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MBA students march into leadership
Business leadership requires a lot of early mornings,
but rising at 4 a.m. from a lumpy U.S. Marine Corps bunk to the bark of
an ornery drill sergeant is probably not what Goizueta MBAs had in mind
when they signed up for the program.
In April, twenty-five full-time MBA students spent a weekend at the Marine
Corps’ Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Quantico, Va., where they
tackled the same strenuous physical and mental challenges faced by men
and women training to be Marine officers.
The experience is one highlight of the new Goizueta Advanced Leadership
Academy, the business school’s newest and most strongly focused effort
to train principled leaders for global enterprise.
“The marketing materials of every business school throw the word
‘leadership’ around a lot, but Goizueta is different in that
we back our marketing with actual leadership programming,” says Kembrel
Jones ’00MBA, associate dean and director of the Full-time
MBA Program.
“When you get right down to it,” Jones continued, “there
is an assumption that just because you are in an MBA program you are a
leader, which is not true. But leadership isn’t a fad. It’s
never going to go out of style. We want employers to say, ‘I need
a couple of leaders, so I’m going to get them at Goizueta.’”
With around 300 full-time MBA students, and about fifty in the one-year
MBA program, Goizueta is the smallest of the top twenty business schools,
and that small size can be advantageous where leadership development is
concerned.
Born out of a spring 2003 branding study that identified leadership as
the most desired quality in an MBA, the Goizueta Advanced Leadership Academy
began its pilot year last fall. The academy is open to students who have
taken leadership positions—with some 300 named student leadership
positions available at Goizueta, there should be no excuse in missing
this requirement—and have committed to the leadership concentration
in their second year, and completed the communications-based Goizueta
Plus program.
With an emphasis on Goizueta’s core values (courage, integrity, accountability,
rigor, diversity, team, and community) the academy’s pilot class
of twenty-five started with a skills and values assessment, workplace
diversity training, and a module on improvisation and impromptu speaking
to hone their ability to think on their feet.
But perhaps the most noteworthy part of their leadership training, and
certainly the most memorable—was their thumbnail introduction to
Marine training. And it was a bit more involved than the average corporate
retreat.
In April 2004, Ted Daywalt ’80MBA, arranged
a meeting with Gen. Thomas Benes, then-president of Marine Corps University
(Benes was named director of the Strategy and Plans Division, Plans, Policies
and Operations, U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters, last May). Daywalt, a
retired Navy captain and member of Goizueta’s Alumni Board, then
led a contingent that included Jones; Ed Hess,
executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Corporate Growth;
and Robert Drazin, professor of organization and
management, that flew to Virginia to tour the Quantico facility and met
for more than three hours with OCS faculty to discuss a possible partnership.
While there, the Goizueta faculty saw first hand what the students would
experience. The intense and often physically draining tests involve critical
thinking, teamwork, problem solving, and communication˜all essential qualities
not only in military officers, but business leaders, too.
Although the leadership academy is a new effort, it is getting noticed.
In October 2004, BusinessWeek magazine ranked Goizueta the top
business school in the country for leadership development.
“Leadership can take on different meanings for different people,”
says Jones, adding that in 2005–2006 the academy will double to fifty
participants. Also to be added are modules on specific practical skills,
such as delivering bad news, as well as a more active mentoring program.
“What we want is for people to find their own style of leadership,
so we want to give students the skill sets that every leader needs,”
Jones says.
—Eric Rangus