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October 2006
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Leaders of the Eller Executive MBA trip to China (left to right): Arvind Singh, Trina Callie, Robert Rieger, and Kenneth Li. |
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Earlier this month, 22 Executive MBA candidates returned from a 10-day learning and cultural excursion to Beijing and Shanghai.
“We tried to mix opportunities to get a sense of the political and business sides of China with opportunities to experience the culture,” says Eller MBA Associate Program Director Trina Callie.
So not only did the students engage in a formal business meeting with top executives from China Salt — one of the remaining monopolies in the country — they also found themselves singing karaoke with the executives at an off-site dinner later that evening.
The students enjoyed more traditional culture in the form of visits to the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, as well as time in the silk markets and an evening at an acrobatic performance. But they also spent two working days each in Shanghai and Beijing.
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Executive MBA students at China Salt dinner, from left to right: Nick Becker (Intel), Keith Oltchick (Marriott), and Alejandro Rios (Intel). |
In Shanghai, they visited a 100-square-mile industrial park, where they met with representatives from Cleveland-based multinational Invacare, which manufactures home health equipment. “It is an incredibly modern, well-planned park that had only 69 foreign-funded companies resident in 1997. Today, there are 2,500 companies ,” says Callie. In contrast, Callie says, they also visited a government-owned industrial park, Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone. The government-owned park was much more formal, and home to Intel's China facility.
In Beijing, the students met with a senior economist from the Bank of China, as well as members of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank. Conversations with these executives were formal and conducted via translator, Callie says.
Many of the EMBA students also took the opportunity to conduct business on behalf of their companies. One student with IBM, Vincent Hsu, connected with China-based corporate executives, and Katharine Kent of The Solar Store identified a potential new supplier.
Callie, along with Robert Rieger, director of the
MBA’s office
of career development, and Arvind Singh, director of international finance
programs, accompanied the students on the journey. Kenneth Li, head of
Shanghai ARMCO, Ltc. and former managing director of Chinese operations
for Ferro Corporation, acted as a guide, translating for the group and
assisting in arranging meetings with top officials.
On October 14, 29 Eller executive MBAs celebrated their graduation from the 14-month program in a ceremony on campus, followed by a champagne brunch.
“As a member of the inaugural class, I was excited to be a bit of a ‘guinea pig’ for the Eller College,” says Cristie Street, managing partner of Nextrio, LLC. “As a high-tech business owner and new mom, an executive MBA was appealing because it offered a comprehensive curriculum at a break-neck pace.”
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Eller EMBA graduate Cristie Street with her daughter. |
Street says her expectations were high — but Eller’s EMBA program delivered. “With very few hiccups, the integrated teaching style, the modular material, and most importantly, the cohort of my fellow classmates created exactly what I wanted and needed,” she says. “It’s a challenging program— so don’t think ‘executive’ translates to ‘cushy.’ There were times when I wondered how I would get it all done. And there were times when I know I could have done it a little better. But these situations exactly parallel our business lives and practicing the ‘juggling act’ is an unofficial part of the syllabus.”
Eller alum Jay Geldmacher, group vice president of Emerson, addressed that juggling act during his commencement speech. Dubbing it the “sacrifice algorithm,” he stressed the importance of grasping opportunities as they are presented and understanding that success means achieving balance— which often occurs at a price.
“I am confident that I walk away from this program
better prepared and more knowledgeable about how to manage the executive
team at any corporation in the world,” says Street. “I wanted
to rely on more than the gut instincts that had helped me grow my business
so far. With each new class, I found that a new piece of the puzzle fell
into place for Nextrio. Armed with this knowledge and a few innovative
ideas sparked by the dynamics of the class, I’m ready to take on
the world — starting with Tucson.”
Increasingly, b-schools recognize that the key to an engaging and rigorous MBA experience lies in experiential learning — taking students from the classroom to the office, where academic acumen is transformed into managerial substance.
The full-time MBA program at the Eller College takes it one step further, helping students shape and articulate their career goals, then guiding them from goal to career, step by step, semester by semester.
Before the first semester, Eller advisors work with incoming MBAs to identify career and industry goals. Then the Eller team identifies opportunities to tailor students’ educational experiences to their desired outcome.
The highlight of the experiential learning program is field projects. Teams of students are given multiple opportunities during the two-year program to work directly with a business sponsor client in identifying and addressing a real-world business problem or challenge. The end goal is to provide the client with a solution and actionable recommendations. With thoughtful planning, the student can tailor these experiences to advance his or her individual career goals with respect to a specific industry and / or skills acquired.
Don Winans, Eller Entrepreneurship ’05, leveraged his field project with Honeywell into a position as a consultant with Accenture.
“Working on the Honeywell Intellectual Property project gave me an opportunity to delve into a relatively new and entrepreneurial subject matter in the business world,” says Winans. “The structure and nature of the project afforded my team the freedom to explore new perspectives on a very real strategic question faced by most industry leaders: how does my company find new life in its intellectual property?”
Winans believes the experience provided substantive content for his resume and for interview talking points: “In this project I performed a management consulting engagement, working with senior executives and world-class scientists to produce a professional document that was utilized immediately to influence business decisions made by one of the top aerospace manufacturers in the world. My team's work, the following year, became a high-priority project with global visibility.”
| Technology
and Management Awards Luncheon Friday, October 27 in Phoenix, Ariz. Honoring Technology Executive of the Year Donald L. Paul, Chief Technology Officer of Chevron Corporation |
Eller
College and UA Homecoming 2006 |
| National
Symposium on Immigration Thursday, November 16 at Arizona State Capital in Phoenix, Ariz. Join leaders from the public and private sectors for a nonpartisan analysis of immigration in the U.S. Eller College dean Paul Portney will moderate the wrap-up panel. Registration and information is available online. |
| Global
Climate Change: Designing Policy Responses Tuesday, November 28 (7 p.m.) at Centennial Hall on the UA Campus Dean Paul Portney lectures as part of UA's College of Science Global Climate Change Series. |
Executive
Education
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| Economic Outlook Luncheon Friday, December 8 Noon to 2 p.m. outlook@eller.arizona.edu |
Eller
College Distinguished Speaker Series
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Patricia Ewanski is one of five recipients of the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Scholarship. |
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On October 11, five recipients of Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Scholarships gathered with members of the Brown Family Foundation Board at the Arizona Inn for an awards luncheon.
The scholarships were first funded in 2002 in memory of Burr-Brown founder Tom Brown. After four years of annual funding, last year the Thomas R. Brown Family Foundation established $1 million endowments for both the Eller College of Management and the College of Engineering, to recruit and support top students in perpetuity.
The scholarship program at the Eller College supports full-time MBA students with declared interests in the field of technology and management. Three of this year’s recipients are dual-degree students, pairing their MBAs with master’s degrees in management information systems, natural resources, and mechanical engineering.
Patricia Ewanski, a dual-degree MBA and master’s in natural resources candidate and recipient of one of the scholarships, addressed an audience which included Sandy Brown Moran, Mary Brown, and Sarah Brown Smallhouse (Eller MBA ’88).
“I have spoken to my fellow scholarship recipients, and each one has told me how much this scholarship has affected their lives,” says Ewanski. “I’ve learned a little bit about their aspirations and I know how hard they work from the classes that we share. Each person I spoke with expressed their aspirations to become a leader like Mr. Brown and to excel in carrying his legacy forward.”
Ewanski plans to leverage her MBA and master’s in natural resources to work as a sustainable development strategist and “intrapreneur” for companies involved in renewable energies or clean technologies.
In addition to Ewanski, Eller scholarship recipients were Kaijia Bao, Fei-Shan Chang, Saurabh Gupta, and Edward White.
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Robert and Kathleen Eckert Professor of Marketing Merrie Brucks |
On January 1, Robert and Kathleen Eckert Professor of Marketing Merrie Brucks will assume the presidency of the Association for Consumer Research. The organization is a multi-disciplinary scholarly organization focused on understanding consumer behavior.
Brucks has devoted her career to the study of consumer behavior, particularly the response of children to advertising. “I began studying kids’ perceptions of advertising long before I had kids,” she says.
Brucks recalls a conversation with marketing professor Melanie Wallendorf in which they talked about the unique perspective of children. “We wondered how they view marketing messages intended for adults,” she says. Their subsequent research indicates that small children perceive images depicting sex appeal — for example, a scantily clad woman holding an alcoholic beverage draped over a lounge chair — as telling the story of a mommy. “They’ll say, ‘That mommy is so tired,’” she says. “They don’t even see the alcohol.”
One of her most recent projects determines to what extent children connect advertisements for products targeted to adults to the specific brand being promoted — the answer, she says, is not much. “Children tend to see such ads as promoting the category. For example, they see a Tropicana commercial and connect it to orange juice but do not make inferences about the brand Tropicana. They see a Marlboro ad and connect it to smoking in general, but not about how Marlboro is differentiated from other brands. They don’t think much about branding for adult-targeted products until they’re in about the fifth grade.”
For products such as tobacco and alcohol, this finding is critical for making national and global public policy. For example, it explains the role that advertising may have in creating positive user imagery for smoking in young children. In her co-authored paper “Young Children’s Understanding of Cigarette Smoking,” published last year in the journal Addiction, Brucks demonstrates that second-grade children have lifestyle associations with cigarette smoking that are consistent with those exhibited by fifth graders, and furthermore, these associations are unrelated to personal exposure to smoking.
“My research has definitely influenced me as a parent,” Brucks says. “From the time my kids were tiny, I would watch TV with them and help them interpret what they were seeing.” Her kids — now in their teens — grew up deconstructing advertising messages, and her daughter is now interested in studying consumer behavior as a career.
Brucks is currently working on a project with doctoral student Wendy Boland and assistant professor of marketing Jesper Nielsen which explores a phenomenon they have dubbed the context carryover effect. They have discovered that when an individual is trying to make a decision between two similar items, if the first item is not available, the individual no longer wants the second item — even though just moments before, the person could not decide between the two.
“Initially we thought this was because the second item became a reject in the person’s mind,” says Brucks. “But we found no support for that. It’s one of those counterintuitive things.” The evidence indicates that individuals become fixated on a differentiation point between the items, and that attribute becomes a reason to reject the second item.
“There’s no way an economist would predict these results,” says Brucks with a laugh. “But we developed all these different choice scenarios, and the results bear out.”
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| Assistant Professor of Marketing Hope Jensen Schau | |
More often than not, a transaction at Starbuck’s runs like a well-oiled machine: order a grande Mocha Frappaccino, give name, submit payment, wait by the pick-up counter, pick up beverage. But try to order the same thing from the university coffee cart, and suddenly things get complicated.
For one thing, the coffee cart doesn’t have a grande size, they call it medium. And they don’t serve Mocha Frappaccinos, they serve blended iced coffees with chocolate syrup. As a result, coffee cart employees must learn to translate the Starbuck’s brand names in order to meet consumer expectations.
It’s called brand code switching, and it’s one type of script subversion explored in a paper published in the Journal of Retailing by Eller College assistant professor of marketing Hope Jensen Schau and her co-authors Stephanie Dellande of Chapman University and Mary C. Gilly of the University of California, Irvine.
Script subversion occurs when a customer deviates from the standard “script” in a service retail transaction. “What scripting does is establish rhetoric for encounters,” says Schau. “It educates consumers on efficient communication practices and manages service encounter expectations.”
Many service retailers rely on scripts to ensure speedy, standardized transactions that keep employees and customers on track, but deviations from the script are inevitable. Schau and her co-authors analyzed data from more than 2,000 service encounters in the quick service restaurant and coffee industries and found evidence for three types of code switching: language, dialect, and brand. They also found evidence that in some cases, script subversion can have positive outcomes for both the retailer and consumer.
For example, in language code switching, a consumer may switch from American English to another language, such as Spanish. A bilingual employee can help the customer navigate the menu, and the research demonstrates that these encounters are similar to on-script encounters — but they result in the highest observed incidence of positive comments and gestures.
On the flip side, dialect code switching — changing from standard American English to a recognizable dialect such as Southern drawl or urban contemporary youth — typically has negative results, despite both customer and employee generally enjoying the transaction.
“While the perception of the ordering customer may be more positive in a dialect code switching encounter, the length of order and even the order accuracy suffer from the script departure,” Schau explains. “Also, it has a negative impact on the subsequent interactions. Not only is the queue wait time elongated, but we’re finding now in a follow-up study that proximal customers to the dialect code switching exchange feel ‘left out’ of these dialect discussions.”
The third type of script subversion explored in the paper, brand code switching, was more prevalent in small firms, as opposed to market leaders such as Starbuck’s and McDonald’s, whose particular brand codes have become shorthand for customers. For example, customers may ask for Chicken McNuggets or a Big Mac at Checkers, a growing chain also known as Rally’s. These transactions were observed to be longer, with fewer instances of positive comments and gestures than in language or dialect code switching.
“Brand codes reinforce the rhetoric by having tight language to communicate rather complex product offerings,” says Schau. “For example, Mocha Frappaccino is much more efficient than saying ‘blended iced coffee with chocolate syrup.’ So, there is a significant advantage to dominant industry firms.”
But, she adds, it offers an opportunity for smaller businesses to distinguish themselves by providing a personalized feel. Unfortunately, brand code switching offers the biggest challenge to chains like Checkers, which is neither the dominant firm nor a mom-and-pop shop that can use personalization as a competitive advantage. “For them, the dominant brand code is a huge inefficiency as their employees must continually translate the menu items,” says Schau.
In contrast, the translation issue is less problematic for independent coffee houses since it is offset by demand. “In essence, Starbuck’s drives people to consume more and fancier coffees,” says Schau. “The translation is a small price to pay for booming demand.”
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Laura and David Lundell, MBA '03 |
Juggling life, work, and school is nothing new to David Lundell: he’s been doing it since he was 16-years-old, when he began working in the IT industry. He continued to work fulltime while he earned his undergraduate degree in computer engineering at The University of Arizona — during which time he and his wife also had their first child.
Post-graduation, Lundell took a position as a database administrator with Tucson-based Lasertel, a supplier of semiconductor laser chips for printing equipment. Throughout his undergraduate education and time at Lasertel, he acted as a consultant, and one of those consulting jobs eventually led to a surprising observation: “It turned out that the biggest problem they faced wasn’t technology, it was communication between upper level management and technology consultants,” he says.
On that case, he noticed that upper management and the technology department could only yell back and forth at each other. “I said to them, hey, you need to be able to communicate with these folks,” he explains. “I realized that in order to serve people well as a consultant, I needed to be able to solve their business problems as well.”
So Lundell decided to supplement his computer engineering degree with an Eller MBA, while continuing to work at Lasertel. Ultimately, the company downsized, and during the second semester of the MBA program, Lundell moved to Phoenix for a database administrator position with Ryland Homes — commuting to Tucson once a week to earn his degree. But work and school were not the only demands on his time: during his fourth semester in the MBA program, Lundell raced up I-10 from Tucson to Phoenix to make it to the birth of his second son.
In 2004, Lundell opened his own business and technology consulting and training firm, Chandler-based Mutually Beneficial. “I help people get the right info into the right hands at the right time,” he says. On one recent case for a large bank, he led a project to extract data from a human resources database and run reports on the information. When he came in to the project, the error-filled reports took four days to run. When he left, the reports were generated in one hour — accurately.
Lundell is currently working on two books on SQL Server, adding to publishing credits which include a book on Windows Server 2003 he wrote for a Prentice Hall series.
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