RSSBusiness 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
http://www.goizuetamag.emory.edu/spr-sum2005/leadership_ranking.html