Browse All Stories
20 results found
Sort by Program
Year Published
Working at the Oracle Corporation, alum Liz Wiseman found herself constantly surrounded by intelligent people. But she noticed an ebb and flow—not of intelligence but of how leaders capitalized on or closed off that intelligence. One executive she coached was brilliant but shut down others, leaving their ideas untapped. Wiseman searched for something to share with this leader about the dynamic he was caught in but found nothing. “Someone needed to research how what leaders did either diminished or multiplied the intelligence of the people around them,” Wiseman says. “This seemed like a worthy pursuit, so I just did it.”
As soon as Thaylene Lowe Rogers made her decision to return to school for an Executive MBA, she hit the GMAT prep books. During a trip to Newport Beach, California, vacation time turned into study time as she and her son began plowing through the math section. After a year of brushing up, she was in. By 2015 she’ll be sporting a new Marriott School degree on her office wall.
During the housing collapse, the sweltering summer heat of Phoenix was no place for a young salesman pushing pest control. But for Adam Keys it was just the kind of pressure needed to get the creative juices flowing. “Nobody had money and nobody liked salesmen,” Keys remembers. It was then that Keys matched the perfect product with its target audience. “I sold No Soliciting signs door-to-door,” Keys says. “Eighty percent of people who would laugh when they opened the door would buy it.” But this wasn’t just funny business: the 2011 finance graduate paid his college bills, learned graphic design, and gained experience running his own company.
In the winter of 1989, the snow and pine trees of Sundance Resort set the backdrop for Doug and Judith Maughan’s second date. Doug, an MBA student at the time, had asked Judith to accompany him to a Valentine’s dinner and dance sponsored by the Marriott School. “He was handsome, smart, and probably the most polite man I had ever met,” says Judith of her date. Doug was also persistent and outdoorsy—during the summers, he caught salmon in Alaska as a commercial fisherman to help pay for school. After Doug worked his charms that evening in the mountains, dates with Judith became increasingly frequent. Sharing space in the Tanner Building, where she was also a Marriott School student, helped fuel their courtship.
Jen sat in the BYU Varsity Theatre eager to learn on her first day of class in the accounting junior core. Rod Hinze was also in class that day, but he found it hard to focus on academics once he saw Jen. When the teacher announced that the students would be forming two-person teams, Rod knew who his partner would be—Jen didn’t have a chance to look around before he was leaping over the seats to get to her. “I looked for the cutest girl in the class and Jen was sitting two rows in front of me, so I literally jumped over the two rows and sat next to her,” Rod says. “She was a little surprised when I asked her to be my partner, but she said yes.”
For Martissa Spencer, patience is definitely a virtue. When Martissa met her now-husband Mike in September 1991, she was busy having her first real romance with the newly returned missionary she had dated in high school. Martissa had plans to serve a mission of her own and was surprised to find out that her boyfriend wasn’t willing to wait. The relationship ended. “I couldn’t change my course,” Martissa says. “I felt very strongly about serving a mission.”
Jeff Holdaway, a 1982 finance graduate, knew there was a way for him to combine his passion for business and law. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1985 and working at a national law firm, an opportunity arose that he couldn’t turn down. Twenty-four years later Holdaway is still glad he jumped at the chance to work at Marriott International.
“Citius! Altius! Fortius!” Heralding the commencement of the 2002 Winter Olympics, the 360-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir reverberated John Williams’s “Call of the Champions” across Rice-Eccles Stadium.
When Sandy Wight earned a MAcc in 1990 and started her career with Arthur Andersen, she had no idea she would become a partner. “My goal was to get a job and have two years of experience on my résumé,” she says. Twenty years later Wight is still gaining experience for her résumé—as a partner in the human capital practice of Ernst & Young.
In an ever-expanding digital universe, Brad Rencher and his team at Adobe Systems Inc. navigate the Cloud like rocket men.
Whether it’s the crisp binding of a book straight off the press or the vibrant design of an e-book, 1999 MAcc graduate Brad Farmer loves all aspects of his job in the publishing industry.
It takes a special kind of person to compare his job to a high school field trip and enjoy it. Such is the case for 1997 masters of accounting graduate Travis Nielsen, whose consulting firm has him on the road every dayyellow school bus not included.
Chances are the origins of your morning omelet were influenced by a BYU grad. After all, Craig Willardson oversees twenty-five million laying hens and is doing all he can for the incredible, edible egg.
Gregory Cornell has had a front row seat to history. After graduating from BYU in finance in 1985, he joined the U.S. Army and served his first four years in Germany at the end of the Cold War.
A world away from his home in Utah, 1989 master of accountancy graduate Phillip Hutchings is climbing a ladder to global success and sharing his knowledge with Marriott School students.
Sumptuous. Decadent. Delightful. Few words could more adequately describe a box of Lula’s Chocolates. Neatly perched inside each mahogany-colored package await aromatic round crèmes, salted caramels, square truffles, and nuts cloaked with melt-in-your-mouth cocoa.
The idea had always glowed—however faintly—in the back of Steve Oldham’s mind. He jokes about it now, saying that just like every other missionary who returns from Brazil, he came home with dreams of starting his own Brazilian steakhouse.
While many business leaders strive to expand their organization’s reach globally, one Marriott School grad oversees projects that have a more vertical approach—out of this atmosphere, actually.
While California gets much of the attention for up-and-coming technology news, Utah’s own “Silicon Slopes” feature many companies making headlines in the tech world.
According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, employees stay at their jobs for an average of 4.1 years. Like most people, Dennis Malloy never expected to stay at his first auditing firm for more than a few years, let alone thirty, but he found his niche at KPMG and never left.