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

Lamar Johnson, University of Texas-Austin McCombs School

“He is, or used to be, what these students aspire to be,” Johnson says. “He’s a widely recognized expert marketer.  He provides a lot of one-on-one coaching. He’s like the pied piper. They line up to talk to him. We’ve had students who have come to McCombs because he’s involved with McCombs. That’s a major draw for us.”

Malcolm coaches and mentors students, and speaks to classes. While professors often use third-party examples of real-world events to support their teaching, Malcolm draws on his own experience, Johnson says. “When Rob comes in and talks about global marketing he talks about the steps he personally took to rebound the Johnnie Walker brand globally and make it a market leader again. Students pay a lot more attention. That can’t be replicated.”

EXECS-IN-RESIDENCE LINK SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY

Beyond the lectures and coaching and mentoring Malcolm provides, he links the school to industry. Current chair of the American Marketing Association, Malcolm also sits on the board of Hershey Foods. “This week we have the CEO of Hershey Foods coming to talk to our 20 best and brightest marketing students,” Johnson says.

Execs-in-residence can educate, and inspire. For Booth MBA candidate Jorge Martinez, one executive simply showed a path through a problem Martinez had thought might be insurmountable. Martinez has bachelor’s degrees in math and electrical engineering from Northern Illinois University, and had worked as an engineering consultant and manager in the power and utilities industry. “I came to Booth because I wanted to do anything but what I was doing,” Martinez says. He wanted to pivot from engineering to investment banking, but had grave doubts about his ability to accomplish such a task.

“Prior to Booth I thought that maybe some things were unreachable because of my background or because of my age,” says Martinez, 36.

It turned out that Martinez just needed a living example of someone who had made the transition he was hoping to undertake. And Booth’s execs-in-residence program put such a person in front of him. The senior managing director in an investment banking firm had switched careers from engineering to finance, and his talk to Booth students showed Martinez that such a pivot could be done. “He was able to kind of lay out the approach that he and other peers took, having an engineering background,” Martinez says. “It basically gave me the confidence to go ahead so I can make the transition.

“I’m extremely passionate about that (execs-in-residence) program. It’s changed my life, basically, in the confidence it’s given me.”

PLANNING A PIVOT, WITH EXPERT ADVICE

A single exec-in-residence also played a key role in helping Booth MBA student Kati Karottki plan her career pivot. Karottki, who has a BS in sports management from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, had gone on to work for five years at Octagon, a global sports and entertainment firm, working her way up to middle management consulting for global client firms. She came into Booth wanting to switch career directions, into marketing. She aims, ultimately, to become a chief marketing officer.

Booth requires that students apply to the execs-in-residence program, and candidates are matched to execs based on areas of experience and interest. “You’re talking C-suite level people from Fortune 100 level companies who sit with four or five students in a room, chat for an hour and half about their background and experience, and take questions,” says Karottki, 29. One session brought students together with Michael Armstrong, a 2002 Booth MBA and executive VP and GM of international brand development for Viacom International Media Networks.

After the session, Karottki emailed Armstrong, let him know she’d be in New York for the summer, and asked if they might meet for coffee. Armstrong replied within four hours and copied his assistant to make arrangements. “He invited me to his office,” Karottki says. “We shot the shit for a good two hours in his corner office. We talked brands, what they’re doing to stay culturally relevant, which brands were doing well, which weren’t. We just had a very very informal but very rich conversation.”

Much of that conversation revolved around an odd new piece of slang, and what its entrance into the branding sphere said about the need for marketers to understand popular culture. It appears that the term “on fleek” originated on Vine with a woman describing her eyebrows. Then the term, which means, essentially, perfect. It turns out that the phrase is one of many studied by executives at Taco Bell, in order to understand their Millennial customers and communicate effectively with them. Armstrong discussed the tactic with Karottki at length. “He took me through this whole from-start-to-finish session on how to speak authentically with consumers,” Karottki says. “He just kept coming back to the point about the role of culture and how that plays in marketing now more than ever.