Hankamer School of Business Centennial

Transcript

Derek Smith:
Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections Conversation Series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more, discussing important topics in higher education, research and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and today we are talking about Hankamer School of Business's Centennial. Baylor's Hankamer School of Business is celebrating 100 years of service to generations of business leaders. Founded in 1923 as the School of Commerce and Business Administration, HanKamer has built a national reputation for excellence recognized by US News among the top 12% of business schools nationally.
Today we are going in depth with Hankamer research, undergraduate and graduate education with a panel of Hankamer professors and leaders. Dr. Brad Lail serves as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs and Associate Professor of Accounting and Business Law. Dr. Patsy Norman is Hankamer's Associate Dean for Graduate Business Programs and Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation, and Dr. Mitch Neubert serves as Senior Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development and is the holder of the Hazel and Harry Chavanne Chair of Christian Ethics in Business.
A lot of exciting things to talk about. I guess the challenge will be just cutting down on all the great things y'all have to talk about since we only have 20 minutes. But Patsy, Brad and Mitch, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today on the program. Really glad to have you all here.

Patsy Norman:
Great to be here. Thanks.

Brad Lail:
Yeah, we look forward to it.

Derek Smith:
Well, so we're going to really cover three different layers, if you will, of what's going on at Hankamer to get a snapshot, what it's looking like right now and what's led us to this point. So I'll start off with a question for all three of you.
Hankamer's Centennial isn't a one-day thing. It's really something that's spread out over the better part of more than 12 months. Patsy, I'll start with you. What have you enjoyed most about the centennial season so far at Hankamer and have there been any surprises for you, any unexpected or meaningful moments that stand out?

Patsy Norman:
So what I've really enjoyed is being reminded about the rich history of our school which we sometimes forget about. In that regard, we had a Fall 2023 Baylor Business Review that highlighted a graduate from each decade. And I really enjoyed reading that. These included our Executive MBA graduate, Thasunda Brown Duckett, who's now President and CEO of TIAA and a full-time MBA grad, Ahmad Jenkins, who has a dual degree with engineering and who is now at McKinsey. So I enjoyed reading that.
One of the things that is worth highlighting is our first female graduate of the Hankamer School of Business actually earned her degree in the very first graduating class in 1925. I may have known that, but I forgot it. So that was good to highlight.

Derek Smith:
Wow, that was right at the very beginning essentially as we think about a hundred years since that first female graduate. Well, great thoughts for sure. What about you, Brad?

Brad Lail:
I think I would add to what Patsy said. The heritage of getting to celebrate a hundred years and being an alum myself has been a lot of fun. The thing that has stood out to me the most is we had our typical homecoming event at the Hankamer School of Business, and it just seemed like there was extra emphasis being a celebration of a hundred years. I had the joy of getting to MC the event that night and just getting to be around everybody and the excitement of not only just homecoming weekend, but this extra 100-year celebration. And along the lines of what Patsy just shared, while I was there at that event, I got to meet the first female accounting graduate of our program. I didn't expect to meet her. Her family was there. She walked up, introduced herself to me. It was just kind of that connection of the heritage that Baylor's left over this time just was kind of a fun, unique experience that I did not expect to have.

Derek Smith:
Wow. That is special. That's really cool. What about you, Mitch?

Mitch Neubert:
Yeah, I'd say some of the same things that I heard from my colleagues there, but one thing unique that popped out to me was we were trying to dig out artifacts, just evidence of things from the past. And there were many wonderful things to celebrate, but actually a new faculty here found an old yearbook in an estate sale and he brought it to me and showed it to me. It was a 1924 yearbook and in there it talked about there were some exciting new offerings for the fall term. And among those offerings for those who were seeking wisdom was the new School of Commerce. So to look back at this yearbook and see that this was something they were talking about that was new and exciting, and now to see how far we've come, from that found into the fantastic building we have now, and to see all that celebrated in homecoming and different periodicals, it's just been a really exciting time for us.

Derek Smith:
This is Baylor Connections. We are talking the Hankamer School of Business Centennial and going to focus now on undergraduate education with Brad Lail. And Brad, you were a student here as we just touched on. Does that have an impact, your time as a student, does that have an impact on your role as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs?

Brad Lail:
Yeah, Derek, when I think about why I loved Baylor so much in my time as a student here and now I get to be in a role and work with teammates and colleagues to help shape what makes those current students have that similar experience, that's what motivates me. I think about our lives are about expectations and what expectations I had for my education. So our culture that we get to shape now involves not only fellow students and how they feel like they belong and part of who Baylor is, but also the content we teach and is it innovative.
And the biggest piece probably that I think back through is who were the instructors that molded and shaped me in my undergraduate experience. So when I think through the job I get to do now, I get to continue to reflect on the expectations I had as a student and now how do we get to play that out with the current students. And, hopefully, it doesn't have to just be my perspective only but hopefully the joys I had from being an alum and the great experience I had, I get to take some of those same qualities and use the resources we have to create that same experience for a thousand new students every year that come through our business school.

Derek Smith:
Certainly that faith foundation from the time you were a student and well beyond that, that has remained the same, but undergraduate business education has evolved in a century. Are you able to paint a picture of that? Does that paint a picture for us of the evolution of the skills that people have needed and how the business environment has changed?

Brad Lail:
That's a really good question. When I talk to constituents that ultimately hire our students or that our advisory board or as our instructors get trained, it's always what do the students need? They need to solve problems, they need to be critical thinkers and they need to be communicators. So when I think about, "Well, when I was here, was that required of me?" Yes, in some ways. But I think, with the innovations in technology, some of the technical things that I had to learn especially as an accounting major, while they might be foundational, aren't as critical as they were back then. And we get to focus instead on probably more things that make jobs enjoyable to us, as not the mundane and not the overly technical, but how do I solve this problem? How do I use data to solve these problems and how do I communicate that well? And those are things I think that we get to focus on more now than we did as a student. And if our program or curriculum's not evolving that way, then we are not doing things as we should as a business school.

Derek Smith:
When you talk about that evolution, what does it look like to stay on the cutting edge so that your students are receiving the up-to-the-minute skills and information that they need to go out and be great professionals?

Brad Lail:
Yeah, I don't know if it's cliche to say this, but the pace of change is high, right? It's higher than it's ever been. And that means for our students to get those kinds of experiences, first, it starts with our faculty and how are they engaging themselves in learning. One of the ways, that we already have foundational ways to connect with the external parties that support Baylor through corporations and organizations. But, in addition, to create experiential learning, we've got to have great researchers. That's where research helps not only inform the academy but also informs the classroom so that students are aware of new things that are happening in the field. And as this pace is high and changing faster and faster, then our curriculum's evolving with that. And so that's where research and teaching really come together.

Derek Smith:
So the research piece, I'm curious. I'm talking to you about undergrad, but we've got Patsy on the grad side. When you're teaching MBA students or professionals online, they're kind of out there in the field. I'm sure they have information that's helpful for their instructors. What does that kind of cycle of sharing look like among different levels of, and when I say different levels, just faculty who kind of focus on different areas between that undergrad, graduate and research so that everyone stays on top of things, if you will?

Patsy Norman:
So a lot of our faculty teach both undergrads and graduates and even in our PhD program. So one of the things that our faculty are able to do is relate to college students, early career students, working professionals. And a lot of times they integrate their research and what they're doing, they're staying up in their fields, and that's important no matter who they teach. Once in a while, we have interactions between the various levels, and so we might have mentoring relationships between some of the various students in certain areas. So there is a natural way for faculty to be able to provide their expertise no matter what level the students are.

Derek Smith:
That's great. That's great. Well, Brad, my final question for you. You've mentioned relationships. You've mentioned talking to people in the field, and I know this isn't just a benefit for undergraduates, but let's talk about them specifically. Hankamer has great industry relationships and partnerships. What are some of the ways you enjoy seeing that benefit your students?

Brad Lail:
Well, the most immediate way is through hiring our students. And we see that, my background being in accounting and business law, the relationships we had with accounting firms and big industry corporations, and we'd get to brag about placement rates at a hundred percent. And I know that those rates are high across the business school. So most practically those relationships play out and how them hiring our students. But the feedback we get from that process of there's just something different about Baylor and why, we're in Waco, Texas, we're not in the big cities and as big as other cities, and yet these companies are willing to dedicate their resources to come to Waco because of the quality of students that we're producing. So I think hiring students is one way.
Another way is just the funding impact. I think, more than ever, our alumni base, our family and our friends are aware of the different types of funds we need, not only to be innovative in the classroom, but to support research, to support programs that help expand upon the undergraduate or graduate experience. And I think those funding opportunities and to attain the funds we need is better aligned than has ever been, and that helps support the things that we need to do as a business school.

Derek Smith:
That's wonderful. Well, Brad, thank you for sharing about undergraduate education here at Baylor. I want to turn now to Patsy to talk more about graduate education. Patsy Norman serves as Hankamer's Associate Dean for Graduate Business Programs and Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation. Patsy, take us inside a classroom or a virtual class online when we think about graduate students at Hankamer. What range of life experiences and skills and needs might we find if we sat in on a few graduate courses?

Patsy Norman:
We really have a diverse set of students because we're targeting students at different parts of their career life cycles, and they also have different programs that they're studying, whatever they want to focus on, whether it's accounting or a general MBA. So if you came on campus, you would find early career students, whether it was a Master's of Accounting student or a full-time MBA student. And we're really just trying to have our professors in those classes equip these students to succeed and lead in dynamic and complex environments they're going to face. We try to get them exposure to a professional world that they may not have really had much time with yet. But I think what you would see if you walked into a classroom is highly curious and engaged students with professors who are really trying to get them to actively learn and be able then to make contributions to not only their companies but the communities that they'll be in.
Now, just to sort of put you on the opposite end, with our Executive and our Online MBA, you find really different people, working professionals, and the experience in the classroom is very, very different because it's more of a facilitation role to help these learn from each other but also learn from the professor in the classroom.

Derek Smith:
So a lot of different ranges, and it's been growing certainly in recent years. How far back does graduate education go here at Hankamer? How has it evolved into what you just described?

Patsy Norman:
So our MBA program started back in 1959 and, over the years for the MBA, we've added two modalities for that degree. We now have an Executive MBA program which is based in Dallas, and we have an online option which actually started in 2014. So we've been doing that for quite a while.
But we've also added, over the years, several specialty master's programs. We have them in accounting, taxation, economics and information systems. One of the things we're very proud of in our centennial year is that we have just launched our Master's of Science in Business Analytics. So we're continuing to look for ways that students need to be educated and what are the new areas we need to look into.
One of the other big evolutions has been the development of PhD programs. So our very first PhD program was started in 2008 in information systems. And since then we've added programs in entrepreneurship and health services research.

Derek Smith:
When you describe these new PhD programs and additional options for graduate education, Hankamer has a great national reputation for all levels of teaching and research. How does graduate education, how has it helped really propelled Hankamer forward when you think about the school's visibility and just its impact on the business community?

Patsy Norman:
I think it's had a number of ways that it has an impact. The most obvious one is you think that our graduates go out and work in organizations and they have tremendous impact on those organizations. But I think, beyond that, our graduates also impact their communities and they're also in political leadership and shaping regulations that happen in the government. So that's obviously one way.
We do have a lot of graduates who are high-level CEOs or presidents. But one of the things that has struck me over the years in my job is that I get to read applications for students who want to be in one of our graduate programs, and often they want to come to Baylor because they have had a personal relationship with a Baylor grad. So our individual level Baylor grads have that impact on their co-workers, on people they go to church with, on people they live near. And that's incredible to see.

Derek Smith:
That's great. So there's the proverbial seat at the table, if you will, that we've talked about with the move towards R-1, that personal touch still very much there when you think about those relationships.
Well, Patsy, thanks so much for sharing with us about graduate education. And we're shifting now to talk about research, which again really impacts each of these areas. We're talking about Dr. Mitch Neubert, Baylor's Senior Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development in the Hankamer School of Business, and a holder of the Hazel and Harry Chavanne Chair of Christian Ethics in Business. So broad question to start off with you, Dr. Neubert, what does research at Hankamer look like and how does it benefit students of all levels?

Mitch Neubert:
Sure. Well, research at Hankamer takes many forms. There's topics that faculty are involved in and engaging students in that look at large macro questions, maybe an entrepreneurial ecosystem or maybe a societal kind of challenge related to sustainability and supply chain. So we have those kinds of big questions that some of the research is focused on.
And then there's some that we'd call maybe micro questions. That's like how are employees responding to a particular type of change, how productive are employees when they work for one type of leader versus maybe a servant leader. So we have a range of topics that are being explored and each one of those takes also a different kind of methodology with it. Some of them are just looking through huge datasets and trying to compare that data to financial documents for a company, and then others is surveys and interviews. So I think we have all that going on and students can be involved in different aspects of that research process. And it's really something we're trying to grow actually, the student involvement. We've had actually master's students and certainly PhD students that have been involved in those projects in the past and we're trying to grow that for certain.
But an area that we really, over the last couple of years under Dean Mazumder's leadership, we're trying to grow is the undergraduate engagement. So we have students who are involved in doing literature reviews, just kind of combing what's out there. We have them also looking into the data and trying to clean that up, doing some simple analysis. And so they're partnering with us in research and I think that's a real important process because it's not just extra help. It's actually they're learning a skill that's going to help them in the future.
I don't know if we've talked about this or not, but everyone's trying to talk about how AI is maybe replacing certain jobs or making certain practices redundant, and things like creativity and entrepreneurship that we try to promote within the school is difficult to replicate by computers. But also it's this kind of critical thinking that comes with being involved in a research process and being able to identify gaps and make connections. So when we involve students in that process of thinking like a researcher, we're helping develop in them a skill that's not easily replaced by artificial intelligence.

Derek Smith:
That's great. You talked about being problem solvers earlier. That's an example of that for sure. And as you talk about growth and research at Hankamer, growth and research at Baylor, I'm curious. You've described as well in the past a human flourishing angle, it seems like, to a lot of the research that takes place. It combines with Baylor's work in the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty or economics related to food insecurity or poverty. Tell us what some of those streams look like in helping to better understand using a business as a tool to serve others.

Mitch Neubert:
Sure. And we've been talking about this just for the last couple of years, but we realized we had a lot of great research going on that was impacting lives and companies in significant ways, but there was a lot that would seem to be gathering around or at least integrated around three areas. So one would be this idea of poverty alleviation or economic development, how to stimulate job creation. So that's working with the entrepreneur and helping understanding what makes an entrepreneur tick, what helps them to be successful in a certain environment. And so some exciting things we do around that area. And we are trying to partner with folks who are working in the area of poverty, but we're kind of coming at it from a different angle, trying to figure out how job creation and having jobs can actually address some of those issues.
Another area about health we've mentioned several times already. Health and well-being is an area that we're really spending a lot of time on, and where some ideas for research come out of, you see a problem in society or you see that an organization is hitting a wall or an industry is having a problem. And then researchers come in to try and answer the problem or give some clarity around what the issues are. Sometimes these questions that we come up with in research are autobiographical. It's like if we had an experience in the workplace, we're wondering, or maybe it's the students we're working with in the EMBA, they're having an experience. We're trying to figure out how to address that experience.
So there's examples here where we have people who've done work on resiliency of entrepreneurs because they either recognized that that's a stressful vocation or they know entrepreneurs who are burned out. And so they wanted to understand how can we understand and then equip entrepreneurs to be more resilient in that health and wellness piece. Or some topics we've talked about before in this podcast are people who have actually experienced or have seen others who experienced pregnancy discrimination or some disadvantage related to adoption or caregiving of an important family member. And we're trying to investigate, well, where are companies doing that well? And so we can then present best practices through our research about how can companies best serve their employees, which are of course their most important resource to be competitive and to prosper. So we have those things going on.
And then the third area that we've been talking a lot about, and it's historically just been a wonderful strength, is ethics. And we've added on to that spiritual transformation, the idea that we're actually trying to understand how we can produce ethical leaders, how we can encourage ethical leadership in work environments, how we can make sure that organizations don't get outside the bounds of what's acceptable in ethical practice. But we're also doing some research on actually how faith might impact some of these things that organizations and people are facing. I mean, even in some of my own research, we kind of looked at faith maturity and how it might impact how you lead and how it might actually allow you to grow your organization and we found really positive results there.
So I think we've got some really exciting areas that we continue to grow in. And they're coming from things we're seeing out there, problems that we want to help solve or even our own kind of challenges we face. And we want to see how that plays out if we do some research with it.

Derek Smith:
Well, that's exciting, Mitch, breath, depth and impact, and we're excited to see that go forward. And my final question that I have is for each of you as we wind down on the program and; Mitch, I'll start with you, and you may have just touched on it. But when you think about looking at and starting the next century at Hankamer and getting to play a role in that from your spot on the faculty, what are you most excited about? What are you intrigued or excited to see?

Mitch Neubert:
Well, maybe it's part of my role, but I'm really looking forward to figuring out how we can leverage the great resources that are already here at Baylor in terms of faculty, students, their competence and their excitement and commitment to make a difference, how we can really leverage that to really answer some real difficult questions. And I do think that's going to require us to step outside of some of our silos and actually work together across departments and even across the college to really be a part of addressing some significant problems and also setting examples out into the marketplace about how companies and people can live out their ethics, their values, and make a positive impact. I feel like we're just scratching the surface in that space. We've done a lot of good work there, but I think through collaboration, we're going to actually address bigger challenges and make a larger impact.

Derek Smith:
That's great. What about you, Brad?

Brad Lail:
In my role, my primary focus is the students, the undergraduate population. So if I think about it probably, I don't know how the students were a hundred years ago because I wasn't around then, but if I think about how they are now and what that's going to look like over the next 20, 30, hundred years, how does Baylor continue to change itself and create that undergraduate experience both through curriculum, through just culture and belonging? How do we do those things? And, like Mitch, I feel we've done a really good job in these last few years, and I think we just really have the right resources to do that in the future. So I think, when I think of what's going on and what excites me for the years to come, it's how do we continue to challenge ourselves and evolve as the students evolve.

Derek Smith:
Wonderful, wonderful. Well, Patsy, you can bring us home on this one, what you're excited about.

Patsy Norman:
Well, I think there's a lot of things to be excited about here at the business school, but let me just mention two things that I'm excited about.
One is, in the realm of graduate education, I'm really excited about our ability to reach out and meet students where they are so they can come in person here on the Waco campus or in Dallas. We're growing our online programs and it excites me to think about how do we meet the needs of people wherever they are.
I'm also excited about Dean Mazumder's goal that all students have an international experience while they're enrolled at Hankamer. And we really have added significant study abroad options, both for our undergrad and graduate students, including certain required experiences in certain programs. But I'm really looking forward to see what other international experiences we can to better equip our graduates to be global leaders.

Derek Smith:
Well, that's wonderful. It certainly fits into the Baylor mission and excited to see that grow. Well, Patsy, Brad, Mitch, thanks so much for taking the time today to share with us and paint a picture of what's going on at Hankamer and a Happy Centennial as it continues to all of you.

Brad Lail:
Thank you, Derek.

Mitch Neubert:
Thank you. A pleasure.

Derek Smith:
Thank you very much. Brad Lail, Patsy Norman and Mitch Neubert, our guests today on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith reminding you you can hear this and other programs online at connections.web.baylor.edu and you can subscribe to the program on iTunes. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.