When Richard Cole 13EMBA -- along with over 200 other students -- entered Goizueta's Executive MBA program in the fall of 2011, he figured he'd acquire new tools and insights that would benefit him both personally and professionally. What he didn't realize, and learned very quickly, was that his classwork would not only sharpen his skill set but would also directly benefit the company he works for.
This realization took place in Ed Leonard's Marketing Management course, and it aptly illustrates the EMBA program's emphasis on experiential learning that enables students to make a material difference in the workplace. In addition to Leonard, who is an associate professor of marketing, several other faculty members, including Richard Makadok, associate professor of organization and management, and Shehzad Mian, associate professor of finance, regularly engage students in projects that address important work issues and challenges.
In Cole's case, he took the conceept of the "value stack" taught by Leonard and applied it to his work as an account manager for Atlanta-based Printpack, one of the largest providers of flexible packaging in the wolrd. Cole has worked for Printpack for 22 years, starting as an undergraduate at Kennesaw State.
As Leonard explains in his course, the value stack notion helps B2B firms better manage one of their most important assets, their customers. "The concept is to view customer assets as a portfolio in which not all customers are equally valuable or equally expensive to serve," says Leonard. "Rather than comparing revenue to cost to serve, as many firms to when deciding which customers to invest in and how much, the value stack project considers the value of the relationship between the firm and its customer over time, measuring the intensity of loyalty and finding ways to improve loyalty rather than simply revenue."