Best Practice: A Tool For Developing Corporate Partnerships: The 3-E Model

Carlson Dean Sri Zaheer

Unlike Michael Porter’s Five Forces model, Sri Zaheer’s 3-E framework probably will never get taught in a business school. But for any dean, it’s a no-brainer tool to help cultivate and nurture key corporate partnerships.

As dean of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management for 10 years until July of this year, Zaheer believed that the institution’s two core assets were its faculty and its corporate relationships.

“I knew the faculty piece well, but I didn’t know anything about how the school engaged with the corporations,” she recalls. “I had no idea how many of our students any one company hired or how many of our alumni might be employed at a company. No one person at the school had the answer.”

3-E: AN EFFECTIVE CHEAT SHEET FOR DEANS MEETING WITH LOCAL CEOS

Yet, as a new incoming dean in an area blessed with many Fortune 500 headquarters and field offices, Zaheer wanted to meet the area’s CEOs to use what she calls her “brief period of the honeymoon as a new dean when everyone is happy to meet with you.”

Enter her idea for the 3-E framework, covering employment, education and engagement (see example below for a sanitized version).

In a one-page cheat sheet, she summarizes the number of a company’s employees in Carlson programs; the company’s involvement on advisory boards, enterprise projects, student visits and immersions, and finally their engagement with the school by such metrics as philanthropic support and how often the company’s executives speak in class.

‘A GREAT CONVERSATION STARTER’

The idea was born after she tried to get this information to prepare for her first CEO visit as dean at Land O’Lakes. “I called everyone I could think of into a room together and asked what we were doing and we literally pulled that first sheet together,” she recalls. “I didn’t want it to be more than one page because I wanted to use it as a discussion point. It was a great conversation starter.”

Often, Zaheer says, she would say, “‘You are doing so much here but how about sending more people in our part-time program?’ Always the biggest surprise is how many Carlson alumni are working in their organizations. That often gives them pause and they say, ‘Maybe we should be doing more.’”

At first, the data had to be pulled manually by several departments in the school. Some eight years ago, Carlson began using Salesforce software to pull things together. Now about 80% of the data comes directly from the school’s databases, supplemented by LinkedIn searches for alumni, among other things. A corporate development person in the school’s advancement group is tasked to put the one-pager together.

Zaheer makes a practice of leaving a copy of the page with the CEO and anyone else in the C-Suite. It’s a hard copy reminder of the partnership between the school and a given company.

SAMPLE OF THE CHEAT SHEET HERE

Executive Summary:

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On The Move:

Francisco Veloso, dean of Imperial College Business in London, will become dean of INSEAD on Sept. 1.

Ash Soni, interim dean at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, named to a two-year deanship after a full search.

Thomas J. Steenburgh, a senior associate dean at UVA’s Darden School of Business who leads Darden’s residential MBA program, will be the next dean of Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management starting this June.

Michael Mazzeo, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management for nearly a quarter of a century at Kellogg, is taking over the deanship of Washington University’s Olin Business School on Jan. 1 of 2024.

Vijay Khatri, an executive associate dean at Indiana’s Kelley School of Business, has won a four-person shootout for the deanship the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business in Boulder effective July.

Balaji Rajagopalan, dean of the College of Business at Northern Illinois University since 2016, is moving over to the deanship at the Trulaske College of Business at the University of Missouri.

Wen Mao, a longtime professor of economics and vice dean at Villanova School of Business, will become dean of the school on Aug. 1.

David De Cremer, provost chair and professor at National University of Singapore, will become the new dean of Northeastern University’s  D’Amore-McKim School of Business on July 1.

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