Friday, January 25, 2019

Winter 2018: Greetings from the Director


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.