conversations Getting Personnel The Challenge: How do you go about creating the first diversity and inclusion strategic plan for the Department of Homeland Security, the third-largest and newest US federal government department? With 240,000 employees, not only is the DHS large, it includes long-established agencies such as the Coast Guard and newer agencies such as the Transportation Security Administration, all with their own policies, priorities, and cultures. When Nimesh Patel joined the DHS in 2011 as executive director for diversity and inclusion, the department had no cohesive strategy or oversight of diversity and inclusion, which sometimes resulted in significant challenges for senior leaders when briefing members of Congress about diversity efforts. “We couldn’t even clearly identify our successes, challenges, or the strategies to address the challenges,” said Patel, who recently left DHS to lead diversity and inclusion at WilmerHale, a large international law firm. The Strategy: Patel relied on his experience consulting with Fortune 200 companies regarding their diversity and inclusion efforts, as well as his relationship building, consensus forming, and negotiating skills, to create the department’s strategic plan. He established a task force including representatives from all of the major agencies to create a collaborative process, enable different perspectives, and gain buy-in from all key stakeholders.
conversations How Can You Take a Smart Approach to Student Loan Debt? My initial principal loan balance was about $28,000. I didn’t get any correspondence from my loan provider until I was a senior in college. When I got an email that said I had accrued $3,500 in interest, it felt huge to me. I definitely made more than that through on-campus jobs and paid internships during school, and I could have put that money toward my student loans. If the provider had been sending notices, maybe I would have been sending in money sooner. Many students don’t understand that interest is accruing on your loans from your first day of college. Once the grace period expires, that interest is added to your balance, so then you’re paying interest on the interest.<br/>
conversations Good for Business The Curriculum: We all want to live a good life. To be successful, to be ethical, to be happy. To do well, to do good, to feel good. How would you go about structuring your world to achieve those goals? For business students, how would you create that organization? How do you enable people to be good? Is “being good” good for business? The first chunk of the course is making the business case for ethical behavior. <br/>
conversations A Welcoming Home The companionship of scholars and the thrill of continuous learning are two wonderful aspects of a life in science,” Robert W. Fogel wrote in a short autobiography when he won the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. “When one is engaged with students who are both very curious and very bright, it is never quite clear who is teaching whom.” That passion for engaging with students stood at the core of the Fogel Dinner, one of the enduring legacies of the late Nobel laureate and longtime Booth professor, and his wife, Enid M. Fogel, the onetime associate dean of students at Booth. Together, they hosted the first Fogel Dinner in 1982 to welcome minority students at Booth to the school and the Hyde Park community. Each fall for the next three decades, Bob—as he was known to colleagues and students—and Enid opened the doors of their brownstone on University Avenue. After his wife’s death in 2007, Fogel continued the tradition until he passed away in 2013. <br/>
conversations Fund and Games Manish Kothari, ’90, is general manager of institutions for Edmodo, a social learning platform, as well as a senior advisor in Cisco’s Entrepreneurs in Residence program. Thanks to a gift Kothari and his wife, Carmen Saura, made to the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the Kothari Saura Internship Fund provides participants in the Entrepreneurial Internship Program (EIP) with a living stipend, so they can focus on entrepreneurial endeavors. Andi Hadisutjipto—a Full-Time student and the founder and CEO of Chicago-based retail technology company Riviter—participated in the EIP in the summer of 2015 and benefited from the Kothari Saura fund. Bound together by their passion for the start-up scene, Kothari and Hadisutjipto joined a conversation with Chicago Booth Magazine to discuss diversity, funding, and the future of entrepreneurship.
conversations The View from London It’s a natural fit—graduates of a business school renowned as a finance powerhouse thrive along the banks of the Thames, making their mark in the world’s preeminent financial and banking hub. More than 800 Chicago Booth alumni live and work in the United Kingdom, home to one of the school’s overseas campuses at Woolgate Exchange, in the heart of London’s financial district. It serves as the headquarters of the Executive MBA Program Europe, anchoring the Booth community as a gathering place for students, faculty, and graduates alike.<br/>
conversations A Head Start No matter how successful they have been in their paths to Booth, incoming Executive MBA students enter the program with questions, uncertainties, and often even anxiety over the vaunted rigors of the curriculum, the uniform brilliance of their new classmates, and the imposing intellect of the faculty. As a part of the student’s LEAD experience, the Leadership Development team partnered with about 55 distinguished Booth alumni for the inaugural Executive MBA 20/20, where roughly 250 students in these new cohorts listened as the alumni panelists addressed queries, allayed fears, empathized with doubts, and offered guidance on getting the most out of Booth.
conversations New Life for Normandy Orders “It was a sight that is hard to describe,” Stanhope Mason recalled. “As far as I could see, both to the east and to the west there were ships.” Years later, as the retired major general looked back on one of the most crucial turning points of World War II, he confessed, “I had expected not to live through the day.” Then the chief of staff for the US Army First Infantry Division, Mason was among the Allied troops who stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. The sheer scale of the operation required advance planning down to the most minute of details—and Mason had a 140-page set of field orders to do just that.<br/> More stories related to: Alumni Features
conversations Who Was XP-1? CBM takes a closer look at the very first Executive MBA cohort. Follow along as pamphlet distributed to these students in 1943 is restored in this issue’s feature “Paper Work.” Whether or not they knew it, the 52 students who made up XP-1 blazed a new trail in business education. Their course of study, now known as Booth’s Executive MBA Program, was the first of its kind anywhere in the world. The program’s creation in 1943 dovetailed with the wartime demand for skilled administrators, according to Taking Stock: A Century of Business Education at the University of Chicago, a 1998 chronicle of Booth’s history up to that point. <br/> More stories related to: Alumni Conversations Faculty
conversations To Wisconsin in Search of a Soul 1987 was a scary time to be enrolled at the Booth School of Business. Students had left jobs to attend what they considered one of the best, if not the best, business school in the country. They planned to move on to big corporate careers, many of them in finance. Then, on October 19, 1987—what came to be known as Black Monday—the stock market recorded its biggest single-day drop in history, losing 22.6 percent of its value, $500 billion. A few months later, BusinessWeek came out with a survey dropping Booth out of the top 10 among business schools, ranking Booth 11th. The school’s curriculum got a D and its professors got a C.