S8E1: Harnessing the Potential of the Eccles School
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Season 8 of the Eccles Business Buzz podcast kicks off with a conversation about the school’s recent strategic planning process, and the newly identified priorities of student success, societal impact, and legacy and reputation.
Allison Boxer is the James Lee Sorenson Presidential Endowed Chair in applied research at the Eccles School, as well as an assistant professor at the Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy and the Sorenson Impact Institute. Allison played a key role in guiding the planning process of the new strategic direction of the David Eccles School of Business.
Frances and Allison discuss the importance of strategic planning, the school’s focus areas for the future, and the efforts to gather extensive stakeholder input. The episode delves into the three strategic priorities of student success, societal impact, and reputation and legacy, and outlines the ongoing steps toward implementation.
Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes
Why having new strategic plans and priorities now is important for the Eccles School.
[02:28] The real point of strategic planning is to bring clarity to what’s most important to an organization and align everyone, staff, faculty, [and] students around key priorities so that we’re all rowing in the same direction. And especially when an organization has a new leader, as we do with Dean Dirks, a strategic planning process can really help set the context and lay out the key priorities so we’re all on the same trajectory.
Putting student success as the top strategic priority
[10:41] I think our job or the job of strategic planning is to synthesize those [differing] perspectives. And we can’t take every perspective, but there is a lot of coalescence into specific ideas. And so that’s really what we’re looking for. The other point of strategic planning is to make choices. We said at the beginning we can’t be all things to all people. So, look at the context and all of the data and decide where it might be the best direction to go. These three, I’m really excited about these priorities. For the business school, the first and foremost is driving student success. That is number one. There is no question about it, and it is due to our mission. We are here for the students. The students are the reason we exist. I think the students are the reason every faculty and staff member comes to work every day. So, the students are central to everything we do at core to our mission. The key here is really helping every student seek and reach their peak.
Creating future leaders who will make a lasting impact in Utah and beyond.
[11:42] We are seeing across the country in a fantastic way, universities, higher education institutions, really taking on this second mission area, which is creating societal impact. For a business school in our setting, thinking about our context, it’s really about extending our reach beyond campus to help people, businesses, and the economy thrive in Utah and beyond. We think of this in a couple ways. We think of it as an academic impact. The research has long-term impact on how things are done, as well as business impact and how, the number one way we do that is by creating amazing graduates who go into the workforce and the economy. But there’s so many other connections that we can have beyond campus walls to really have an impact on the business community in Utah and beyond.
How Allison envisions these strategic plans to be implemented.
[23:40] I want the strategic plan to be dirty, not dusty. I don’t want this plan to sit on a shelf and gather dust. It was a really cool exercise we did for that one year. I want it to be on people’s desks with dog-eared pages and coffee stains as a sign that it’s a part of their daily life and being referenced and that we’re really using it. I think that’s the key implementation as this document lives over the coming years.
