Take a walk through the halls of the Opus College of Business and you’re likely to run into Corey Eakins ’09 M.B.A., director of the Evening UST MBA Program. In the morning, you may find him in the skyway with his iPad, on his way to meet with faculty members about a new study-abroad offering. In the afternoon he’s in Terrence Murphy Hall, meeting with the student advising team to understand a concern raised by one of their advisees. You might see him in the evening, too, networking with attendees at an event designed to provide students and alumni with the opportunity to learn from the local business community. Eakins is a man on the move, always thinking about how to improve the student experience.

Eakins, in his career and his personal life, has always shown an eagerness and an interest in moving forward, in putting his skills to work to launch a new business, to help a student launch a new career and to help a college launch a new program. Interestingly, this education administrator began his career as a golf professional.

“I grew up around the game,” said the Wisconsin native. “My mom was the general manager of a country club in Hudson.” While completing his undergraduate degree in communications and public relations at St. Cloud State University, Eakins took a job as an assistant golf professional at a nearby country club. He decided to transform his love of and skill in golf from a part-time hobby to a full-time profession. He took the PGA Playing Ability Test and entered the PGA Apprentice Program to become a Class-A member of the Professional Golfers Association of America.

The Business of Golf

Eakins realized that “a golf professional really is a very specialized business person in a niche industry.” Freshly certified as a golf professional, in 1996 he became one of the first four employees at Heritage Highlands, a new golf course in Tucson, Ariz. When he came on board, the course hadn’t even opened yet and Eakins jumped in to get it up and running. “I worked for four months before we saw a golfer,” he said.

Building an organization from the ground up and opening a brand new facility from scratch was very interesting for Eakins. “I was doing everything and anything – I helped laser [measure] yardages so we could order the numbers to go on the sprinkler heads,” Eakins said. His communication degree came into good use, too, in producing brochures, collateral and even websites. The work paid off, and Heritage Highlands was nominated for the best new course of the year in 1997.

Eakins came back to River Falls, Wis., for a break after a busy summer on the course. While home, some friends told him about a new golf course under construction in Hudson. “I wandered out there and knocked on the door of the construction trailer,” Eakins said. One of the partners invited him to play the course as the grass was still growing in and they spent the afternoon talking shop. Months later, because of this chance encounter, Eakins was invited back to help open the course, Troy Burne Golf Club, Tom Lehman’s first signature design in the Midwest. It was a great opportunity for Eakins to “come in to a golf facility that already had name recognition” and to be involved with Lehman in getting another golf club up and running. Plus it was nice to be back home – both Eakins and his wife, Lauri Eakins ’10 M.B.A., are natives of River Falls.

Eakins’ experience in these golf clubs taught him some important business lessons. “I opened these facilities and realized that I was really a professional business person running a complex organization. I was able to develop staffing structure, help develop membership programming, plan corporate events and develop the marketing of the golf course.”

He also learned the importance of providing an exceptional customer experience. “You’re asking for a significant amount of money for a day of golf,” he said, “so we owed it to our golfers to treat them very well. For probably three-fourths of our guests, playing our course was a once-a-year treat, and we had to make it really special.” He worked with the college students he hired each summer to help them provide that experience. “The term you heard a lot was ‘country club member for a day,’” Eakins said.

Making a Career Change

“The tough thing about being a golf professional, especially in a seasonal market like here, is that from April to October you’re just busy,” Eakins said. As he and his wife became parents in 2001 and again in 2003, Eakins sought greater work-life balance. “I am very much the kind of person who has to feel passionate about what I’m doing every day in order to want to go to work. I enjoyed that in golf; even when I left golf, I still loved the sport, and I was just looking for a different schedule that worked with my family.”

The question for his next step became, “What environment most energized me?” The answer was higher education. “I wanted to do something different and looked at the M.B.A. as a key tool to help me transition careers and open up other doors,” he said. “I kicked around an M.B.A. back in Arizona but never got around to it.”

As we have seen many times in our research, it is not just a relentless focus on value creation that allows entrepreneurs to bring new products and services to market; it is also a reliance on personal values (what is important, what is not, what must be done, what must not, why efforts must be made, how tasks should be carried out) and acting as an authentic embodiment of these values that enable entrepreneurs to inspire the commitment of others. This, in turn, allows them to secure the resources they need to bring innovations to market and to create organizations that – years after the departure of the entrepreneurs – continue to bear the stamp of the founders’ values in the form of organizational culture.

When Kieran Folliard was planning to enter the crowded and notoriously fickle bar and restaurant business in downtown Minneapolis, he knew exactly what he wanted to create. He wanted to develop a landmark, beautiful and handcrafted building, reminiscent of the grand 18th-century public houses of the Dublin he remembered from his youth. Of course he spent time raising finance, arranging suppliers, hiring staff and developing budgets, but his heart – and most of his days – were invested in sitting at a dusty desk in the middle of the construction site working with local wood carvers and artisans to try to create a thing of beauty that would last 100 years. Would his customers even notice that this section was handcarved or the stained glass handmade?

“I didn’t do any customer research,” he said. “At the end of the day, you’re doing it so that you can be proud of what you’re doing, for the authenticity, for yourself and, hopefully, for the people who work and frequent the establishments. I can still hear my father’s voice saying, ‘If you don’t want to do it right, don’t do it at all.’ It’s important for me to try to create beautiful things that last and that is why I focused on the craft and the design of The Local.” The importance of aesthetic beauty became a central theme of what is today the Cara Irish Pubs Group.

When Howard Schultz began developing the concept that became Starbucks, he knew that he needed to look beyond more efficient execution of the existing model of the American café. While he initially was inspired by the café culture of Italy, much of the unique and high-quality experience he sought to craft was developed through a  collaborative approach with his employees, many of whom were used to a more transactional relationship with their retail employers. Guided by values of respect and fairness, even in a low-pay environment, Schultz departed significantly from retail norms by offering his employees extensive training and education, health benefits and stock options.

Why did Schultz take this approach? Because he had researched the power of intrinsic motivation? Or because he had benchmarked such practices in other industries? No. The reason he developed a unique approach to managing hourly workers goes back to the values he learned in his youth. Schultz grew up in a stable lower-middleclass home in the 1950s; however, that all changed the day his father fell and broke his ankle. His father had neither health insurance nor workers’ compensation when he got hurt on the job. With no financial support, the fragile middle-class environment crumbled. His father could not work, could no longer put food on the table and, worse, eventually lost his confidence and esteem. “He was beaten down; he wasn’t respected,” Schultz said. Schultz recalled that after this incident, he vowed to put an end to that vulnerability if he ever owned his own company: “I wanted to try and build the company that my father never got a chance to work for.”

Today, Starbucks has one of the lowest rates of employee turnover in the industry and is regularly one of Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For.” What became critical differentiators began as personal, normative values, rooted in his own experiences as a young boy.

The ‘Four Goods of Entrepreneurship’

Most of us are guided through our personal lives by the values forged in our early years alongside parents, teachers, coaches and friends. In our professional lives, however, we often feel the pressure to hang many of those values on the coat hook on the way in to work each day, and to adopt the more generic and, often, aridly economic values of the institutions in which we work.

In contrast, the entrepreneur has the opportunity, indeed necessity, to create from scratch a new organization and culture, along with unique and distinctive products or services and a new set of stakeholder relationships. As catalysts of all this activity, entrepreneurs both consciously and subconsciously use their own personal values, experiences and dreams to inspire others to believe in and commit to their entrepreneurial journey. We call this “weaving the web of belief,” where it is the personal values of the founder that inspire and bind together the initial resources of a venture, long before concrete financial or other extrinsic motivations come to fruition.

One useful way to understand how personal values infuse and shape the entrepreneurial process is using a framework we have developed with Michael Naughton of St. Thomas’ Center for Catholic Studies, called “The Four Goods of Entrepreneurship.”

1. Products and services that are inherently good
2. Trading relationships that are good
3. Altruism that promotes the good
4. The development of good character and substantial leadership in the entrepreneurs themselves

While it may seem obvious to say that most entrepreneurs are starting their business for good rather than “evil” purposes, at St. Thomas we go further in our belief that it should be the primary purpose of business to contribute to the greater good. This is very different from suggesting that we should only found businesses that solve world hunger or eliminate injustice. But it does mean that good entrepreneurial businesses should make the world better rather than worse. “The Four Goods of Entrepreneurship” framework identifies how the entrepreneur’s values can contribute to the greater good in many more ways than by simply determining the best destination for a year-end altruistic contribution. Philanthropy is good, but it is not the only source of good in an entrepreneurial venture and sometimes it is not even the best source of good.

A case in point is Kate Herzog ’10 M.B.A. and her growing venture, House of Talents [profiled in B., spring 2010]. Like Folliard, Herzog has a love of beautiful things that  harken back to her childhood, in this case, in Ghana; thus, her initial idea was to link talented artisans from Africa with consumers in developed markets. But Herzog also wanted her business to serve as a vehicle for economic development.

She remembered feeling as a child that charitable aid took little account of the personal hopes and dreams of the people it was trying to help. So her goal was not simply to import good products but also to develop relationships with her suppliers that allowed them to gain financial independence so that “those artisans could construct the lives they envision for themselves.” She worked closely with her suppliers, providing feedback and  mentoring that helped them refine and strengthen the design and quality of  their products. She committed not only to paying them a fair price, but also providing them with a 50-percent advance with each order to enable them to access needed resources without having to turn to exploitative local money lenders.

In addition to the entrepreneurial goods created through her product and trading relationships, Herzog also actively gave back; however, even her altruistic acts were laden with her personal values of respect and dignity toward the poor. Instead of cash or aid, House of Talents donated useful equipment that helped the artisans build on their successes: laptops, digital cameras, welding glasses and a bicycle, within the first two years.

Entrepreneurial Values

In the Opus College of Business Entrepreneurship program, we give our students the opportunity to consider the role of their own personal values as they ask themselves a critical question, “What sort of an entrepreneur do I want to be?” One vehicle we use to generate these discussions is case-study analysis. Over the past five years, with  support from the Ron Fowler Case Study Awards, we have developed a collection of local case studies of entrepreneurs, many of whom are alumni from our program. We do not start these case studies with the founding of the business. In order to fully understand the strategic direction of the business, we first have to understand the lives of the entrepreneurs up to that point: What is important to them? What is not? How would they define success or failure? What are they trying to achieve? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How do they make decisions? What do they value? Only by asking these questions can we start to understand the complex situation facing the entrepreneur and make effective decisions. Thus, our students learn not just the importance of business technique but also the importance of thinking through their own personal values and experiences to determine how they might structure their businesses around what is actually important to them.

Another important vehicle for exploring how their values shape the entrepreneurial process is the Lemonade Stand Project. In our introductory Entrepreneurship class,  professors Jay Ebben, Ph.D., and Alec Johnson, Ph.D., have created a course centered on a “build it from scratch” project, which requires students to develop their own concepts and bring them to market within one semester and with only the resources that they can beg or borrow. Given these constraints, students quickly come to  understand the importance of their own experiences and values in driving insights about new ways to create value in the market.

In the most recent semester, one group created a venture called Love Your Melon to promote  awareness of children’s cancer: For every hat sold, another was donated to a child undergoing cancer treatment. The source of the idea came from one student’s own experience with a family member suffering from the disease. Other students have used, for example, a personal love of art to develop graphic business ideas, love of music to develop auditioning software, and belief in the character building power of sports to develop youth mentoring proposals.

Like Herzog, the students have created more than just good creative products and services. Through teamwork, and desperation (Ebben and Johnson push them pretty hard!), strong relationships of trust, friendship and community emerge. And, perhaps most importantly, the Lemonade Stand Project illustrates again the development, deepening and enriching of the character of the actual entrepreneurs themselves. Not only can these young entrepreneurs make the world a little bit better, but in trying to do so they can transform themselves, becoming more capable, more connected, more confident and more community oriented.

As one student said, “In just a few months, I think I have evolved completely and grown as a person, not only in business knowledge but also in confidence, in knowing what I can actually do.” In the words of another, “If we are able to take this one idea in a matter of one semester and get it to market and affect thousands of children’s lives, think of what we can do with more than two or three months.”

In sum, we believe that personal values and value creation are tightly intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Through an understanding and expression of their personal values, entrepreneurs can create multiple sources of good. And along the way, their entrepreneurial journeys can lead them to a deeper understanding of what they truly  value. As one of our new students recently put it when reflecting on his experience in the Lemonade Stand Project, “I learned that if I choose my responsibilities and recognize that I am representing St. Thomas, my class, my family, and if I choose to let them show themselves in the way I do my business, I can take pride in everything I am doing. And there is something beautiful in that.”

Read more from B. Magazine.

Perhaps the most motivating members of our student body are the military veterans who have chosen to earn their degrees after they complete active duty. Whether they choose to begin or continue an undergraduate business degree or pursue an M.B.A. or other graduate business degree, these individuals bring a wealth of experience, deeply held convictions and a great sense of responsibility to their studies. They also bring perspective. Most of the veterans in our programs have seen active duty overseas, have witnessed events that few of us ever will, and that few of us wish to dwell on, frankly. These types of experiences allow veterans to understand that the world of business is just one part of the world and that it should serve a greater good. This understanding is what makes them leaders.

As a Vietnam veteran, I know not only the leadership traits military service can instill in an individual but also the importance of developing those traits into skills that can be put to meaningful work. This is the cornerstone of our efforts to serve U.S. veterans in our business programs.

The University of St. Thomas has been a proud member of the Yellow Ribbon program since its inception following 9/11. This program is part of the GI Bill and allows approved degree-granting institutions and the Veterans Administration to partially or fully fund tuition and fees for post-service veterans. We recognized early on that  those who serve our country have the experience and perspective that business leadership needs. We also recognized that they require more than our commendation; they also require our complete support.

Each of our students, regardless of background, receives personalized attention and service from our recruiting and advising staffs; this is an essential part of the St. Thomas culture. But veterans, our experience has shown, benefit greatly when our recruiting staff go even further in helping them understand how their military service can be translated into success in business. Once enrolled in our programs, veterans often rely on our student advisers to help them balance not only family and class obligations but also ongoing obligations to the reserves. Rather than being seen as an interruption or distraction, we see this continued service as an enhancement to their studies, and yet another element that will contribute to their ability to prioritize, to work collaboratively and to lead effectively.

In all we do, the Opus College of Business is committed to fostering diversity and inclusion among our students, staff, faculty, stakeholders and communities. Our goal is to develop morally responsible leaders who understand the importance of inviting and honoring input from and engagement by all traditions and viewpoints. Ensuring that our veterans are given the opportunity to succeed and, with that success, continue serving our communities is, for me and my colleagues at the university, one tangible means of that commitment.

Read more from B. Magazine.

The St. Thomas Board of Trustees unanimously elected Sullivan, 55, to succeed Father Dennis Dease, who will retire June 30 after 22 years as the 14th president of Minnesota’s largest private college or university.

With a Ph.D. in business administration, Sullivan has a strong background in business education that she will bring to St. Thomas. John M. Morrison, a trustee who served as chair of the search committee, said Sullivan’s extensive background as a professor and administrator has prepared her well for the St. Thomas presidency.

“Julie is tailor-made for the position,” said Morrison, a banker and founder of the Morrison Center for Entrepreneurship at the university’s Schulze School of Entrepreneurship. “She has the academic experience, business acumen and personal qualities we need in our next president, and her Roman Catholic faith is central to her life. St. Thomas, which is similar in many respects to that of the University of San Diego, will thrive under her leadership.”

While an undergraduate at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Sullivan thought she would become a public accountant. After a six-month internship with what then was Ernst and Whinney, she concluded that she preferred tax accounting over auditing. She needed a master’s degree to work directly in tax accounting, so she continued her studies at the University of Florida.

“I had a teaching assistantship during my master’s program and discovered I loved to teach,” she said. “Thus, I decided to remain at Florida and pursue a Ph.D. in business administration.”

She began her academic career in 1983 at the University of Oklahoma, and four years later moved to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to be a visiting professor for one year. She was hired as a tenure-track faculty member at the end of that year.

During her 16 years at North Carolina, Sullivan became an Ernst and Young Distinguished Professor and served as co-director of the Center for Innovation and Learning, director of the Center for International Business Education and Research, associate dean of the master’s of accounting program and senior associate dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School.

She was interim dean of Kenan-Flagler in 2003, leading a $180 million capital campaign, when she moved to California and became a full professor in the Rady School of Management at the University of California-San Diego.

Sullivan was named executive vice president and provost of the University of San Diego in 2005. Today, she is responsible for all degree and nondegree educational programs, information technology services, admissions, financial aid and career services. She also oversees the chief financial officer and has responsibility for the operating budget.

One achievement of which she is particularly proud is the 2011 designation of San Diego as a “Changemaker Campus” by Ashoka, an Arlington, Va.-based organization that supports successful social entrepreneurs around the globe.

Sullivan believes St. Thomas, too, can become a “changemaker” campus – if not by designation by Ashoka, then certainly by day-to-day practice.

“St. Thomas is an outstanding university which enjoys a wonderful history and legacy that is firmly rooted in its commitment to Catholic values and the liberal arts while looking forward with an entrepreneurial spirit,” Sullivan said. “It is poised to do even more – to expand its influence and its visibility.”

Dease also applauded the choice of Sullivan and promised a smooth transition over the next few months. He will become president-emeritus following his retirement and will work with Sullivan and the board on special projects.

Read more from B. Magazine.

But is this really true? On social media sites, are people really connected to each other, or merely engaged in an aggregation of anonymous contacts? While it is true that Facebook’s popularity has increased exponentially each year since its inception, many current users censor what photos and comments they share, posting only content that positions them in the best light possible. Yet even with this, a large amount of personal information is being made available online that may hinder your online reputation, as well as aid marketers in creating targeted advertising intended to appeal to your interests and preferences.

Beyond capturing a user’s time and attention, social media is deemed a safe place to share one’s innermost thoughts and feelings for the world – or at least a large online audience – to read. The need for a sense of community and constant audience often means users of social media sites such as Facebook share far more information about themselves than they reasonably should. Gone is the demand for privacy. Now, people put their lives on the Internet for all to see. For Christopher Michaelson, Ph.D., an  associate professor of business ethics at the Opus College of Business, this means that people don’t fully understand the extent to which they are exposing themselves online.

Today, there is more information available to decision makers than one can feasibly manage, make sense of or put to use. What does this mean for marketers? Jonathan Seltzer, an instructor of marketing at the Opus College of Business, said, “The sheer wealth of data that is available increases the segmentation well beyond what was previously imaginable.” Social media sites and online networks leverage the power of peer-to-peer relationships and referrals to learn about their users and make money based on what they know. “In theory, better targeting should mean more efficient marketing for business, and in a consumer economy that should equate to lower costs and happier customers,” said Michael Porter, Ed.D., director of the Master of Business Communication program at the Opus College of Business. But this may not always be the case.

Information is Power

Not so many years ago, large companies were cautious about using social media sites to gather information about job applicants for fear of legal repercussions. Today, it is common practice to Google an applicant’s name as a way to learn more about past work history, interests and hobbies, as well as an applicant’s personal life. Mick Sheppeck, Ph.D., an associate professor of management at the Opus College of Business, noted, “Companies are increasingly using personal information as they search for qualified applicants and this is likely to continue until people become more cognizant of what they are sharing online and who can access that information.”

In a January 2013 WCCO segment “Beware: Your Reputation is Now Being Googled,” Greg Swan, a digital strategist at Weber Shandwick, noted that 70 percent of job candidates are rejected purely based on the results of searching one’s name online. “It used to be that you’d ask someone, ‘Have you Googled yourself lately?’ and we’d all  giggle. But now that’s a real thing,” Swan said.

That’s not to say people are naive about what they do and don’t share online, but many do not realize the full extent of their actions until it’s too late. Generally speaking, social media users can be broken into two camps in terms of how they think about personal information and one’s right to privacy. Sheppeck said the smaller camp believes that access to personal data is the way of the world. Regardless of safeguards, individuals cannot protect themselves and should quit worrying. The other, larger camp needs to pay more attention and be mindful of what they choose to share. “Millennials, even more than other groups, are limited in their awareness of how personal information is being used today,” Sheppeck said.

Targeting the Masses

According to a February 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center, 73 percent of 2,253 adult respondents answered that they would not be OK with a search engine (such as Google) keeping track of their searches and using the results to personalize future searches. And 68 percent said they were uncomfortable with targeted advertising for the same reason: They didn’t want anyone tracking their behavior. That being said, user actions do not reflect these findings as millions of people routinely share the most intimate details of their lives online.

When Facebook launched in 2004, it was heralded for its lack of advertising. With 1 billion active monthly users as of October 2012, a lot has changed since its founding. The  average Facebook user is regularly commenting on photos and “liking” content, updating their status and connecting with friends and family, as well as those they’ve never met. While no stranger to advertising, the average Facebook user may not realize how her information is being used to generate the targeted ads she sees every time she logs in. If you recently became engaged, the ads are tailored accordingly and may include bridesmaid dresses, photographers, upcoming wedding shows and invitations, with many products and vendors showing up as promoted posts in a user’s news feed. Once you update your status to reflect your recent nuptials, the ads will change again, likely  focusing on the next logical step after that blissful walk down the aisle … the honeymoon followed by babies.

For those looking to advertise with Facebook, the online social giant leverages its more than 1 billion users, saying, “We’ll help you reach the right ones.” But what does that mean? Every piece of information shared on Facebook says something about a user. Individually, those pieces of information aren’t much, but together they tell a very complete story about each user’s personal life, education and work experience, likes and hobbies, and much more. By targeting a group based on location, age and likes, marketers can reach a very specific segment of their target audience and one that is likely to be receptive to the message being communicated.

Facebook’s primary source of revenue is advertising. By selecting key words and personal information shared by each user – such as relationship status, location, employment, likes and activities – businesses can run ads targeting a selected subset of users. A February 2012 article on the New York Times opinion page stated that Facebook earned $3.2 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, which makes up 85 percent of its total revenue.

The same article noted Google’s use of personal data for advertising and its resulting $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011. By simply “analyzing what people sent  over Gmail and what they searched on the Web,” Google obtains a mass of data and information to sell ads, markedly more information than even Facebook, given that Google is one of the most popular search engines used today.

A Right to Privacy

According to Porter, “There is a balance that consumers need to accept between privacy and free services as a part of the economic exchange.” As consumers, your buying habits and purchases provide information about you, and retailers would be foolish to ignore this information, but at what point does it cross the line? To that end, Sheppeck raised several interesting questions: “How much data is too much? Where should companies draw the line when it comes to mining for customer information? If privacy is the number one concern, at what point is an individual’s privacy breeched?”

Additionally, Sheppeck added, the mere act of tracking and storing personal data puts that data at risk and, therefore, puts individual privacy at risk. If the practice of mining personal information is to continue with little or no legislation regulating it there must be safeguards in place to protect said data. While breeches of security are to be expected, consumers expect that personal information will be protected in addition to being leveraged.

What the Future Holds

With far more questions than answers, this issue is just starting to heat up. As users of social media start at a younger age and people become more conscious of how their personal information is being used, as well as how it impacts their online reputation and subsequent ability to get a job, the legal ramifications will start coming to light. “Right now, the economy is our primary concern. As the economy improves or at least stabilizes, issues regarding user privacy and how personal information is managed will find their way into the courtroom, and the resulting legislation will better safeguard the personal data being shared online,” Sheppeck said. “In the near future, we will need a federal standard that articulates data areas that are off limits.”

Until then, users must be vigilant about what they do and don’t share online. It often is forgotten that the Internet lives on. You may delete a post or picture, but  somewhere, on some far distant server, there is a record of you at last year’s office party with a lampshade on your head.

Read more from B. Magazine.

A year before they graduated from the University of St. Thomas, Emily Pritchard ’11 and Martha McCarthy ’11 were guaranteed millionaires – in the eyes of a fellow entrepreneur, at least. As the only undergraduates, and the only women, to make it to the finals of the Fowler Business Concept Challenge in 2009, Pritchard and McCarthy’s concept for SnapSystem Bikes won rave reviews from one of the judges, who was so impressed by the uniqueness of the idea and the professionalism of their presentation, he felt sure he could make them millionaires.

After additional research, however, the two women discovered that a key element in the future success of their new venture was missing – passion. “We just weren’t very  interested in making bikes,” Pritchard recalled. “It was a great idea, it met the market need our entrepreneurship professors had told us about and it had little or no competition, but we just couldn’t get excited about it.”

What did excite them, was social media and the opportunities it afforded. Spurred by the confidence gained in receiving such positive feedback during the Fowler Business Concept Challenge, Pritchard and McCarthy went on to write another business plan, this one for a social media marketing company, the Social Lights, which they launched in January 2011.

The forum is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. When you began working with the forum, how was diversity and inclusion (D&I) defined?

When I started in 2002, the forum – and the field – was very much about diversity and not inclusion. Representation was the main focus and the definitions of what that meant were multiplying – mental health, size, transgender and immigrants. The topic of generations in the workplace was (and still is) hot, as was the role of women, especially in leadership roles. There was also pushback about that expansion, too. We hadn’t solved race and gender issues, among other things, but were already moving on to open opportunities for many other groups of people. There certainly wasn’t talk of cultural competence or much on bias. … Somehow, it felt like we hadn’t gone much beyond compliance, but that seemed to change rather dramatically over the next few years.

What are the differences and similarities between “diversity” and “inclusion”?

Diversity is about who is at the table – it’s numbers and representation (and hopefully representation at all levels). Inclusion is about how these people are valued, how they interact with each other, what their opportunities are. It’s about engagement. Think about it this way: You recruit a person who is different from the majority of employees because you want the diversity of his or her thoughts and experiences and the creativity that this difference brings. But then you require conformity to your organizational culture. Once/if the new employee assimilates, you have lost the edge that was the reason you brought him or her in. It is a fine art to be able to balance multiple cultures within an overall organizational culture. But those organizations that master it become the best places to work and are paid back with loyalty, productivity and a creative edge.

How did the forum begin?

In 1989, Minneapolis Community College (MCC) hosted what was then called American Management Association’s (AMA) Black Managers Forum, a two-hour teleconference. The event grew over the next few years to include sponsorship by the Twin Cities Chapter of the National Black MBA Association, a panel of local experts to respond to questions immediately following the teleconference broadcast and, in 1993, a morning workshop. In 1994, the name was changed to the “Multicultural Forum.” The University of St. Thomas was granted permission to use the name and continue the event in 1997, after the AMA backed out. At the first teleconference, 75 people took part; more than 1,200 people participated in the 2012 forum.

Historically, who have been the main attendees of the forum? How have you seen this change?

When I first began, the typical forum attendee was from the Twin Cities and worked in human resources or diversity (heavy HR emphasis). We had attendees from all levels, but more managers and below, and fewer directors and above. There has been a rather dramatic shift in my 11 years. More than 50 percent of attendees are now line managers, working every conceivable function – marketing, sales, operations, finance, etc. We’ve also seen an increase in attendance from upper-level management, no matter the function – 25 percent are at the director level, with 14 percent at the vice president level and higher.

What is the impact – both on the forum and on the field – for this change in attendee profile?

In an inclusive workplace, the people not working in HR or D&I are the front line of the effort. They make the environment inclusive or not by their actions and attitudes. The fact that so many of them are attending a diversity conference means that their organizations are getting something right. … The message is out that we are more productive and more profitable if our employees are happy and engaged in their work. An inclusive workplace, where all employees understand their value because the organization treats them as valuable just as they are, is key to that engagement.

What do you see as the primary reason for this shift?

I think it is the emphasis on inclusion. D&I leaders realized that creating a diverse workforce was only the beginning of the work. In order to retain those workers and advance them into increasingly more influential positions, an environment where they could bring everything they had to offer to the table was crucial. That could only be done if they felt valued and safe, and if they were included in the conversation.

I wish I could say that increasing the number of line managers who attend the forum was fully intentional on our part because we saw the inclusion trend coming and reached out to line managers in a very purposeful way based on that! There definitely has been an outreach to members of employee resource groups and diversity councils because we were and are offering content relevant to them. Those folks are the core of inclusion efforts. But I think it was the diversity leaders in their organizations that saw what the forum was offering and determined to bring their line leaders to the conference. Organizations are now doing that even more by holding their diversity council meetings in conjunction with the forum to take advantage of the learning we offer. The same is true for the leaders of employee resource groups – they are being sent to the forum to learn from the presenters and each other.

What is it about the forum – the location, timing, format, for example – that you think most makes this a “must attend”?

I do think location is part of it. We have a very loyal following here with an amazing wealth of Fortune 100, 500 and 1000 companies in the Twin Cities that are very global in their outlook. Our location has its drawbacks, too – there are some who think of us as flyover land and all white, so what could we possibly know about diversity? We work hard to overcome that perception, and I think we’re having success in the effort. Of course, that hard work essentially means being the best at what we do, offering something that our attendees perhaps can’t get elsewhere. Practical applications and best practices brought by subject-matter experts, whether consultants or company peers, training of all our speakers so they understand adult learning principles in order to deliver the high caliber of teaching, a robust evaluation process that leads to a continuous learning process. … These are key.

This year’s conference is a great example. We’ve wanted to increase the interaction of attendees with each other, to bring them a more robust conversation and a different way of learning.

So this year, not only will the general sessions build upon each other and thoroughly align with the theme (Our Time to Lead), but attendees will be intimately involved in the discussion of leadership.

What does “Our Time to Lead” mean – to attendees, to the D&I field, to the forum?

The theme is based on several convergences and opportunities I see occurring right now. The first is an ongoing trend from the past several years: D&I practitioners are focusing their efforts on the ways they can directly or indirectly improve a company’s bottom line, and are learning to speak the language of business so they can effectively communicate that to their business leaders. D&I is not a cost center; rather, it is a revenue enhancer and maybe even a revenue generator.

The second convergence is globalization. In a globalized world, we are all dealing with unfamiliar cultures. In order to understand contracts, employment norms, or the shades of meaning in a language in another culture, business leaders need a level of cultural competence. Cultural competence dwells in the D&I space, so we have a direct role to play in furthering business interests around the world.

Finally, the downturn in the economy has led to extensive changes in businesses large and small. As things are rebuilt and reorganized as we recover, there is a unique opportunity to embed D&I processes into the restructuring.

For all these reasons, it is our time to lead. The theme was created to point that out and to challenge attendees to find their personal and collective leadership abilities and initiatives.

Does the “our” refer to the attendees, to the forum, to both?

Good question! The “our” refers to the attendee and D&I specifically. But it also refers to the forum … 25 years of leadership and looking into the future, 25 more years of leadership. While it is a celebration of the 25 years, I don’t want to dwell on that; rather, I want to look to what more we need to be doing. The theme next year is “Breaking New Ground,” which will be announced at the close of the 2013 conference along with a new name, logo and lead sponsor. I want the forum to be known for breaking new ground, for leading in new ways throughout the year.

What will leadership look like, to you, in the next 25 years?

Before we plan for the next 25 years, we have to understand where we are. The forum works with some of the largest companies on earth. Many companies that size do have some things basically right, although their commitment isn’t always secure – the recession has shown us that. That is true of a lot of smaller companies, too. But there is a vast number of organizations that haven’t even begun their journey and likely don’t know they need to be on one. Even the federal government – keeper of affirmative action and equal opportunity – has only just begun to understand that diversity is more than just numbers, that there are opportunities to engage employees that will make the government workplace a better place to work and consequently a more customer-friendly organization. That is the work of inclusion.

If D&I leaders are successful, it will mean that we have embedded diversity and inclusion practices into our organizations’ DNA, that working in an inclusive environment becomes natural and expected and that more companies, large and small, are on the journey. I just read an article the other day that stated D&I work is taking off in Europe and other places because of the work of U.S.-based multinationals. We have already led the way.

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Bignall is, first and foremost, president and CEO of ReconRobotics Inc., a company that creates tactical micro-robot systems used by the military, law enforcement and rescue teams. Bignall and his entire team are devoted to increasing the safety of military and law enforcement personnel and other responders through robots that are increasingly sophisticated. Currently, their robots can explore an environment that might be dangerous for humans to enter and provide auditory and visual feedback, even in complete darkness. Some robots are designed to examine the undercarriage of a vehicle for explosives or narcotics. The robots have become increasingly advanced since the company was founded in 2006, and they will continue to provide improved information as more sensors are added for hazards such as radiological, chemical and biological threats.

Alan Bignall (Photo by Mike Ekern ’02)

These innovations have led to lots of attention for this relatively small company. Fast Company named it to its annual list of the most innovative companies in both 2012 and 2013, and in 2011 Popular Science named the Recon Scout XT micro-robot one of the top 100 tech innovations of that year. Bignall himself received the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business 2011 Entrepreneur Alumnus of the Year Award. Bignall attributes ReconRobotics’ success to the fact that what his company does – saving  lives – creates enthusiastic employees. “Passion drives us and coalesces around our goals,” he explained. “You can always hire smart people, but how do you get passion and a drive to make a difference?”

The employees at ReconRobotics are indeed enthusiastic about delivering products that provide advance warning to those who put themselves in harm’s way in their line of  work. Aimee Barmore, a St. Thomas M.B.A. student and director of the law enforcement and federal programs North American sales team, said that passion inspires her work. “Alan and I were at a trade show in California,” she said. “A soldier came up and said, ‘Sir, Ma’am, I have to say this thing [one of the robots] is awesome. It saved my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you!’” Hearing stories like this makes her proud of her work.

Bignall has been with the company since it was formed by a University of Minnesota professor and students who wanted to commercialize their work. Recently,  ReconRobotics turned to the work of students again. As a result of a senior-year engineering project that involved designing a landing system for unmanned aerial vehicles, four St. Thomas students formed a company, Xollai, to further develop their initial idea and to create additional products. ReconRobotics purchased Xollai because, Bignall said, the young alumni who created it were a very innovative group. “They had potential patents. They had great ideas that solved key user problems.”

During a 2009 interview for St. Thomas magazine, Bignall said that the state of Minnesota had the opportunity to become “Robotics Alley” due to its positioning in miniatures, motors and electronics. His vision led to the founding of Robotics Alley, a public and private initiative that hosts an annual robotics conference in the Twin Cities.

To make a point, Bignall made a comparison between hockey and robotics. “We spend enormous amounts on youth hockey. Why not on robotics?” he asked, noting that  there are now more high school robotics teams than hockey teams. A strong robotics industry could bring 10,000 high-paying jobs to Minnesota, he said. Robotics Alley brings together academic, business and government leaders to build on Minnesota’s already solid presence in the industry.

The desire to promote the robotics industry in Minnesota is also behind the Global Robotics Innovation Park (GRIP), a planned research park and business incubator in the Twin Cities. Tenants will include companies and academic research institutions. ReconRobotics and Robotics Alley are both partnering with GRIP to encourage the development of Minnesota’s robotics industry. For Bignall, ReconRobotics’ investment in outside projects such as Robotics Alley and GRIP are important. “This is about being a leader. If you want to make a difference, you need to reach beyond the edges of your business.”

While leading ReconRobotics, Bignall has channeled his enormous energy into other projects as well. In 2010, he co-founded Biolyst, LLC, with his chiropractor, Tim Kelm, who had successfully treated Bignall’s peripheral neuropathy with lasers. “Peripheral neuropathy is extremely debilitating. The Mayo Clinic told me there was no  treatment,” Bignall said. After finding relief through laser therapy, he asked Kelm to join him in founding a company that would provide this treatment through franchise Realief Neuropathy Centers. There are now three Realief Neuropathy Centers, located in Minnesota, Arizona and South Carolina, and more will be opening soon. Bignall isn’t running the business, but he is excited to be a part of it as a founder and board member. “I love businesses where you can help people,” he said.

Bignall also loves the game of baseball. “Did he tell you how he wants to die?” Barmore asked. “He wants to be seated at a baseball game, eating a hot dog and drinking beer.” It should be no surprise that such a dedicated fan of baseball owns the Albany Dutchmen, a team belonging to the New York Collegiate Baseball League. Bignall, who dreams of owning a minor-league team, said, “I love business and the game. Owning the Albany Dutchmen has been a chance to learn the business of baseball.” He doesn’t attend games as often as he would like, but he watches his team on the Internet.

On top of all this, Bignall recently finished serving as entrepreneur in residence at St. Thomas, a volunteer position that entailed being available to help students and faculty at the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship in the Opus College of Business. “I was available to mentor groups and individuals and to guest speak as needed,” he said. “I was not there as a teacher; I was there to boost the program, and I helped raise money for it.”

The Throwbot XT. (Photo by Mike Ekern ’02)

Before he joined ReconRobotics, Bignall worked for other companies, both large and small, including Rolls-Royce, IDS, Fingerhut and Visual Interactions Inc. When asked  about the high points and low points of his career, he was characteristically optimistic. “I am generally high on life,” he said. For him, the challenging situations one can face at work are merely opportunities to learn. His lowest point was probably at a time when he was between businesses. “I had no team, no energy,” he said. “I wasn’t surrounded by smart people. I’m energized by dealing with entrepreneurs.”

He pours this energy back into the people around him. “I have had such a wonderful professional life,” he said. “I want to make other people successful. Personal recognition  is nice, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for how to help people.” He added, “I’m always looking for new businesses to start. They just pop up all the time.”

Jack Klobucar, marketing director at ReconRobotics, has noticed Bignall’s investment in people. “What really separates him from others is the way he thinks and runs his business. He focuses on two groups. First, he focuses on the customer. If a customer has a problem, we’ll fix it immediately. Not tomorrow; today. There’s no one like that in the industry. We have a loyal customer base. Second, he focuses on each employee. He feels that if he can help an individual to be challenged and to grow, everything else  takes care of itself. This is highly unusual. I’ve consulted with dozens of companies. Most CEOs focus on numbers, but Alan focuses on the individual customer and the individual employee.” He noted that Bignall’s focus on these two groups has had a ripple effect, making the other stakeholders happy, including shareholders.

Bignall gives in part because he is grateful for what he has received from others. “I haven’t had just one or two mentors,” he said. “I’ve had hundreds of mentors. I try to listen to advice from everybody, and I try to be self-aware. I have a rule: If something’s not working, it’s always my fault.” Barmore has seen this in him. “He’s not a know-it-all,” she said.

The result of Bignall’s humility, energy, vision and focus on the individual is a successful work team that has fun while delivering results. “From day one, he wanted to create a business where he would like to work,” Klobucar said. “He looks at it through the eyes of the employee.” And, he noted, the employees respond: “We’re all in this together, creating something entirely new.”

Read more from B. Magazine.

Our survey also provides us with the opportunity to learn more about shopping behavior and gather additional research data. It provides a community service for consumers and retailers, along with creating awareness and interest in the Institute for Retailing Excellence, the Opus College of Business and the University of St. Thomas.

Each year we measure consumer spending intentions includ-ing household spending, total market spending, spending by mar-keting channel, product category purchases, shopping at regional centers and downtowns, and reasons for changes in spending from the previous year. We’ve also measured other things such as chang-es in shopping patterns as the result of the I-35 bridge collapse, changes after Macy’s bought Marshall Field’s, and a typology of customer groups over time.

Initially we mailed a four-page survey with a postage-paid return envelope to 3,000 households randomly selected in the 13- county Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Statistical Area. We usually had a response rate of approximately 10 percent, except in 2007 when the response rate fell to less than 5 percent. The fol-lowing year, we ran a test including the 3,000 mail surveys, 800 mail surveys using a magazine address list of randomly selected households and a computer household panel of 300 members.

The computer panel proved best: It produced results demo-graphically comparable to the mail survey and it cost less, took less time, could be done in November instead of October, had data that was clean and ready to use, was easier and faster for respondents to complete and it eliminated ambiguity and misunderstanding com-mon with mail surveys.

We’ve learned that the survey accurately reflects local con-sumer spending patterns. Since the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area is only 1 percent of U.S. households, our survey varies somewhat from national surveys. For example, spending dropped more during the “great recession” locally, but we recovered faster than the rest of the nation. This may reflect the area’s generally more fiscally conservative values compared to the nation, as well as the healthier local economy compared to the nation.

Retailing is dynamic. As a result, we’ve had to make changes to the survey. Brookdale Mall is gone, downtowns have weakened, the Internet has become increasingly important, and new centers like Arbor Lakes and Riverdale have emerged as important retail centers. We also have added more questions about Internet shop-ping, stores shopped the most and the percentage of shopping completed by certain dates.

Survey Results

Holiday spending has varied significantly over the past decade. Spending per household in the early 2000s was almost $800 and then fell to $637 in 2009 during the great recession. This was a drop of about $160, or 20 percent. By 2011 household spending had rebounded to $703, up $66, or 10 percent, but still a long way from its peak in 2004. Total metro market spending followed a similar pattern. Spending peaked at $959 million in 2004 and then fell to $810 million in 2009 before rebounding to $915 million in 2011. An increase in the number of households helped offset a decline in individual household spending.

Plans for spending this year compared to last tends to par-allel the amount consumers plan to spend. Those planning to spend more reached a peak in 2007 and fell to 4 percent in 2008. Similarly, those who planned to spend less have generally been in the 30 percent range, except during the great recession years of 2008 and 2009, when 54 percent said they planned to spend less. Reasons for spending more or less can be categorized into system-atic and individual household factors. Leading systematic factors that affect everyone include how the economy is doing, gas prices and inflation, while individual household factors include promo-tion, a birth of a child, losing a job, retirement, etc.

We also track spending by place: regional centers and down-towns, non-mall stores, non-store retailing and the Internet. The biggest change has been the rapid and steady rise of Internet shop-ping. It has gone from 7 percent of holiday sales to 26 percent in the past 10 years. Non-store sales such as through catalog, TV and phone have dropped from 9 percent in 2002 to 3.5 percent in 2011. Store-based retailers also have seen a decline. Their share of sales has declined from more than 80 percent to less than 70 percent. Regional malls and downtown retailing tend to be more upscale and they were hit particularly hard during the great reces-sion. Their share declined while non-mall stores and downtown retailing regained their market position as the economy improved and customer spending increased.

We originally asked consumers in which of the nine regional malls and two downtowns they planned to shop at least once. In 2011 we added four centers that function like regional malls because of their size, diversity of stores and extensive trade areas: Albertville Outlet Center, Arbor Lakes area in Maple Grove, the Riverdale area in Coon Rapids, and the Woodbury Lakes area. Generally speaking, more people plan to shop at the Mall of America. This is the largest mall with more than 500 stores. Rosedale comes in second and Ridgedale third. These malls are strategically located in densely populated areas with excellent freeway access and extensive trade areas. In 2011 the percentage that planned to shop these malls was 29 percent, 21 percent and 9 percent respectively. Brookdale slid from 6 percent in 2003 to 1 percent in 2010 before being demolished and replaced with a Walmart Supercenter. Downtown Minneapolis has held its own over the past decade while downtown St. Paul has slowly declined. Minneapolis’ strength appears related to the large number of people who work there, the number and variety of stores, the Holidazzle Parade and Macy’s eighth-floor holiday exhibit. The added retail centers fare well, with the Arbor Lakes area the most popular, but are still low compared to most malls.

In terms of where respondents plan to do most of their shopping, Rosedale has been the most consistent leader with Ridgedale, Mall of America and Maplewood also very popular. Southdale and Burnsville were in the middle with North Town, Eden Prairie and Brookdale significantly less popular. Both down-towns were much less popular than other regional centers. Arbor Lakes and Riverdale were moderately popular. Most consumers shop at their closest retail center.

We also asked about planned purchases by category. Books, gift certificates and cards, clothing, entertainment and toys are the most consistently purchased categories. Consumer electron-ics – video-game related and computer related – are in the middle while sporting goods, jewelry and furniture and home furnishings are the lowest. Mobile phones and travel recently were added categories with mobile in the midgroup and travel in the most popular group.

This past year we expanded our research on Internet spending. Internet-only companies such as Amazon and “bricks and clicks” retailers such as Target and Target.com were the most popular, with each accounting for about 38 percent of Internet sales. Deals such as Groupon and broker facilitators like Ebay were in single digits. The most popular Internet shopping site was Amazon, fol-lowed very distantly by Ebay, Target.com and Barnes & Noble. com. The most popular stores were Target, followed distantly by Macy’s then Penney’s, Kohl’s and Best Buy.

Changes Seen Over the Decade

Regional malls’ importance generally has declined, especially during the great recession when discount stores and category-killer super stores such as Best Buy gained greater importance. The growing importance of Internet shopping is shifting spending in stores to the Internet, significantly undercutting store-based retailers, especially in consumer electronics, books and toys. Consumer demographics and new and different products have emerged over time, as well.

Some of the changes we saw over the decade were the rise of open-air life-style centers; more free-standing stores – especially discount and category-killer super stores; the continued decline of downtowns; and the declining importance of regional malls anchored by department stores.

Note: The authors and other researchers are members of the Marketing Department. Brennan is also co-director of the Institute for Retailing Excellence.

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Elder was a perfect fit for Hiawatha Academies. “I was interested in applying business skills to social-impact organizations. The crisis of the achievement gap needs leaders to solve it,” he said. He was attracted to Hiawatha Academies’ proven results.

As COO, Elder has three main responsibilities. First, he manages ongoing daily operations that support the schools’ academic teams. He describes this aspect of his job as “I’ll do that” – he will do whatever needs to be done to allow teachers to focus on instruction and principals to be able to spend 80 percent of their time in the classroom, observing and developing teachers. Second, he is in charge of the organization’s strategy. His first major assignment as COO was leading the board through the six-month planning process that led to the current plans for Hiawatha Academies’ growth. And third, Elder handles external relations, including fundraising – no small task, since the network of schools needs $10.7 million to meet its goals for growth.

Read more from B. Magazine.

The Birth of a Center

Between November 1977 and March 1978, those business leaders convened for daylong retreats tackling major questions facing the community and defining business’ responsibility. Out of the process emerged the Minnesota Project on Corporate Responsibility (MPCR), the forerunner to what is now the Center for Ethical Business Cultures (CEBC).

As the MPCR, its principal role was that of convening busi-ness leaders to address complex issues such as diversity, corporate responsibility, corporate philanthropy and education. Throughout the 1980s, it facilitated the discussions as business leaders defined the nature of the problem, identified solutions and developed business’ responsibilities.

In the late 1980s, having been renamed the Minnesota Center for Corporate Responsibility (MCCR), the center developed principles to guide business behavior as it engaged with its stakeholders. These became known as the Minnesota Principles, with the MCCR assuming the role of an evangelist of sorts, spreading the principles.

The principles moved from Minnesota to a global stage in the early 1990s as the Caux Roundtable – an international col-laboration of business leaders from Asia, the Americas and Europe – came to Minnesota seeking to identify tenets to guide business behavior as it conducted its affairs around the globe. The group adapted the principles to reflect global themes and adopted them as the Caux Roundtable Principles for Business.  They have been published in 12 languages.

As businesses’ needs changed, over the last decade the CEBC emerged into a role of practitioner, assisting business leaders in building and sustaining ethical cultures. In this capacity, the cen-ter provides practical advice and counsel, and ethical leadership development services.

The center is now making progress toward its most ambitious undertaking: building a national thought-leadership position in the field of business ethics.

Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience

Today, CEBC is firmly embedded in the Opus College of Business. The center plays a unique role serving at the intersection of thought and practice leadership. It is taking its decades of expe-rience and wealth of knowledge gained in serving the business community and coupling those with the historical commitment and growing investments in academic excellence and business eth-ics by the Opus College of Business.

One tangible outcome of this effort is the book Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience. It is a project that arose from a major gift of $1.9 million to the University of St. Thomas by Harry Halloran Jr., a Philadelphia entrepreneur and chair and CEO of the American Refining Group (ARG). David Rodbourne, vice president of the center, served as project director and Dr. Kenneth Goodpaster, Koch Endowed Chair in Business Ethics at the college, served as the executive editor.

The book truly is, in all senses of the word, landmark. Never before has one publication taken such a detailed look at the evolu-tion of “business ethics,” encompassing not just ethical behavior but also management theory and practice, and tied them to his-torical developments in business and industry in such a compre-hensive manner.

Goodpaster and Rodbourne convened a group of leading academic scholars and business practitioners to begin to shape the project. Five leading scholars were chosen to research and write American history, including Goodpaster, as well as management, history and ethics professors from the University of Georgia, Florida International University, Boston University and DePaul University.

The book examines the journey of American business in corporate responsibility, tracing ideas and practices across nearly two centuries. It is a story with many threads: visionaries, rogues, social reformers, labor leaders, political activists (radicals and moderates) and a productive, innovative economy.

As Ken Powell, chairman and CEO of General Mills, notes in the book’s foreword:

“This book appears at a timely moment. Many business leaders are clearly rethinking what it means to be a truly socially responsible company, and this important work helps us under-stand not only the history of corporate responsibility, but also its evolving future.”

The official launch of the book occurred with an afternoon kickoff event on Sept. 7, and will be further touted at a spring 2013 academic conference, which will attract papers and reflections from top thought-leaders in the field. A second book examining the global history of corporate responsibility is already on the drawing board.

The Next Step

As a result of notable scandals in the last decade, the public is looking to government for greater protection and regulation of business behavior. According to one survey, the public most wants corporations to follow ethical business practices, to listen to customer needs and feedback, and to put customers before profits.

Given this clearly expressed public need, the CEBC board of directors – led by its past chair, former board member and retired chair and CEO of Toro Corp., Ken Melrose; its current chair and deputy general counsel of General Mills, Linda Sorrano; and Opus College of Business dean Christopher Puto – began to seek a new role for the center. In their vision, this new role would impact both today’s and tomorrow’s leaders as they shaped, developed and acted upon their own ethical cores.

Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience is only one of many visible steps the center is taking to make that vision a reality. This new course will allow the center to become a place where thought leadership intersects with practical leadership in business ethics. More explicitly, our vision is to make the CEBC a conduit that ensures a free flow of intellectual capital between the academic and business communities, a reservoir where thought and practice leadership reside, and a catalyst to stimulate dialogue that fosters the development of an ethical culture.

Read more from B. Magazine.

The disaster became one of the best things that happened to the company, as it pushed Selden to transform the business. By 2009, due to Arise’s tremendous success, Selden was one of 150 CEOs invited to attend President Barack Obama’s Jobs and Economic Growth Forum.

Selden’s path to her current position as co-chair at Arise started during an internship while she was an undergraduate student at St. Thomas. She was pursuing majors in accounting and computer science and was interested in an internship at Arthur Andersen (now Accenture). Her internship led to a job offer in either audit or tax, but she asked to go into consulting and became the first St. Thomas graduate to go directly into that field at Arthur Andersen – one of many firsts she has achieved in her career.

Her education and experience taught her about technology and how it was changing business. She also learned how to work with teams and serve clients. She moved up within the organization, eventually becoming the youngest managing partner. Over three years, she more than doubled the revenue of her group, largely through reinventing its strategy, moving it from 90 percent consulting work to a 50-50 mix of consulting and outsourcing.

Selden was encountering ideas that were preparing her for a move to Arise, although as one of the top five women at Accenture, she had no plans to leave soon. She began to reflect on how “outsourcing” generally meant “offshoring.” She also considered the need for employment opportunities for Americans, regardless of where in the United States they lived. Selden’s small-town roots in Tomah, Wis., had made her aware of how people often were unemployed or underemployed because of a lack of opportunities in their area. She was reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, a book which argues that technological advances have leveled the playing field in global commerce.  “When I read the book, it stopped me in my tracks to realize that technological benefits were being used against us. It made me angry,” she said. Selden felt that technology could be used to help the underemployed.

One more factor made her think about how changing the way people work might allow them to have a remarkable career while maintaining great relationships with family members: Her three-year-old asked her, “Mommy, what’s it like to live on an airplane?”

“That was a low point,” Selden said. As Selden was asking herself questions about the lack of adequate employment opportunities in some places and how we can improve the way we work, Arise approached her with the opportunity to become the company’s CEO. The intersection of her roots, her interest in technology and the chance to bring her ideas and abilities into play was too remarkable to pass up.

A New Way to Work

Arise provides a virtual workforce to its clients in the areas of customer service, technical support and sales. The people who work with Arise incorporate as an LLC, so they are not employees but small business owners. Selden notes that the social contract has changed over time. Pensions and unions have gone away, and workers are less confident that they will work for their current employer in 15 years.

Arise’s setup gives people more control. They decide which clients they will serve, how often they will work and where they will do the work – whether from their home or a vacation home. Selden notes this trend is not just happening in the call-center industry but also in law, marketing and technology, allowing employees to have ownership of their careers. “A ‘parent-child’ type of relationship between employer and employee tends to create an environment where the ‘child’ tries to figure out what he can get away with. We need more adult-to-adult relationships for the 21st century,” Selden said. “Arise’s environment is strictly oriented around your ability to control how much you make and when you work.”

Top performers choose their hours before everyone else. Employees are not paid just to show up. The relationship between the company and the worker puts success in the hands of the worker. “You control your own destiny,” Selden said.

“It’s scary, and it’s foreign to corporations, which are used to a top-down, command-and-control relationship.” Selden had to convince companies that they could trust people they’d never met and that Arise could provide them with better results through a performance-based environment.

Some of the people who work with Arise employ others who would rather not create their own business. One of Arise’s success stories is Lexsine Miller, a single mother who was holding down two jobs and lost everything in a move before she began working with Arise. She has built her business, Open Door Multiservices, into a seven-figure company that employs hundreds of people.

From Wilma to Washington

Following Hurricane Wilma, which dealt a severe blow to Arise, Selden decided to diversify the workforce. She shut down recruiting in Florida, but not one person who worked with the company was let go. She led the company in finding new ways to recruit and in reinventing service delivery. By the end of 2006, Arise had more than replaced the business it had lost from the hurricane.

The company began training and recruiting people virtually. Selden worked hard to convince potential clients to trust that work done by a virtual workforce would be done with quality. She also found that Arise could deliver value for businesses beyond the workforce it provided. “Companies can use our technology infrastructure for their own purposes. They can use our curriculum. Our business process has commercial value, so we offer not simply people doing good work but highly scalable tools and processes clients can use. We have a consulting team that works side by side with them.”

Arise also expanded internationally. In addition to its workforce of 25,000 people in the United States, it now has 1,000 workers in Canada and 2,000 in the United Kingdom and Ireland. “Global clients drew us into other countries,” she said. “Multinationals told us they needed talent in other locations.” She also convinced large employers that Arise could provide a sizeable virtual workforce. “They believed there was no way the model could work at that scale.” But Arise proved that it could indeed provide 3,000 workers for one client and 2,000 for another, adjusting the size of the workforce according to peak demands.

When Selden was invited to attend the Jobs and Economic Growth Forum, she was in a small business and entrepreneurship breakout group with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Karen Mills, administrator of the Small Business Association.

“I told them that 1 million call-center jobs left the United States between 1999 and 2009. The trend can’t continue. Virtualizing work, leveraging the broadband infrastructure, could keep families intact in local communities. It also supports a green economy; you’re not outfitting a large building for your workforce, and they don’t use fossil fuel to commute,” she said. Arise caught President Obama’s attention, and the organization has been featured on television and in print as a bright spot in a
stagnant economy. Selden was invited back to Washington last January for a forum on insourcing American work.

“Companies aren’t seeing enough economic benefits from outsourcing their work overseas,” Selden said. “Labor costs are rising, exchange rates need to be taken into account, and costs can be neutralized if an issue is resolved in the first call instead of two to three calls because of a lack of understanding between the customer and the employee.”

Mary Bartlett ’89, vice president, implementations and product management at Arise, has known Selden for 20 years. Although they both attended St. Thomas at about the same time, Bartlett didn’t meet Selden until she was working for Accenture, where the two hit it off. “She convinced me to go to Winnipeg for a winter project, so you know she’s a good saleswoman,” Bartlett said. “Angie is the epitome of a Level 5 leader from Good to Great. She has personal humility. She deflects good things onto the people around her. Her ambition is not for herself but for her company, her team, her group. She has the ability to make you better than you ever thought you could be. She’s your biggest advocate. People are better off for being around her.”

In May, the Opus College of Business presented Selden with a 2012 Entrepreneur Award. “That is a capstone of what we’ve accomplished at Arise,” Selden said. “The entire company is fueled by entrepreneurs, so that award is for them as much as for me.”

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Two well-known and highly renowned business schools have announced significant changes in their MBA programs to help their graduates rise above such allegations. Yet a third, less well-known but equally dedicated business school, has focused on teamwork, building interpersonal relationships and business ethics since the inception of its full-time MBA program in 2003 – the Opus College of Business.

Harvard’s dean, Nitin Nohria, has embraced the concepts outlined in the 2010 Harvard Business Publishing book Rethinking the MBA. The authors noted eight essential business needs that are not adequately addressed in many of today’s MBA programs: Gaining a global perspective; developing leadership skills; honing integration skills; recognizing organizational realities and implementing effectively; acting creatively and innovatively; thinking critically and communicating clearly; understanding the role, responsibilities and purposes of business; and understanding the limits of models and markets.

Garth Saloner, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, delivered a plenary address at the AACSB ICAM in April 2012 that offered a thoughtful and insightful description of Stanford’s repositioning its MBA graduates as global change agents who “change lives, change organizations and change the world.” Stanford’s new curriculum includes leadership labs. Harvard’s includes global off-site activities for students.

There is clearly no way to adequately describe these innovative and effective approaches in the space of this column. Rather, my point is that many other schools of perhaps lesser visibility also are embarking down this path with their curricula and having examples from the more visible schools’ approaches provides a form of imprimatur for us. The Opus College of Business is one such school well down the innovation curve on most of these efforts.

We have included credit-based Leader Development Labs since the MBA program’s inception in 2003, and we now are offering the next version (Lab 2.0), which includes True North groups and extensive personal development. We enhance communication skills through credit based labs attached to substantive core courses. We stream ethics throughout every course, capped by an advanced ethics seminar and an attached ethics lab in which MBA students interact directly with Fortune 500 C-level executives to observe and understand ethics in practice. Finally, all full-time MBA students participate in one of the world’s most advanced business simulations to put their newly acquired leadership and decision-making skills into practice.

Does it work? Yes. We have placed graduates of our MBA programs at General Mills, Ecolab, 3M, Target, Best Buy and Cargill, among others, and they are performing successfully right along with similar graduates from the premier MBA programs. The credibility provided by the academic industry leaders has opened the door for the rest of us, and this is a very good thing for all.

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One could argue that a major individual contributor to those statistics is Brad Ribar ’82 M.B.A., founder, owner and chief roaster at the Minnesota State Fair roasted corn stand, where he and a crew of 90 to 100 employees roast and sell about 200,000 pounds of sweet corn in just 12 days.

The Best Job of the Summer

For many regular fairgoers, a stop at the corn roast stand is a must. But when it first appeared 28 years ago, it was a slightly harder sell. “We gave away a lot of free samples the first year. People had never seen roasted corn before. Also, when we first started, no one wanted burnt kernels. Now, they ask for them,” Ribar says.

Ribar got the idea for a corn stand at the Minnesota State Fair while visiting his uncle in Wisconsin. At that state’s annual get-together, he sampled the Lion’s Club roasted corn. He was so taken by it, he asked to vol-unteer at the booth for the duration of his stay. While there, he says, “I asked a hundred questions and, when I left, I knew what I wanted to do.”

While he may have been certain of his success, Minnesota fair officials were not. It took five years of lobbying for them to accept his application – three years to approve the idea and two additional years to find the right location.

“To get space at the fair, you have to apply. A committee reviews your experience and your equipment, as well as their needs. It’s almost as though they are preparing a meal in one area; they want to ensure the stands represent a full meal and not too much of one thing.” One thing working in Ribar’s favor was his business plan, a plan he had drafted and honed while a student in the Evening UST MBA program.

The program’s strength in entrepreneurship was one factor in his decision, and he discovered that his classmates’ strengths were just as important. “My classmates were people who ran their own businesses and were, like me, interested in understanding all they needed to know about that. My professors were also business owners, or people working in corporate America, so I learned a lot I wouldn’t have otherwise learned on my own. That was important to me,” he says.

State Fair Love Affair

Ribar grew up at the Minnesota State Fair, where his grandparents ran the sanitation business for 68 years. “I love the fair. There’s something special about it I’ve never felt at other state fairs or county fairs. When you walk in, you have a sense of excitement, even when no one else is there,” he says.

Working for his family in both the sanitation business as well as the wholesale Christmas wreath business his grandparents left to them when he was in the ninth grade, Ribar discovered at an early age that he never wanted to work for anyone else. While completing his undergraduate business degree at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, Ribar found summer employment with a landscaper and a plumber, experiences that further cemented his entrepreneurial aims. “Working for a plumber, I learned a lot about mechanics that are beneficial now. But with the landscaper, I learned that it took them three days of selling to get two days of work. I knew that wasn’t something I ever wanted to do.”

Since inheriting the wreath business, Ribar has gone on to found and operate three different businesses: Ribco Enterprises, owned jointly with his wife, is the name under which the corn roast operates; Brad & Harry’s, a partnership with a college friend that operates cheese curd stands at other state and county fairs; and Lorette Foods, another cheese curd operation he owns with his mother- and father-in-law. But the roast corn stand was the first and is clearly, listening to Ribar talk, the one about which he is most passionate.

Love What You Do

An early and disciplined saver, Ribar graduated from college with a substantial nest egg, one he used to start Ribco Enterprises.

In the first year, Ribar employed 24 people, though he admits they would have needed only half that number. At this year’s fair, 55 to 60 part-time employees were on hand at any one time to staff the business. Employees are recruited solely by word-of-mouth. “We began by talking to people in my church’s youth group and their friends. Each year, some would return, or their friends would apply. We have some people working with us today who have been with us since day one,” he says.

While his employees come from many different backgrounds – from college students to financial advisers – they share Ribar’s ethos: “Love what you do; believe in it. Don’t be afraid to work or get dirty, and be willing and ready to have fun.”

For young entrepreneurs, Ribar has additional advice: “Don’t get discouraged – give anything three years. It takes that long to know if you’ve got a shot or not. I’ve seen many people quit after two years when they were close to making it happen.”

Ribar is the first to admit that the success of the corn stand is due to a lot of luck and good help. “When we first opened, our biggest issues were the mechanics. We designed the roast-ing racks ourselves. … It was a bad design.” The first time they tested the racks – the night before the fair opened in 1984 – they flipped the corn across the booth. “Luckily, I have an uncle who is a welder, and we ran to his garage. We cut them apart and re- welded them and are still using them today.”

Another contributing factor to his success was finding a farmer who can grow sweet corn in the quantities Ribar requires. In the early years, he bought from a variety of farmers. But today, he works with just one. “He grows a special seed just for us. It’s an expensive seed that many farmers don’t like to grow because the yield is low and the corn doesn’t last as long in the stores as some others do. But it’s perfect for us,” Ribar says.

It helps the roast corn stand consistently makes the list of top 10 food sellers at the Minnesota State Fair each year. The corn is a “supersweet” hybrid variety that holds more sugar in each kernel. Sweet corn itself is a genetic mutation of field corn that dates back to the 1700s, when it was purportedly first grown in Pennsylvania.

“Really good corn and roasting make all the difference,” Ribar notes. “Roasting gives the corn a different flavor. It’s richer and deeper. If you roast it for 25 to 30 minutes, the sugar in the corn caramelizes.”

When asked how he landed upon the ideal roasting time, Ribar smiles: “We cooked it for an hour.”

Corn Futures

Twelve years ago, Ribar and his brother sold the wreath business they had inherited. “I had three kids at home, worked all summer, and the wreath and fair business overlapped. I never saw my children … and they were why I was working so hard. I couldn’t see the point in that,” he says.

That was the day when, in Ribar’s estimation, he retired. Since then, he has been a man of “leisure,” or at least leisure in his eyes. Between his various enterprises, he and his team travel to 40 events each summer. In the off season, they attend trade shows and conferences to learn of innovations in the field and talk with others in their line of business. And he ice fishes. But it’s the corn business that he loves, and that occupies most of his time and passion. He hopes that his son and daughter will take over some day, but when asked what is standing in their way, Ribar smiles again: “The old man.”

Read more from B. Magazine.

As chair, I primarily run the meetings of the authority. We meet every three weeks. We’re responsible for all contracts and for managing the process of constructing and operating the building. In all key design and construction decisions, the authority and the Vikings have joint sign-off, so I need to build consensus. The city of Minneapolis is also a major player. It has an implementation committee that is advisory on all exterior elements. There are three subcommittees: design, planning and stakeholder experience, which deals with how the stadium fits in with the neighborhood and which considers issues such as parking and transportation.

I work with outside groups, so I’m a representative to the city, to the downtown business committee, to the general public. I’m a communicator who has to relay how the project is progressing. I do lots of listening and attend public meetings to hear reactions to plans. This is a statewide facility. People from all over the state are interested in it.

The big difference between this facility and the Twins stadium is that this is being built as a multipurpose facility. The Vikings only have 10 games a year here, and the facility will operate 365 days a year. The public uses the Metrodome a lot: the Gophers baseball team uses it, it’s used for motocross, it’s used for state high school leagues. My job is to build a people’s stadium. The Vikings will make sure it’s done to their specifications and to meet NFL guidelines. In general, the MSFA needs to make sure the building is done on time and under budget.

Michele Kelm-Helgen ’83 (Photo by Mark Brown)

You chaired a committee that oversaw school boundary changes in eastern Carver County. How does your experience handling a very emotional transition like that help you in your current role?

When I was in the East Carver County School District, I started out chairing the boundary committee and later served for eight years as the school board chair. During that time, we built three elementary schools, a middle school, a high school addition and around the time I left we were starting a new high school. All of those building projects changed boundaries. It became apparent that the most important thing was to make sure the process was open and transparent. It was important that people felt they had the opportunity to be heard and had a chance to react. You’ll never make 100 percent of the people happy, but if those who disagree with the decision feel the process was fair, that they had the opportunity to be heard, and that they knew about things ahead of time, it makes the decision more palatable.

Process is important today with the neighborhood and business community. This is a really big project with lots of public money. There’s lots of private money, too, but it uses a lot of public money. People want to know what’s happening.

During the short time the MSFA has existed, what conflicts have you faced, and what conflicts do you think you’ll face in the upcoming years?

So far, major decisions have been made, but I haven’t experienced a great deal of conflict. The work with the Vikings has been smooth. There will be differences among the team, the public, and city and neighborhood interests. We have processes in place to find ways to reach consensus. The city committee and subcommittees will be key to interactions with the neighbor-hood.

The MSFA is charged with building a “people’s stadium” that will be located in Minneapolis and heavily used by the Vikings. How do you balance the interests of the state, the Vikings and the city of Minneapolis?

In part, the legislation gave us a good guidepost. It designated a budget, a basic program and what’s to be included in the stadium. It specified that operations are to be done by the authority. Those specifications have already balanced these different interests. In addition, Minneapolis appoints two members to the authority, and the governor appoints three, including the chair. This gives people a voice. Some key decisions, such as decisions about the exterior of the building, require four-fifths of the authority to agree on the decision, so at least one city member has to agree with the rest of the committee. This requires joint decision making. There are also minimum design standards in place. Decisions about the architect, the construction company and the space need to be agreed to by the Vikings and the authority. The governor looked to me, because, for much of my career – when I served on the school board, as chief of staff for the Minnesota Senate and as deputy chief of staff – I was a negotiator, responsible for reaching collaborative decisions. This is kind of a microcosm of that. Overall, things have been set up with a balance of power.

You have a strong background in business and politics, but this seems to be your first venture into sports. How do you chair the MSFA as an outsider to the world of sports?

Like most Minnesotans, I have been a Vikings fan, but the extent of my involvement in sports has been as a fan. I’ve never worked in the sport arena. I have had a lot of involvement with budgets and construction. I oversaw more than $100 million in construction when I was chair of the school board. As chief of staff for the Minnesota Senate, I was involved with policy and budget decisions, and as deputy chief of staff I was putting together a $34 billion state budget. I was involved in the stadium legislation itself. I also have an M.B.A. from St. Thomas. The governor was mostly interested in my financial background and my experience with budgets, including my ability to understand them and read a large spreadsheet. The Vikings will make sure the sports side is covered. Our job is to make sure that public resources are protected and public events are provided for – all the things the public has come to expect from the Metrodome.

The new stadium has myriad issues related to it, ranging from major questions, such as who will have naming rights and whether it will have a retractable roof, to details, such as acoustics and whether fan noise will make it hard for players to hear each other or their coaches. What issue has been the most surprising to you so far?

The issue that surprised me most is the retractable roof. The way the legislation was done, this was never included in the budget. The language said that if there were savings they would be used on a “retractable feature.” This has been interpreted by the public as “We’ll have costs savings and a retractable roof.” I’m surprised and concerned. A retractable roof costs around $180 million. I hope for a retractable feature, but the budget is $975 million. I don’t see how we can have a retractable roof. Maybe a retractable wall or window or skylight system, but not a full-blown roof like at Lucas Oil in Indianapolis. There is little likelihood that there will be that kind of savings. I’m surprised people picked up on that, and I worry that people are expecting it. Expectations are important. Usually when I explain the situation, people get it.

How will you celebrate a successful stadium opening in 2016?

I haven’t thought of that. Hopefully the public will see this as a thing to be proud of. This site, which has never really attracted development, has to become part of the neighborhood. The stadium’s exterior is important, because it connects the stadium to downtown. It can’t be an island or a barrier. People will measure success by [how well the stadium becomes a part of the neighborhood], and we’d celebrate that.

Anything else you would like to mention?

There’s one more thing I’d like to note: St. Thomas clearly is a major presence in downtown. It has done a great deal to revitalize the area that it’s in. I would see that as the kind of thing we want to do, to become part of the community. I see this as an opportunity for St. Thomas to be involved, for students and programs to have a connection. I’d appreciate its input. I think about key areas of the city and what’s made a difference. I’ve thought about St. Thomas and how we could learn from it.

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Fewer than 30 percent of respondents knew that its system of government is a unique combination of federal parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy. More than 80 percent knew that the country has two official languages – French and English – but fewer than 1 percent could name any of the six languages officially recognized in various regions of the country (Chipewyan, Cree, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, Slavey and Tlicho). All participants could name at least one province, but few could cite the 10 Canadian provinces and three territories stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans and northward into the Arctic.

Canada is the second largest country in the world based on area, is home to 34.5 million people, ranks sixth globally on the human development scale, has the ninth largest per capita income, ranking ahead of the United States, and is the next, perhaps most important, frontier for Tony Fisher ’97, president of Target Canada.

O Canada

Fisher, a native of St. Paul, Minn., has worked for Target Corp. in one capacity or another since interning at the Dayton Hudson Corp. (forerunner to Target Corp.) during his junior year at the University of St. Thomas. In 1999, he joined Target as an entry-level business analyst in merchandising, then moved on to senior business analyst, manager and senior buyer in apparel and grocery. As a divisional merchandising manager, he was responsible for toys and sporting goods. Before being named president of Target Canada in January 2011, Fisher was vice president of merchandising operations for Target Corp.

Yet Fisher’s path to the presidency was not a direct one, nor was it traditional. Following his junior year at St. Thomas, Fisher was drafted by the Texas Rangers as a center fielder. He played for teams in Port Charlotte, Fla.; Savannah, Ga.; Charleston, S.C.; and Pulaski, Va. Teammates included his roommate Travis Hafner, as well as R.A. Dickey, Carlos Peña, Joaquin Benoit, Doug Davis and Mike Venafro.

“Minor league baseball is remembered for a lot of things … playing in different cities, the fans that treat you like you’re in the big leagues, the terrible locker rooms … but one thing everyone remembers from playing in the minors are the bus rides. I’ll always remember my first one. I had just joined the team and we immediately went on a 10-day road trip. When you travel, they give you your entire trip’s meal money in one envelope as you get on the bus – $15 per day. I got on the bus with my $150 and not more than five minutes later, the guys invited me to play poker. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s nice. I’m new and they’re being so inviting. This will be a great way to get to know the guys!’ I think I lasted about seven minutes and my money was completely gone. Needless to say, I didn’t get to know many guys playing poker that trip; however, I was very nice to the next new guy to join the team and of course invited him to play poker with us!”

Minor league baseball, perhaps, is the place that distilled Fisher’s belief in the importance of teamwork. “Baseball, like business, is a sport where teamwork and collaboration are abso-lutely critical in order to achieve your long-term objectives. You learn to work with people from very different backgrounds, cultures and countries, and you figure out a way to come together, to compete and to win.”

Fisher played baseball for three years, returning to Minnesota in the off season to complete his degree at St. Thomas. “I had some great experiences in my time at St. Thomas, and I think the basic foundation of a disciplined focus to learning was at the core of what I took away. There are many things that allow leaders to be successful: Setting the right vision, being a strong critical thinker, developing and leveraging a broad network of resources, being self-aware, and having a committed focus to developing people.”

When he chose not to rejoin the Rangers, he “wasn’t sure at the time if the decision to stop playing professional baseball was the right decision or not, namely because I stopped before I had reached my peak performance. Reflecting back, the decision for me came down to thinking about which career gave me the best chances of success. I was more confident in my chances as an execu-tive than as a baseball player.”

A Sound Decision

Clearly, Fisher’s decision to focus on his career in business was a good one. His 13 years with Target have seen him rise steadily through the ranks and be involved in almost every aspect of merchandising. This intimate knowledge of the U.S. retail giant left him ideally positioned for his latest role, and he assisted the corporation during its initial planning stages. “Before joining Target Canada, I had strategic pricing as one of my areas of responsibility,” Fisher notes. “My involvement in the planning process prior to our deal being announced was to help determine what our profit model would look like given the existing retail market conditions.”

Those market conditions were one of the factors motivating Target to expand into Canada. “Target has always been and will continue to be focused on profitably growing our core business in the United States,” Fisher says, “but we also realized that international expansion was a critical growth factor for us as we looked at our long-range strategic plan.” Target leadership researched various international options, from emerging markets to well- established markets overseas. Canada – with its robust economy, educated workforce and stable government – provided the best fit. Research showed that Target brand awareness was strong across Canada – 70 percent. In addition, more than 30,000 Canadians held Target’s proprietary credit card and more than 10 percent of the nation’s citizens already shopped at Target stores in the United States or online.

While the decision to move into Canada was made several years ago, it wasn’t until 2010 that the company encountered the right set of circumstances to make it possible. A first, and critical, step was protecting the company’s immediately recognizable trademark. Since acquiring the assets of a company called Dylex Ltd. in 2001, Fairweather Ltd., International Clothiers and Les Ailes have claimed Canadian ownership rights of the Target name, which was registered by Dylex in Canada in 1981. For its part, Target Corp. claimed Fairweather had lost rights to the name since it stopped using it following the acquisition of Dylex. Finally, in February 2012, Fairweather and Target reached an agreement in the courts whereby the Canadian retailer will stop using the Target trademark by Jan. 31, 2013.

Another consideration in the expansion was whether or not to build new stores. Fisher says, in 2010 “we took advantage of the opportunity to buy up to 220 of the leasehold interests of Zellers, an existing discount retailer in Canada owned by the Hudson Bay Co., which would allow us to expand internationally with a large number of stores within our first year of launch. We determined which of the 220 locations would be of best strategic and financial interest for Target, and then decided which locations would be best served as a Target store.” The end result is an ambitious plan to open 124 stores by the end of 2013, with some of the first stores opening in the Toronto area as early as this coming spring. The company will open new stores from then on approximately every two months, first in Western Canada followed by Ontario, Quebec, the Atlantic regions and then multiple provinces.

“This isn’t a typical merger or acquisition,” Fisher notes. “We only bought the leasehold interests, and because of that we need to build our own team, build our own technology infrastructure, and build our own supply chain, all within a two-year timeframe of announcing the deal. In addition to this, we plan to invest an aver-age of more than $10 million per store to completely remodel the existing locations into fully branded Target stores.”

Paramount to the success of their business strategy is building a team, and no one is better known for its focus on teams than Target Corp., whose employees are known as team members and whose career services website proudly proclaims “our team is our greatest asset.” So it was critical that the teams representing Target Canada reflected the communities in which the stores operate. As Fisher states with pride, “I’m excited by the fact that when our stores are fully staffed, more than 99 percent of our team will be filled with Canadian team members.”

Concentric Learning

Expanding into a foreign country requires not only an understanding of differing laws and regulations but also of differing cultural norms. Americans – especially those who share a border with Canada (the longest land border in the world) – have long had a tendency to view the country as “America North,” a misnomer that fails to grasp the history, complexity, socio-economic characteristics and diversity of the Canadian people.

Fisher and his team were determined not to make that mistake: “We were very clear from the beginning that it would have been a mistake for us to treat Canada as the 51st state, or Target’s fifth region. We started our plans with what we called ‘Listening and Learning’ tours across the country.”

On these tours, Target representatives met with leaders at all levels to learn more about the country. They conducted focus groups made up of Canadians who already shopped at Target and those who didn’t. “What was very clear is that Canadians want the full Target brand experience, not something diluted or changed for Canada.” At the same time, the focus groups pointed out, Canadian shoppers expect the merchandise to reflect local tastes, preferences and even climate. While many of the merchandising choices will be based on consumer input and feedback, shelves also will be stocked with Canadian cultural products, a requirement of Target’s deal with the Canadian government.

It is Fisher’s role as president to be engaged in and aware of each step along the path to the largest expansion in Target’s history. And in this role, his workday has become anything but typical. While he and his family have moved to Toronto, he still visits the corporate headquarters in Minneapolis at least once a month. He meets with current team members and interviews prospective team members, consults with local industry and government leaders, and listens to retail peers, among them other U.S. retailers with a longer track record in Canada, well-known names such as Wal-Mart and Sears.

Wherever he is, Fisher is engaged in the full-time job of concentric learning. Fisher believes that one of the most important aspects of being successful as a leader is to be a concentric learner or, as he defines it: “being accountable to your opportunities. You have to ask for feedback, show resilience by accepting what you heard, and then be adaptable by improving where you need to. Leaders who always focus on concentric learning, while soaring with their strengths, will continue to find success in their careers. I believe that’s a big reason why I’ve been fortunate to have the career I’ve had so far.”

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What are the primary differences between the health care reform movement now versus that of the Clinton administration?

The costs and problems of poor health faced by individuals and by health care providers are much worse. At the same time, the number of Americans without the assurance of affordable financial coverage has doubled. Care providers are getting desperate or they are turning entrepreneurial to improve access and affordability with retail solutions. Information technology has finally reached the health care business, and social media has rocked the doctor-patient relationship.

Public policy solutions to the cost, coverage and quality problems have turned 100 percent partisan for the first time in our history, and distrust of partisan policymakers to make the right decision is at an all-time high. And finally, the collapse of the post-World War II debt/inflation economy has forced policymakers to act on costs and coverage, as President Obama did.

What, in your opinion, is the fundamental flaw in the current American system of health care?

American employers carry the burden of both the poor health of their workers and their families, and the high cost of insuring access to health care for them and for all other Americans, many of whom are uninsured through payroll and income taxes, and in sharing a substantial cost of private health insurance.

In every other country, the government – liberal, conservative or autocratic – distributes the burden of financial security and health care cost containment across all businesses and individuals. The burdens of poor health, aging employees, unusual health care costs or inefficient health care are never a competitive disadvantage.

The American “edge” is our potential to turn inefficient, unproductive, questionable quality health care systems into high-value production systems using the knowledge developed from public and private insurance data on what works and what doesn’t to improve and to reward performance.

And how do we go about eradicating this flaw?

By improving the ability of Americans to become responsible health care consumers and by rewarding that behavior. Everyone knows that staying healthy reduces health care costs. But nothing in our payment system has rewarded healthy people and those who provide them with the sources of a healthy lifestyle, the way they reward poor health and its consequences.

Some argue that financial “skin in the game” will do it. We can’t afford the money it will ultimately cost to start there. We have to start by changing the doctor-patient relationship. Each of us should have a health care “home” that is readily accessible and in which a health professional has the burden to inform the patient/consumer, who then assumes responsibility for making informed decisions. We call it “shared decision-making.”

What specific information do consumers need to take part in this shared endeavor – and how do they access it?

America prides itself on providing the best health care in the world. If that’s true, then consumers are entitled to know, in every community, which is the best care, who does it best and what it costs – consistently. American business abandoned the cottage industry approach to product and service design and delivery long ago – everywhere but in health care, where primary care is still undervalued and specialty care over-compensated for its comparative value. A variety of professionals are linked in an integrated health system where patient care can be coordinated with the patient/consumer determining what is “quality” and “value.”

Consumers are entitled to know that American hospitals, doctors and health systems never will guarantee the results of what they promise to deliver. No other business could survive on the error rate present in American health systems, including the brand-name best systems. Nor could they compete if all consumers knew in advance the number of lives lost unnecessarily, the excessive use of diagnostics, the average number of return trips required after surgery or the number of failed or unnecessary lower back surgeries or other therapies.

Health professionals, hospitals and medical technology producers long have resisted consumer comparison on the basis of effectiveness or cost or quality, such as exists in electronic technology. Our ingenuity has brought the world into the living rooms of even the lowest-paid American worker and his four-year old daughter. In the second decade of the 21st century, I can communicate with almost anyone around the globe in seconds, but I cannot make an appointment online with my doctor.

Much of your prescription for a more effective health care system relies upon consumer engagement. What, if anything, does the profession itself need to do to contribute to any improvements?

The American health professions education industry is inefficient. It costs twice as much as adequate professional training anywhere else in the world. The cost of health professions education has grown much faster than care costs, and graduate debt burden is skewing professional choices.

America’s health care education enterprise is hopelessly dependent on medical industry-driven research grants and a battle for the “best” researchers who can convert discovery into highly profitable new device or drug businesses. Scope-of-practice laws designed by and for the income protection of hundreds of medical, ancillary and allied professions discourage consumers from using lower-cost alternatives. “Competition” leads to overbuilding of costly facilities to house overly expensive diagnostic and therapeutic technology, and prices are passed on to businesses trying to compete across the world.

You wrote recently in your commentary that “a national economy that commits twice as much to paying for worker and retiree health care as all of its competitors, without a value return, cannot compete in tomorrow’s global marketplace.” What is the “value return” that would make the United States more competitive?

In what other industry – in what other country – would product prices vary by as much as medical diagnostics, services and surgeries vary in this town, in this region or in this country? What other industry requires you to buy insurance in order to be able to buy its products and services? If health care systems in this country could self-insure and thus reap the financial benefits of healthy members and efficient service provision, how much value would we add? If we honored choices at the beginning of marriage about family and its health, and honored choices at the end of life about support systems for disabilities and for terminal illness, how much value would we add to an American health system?

The good news is that you can learn all this and meet physicians and health professions leaders who are trying to raise the value of life in their communities by changing the value question in their design and delivery of health and health care services.

There has been much debate about instituting a national health care system similar to those currently in place in the United Kingdom or Canada. All efforts to date, however, have been met with opposition by large segments of the population, whether in politics or not. What are the pros and cons of such a system in the United States?

In other developed countries, everyone has health services from birth and access to the benefits of continuous improvement in medical technology at costs which are affordable to individuals and to the community and to the national economy. The result is healthier people at a lower overall cost. On the other hand, Americans are convinced that they get better care because they see and hear about new medical discoveries which they presume will be available to them over the counter or in an emergency whenever they need them, so they are leery of changing the system or taking more responsibility themselves, even when the costs of not doing it, as patients or as taxpayers, exceeds what they can afford.

Experience has taught some of us that a U.S. health system that plays to our strengths as a nation can provide more and better health for less money. We have seen the evidence in several communities – ours among them. We need simply to make the value of health and appropriate health care more visible and the financial rewards for it more consistent. Implementation of the new national health reform law at the state and local level has great potential for creating this uniquely American system … one community at a time.

Sen. David Durenberger is a Senior Health Policy Fellow at the University of St. Thomas, and chairs the National Institute of Health Policy. He was elected to replace Hubert and Muriel Humphrey to serve as the senior U.S. Senator from Minnesota from 1978 to 1995, becoming the only Republican U.S. Senator from Minnesota to be elected to three terms. During his time in the Senate, Sen. Durenberger served as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence and chairman of the Health Subcommittee of the Senate Finance Committee, and was catapulted into a leadership role in national health reform.

Durenberger was Senate sponsor of the Medicare Catastrophic Act, AHCPR (now AHRQ) voting rights for handicapped, Americans with Disabilities Act, President H.W. Bush’s 1000 Points of Light and President Clinton’s National and Community Service Act, National Service Learning, Consumer Choice Education Act (charter schools authority), Safe Drinking Water Act, higher education Direct Lending Act and Women’s Economic Equity Act.

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Today, a rapidly growing number of organizations and practitioners include in the definition of women’s health not only reproductive health, but social and emotional well-being. As defined by the World Health Organization, the topic of women’s health includes biological differences between men and women as well as the study of those illnesses unique to women, more common or serious in women, with distinct occurrences in women, or with different outcomes or treatments in women. Since the 1980s, research on gender differences in health and disease has influenced new treatment and prevention of serious illnesses, including heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and depression.

Clinic Sofia in Edina subscribes to this revised and expanded definition. Launched in 2004 by Dr. Donna Block ’05 M.B.A., the clinic’s mission is to “nurture a community of confident, healthy women,” a mission taken seriously not only by Block, but by the all-woman staff and the clinic’s clients.

The clinic’s name evokes Sophia, the Greek goddess of wisdom, fertility and nurturing. Its waiting room is the first and most visible sign of this mission. Bearing a greater resemblance to a 19th-century literary sálon than a medical office, it is furnished in comfortable couches and lounge chairs. A large bowl of chocolates sits on a side table and soft music issues from a portable CD player. The waiting room also is an exemplar of the clinic’s – and Block’s – approach to business: a carefully crafted, deliberate implementation of disciplined intuition.

A User-Guided Design

Katie Sexe ’10 M.B.A., like many managers of small, independent clinics, wears several hats at Clinic Sofia. Her chief responsibility is overseeing the clinic’s budget, but she also is charged with ensuring the clinic is prepared to accommodate the new Affordable Care Act mandates going into effect in 2012. She handles marketing and public relations for the clinic, a responsibility for which her Evening UST MBA prepared her well. “Everything we do here is based on consumer input and market research, which influences not only how we operate, but our plans to expand.”

The decision to open a second Clinic Sofia in Maple Grove in 2012 was driven by an analysis of the market as well as the connections of the clinic’s newest team member, Dr. Suja Roberts, who has privileges at Fairview Maple Grove. As the only female Indian OB/GYN in Minnesota, Roberts is well-positioned to serve a growing Indian population; census results in 2006 revealed that the Indian population in Minnesota was just over 30,000 and is the second largest Asian community in Minnesota.

It is this focus on market forces that has kept Clinic Sofia financially healthy. But it is the “user-guided design” that has contributed to its growth and reputation. The majority of new patients at the clinic come from referrals. Block has consistently been named as one of the Twin Cities’ top doctors by Mpls./St.Paul Magazine and Minnesota Monthly, and is listed in the Guide to America’s Top Obstetricians and Gynecologists by the Consumers’ Research Council of America. Clinic Sofia was voted best OB/GYN by two suburban newspapers and was ranked number one for overall consumer satisfaction in a survey by Fairview Physician Associates in 2010. These accolades are not a result of mere financial discipline, but of a commitment to service shared by the clinic staff and consistently reinforced by Block.

Treating the Whole Person

Block is the third of four girls in a family from Nebraska. In the sixth grade, she wanted to be a Rockette or a doctor but, like many women of her generation, was told she couldn’t be a doctor. Later, as a junior in a parochial high school, one of the nuns told her she was smart and dedicated enough to do “something” in medicine. So Block pursued an undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, majoring in speech pathology and audiology. She also earned her master’s degree in audiology.

It wasn’t until she was in her mid-30s that Block began and completed medical school at the University of Minnesota. She has been an OB/GYN since 1987 and worked in private practice from 1991 until she opened Clinic Sofia in 2004.

For Block, the experience in private practice was less than satisfying. “Every doctor at that clinic was a good doctor,” she recalls. And yet she felt that something was missing in the treatment they provided to clients. “I really wanted to establish an environment where women were not only treated for medical issues but were made to feel that their concerns and fears were heard; I wanted to nurture women. At Clinic Sofia, we take care of the whole person – we are the primary-care providers for many of our patients. We address their cholesterol, genetics, history, etc., but we also make as many referrals to psychologists as internists.”

Treating the whole woman was the impetus behind a conference held by Clinic Sofia in October 2011. “Is this all there is?” attracted more than 200 attendees and focused on the questions, concerns, fears and bonds shard by women as they age. “At about age 40, women start to feel invisible – we heard this more and more from our patients,” says Block. “So we put together this conference to address the physical, psychological and socio-economic changes many of us face at that time.” Proceeds from the conference went to Women Venture, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping women succeed in business.

A careful attention to the budget allows Clinic Sofia to explore opportunities such as the conference. The hardest challenge they face, according to both Block and Sexe, is ensuring that they provide the best care but also remember it is a business. “If we don’t maintain the business, we can’t provide the care,” Block acknowledges. She goes on to credit the Health Care UST MBA program with her ability to successfully implement and manage what began as a good idea. “What I loved most about the program was the culture. I had been in environments that were very negative and this was stimulating and nurturing. My cohort was made up of administrators and practitioners with diverse experience. That variety helped us develop a common language and has helped me, overall, in the business, by providing an insight into the different perspectives in any situation.”

Building a Shared Culture

Perspectives from each member of the 20-person clinic staff are welcomed each week in Monday morning “huddles,” occasions to make certain each staff member is informed of events and activities. It is an opportunity to share client feedback and propose new ideas or initiatives. And, perhaps most importantly, it is an occasion to reinforce a shared culture. As evidence that the clinic’s culture is just as positive and nurturing as its patient care, five of the eight people who were with Block when she opened the clinic in 2004 still work there. Among these is Debbie Schumacher, head nurse, who also worked with Block prior to joining Clinic Sofia.

The clinic’s success, according to Schumacher, stems from allowing people – both patients and staff – to rise and flourish, and this is a talent Block has had since they first began working together in the 1990s. “She was the first physician I had ever worked with that really cared about patients as whole people. We felt the clinic had a very different philosophy than we did.” This shared philosophy led Block and Schumacher to hold menopause clinics in Block’s home in 1991-92 to help women understand the process because, Schumacher explains, “many doctors just weren’t listening to what women really needed. We felt we provided education and nourishment to their souls.”

No Longer Just Women’s Health

Ask Block about the potential for the Clinic Sofia model to be followed in other cities by other practitioners, and she becomes quite animated. She feels the small, independent model could be implemented for anyone, even for less-affluent patients. The key to success, however, is being disciplined and taking a big picture approach while defining and understanding the qualities and characteristics unique to the clinic’s success. “You have to build the culture to make it effective. Everyone needs to understand the importance of nurturing a healthy woman.” One must also, she is quick to point out, be conscious of and stick to the budget. A strong business sense and clear understanding of the financial picture is just as important as the care provided to ensure the organization remains vital.

Nurturing may sound less clinical than mystical, but the success of the clinic is evidence that this is, indeed, what women want. And what women want in the marketplace is no longer of concern to just appliance makers.

In 2010, women made up nearly 51 percent of the U.S. population. There are twice as many women as men aged 85 or older. In 2008, 55 percent of all U.S. college students were women, and women had a larger share of high school diplomas, associate, bachelor’s and master’s degrees. For the first time in history, women comprise nearly 60 percent of the American workforce.

While once women’s wants – and women’s health – may have been of concern to a very few, they are now of concern to all of us. And while once young women were told they could not be doctors, Block is evidence that they cannot only be doctors, they can be doctors instrumental in  shaping the health and well-being of a new generation of leaders.

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In a follow-up Q&A, published on the OCB website, Addicks suggested that, “In today’s world, we should assume that our brands are ‘always on’ … (but) the marketer must resist letting the digital marketplace define and position the brand. Instead, the marketer must, as always, stay true to brand marketing fundamentals and define what she or he wants the brand to be, clearly enunciate what the brand will stand for (purpose) and why the brand will be different.”

Intersections events engaged executives from Best Buy and Target in February and March, along with OCB faculty members. On April 26, the final Intersections event of the academic year will feature Jeff Lavers of 3M and Dr. Laura Dunham discussing innovation. All archives and upcoming Intersections events can be found online.

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“It’s so much better than 20 to 30 years ago,” said Tom Flynn ’71, M.D., president of Minnesota Oncology and a practicing physician in oncology and hematology. “Cancer patients today can get well and enjoy life. This trend will continue as we have better, more effective, less toxic treatments.”

Minnesota Oncology is a physician-owned practice with 58 physicians and nine clinic sites. Flynn is responsible for governance, physician policy development, strategic planning and relationships with outside entities such as hospitals and insurance companies. He is the face of the organization to the outside world and, as a physician leader, he works closely with the executive director of the practice. An alumnus of the University of St. Thomas with a major in chemistry, Flynn shared his views on trends in oncology of particular interest to non-physicians and businesspeople.

Costs and Reimbursements

You can’t talk about trends in oncology without discussing costs. Cancer care is getting more expensive, and the costs of cancer care are escalating at a faster rate than overall health care costs. Many new drugs have been introduced, but these new drugs tend to be very expensive as the pharmaceutical industry works to recoup research and development costs. As Flynn notes, these cost increases areunsustainable and must be addressed by stakeholders.

While costs rise, there is continued downward pressure on reimbursement to medical service providers. Third-party payers want to be responsive to their clients, which are typically employers. So to keep insurance costs down, they try to keep the cost of care down. As the Affordable Care Act is implemented, the health care landscape will change, but not all of the ramifications of the act are known. Flynn said, “Patients have easier access to care, but it is unclear how oncology fits in the picture.” He observes that methods of reimbursement affect care delivery.

Currently, the most popular form of reimbursement is “fee for service.” This form of reimbursement can encourage providers to provide more treatments than are necessary. An alternative, a lump-sum payment, can encourage providers to make choices for the patient based on controlling costs, rather than on the best course of action.

Flynn notes that we need to develop ways to base reimbursement on episodes of care or groups of services. His practice embraces “clinical pathways,” a way of standardizing a patient’s care based on best practices.

“We want patients to receive the best possible care at the most reasonable cost. There are ways to do this. Clinical pathways are evidence-based and have been developed to provide high-quality care. Research has shown that using clinical pathways versus using other methods to treat cancer has led to substantial cost reduction and equivalent survival rates.”

Disappearing Private Practices

These reimbursement pressures along with factors including regulatory burdens, requirements to keep electronic records and scrutiny by payers, are creating a shift from small medical group practices to more practices based in larger hospitals and health care systems.

The Community Oncology Alliance reports that during the three-and-a-half years leading up to March 31, 2011, 199 clinics closed, 369 practices reported they were struggling financially, 48 practices sent patients elsewhere, 315 practices were acquired by hospitals and 11 practices merged or were acquired by another entity. Many physicians see large health care systems as more secure environments in which to practice. From an economic perspective, it is difficult to maintain a private practice.

Bills for cancer care are large, and one outstanding $10,000 bill for a patient can have serious consequences on a small private practice. Larger groups can, of course, absorb unpaid bills more effectively, as well as keep up with increased regulatory burdens.

Changes in Treatment

Oncology may be increasingly expensive, but it also is more effective. “Our understanding of cancer on the molecular level is very exciting and has led to significant changes in cancer treatment,” said Flynn. Treatment has become more specific and drugs now can target specific genetic mutations. A leukemia that might have required a bone marrow transplant in the past now may simply require the patient to take a daily pill.

As treatment has changed, we have more cancer survivors, and more people for whom cancer has become a chronic disease. These patients who live for years with cancer need to be able to return to a “new normal” in life, receiving not only continued medical care while they have the cancer but also ancillary support, such as counseling and physical therapy, to feel as well as possible.

The sentence, “You have cancer,” can still bring dread to a patient’s heart, but it is no longer a death sentence. As medical developments continue to help in the fight against cancer, the need to tackle the issues associated with costs, reimbursement for care and caring for survivors and those with chronic cancer continues to increase. The challenges are enormous, but with such optimistic outcomes for patients today, the field of oncology is filled with a sense of hope and possibility.

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A recent United Health Group study reveals that in remote areas of the United States, 18 percent of residents are now more than 65 years old, versus the 13 percent national average. Families in rural areas are disproportionately living below the federal poverty level, and people living outside of metropolitan areas have a higher rate of chronic illnesses (hypertension, diabetes, cancer and arthritis) induced, in part, by increased smoking and obesity. The grim picture? Rural residents in our country are older and sicker than urban residents.

These factors alone are enough to have a large impact on insurance coverage and availability in rural areas. To complicate matters, nearly one third of the older rural population is utilizing Medicare or Medicaid as its primary source of coverage versus one quarter of that population in urban areas. Rural Americans are more likely to be uninsured compared to city dwellers, and private insurance coverage rates in rural areas lag behind their counterparts in urban areas by 6 percent.

In sum, rural residents are older, sicker and less insured than their urban counterparts … and they have less access to health care. Consider that, in cities, there are 105 primary care physicians per 100,000 people. Compare that to 65 primary care physicians per 100,000 people in rural areas. Specialty care is particularly lacking for many people living in rural areas, as well as pharmacists, dentists, mental health professionals and well-trained EMS professionals. Between the isolation of working in a rural area, limited vacation time and fewer opportunities for spousal employment, recruiting physicians is a difficult task for many health care organizations in these regions.

This complexity is compounded by the fact that no two rural areas are alike. The topography, demographics and lifestyle among the rugged ranchlands of Wyoming are not comparable to those of the flat marshlands of Louisiana. Thus, there is no one-size-fits-all business model for administering rural health. And with the federal government’s recent legislation – the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, with much more debate to come – there is potential for significant impact on health care provider reimbursement, with arguably more impact on rural health care facilities, especially in the early days of implementation, since their patients are less likely, on average, to currently be insured and more likely to use Medicare and Medicaid.

In the midst of this environment, a majority of medical professionals opt for large, urban health care centers where the paycheck is stable and the impact of environmental factors are felt less on a personal level. According to the National Rural Health Care Association, only about 10 percent of physicians practice in rural America despite the fact that nearly 25 percent of the population lives in these areas.

Since 1972, in an effort to improve medical access in underserved areas, the National Health Service Corps, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has worked to, if not eradicate, at least slowly close the gap between health care access in urban and rural areas. In return for a two-year commitment to serve in a Health Professional Shortage Area, the NHSC awards scholarships and loan repayment to primary care providers. Throughout the country, there are 2,157 HPSAs in rural and frontier areas. In Minnesota, 313 clinics or hospitals sites are located in these shortage areas and 11 of these are located in Clay County on the Minnesota/North Dakota border.

Fargo/Moorhead is the most populous area in the county and is home to Sanford Health, the largest, rural, nonprofit health care system in the country and the largest employer in North and South Dakota. With a presence in more than 111 communities in eight states (including 31 hospitals and 111 clinics and more than 900 physicians and 18,000 employees) Sanford Health is well-positioned to make a significant impact on the direction of rural health care.

A Rural View

The composition and reach of Sanford Health today is a result of a 2009 merger with MeritCare, formerly the largest health care provider in the state of North Dakota. Its service area spanned more than 200 miles, from Jamestown, N.D., to Bemidji, Minn. At the time of the merger, Dr. James Volk ’10 M.B.A. was an influential leader within MeritCare.

Early in his time there, Volk identified several measures to ensure rural patients were receiving the best possible care in a format that took into consideration some of the limitations of rural life, among them, distance. One of these measures was expanding the hospitalist services in the system. A hospitalist acts as transition coordinator and case manager of sorts and focuses on the care of patients in the hospital. Unlike primary care physicians who are housed in clinics, hospitalists are better able to coordinate the care of patients between the various specialists at the hospital, track patient results and communicate with families. They also are more cost effective and more convenient for rural patients than repeated visits to primary care physicians. Given these advantages, both to patients and to MeritCare, Volk expanded the hospitalist staff from two to 21.

Following the merger with Sanford Health, Volk assumed his new role as senior vice president of medical subspecialties and women’s health in the Fargo-Moorhead area. Volk has combined managerial and practitioner responsibilities throughout much of his career. His management role has solidified a key tenet of his professional life. In his words, “As physicians, we have a responsibility to take ownership and have accountability for the direction that health care takes in this country, and I think that we have shirked that for some time.”

He acknowledged that active participation is no easy task for rural physicians, whose workload has increased significantly in recent years. One solution to providing adequate care in rural areas has been to hire more advanced practice providers, predominantly physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners. This has alleviated some of the shortage of medical practitioners in rural areas and is a favorable change for rural patients; however, with the hiring of advanced practice providers, physicians become responsible for their management, in addition to seeing patients themselves.

Another excellent trend for providing good care for rural patients is telemedicine, where physicians assist patients remotely. Although a great boon to rural patients, expecting physicians to email and teleconsult while still seeing a full load of patients in person has increased the demands placed upon physicians. Notwithstanding these trends, Volk maintains that physicians can and ought to be engaged. He suggests they do so by attending department meetings, having a voice in the political process and in other ways helping to direct the industry.

Yet that goal is encumbered by the realities of providing care in rural areas. When asked why he continues to practice rural health care management instead of moving to a system in an urban area with more resources and easier physician recruiting, Volk states that he knows well the challenges of providing care in rural areas. Thanks to his upbringing on a farm in North Dakota and his lengthy professional experience in rural areas, he understands what it is like to travel long distances to reach tertiary care centers, often requiring patients to take an entire day off of work. In these cases, some patients are forced to decide if they want to travel that distance at tremendous time and monetary expense or if they prefer to live with the health issues.

One of Volk’s missions at Sanford is to provide as much local care as possible to ease the financial and travel burdens on rural patients and to remove barriers that prevent people from seeking any care at all. This mission becomes a balancing act between the needs of the patients and the cost of providing these services locally.

For example, in previous years, Sanford Health provided “outreach” cardiology services to Bemidji, Minn. Once a month, a cardiologist would visit Bemidji and see all the patients he or she could on that day. After accruing enough data to determine there was sustainable, significant patient demand, Volk worked with the clinic and hospital in Bemidji to recruit a full-time, local cardiologist, thus removing the need for outreach services.

However, the physician is only part of the resource allocation. This newly hired cardiologist and his patients had to travel 140 miles one way to Fargo, N.D., once a week for cardiac catheterizations because there was no equipment for that procedure in Bemidji. With an equipment upgrade in October of last year, the cardiologist was able to provide cardiac catheterizations in Bemidji, which is a tremendous benefit to people living in the rural areas surrounding the city. This business decision changes the procedure from a daylong venture to a quick, one-hour visit.

A Healthier Prognosis

In a perfect world, the quality of care one receives should not be dependent upon where a patient is seen and by whom. But this is not a perfect world and the health care industry is not a perfect industry. There are signs that the struggles of patients in rural areas are being taken seriously, however. Affordable Care Act funding will allow, for example, the NHSC to triple in size, supporting more than 10,000 providers working in underserved areas.

During the Rural Health Policy Institute in January 2012, Mary Wakefield, Ph.D., Health Resources and Services Administration administrator and former NRHA member, described HRSA projects and grant programs benefiting or with the potential to help improve rural health quality and access. She also called attention to a new $1.5 billion home visiting program where nurses and social workers will provide health education in the homes of families in rural areas, perhaps minimizing some of the risk factors that contribute to the poorer health of rural America.

And in February 2012, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Representative Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), co-chairs of the Congressional Rural Health Coalition, introduced the Rural Hospital and Provider Equity (R-HOPE) Act. Its purpose is to help rural communities across America protect and expand access to quality health care. As one of the bill’s sponsors, Thompson summarized it this way: “The quality of health care you receive should not depend on whether you’re from a big city or small town … ensuring access to high quality, affordable health care isn’t a Republican priority or Democratic priority – it is a national priority.”

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Bray spent 13 years as a registered nurse. “I loved medicine, but I was concerned about issues such as how care was delivered. I couldn’t influence the system,” she said. Deciding to pursue a position that would help her play a role in influencing policy decisions, Bray originally thought of pursuing a graduate degree in public health, but after taking a law class, she decided to pursue a J.D. She worked as a lawyer for a while but discovered that, despite the important influence law can have on health care delivery, she needed an understanding of business to give her access to work on the leading edge of the issues. “Credibility is important. I needed an M.B.A. with a health care focus,” she said.

Her search for the appropriate business education led her to the Health Care UST MBA program, which had the quality, flexibility and health care focus she was seeking. She also liked the cohort nature of the program and remains in contact with many members of her cohort. “We have different ideas. It’s nice to get a viewpoint from outside my niche.”

Bray’s colleagues at Hazelden value the combination of education and experience she brings to the job. Nick Motu, publisher and vice president of marketing and communications, said, “Ann has an entrepreneurial spirit. She has blossomed as a business person, and she was not initially hired as one. She is a good business leader as well as a legal leader. She looks at both business implications and legal implications when she examines contracts. Ann understands the business needs. She’s juggling a lot and doing well.”

Not only does Bray have a wide variety of formal educational and career experiences, she also has a broad range of interests outside of work. She rides horses and competes nationally in Western horse events. She also has experience doing interior design work for herself and others. She has used that experience in her current role by contributing her ideas to the designs of some of Hazelden’s facilities with the goal of offering patients an atmosphere that is less like a hospital and more like a home. Such an atmosphere is not only more welcoming but also helps patients transition from the Hazelden campus to home.

Bray’s father served as police chief in St. Paul and also as a state senator. He is still active today, riding horses and roping cattle. His courage, the high expectations he has of himself and his ability to change careers inspire her. She is not shy, however, about considering anyone and everyone as a role model. “You need to stay open to being influenced by the people you meet,” she said. “An artist in San Francisco, a street vendor in New York. Knowledge is cumulative, and I try to accumulate a lot of knowledge. I’m looking for answers. I need to be open to a lot of different experiences.”

As someone who looks for answers from many different people, Bray values her team. Bray sees herself as a contributor to Hazelden, right along with those she works with. “I seek out out good ideas and bring them to life. I’m a pot-stirrer. My job is bringing out the best of Hazelden. There are lots of great ideas.”

About Hazelden Hazelden provides drug and alcohol addiction treatment at locations in Minnesota, Florida, Illinois, Oregon and New York. Although the rich and famous have sought out Hazelden for treatment, “we see far more ordinary folks,” said Bray. Hazelden takes commercial insurance and offers scholarships. “We do a lot to be accessible,” she said. This accessibility includes innovative outreach to young people; recently, they opened a collegiate recovery residence in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. Bray views drug and alcohol treatment as one of the most exciting fields in medicine. “It’s very consumer-directed. We’ve learned a lot about how consumers shop for health care through our field.” Addiction treatment is also a very innovative field. “We use social media, people helping people.” For example, Hazelden recently introduced the mobile application MORE, a personalized coaching tool. “The U.S. Navy uses the MORE program, which beams onboard to ships,” said Bray.

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To answer this question, I first need to set out a context and two caveats. The context is that above a certain income or wealth level – a relatively modest one for most of us reading this – people consider a broad bundle of elements in their decisions to go to and stay at an employer, and a related bundle of factors affect our ability to be fully engaged at work and to perform highly. Health care benefits and the proportion covered by the employer are important elements in these bundles, but not the only ones, or even the primary ones for most employees.

The caveats to this general answer are that for the working poor, conditions are desperate, and that for all of us, this answer may change in the future. Health care is more uniform and nationalized in most developed countries than it is in the United States, where our cultural values tend toward a very high level of independence and a reliance on markets to regulate. If nothing changes on that front, and if health care costs continue to rise dramatically, employer offerings of and payment for health insurance could become a more important, direct element in employers’ recruiting and retention tool kits.

Generally, however, we consider health and well-being factors more broadly in our decisions about our jobs. I recently started the University of St. Thomas Work and Well-Being Study (UST-WWS) with second-year UST MBA students Sara Christenson and Annelise Larson to explore just such issues.

Working with a local organization, we found that employees’ overall holistic sense of well-being may be a greater predictor of retention than any jobspecific factor (see chart; scale is for efforts to leave the organization where 5 = monthly and 1 = never).

Overall well-being consists of a bundle of domain well-beings, such as career, financial, social, leisure, health and community well-being. In our initial UST-WWS sample, financial well-being was one of two specific domain well-being measures that related strongly to retention and presenteeism at work (“presenteeism” is a term used to capture the notion that people are physically at work but unable to be fully engaged and productive).

And this is how I come to my answer to this question: It is through the overall financial well-being of America’s workers and their families that the impact of health care costs will most significantly be felt. If, as has been the case for over a decade, discretionary incomes continue to fall because the relative costs of essentials such as food and health care rise dramatically, the financial wellbeing of Americans will continue to fall, affecting our ability to create full, stable lives that include staying with the employing organizations that best fit our interests and talents. As basic living eats up a greater proportion of our paychecks, affecting our overall financial well-being, UST-WWS findings suggest that this will impact our overall well-being and our ability to be fully present, engaged and productive at work.

Teresa Rothausen-Vange, Ph.D., is professor of management and holder of the Susan E. Heckler Endowed Chair in Business Administration in the Opus College of Business. You can reach her directly at tjrothausen@stthomas.edu or (651) 962-4264.

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This was the first opportunity for the college to be ranked by U.S. News because the news outlet only considers schools that hold accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International. Following a five-year process, the Opus College of Business became the first private college or university in Minnesota to receive AACSB accreditation in December 2010.

In its first year of eligibility, the Opus College of Business’ full-time MBA program was ranked 104th among the 441 U.S.-based, AACSB-accredited programs able to take part in the survey. U.S. News only published its top 102 ranked programs online, but listed St. Thomas as having a “rank not published” in its report and corresponded directly with the school about its rank. MBA programs belonging to Stanford and Harvard tied for first in the country, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business notched third place.

In a separate ranking of 326 accredited part-time MBA programs, U.S. News and World Report listed St. Thomas at No. 200.

“We always believed we had an outstanding business school, but there wasn’t a good way to demonstrate that,” commented Dr. Christopher Puto, dean and holder of the Opus Distinguished Chair in Business. “To move from being unranked to the top 25 percent is a wonderful affirmation. This initial ranking recognizes the efforts of our faculty, staff, students and benefactors. I could not be more grateful or proud of what they have accomplished.”

There are six AACSB-accredited colleges and universities in Minnesota and 22 in the five-state area. In its “Best Business Schools” list, U.S. News and World Report ranked only four of those 22 higher than St. Thomas: the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

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For more information, visit the Multicultural Forum website.

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