By: Kalle Lyytinen
A new year, 2019 has begun and I am celebrating my 10th
year as the Director of the program. As Director, I have met and worked with 15
different cohorts of this program. At the same time, we are midway through our
24th academic year in the program and are preparing for the 25th
anniversary. We just had our January residency with typical cold Cleveland
weather which everybody learns to deal with during the course of the program.
We gracefully overcame weather-related challenges!
During this spring we will continue our efforts to compete
better in an increasingly crowded marketplace of executive DBA programs (there
are 45 of them just in North America). To address this challenge, we started
our capital campaign, continue to invest in DM community efforts and work on
the proper and sharper marketing message with Weatherhead’s marketing team. We
plan to implement changes to our website and its content and invest more on
Internet searches and online marketing.
Another issue we seek to address is the desire to change the
degree name as expressed by a portion of the DM alumni and student community to
the established and ‘standard’ label of DBA. You have received by now the
invitation to express your opinions and justifications for changing the degree
name and to vote in favor or against it. We hope that we can reach over half of
our alumni (approximately 145 alumni) so that we can say after the vote that
whatever the outcome, we had at least half of the alumni express their opinion
on this important matter.
We will announce the results of the alumni vote in February
and then have a DM faculty meeting to vote on the name change. If the majority
vote is in favor, we are hopeful we will get the proposal for the name change
to the University board and administrators by mid-March so that the University
Board of Trustees can make a decision in the summer. If enough backing is
offered at each stage, by 2020 when the program celebrates 25 years, the name
change will be official. If the decision is positive we will start sending out
documents to all who want to use the new degree name. Our decision has been that this change is not
obligatory. If you want to keep your title as DM or EDM, you can do so!
Finally, I want to thank everyone on the alumni committee who has overseen the
process for their help and support.
Mark your calendar for our 25th year anniversary
planned for April 24-25, 2020! If you have any suggestions for the program or
want to be involved in planning or organizing the program please contact either
Beth Fitz-Gibbon (pathfox820@gmail.com)
or Joann Farrell Quinn jfquinn@jfqconsulting.com.