From the Dean's Desk

Guest Column: Kristen Collett-Schmitt

Kristen Collett-Schmitt

Kristen Collett-Schmitt

Monday, 6 February 2023
“Diversity is a richness” and “God, in His loving design, excludes no one.” - Pope Francis
Our daily work in Mendoza is guided by our mission to contribute to the development of ethical business leaders as well as by our vision to create student experiences that are informed by our Catholic character. In this spirit, our Catholic character also invites us to reframe our discussion surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in Mendoza.
There is evidence that students feel a deeper sense of inclusion at institutions where they perceive a stronger institutional commitment to creating a diverse and welcoming campus. This perception could be achieved in many ways, including through visibility of accessible support systems and opportunities that encourage appreciation of diverse perspectives, talents and lived experiences — all of which requires College-level commitment of resources. Fortunately, the Mendoza College of Business already has so many of these support systems and opportunities in place, and we actively signal both internally and externally how diversity and belonging relate to our core mission.
In my last Mendoza Exchange message in the fall, I was just a few months into my new role as the College’s inaugural associate dean for innovation and inclusion. At that time, I committed to offering stronger support of student affinity groups and to programming that highlights diverse experiences and connects Mendoza faculty, staff and students. My goals also focused on coordinating with other Colleges on campus and communicating with the University on our DE&I efforts.
As a College, we’ve made good progress on achieving many of these commitments and goals from the fall semester. For example, we’ve organized events including a faculty/staff discussion on the book “Relationship-Rich Education'' by Peter Felten and Leo Lambert; and a Mendoza-led session of “Show Some Skin,” the student-led initiative that invites members of the Notre Dame community to share narratives about identity and difference. I’ve also been intentional in reaching out to students so they are aware of both my support as a DE&I resource and as a signal of Mendoza’s institutional commitment to student belonging. 
As the spring semester is underway, I am even more encouraged and energized by the potential for meaningful change and advancement in the College given the number of exciting and student-led opportunities that have already taken place or are already planned.
We recently concluded Notre Dame’s eighth annual Walk the Walk Week. Several members of our Mendoza community marked the week together by attending the 2023 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast and Day of Celebration in downtown South Bend and the Staff DE&I Council’s film screening of Hesburgh. On January 26, Mendoza was a proud sponsor of the inaugural “Celebrating Black Excellence Dinner” hosted by Student Government. Not only did several members of our community experience a moving keynote address from Derrick Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, but we also recognized the outstanding accomplishments of Black students, staff and faculty at Notre Dame, many of whom we are blessed to work with and teach every day here in Mendoza. A complete list of Mendoza nominees and winners can be found here.
Registration is now open for the 2023 DE&I Grow the Good in Business Case Competition. Building on the success of last year’s inaugural competition, we will open this formative DE&I experience to all undergraduate and graduate students in Mendoza this year. The case challenges students to create solutions to improve access to and quality of financial services in underserved markets using the business acumen they've learned in Mendoza. You can find more information about the competition here and below. Please invite the students you engage with to register for the competition and attend our exciting kickoff event on Friday (February 10).
February and March mark Black History Month and Women’s History Month, respectively. Throughout both months, we will recognize the contributions and achievements of Black faculty, staff and students and women from our own Mendoza community on digital signage throughout Mendoza and Stayer. Additionally, in February, Mendoza will be a proud supporter of Black History Week 2023: “Building for Tomorrow,” which is sponsored by the Black Graduate in Management Club (BGM). The week will include opportunities for showcasing Pan African heritage, as well as professional development and networking.
Black History Week 2023 will be extremely powerful in how it will showcase the excellence of Black students across the entire campus of Notre Dame, as BGM’s collaborators include the African Students Association, Black Student Association, National Society of Black Engineers, Black Graduate Student Association, Black Law Students Association, Black Business Association of Notre Dame, Black Faculty and Staff Association, and the Multicultural Student Programs and Studies.
What else is ahead? Stay tuned for more information on other Mendoza-sponsored, student-led DE&I initiatives on campus, such as Lunar New Year in February, the MBAA’s Diversity and Heritage Ball in March and Holi later this spring.
The fact that the large majority of spring DE&I initiatives are led by Mendoza students reflects their recognition of our strong support systems and institutional commitment to a diverse and welcoming campus community for all. I am grateful for the support of so many faculty and staff who have walked beside me through my outreach efforts to students and also committed resources to student initiatives. I acknowledge your own daily efforts to strengthen our inclusive College community. I also want to thank Kara Palmer and the Mendoza Staff DE&I Council for a close collaboration.
I hope to see you at many of our events this spring, and know that I welcome a conversation or your feedback at any time, whether it be in person or through our suggestion boxes. 
In Notre Dame,
Kristen Collett-Schmitt
Associate Dean for Innovation and Inclusion
Associate Teaching Professor of Finance

New Research

Dean Martijn Cremers

Dean Martijn Cremers

Monday, 30 January 2023
I’m pleased to feature a new installment of our Research Roundup, which includes faculty research recently published in or accepted by top academic journals:
Robert Battalio, Professor of Finance
The Cost of Exposing Large Institutional Orders to Electronic Liquidity Providers (Management Science)
The research begins by showing that relationships between high-frequency traders (HFTs) and brokers allow brokers to avoid paying exchange fees for small pieces of large institutional orders. The researchers conclude by demonstrating that this type of routing strategy allows HFTs to become aware that large order is being worked in the market and to use this knowledge to engage in profitable trading strategies that increase overall trading costs for the large institutional order.
John Donovan, Assistant Professor of Accountancy
Financial Reporting and Entrepreneurial Finance: Evidence from Equity Crowdfunding (Management Science)
The study examines the role of accounting in entrepreneurial finance and provides evidence that greater financial statement disclosure increases capital raised through equity crowdfunding. The research also documents that financial reporting is incrementally more important in raising entrepreneurial capital when the firm has longer historical operations, during periods of greater macroeconomic uncertainty, and when complemented by other sources of non-financial disclosure.
Adam Wowak, Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of Management
John Busenbark, Assistant Professor of Management & Organization
How do employees react when their CEO speaks out? Intra- and extra-firm implications of CEO socio-political activism (Administrative Science Quarterly)
CEOs are increasingly taking public stances in societal debates. The research investigates the influence of such CEO activism on employees’ attitudes and behaviors, particularly their engagement with the firm and with the ideology underpinning the CEO’s stance. The researchers find that employees’ reactions to activism hinge on the alignment between their own values and the CEO’s stance. When they agree, employees respond positively, strengthening their commitment to the firm and support for the CEO’s ideological position. When the stance runs counter to employees’ values, they pull away, experiencing diminished commitment and support for the CEO’s cause.
Katie Wowak, Robert & Sara Lumpkins Associate Professor of Business Analytics
John Lalor, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Sririam Somanchi, Assistant Professor of Business Analytics
Corey Angst, Jack and Joan McGraw Family Collegiate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Business analytics in healthcare: Past, present, and future trends (Manufacturing & Service Operations Management)
The researchers provide a working definition of “business analytics in healthcare,” which had been absent from the literature. The paper leverages a topic modeling technique and network analysis to provide insight into how business analytics in healthcare research changes over time, and new opportunities for research. It provides an in-depth analysis of articles from the UT Dallas journal list published between 2007 and 2020. The study also analyzes another 6,515 articles from PubMed via the research team’s interactive article analysis web application tool, which is publicly available, over the same time period.
Joonhyuk Yang, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Digitization and Flexibility: Evidence from the South Korean Movie (Market Marketing Science)
This paper studies the transition from 35 mm to digital technology in the movie exhibition industry. Once digital movies were broadly available, theaters created increased product variety during less popular time slots on weekdays while offering more showings of consumers’ favorite movies during peak demand on weekend evenings. Overall, the research shows that digitization of movies and projection technology creates flexibility in scheduling, which seems to allow theaters to better respond to consumer demand.
Thank you to Robert, John D., Adam, John B., Katie, John L., Sririam, Corey and Joonhyuk for your important research contributions. My congratulations to all.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

Guest Column: Craig Crossland

Craig Crossland

Craig Crossland

Monday, 23 January 2023
Hi everyone,
Happy New Year! I hope that 2023 has been treating you well so far and that your holiday break was largely free of blizzards, weather bombs and other forms of meteorological nastiness. I’m honored to be able to contribute this Mendoza Exchange Guest Column. The last time I contributed one of these was back in mid-July 2022, just after I had taken on a new role as the associate dean for academic programs here at Mendoza. It’s been an exciting, energizing and inspiring six months for me.
In my previous column, I mentioned that my own priorities this year are “community and efficiency.” Now that I’ve got a bit of time under my belt in this role, I’m in a better position to comment on Mendoza’s instructional engine as a whole, and what it is that these priorities are directed toward. In particular, I’d like to highlight the scope, breadth and importance of our College’s instructional activities.
All of us contribute to the College in our own specific ways, but it’s also helpful to take a step back from time to time and look at the big picture. For example, in Fall 2022 alone, 150-plus Mendoza faculty taught more than 400 separate class sessions to around 13,000 total students. These classes were taught across five undergraduate majors, seven undergraduate minors, an honors program, a dozen graduate programs and two Ph.D. programs.
With our classes being a mix of full-semester and half-semester, this works out to approximately 9,000 (!) individual class sessions, and hundreds of thousands of faculty-student interactions. If we add in all the other staff-student interactions and faculty-student interactions outside the classroom, the magnitude of what’s involved starts to become clear. 
These many, many student interactions – individually and collectively – help to guide, influence and shape students’ experiences at Notre Dame, and, subsequently, their worldviews and even core identities for years and decades after they leave campus. The Notre Dame alumni base is known as one of the most supportive and engaged in the world, and this isn’t attributable to just a few football games, a big mural and a pretty campus. It is a direct outcome of the passion and dedication of our faculty and staff.
Higher education, and especially business education, is a popular subject in the media, with commentators approaching this from a wide range of perspectives and with a wide range of agendas. One of those that I personally take most umbrage with is the contention that business education is a soulless, formulaic, transactional relationship whereby students simply turn up and exchange their or their parents’ hard-earned cash for a standardized credential.
At Mendoza, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Although I don’t have any problem with return on investment being part of the conversation (especially with some of the record career outcome data we’ve seen across our programs over the last few months), an exclusive focus on this measure completely misses the point.
There are around 4,000 degree-granting institutions of higher education in the United States, and many estimates place Notre Dame comfortably in the top 1% of these institutions. Our elite academic programs – and the individualized experiences and opportunities that characterize these programs on a day-by-day basis – lie at the heart of who we are and remain a core driver of the difference that our graduates go on to make in the world. We grow the good in business here at Mendoza in many ways, but especially through our academic programs.
It goes without saying that this wouldn’t be remotely possible without the hard work and dedication of hundreds of people in the College. Although I’m unfortunately not able to thank everyone by name, I’d like to take a moment to recognize those who I’ve been working closest with in my current role and who continue to share their wisdom and expertise with me every day.
First, though, I’ll humbly request that you consider viewing our College’s current organizational structure in a slightly different way. We often refer to the “matrix” structure here at Mendoza, visually represented by a lattice where the academic programs (e.g., MSM, MBA, MNA) are on the horizontal axis and the functions (e.g., Admissions, Careers, Student Services) are on the vertical axis, with the nodes of the lattice being the intersection of programs and functions.
Although this does partly describe our approach, I’ve come to believe that Mendoza program activities are perhaps better viewed as a “cube,” where the two-dimensional lattice becomes a three-dimensional structure (thanks to Joe Sweeney for championing this idea). This third dimension represents the departments, and especially the directors of undergraduate studies (DUSs) and department chairs, who work closely with both the academic programs and the functional teams. The chairs and DUSs are responsible for a range of critical roles, including solving the Rubik’s cube of class scheduling every semester, ensuring academic rigor and continuous curricula improvement, and serving as the primary conduit for faculty.
To that end, please let me thank the members of the “cube” who serve as leaders of the Mendoza Programs enterprise:
  • Dean’s Cabinet: Dean Martijn Cremers, Kristen Collett-Schmitt, Ken Kelley, Rob Kelly and Kara Palmer
  • Staff Directors: Tracy Biggs, Brian Connelly, Carol Elliott, Chris Fruehwirth, Christine Gramhofer, Morgan McCoy, Megan Piersma, Ryan Retartha, John Rooney, Natalie Sargent and María Stutsman y Márquez
  • Academic Directors: Chris Adkins, Gianna Bern, Seth Berry, Mike Chapple, Brandon Erlacher, Craig Iffland, Angela Logan, Amanda McKendree, Kris Muir, Sharif Nijim, Jim Otteson, Jim Seida, Katherine Spiess, Joe Sweeney and Andy Wendelborn
  • Directors of Undergraduate Studies: Colleen Creighton, Jen Cronin, Mitch Olsen, Jason Reed and Jen Waddell
  • Department Chairs: Brad Badertscher, Shane Corwin, Rob Easley, Shankar Ganesan and Ann Tenbrunsel
More generally, if you’re reading this and you’re helping to make our academic programming even stronger, thank you! Good luck with the spring semester. I look forward to being in touch again in the summer.
Sincerely,
Craig
Craig Crossland
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Programs

Welcome Back!

Dean Martijn Cremers

Dean Martijn Cremers

Tuesday, 17 January 2023
Happy 2023 and welcome back! I hope that you had a good break. I’m looking forward to a great spring semester.
Thursday (January 19) is the beginning of Notre Dame’s Walk the Walk Week (WTWW), a week-long series of campus events aimed at helping each of us consider our role in making Notre Dame and Mendoza more welcoming and inclusive.
I encourage you to attend the showing of Hesburgh at 5 p.m. on Wednesday (January 18) in the Jordan Auditorium. The documentary focuses on the lasting impact of Father Ted on diversity at Notre Dame, the country and the world. The Mendoza Staff Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council sponsored the event, which includes pizza and a panel discussion. (See more information below.)
As we prepare to start classes, I highlight some of the new undergraduate courses offered this spring (a complete list can be found here). Collectively, they showcase our commitment to the curricular innovation made possible by our new Undergraduate Business Core, which significantly reduced the number of required courses to allow for a more flexible, customized education:
MGTO 30535 Entrepreneurship: Go To Market (Sam Miller)
With an emphasis on digital marketing strategies, the Go To Market course will provide hands-on experience in designing and testing market strategies that generate real evidence that’s critical for entrepreneurial success.
MGTO 40612/5 Applied Impact Consulting (Wendy Angst)
In Applied Impact Consulting (AIC) students work as global consultants directly with clients on projects to build an Impact Portfolio to highlight the global impact that we as a University are having on the world’s most pressing problems.
BES 30310 Business and the Common Good (Dave O’Connor and Mary Hirschfeld)
This gateway seminar for the new Minor in Business and the Common Good focuses on the place of wealth and commerce in a well-ordered life, both for the individual and the community, with a special interest in Catholic social teaching.
ACCT 30160 Sustainability Accounting & Reporting and Impact Investing (Sandra Vera-Munoz)
Students will learn about the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ecosystem, including factors influencing stakeholders’ demand for ESG information. (This is not a new course but it is now open to more students.)
ITAO 30310 AI for Good (Georgina Curto Rex)
In this course, students explore the state of the art in AI business development and its ethical implications in relation to current global societal and environmental challenges.
ITAO 40570 Urban Analytics (Jeff Kai)
Students will master popular modern statistical methods and be equipped with hands-on skills in urban data analytics.
The new courses reflect the efforts of many faculty and staff members in the College, from the faculty to the chairs and department directors of Undergraduate Studies. I especially want to thank Associate Dean Craig Crossland, Academic Director Amanda McKendree and Assistant Dean Andy Wendelborn and his team for their dedication to providing our students with a learning experience worthy of this great University.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn 

Merry Christmas!

Dean Martijn Cremers

Dean Martijn Cremers

Monday, 19 December 2022
As this fall semester draws to a close, I know that all of us are ready for a much-needed break. The end of the semester is one of the busiest times of the year. As grades are handed in and our offices close for the year, I hope that you will have time in the coming days to relax, recharge and enjoy your families and friends.
I was glad to see how our Mendoza Atrium has become a gathering and studying space for our students, and I’m grateful for our facilities and operations team who created a beautiful environment, with the Christmas trees, the Nativity scene and the fireplace.
In a recent message, Pope Francis wrote about the Christmas tree and Nativity. The tree with its lights, he writes, “reminds us of Jesus who comes to illuminate our darkness,” and that we, like trees, need to be rooted in order to be steadfast amid difficulties, uncertainty and fear. The Christmas tree, therefore, is a symbol of being rooted in Jesus Christ.
The Nativity scene invites us to contemplate the “smallness” and humility of God who chose to be born in poverty — a proscription against the commercialism and busyness that are all too often a part of Christmas. Pope Francis reminds us,
“In its genuine poverty, the Nativity scene helps us rediscover the true richness of Christmas, and purify ourselves of the many aspects that pollute the Christmas landscape. Simple and familiar, the Nativity scene recalls a Christmas that is different from the consumerist and commercial Christmas: it is something else. It reminds us how good it is for us to cherish moments of silence and prayer during our days, which are often overwhelmed by frenzy.”
As we gather with loved ones this Christmas, may the traditions of the tree and the Nativity — or “roots and contemplation” — help us to rediscover the joys of faith, peace and prayer.
I am so very thankful for your hard work and caring efforts on behalf of the College throughout the year. I hope you will have a wonderful break, and may we look forward to the New Year with refreshed spirits and renewed hope.
Merry Christmas and best wishes for 2023!
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

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