Jennifer Ernst knew when she started the Executive MBA program at Santa Clara that having the degree would give her more career options, but it was even clearer when she graduated with honors in 2005.

“A decision to get an MBA, especially an executive MBA with its accelerated program, is a strong declaration you’re serious about business,” she recalled during an interview at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where she has been director of business development for the Xerox-owned company since 2006.

Her job includes leading business-to-business sales in the United States and Europe, expanding PARC business in Asia, and responsibility for all phases of business development, resulting in multiple $1 million-plus deals with companies throughout the world.

Ernst, who has an undergraduate degree in radio and television from San Francisco State University, spent her early career in communications. She’d started as a project manager in the creative services group at PARC, working up to communications manager from 1998 through 2006.

“Before I got to SCU, I had been doing marketing,” said Ernst. “I didn’t know what else was out there so I really didn’t know what I’d be good at. The MBA program helped expose me to a lot of varied opportunities.”

Continuing to work fulltime through the SCU program made her classroom work more relevant because she could immediately apply what she learned, as well as benefit from the experience of her classmates.

 “When I interviewed people from SCU, I found a sense of groundedness, of no arrogance,” she said. “Within the EMBA cohort, we had diverse people. Our skills complemented each other. I brought an understanding of research innovation and functional experience from marketing and communications. Others helped me learn leadership, finance, and handling change.”

Ernst said she probably would not have been considered for her current job if she hadn’t had the MBA.

“I had a richer tool set having done the EMBA,” she said. “I went from being a communications person, to being a business person with a communications background. I went from reporting the news to making it.”

Barry Posner is Professor of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University (located in the heart of Silicon Valley), where he served for 12 years as Dean of the School.

Barry, along with his co-author Jim Kouzes, received the American Society for Training and Development’s highest award for their Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance.  He has been recognized by The International Management Council as one of the nation's top management and leadership educators, listed among the Top 50 Leadership Coaches in America, and recently honored as one of the top dozen “most influential international thinkers in HR.”

He is the co-author of the award-winning and best-selling leadership book The Leadership Challenge. Described as a groundbreaking research study, this book combines keen insights with practical applications and captures both why and how leadership is everyone's business. With over 1.8 million copies in print, this book has been named one of The Top 100 Business Books of All Time, book-of-the-year by the American Council of Health Care Executives, received the Critic's Choice Award from book review editors, and been translated into 20 foreign languages.

The Leadership Practices Inventory has been called "the most reliable, up-to-date leadership instrument available today," and the online version has been completed by over 1.3 million people around the globe over the past four years.  Barry has also co-authored several other award-winning, inspiring and practical books on leadership: The Truth About Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know; Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It; Encouraging the Heart: A Leaders Guide to Recognizing and Rewarding Others; The Academic Administrator’s Guide to Exemplary Leadership; and A Leader’s Legacy.

Barry is an international renowned scholar who has published more than 90 research and practitioner-oriented articles, in such journals as the: Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Relations, Personnel Psychology, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and the like. He is currently on the editorial review boards of the International Journal of Servant-Leadership, Leadership and Organizational Development, and Leadership Review.  Barry serves on the Board of Directors for EMQ Family First.

Barry received an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a master's degree from the Ohio State University in public administration, and his Ph.D. in organizational behavior and administrative theory from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At Santa Clara he has received the President's Distinguished Faculty Award, the School’s Extraordinary Faculty Award, and several other outstanding teaching and leadership honors. Described as a warm, engaging and pragmatic conference speaker and dynamic workshop facilitator, Barry has worked with such organizations as: Alcoa, Applied Materials, Australian Institute of Management, Charles Schwab, Conference Board of Canada, Hewlett-Packard, Kaiser Permanente Health Care, L.L. Bean, Levi Strauss, Merck, Motorola, NetApp, Trader Joe's, Roche, among others, and been involved with leadership development efforts at more than 35 college campuses.  He has made presentations and conducted workshops across the U.S., and around the globe, from Canada, Mexico and Europe to the Far East, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

“There are no new ideas, only new ways of making them felt.” Audre Lorde, poet

Professor Andy Tsay’s take on Lorde is that the single-minded pursuit of the breakthrough idea may be futile, or at least misguided.

“Novelty is invariably less important than implementation,” he says. “Grand visions are easy, yet most don’t lead to much. But if you take a decent idea and execute the heck out of it, you can have major impact.”

Tsay says this form of competitive advantage is difficult to imitate, as much of the knowledge is unspoken or subtle. That’s why teaching operations management is so important, he says, noting the field’s distinct role in cultivating respect for details and execution.

But successful implementation also requires tremendous creativity, especially in problem solving, Tsay says. For him, this means continuously scanning the world beyond his specialty, taking ideas from one place and using them in another, and fusing existing ideas into new combinations. He’s inspired by the lives of persistently creative people in various pursuits, and has a pet interest in the “one-hit-wonder” phenomenon in popular music.

He views his role as being a ‘portal’ for students into a vast and shifting body of knowledge. “A key part of my job is the management of intellectual property—collecting, organizing, recombining, and retrieving knowledge assets from a myriad of sources,” says Tsay, who is convinced that his systematic procedures for doing this play a major role in his teaching success.

Tsay has taught at the Leavey School since 1995, and is a five-time recipient of the Extraordinary Faculty Award for Teaching, Research and Service, and two-time winner of the Breetwor Fellowship. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematical and computational science, his master’s in engineering and his Ph.D. in business, all at Stanford University.
 

The Santa Clara EMBA program integrated an innovative program design with a carefully selected cohort which incorporated a diverse set of industries, experiences and backgrounds (some people were from Marketing, Operations, Engineering, Supply Chain, etc.).

The result for me was an accelerated learning environment that gave me both the tools and confidence I needed to start integrating some of the leading concepts in my company early in the program. The immersion aspect of the program which united us not only with up and coming Chinese companies but also with domestic Cisco executives and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors was transformational for me. The experience opened my eyes to gain real world experience and expertise in several industries.

Towards the end of the program I was promoted from directing a modest group of project management professionals to the role of Director of Business Services responsible not only for the Project Management Office but also Supply Chain, Information Services, Operational Excellence and Risk Management – an organization 8x the size of the group I had when I started the program which will allows me to utilize many of the aspects of the program.

Although Kevin Haley MBA ‘05 anticipated changing direction after completing the MBA, he never expected that as a result of a class project, he would become founder of a new company whose product may revolutionize fossil fuel emission control when it comes to market later in 2011.

He began the Executive MBA program because he “didn’t want to be just another engineer” when he left a 20-year career at Intel.  During his program at Santa Clara, he and his classmates developed a creditable business plan for a new “clean-tech” product  that would virtually eliminate soot from diesel engine emissions. It wasn’t until the project was completed that Haley revealed he was an expert in thermal technologies and knew that the product also was scientifically viable.

“I said, I know what this is and it’ll work. We’ve got to make a company out of this,” recalls Haley, a former engineering manager who holds 19 patents. When he retired from Intel in 2010 , he launched Clearstreme LLC to market the product. He expects that by year’s end, the product will be on the market after being approved by the regulatory agencies that monitor emissions-cleaning laws and compliance.

Haley, who received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington, said earning his MBA gave him the confidence and training he needed to become an entrepreneur.

 “A lot of what I learned confirmed what I’d been doing at Intel, but it also exposed me to different aspects of business,” he said.  “I’d had no familiarity with accounting, international business or money policy. When Clearstreme becomes successful, it will be because of Santa Clara.”  

I recently accepted a new position with Vanguard as Principal, Head of International Marketing. This is an exciting development in my career as I join one of the largest mutual fund companies in the world.
 
I truly believe the Santa Clara Executive MBA made a huge difference in preparing me for my new role. I am proud to tell others I earned my MBA from the Leavey School of Business. For this alumnus, the investment is truly paying off!