On the evening of October 4, 2006, the inaugural class of Back in Business: Invest in Your Return, Tuck's response to the challenge of workforce reentry, gathered in Stell Hall for the program's opening reception. All 41 participants were highly educated, widely experienced, and intensely motivated. They had signed on to this new program to facilitate their reentry into the business world at a level appropriate to their achievements, and their excitement was palpable.
"These are pioneering people in a pioneering program," said Professor Anant Sundaram, faculty director for Tuck Executive Education and faculty co-director of the Back in Business program. "There is so much energy here and so much hope."
Back in Business grew out of Senior Associate Dean Robert Hansen's chance encounter with Hans Morris D'80, chief financial officer of Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking, at a meeting of the Dartmouth Leadership Council. What began as a general discussion of executive education programs soon turned to mutual concerns about the exodus from business of leadership-track women, who were dropping out of the workforce in growing numbers.
A 2004 survey conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy found that 37 percent of the 2,443 women surveyed—all of whom had advanced degrees or high-honors undergraduate degrees—had left work voluntarily at some point in their careers. The survey also found that while 93 percent of those who had dropped out wanted to resume their careers, only 30 percent of this group had returned to full-time professional jobs.
To Morris, this was a familiar story. "We've gotten really good at hiring smart, well-educated, hardworking women for demanding jobs," he says, "but at some point, many want out, and we need to become better at keeping them." And keeping them—or bringing them back—is becoming a priority in corporate America.
With the impending retirement of the first wave of baby boomers, businesses anticipate a shortage of well-qualified high-level executives to replace them. "In any firm, there are a certain number of go-to people who manage teams well and just go out and get the job done," says Morris. Women with demonstrated ability who, for family and other reasons, have temporarily abandoned successful careers are an untapped repository of these critical skills.
In a series of follow-ups to their first conversation, Hansen and Morris concluded that Tuck was in an ideal position to identify, recruit, and retrain such women and that Citigroup, as lead corporate sponsor, would benefit from prime access to this sought-after pool of potential employees.
WHAT THE CUSTOMER WANTS
Developing a new program is not unlike starting a small business, says Hansen: first you need to find out what the customer wants. So Tuck convened two focus groups, one in New York City and one in Boston, asking female MBAs from Tuck and similar institutions who had left the workforce what would facilitate their successful return. The answers were clear: updated skill sets; greater comfort with analytics and technology; guidance in marketing themselves, especially in light of their nonlinear résumés; and a boost in their confidence, which had been diminished by their time away from the business world.
These responses formed the matrix of the program that Faculty Co-Director Constance Helfat, J. Brian Quinn Professor in Technology and Strategy, and Sundaram set out to create. There were no models to work from. Other business schools were starting to offer their own programs to address so-called off-ramping, but these were limited in scope (one-day workshops, for example) or restricted to graduates of the host institution. Tuck was prepared to undertake a greater commitment.
Helfat and Sundaram knew that a simple review of core business functions would not prepare participants for a swiftly changing environment. "People who've been away from business for a significant period might not know about developments that have taken place over the past 5 to 10 years," says Helfat. Analytics have come to play an increasingly pivotal role in business affairs. Strategy is now more informed by analytical frameworks, in combination with numbers and spreadsheets, than by intuition. The traditional rules of accounting and disclosure have been upended by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. And the inexorable advance of technology continues to challenge even those with no disconnects in their résumés.
With these concerns in mind, Sundaram and Helfat designed a comprehensive program of classes, workshops, lectures, team projects, career development sessions, and networking opportunities. They devoted half the curriculum to business skills (current developments in strategy, economics, finance and accounting, marketing, operations and supply chain management, global transactions) and apportioned the other half equally to leadership and individual development training (management communication, self-assessment, technology labs, project presentation) and facilitating career reentry (résumé workshops, career panels, mock interviews, and networking events).
Program sessions ranging from formal academic classes and fireside chats with faculty and other experts to roundtables with potential employers were grouped into four modules, lasting two to four days each, over a two-month period. This schedule was intended to make participation feasible for people with significant family responsibilities and allow time for course preparation.
The second and third modules were planned for New York—a convenient site for the speakers, consultants, panelists, and sponsors attending formal and informal events and otherwise interacting with participants. The opening and closing modules would take place at Tuck, on the theory that participants would find Hanover an appealing getaway destination where they could focus their attention on the learning experience. Helfat and Sundaram believed that the sustained intensity of all four modules would promote close-knit and ongoing relationships among participants and faculty.
BROAD PERSPECTIVES
Once the course design was complete, the program directors convened a meeting of the program faculty. The room was filled. "We wanted to involve as many as possible to present a broad range of perspectives," says Helfat.
In all, 14 professors signed on. In addition to the faculty directors (Helfat in strategy and Sundaram in finance), the roster included Robert Hansen, in finance and economics; Kusum Ailawadi, in marketing; Ella L.J. Edmondson Bell, in organizational behavior; Andrew Bernard, in economics; Leonard Greenhalgh, in negotiation; and Vijay Govindarajan, in strategy and international business.
The significant participation of core faculty proved to be one of the program's greatest draws. "I can't believe I'm getting the chance to learn from people like Anant and Connie and the others," said one participant.
As with any new business, a critical step in coming to market was pricing the product. Tuck estimated that program costs such as faculty, food, lodging, and administrative services would amount to $12,000 per person—high for many in the target population. By supporting the program, Citigroup and other corporate sponsors—a group that came to include Lehman Brothers, Deloitte & Touche, and American Express—effectively reduced program costs for participants by half. Under Hans Morris's leadership, lead sponsor Citigroup also provided significant in-kind services, lending its New York City headquarters for the program's launch event and hosting parts of modules two and three.
Tuck made it clear to all corporate sponsors that career support, including a commitment to recruit program graduates, was a condition of participation. It was a condition the sponsors were delighted to accept. "The war for talent is heating up," says Program Manager Corrie Martin, "and these are great people who are interested in working for them. In addition to their work background, they've been running nonprofits and school boards, managing large budgets."
Between the April 10 launch and the October 4 start date, a program brochure, website, and articles in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other targeted media outlets roused considerable interest. The organizers had anticipated an entering class of 20, but so many well-qualified candidates applied that 41 were admitted to the program.
The plethora of talented applicants was not the only surprise. Back in Business had been explicitly designed to meet the needs of female MBAs in their late 30s and early 40s who had left promising careers to care for their children. "We hadn't anticipated the diversity of the people who would be interested," says Helfat.
Members of the program's charter class of '06 ranged in age from 36 to 60. Some had dropped out to care for aging parents or ill spouses rather than children. Others had left seeking a different balance in their lives. Only half were MBAs; the rest had law degrees or other equivalent credentials or experience. Tuck's Online Bridge ProgramSM, another of the school's innovative offerings, was available to those needing additional help to get up to speed. Some, as anticipated, were looking for positions with less travel or more flexibility, while others were eager to rejoin the 24-7 world. "If I don't do it now, it will become that much harder later," said one participant. And some in all the above categories were men.
The Back in Business co-directors were gratified to find that the program they had planned so carefully was able to deliver as promised to a much broader group than they had envisioned.
"We thought it through very diligently, and I think," says Sundaram, "we struck the right balance between academic content and practical support."
The participants enthusiastically agreed. From day one, they were completely engaged by professors in the intellectual challenge and professional transformation. In his opening class on the essentials of finance, Sundaram established what was, in effect, the overarching theme for the entire course: strategies for the creation of value. In her Lifeline exercise, Bell explored value in a different context: participants were given 15 minutes and large sheets of paper to chart the highs and lows of their lives as a way of viewing their personal histories as a continuous flow instead of a résumé listing achievements and gaps. In Greenhalgh's Negotiation class, a case study involving the sale of eggs introduced the deceptively simple concept that one can break out the components and sell the yolks and the whites separately. And in Helfat's session on Corporate Strategy, a participant who was asked to describe the features of several low-end paintbrushes from the same manufacturer surprised the class (and herself) by turning the assignment into a mock presentation that was funny as well as informative.
Then there was Dean Hansen's game theory analysis of the competition between Ryanair and Aer Lingus, presented on the very day that the former launched a surprise takeover bid for the latter—a development that went unmentioned in class because Hansen had not yet read that day's Wall Street Journal. He later used the omission as an opportunity to convey the lesson that one should never go into a business meeting without checking the Journal first. On the other hand, he said, the incident was an affirmation of Back in Business's signature methodology—the application of very advanced academic models to a very current situation.
The program culminated in the Capstone Project presentations, which took place on the final day. At the start of module one, the class had been divided into eight teams, each arbitrarily assigned to one of four "ripped-from-the-headlines" acquisitions: Disney and Pixar, eBay and Skype, Adidas and Reebok, and the chemical companies BASF and Engelhard. Each team was to prepare a strategic analysis, using concepts presented in the course, to determine whether the acquiring company had made the right decision at the right price.
The 15-minute presentations (time management being a critical skill) varied widely in style—some were straightforward, whereas others incorporated role-playing, graphics, video and, in two cases, matching team T-shirts to make their points. In all cases, the results were impressive. "The substance, strategy, and financial analysis—not to mention the creativity and humor—set a very high bar," says Sundaram. The presenters, after all, were not newly minted MBAs but professionals with significant experience in both business and life.
If the presentations marked the intellectual climax of the program, the closing dinner that evening celebrated the group's collective personal achievement after two months of intense interaction and growth. Class members gave out individual awards to each participant (most creative, most politically astute, most likely to be CEO, best smile), and the class as a whole announced the establishment of a legacy gift to assist future Back in Business participants. "You are smarter, older, and wiser," said Morris, addressing the exultant graduates at the program's closing dinner. "You have already been successful, and now you have everything you need to be successful again."
Back in Business: Invest in Your Return 2007
will be offered in three modules:
October 17-21, 2007 (Hanover)
November 7-11, 2007 (New York City)
November 28-December 2, 2007 (Hanover)
Information about the program is available at
www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/exec.
For details on corporate support or application information, contact Corrie Martin at 603-646-0252.
CONTINUING TO GET IT RIGHT
The opening season of Back in Business having come to a triumphant close ("It's an extraordinary program; it will become a paradigm," said one participant), planning began almost immediately for the second program, to be held in the fall of 2007. It will bear a striking resemblance to the first. "What's surprising is how little there is to tweak," says Sundaram. "We started with a blank slate. There were lots of opportunities to get it wrong, but we are deeply gratified by how much we got right."
The ultimate metric, he says, will be whether the participants have found appropriate employment commensurate with their backgrounds and their aspirations. Hansen agrees, but he is reluctant to measure success by how many have found jobs within a set period. "The real question," he says, "is whether we have built a successful bridge to reentry and have prepared participants to cross it on their own."
Another measure of success, of course, is the creation of a successful program for Tuck, not to mention the impact on business education in general. "In 20 years, programs like this will be a normal part of every business school," says Helfat. But beyond these institutional goals is the potential for programs like Back in Business to alter the corporate mindset, which still prefers face time to flexibility ,despite advances in distance technology, and linear career paths over more irregular ones, despite the demonstrated benefits of maturity and varied experience.
But other population trends, in addition to gaps in the executive pipeline, are already forcing change. Longer lifespans will likely entail extended periods of disability as people age, which will require one or more family members to pull out of the workforce temporarily to provide needed care to elder parents or relatives, says Hansen. This development will increase the demand for comprehensive reentry programs like Tuck's. And the more such programs become a phenomenon, the more employers will pay attention. "This demographic," says Sundaram, "should be part of the portfolio of human capital that every company looks to tap."
