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To: Business School Community
From: B. Joseph White
Subject: UMBS 75th Anniversary Challenge
I write as chair of the School's Quality Council and on behalf of my colleagues on the Council.
Academic year 1999-2000 will mark the 75th anniversary of the University of Michigan Business School. In 1924 the Regents of the University established the School to offer graduate studies in business. In September of that year, the School enrolled our first MBA students, the class of 1926. In 1935 the doctoral program was added, followed by the undergraduate program in 1942. The rest of the century has comprised a period of virtually unbroken growth and development resulting in today's University of Michigan Business School, a dynamic and thriving institution of which we are the beneficiaries and stewards.
I am writing to invite and, frankly, to challenge all of you -- students, faculty, and staff -- to make the 75th anniversary of our School a year not only of celebration, but also of high achievement.
Specifically, I propose that we join hands to pursue a shared goal of achieving new standards of excellence in all of the School's key resources -- people, programs, and facilities and infrastructure -- by the end of the 1999-2000 academic year.
This effort is an initiative of the Quality Council. We are calling it the UMBS 75th Anniversary Challenge.
I sense that the timing for such an effort is ideal. Why?
First, we can pursue this goal from a position of strength. By most indicators, including demand for our programs, the quality of our students, the stature of our faculty, our role as a leading innovator in management education, and financial strength, our School's performance and reputation have never been better. But we know that in a competitive world, complacency is the enemy and it's always wise to capitalize on momentum.
Second, despite our strong performance, I know that every student and every Dean B. Joseph White member of our faculty and staff has knowledge of areas in which our performance is falling short of our high aspirations, and, more important, has ideas about how we can, in fact, achieve new standards of excellence.
Which of us has not thought about ways in which we might recruit students even more effectively, support research better, teach a class better, maintain higher housekeeping standards, use information technology more effectively, take greater advantage of our diversity, be more innovative ... and so on? The question is, can we harness our ideas for improvement and convert them into action? I believe we can, we should, and we must.
Third, early in our 75th anniversary year, we will undertake the School's biggest set of physical moves in over a decade. The catalyst will be the opening of Wyly Hall, 80,000 square feet of new space that will create a cascade of domino-like changes throughout the School. In my experience, a new building and related moves can be a time of great opportunity for any organization, if only the members choose to seize it.
For example, we have already decided that next summer, coincident with the completion of Wyly Hall, we will undertake extensive beautification of the School's interior courtyard behind Davidson Hall with brick walks, granite benches, and new landscaping. In other words, we intend to convert the problem created by the construction (much damage to our sidewalks and grounds as a result of heavy equipment) into an opportunity to create a new standard of excellence in the quality and beauty of our surroundings.
So the question is, what other opportunities for improvement like this can we spot and seize?
For these three reasons, as well as the occasion of our 75th anniversary, the next eighteen months, from January 1, 1999 to June 30, 2000, can be a time of great opportunity for improvement through high achievement at the University of Michigan Business School.
Let me propose a way for us to proceed. Why don't we think of these achievements, and the resulting improvements and new standards of excellence, as our 75th anniversary gifts to our School? More specifically, I propose that we devote the first three months of 1999 to deciding just what our anniversary gift list will be, who (what individual or group) will be responsible for each gift, and what the plan, including resources, will be to secure it. Then we'll have a maximum of fifteen months in which to get our work done. Our list might change hopefully it will get longer as time goes on. But let's start with a list, responsibilities, and a plan. We welcome participation in this gift process by students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends of the School.
I've mentioned one such gift above: a beautiful interior courtyard. Here's another example: we have a Women's Initiative under way to make our School the most attractive to talented women interested in MBA education and business. I bet that Jeanne Wilt and her team can create one or more gifts from this initiative to be delivered during our 75th anniversary year.
Or how about this: I am often asked the question, "What's the next major round of curriculum innovation in the MBA and BBA programs at the Business School?" I'm not yet satisfied with the answer. I wonder if Sue Ashford and a team of faculty, in consultation with students and staff, could make the answer to that question, and the actions implied, into a great 75th anniversary gift?
Similarly, I know that Brian Talbot believes we can achieve a higher rate of quality growth in Executive Education. Into what gifts to our School might that intention be transformed?
Let me add an observation about these anniversary gifts to our School. We want them to be 'endowment gifts' or 'legacy gifts' -- whose effects will endure beyond our 75th anniversary year.
By the way, we do plan to celebrate the 75th anniversary as well as make it a time of achievement. We should also plan to have some fun while setting new standards of excellence. With regard to the celebration, we intend its "bookends" to be Reunion Weekend, October 22-24, 1999, and the dedication of Wyly Hall on a date yet to be determined in the Spring of 2000. With regard to fun, I have already decided that one of the gifts to the School must be clean and modern restrooms in high traffic areas like the second floor. And because our new standard of restroom cleanliness will be so high, I intend to host an inaugural lunch in two of them ... one men's, one women's ... when they're ready.
(This may or may not be your idea of fun. In any case, I have met with student government leaders and told them that since our students are experts in having fun, we need them to take the lead in the "fun" part of the 75th Anniversary Challenge.)
So where do we go from here? The essential next step is to form and charge a Steering Committee made up of faculty, students and staff with responsibility for leading and organizing the UMBS 75th Anniversary Challenge program. We will also need the Steering Committee to monitor and track our progress and achievements throughout the next eighteen months, since I anticipate that the program will be extensive and decentralized.
Leadership will be essential and I have asked one of our most respected colleagues, Associate Dean Gautam Kaul, to chair the Steering Committee. I know that he has the requisite organizing skills, creativity, and most important, enthusiasm, to ensure a successful program. Gautam has accepted my invitation and he and I will next determine a process to recruit the members of the Steering Committee.
I hope you think there is merit to these ideas. I believe that much is at stake in capitalizing on the opportunity presented by our 75th anniversary: our excellence as a School, our pride as members of the School community, and the quality of our stewardship of the School. Uniform excellence in the School is tantalizingly close, and achievable. We shouldn't, we mustn't, miss this special opportunity to reach for it. Throughout this decade I have been astounded by what we can accomplish as a community when we put every shoulder to the wheel, open ourselves up to each other's ideas, take risks, and act with conviction. Let's create a School of which we will all be exceedingly proud, in every respect, by setting new standards of excellence and meeting the UMBS 75th Anniversary Challenge.
Members of the Quality Council and I welcome your comments.
snagelvo@umich.edu
Every time I see a Nike commercial, I freeze, mesmerized by the prowess and movements of the athletes, and the synergies of strength and strategy. The sight of the "swoosh" alone makes me want to throw on my running shoes and sprint to the track, or race over to the tennis courts.
One recent commercial is even more powerful but subtle, featuring a team of anonymous street basketball players. A mellifluous, almost hypnotic song accompanies the quiet swish of balls slipping through the basket, as player after player attempts to emulate Michael Jordan's dunk. As the ad closes, neither "Nike" nor "swoosh" appear on the screen. There is only the Air Jordan logo, showing the silhouette of the world's most famous basketball player. Nothing empowers me more to be the greatest athlete that I can be with the help of some Nike paraphernalia.
Slightly more discreet, a current Gap ad features rock stars in all-black outfits playing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Set against a white background, the blue Gap logo quietly appears at the very end of the commercial. Message: Gap is effortlessly cool, modern, and comfortable. Who would want to wear anything else?
How can the subtlety of Nike and Gap ads elicit such powerful responses from viewers? UMBS marketing Professor Rajeev Batra has explored these emotional and psychological effects of advertising for most of his career. "Most Michigan marketing courses tend to be analytically driven," explains Batra. "What I emphasize is the power of the intangible, emotional effects of advertising and branding."
Professor Batra has taught the Advertising Management course here for 10 years. These days, he teaches the popular Strategic Brand Management course, which he introduced to UMBS (under a different name) in 1996. The course examines the challenge of building and leveraging brand equity.
"As society becomes more affluent, today's consumer looks for product attributes beyond functionality, and products must better meet the psychological needs of consumers." Batra explains. "So effective brand-building becomes crucial. Brand-building requires both careful strategic planning and creative tactics."
Batra cites Nissan as an example of a company with an ill-conceived brand-building plan. Everyone loved Nissan's recent eye-catching commercials, including one featuring GI Joe driving a Nissan and picking up Barbie. Unfortunately, these ads simply didn't sell cars. Now Nissan is refocusing its advertising on the car itself, and looking at some new products to resuscitate sales. "Nissan used a highly creative, well-respected California ad agency. But without strategy and discipline," Batra warns, "even a very creative branding campaign is ineffective."
He is now developing another new 7-week elective, Topics in Brand Management. This new course will serve somewhat as a sequel to Strategic Brand Management. "We found that there was too much material for the seven-week Brand Management class," Batra explains. Building on Strategic Brand Management, the new course will explore evolving preoccupations among today's marketing managers. Because of pressure from private labels and the innovation of e-commerce, today's companies face slimmer margins and increased need to leverage their marketing budgets. Batra explains, "Companies are growing more and more conscious about their marketing spending, and are starting to actually measure ROI for their marketing money."
Available in the second seven-week session this winter, Topics in Brand Management course will therefore look at current marketing trends, including ways to increase efficiency in marketing spending. The course will examine the use of cost-cutting measures, like direct and database marketing, which reduce inefficient use of marketing expenditures.
Batra currently is basing his research on the unique challenges and opportunities of global brands. He is interested, for example, in the ways that foreign brands have special appeal in certain countries. In India, Batra observes, foreign brands have a cachet, serving as symbols of status and prestige.
Over some 25 years, Professor Batra has emerged as what some of his colleagues call the "Brand Management Guru," teaching students about the power of branding and advising ad agencies and companies about the effects of advertising and brand building. His background reveals a natural evolution into advertising and brand management. Born and raised in India, Batra received his bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management. Marketing enabled him to combine analytical skills with creativity, more so than other disciplines like accounting and finance. "Marketing also involved my strong interests in writing and journalism," Batra adds.
From business school, he took the route since then well-trod by Michigan MBA students, becoming a brand manager for a consumer products company. Batra worked in India on the Pond's Cold Cream and Vaseline Intensive Care products for Chesebrough-Ponds, a company now part of Unilever. He enjoyed the cross-functional work of a brand manager, which gave him considerable control and responsibility of projects. The brand management role exposed him to market research, advertising, and production. "After a few years in brand management, I asked myself if this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. That is, sell cold cream. And the answer was 'No.'"
Batra came to the U.S. to pursue studies on the effects of advertising. This research combined his background in marketing and economics with his interest in psychology. After receiving an M.S. in advertising from the University of Illinois, Batra earned a Ph.D. in marketing from Stanford University in 1984. Batra's thesis discussed the importance of emotional advertising. From this research, Batra became interested in the nonverbal elements of advertising, such as colors and typeface, which all impact the imagery surrounding a brand. Most of Batra's published research since then has delved into ways to measure the effectiveness of emotional advertising, determining what emotions are appropriate to elicit and when, and how to copy test these ads. Another stream of his research has dealt with ways to optimize advertising budgets, which also involves determining optimal rates of repetition, or frequency, of ads.
Batra's first academic appointment was at Columbia University, where he taught courses in advertising and marketing management. Batra describes the merits of life as a business school professor: "Teaching provides intellectual freedom, a way to set my own path. Plus, I have one foot in the business world, one foot in theory, giving me the best of both worlds. Finally, I don't think any other job in the world allows you to blend family and work the way an academic job does."
After five years in New York City, Professor Batra joined the UMBS team in 1989. "My wife and I decided that Michigan would be a nice place to start a family. Plus we were coming to a great school in a great town."
Batra likes to emphasize the "softer side" of his discipline. The main message Batra imparts on his brand management students is that amidst the numbers, marketing is a highly creative and behavioral science. "You need to have insight into what really triggers a purchase in a consumer's mind. Don't leave your intuition behind. Stay in touch with trends in society; know what movies people are watching, what music they're listening to," Batra says, pointing to the context in which good brand-building must occur. However, despite this devotion to brand-building, Batra also reminds marketing students that in the long run the "basic nuts and bolts of price, quality and distribution are much more important in determining a product's success."
To non-marketing students Batra likes to underscore the value of good marketing. "It's critical to realize that the physical product isn't the only thing that matters. The success of your product depends on the overall perception of value, which is in large part psychological." Batra quotes a brand management expert who stated, "In the factory you make a product, but what the consumer buys is a brand, with all the associated intangibles."
In addition to teaching, Batra also provides occasional consulting to ad agencies and companies. Through his consulting relationship with Interpublic, the world's second-largest ad agency group, he has helped the group with the challenges of adjusting its marketing communications strategies to address shifting consumer values and attitudes. Batra has also designed and implemented a system to measure the efficiency of emotional advertising, currently used by the McCann Erickson ad agency, and has served on McCann's Advertising Review Board.
This summer Batra also collaborated with Dean White and a San Francisco design firm to develop the new UMBS logo. The merits and demerits of the new design have been thoroughly discussed by students. Batra hasn't taken any of the debate personally. "No matter what logo anyone came up with, I believe a lot of people would have disliked what was selected. Changes in aesthetic elements usually provoke strong reactions."
"Like any change in design and styling, it will take some time for people to get used to the new logo." He explains the challenge was to create a logo that was distinctive and could break through the clutter of business school logos to position UMBS as contemporary and innovative. "Don't look at the logo in isolation, but in the context of the logos of Wharton, Chicago, Kellogg, and other business schools. Our logo says that we are contemporary, willing to take chances." Given the heavy influence of student feedback at UMBS, Batra also believes that the timing of the new logo (over the summer when students weren't around to give input) may have unintentionally led to students feeling uninvolved.
Batra discusses the strengths of the Michigan MBA program, stating, "We're not about telling war stories from corporate experiences, or teaching esoteric theory without practical applications. UMBS does a very good job of blending rigor and relevance." At the same time, Michigan continues to face the challenge of globalizing its curriculum, infusing every course with content relevant to the quickly evolving global economy. Discussing the UMBS marketing department specifically, Batra notes that its large faculty brings diverse specialty areas and multiple points of view. He supports the desire for even more marketing electives, for example, one focused on electronic commerce, a need the department is trying to fulfill.
aplamond@umich.edu
Inspired by UMBS Professor of Crisis Management, Gerry Meyers,
and hosted by Dean B. Joseph White, the First Annual University
of Michigan Round Table was 
held on Wednesday evening, November 4, at
the Metropolitan Club in New York City. The objective of the Round
Table was to gather a diverse group of business leaders and UMBS
students and alumni to discuss a current business crisis. This
year's featured Round Table leader was Stephen F. Goldstone, Chairman
and CEO, RJR Nabisco, Inc. Mr. Goldstone graciously facilitated
a discussion on the tobacco industry and RJR Nabisco's involvement
in the pending tobacco litigation and controversy.
In total, 30 people participated in the Round Table executive level discussion. Seven UMBS second year students joined Dean White and Professor Meyers at the event, including Andy Herz, Deirdre Keller, Derek Martin, Matt Moyer, Ann Plamondon, Jeff Prus, and Eric Stettler. Professor Meyers invited the students based on their contributions during Meyers' Crisis Management course. Other participants, to name a few, included Joseph Antonini, former Chairman and CEO, Kmart Corporation; Peter Bijur, Chairman and CEO, Texaco, Inc.; Thomas Graham, former Chairman and CEO, AK Steel Holdings Corporation; Angie McGuire, VP, Worldwide Services and Business, Lucent Technologies, Inc.; Steve Percy, Chairman and CEO, BP America; John Phelan, Jr., Former Chairman New York Stock Exchange; and Kenneth Urban, Former Managing Director, Morgan Stanley & Co., Inc. Several attendees were alumni members of the UMBS board of directors and business leaders who had previously visited Professor Meyers' OBHRM 611 Crisis Management class. While the guest list reflected a "who's who" in corporate America, it was the students who received much of the attention. The seasoned business leaders were truly interested in hearing the contributions of the MBA students who represent the next generation of business leaders.
Participants received reading materials in advance regarding recent news events and proceedings since April 1998 about the tobacco crisis in the United States. Stephen Goldstone began the evening's discussion by providing an overview of the crisis. The other participants then offered additional thoughts and generated questions for Mr. Goldstone. The questions varied from inquiries into RJR Nabisco's strategy for managing the crisis facing the tobacco industry to questions about Mr. Goldstone's role as an industry leader to the challenge of managing RJR Nabisco's $9 billion in debt amidst the current litigious environment. To encourage an open dialogue about this controversial and sensitive topic, it was agreed that the ideas exchanged during the Round Table would respectfully remain in the room. The subject matter proved most interesting and complex.
While the participants were fully engaged and could have continued to discuss the issues well after the coffee cups were cleared away, the Round Table dinner concluded at 9:00 p.m. with resounding applause for the hosts, Dean White and Gerry Meyers, as well as the Round Table leader, Stephen Goldstone.
The Round Table dinner discussion was certainly timely as the announcement of a tobacco agreement with the remaining 46 states came just one week after the UMBS event. The 46 states and five U.S. territories agreed to accept a $206 billion tobacco settlement to cover smoking-related health care costs, making the deal the largest civil settlement in U.S. history. The payments from the settlements will be made over 25 years. The question remains as to whether the states' allocation of the settlement with the tobacco companies will be used as it is intended--to promote public health by reducing smoking.
gflowers@umich.edu
The Business School Snack Bar employees would like to thank you for your suggestions. We encourage you to continue giving us your suggestions and comments.
S: Can you get soup spoons?
A: We are looking into this possibility, however the company we currently purchase plasticware from does not carry individual wrapped soup spoons. We are searching for a vendor which carries wrapped spoons.
S: Overworked B-school students would appreciate ice coffee and espresso.
A: This may be a possibility and we will look into it. We know of many items that would be a great addition to the snack bar but the small space we have to work with limits our menu.
S: Please take down the picture of "Vegetable Woman" in the table area.
A: We also thought that this was a good idea, and the picture was taken down in October.
S: How about a bagel cutter?
A: We will be getting a bagel cutter in the week of November 9, 1998.
S: Please increase your menu.
A: We have added several items to our menu this semester. There are sub sandwiches called the Big Max, vegetable trays and spinach gorgonzola. What would you like to see offered as a menu item?
S: Where are the following items in the Student Lounge: Real cream/milk/half-n-half for coffee.
A: These items are in the cooler with the Snapple and sandwiches on the bottom right shelf.
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