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Awarded a BYU Homecoming 2023 Alumni Achievement Award, MBA alum Christopher Clason explained how inspired leaders create value in their professional and personal lives.
EMBA program alumnus Shawn Pace finds and meets people’s real-world needs, whether he’s in a Ukrainian refugee camp or an executive board room.
Jeffrey Burningham, adjunct faculty and partner to the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, believes the creative process is pivotal to a fulfilling life.
“Go, Cougs!” is still Adam Vandermyde’s enthusiastic cheer more than a decade after graduating from BYU Marriott’s MBA program in 2008. Through the years, Vandermyde has continued to support his alma mater by cheering for BYU sports and by hiring more than 150 BYU graduates to work at his companies.
Growing up with a father in foreign services, Reneta Bezerra ventured far beyond her home country of Brazil. Now that she has a family of her own, she’s still on the move.
Call it a cruel but fortunate twist of fate: Dan Handy’s companies tend to undergo extreme growth when it comes time for him to hit the books. As an undergrad and a grad student at the Marriott School, the current CEO of Bluehost.com guided two internet start-ups to success, sometimes smashing against current trends with a Ping-Pong paddle.
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.
Randy Judd’s story begins in the Ozarks of Arkansas, where he grew up with no indoor plumbing and went to school in a two-room schoolhouse. His family’s financial situation created what he feels was a truly fortunate opportunity to work full-time during college—a path that led him to the restaurant business.
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.”
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.
Pretty Govindji was always an avid viewer of the Food Network, but when her sons came into the picture, her investment in tasty meals took on new meaning. Dinnertime goals soon centered on organic cooking, and before too long, Govindji realized what she served food on might matter just as much as good fruits and veggies.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
Jamie Shaw first caught the travel bug as an MBA student at the Marriott School. She had never left the country before but decided to participate in a new business study abroad program to several Asian countries. From the first stop, she was smitten.
With wet eyelashes, Reachel walked out of her bedroom and found a stranger sitting in her apartment. The guy casually resting his elbow on the couch was Andrew, a friend of her roommates.
BYU's 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year, Brad Moss, won big at a competition hosted at the New York Stock Exchange.
Lynette Hansen has beaten the odds and exceeded expectations throughout her life, from graduating college early to surviving cancer. Now as a health care professional, she works to turn the odds in favor of the people around her.
Growing up in Central Florida, Erik Jacobsen pretty much knew he wanted to be a cowboy by the time he was twelve or thirteen years old.
Alison Davis-Blake isn’t one for convention. Her quiet demeanor, questioning mind, and drive to excel have always set her apart.
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.
Laura Pearson steps to the line and bounces the fuzzy, yellow ball in a simple cadence. A few seconds later, her team is ahead 15–love. This Marriott School grad may be queen of the court, but she also doubles as a financial analyst at Google.
Good communicators are supposed to work behind the scenes, but sometimes they can't help getting pulled on stage.
Born on a pair of Levi’s in a small trailer and circumcised by a doctor whose surname was Butcher, Daniel Burleigh’s entrance into the world seems like the beginning of a modern-day Charles Dickens tale.
It sounds like something straight out of reality television: a marketing manager for a consumer health care company in Philadelphia switches places with a manager at one of the nation’s top tech companies in Seattle. For four months they work through the challenge of trading places and come away with new insights on marketing. While this premise could be television’s next big hit, the marketing job swap was reality for one BYU alumna.
CIA officials knew they had a mole in their midst—they just couldn’t prove it. The FBI was called in to gather evidence until they finally nabbed Harold James Nicholson, the highest-ranking CIA agent to ever be convicted of espionage. It sounds like a scene ripped from the pages of a Tom Clancy novel, but for Marriott School alum John McClurg, it wasn’t fiction.