interests of each faculty member, check out our faculty profiles and their related publications. 

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Since he was four years old, Olympic-hopeful Matthew Jones 21BBA has been passionate about strength sports. For 13 years, Jones hit the wrestling mat until concussion issues sidelined him at the age of 16, forcing him to walk away from the sport he loved. Jones quickly discovered powerlifting and went on to win the 18-Under Powerlifting World Championship in 2017. 

When Jones came to Emory, however, he opted to take a different journey for his sporting career. “During my first year at Emory, I walked onto the Emory Track & Field team as a hammer thrower,” Jones said. “I had never done the sport before, but wanted to represent Emory in athletics. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself.”

On the way to a team meet in Alabama, an accident caused Jones to suffer a severe concussion, tragically ending his moment as an Emory athlete. “It was the worst concussion I’ve ever had,” Jones said. “It was tough because I couldn’t train, let alone complete the level of school that Emory had required.” 

As pivotal moments often require life changes, Jones’ concussion forced him to slow down and reevaluate. He shifted focus solely to Olympic weightlifting, a sport he discovered and grew to love during team workouts. USA Weightlifting noticed and placed him into the Transitional Athlete Program, a program that monitors the progress of weightlifters with potential who have come from other sports. Within a year of starting, Jones finished seventh at Junior Nationals (under-20) and qualified for Senior Nationals within a year and a half. In 2020, Jones ranked 16th in the country for his weight class. 

Winning Performance Prompts Freshman Business Launch

Of his many academic and athletic achievements, Jones is proudest of starting his own business, Matthew Jones Performance, as a freshman in 2018. With a unique business model, Jones uses remote weekly individualized programming, weekly technical video analysis, and frequent communication with clients to reinforce and grow their athletic potential. “I remotely coach athletes of all skill levels from across the country,” he said. “I take pride in the fact that I can help people of all ages reach their physical and mental goals through athletics.” 

Jones credits Goizueta in helping him grow his business, including Senior Lecturer in Organization & Management John Kim’s Strategic Management course, Associate Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management (Biostatistics & Bioinformatics) Donald Lee’s Advanced Decision Analytics, and Assistant Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management Vilma Todri’s Introduction to Business Data Analytics.

“As an Information Systems & Operations Management major, we deal with a lot of data, so we’re looking for business patterns to make operations more efficient,” Jones said. “In coaching, I’m looking for patterns in the weightlifting or in the athlete’s performance so that I can make changes to make it better. I have used this knowledge to better utilize athlete data and also run the business-side more efficiently with more attention to detail.” 

Although Jones will be working full-time at Cintas after graduation, his passion for strength sports will continue as he trains as a weightlifter, as well as works to expand his growing business.  “I’m going to have a lot of challenges ahead of me,” he said. “But I’m looking forward to getting into a routine and seeing how successful I can be and how far I can go.”

The study of Organization & Management is a multi-disciplinary endeavor that draws from various social science disciplines including economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. Goizueta Information Systems & Operations Management faculty teaches future leaders to account for and leverage digital technology and novel operating practices required to compete in business today. 

Emory University’s Commencement Weekend ceremonies will take place May 14-16, 2021. Enjoy other student stories on the Emory Memory wall. 

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The challenge: Propose a solution to a consortium of medical doctors seeking to push forward climate change initiatives. Team captain Farhan Hossain 21BBA and his team of Kat Sarafianos 22BBA, Liam Carlson 22BBA, and Matt Santos 21BBA faced a tight timeframe, limited resources, and various legal requirements, but they stepped up and delivered. 

“It was an interesting issue because there weren’t financials to dig into, or products, or a service issue, but it was more of how do you organize and reorient the overall focus of a business of a nonprofit,” Hossain said.

Using Classroom Insights to Add Real-World Value

To address the challenges the consortium was facing, the student team pitched a platform approach by offering innovation and connecting grassroots actors to technology. They also suggested reorganizing operations within the nonprofit itself. Whereas the current nonprofit operates on a state-by-state level, Hossain and his team proposed a new role of acting as a regional motivator or actor to encourage more grassroots action in a specific area.

“It’s tough to get motivated and organized on a state level as opposed to a county or a regional level, and there was very little oversight and direction in certain regions,” Hossain said. “We got positive feedback from the nonprofit about this strategy because they had never thought of organizing in that way.”

After not making it through the preliminary rounds his first year competing as a junior, Hossain was thrilled for his team to take second place overall.

“Super grateful for the opportunity to lead the team this year. This specific case competition provided a great growth opportunity,” Hossain said. “I am very proud of what my team and I have accomplished together. Special thanks to the Goizueta Case Competition Club, John Kim and Dr. Mitchell-Damron (Goizueta’s director of student life, engagement, and support) for all their help.”

Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education Andrea Hershatter expressed her excitement for the team’s success. “I cannot tell you how excited and proud I am that the team placed second in what I understand is currently the largest undergraduate case competition in the United States,” Hershatter said. “I am delighted by their accomplishments, including the ways in which they highlighted their academic abilities, represented the program, and enhanced the reputation of Goizueta.”

Hossain encourages other students to get involved in competitions like this because not only are they an enjoyable experience to network with students from around the world, but they are also an opportunity to apply what is learned in the classroom to real-world problems.

“These case competitions opened up a light to me in seeing how you can apply your finance and consulting knowledge, and it helped me with the decision-making process in terms of what I wanted to do fulltime,” Hossain said.

“If anyone is on the fence about what they want to do for their career, exposing yourself to opportunities like these competitions will always help you understand what the career looks like and help you get insight from experts.”

– Farhan Hossain 21BBA

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On the last day of classes, John Kim 05MBA, senior lecturer in organization & management, breaks from the strategy basics he normally teaches to help students focus on their future.

“For me, strategy frameworks are not just for businesses (or someone else). They can help us think through our own careers and lives,” Kim said. “Sometimes, education can feel like a straight line, but let’s all agree that life is a bunch of S curves where there is no syllabus.”

Strategy and operations have been his career focus for the past two decades. The Goizueta alum worked with Deloitte Consulting and Philips Healthcare for 12 years before returning to his alma mater in 2017 to teach. For the last three years, as full-time faculty, he has been teaching strategy, consulting and healthcare strategy across the BBA, MBA and Executive Education programs.

“What I tell people is that I get paid to learn, teach and hang out with smart, curious and ambitious people,” he said. “It’s a bit of a luxury. I see myself as a curiosity coach. For me, if students leave the semester more curious, more open-minded and more empowered to ask good questions, I feel I’ve done my job.”

As a big believer in lifelong learning, Kim started a blog in 2012. The Consultant’s Mind showcases hundreds of posts about consulting tips and tricks, working around real-world scenarios and much more.

Recently, Kim launched a new blog, Strategy Happy Hour, where he invites previous students to connect, write and dive deeper into everyday problems. “This year, by the end of Q1, all strategic plans went out the window. It’s a fascinating time to think about, discuss and hopefully improve business,” Kim said.

“Graduating from school, you learn one-third of what you need. The other two-thirds, you’re going to learn through experience,” he said. “It’s my strong belief that intellectual curiosity is fuel for your career. Strategy Happy Hour is a community where people can geek out and write about interesting business stuff as if they were a student again.”

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We live in a copy-cat world. It’s easy to Google “best practices” online and make your business more operationally efficient. It’s never been easier to hire from the competition and outsource half of your business operations to third-party manufacturers, designers, marketers, consultants, and fulfilment companies. Benchmarking the competition is often the first step.

Empirical studies indicate that few firms can perform well above average for a sustained period. However, those same studies find that a small subset of firms do consistently perform well above average for years or even decades. This profitability is attributable to finding an attractive segment of the market with high growth and few major competitors, as well as offering a unique value proposition to customers.

However, it is more likely that today’s competing firms closely resemble one another, rather than offering a distinctive business model in a way that creates value, said Kim.

Businesses are easier to start

By some measures, it’s never been easier to start a business. First, interest rates have been at historic lows for almost 10 years, making it easy to find investors eager to get a return. Second, the global supply chain now provides numerous varieties of “(fill-in-the-blank) as a service” models, allowing new entrants to jump into established markets with few fixed costs, said Kim. Companies can rent technology like cloud services and warehouse space and outsource services like product fulfillment and distribution – all with funds borrowed at low interest rates.

In other words, what used to cost millions in capital expenditure — developing products, establishing manufacturing capacity, setting up IT infrastructure – has now conveniently become an operating expense.

Profits are harder to sustain

Even during favorable economic conditions, more than a third of publicly traded companies on the U.S. stock exchanges lose money. Companies can be clever, borrowing money and buying back shares, to improve the return on equity, in spite of the slow-growth environment. “In some ways, isn’t this a confession that management teams do not see the potential or possess the ability to grow their business?” said Kim.

Some established companies also overlook threats or miss opportunities because they focus on their ‘traditional’ goals and objectives, making small tweaks instead of big shifts, said Robert Kazanjian, Asa Griggs Candler professor of organization and management at Goizueta Business School.

“They don’t revisit questions about where to compete and how to compete,” Kazanjian said.

Forward-looking companies anticipate and work ahead of market shifts through organizational agility, Kazanjian said. “I see few companies that aren’t concerned about a competitor arising with a disruptive business model.”

Agile businesses sense where markets may move by analyzing internal and external information. Then they experiment until they reach the right response, Kazanjian said.

Every business is a technology business

Industry definitions are changing, too. In a recent Goizueta class he was teaching, Kim recalled, when he asked for examples of industries which are being transformed by the onslaught of new forms of structured and unstructured data, one participant sheepishly — and wisely — replied, “Every industry?”

In the past, chief information officers (CIOs) focused on internal systems that were located “on premise” and were considered a cost center. Now, CIOs are co-pilots in the customer experience, channel partnership, competitive strategy, and digital transformation arenas.

“The opportunity (and existential threat) for machine learning and big data to upend existing operating models, is not something that the CMO, CFO, and COO can simply pass on to the CIO and claim it’s not their problem,” said Kim.

How to sustain a competitive advantage

How can market incumbents use scale to their advantage while also being nimble enough to fend off startups with the good fortune of investors that don’t mind funding them through extensive losses?

“The core elements of a good strategy are to have a clear sense of what business you are in, and what your value proposition is. This is not a once-and-done process. Revisiting that strategy regularly is essential for remaining competitive,” said Kazanjian.

“Successful companies solicit information from all levels and departments so they can share and test ideas internally,” Kazanjian said. “If they have good input from people about what they are seeing and hearing, and they validate that externally, they can make good decisions about where to compete and how.”

“When you’re an incumbent, it’s easy to be focused on making the best products that serve your best customers 2% to 3% better each year and miss, say, the low end of your market,” Kim said. “So, you have to keep your eye on your best customer but not overlook the customers that you may have priced out, or featured out, by making your best product too fancy.”

Gillette, for example, cut the prices on its razors after losing market share to competitors that sold cheaper products that were as effective. The company acknowledged “the drawbacks of its singular focus on creating ever-more sophisticated razors with higher and higher prices” and shifted to promoting products at different price points instead.

Learning to listen, adapt, and build your moat

U.S. philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” In this business environment, everyone has to be a learner, or will find themselves obsolete.

Strategy is about creating a set of activities that creates a sustainable competitive advantage. Kim teaches new leaders to apply the fundamentals of strategy according to their particular situation, like what their market needs and how they could serve it based on their own strengths and weaknesses.

In a similar vein, Kazanjian shares examples of how companies identify new product niches or service opportunities in his classrooms. “I’ve started to talk with companies about how they regularly and systematically collect information from both their current customers and possible customers that may help them be able to service better given their current capabilities,” he said.

“The fundamentals of having a sustainable competitive advantage are still super relevant, but what has changed is the means by which you [as a leader] can do that,” Kim said. “The key is to figure out who you can be, and how you can do that the best.”

Warren Buffett famously said that he looks for companies with economic moats. What is your moat?

If you’d like to learn how you or your organization can engage with Goizueta faculty on this topic, speak with a learning advisor at 404-727-2200 or visit our website.

Emory University’s Goizueta Business School was created in 1919 as one of the nation’s first business schools. Its MBA programs consistently rank in the top 25 in the world among major publications including Businessweek, The Economist, U.S. News & World Report, and Forbes.

The post Strategy is more important now than ever to be ahead of tomorrow’s business shifts appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

John Kim on strategy development and implementation for an unpredictable business world.

Beware of False Choices

“One thing we try to teach here at the business school is to be careful of false choices,” says John Kim, Organization and Management faculty at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

“Business is incredibly dynamic. Every industry is now a technology business, and the corporate playbook that evolved to protect profits is quite outdated.” Kim notes that Thomas Friedman poetically described this new normal in his 2005 book The World is Flat, and over the last 15 years, competition has only accelerated because of the explosion of two resources: cheap money and data. 

Kim notes that it’s a great environment to start or fund a business because interest rates have been low for the last 10+ years. There are dozens of new entrants in all industries, and all parts of the value chain, who are often well-funded, flexible, and are not weighed down by legacy business models and assets. The big winners are the customers who have increasing choice, lower prices, and great value capture.

This new business context also requires a strategic approach to problem-solving. Kim notes that most businesses are good at what they do; they have intelligent and motivated people who solve the straight-forward problems quickly. The challenge is that the most meaningful problems are not straight-forward – they have constraints, built-in assumptions, or don’t factor in changes in customers’ preferences. Too often, business is solving yesterday’s problems.

Instead, Kim borrows a phrase from marketer Seth Godin, who coined the term ‘perfect problems’ to describe ones that do not have clear solutions as each alternative comes with constraints. This is where Kim’s warning over ‘false choices’ comes to the fore. When we are faced with problems where any possible solution seems unacceptable as it transgresses other ‘red lines,’ then it is time to think differently. 

“Strategy is no longer a choice of ‘this’ or ‘that’ but much more often ‘this and that’,” he says. It is looking beyond these false, over-simplified choices that set good managers apart and allow for more complexity and ambiguity.

The Challenging Environment

From his corporate experience, Kim sees two significant challenges to strategy implementation. First, senior leaders turn over quickly. “It’s hard to have consistency of vision and leadership and implementation when there is such a movement in the C-suite with someone moving in and someone moving out every 5–6 months. So, it’s not a surprise that a lot of strategies either don’t follow through or there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and strategy gets a little bit muddled as a result.”

Secondly, when the strategy does eventually make it to the ground-floor and needs to be executed, things have often moved on, and the market responses are rarely the ones you expect. Riffing on Peter Drucker’s famous quote on uncertainty, Kim explains to his students that, “Instead of trying to think of something brilliant to do tomorrow, why don’t you think of something very actionable today that prepares us for what we know will be a totally messy, crazy, unpredictable tomorrow.”

Kim believes that the truly differentiating factor for executives is their ability to frame problems clearly, patiently develop strategies, and use persuasion to get them implemented. Organizational decision-making is messy, and it often takes a fair amount of leadership, experience, and professional savvy to get strategies implemented.

A Business Executive’s Response

The business executive’s job is to not only set the direction, build a climate of trust, and create the energy for change—but also to be willing to test the assumptions and constraints around a given problem. Increasingly the answers will lie outside of a given industry, and thus require leaders to be broader in their horizon-scanning and more open to alternative paths forward.

In many organizations, the requirement at the very highest executive levels is one of horizon-scanning. Trying to understand what the future will bring in a macro sense, so that you can make those actionable decisions today that will prepare the business for the unpredictability of tomorrow. Kim notes that senior leaders “need to go very wide and very deep.” While this seems an unrealistic or even daunting requirement, Kim likens this to the skills of an oil wildcatter surveying 1,000 square kilometres of territory to understand where the oil might lie. This requires the ability to “rapidly pattern recognize problems…identifying the time-frame, the constraints, the assumptions, the variables, the economic drivers that will indicate where a specific cause of a problem may lie, similar to asking ‘where should we dig for oil?’”

The acquisition of these capabilities is something that John Kim believes is going to become ever more valuable in the coming years. “With the coming of machine learning, anything that can be automated will be automated. This brings a vital lesson to us—we have to play to our individual strengths, and your strength is not to be a better machine. We need to be doing all the things that the machine can’t do. Which is to lead, demonstrate empathy, demonstrate decision-making, and critically to understand when a pattern is wrong and that it’s actually shifting to a different pattern.”

For Kim, this is where leadership, culture, and organizational design come in. Are the right questions surfacing and being explored by a diverse, informed group of trusting leaders? Or are the only solutions being proffered ones that are mired in a slow grind of bureaucracy and alignment meetings? Those who can manage the messiness of business will be even more valued in the unpredictable tomorrows Peter Drucker identified several decades ago.

The post Strategy for a messy tomorrow appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

Beware of False Choices

“One thing we try to teach here at the business school is to be careful of false choices,” says John Kim, Organization and Management faculty at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

“Business is incredibly dynamic. Every industry is now a technology business, and the corporate playbook that evolved to protect profits is quite outdated.” Kim notes that Thomas Friedman poetically described this new normal in his 2005 book The World is Flat, and over the last 15 years, competition has only accelerated because of the explosion of two resources: cheap money and data. 

Kim notes that it’s a great environment to start or fund a business because interest rates have been low for the last 10+ years. There are dozens of new entrants in all industries, and all parts of the value chain, who are often well-funded, flexible, and are not weighed down by legacy business models and assets. The big winners are the customers who have increasing choice, lower prices, and great value capture.

This new business context also requires a strategic approach to problem-solving. Kim notes that most businesses are good at what they do; they have intelligent and motivated people who solve the straight-forward problems quickly. The challenge is that the most meaningful problems are not straight-forward – they have constraints, built-in assumptions, or don’t factor in changes in customers’ preferences. Too often, business is solving yesterday’s problems.

Instead, Kim borrows a phrase from marketer Seth Godin, who coined the term ‘perfect problems’ to describe ones that do not have clear solutions as each alternative comes with constraints. This is where Kim’s warning over ‘false choices’ comes to the fore. When we are faced with problems where any possible solution seems unacceptable as it transgresses other ‘red lines,’ then it is time to think differently. 

“Strategy is no longer a choice of ‘this’ or ‘that’ but much more often ‘this and that’,” he says. It is looking beyond these false, over-simplified choices that set good managers apart and allow for more complexity and ambiguity.

The Challenging Environment

From his corporate experience, Kim sees two significant challenges to strategy implementation. First, senior leaders turn over quickly. “It’s hard to have consistency of vision and leadership and implementation when there is such a movement in the C-suite with someone moving in and someone moving out every 5–6 months. So, it’s not a surprise that a lot of strategies either don’t follow through or there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and strategy gets a little bit muddled as a result.”

Secondly, when the strategy does eventually make it to the ground-floor and needs to be executed, things have often moved on, and the market responses are rarely the ones you expect. Riffing on Peter Drucker’s famous quote on uncertainty, Kim explains to his students that, “Instead of trying to think of something brilliant to do tomorrow, why don’t you think of something very actionable today that prepares us for what we know will be a totally messy, crazy, unpredictable tomorrow.”

Kim believes that the truly differentiating factor for executives is their ability to frame problems clearly, patiently develop strategies, and use persuasion to get them implemented. Organizational decision-making is messy, and it often takes a fair amount of leadership, experience, and professional savvy to get strategies implemented.

A Business Executive’s Response

The business executive’s job is to not only set the direction, build a climate of trust, and create the energy for change—but also to be willing to test the assumptions and constraints around a given problem.  Increasingly the answers will lie outside of a given industry, and thus require leaders to be broader in their horizon-scanning and more open to alternative paths forward.

In many organizations, the requirement at the very highest executive levels is one of horizon-scanning. Trying to understand what the future will bring in a macro sense, so that you can make those actionable decisions today that will prepare the business for the unpredictability of tomorrow. Kim notes that senior leaders “need to go very wide and very deep.” While this seems an unrealistic or even daunting requirement, Kim likens this to the skills of an oil wildcatter surveying 1,000 square kilometres of territory to understand where the oil might lie.  This requires the ability to “rapidly pattern recognize problems…identifying the time-frame, the constraints, the assumptions, the variables, the economic drivers that will indicate where a specific cause of a problem may lie, similar to asking ‘where should we dig for oil?’”

The acquisition of these capabilities is something that John Kim believes is going to become ever more valuable in the coming years. “With the coming of machine learning, anything that can be automated will be automated. This brings a vital lesson to us—we have to play to our individual strengths, and your strength is not to be a better machine. We need to be doing all the things that the machine can’t do. Which is to lead, demonstrate empathy, demonstrate decision-making, and critically to understand when a pattern is wrong and that it’s actually shifting to a different pattern.”

For Kim, this is where leadership, culture, and organizational design come in. Are the right questions surfacing and being explored by a diverse, informed group of trusting leaders? Or are the only solutions being proffered ones that are mired in a slow grind of bureaucracy and alignment meetings? Those who can manage the messiness of business will be even more valued in the unpredictable tomorrows Peter Drucker identified several decades ago.

The post Strategy for a messy tomorrow appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

Attendees of this year’s Undergraduate Business School Leadership Conference explored the concept of innovation during networking opportunities, team building activities and thought-provoking talks with Goizueta professors.

UBSLC is a student-run international conference held annually at Goizueta. The conference, which took place Feb. 15-16 this year, provides a forum for top undergraduate business students to meet with leading business executives, cultivate meaningful connections and unify under a common theme designed to help them become more effective leaders and professionals.

Attendees also heard from Tapestry, Inc., CEO Victor Luis during a fireside chat.

Innovation in society 

On Thursday, Wesley Longhofer, assistant professor of organization and management at Goizueta, spoke to UBSLC students on how innovation can address society’s biggest problems — and how business schools fit into the equation.

“What’s missing from business today?” Longhofer asked the students.

“A triple bottom line,” “civility,” “a sense of community in the workplace,” “humanity,” were some of the responses.

Longhofer then asked the students to consider the purpose of a business school. “The business school is the context in which our ideas generate, our ideas forge, and that context also shapes our ideas. If you want to ask how you innovate in a business school, you have to understand what a business school is. You have to understand that institutional context that I teach in and you’ll take classes in,” he said.

Part of that context, according to Longhofer, is understanding poverty and inequality in today’s society.

Longhofer offered key ideas on how business schools might address society’s biggest problems, starting with incorporating the impact businesses have on society in discussions and classes beyond special programs for social enterprise. Longhofer also questioned why business professionals don’t have free clinics, pro bono programs or codes of ethics like other professions. Finally, Longhofer spoke on the importance of finding blind spots and filling them in, pointing out the lack of venture capital given to African Americans, Latinos and women in comparison to other groups.

Longhofer advised students not to become discouraged if they join a company whose values don’t match their own: “You can take whatever issue you care about, and you can push a company from within to make sure that their values align with your values. It’s not that easy, but you can change the company.”

Innovation within institutions

“How do you make sure everything that you create [while in school] doesn’t die when you leave?” John Kim 05MBA, lecturer in organization and management at Goizueta, asked UBSLC students during a workshop on Friday.

Before joining the Goizueta faculty, Kim worked in consulting and strategy for more than 20 years, and continues to write a consulting blog.

With this unique combination of professional and academic experience, Kim was able to share valuable insight with UBSLC students as they prepare to graduate from business school and join the workforce.

When asked who among the group planned to go into professional services of some kind, all the students raised their hands. “The reason I bring that up is that your business is taking very complex, confusing, somewhat ambiguous ideas, structuring them into buckets, and then persuading people to take action,” Kim said. “We’re in the persuasion business.”

During the workshop, Kim focused on the frameworks of innovation: What are the obstacles and enablers of innovation within institutions? The students were asked to reflect on the question in the context of student-run clubs and organizations.

Kim concluded the workshop with words of advice for the students. Kim said, as young people, the students would not have a lot of “positional power” when entering the workforce, so focus instead on building “expertise power.”

“I’m a big fan of the expression, ‘strong opinions, loosely held,’” Kim said. “Stand your ground because you did the research and you’re confident in your competence. Do the work to prove you have a seat at the table—but don’t be a hard head either. Especially when the evidence shows that it’s probably worth you changing your opinion.”

Conversations about innovation

During an activity session with Ed Lee, senior director of the Alben W. Barkley Forum for Debate, Deliberation and Dialogue, UBSLC students discussed the following questions in small groups:

1. Why do we need to innovate?
2. What are the barriers to innovation?
3. What are the ways in which educators could better prepare us to be innovators?

Lee provided scratch paper and markers to facilitate creative ideas and help students sketch out thoughts and ideas. “When we look at the paper afterwards, we will see the various ways in which we have come together to think about innovation,” Lee said.

Gallery

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For students looking to add beneficial business skills to their resumes, Goizueta might have the answer.

The school is hosting its annual Emory Business Institute, providing non-business degree students with an opportunity to experience the Goizueta curriculum.

Open to all Emory and non-Emory students, the three-week, intensive academic course carries six credit hours and will teach students about marketing, accounting and finance, as well as how students can apply learned skills to practical career situations.

“There’s a lot of things that [Goizueta does] really well that non-business majors probably need,” said John Kim, lecturer in Organization & Management. “We know, even if you didn’t graduate from business school, what the business expectations are of you even though you studied history, which I think allows us to really curate what’s important rather than you trying to curate it yourself.”

Tuition for the program is Emory’s standard summer tuition rate set at $9,264, which includes all evening programming, transportation for corporate site visits, most course materials and assessment tools, all coaching, and some snack breaks and lunches.

“I think the big takeaways for people are No. 1, it gives [students] a good business baseline understanding of the 40 things they should know before starting work across any discipline,” Kim said. “No. 2 is showing them that actually business is pretty interesting. It’s really fun and fascinating to dig into business problems.”

The course will include fast-paced lectures, cases and workshops. Faculty will focus on what they believe is the most critical for non-business majors entering the workplace, including career preparation and professional development courses to develop key skills. 

“The vision for this and where this is heading is this is a need not just for Emory non-business majors but just non-business majors period,” Kim said. “Atlanta has 6 million people. There are a lot of juniors and seniors out there who either go to different schools or whose schools don’t offer business school stuff that there’s a demand for this.”

The institute will run five days a week from Tuesday, May 15 through Friday, June 1 with sessions running from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. daily.

“At the end of the day, everybody wants to work in really good jobs where you’re tackling tough problems, and usually what that means is that you need to be wise beyond your age,” Kim said. “So how do you do that? I would see this program as a platform to know the basics but also know how to educate yourself.”

For more information, contact John Kim at jkstrategy@emory.edu.

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