Executives-In-Residence: Filling A Business School Education Gap

Haas MBA Jill Schweitzer

Haas MBA Jill Schweitzer

Riemer works with full-time, part-time, and executive MBA students at Haas. The job doesn’t necessarily stop when a candidate graduates. With some Haas graduates, he continues coaching them as they embark on their careers. “Some of them will even come back to me on something brand new,” Riemer says.

Haas 2013 MBA Jill Schweitzer was one of Riemer’s students who came back to him on something new: a job-search startup. Schweitzer, after Riemer had given a presentation for a core class, started attending his office hours after a Haas peer recommended she talk to him about her interest in startups and product management, particularly in sports technology. Then he accepted her request that he formally advise her in an independent study course on sports tech. Riemer, she says, helped her define her personal and professional story to show why a path into sports tech and product management made sense, and how she could bring value to a company in that sector. He recommended she attend an MIT Sloan School sports analytics conference. There, she met representatives from online ticket service StubHub. The company ended up hiring her as a product manager. “David played a really big role in helping me tell that story about how I’m relevant to that company and product management despite my not really having experience in product management,” says Schweitzer, who had spent five years in Cisco Systems in account management and sales before she started at Haas.

A few months into her StubHub job, however, she began thinking more and more about a startup that would help students in their career search. She quit StubHub after eight months to launch Blaze, a web app to help undergraduates discover career options. Again, Riemer was there to help. He pushed her to find a co-founder. He invited her to workshops at the U.C. Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator. “He’s a wonderful mentor and coach,” Schweitzer says. “He was excellent support for me in terms of giving me great feedback but also giving great moral support. Getting his ideas and feedback on direction was incredibly helpful. He was really great about making introductions. He was very thoughtful and very supportive throughout in many ways.

“It was unique to be able to have one-on-one meetings with someone that has had such significant experience in industry . . . having started companies before, having worked with startups directly. He really had a nice range of experience,” Schweitzer says. After a year working on Blaze, she and her co-founder felt they weren’t getting enough traction, and shut the company down. Within three months she was hired as a senior product manager at Vouch, a San Francisco lending startup.

Columbia Business School hired Barry Salzberg in July, two months after he retired as global CEO of Deloitte, as a professional practice professor and head of the execs-in-residence program. Since arriving, he’s added four execs – in media technology, financial services, consulting, and private equity and investment banking – bringing the school’s total to 18. The execs hold office hours (and sometimes small-group lunches), coaching students on business practices and career issues, as well as providing insights into leadership and the corporate world, Salzberg says.

“The major purpose is to provide real, practical, hands-on, live, experienced mentorship to students, students who are thinking about where their careers need to go,” Salzberg says. As a secondary function, the program is intended to forge connections between faculty and practitioners – the execs can provide input on industry trends, help build and update the curriculum, help develop case studies, put on seminars, and present guest lectures, Salzberg says. 

A MAN WHO ‘STUDENTS ASPIRE TO BE’

In 2013, the University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business started exec-in-residence programs in its Center of Customer Insight and Marketing Solutions, and  in its Energy Management and Innovation Center. “There are a lot of people who have spent a career in industry and want to give back on campus and bring the world in where the faculty have a more difficult time doing that,” says Lamar Johnson, executive director of the marketing solutions center, who spent nearly 34 years as director of customer services and logistics for Procter & Gamble. The exec-in-residence for the center is Rob Malcolm, another P&G veteran – 24 years – who had gone on to become president of marketing, sales, and innovation for Diageo, the world’s biggest premium liquor, beer, and wine firm.

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