The BYU Marriott MBA Program
In 1960, a newly minted Harvard PhD named Quinn McKay returned to BYU, his alma mater, to take on an audacious goal: start an MBA program from scratch.
He spent the first year working with Weldon Taylor, dean of what was then the BYU College of Business, to put the program together. “We had a small budget,” remembers McKay, “and some of our best professors were rather skeptical of starting an MBA program. But I made a couple of trips—one to Los Angeles and one to Phoenix, Arizona—to talk to possible candidates.”
And in fall 1961, the first class of MBA students, fifteen strong, began their studies. According to Gordon Peterson, a member of that original class, their first two courses were calculus and quantitative techniques.
Though small, the program was off to a great start. Among its faculty were Bob Daines, Garth Mangum, and Stephen R. Covey. Peterson says that though the program was only beginning, he still chose BYU over Stanford and never regretted it.
The program began to gather steam almost immediately, bringing in a larger class the next year. Six of BYU’s first fifteen MBA graduates, including Peterson, were offered jobs by IBM.
Since then, some of BYU Marriott’s best-known MBA graduates have included Fraser Bullock, Coo and CFo of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games; Dave Checketts, past president and CEO of the New York Knicks; Alison Davis-Blake, former president of Bentley University and a graduate of the MoB program, which has since been included in the MBA program; Henry J. Eyring, president of BYU–Idaho; and even Thomas S. Monson, former president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the first student in BYU Marriott’s budding Executive MBA program.
“In addition,” says Daniel Snow, today’s director of BYU Marriott’s MBA program, “a number of the folks who have been active in starting businesses in Silicon Slopes are graduates.”
Growing and Diversifying
Since its beginnings, BYU Marriott’s MBA student body has become not only larger but more diverse.
Snow says that he has talked with many alumni who graduated in the 1960s. “They would say things like, ‘I hope you have more women in the class today, because it’s a much better discussion experience when you bring people with different views and different perspectives.’ Or they’d say, ‘Boy, it turns out in my career that it’s been important to work internationally and know how to interact with people from other countries. I hope you have students from other countries in your program now.’
“As somebody who graduated from the program twenty-three years ago,” Snow continues, “I see that the students today are better than my class was. They come from a better experience. It’s a more diverse and more interesting group of people. Traditionally, 10 or 20 percent of our program is international; this last year, 10 percent of our students were US minorities, and 26 percent of our students were female.”
Today’s MBA students come to BYU “because they’re drawn to the mission and they’re drawn to the idea that in your career, you can bring principles from your faith into being an ethical, principled, effective leader,” Snow says.
And when they start their studies, they learn that their lives are about far more than making money or being successful. Instead, the goal is to become, as BYU Marriott MoB alum and well-known author Liz Wiseman has famously written, a “multiplier.”
“Sometimes that is through their career, sometimes it’s through their community service, sometimes it’s in their families,” says Snow. “But our belief is that the training we give here prepares them to go and make a big impact.”
Tapping into the Network
It’s no secret that one of the biggest benefits of a BYU Marriott MBA degree is lifetime membership in the program’s alumni network.
Dave Jungheim admits that, for a long time, he “felt that alumni relations was all about the school keeping track of us so they can hit us up for money.” But when he retired from the military and signed on as BYU Marriott’s MBA alumni relations manager, he saw the true value of the network of MBA grads. “Our alumni are an amazing network that creates some incredible synergistic effects,” he says.
Tremendous things happen, says Snow, “when you get that triangle of students, faculty and staff, and alumni who see the magic of this place.”
The “magic” of the BYU Marriott MBA alumni network is simple: the alumni work together, so much so that when Snow talks about MBA alumni, he says, “It’s hard to disentangle alumni from our current students and our future students, because those are all the same person, just at different times in their life.”
Every BYU Marriott MBA graduate stands on the shoulders of more than sixty years worth of giants, including McKay, the program’s founder. After earning his undergraduate degree at BYU, McKay found his way to Harvard and a successful career starting business-education programs internationally—all because one of his BYU professors sat him down to f ill out a scholarship application.
“I was just a farm boy helping support my mother,” McKay remembers, “but William Edwards took me by the arm and took me into his office, sat me down, pulled out a sixteen-page application, and made me f ill out the first four pages. ‘Now, Quinn, you finish f illing that out and send it in.’ I didn’t think anything would come of it, but ten days later, Harvard called me and said I’d been awarded the Donald Kirk David scholarship.”
According to Sam Dunn, BYU Marriott assistant dean and director of the Business Career Center, “We rely heavily on our alumni for mentoring, for connections, for networking, to provide guidance and counsel, to provide insight, and, frankly, to connect us inside their companies.”
The upshot is that alumni enjoy the opportunity to work with the high-quality graduates that BYU Marriott’s MBA program is known to produce. “Our goal is to train leaders who are going to go forth and make a positive difference in the world through their contributions in their careers, in their faith communities, in their geographical communities, and in their homes,” says Snow.
But it’s not just faculty and alumni who are looking out for students; students themselves are eager to help each other. “We have so many great anecdotes about students, against their best interests, telling a recruiter, ‘Hey, you should interview one of my classmates because you’re his or her dream company. Even if I have to give up my spot on the interview list, you should interview so-and-so.’ That happens regularly,” says Snow.
Of course, the success of the alumni network is also due to the efforts of the MBA staff. “If you walk into their offices and ask them about an individual MBA student, they’ll have a picture of the student on their screen,” says Snow. “They have metrics of how many practice interviews that student has done, what internship interviews that student has gotten, which ones they have missed out on, which ones they are hoping to close on, which full-time offers they have. The MBA staff know their sheep, and those sheep are carefully counted. They have a deep hands-on approach to working with individual students—and it’s remarkable.”
In addition, Jungheim spends a good part of each day on LinkedIn managing the BYU Marriott MBA alumni group, which has several thousand members and represents 50 percent of living alumni.
“We had one alumnus today post and say, ‘Hey, look. A fellow alumnus was just laid off. Here’s what type of job he’s looking at. Here’s the company he is targeting.’ So I hopped onto my LinkedIn account and sent him a key connection within that company who’s a fellow alumnus.”
Jungheim says that, for him, the “two governing principles with alumni relations are understanding and meeting the needs of our alumni and empowering them to give back in meaningful ways.”
To meet these goals, Jungheim spent a lot of time talking with MBA alumni when he first started as director. In doing so, he found that their main need was to stay connected, “not just with their class or with their team, but with the program.” This insight led him to create the MBA program’s annual report “so they could know in much more detail the ins and outs of how the program is doing now and learn about the accomplishments of our students, faculty, and alumni.”
But the alumni network’s offerings go much further than this yearly publication. Jungheim says that alumni are often “quite surprised to find out how many things we do for free. I just got off the phone with someone from the class of 2000 who asked about our services—they’re thinking of putting together their first big class reunion. I told them what we provide, and their next question was, ‘How much is it going to cost?’ And I said, ‘Nothing.’”
Connecting to the alumni network is easy and rewarding, says Jungheim, whether through LinkedIn or by contacting the alumni manager directly. Start by simply sharing your story, he says: “I’m convinced that every single alum has a compelling story.” Then take advantage of MBA class reunions or program-wide conferences, which occur every five years and provide excellent networking and continuing-education opportunities.
Engaging for the Future
The MBA program is on an “upward trajectory,” says Snow. “My vision is for us to become recognized as a top-ten MBA program.”
Some might feel that online MBAs and internal company training programs are making the in-person MBA obsolete, but Snow notes that BYU Marriott’s MBA program isn’t just a training experience; it’s “a transformational experience.”
He continues, “Organizations need leaders who can (1) see and make sense of messy multidimensional challenges, (2) lead people and organizational efforts to address those challenges, and (3) do so innovatively. All of these skills must be grounded in a foundation of real business acumen, analytical capability, and faith.”
In other words, Snow is committed to turning out graduates who “have sights set on their careers, but they also have their sights on something higher, which is to help develop themselves into people who can go be of use and make the world a better place.”
Snow points to BYU Marriott’s MBA faculty as key to the program’s success. “They could be working elsewhere, but they’re here because they’re passionate about the mission of this place.” He also loves the MBA alumni base, “which is really energized to work with our students because they see so much potential in those students.” Add the current MBA students to the mix, and “we punch above our weight because those three groups see the magic in the program and are eager to build and be part of it.”
Jungheim agrees, noting that “an institution is only as good as the sum of its parts plus the synergy. BYU Marriott’s MBA program is an institution where I feel like there’s true value and meaning that’s produced in helping take care of and better the world.”
“I am not ashamed to aspire for each graduate to be in the C-suite of a major company or organization,” Snow says. “Each would be active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or in another faith, and each would be an active, contributing member of their community. This is going to require hard work and engagement by every member of the BYU Marriott MBA community.”
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Taking on COVID-19
“I guess it was March of last year when the virus hit hard,” says Sam Dunn, assistant dean of BYU Marriott and director of the Business Career Center. “[The virus] shut down traditional recruiting. We were just a couple of months away from graduation, and we still had quite a number of students who had not yet placed. We reached out to the alumni to see what help they could provide.”
The response was indicative of the strong bond MBA alumni feel to the program and to each other. “Looking at our MBA students in April 2020, 100 percent of our first-year MBAs landed internships, and 91 percent of our second-year students found full-time jobs within three months of graduation,” Dunn reports. “Those numbers are pretty much on par with what we experienced pre-COVID-19. I thought there might be a ten- to fifteen- point delta because of the virus, but we were able to make that up because of the resilience of the students, the hard work of the staff, and outstanding support and help from our alumni.”