A Shared Vision

The C. T. Bauer College of Business is developing its next strategic plan, considering stakeholder input from faculty, staff, alumni, students and the business community.

In his first year leading Bauer College, Dean Xianjun Geng started his tenure by meeting with and listening to various college units about their self-identified strengths and areas that need improvement. Those meetings were followed by a retreat for Bauer leadership, where preliminary conversations about the plan began.

In the fall, Bauer leadership identified engagement, experiential learning, investment in people and programs and local and global impact as four reoccurring themes mentioned by stakeholders. This spring, five initial task forces started meeting to draft their recommendations for the college’s future, with plans to launch two more task forces underway.

Currently, the groups are analyzing the following areas: corporate engagement, alumni engagement, MS programs, executive education and undergraduate education. Task force members have a range of professional and academic backgrounds and bring new and familiar perspectives of the college.

“It's my strong belief that things will not work out optimally unless faculty and staff work closely with each other to create recommendations,” Geng said. “By design, we have included both groups on each committee.”

He added: “All task forces have a co-chair structure rather than a single chair structure to emphasize the idea of teamwork. It's about shared vision. No single person's voice is bigger than another person's voice.”

Stephen Stagner Sales Excellence Institute Executive Director Randy Webb serves as one of the corporate task force chairs, contributing decades of experience in industry and academia to the committee.

The group began its work with a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis of peers and competitors in the market.

“I believe what we're doing is really valuable because engagement leads to investment,” Webb said. “Not just investment in terms of money, but investment in time. We have an opportunity at Bauer to do a better job of engaging the corporate community to get them engaged in the classroom, projects, research and experiential learning, so the students can get real world experience and perspective.”

Instructional Associate Professor Barbara Carlin is helping to lead the behind-the-scenes logistics for all task forces and will conduct data analysis and generate comprehensive recommendations based on each group's reports and findings.

“Strategy works best when it emerges from the people who have to execute that strategy,” Carlin said. “There's no better collection of people to understand both the environment and the organization to develop a strategy than people who work in a business school.”

In the later phases of strategic plan development, college leadership will meet with student leaders as well as members of the Bauer College Board to get additional insights. Geng plans to give an update on the plan’s progress at the biannual faculty and staff meeting in late April, with the plan of integrating the recommendations across the task force reports into a comprehensive strategic plan toward the end of summer.

“At the end of the day, this is not any individual's plan, but it's our collective plan,” Geng said. “I'm grateful that many people across the college have reached out. This collective input is what shared governance is about.”