On The Rise: How Marquette’s B-School Is Making A Name For Itself, In The Midwest & Beyond

Marquette Business Dean Andrew DeGuire: “The intentionality over the last five and 10 years of putting us at these intersections of important trends and important connections to our constituents — really I’d say I’m the beneficiary that now has the responsibility: Now that we’ve made these investments, how do we really get them to perform at scale? Photo courtesy Marquette University

P&Q: How far back does your connection to Marquette go?

Andrew DeGuire: It actually goes back easily 20 years. So I’d gotten recruited out of the consulting world to come to a company in town, Johnson Controls. And one of the things I saw when I looked around was that it’s a really good company, but that the talent had stagnated. And so it was a, “How do we find a way to reinvigorate the place?” situation. Conveniently, I happened to know some excellent professors who’ve trained excellent students to begin to build that pipeline. And side note, the name of my deanship is the James H. Keyes deanship — he was the CEO of Johnson Controls when I started.

So there’s one special point. And we just found a way to repeat the cycle of grabbing a couple of interns, growing them into employees and helping feed the next generation of talent for the company. And so then, after a dozen years at Johnson Controls, three years out of Quad Graphics, and six years at Northwestern Mutual, basically it was the Fortune 500, Fortune 100 within town creating a talent pipeline. And one of the questions that I had was, “How do you continue to build and stack that?” 

And that’s one of the things that I experienced, and what my company experienced: There’s something special about a Marquette grad, both undergraduate and graduate, because they’ve got excellent technical skills but they also learn the good traits of leadership that make them both leaders who do the right thing and who do it in a very human way.

Here, we want to create technically excellent people who will become leaders, but also those who have the critical thinking, ethical background and broader understanding of the world. And so that Jesuit tradition helps them stand out. Why are we taking all these philosophy and theology and fill-in-the-blank classes as undergraduates, why is that a running thread through our graduate programs? Let’s look at the example of AI. Great, we’re putting all these things into ChatGPT, they just spit back an answer. Wow, doesn’t it sound fantastic?

Our tech grads who I was hanging with at Northwestern Mutual were all going, “But where’d it come from? How did it come up with this?” Their natural instinct, their natural training, didn’t go to what was just technically possible — they wanted to understand the underpinnings in order to be able to trust it. So that’s the kind of thing that really makes this place special. 

And so then fast-forward to 2020, the person you really should be talking to, his name’s Joe Daniels.

Terrible tragedy.

He was my advisor. Joe showed up on campus the same day, same semester, I did. And so when he landed in this chair, he had the vision and I was going to be a willing partner in the business community to help make that happen. And he isn’t here anymore. And Holy Spirit, serendipity, pick whatever you want, that was what really drew me here is this: How do we fulfill the promise that so many of us have seen and others before me worked so hard to lay the foundations of and steward so well?

What do you see as the big challenges here at Marquette? We’ve sort of talked about some demographic challenges, international students being down, trying to get them back up, STEM MBA is going to help — but what do you see as some of the big challenges there at the school?

I think a lot of it is just making choices about where we want to place our resources. Because at the end of the day, everywhere you’ve been, I don’t think you’re going to walk into any college university that says, “We are flush with all the resources.”

So it’s a question of how we pick our spots. And again, that’s my training in strategy. What are the focused, impactful areas that we’re going to go to? There is so much energy and thoughtfulness and so many initiatives within the college, within the faculty, that are all good. We’re going to be stronger together, we’re going to practically go through the process with the faculty and staff and in light of our own budgets really figure out where those most impactful spots are that we want to place our bets.

In real estate, we just received a major donation to establish a new real estate center: There will always be real estate issues. Our supply chain center is top 10, that’s one that honestly has only gotten heightened as we saw through COVID: Great, again, how do we take it to the next level?

Photo courtesy Marquette University

How would you describe the start to your deanship?

Just fantastic. I mean, this is the nice thing of having Tim Hanley previous in the chair, he and I did a really thoughtful job of transition management and we’ve basically followed what you’d see in executive leaders at other companies. In fact, as one of our executives in residence, he used to be at AbbVie, he was the Chief Human Resources Officer. So he just said, “What’s the transition plan for it?” And we just literally worked that transition plan. And so then whatever was Tim’s last event with the faculty and staff, that was my first event. And I knew the team and the team at least knew some about me, so that the first few weeks obviously don’t feel like the first few weeks just because I’ve been interacting with the university for 20-plus years and I know the business community and I can jump right in versus an existing dean from another college moving to Milwaukee, maybe it’s their first time at Marquette.

New dean, new building, new STEM MBA, new handful of other things: It feels like a new era at Marquette. And a world of possibilities.

Yes, but I take it as beyond just “new.” New is incredibly helpful, especially in building programs, but if you actually look at what they all represent and go with the building, we can go in the programs, we can go with the team. It literally is true of us being at the intersection of the business that happens in this region — as opposed to a nice building but kind of tucked away off on the side that you have to kind of discover. The intentionality over the last five and 10 years of putting us at these intersections of important trends and important connections to our constituents, really I’d say I’m the beneficiary that now has the responsibility: Now that we’ve made these investments, how do we really get them to perform at scale?

If I’m writing a profile of this school, what’s the headline? What would you say is the thing that you’d like people to know most, that perhaps they don’t already?

It’s a great question because the way that Marquette used to describe itself as a “hidden gem.” And I would always challenge that. It’s like, “Why are we hidden?” I think really we are at an inflection point, as we’re really now starting to take advantage of the team that is here, the place that we’ve got, the connections that we’ve got, and as we now start to scale. We have nationally ranked top 25 or top 10 programs, middle of the city, state-of-the-art capabilities, incredibly capable faculty. We have all the ingredients to be playing consistently within the top 50, but not because we care about that, but because the people here have the mission and focus and capabilities that the rankings will just fall out because we see what’s needed in the business world, and what’s needed and more for leadership in business.

We’ve been around since 1881 for a reason, and we’re seeing a bright path ahead of us that combines the new with what’s made Marquette great all along.

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