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The New Accenture Leadership Center for undergraduate students provides unique opportunities for alumni to come back to campus.

Students tell us that one of the strongest qualities that brought them to the UW-Madison School of Business is the great network of alumni and their willingness to reach out and interact with current students. A group of alumni and friends from Accenture saw an opportunity to capitalize on this relationship, bringing the Accenture Leadership Center (ALC) to life the School of Business.

Wierzba “The ALC Center is an example of how our alumni can make a significant impact on the students. We didn’t wait to be asked, but saw an opportunity to reach out and ran with it. I would encourage others to think creatively and make a difference.”

Concentrating on the development and implementation of leadership skills, the ALC offers hands-on workshops, ongoing mentoring and leadership coaching, an intensive immersion program for analyzing and enhancing leadership styles and more to students in the business, pre-business or engineering fields. These programs provide many opportunities for alumni to come back to campus and share their expertise and insight.

Wisconsin business alumni are invited to participate in the following ways:
• Coach and mentor students in the program.
• Guest Speaking
• Sponsor a student project for your organization
• Opportunities to recruit ALC-trained students to work at your company

If you would like to volunteer with the Accenture Leadership Center, please contact Shannon Elliot at selliot@bus.wisc.edu or 608.262.8676.

by Dean Michael Knetter 

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, we engage 1 percent of our 36,000 alumni—almost 360 business leaders—on more than two dozen working boards. This not only helps us keep alumni involved with the school, but also strengthens our connection to corporate leaders, both regionally and around the world.

The most traditional of these groups is our Dean’s Advisory Board, which comes to campus twice a year, provides invaluable input on our strategic plan, and helps keep our efforts relevant to the real world of business. While we believe this service is as rewarding for board members as it is valuable for us, we often find that they have an even more fulfilling experience when they join one of our other boards. What’s just as important, from our perspective, is that their involvement helps us keep our curriculum relevant, enhances employment opportunities for our students, and leads to funding of critical projects. 

Special Interest Boards

We have created three distinct types of boards to aid our school. Advisory boards seek advice from members on broad issues. Program boards focus on the tangible ways alumni and friends can support particular degree programs. Project boards work on specific issues of importance not tied to a single degree program, such as diversity or leadership.

Some of our strongest program boards are those that work with the specialized tracks making up our MBA, including brand management, applied securities, corporate finance, supply chain management, and real estate. For example, the Executive Advisory Board for our Center for Brand and Product Management is made up of representatives of a wide range of national and international companies, including General Mills, Intuit, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, and Procter & Gamble, Abbott Vascular (Guidant), ConAgra, Grainger, Johnson & Johnson, and S.C. Johnson.          

Board members commit to helping the Center’s students begin successful careers in brand management. They come to campus to share their experience with students through applied learning sessions. They open doors for students seeking summer internship and full-time positions in brand and product management. They arrange site visits to leading companies. They help recruit prospective students, mentor students while they are in the program, and enhance students’ educational experience by getting involved in on-campus activities.            

One of the inaugural members of the center’s board was Jeffrey Rotsch, senior vice president of General Mills Inc. and president of its Consumer Foods Sales Division. According to Rotsch, “I agreed to serve on the Center’s advisory board, as did executives from other companies, because we think the Center will play a major role in training the next generation of product managers.”

           

A key result of this intense board involvement has been in the area of placement. Since the program in brand and product management began, its students have had a 100 percent placement in positions at leading firms. Sixty-eight percent of those graduates accepted full-time job offers from companies represented on the center’s board. 

           

Program boards for the Center for Brand and Product Management and for other career specializations have been particularly valuable in allowing us to develop international study trips, an increasingly important part of our MBA curriculum. This year, for example, three of our MBA career specializations planned separate trips to explore business in China. On these trips, they met with executives of leading firms with China operations, including Procter & Gamble, Citigroup Real Estate, Morgan Stanley, Best Buy, Johnson & Johnson, and Grainger.

Investing Time—and Money          

In addition to our formal program boards, we have more loosely connected alumni groups that work on critical topics as members of project boards for the school and the university. A great example of this is the Badger Alumni Capital Network—or BACN, which we inevitably pronounce as “bacon.” BACN was created to enable our alumni and other supporters, acting largely on their own, to help the university convert intellectual property into startup companies.

Historically, the university has produced a relatively low number of startups based on intellectual property, research activity, and patents generated by its faculty. We felt that, by assembling a talented group of alumni from around the world who had an interest in running young companies, we could promote the school, bolster the state economy, and create a new and deeper pool of angel capital.            

Phil Mathews, a graduate of our MBA program and a retired partner of BlackRock Financial, has taken the lead on the BACN initiative. He has helped assemble a group of alumni and friends who will act as advisors, connectors, investors, and possibly even full-fledged partners in some exciting new ventures being launched by faculty inventors. BACN brings together people who have a natural affinity for the university and a long-term interest in success. That increases the level of trust between inventors and investors, which is critical to value creation.            

In recent months, BACN has investigated ten areas of intellectual property, and it has aided two new companies in their patented work with computer network security and drug testing. According to Mathews, “BACN is an opportunity for alumni to work together and share their expertise for the benefit of the university and themselves.” 

An Exchange of Ideas

Board members don’t just help us launch initiatives we think are important. Often, they bring outstanding ideas to us. An example of this is the Accenture Leadership Center.          

Among our alumni, we have several retired Accenture partners who felt strongly that leadership should be a critical component of our undergraduate business program. They funded the creation of our Accenture Leadership Center, which provides opportunities for undergraduate students to develop leadership skills outside the classroom, but their support went far beyond financial involvement. For months, these alumni worked with our staff to develop hands-on learning activities for the students. They acted as mentors to students tackling semester-long leadership projects, and they provided a level of involvement to undergraduates that the school never would have been able to offer on its own.            

Board members are even assisting with our executive education offerings. For example, each year, we offer a two-day corporate governance program for senior management. Known as the Directors’ Summit, the program attracts corporate board members and institutional investors from around the country. The board members with expertise in this area help us assemble a program featuring speakers with national credentials and high visibility.            

In the future, we expect our board members to make significant contributions to another key area: creating a business school that reflects the diversity our graduates will experience in the workplace. Based on what has and hasn’t worked to promote diversity in their own companies, board members are helping us further diversify our students, faculty, and staff. A new recruitment plan focused on underrepresented minorities has been developed with the input and support of board members.      

I’m an economist by training, so return on investment is ever top of my mind. For that reason, finding new ways to involve alumni in our programs and projects remains a top priority for me. Active, involved boards can provide an extraordinary return to a business school—a return that can be measured in terms of industry knowledge and networking opportunities.  The time I spend managing board relations is significant, but the payoff to the business school is enormous.

 

This article was part of a larger piece on advisory boards that ran in the September/October issue of BizEd magazine.