Journeying from Pakistan, he saw Emory for the first time when he moved in as a first-year student who valued kindness and being helpful. “That began the four most formative years of my life,” he recalls. “I was a first-generation student making independent decisions, in a country, university, and system that rewards persistence and dedication. I wanted to take full advantage of that.” 

No case competition team for undergraduates at Goizueta Business School? Bhatty helped create one, and they flew to compete nationally. An investment newsletter written by juniors and seniors only? Bhatty broke in as a freshman. Google not recruiting at Emory then? “I can get a job with them,” Bhatty vowed.

And he did. Bhatty landed at Google for Entrepreneurs, as a digital lead for search advertising. “At Google, my impact was as one piece of a large, well-oiled machine,” he notes. “For me to have a larger individual impact, I had to take a risk.” 

He left Google for the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and he joined a fellow MBA student to co-found Halo Cars in 2018. A rideshare driver makes extra money by putting a smart digital advertising screen—a Halo—on their car roof, and the ads can be hyper-targeted based on the car’s location.

Within a year, Lyft bought Halo Cars, and today Bhatty is head of business development and strategic partnerships for Lyft Media. “Don’t be afraid to take risks,” is Bhatty’s advice for student entrepreneurs. “Early in your career, the risk is not that high, and that calculated risk will reap benefits the rest of your career. If you decide entrepreneurship is not your path, you will be a better employee and problem solver.”

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“I owe all my major achievements to what I learned at Goizueta. Without the business knowledge and skills, I could not have obtained an offer from McKinsey & Company, could not have the opportunity to work for a huge conglomerate as their head of strategy, could not got the chance to play a vital role in changing the almost unchangeable China healthcare landscape,” he says. “Without the MBA learning experience in Atlanta as a fresh medical school graduate, I could not have the drive to work on my first novel Everything Grows. The Sheth Award is a confirmation that I have learned the right things at Emory, and I have done the right things after I graduated from Emory.”

Throughout Zhang’s life, he has demonstrated an unyielding passion for learning and sharing his gifts with society. He has written, “In the past thirty years, I have gone from an era of extreme material scarcity to an era of extreme material proliferation.” Zhang has come to realize that “Having more, even much more, does not mean that you are happier,” he reflects. “The future business models have to address the deeper causes of human happiness. Having more is just not the direction to go.”

To achieve work/life balance, Zhang briefly took a hiatus from business and moved to California where a publisher challenged him to re-translate Tagore’s Stray Birds. Controversial and much criticized, the translation was eventually banned and removed from shelves in China. Zhang defends his work as a better reflection of contemporary Chinese language and history.

As an author and poet, he is a self-described audacious and free man who weaves autobiographical elements and business expertise into stories that incorporate social taboos. Zhang crafts thought-provoking novels, essays, poetry, and short stories. Perhaps best known to his global audience as the beloved novelist Feng Tang, Zhang earned several People’s Literature Awards in China, was named to the Top 20 Under 40 Literature Masters in China and lauded by Chinese GQ magazine as one of the world’s most influential writers in recent history. Many of his books have been adapted for television, streaming video, film, and have earned billions of loyal viewers. As a literary figure in China and beyond, Zhang is also recognized for his calligraphy and frequently demonstrates his art through museum exhibitions and collaborations with noted artists and photographers.

Read more about the Sheth Distinguished International Alumni Award, established in 2002 by the generous gift of Madhu and Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt professor of marketing, seeks to recognize Emory University’s international alumni who have distinguished themselves in service to universities, governments, private-sector firms, and/or nongovernmental organizations.

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Dye was a brand-new college graduate with a chemistry degree when she was hired as a private high school English teacher one week before classes began. She had taken zero education classes. “I had always been close friends with my teachers and professors, and something in me gravitates to teaching,” she says. “Along with a reasonable syllabus, I pulled together an hour and 20 minutes of material for a 45-minute class. That mistake I only made once.” 

A love of literature and analysis led Dye to Emory for a PhD in English, concentrating on 19^th century Southern literature. In a weak academic job market, her proficiency in non-linear thinking turned into a career-building tool. She joined McKinsey and eventually worked up to associate partner. Later, as vice president and chief strategy and innovation officer at Navigant Consulting, she helped grow revenues from $724 million to over $1 billion and increase stock price by 85 percent.

“Literary interpretation and critical thinking are really well suited to strategic development. I gravitated really quickly to innovation and creativity,” she says. “What makes an exceptional literary critic is analogous reasoning, and I used parallels and metaphors when I consulted with organizations. I am a reader and writer at my core.”

After four years of teaching as an adjunct faculty member, Dye earned her current Goizueta title in 2017. She remains an innovator, using Twitter and podcasting to educate beyond the classroom.

“Lots of folks like myself successfully led multimillion and multibillion dollar publicly-traded companies. As a McKinsey consultant, I had the opportunity to serve hundreds of Fortune 100 companies, but also I personally led 5,000 employees as a member of a senior executive team. I like to think that one reason for my success as a faculty member is academically rigorous training and my practical management expertise.”  

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What’s David’s advice for students? Take advantage of access to broad university experiences beyond the classroom.

“Learning is not restricted to the classroom, so the staff member in my dorm set up a meeting for me to consider a PhD,” he recalled. “I’ve literally been putting one foot in front of the other ever since then, and today I tell our students that should not be the totality of their Emory experience. Coming to a top-tier research university, you need to take advantage of all the value that we are adding.”

Individual choice defines Schweidel’s work, too. He studies data from consumer decisions and spending patterns of consumer groups—especially on social media—to identify trends. His research focuses on the development and application of statistical models to understand consumer behavior and shape how companies manage relationships with consumers. He asks questions like: As information spreads at lightning speed, how do companies harness that power to reach (and not manipulate) consumers?

“Take something like consumers’ location data, which has the potential to destroy their privacy,” Schweidel says. “Where’s the tradeoff, and how do you balance the consumer privacy with the business objective?”

Through tweets and posts, consumers signal their values, and companies must pay attention. “If your consumers care about an issue, you have to,” he added. “Business doesn’t operate in a vacuum.”

Because technology and data-gathering morph constantly, Schweidel uses current issues in his classes. Example: As marketing copy is churned out by language generation tools aimed at increasing search engine optimization, how will business change? “It’s not Mad Men anymore,” Schweidel says of consumer marketing. “It’s math men. Data and analytics now make things tick in business.”

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Since Adamski has become a professional, the personal connections he developed at Goizueta have continued into his everyday life.

“I still consider several of my professors to be friends,” he says. “They’re people that I highly respect.” He acknowledged that lessons in critical thinking were delivered with real-world examples, personal experiences, and outcomes, including lessons learned.

Working in the procurement industry, Adamski has worked with ProcureAbility for the last year after earlier stints with A.T. Kearney and Georgia Pacific. Goizueta helped Adamski develop hard skills and soft skills to use in procurement consulting.

“From a hard skill perspective, the way to think about problems, the way to even first off ask the question, ‘Is this a problem worth thinking about?’ That is definitely something I use on a regular basis,” he notes.

Adamski recalled the change management and leadership courses that gave him the tools to influence clients and colleagues to, “help them along that evolutionary journey.” Soft skills have become increasingly important during the pandemic where meeting remotely by video conference is a way of life. Welcoming colleagues and clients into your home via a computer monitor has become a necessity to grow relationships. “We have to strive to make sure that we can see each other as human beings, not just as someone on the other side of the screen,” Adamski says.

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“I get a lot of satisfaction watching from the sidelines,” she says. “If I can set things up and think through challenges and complexities, and it runs as if it was easy and straightforward, thenI’ve  succeeded in my job.”

Igleheart is program director of Start:ME, the business accelerator housed in The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute. She is in awe of the hardworking Atlanta entrepreneurs who go through the three-month training program and of the mentors who show up every week to guide and support them.

“They’re really passionate about what they do, whether it’s baking or fashion or construction. They bring so much enthusiasm to what they’re doing,” she says.

Participants live and work in Clarkston, East Lake, and Southside Atlanta. Start:ME has worked with 257 ventures since 2013. Two-thirds are led by women, 84 percent by people of color, and a quarter by foreign-born entrepreneurs. Together they employ more than 500 people and generate about $12 million in annual sales. A new crop of 49 businesses and 80 mentors are in the 2021 cohorts.

Bringing together good people to build networks and connections is a key ingredient in Start:ME’s formula: A power-washing company partners with a housecleaning firm. A designer and a seamster find ways to collaborate.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upended everything. Start:ME’s lively in-person meetings had to jump to Zoom, and Igleheart worried that the group energy would be lost.

But moving program content into videos meant participants could view it at their own pace. Meetings became more interactive, with discussions in breakout groups. Another bonus: a larger and more diverse group of mentors and experts could pitch in.

With a master’s degree in international policy from Stanford and a decade of finance experience, Igleheart has a wide-open, optimistic view of what’s possible for Start:ME entrepreneurs. “I see the success of our program in the success of the people we serve,” she says. “Not that it runs itself, but in some ways it does. People take what you give them—the structure, the knowledge, the relationships—and they independently start to share it with others and apply it to new ventures.”

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Now a technology sales executive at Microsoft, Sole began her career as an accountant after graduating from George Mason University with a bachelor’s degree in accounting at the onset of the global recession. 

“It was a crazy time,” Sole says. “I felt fortunate to have been offered a job, but I soon realized I needed change; the accounting world wasn’t for me.”

She earned a master’s in international commerce and policy from Mason, became a business consultant, and was then tapped for a tech role. “This was out of my comfort zone at the time; the perfect recipe for growth,” she says.

Her tech job was virtual, so Sole moved to Atlanta. “By analyzing the gaps in my skill set, I knew I needed an MBA,” she says. “At Goizueta, I could expand my network, build business acumen, and develop entrepreneurial skills.”

Sole joined a diverse Executive MBA class: “My cohort is incredibly smart, accomplished, kind, and supportive. On a global study trip to Dubai, we formed a real, unbreakable bond. We still have a group chat to catch up on each other’s progress and adventures.”

One of her most valuable classes was Organizational Behavior with Associate Professor Peter Topping. “He taught us invaluable skills that differentiate a person or a company,” she says. “I use the knowledge I gained daily.”

As a technology sales executive in New York City, Sole leads education partner sales in the Mid-Atlantic Region for Microsoft. “I accelerate digital transformation for customers by leveraging Microsoft’s partner solutions,” she says. “My day-to-day requires I lead and orchestrate across cross-functional teams to drive business outcomes. To lead effectively, being self-aware is critical in developing emotional intelligence.”

In the tech world, according to Sole, “things change at light speed. I prefer it this way because to me, monotony is slow death.” Sole is also on an entrepreneurial journey. She is currently building Velvé, a multi-functional skincare product line for women leveraging African botanicals and cutting-edge skin science, set to launch later this year.

Curious about the Goizueta Executive MBA program? Learn more here. #MeetGoizueta

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“The main driver for this addition in our programming is the clear direction of the global economy and the skills leaders will need in the future,” said Brian Mitchell 00MBA, associate dean of full-time MBA programs. “This has led to significant growth in interest in STEM for younger students, which they bring with them to business school. Our faculty has always delivered a quantitatively rigorous curriculum, so credentialling a STEM track has been a natural evolution for them.”

Students who choose the new STEM track will complete electives that give them a deeper understanding of the tools necessary for analyzing business decisions and more experience applying those tools to real-world challenges.

“For those choosing to pursue careers in STEM-related fields,” said Mitchell, “this credential will be a competitive advantage in the marketplace.” Goizueta also offers a STEM-designated MS in Business Analytics degree and STEM-designated Master of Analytical Finance degree.

Learn more about this new STEM track in Goizueta’s Full-time MBA programs.

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MBA students led by Willie Sullivan 21MBA began forming the case competition in summer 2020 in response to police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. Their organizing mirrored what Lewis (1940-2020) did as a college student in the 1960s.

By King Week 2021, when judges determined top student teams—and Emory MBA students finished second—the competition extended the economic legacy of Lewis’ courageous crossing of Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. 

“Racial justice and business success are not mutually exclusive, and in fact are connected,” said Bonnie Schipper 23JD/MBA, a member of the runner-up team with Rutendo Chikuku, Bryan Shepherd and Simone Trotman, all 22MBA. HP welcomed the team’s bold ideas for providing Black suppliers more access to capital, networking opportunities, and economic metrics. The team won $10,000, and half of prizes went to racial justice community nonprofits.

Other corporate sponsors and finalist teams included: Johnson & Johnson (University of Southern California Marshall Business School, winner of the $20,000 grand prize), Salesforce and Southern Company (two teams from MIT), Truist (Harvard Business School, $10,000 Audience Prize) and Walmart (Yale School of Management). SurveyMonkey and Poets & Quants provided support. “This competition came together so quickly, and a force of will made it happen,” Sullivan said of the volunteers, including former Lewis chief of staff Michael Collins 15MBA.

Learn more about the next John R. Lewis Racial Justice Case Competition.

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Minority Board Directors Held Back by Glass Ceiling and “Myopic” Biases

Diversity remains a troubling issue in the upper echelons of U.S. business today. A stunning 81 percent of board members in top firms are white and male, according to the Standard & Poor 500 Index. So what prevents women and minority directors making it to the top? Goizueta’s Grace Pownall, professor and area coordinator of accounting,and Justin Short, assistant professor of accounting, together with Zawadi Lemayian of Washington University parsed 12 years of data on gender, ethnicity, and compensation to get insight into who holds power in U.S. board rooms. In Behavioral and Experimental Finance, research results point to two critical roadblocks that continue to stymie the career trajectory of aspiring Black, female, and minority directors: the glass ceiling effect that reduces the talent pool; and what Short et. al. call “myopic” bias entrenched in corporate America.

“The glass ceiling is a bottleneck for diverse talent,” says Short. “But we also see minority directors fail to secure promotions once they’re on the board. We conjecture that this is down to biased or myopic thinking on the part of chairs and peers.” Leaders need to be cognizant of the cut-off points that tie to ethnicity and gender in the U.S. and elsewhere, say the researchers; not least of all because of risk to innovation. “Without diversity, any organization risks deferring to group think, and sourcing creativity and ideas from the same, small pool of shared experience,” says Short. “There’s still work to be done because diversity at top levels of American business should be commonplace.”

B2B Firms Need to Smarten Up before Using AI in Procurement

Procurement, the process of buying in goods, products or services from external suppliers, is critical in the B2B market. But it’s costly, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. To speed and drive efficiencies in supply chain management, procurement managers are turning to artificial intelligence (AI). On the one hand, AI can automate the process of obtaining pricing quotes using tools like AI Assist and chat boxes. Then there’s the “smart control” that AI can leverage to identify the best potential suppliers via algorithms that collect and analyze market information.  Cut-and-dried benefits then for decision-makers? Not quite, says Goizueta’s Ruomeng Cui, assistant professor of Information Systems and Operations Management of research to appear in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Because unless your AI system is fitted with the smart control, you run the risk of getting higher price quotes from suppliers than you would if you used human procurement purchasers. And it’s down to how suppliers interact with automated chatbots. Together with colleagues from Rutgers University and Tianjin University, Cui ran a large-scale field experiment using China’s Alibaba trading platform and integrated chat program, Aliwangwang. What they found is that suppliers essentially “discriminate” against chatbot buyers when it comes to quoting prices. “Suppliers see chatbots as lacking expertise around their products,” says Cui. “The fact they don’t have to lower prices to build professional relationships with chatbot buyers means they tend to quote higher than they would otherwise.” This effect is mitigated, however, when buyers signal to suppliers that they also use the smart control: an AI-powered recommendation system. Caveat emptor, say Cui and her co-authors: by all means use AI in your procurement processes, just be smart about it. 

Do Multinationals Enjoy an IT Advantage in Emerging Markets?

We know that digital technology helps firms compete globally. But does IT give foreign firms the edge over local businesses for exploiting opportunities in emerging markets? Yes and no, says Goizueta George S. Craft Professor in Information Systems & Operations Management Benn Konsynski, and his co-authors. Their latest paper in Journal of Management Information Systems looks at data from a large sample of local and international businesses operating in India and reveals two key insights. First, they find that foreign players using IT to boost organizational capabilities do tend to have the advantage over incumbents when it comes to partnering with other companies – a key factor in their ability to scale operations in emerging markets. However, in areas like marketing and customer services, technology gives local firms the edge over foreign competitors, likely because of superior knowledge and understanding of local markets. Konsynski and colleagues shed authoritative new light on two critical areas: how both context and contingency shape outcomes for firms leveraging digital technologies to compete; and the perhaps unforeseen challenges that await newcomers looking to expand operations in emerging markets, which remain an attractive opportunity for international companies.

If PPP Relief is so Attractive, why are so few Small Firms Taking it up?

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), part of the U.S. Government’s CARES Act, is a relief package that offers highly subsidized financing to small businesses. With anescalating value, PPP reaches deep into the pockets of Federal Reserve with the aim of helping corporate America weather the economic contraction and job losses due to the pandemic. Yet, despite the “positive shock” it represents to struggling firms, PPP uptake has been far from universal. Not only that, but a significant proportion of firms applying for PPP actually return them to the government without using them. So what’s going on? It has to do with the indirect costs imposed on borrowers, says Goizueta’s Tetyana Balyuk, assistant professor of finance, in the National Bureau of Economic Research: Working Paper. She and colleagues from Johns Hopkins Carey and Fuqua School of Business looked at publicly listed firms that applied for PPP funds using databases maintained by the Securities and Exchange Commission. “These firms are worried about ex-post audits and investigations into recipients of these PPP funds, which are conducted by the government. Specifically they’re worried about subjectivity of these types of audits, and the broad powers the government has to pursue litigation.” The solution to this, she says, is to focus on the objective standards for PPP eligibility, and similarly objective standards for the conduct of ex-post audits. “Among other measures, policy-makers might want to look at delineating safe harbors to circumscribe litigation, which has been a standard practice in securities law since the 1930s.”

What are the Costs – and Opportunities – to Retailers in Returned Merchandise?

In 2018, a staggering 10% of all retail sales –around $369 billion – were returned to the original seller. For retailers, this is vastly challenging. First there’s figuring out how to respond; then there’s the huge financial loss from returned stock. And then there’s simply trying to work out what to do with unwanted merchandise and how to absorb it back into the inventory. But is there an opportunity here for retailers, too? Goizueta’s Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing, and Sandy D. Jap, Sarah Beth Brown professor of marketing,believe so. Together with Wharton Professor and former dean of Goizueta Business School, Thomas S. Robertson, they’ve published their research in Journal of Retailing.

The researchers dive into literature surrounding the returns market – a market so valuable it is “ripe for more research” – and found that returns policies can build reputation, drive customer loyalty, and secure competitive advantage. “Consumers today increasingly expect to be able to return goods easily,” says Jap, “and it’s a burden for retailers. But also an opportunity to deliver a customer experience that drives brand loyalty.” For those retailers, returns provide the chance to exchange goods, or even cross or upsell to customers who return to stores or sites to bring back original purchases. The trick, says Jap, is to “get it right.”An easy returns policy may build erputation for great customer service; too lax a policy and you might end up “training” customers to make returns, she says. There’s the risk to reputation, too, in how retailers absorb or dispose of returned goods: are their policies sustainable and environmentally friendly? More to explore in the potential trade-offs here, says Jap, and she and her co-authors call for more research into this evolving stage in the purchase journey.

Achievement? It’s All in the Eye of the Beholder

There is a well-documented gap in achievement between U.S. social classes  that hurts the perception of, standing, and prospects for people from lower-class, high-school educated backgrounds, vis a vis their higher-class counterparts with college degrees. One way of attenuating this gap might be to rethink the way society measures achievement, says Goizueta Assistant Professor of Organization and Management, Andrea Dittmann. Instead of assessing people’s skills and aptitudes through the lens of individual achievement, might it not be just as helpful to measure ability based on how well people work together, as a part of a team? Together with Nicole Stephens of Kellogg and USC Marshall’s Sarah Townsend, Dittman ran four studies of outcomes for students working alone or in groups. The work published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology portrayed consistent results: when working individually, higher-class students are better able to showcase their strengths. But in groups, this advantage disappears. In fact, when people from lower-class contexts work in teams, they demonstrate unique strengths that can set them apart from more privileged counterparts. Dittman and co-authors call for gateway institutions – institutes of higher education and workplaces – to integrate these findings into practices and procedures that reflect that one style of achievement is not superior to the other, but simply different.

Is There a Case for Sharing Less Information in Financial Statements?

There’s broad consensus in the world of finance. Disaggregation – the practice of breaking down different components or sources of earnings in a financial statement – is good. After all, for investors looking to predict a company’s earnings from one year to the next, all information is good information, right? Not necessarily, says Goizueta Professor of Finance, Teri Yohn; it all depends on what type of information is being shared. Together with colleagues from Colorado, Indiana, and OSU, Yohn hypothesized that not all disaggregated components in earnings statements are heterogeneous. Not all information might be specific to one year, and that’s problematic. “Investors assume that disaggregation highlights one-off specificities that impact earnings – things like restructuring costs– but won’t have a de facto impact on the future earnings of a company,” says Yohn. However, her research, published in The Journal of Accounting Studies, shows that disaggregation also trawls up homogeneous things – the same components that impact earnings year over year. This can lead to confusion on the part of investors, and actual mistakes in forecasting future earnings. “Our paper has two clear takeaways,” Yohn says “For investors: don’t assume that disaggregation only highlights the one-offs in earnings specific to a given timeframe.” For regulators and standard-setters who have pushed for more disaggregation in recent years, Yohn and her co-authors urge deeper reflection about what type of disaggregation should be included in financial statements, or not.

Learn more about our Goizueta Business School faculty, their research, specialties, and areas of interest. #GoizuetaKnows

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A passion for finance and numbers led to a six-year hedge fund stint and a Statistics PhD from Wharton. But while pursuing his doctorate, McCarthy discovered an emerging discipline that integrates statistical-based predictive analysis and “looking at what customers do.” It became his passion and the focus of his research.

“If you’re generating revenue, it’s coming from your customers. Customer-based corporate valuation (CBCV) entails looking at data regarding the flow of customer acquisitions over time, how long they stay, the orders they place and how much they spend,” he says “We run this data through best-in-class predictive models for customer behavior to produce forecasts – of revenues, as well as marketing expenses and ultimately cash flows. Wall Street meets marketing.”

Of course, accessing data doesn’t come without challenges., including the question of privacy.

“The flavor of the month for predictive models right now is machine learning, where you throw in a bunch of data and algorithms spit out predictions based on historical patterns,” McCarthy notes.  “That’s fine, but it requires a huge amount of data, some of which might not be available in the near future because it is sensitive.”

The CBCV methodology efficiently works with smaller volumes of data that are fully privacy-preserving, says McCarthy.

“We typically use data that comes from corporate filings and is highly compliant in terms of privacy regulation: we know how many customers a firm has acquired over a quarter, for example, but nothing about specific individuals. As long as we have the right aggregate data, we can predict nearly as well as if we had all of the granular data.”

McCarthy’s work on customer acquisition, retention, and corporate valuation has brought him to the forefront of a phenomena of the Covid-19 shock: the explosion in valuation of the U.S. restaurant food delivery sector  “I wanted to understand what’s driving the spike for Uber Eats, Door Dash and others: new customers, existing customers coming back in greater numbers; and if so, why?”

He has a paper coming in spring 2021 that, he hopes, will shed empirical light on this “billion dollar question” for many organizations in this sector.

McCarthy’s research keeps him close to business. It also delivers insights of extremely high value to organizations. Has he been tempted to move into entrepreneurship himself?

“I have co-founded two firms using my models over the years. It’s heartening that so many diverse stakeholders find this area of diligence compelling. But if I’d wanted to be in industry, I would have stayed at the hedge fund.”

Academia and scholarship, he says, afford a unique opportunity and the intellectual and creative freedom to go deep into problems. “I love the fact that you can just take nine months and say: I am going to devote this time to look at this one little problem that many people would not find interesting, but that I find absolutely fascinating. I also really enjoy the teaching. I enjoy being able to learn these things and then feel like I’m able to give back to next generation leaders. At the end of the day, I feel very good about.”

Learn more about Daniel McCarthy and his research.

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A Look Back

“The historical context is really illuminating. It is important to recognize trailblazers and have an opportunity to think through the events of the country and world as they collide with our local history,” says Jill Perry-Smith, senior associate dean of strategic initiatives who is charged with leading the school’s DEI strategies.

“Emory was desegregated in 1962 – not long ago from a historical perspective,” she said.  As the civil rights movement took hold, then Goizueta Dean Jim Hund embraced the opportunity for discovery, engaging social justice activists and economists to address Southern Black entrepreneurship. Awareness continued to grow through the 1970s, with matriculation of Black undergraduate and graduate-level students and the implementation of President James T. Laney’s President’s Commission on the Status of Minorities. In 1994, the school was renamed to honor Cuban immigrant Roberto C. Goizueta, Chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company.

Global student recruitment gave way to worldwide outreach and a multicultural infusion on Goizueta’s campus, and Dean Tom Robertson responded to student needs by hosting the first Diverse Leadership Conference. In the following years, Goizueta appointed Alicia Sierra as its first director of diversity and community initiatives, along with naming Dean Erika James to guide our institution. Dean James made history as the first Black woman to lead a top-25 ranked business school ahead of its peer institutions.

Progress in DEI has remained a constant throughout Goizueta’s storied history, and Perry-Smith noted that three priorities are at the forefront of the school’s formal DEI Initiative: enrich our community, reflect broader society, and improve equity.

We prepare for our future, our anti-racist future, for Emory and the broader community here in atlanta – and beyond – that we serve. These conversations will serve for more action and progress, and that’s exactly what we need at this moment in time.

Greg Fenves, president, Emory University

Turning to the Future

“The work we are doing now to set infrastructure in place will enable us to make more sustainable and impactful change in the future,” Perry-Smith explained. “For many, the events of 2020 and 2021 symbolize an awakening, a call for more global conversation around vital issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.”

“Our focus extends to raise awareness for individuals with identities who have been historically marginalized and who have faced systemic barriers to equitable treatment,” she said. “Beyond race, cultural upbringing, gender identity, and sexual orientation, we explore the needs of people who are neurodiverse with unique ways of processing knowledge. Our goal is to discover how every single person can contribute to their fullest to help us achieve a better campus community and society.”

Enrich Our Community: Exposure to cultural knowledge with an aim of increased self-awareness.

“We do not live in a static state. Public sentiments and individual needs will ebb and flow depending on current events and society at large,” Perry-Smith said. Last year, Goizueta Business School established the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council,for which Perry-Smith was chosen to guide. “Our DEI Council has tentacles into key parts of the organization. We have appointed ambassadors from each program office, faculty members from each area of study, and we touch all aspects of our organization to advise and give input on pressing issues.” She noted, “We are diving into evidence-based data across all constituents. We need to be transparent about that information, even if it’s not all favorable.”

Enhanced awareness education and training is an important tool in the anti-racist cache of resources. Perry-Smith noted that while some diversity training can be ineffective and even harmful to positive outcomes, “research reveals that cognitive learning is helpful. And this is where we shine as an institution, to engage in critical inquiry based on evidence.”

One such global effort began with expanding the scope of the Common Reads Program and the Ally Education Series, both forums for shared understanding and empathy. Goizueta encouraged all students, faculty, and staff, to read Whistling Vivaldi by author Claude M. Steele. Through research and interviews, Whistling Vivaldi speaks to race, racial bias, and stereotypes, both racial and cultural. Goizueta community members participated in peer-facilitated small group discussions designed to delve into the racial biases and stereotype threats they have seen and experienced in their own lives.

Brian Mitchell 00EvMBA/00MPH, associate dean for the full-time MBA program and Goizueta’s Global Strategy and Initiatives, pointed out, “Whistling Vivaldi is a great book for students who are coming into an academic environment because it talks about biases and stereotypes as it relates to academic performance.” He went on to explain the burden these types of assumptions might add to working through an already difficult situation. “The conversation we have with students is ‘Here are some of the realities around the stereotype threat, here’s how they might affect you as a student in this program, and here are some strategies for how to work through it.”

Improving Equity: Inspire our community members to leverage the power of diversity to improve equity in business and society.

“Going beyond the walls of Goizueta, our school also has a rich history of partnership with community organizations to share expertise and insight,” Perry-Smith said. “We explore our connection to one another on many levels, including economic empowerment and social justice.”

In March, Goizueta celebrated the launch of The Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute, the new home for the faculty and staff of Social Enterprise @ Goizueta along with its programs. The institute reflects the school’s elevated commitment to social impact and seeks to transform business to solve society’s challenges. At the launch event, Goizueta Business School Associate Professor and Academic Director Wesley Longhofer led a fireside chat with Harvard Business School professor and author Dr. Rebecca Henderson, based on her book Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire. The conversation revolved around building a profitable, equitable, and sustainable capitalism grounded in new ways of defining the role of business in society. Longhofer shared, “As an Institute, we do not claim to have all the answers facing business and society; rather, we want to be a catalyst for asking the right kinds of questions.”

One of the Institute’s transformative programs is Start:ME, a free small business training program that provides entrepreneurs the tools and connections necessary to build and grow successful businesses in underserved communities around Atlanta. Eighty-two percent of 2021 winter cohort businesses are led by people of color, 84% are led by women, and 24% are foreign-born entrepreneurs. The 49 small businesses served represent more than $425,000 in revenue for 2020.

On a global level, Grounds for Empowerment provides women specialty coffee farmers the market connections and business know-how to enable them to reach their full economic potential. This cohort program works with small groups of women growers from Latin America through semester long consulting support and in-country workshops supported by Emory students and industry members.  

Funded by the Goizueta Business School Dean’s Innovation Fund, the Improving Goizueta’s Support of Black Entrepreneurs and Black Students Study led by K. Hall Consulting and a team of student consultants this past summer conducted interviews with 30 stakeholders across the entrepreneurship ecosystem both in Atlanta and on campus to determine where and how the business school could better partner, engage, and support Black entrepreneurs. Following up on Phase 1 report, Goizueta faculty and students will continue efforts in Phase 2 which is focused on developing an academic case on Black entrepreneurship to support classroom learning along with the implementation of other internal and external diversity, equity, and inclusion recommendations.  

In the summer of 2020, Mitchell guided candid student conversations around key events highlighting racial injustice, the impact of such instances, and changes that could be implemented. For alumnus Willie Sullivan 21MBA, the repeated rally cry for social justice at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement sparked a desire to lead meaningful change.

“We wanted to do something actionable,” said Sullivan, speaking of his MBA classmates. “How could we take a business case note and have students come up with strategic frameworks for a major corporation to do something about large societal issues?”

Sullivan and classmates conceived The John R. Lewis Racial Justice Case Competition to address equity and inclusion problems plaguing corporate America. Sponsored by Goizueta and with the blessing of the late Congressman and civil rights icon John R. Lewis’ family, the inaugural competition earned submissions from 105 teams from 52 of the nation’s top universities. Thousands listened to presentations to corporate partners (HP, Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce, Southern Company, Truist, and Walmart) during which bold student teams confronted issues of supplier diversity to include Black-owned businesses, minority vendor supply chain relationships, STEM careers and scholarship for Black girls, the Black wealth gap, training for people of color on house arrest, and people over profits.

Interim John H. Harland Dean Karen Sedatole praised the student-conceived, student-designed, and student-executed event. “Their passion and leadership skills are a testament to the quality of students, faculty, staff and programs that we have here at Goizueta Business School. We’re so very proud of them.”

Reflect Broader Society: Achieve a composition of our faculty, staff, and student body that fully reflects the broader society.

Goizueta has developed partnerships with a range of organizations to recruit and increase representation of students and faculty from diverse backgrounds in our business programs, including the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, Forte Foundation, Management Leadership for Tomorrow, MBADiversity.org, National Black MBA Association, The PhD Project, Prospanica, The Robert Toigo Foundation, and Women in Technology. On campus, clubs and groups, too, celebrate the broad range of backgrounds and experiences in our diverse community, with at least 14 distinct organizations for Goizueta students.

In 2002, Goizueta formed a strategic partnership with The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, a cooperative network of universities designed to enhance diversity and inclusion in business education while at the same time reducing underrepresentation in graduate school enrollment through merit-based full-tuition scholarships to top-tier MBA candidates. From the onset of the partnership, Goizueta has awarded more than $14 million in scholarships to Consortium members.

“I’m impressed by how the school has embraced diversity in a way we were fighting for when we were students. It’s rewarding to see DEI being prioritized,” said Nsombi Ricketts 06MBA, who came to Goizueta through the Consortium and later founded the student-run Diverse Leadership Conference at Goizueta in response to racial incidents on campus.  She noted, “When I look at Goizueta today, I’m proud to see that our work has had a tangible impact and that the DEI conversation impacts so many populations – students, faculty, and even alumni.”

“We are very encouraged by the work being done in the business school and across the university around social justice. the context that comes from addressing this crucial topic from an interdisciplinary perspective enhances understanding and adds depth and breadth to the conversation.”

Andrea Hershatter, senior associate dean of undergraduate education and senior lecturer in Organization & Management, Emory University

Impacting Community

Beyond the classrooms of Goizueta, Associate Dean of the Evening MBA Program and Co-chair for Goizueta’s DEI Council Corey Dortch stressed this point. “We want to encourage students to lean in and face head-on how they can lead on DEI in their workplaces – even where they are right now – from a framework of real-world knowledge and confidence. DEI is a skill.”

Dortch praised the many faculty and staff who listen to the students and their colleagues of color, and then make decisive moves to address concerns. “I’m proud to be part of a community that strives to get it right.”

The strategic, structural, and sustainable principles that Goizueta will continue to evolve to create impactful and lasting change among its community is also mirrored at the university.

“We seek to truly understand how racism permeates so many aspects of society, and to seek to change that, and for Emory to be a model of an anti-racist university,” Emory University President Greg Fenves said.

“We prepare for our future, our anti-racist future, for Emory and the broader community here in Atlanta and beyond that we serve,” Fenves said. “These conversations will serve for more action and progress, and that’s exactly what we need at this moment in time.”

For more information on Goizueta’s longstanding commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, please visit emory.biz/equity.

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