A Harvard MBA Gives Kellogg The McKinsey Treatment

The Jacobs Center at the Kellogg School of Management

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL AND KELLOGG?

Ziegler does not regret her Harvard Business School education. She says it profoundly changed her life. But she’s also not shy to note the advantages of the Kellogg MBA experience. “I loved my MBA experience but it pales in comparison to what students get to experience here,” she says. “It was totally different.”

The difference occurred to her soon after arriving at Kellogg. Ziegler’s best friend from Harvard visited her from London in February. “You know, I don’t understand your job,” he said. “What are you doing?”

Ziegler explained that she spent 60% of her time as the dean of students and about 40% of her time as the associate dean of MBA programs.

“I still don’t understand it,” he replied. “Why do students want to talk to you? And what on earth would they want to talk to you about?”

“It occurred to me that I didn’t have a single relationship with an administrator at Harvard and I was the president of all kinds of clubs. This is not a negative thing. It’s just different. But the story crystallizes the difference. What you hear on the outside about our culture, the focus on collaboration and support, and the partnership model with administrators, faculty and students, is true on the inside. It’s actually even more powerful.”

ONE OF 83 HARVARD MBAS WHO WENT TO WORK FOR MCKINSEY IN THE CLASS OF 1998

When she graduated with her Harvard MBA in 1998, Ziegler was one of 83 Harvard MBAs who accepted an offer from McKinsey & Co. Only three of those 83 recruits stayed long enough to make partner. Ziegler was one of them, gaining election to the partnership in just over five years. All told, she would spend 12 and one-half years at “The Firm,” consulting for a variety of insurance, consumer finance and retail bank clients.

After the economic crisis hit in 2008, she found herself doing some consulting for non-profits, including those in higher education, the performing arts and economic development. “That work lit me up in a way I wasn’t expecting,” she says. “And that also coincided with the idea that maybe I should become the bus driver rather than the bus driver’s advisor.”

She left McKinsey in April of 2010, deciding to do her version of an Eat, Pray Love tour, buying an around-the-world plane ticket for some rest, relaxation and reflection. Ziegler started in Peru and ended up in Cambodia. True to her fanatical roots as an Ohio State alum (she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1993), she then went to a slew of Buckeye football games. She is the proud owner of an eight-foot-tall Brutus Buckeye mascot, and her year-old Portuguese Water Dog is named after Archie Griffin, the Heisman Trophy-winning rushing back for Ohio State in the early to mid-1970s.

AN ARTICLE IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE BROUGHT KELLOGG TO HER ATTENTION

“I came back full of energy with the thought that the social sector was the place I wanted to be,” says Ziegler. Nevertheless, a major global financial services concern offered her a big job that she ultimately turned down in January of 2011. To celebrate her rather bold decision, she agreed to meet a friend for a lunch. Waiting at the table for her friend to arrive, she picked up the Chicago Tribune and read a story on the “Seven People To Watch In Chicago.”

One of them was Sally Blount, who had been recently recruited from New York University, where she was dean of the undergraduate business program, to become dean of Kellogg. “I sent her a cold call email saying ‘I was a former McKinsey partner and thinking about going into higher ed. Would you spend 30 minutes with me on the phone?’ It was Sunday afternoon and she responded immediately.

Over a three-hour lunch, the pair clicked. Three days later, Ziegler started consulting for Kellogg. Two months after that, she interviewed for the Kellogg job she eventually started on June 27th of 2011. Says Dean Blount: “She is an operations genius. It was fabulous working with her as a consultant. It is even more fabulous bringing her on the team. Folks like her make it really fun to come to work.”

When she assumed her job at Kellogg, she spent the first four weeks doing what every McKinsey consultant does at the start of an engagement: learning what people in the organization already know. She met one-on-one with 90 Kellogg staffers “to know how they spend their time and their view of what impact they have on the students.”

BEING KING OR QUEEN FOR THE DAY

“The 90 people on my team wake up every day and kill themselves to deliver on the student experience,” she says. “I wanted to know how they think about what they do. I gave everyone the opportunity to be king or queen for the day, and I asked each person what three things they would do if they had the power. Those ideas formed the basis of my first-year priorities.”

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