From the Dean's Desk

Guest Column: Tim Bohling

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 12 October 2020
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Strategic Planning and Purposeful Progress
With the fall season underway, our College is actively advancing through our annual strategic planning process. Throughout the month of October, each of the graduate program units and functional specialty units will review the progress made on the strategic choices from last year’s planning process and clarify and declare the path forward to continue to make purposeful progress toward advancing the Catholic mission and vision of our College.
I’d like to convey deep appreciation and congratulations to each of the Marketing and Graduate Enrollment team members and our colleagues across the College who played an essential role in helping to lay a very solid foundation that we will build from going forward. Reflecting on the progress achieved since our Marketing and Graduate Enrollment team was formed illuminates the strength of our collective unit. The team has implemented an innovative marketing and graduate enrollment model to elevate the brand reputation of our College, driving purposeful enrollment growth and tight alignment across the enrollment journey, enhancing the entire student experience.
Achievement of performance metrics has been stellar, far exceeding our organization’s goals. Today, Mendoza has the largest number of enrolled graduate students than in any of the prior 10 years, reversing year-over-year declines, while achieving substantial gains in key class profile and diversity metrics. The team’s laser focus on delivering an exceptional student experience across each stage of the enrollment journey is central to our multi-year transformation plan.
The strategy employed includes the following three key components:
  • Defining and activating our new brand strategy that powerfully conveys our meaningfully distinct value proposition to Grow the Good in Business™.
  • Deploying a Smarter Marketing and Recruitment Playbook that delivers highly personalized communications across the student enrollment journey.
  • Implementing an integrated team organizational structure that focuses on deeply understanding and seamlessly operating across each phase of the enrollment journey.
As we look to deploy the Marketing and Graduate Enrollment strategic plan going forward, we will be guided by the following priorities:
  • Powerfully present our brand distinctively and authentically across all stakeholder touchpoints.
  • Build and enroll a community of inspired learners committed to become the best version of themselves and to Grow the Good in Business.
  • Apply the art and science of demand management in order to create and deepen relationships across both digital and physical stakeholder engagements.
  • Operationalize a data-driven integrated operating model that illuminates the efficacy of our investments and drives a go-to-market model that senses and responds to optimize performance.
  • Attract, retain and upskill the best talent in the industry while continuing to live the Notre Dame values.
While these are indeed unprecedented times, I’m confident that together with the exceptional talent here we will continue to successfully deploy our strategic plan priorities and make purposeful progress advancing the mission of this incredibly special College.
In Notre Dame,
Tim Bohling
Chief Marketing and Graduate Enrollment Officer
Teaching Professor of Marketing

Tom Mendoza Presents

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 5 October 2020
Many of you had the opportunity last fall to hear Tom Mendoza (ND ’73) speak as part of the 2019 Dean’s Lecture Series. I received many comments about how engaging and inspiring Tom was, especially in talking about ethical leadership in the tech industry.
I’m excited to announce that we are launching a new series — this time, hosted by Tom, who during his 24-year tenure with tech startup NetApp rose to the position of vice chairman and was considered instrumental in the development of the company’s corporate culture and its global recognition as one of Forbes’ “Great Places to Work.”
Tom Mendoza Presents will feature Tom’s conversations with top business executives about their journey to success, what they learned along the way in forging great companies that have positive social and environmental impact as well as financial performance, and their advice to students and professionals as they build their careers. During this academic year, the events will be held as webinars facilitated by ND Studios.
I encourage you to join the webinars, as well as to ask your students to attend for those who teach. It’s a great opportunity to hear first-hand from leaders at the forefront of tech investing and innovation.
The speakers include:
October 16, 11 a.m. EST: Carl Eschenbach, partner at Sequoia Capital investing, which is considered one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firm. Eschenbach focuses on infrastructure technologies, cloud and SaaS investments. He is a director of Armis, Aurora, Cohesity, Gong, Palo Alto Networks, Snowflake, ThousandEyes, UiPath, Workday and Zoom. Eschenbach has 30 years of high-tech industry experience including infrastructure software, networking, telephony and storage.
November 6, 1 p.m. EST: Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of computer networking company Arista Networks, who is responsible for Arista’s business and strategic leadership in cloud networking. Ullal led the company to a historic and successful IPO in June 2014 and its entry into the S&P 500 in 2018. With more than three decades of networking and executive experience, she is the recipient of numerous awards including Barron’s 2018 “World’s Best CEOs” and Fortune’s 2019 “Top 20 Business Persons.”
You can register for the webinars (and find more information) at Tom Mendoza Presents or by contacting Jean Meade (Jean.Meade@nd.edu).
Christmas Celebrations
On another topic, I want to let you know that, unfortunately, we will not be holding the annual Mendoza Christmas Party for faculty and staff this year due to safety considerations regarding social distancing and large gatherings as well as continuing budget restrictions. I know this is deeply disappointing. The occasion is a cherished Mendoza tradition that we all — including myself and my family — very much enjoy. 
I’m glad that the University announced that all staff members are being given six additional paid holiday days, which will begin with a paid day off the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (November 25) followed later by an extended Christmas break from Monday, December 21, through Tuesday, January 5. Even though we won’t be able to celebrate as a community as we have in the past, I hope these additional days will allow you to rest and enjoy time with your loved ones during the holidays.
I echo the words of provost Marie Lynn Miranda and executive vice president Shannon Cullinan — you have worked tirelessly and with amazing commitment during the past six months. I’m thankful for your heroic efforts.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn 

Faculty research update

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 28 September 2020
Our faculty continues to publish research in top-tier journals at a robust rate. I am pleased to highlight several faculty members’ recent success:

Peter Kelly
Assistant Professor of Finance
Earnings Announcement Return Extrapolation
Review of Accounting Studies (Forthcoming)
The researchers show that extrapolative beliefs are an important ingredient for explaining return patterns and investor behavior around earnings announcements (EAs). Stocks expected to have high EA returns according to their new extrapolation measure experience predictable increases in prices before EAs and predictable decreases afterward (consistent with over-extrapolation). Additionally, the research offers evidence that individual and institutional investors hold extrapolative beliefs before earnings announcements based on past earnings announcement returns.
Katie Wowak
Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
"Hiding in the Herd: The Product Recall Clustering Phenomenon"
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (Forthcoming)
The research finds that product recalls in the automobile industry occur in clusters, which are a collection of recalls within close temporal proximity in which a leading recall (the first recall in a cluster) by one firm excites following recalls (subsequent recalls in a cluster) by competitor firms. Over a 48-year period (1966-2013), 73% of recalls announced during that time occurred in recall clusters. Additionally, leading recalls are associated with as high as a 67% larger stock market penalty than following recalls.
Ahmed Abbasi
Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
"TheoryOn: A Design Framework and System for Unlocking Behavioral Knowledge Through Ontology Learning"
MIS Quarterly
Analysts and researchers are increasingly dealing with a data deluge that impacts coverage and precision while retrieving information. When manually processing large volumes of scientific research and/or technical documents, these knowledge inaccessibility and inaccuracy issues are especially pronounced. Building on recent advances in text analytics, the researchers designed and developed a machine learning framework to aid analysts and researchers in their information seeking process. Through a series of experiments, they show that the proposed framework can significantly improve the quality, completeness and speed of information retrieved by expert users. This work is part of a research stream on human-centered text analytics that recently won the INFORMS Design Science Award.
Mike Mannor
John F. O'Shaughnessy Associate Professor of Family Enterprise
Management & Organization
"Keep Your Eye on the Ball or the Field? Exploring the Performance Implications of Executive Strategic Attention"
Academy of Management Journal (August 2020)
For CEOs managing complex organizations in a rapidly changing world, it can be hard to decide how to focus their strategic attention. This research, a collaboration between Mike Mannor and a former Notre Dame MBA student, finds that performance is strongest when CEOs adapt the breadth of their attention to align with the quantity and quality of opportunities in the current market, and their organization’s recently demonstrated ability to convert opportunities into results.
Yixing Chen
Assistant Professor of Marketing
"Improving Cancer Outreach Effectiveness Through Targeting and Economic Assessments"
Journal of Marketing (May 2020)
What should health care institutions do to boost cancer screening rates while saving more money for the health care system? Combining machine learning and a large-scale field experiment, this NIH-sponsored study recently published in the Journal of Marketing develops a personalized outreach program that can simultaneously improve liver cancer screening rates by up to 24 percentage points and return on outreach program by up to 96%.
Please join me in congratulating these colleagues contributing new knowledge to their fields and advancing the reputation of Mendoza through their research.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn 

Guest column: Chris Fruehwirth

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 21 September 2020
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The changing IT world
This past year has been a blessing and maybe a curse for IT. The blessing is that the technologies we provide have been more utilized than ever before (which is exciting for us). The curse is that demand for our services is at an all-time high.
The pandemic has caused our College and the world to rapidly adapt to a pace of constant change and embrace technology. For many of us, this started with the March transition to online teaching and resumed in August, where we were utilizing the dual delivery technology in the classrooms. Mendoza IT and I have learned that Mendoza College and the Notre Dame community have many very resilient faculty, staff and students in these turbulent times. My team has witnessed this resiliency in many situations since the start of this online journey. We know that technology plays a vital role in navigating these challenging times, but none of us forgets that people matter the most.
When looking back at this past year, there are a few IT items to highlight. In March, moving online involved Mendoza IT ensuring technology readiness of faculty, staff and students. The move was composed of technology training sessions around Zoom and Panopto presented by Nick Page, an individual technology equipment readiness review and the creation of support documentation on the Mendoza Exchange website. Some of our front line IT support staff who answered numerous calls and emails and who provided consultations for our faculty, staff and students included Ryan Krasyk, Ryan Hudson, Hank Gettinger, Jerry Kickul, David Hardman and David Yeh.
Moving into preparation for the fall academic year, Mendoza IT (and our colleagues at OIT) had numerous classroom preparations to accomplish in a reasonably short amount of time. Delays in the IT supply chains for critical AV equipment such as microphones and cameras almost hindered classrooms from being ready. The Mendoza IT members of Jim Spencer, Jeremy May, Frank Mark, Nick Page and our new part-time hire Kyle Way spent long hours making sure that our classrooms provided the optimal dual delivery experience for our faculty and students. Shortly before the classrooms were released back into our faculty’s hands, M&O chair Craig Crossland facilitated and led a very informative dual delivery classroom demo for all of the College, which contributed to our faculty readiness for the upcoming academic year.
All the while, another essential effort for the College was going on, which was the construction of the B003 classroom in Stayer. This classroom was completed in a tight timeframe to ensure that the residential MSBA program had highly functional classroom space for its new students. This project wouldn’t have been possible without our faculty partnerships, including Scott Nestler, Fred Nwanganga, Sharif Nijim and Rob Easley. Our two project managers, Zara Osterman and Diego Wang, were another vital component for this IT project. These two made sure the vendor kept to the tight timeline and delivered a fully ready classroom for the first day of class.
Finally, there are two last efforts I would like to mention. First, Mendoza IT recently accomplished launching the Virtual Municipal Finance Workshop 2020, working with our very own Professor Paul Gao. From Mendoza IT, both Minhee Myung and David Yeh were critical in getting the technology components of this effort off the ground. Tami Springer from Faculty Support also stepped out of her typical role and spent time working with Mendoza IT cleaning up our customer relationship management system (Salesforce) that supports a variety of MCOB business processes.
In closing, I would like to thank all the faculty and staff for their patience, support and understanding during these last few months. As I have highlighted many different people throughout this column, I will leave you with the following quote:
“It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people."
Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple.
With gratitude,
Chris Fruehwirth
Director of Mendoza IT

The next level

Martijn Cremers

Martijn Cremers

Monday, 14 September 2020
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I recently participated in a livestream interview with Lou Nanni, vice president for University Relations. During the interview, Lou asked me about my strategic vision for the College; specifically, he asked, what are my plans to take the College to “the next level”?
It’s an important question, which I interpret as asking where the College could be in five to 10 years. It’s also a challenging question, as we necessarily need to be very focused on managing the current changes and disruptions due to the pandemic, which makes it harder to continue to “elevate, cooperate and integrate”; i.e., to also work on our strategic vision.
I will mention a few of our strategic initiatives to advance our mission through initiatives centered on the imperative to Grow the Good in Business — to contribute, cooperate and compete with a view that centers on serving others, especially those who have the greatest needs:
Undergraduate Scholars and Honors Program: The aim is to elevate our undergraduate program by further challenging our most academically gifted and academically ambitious students in the Scholars Program by offering honors sections of existing courses as well as (mostly new) honors courses, where both honors sections and new honors courses offer accelerated and advanced content. The Honors Program would further allow students to write a thesis supervised by a faculty member. Associate Dean Jim Leady is taking the lead on working toward developing plans for both programs. We hope to launch the Scholars Program in the 2021-2022 academic year.
Business Analytics: We will continue to integrate analytics throughout our curricula. For undergraduates, the ITAO team of Sriram Somanchi, Fred Nwanganga and Xiaojing Duan with assistance from Rob Easley and Bob Lewandowski has been working hard to create a new course required for all business majors, Fundamentals of Coding. The course will give students a basic level of understanding that in turn allows us to integrate analytics and coding in all of their subsequent courses. Although I didn’t talk about this specifically in the interview, we have the same goal to integrate analytics throughout our graduate programs curricula. For example, we added a new data analytics concentration as well as a host of new accounting-focused data analytics courses to our MSA program.
Frontlines: As you know, we recently received a significant gift from Ken and Susan Meyer that will allow us to expand the Meyer Business on the Frontlines Program. The gift allows us to offer the Frontlines experience to all Notre Dame MBA students, as well as to pilot a domestic version this year, Frontlines in America. The team of Viva Bartkus, Joe Sweeney and Kelly Rubey also are creating a shorter term Frontlines Engagements course.
COVID-19 has been a challenge. At the same time, these past months have helped us recognize that we're here for a purpose, to work together, to help each other and to teach and serve our students. You have brought your “A” game! We’ve learned a lot, and because you have been willing to really step up and work together, we've been very resilient. It's times like this that show that we are very much a strong community, and I actually think that through the great adversity and the mistakes and the pivots and the changes and asking more and more of you, of all of our faculty, staff and students, we've become an even stronger community.
Lou also asked me what my first year serving as dean has been like and whether there have been any surprises. To the last question, I can answer, YES. A minor surprise is that I get way more emails than I could have imagined. More importantly, I have been surprised with how patient, gracious and generous you all have been with me as I started and continue in this new role, even as I’m making mistakes and learning, and I'm so grateful for all the help that I continue to receive.
In Notre Dame,
Martijn

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