A Harvard MBA Gives Kellogg The McKinsey Treatment

Source: Kellogg School of Management

It was during a lunch with students the month after Ziegler joined the school that she hit upon the idea to use Kellogg students to create consulting teams to dive deep into the school’s operations. Over salads and sandwiches, one of the second-year students who had been a consultant said to Ziegler: “I want to learn how to lead consultants. First-year students want to be consultants, and clearly you need help. Can you come up with a project where you are the partner and we learn from you but I get to lead a team of students?”

Ziegler embraced the idea, creating three projects with three “partners” from the dean’s office, three student managers and 15 students who served as “consultants”—five per team. Focus groups were formed to help design the questionnaires. Ziegler’s group worked on the student experience. “They had two deliverables,” she explains. “One, they had to give me a touch point map of all the interactions our students have with us, and two, they had to tell me what matters most to them and how we are doing against what matters. That is the killer chart! It gives me the foundation from which to build upon.”

DISCOVERING KELLOGG’S TEN MOMENTS OF TRUTH

The MBA students were given 100 “importance” points to parcel among a dozen different touch points. Then, students were asked to grade the school’s performance on each one using a one to five point scale, with five being the best. Each respondent was put in a drawing for a free iPad3, an incentive that quickly attracted nearly 350 participants.

If something was deemed important and Kellogg was under-performing, an opportunity would become immediately apparent by the gap between its importance and the school’s performance. Closing that gap would presumably yield significantly higher satisfaction. “It’s like the top ten moments of truth,” says Ziegler. “It’s very consultant-y, but the exercise allows me to make trade-offs pointed at the things that are important to our students. It is a starting point for sure, a good foundation to build from as we plow forward.”

The analysis examined out-of-classroom touch points only. But when Ziegler asked students to spread their points between inside-the-classroom factors and outside-the-classroom factors, the MBAs assigned equal importance to both.

THUMBS DOWN ON FOOD AND FACILITIES – THUMBS UP ON CLUBS AND THE CAREER MANAGEMENT CENTER

The results? What mattered most was the leadership opportunities afforded by Kellogg’s 98 active student clubs, which also got the highest performance grades (see table left). The worst scores, not surprisingly, were for food and facilities. So Ziegler has been pressing renovations to Kellogg’s Jacobs Center because the school’s new home, now under construction, won’t open until 2016. Kellogg has since gutted and completely renovated two major study rooms for students and spiffed up the prominent staircase that leads to the dean’s suite. The school also has brought back the coffee cart with food and Starbucks drinks, added a broader selection of healthy snacks outside its deli, and included a salad and soup station in the main atrium where most students eat.

For each issue, she saw opportunity for improvement. Kellogg, for example, found alumni interaction with current students was fairly important, garnering ten importance points. With a performance score of three, about average, Ziegler saw a chance to make a difference. Kellogg is now building a social network to more effectively connect alums with students, faculty and administrators. The beta test for that network will occur in late December or early January. The school has also hired a new head of alumni relations who is meeting with students to strengthen interaction between MBA candidates and graduates. When an MBA has a summer internship in Dallas, efforts will be made to make sure the Dallas alumni club knows the student is in town. And Ziegler made a point during this year’s orientation of telling MBAs, “From this moment on you are part of a 54,000-strong community and that is something you will have for the rest of your life. This is the time to celebrate it and embrace it.”

Yet another of the “consulting projects” examined the school’s global immersion in management trips, an elective course that for years has Kellogg MBA students traveling to far flung locales in the world. In recent years, Kellogg MBA candidates have been to Kenya, China, Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, Brazil, and India, Students had played a major role in the curriculum design for those trips even though a professor is assigned to each class. “The feedback from students was, ‘we don’t want a student designing the curriculum for us.’ So we took away the curriculum role,” says Ziegler.