Notes From Building B-Schools Symposium: Day 1

I finally landed in Tampa, Florida at one o’clock in the morning today. My original plan was to fly out at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, but I booked a day late. I made a horrible mistake and caused a great hassle, but in return I had some time to spend with Dao for a day. So I can’t complain.

I didn’t go to bed until 2 a.m. and woke up at 7 for some breakfast. The last thing I needed was to listen to some inspirational speech, but I have to handed to Donna Typson who delivered a motivating talk on “Peak Performance.” She was engaging in sharing her personal accounts and also providing some great advices. Here’s are a few wisdoms to keep in mind:

  1. Don’t let your job take away your time with your children
  2. We live our life in chapters. You are the only one who can give yourself permission to turn a new page
  3. To be successful, you need to share time, energy, knowledge and contact

After her speak, I went up and bought her children’s book titled The Red Bow.

Followed by Typson’s was a presentation from The Mihaylo College of Business and Economics on “To Brand or Rebrand: Leveraging Research and Technology to Build B-School Brands.” Mihaylo is in the process of building its own social network using Moodle. The site has the following features: My Mihaylo, connections, classes, workspace, docs, bridge and goals.

After lunch, Tim Westerbeck, president of Eduvantis, gave a presentation on “Building a Brand Culture.” Here are the five principles he highlighted:

  1. Identify your core institutional values
  2. Codify the core values as “constitution”
  3. Embody core values in everything you do
  4. Develop policies and practices reflecting the core values
  5. Deliver a service experience consistent with core values/brand

The last presentation of the day was from Daniels College of Business on how the communication team built danielspioneer.com from brainstorming to getting feedback to implementing site using WordPress. In a way, this site is somewhat similar to our “At the Center of It All.” The second half of the presentation is on “Managing Communications When Things Go Wrong” by Darlene Rotch, Chief Executive Officer, Panorama Public Relations.

For dinner, I went to Champp’s with five other people for informal networking. We had hamburgers and exchanged business cards. I am looking forward toward tomorrow’s programs which are “New rules of engagement: How to elevate your business school’s Web 2.0 to the next level” and “Maximizing your marketing and communications reach with minimal resources.” After that, I will head back to Virginia to be with Dana and Dao. I miss them so much already.