“Kindness” is not usually first on a list of what creates excellence in a business leader, but it’s up there for Nilofer Merchant, CEO and founder of Rubicon Consulting, an influential Silicon Valley firm specializing in high technology business.

“Kindness disarms people,” said Merchant (MBA ‘00), “Rubicon does strategy at the highest level for multi-billion dollar companies (Adobe, Apple, HP, Symantec and Nokia are a few). These are companies that have to decide who they are today and where they want to go. They never call us because things are going great. You get called because something is broken.

“Now, you could see these people as screw-ups, or you can see them as people who’ve done the best they can with what they have. I think that compassion and courage are rare in business. I’m the first person to say what the elephant in the room is, but I say it kindly. If you don’t have kindness in your heart, how many people are going to want to tell you what’s going on in the company?”

On the other hand, Merchant also has coined the phrase “murder boarding” for her process of promoting good ideas and killing bad ones. She has a pitch-perfect ear for the catchy phrase, exemplified by a talk she gave called “Even Steinways Get Out of Tune.” The talk, later turned into a company White Paper, was about spirituality in business – a topic that first piqued her interest when a classmate (who later became her husband) suggested she take Andre Delbecq’s course, “Spirituality for Business Leaders.”

“You had to study a tree and write a journal entry about it,” she recalled. “I remember thinking it was the silliest exercise ever.”  But as she thought more about the assignment, and about the capstone project was she was working on, she realized that the tree was a powerful analogy for business. She saw core strengths and experiences as the roots and the fruits of labor up in the branches. The class also inspired her to explore her personal values and goals.

“What kind of person do I want to be? What feeds me at a personal level?” she asked herself. She says that people who don’t ask those questions often never learn what their answers are.

Merchant admitted that although she learned much at Santa Clara, she wasn’t a stellar student. It took her seven years to finish her degree, which was interrupted by leaves of absence as she was promoted into new positions.

“When I started the program, I wasn’t even a first-level manager,” she said. “By the time I left, I’d been a vice president at a start-up and an executive at a Fortune 500 company.”

“What was nice about the program was that everyone was in the same spot,” she added. “Everyone was in ties and suits and working really hard. Going to SCU added tremendous value to my career. I’d go to class Tuesday and then apply what I learned on the job, and then come back to class Thursday with a different take on the issue.”

Her MBA program gives her access to SCU’s network of alums populating businesses throughout Silicon Valley. Merchant also keeps in touch by frequently serving as a guest speaker to Leavey classes.

“Santa Clara is justly known for serving the working executives of this area,” she said. “If you want to continue working and building your career, it’s really the only choice.”

Merchant took what she learned and tested in the marketplace and turned in into The New How, a book about strategic leadership and the perspectives needed to make it work. The book was released by O'Reilly Media in late 2009.

Santa Clara's Evening MBA program has "opened my eyes" to the world of business. 

The dynamic and diverse character of the Silicon Valley is reflected in the student body. From launching a telecom business in Bangalore, to going through the process of an IPO, or learning how to manage change after an acquisition, the many perspectives that my peers bring to class have helped me better understand the real challenges facing business leaders today. 

I have also had the opportunity to experience international business firsthand through one of Santa Clara?s Global Perspectives course. I spent 10 days in London and Geneva studying at the London School of Economics and visiting some of the top financial institution in the world.

Through all of these experiences I have developed lasting friendships that will continue long past graduation. I am taking with me the skills, confidence, and network I need to create a business, not just be a part of one. 

Tammy L. Madsen, Ph.D., had just joined the faculty at Santa Clara when she was tapped in 2000 to be part of the committee helping to plan the new building for the Leavey School of Business.

“Many of us had strong opinions based on our experiences at other universities” she says. “But, ultimately, the challenge was figuring out what we would need 10 to 20 years out.”

Since then, she’s advanced along with the new Lucas Hall, becoming chair of the Management Department in the school in 2007. Madsen, who grew up in Fremont in the Bay Area, was attracted to Santa Clara because she wanted a place that valued research and teaching.

She teaches the required capstone strategy course in the MBA program; the course introduces various strategic analysis frameworks and covers a range of topics such as industry analysis, strategic positioning, alliances, outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions, and global strategy.

Students engage in an intensive research project where they apply various strategic analysis frameworks and the knowledge and skills they have gained throughout the MBA program to analyze a firm undergoing strategic change. Madsen uses in-depth case analysis and various experiential exercises in her classes. One of her goals is to ensure that students can use class content at their companies.

“Basically, it’s about putting knowledge into action,” says Madsen, who started her career working for a small defense company to analyze F-14 aircraft. She moved on to packaging design and program management for commercial vehicles at Delco Electronics in Santa Barbara, but realized she wanted a different kind of career.

“My exposure to various divisions within General Motors motivated me to pursue a doctorate in strategy and organization,” she says of her move into academics. “I couldn’t help but think that there has to be a better way to run an organization."

"I love my job. I enjoy doing empirical research – exploring questions, collecting data, conducting analysis, and disclosing counterintuitive findings," recounts Madsen. "Many of us are faculty because we enjoy continuously learning and building knowledge.”

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Sanjiv Das left positions teaching finance at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and the University of California at Berkeley when Santa Clara University offered him academic freedom in 2000.

“They said that as long as I did research, they didn’t care if it was in computer science or finance,” he explains. “at Berkeley, it would have had to be one or the other.”

One of the fruits of the professor’s approach is an elective called Quantitative Business Models that makes extensive use of mathematical software – a first of its kind for a business school.

“I don’t think there’s a course like this at any other campus,” he says. “It aims to remedy the incorrect believe that quantitative models aren’t feasible for students who don’t have engineering backgrounds. I don’t think the QBM course would have been approved at some other places. I would have been accused of encroaching on computer science or the marketing field.”

He has brought that same kind of innovation to Santa Clara, putting together a distinguished group of faculty and advisors to launch the Santa Clara Initiative for Financial Innovation and Risk Management (SCIFIRM). The group, which includes SCU finance faculty George Chacko, Hersh Shefrin, Meir Statman, held its first conference, “The Value of Values” in Spring 2010, and brought together international leaders in the study of socially responsible investing.

“A thought process knows no boundaries,” adds Das, who earned his doctorate in finance from New York University, a master’s degree in computer science from Berkeley, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management. It’s hands-on learning, and brings the satisfaction of learning by doing; in my case, learning by teaching.”

Constructing eco-friendly buildings is only half the battle of going green, according to Lindsey Cromwell Kalkbrenner, director of the SCU Office of Sustainability and MBA alumna (‘09).

“Santa Clara’s main goal is to develop a culture of sustainability within the campus faculty, students and staff,” said Cromwell Kalkbrenner, who also was instrumental in the “Greening of Lucas Hall” team. She explained that her job involves three main goals:

•    Stewardship -- promoting recycling, energy conservation and other efforts to reduce the University’s ecological footprint 
•    Education – integrating sustainability into academics as well as campus events
•    Outreach – taking lessons learned to other institutions and the wider community

Cromwell Kalkbrenner is somewhat unique in the world of sustainability coordinators. The job at other institutions is usually tied solely to facilities departments. At Santa Clara, the facilities and operations staffs have been working on greening projects for years. Cromwell Kalkbrenner said her office takes that movement to the next step – building the bridge between academics, operations and campus culture.
“It just makes financial sense to reduce energy consumption,” she said. “Because we’re a Jesuit institution, we have a moral imperative to create a better place for future generations.”

After earning a biology degree at SCU, Cromwell Kalkbrenner admits she didn’t really know what she wanted to do. She taught at a marine mammal facility in her native Hawaii until returning to California in 2006 to start the sustainability position at SCU.
“This job has opened up a whole new field for me,” she said. “My family didn’t recycle when I was growing up. I lived in a rural area and we had to take our trash to the dump. But I learned a lot about conservation at my first job out of college and started changing my habits.”

Although she tries to be as eco-friendly as possible, she admits that she occasionally forgets to take her reusable coffee mug to Mission Bakery and ends up with a disposable container. Still, she can check off most of the boxes on the University’s Sustainability Pledge “Beyond Green”  part of a campaign her office spearheads on campus.

She decided to take up graduate business studies because she felt the program was the most likely to give her the flexibility to go in different directions.

 “My job is all about communicating, negotiating, leading, and networking—definitely easy to apply my newly-acquired business skills.”
 

Terri Griffith, professor of management in the Leavey School of Business since 2001, virtually immerses herself in research to learn how companies can best function with modifications to the traditional work environment.

Santa Clara’s location in the center of the technological world benefits her, since her research “is focused on the implications and effective use of technologies in organizations.” Griffith, who has served on advisory boards and has won numerous grants, has been looking at virtual work environments since 1984. Today’s business climate and technological advances allow and typically encourage formerly nontraditional communication methods.

“Most organizations are hybrids,” Griffith says. “They do some of their work face-to-face; use teleconferencing; instant messaging, e-mail. My colleagues and I study how that kind of work environment affects the rate of innovation.”

She has learned that “while communication is always easier face-to-face, the actual work outcome can be better in a virtual setting. A project team can pick the best people around the world and perform better.”

Griffith has been a visiting professor at various universities, and has served as senior editor of Organization Science, a research journal.

Through a National Science Foundation grant, Griffith is collaborating with John Sawyer of the University of Delaware to research  “knowledge, innovation, and virtual work” in science and engineering organizations.

“We’ve finished collecting data with a Fortune 100 science and technology company,” Griffith says. “We’ll be able to track how and which teams are more innovative” because of their virtual work environments.

Students in Griffith’s organizational design course at SCU average three to five years of professional experience and most plan to move into management positions at their companies.

“Each individual comes in with their own intuition and experience,” says Griffith, who won the Leavey School of Business Research Award in 2004. “If they are able to hear how others have handled situations, they can understand how to apply their knowledge. They can go back to their organization and apply what you just talked about. Since they have a fair amount of experience, we find a way to organize the knowledge they have.”