What Executives Are Saying

As you enter the Tanner Building (the building the business school is located in), you see these beautiful gigantic blue banners that have several quotes of top executives describing the business students. We wanted to share some of those quotes with you:

"You will not find a better group of graduates than those educated and trained at the Marriott School of Management.... Their second-language capability and international experience are unequaled by any other business school."

— Nolan Archibald
Executive Chairman, Stanley Black & Decker

"BYU students are trailblazers. They approach problems with open minds and are eager to find creative solutions. I'm impressed with their dedication to innovation."

— Fraser Bullock
Founder/Managing Director, Sorenson Capital

"Graduates come away from the Marriott School with a very high ethical standard. You don't have to worry about what's underneath the résumé."

— Frank Crespo
Vice President and Chief Procurement Officer, Caterpillar Inc.

"One thing that differentiates the Marriott School is the experience of the student body.... Since business is conducted in a global framework, hiring people who have had real life experience in a variety of countries with a variety of languages allows for a more effective, deeper relationship with the clients."

— Linda Daines
Managing Director, Goldman Sachs

"The school offers mature individuals. Most graduates come out of school with an understanding of what it takes to work hard. They are very strong when it comes to figuring out and solving problems. They are ready to make a contribution."

— Reed Maughan
Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

"From my experience, communication and analytical skills are the strongest differentiators between students at BYU and those at other universities. Students take multiple classes that develop and hone these talents, which make BYU grads valuable employees."

— Eric Varvel
CEO, Credit Suisse Investment Bank

Source: https://marriottschool.byu.edu/recruiter/index/executivessay

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Interview with Jan Saumweber

Jan Saumweber, SVP of Sara Lee’s Global Walmart Team, gives advice on anticipating how your chosen role (e.g. sales vs marketing) will affect your family, recounts how showing strong ethics early in her career gained her credibility, and finally encourages women to join the business community. Enjoy!

Check out more interviews at the BYU MBA Morning Market Call.

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BYU MBA Stress Management

Word on the street is that the MBA program is stressful. So we set out Mythbuster-style to find out just how stressed people are these days. We found that the vast majority of BYU MBAs (70%) report having medium to high stress on average, with only 3% reporting very high stress and everyone else claiming low or very low stress levels.

It’s possible our data was skewed by the likelihood that MBAs with very high stress are less likely to take non-essential surveys. Then again, that same group is equally unlikely to be reading this, hence a mutual nose-thumbing is in order.

MBAs employ a variety of methods to manage stress. Aside from the usual suspects of exercise, sleep, socializing, and “couch-potato-ing” (actually recorded in our responses), 20% of respondents reported using food (both the good and the bad kinds) to lower stress and 26% claimed to use Jedi mind tricks to counter stress. Among our favorites in the ‘other’ category are: calling my mom, praying often, eliminating cause (we’re interested to know how), getting out of Provo, and hanging out with people more stressed to see how ridiculous they are.

-Merritt Aho, Marketing, Class of 2011

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The High-Performance Machine

When I wake up today, I’m a 31 year old MBA student-husband-father-friend-classmate with possibly overly divided attentions, a growing list of personal successes, an also growing list of mistakes and awkward ideas, and a rolling list of to-dos that just seems to exist no matter how much effort I put into eliminating it. I’m ambitious. I expect myself to make a difference. I want to contribute valuable insights and work. I want the next moment to be my best moment. I hope the last less-than-my-best moment will go away quietly.

I’m thrilled with this knowledge-building, friendship-gaining, connection-finding, experience-gathering opportunity. I’m also exhausted by it. I’m enjoying this experience, and I expect I’m going to get better at it, but, in the meantime, all of these roles and goals and activities are putting a lot of miles on me.

And that got me thinking again about what I’m doing to keep me going.

A while ago I found that I had to be a lot more careful about what I ate and how much I slept in order to be clear and engaged in my work. It wasn’t that I was suddenly motivated to turn myself into some superhuman gladiator capable of conquering anything I came in contact with. These changes were to just keep up.

I assumed I was getting old, and it was now my job to make sure I didn’t fall apart.

Recently, it occurred to me that needing to eat and sleep better might have less to do with being “old” than I had thought. While looking over a sports car, it dawned on me that the high-performance vehicle required special motor oils, the highest quality fuel, and special tuning in order to function properly. If the car didn’t get those necessities, then it would actually function worse than its less than sporty commuter-class counterparts.

The light went on, and I suddenly realized (rationalized) that I wasn’t getting old, instead, after growing up as a commuter-class “me” that could deal with irregular maintenance and lower quality fuels, I had somewhere transformed into a high-performance “me” that would accept nothing less than the best to manage this high-performance lifestyle I was living.

I know I’m not the only one balancing the student, family, friend, job-hunter, success, failure, feeling-found, feeling-lost lifestyle, and I believe I’m not the only one who’s suffering from “high-performance” maintenance requirements. So, I hope all of you are also enjoying this MBA experience, and I encourage you to keep diving in where you see fit, and, if you’re feeling like this experience is making you age quickly, I suggest to you that you see it instead as refining you into a high-performance machine that needs special maintenance and care, and then continue maintaining yourself accordingly.

Christian Mealey, Marketing, Class of 2012

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