Dayle Smith’s Wild Week: 3 Conferences, 1 Napkin Idea, And A Bet On Collaboration Over Competition

When Dayle Smith agreed two years ago to host the International Association of Jesuit Business Schools’ World Forum, she figured it would be a one-off. Instead, the Loyola Marymount College of Business Administration dean turned it into the launchpad for something far more ambitious: three back-to-back conferences in a single week, built around the premise that some of L.A.’s biggest problems – healthcare access, AI’s effect on jobs, sustainable cities – can’t be solved by any one sector alone.

The timing wasn’t accidental. LMU’s business school is marking its centennial this year, and Smith wanted the celebration to do more than look backward. So one day after the Jesuit forum wrapped in mid-July, CBA opened its doors to consular corps members, corporate leaders, NGO representatives, and local government officials for a second conference entirely of its own design. A third conference followed almost by accident, after the North America PRME meeting lost its planned host site in Monterey, and CBA agreed to step in – during the same week it was already running two other events. 

Smith says the stretch left her staff exhausted but energized, and the conversations it started haven’t stopped.

“We had no idea what we were getting into,” she says with a laugh. “But you know what? It was an amazing week.”

A CONVENING BUILT ON ‘FIRE STARTER’ TALKS, NOT PANELS

The second conference, done in partnership with Jens Molbak’s Seattle-based NewImpact, was what Smith calls a “convening on trisector innovation.” Rather than a standard panel format, she and her team built the day around short, TED-style “firestarter” talks of roughly 20 minutes each, followed by working sessions where academics, executives, consular officials, and government representatives sat at mixed tables to actually build solutions together. The topics: healthcare access and affordability, AI’s impact on workforce development, and how to build sustainable cities, the last of which pulled in LMU’s Seaver College of Science and Engineering and its Center for Urban Resilience.

Smith says the sessions haven’t stopped generating momentum: She was on the phone with Molbak the morning of this interview discussing next steps, and a graphic artist captured each day’s discussions in illustrated form – renderings she plans to make public.

The final conference, focused on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, was a deliberate bookend, Smith says, to the “inspirational paradigm” conversations that opened the week – a way of moving from big-picture values down to measurable global targets.

“How can everything that we’re all talking about as academics make it real-world, societal impact, bring everyone to the table who should be there, and talk about this stuff?” she says.

A MISSION THAT PREDATES THE PRME SIGNATURE BY 500 YEARS

Smith connects the week’s programming directly to CBA’s academic DNA. The college is a signatory to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Management Education, and every undergraduate now goes through a program called Business for Good, which asks students to understand the UN Sustainable Development Goals not from a position of comfort but by working with NGOs and emerging economies to see global problems from the bottom up.

She traces that orientation to something older than any UN framework: roughly 500 years of Jesuit educational philosophy centered on formation – not just what students learn, but who they become.

“You cannot be a business leader without those characteristics of what does moral courage look like. Can we give our students a sense of what does it mean to have moral courage?” she says.

Smith says that philosophy shapes how CBA answers a question she gets constantly from prospective students and their parents: what’s the return on a private-school business degree. Her answer isn’t to defend the sustainability curriculum against ROI pressure but to reframe what ROI means, arguing that principled leadership is itself a competitive asset employers want.

“I think it’s our responsibility to send out principled leaders,” she says.

Pressed on whether that curriculum survives contact with families asking about payoff, Smith points to L.A.’s recent wildfires as evidence of what happens when businesses ignore sustainability planning altogether.

“We saw it here in L.A. You had major fires in Eton and the Palisades. You had small, medium enterprises deeply, deeply affected,” she says.

FROM A NAPKIN SKETCH TO A CROSS-CAMPUS PLAYBOOK

Smith traces CBA’s joint Master’s in Entertainment Leadership – built with LMU’s School of Film and Television – to a single dinner nine years ago, before she’d even started the job. Over a meal in New York with SFTV’s incoming dean, the two sketched the concept on the back of a napkin: a degree spanning film, television, music, sports, and digital media that pulls in entertainment lawyers and working industry professionals to teach master classes alongside faculty.

That napkin sketch became a template. Smith points to CBA’s Master’s in Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Innovation – nicknamed MESSI – built jointly with LMU’s science and engineering faculty, and to an undergraduate boot camp called BEST (Business, Engineering, Science and Technology) that brings students from both colleges together to think entrepreneurially about community problems. She says she eventually wants to expand it into what she calls BEAST, folding in the arts.

Rather than run a single dean’s advisory board, Smith says CBA has built more than a dozen affinity advisory councils – over 120 business leaders total – embedded directly in specific departments and programs to keep curriculum current and build internship pipelines.

“Used to be business schools were faster than business. That definitely has flipped,” Smith says.

THE OLYMPICS AS A DRY RUN FOR TRISECTOR THINKING

With the 2028 Games approaching, Smith says CBA is already building coursework around the business side of the Olympics, working with an LMU alumna who leads the LA84 Foundation on a class examining what the Games mean economically for the region. She frames the Olympics, much like the World Cup before it, as another test case for the cross-sector collaboration CBA has been rehearsing all year – local government, corporate partners, and small and medium enterprises working through procurement and supply chains together.

Smith also points to a recent panel she moderated for California Leaders magazine with four executives who run major L.A. venues – the Coliseum, BMO Stadium, SoFi, and Hollywood Park – as evidence of a story she thinks gets missed in Olympic coverage: what those venues do with the other 275-plus days a year they’re not hosting marquee events, and how that work builds regional economic resilience.

“What fans don’t see, but should, because that’s what’s building inclusion – that inclusive economy. It’s building regional competitiveness. It’s creating jobs,” Smith says.

She adds that Los Angeles hosts the third-largest consular corps in the country, and that foreign direct investment into the region creates roughly 850,000 to 890,000 jobs a year – numbers she says get lost in a political climate skeptical of international engagement.

AI AS A ‘LEARNING PARTNER,’ NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR HUMAN TRUST

Asked how artificial intelligence factors into CBA’s cross-sector work, Smith draws a sharp line between the technology and the relationships that make collaboration possible in the first place.

“If the humans don’t want to come together and collaborate, it doesn’t matter what AI says or does,” she says.

She describes AI as a tool for processing large amounts of information faster once people are already aligned on values and willing to work together, pointing to the Chinese concept of guanxi – a sense of relational trust she says resists direct translation – as something she doesn’t believe machine learning can replicate.

“It’s that sense of relationship that I don’t think machine learning will ever get us to.”

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