Even more amazing is the 20 years that have passed since our landmark naming gift from the W. P. Carey Foundation. From historic enrollment to rankings excellence, the support we receive from the W. P. Carey Foundation is crucial to our ongoing success. The story and celebration of that partnership are the focus of this issue of W. P. Carey magazine.

While this issue takes an in-depth look at the past 20 years, we also pull out our telescope to the future. Learn more about some of our new programs, including the exciting new School of Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship launching at ASU’s West campus. And read about the impacts our alumni are creating across industries and geographies. With more than 120,000 graduates, the W. P. Carey School of Business has a far-reaching network of influence and support across the globe.

I am honored to count you as part of the W. P. Carey community and hope to see you soon.

Regards,

The entrepreneurial leadership program, offered exclusively on the West campus, gives students a broad foundation in business and focuses on starting, leading, and managing entrepreneurial organizations. Potential career paths include working in entrepreneurial-minded roles in existing organizations as well as creating or joining new ventures and small businesses of all types.

In his 20-plus-year career, Zollars set sports industry trends with the Arizona Coyotes, Washington Wizards and Mystics, Golden State Warriors, and Los Angeles Kings and Galaxy. But he is most widely known for his selfless commitment to others.

Bob Zollars (BS Marketing ’79) says his family has heard from countless people whose lives his son positively impacted.

“We always knew Danny had many friends and helped their development in the industry,” he says. “But when he passed away, the outpouring of love for him and stories of how he helped so many people were remarkable.”

In addition to serving as a mentor to ASU Full-time MBA students, Bruce Gilmore (BS Purchasing/Materials Management ’89) is a W. P. Carey School of Business alumnus and faculty associate in the highly regarded Department of Supply Chain Management.

Gilmore became a reentry student at ASU when he left the Air Force. “I found a wonderful mentor here, a professor of practice named Harry Wiggins,” he says. “I studied supply chain management—it was called ‘purchasing’ back then—and began my career in the semiconductor industry after I graduated.”

Wiggins helped Gilmore decide his career trajectory. “He gave me real-life advice, not just classroom advice, which was really important.”

Years later, in a full-circle moment, Gilmore’s son Eric received a scholarship named for Wiggins while studying supply chain management at W. P. Carey. “He impacted so many people, including me and my family,” Bruce says. “That experience cemented my feeling of how I would want to invest back to ASU.”

Gilmore is proud to give back as a mentor. “Executive Connections is a key, strategic part of the Full-time MBA program,” he says. “I have been very impressed by the caliber of the mentors and students that I get to know. I benefit from mentoring and building a network of all these people with impressive backgrounds.

“Engaging with the future of industry gives me great hope,” he adds. Visit wpcarey.asu.edu/bruce-gilmore to learn more.

Featuring:
Bruce Gilmore, David Greenberg, Terri Tierney Clark, Megan Hucek, Chikezie Anachu, Robert Maloney, Kalyan Subramanian, Joann Praise Emmanson, Lawrence Taylor, Giovanni Pieve

Alumni seeking support through a career or job change have several tools available through the school, including ongoing career training, free educational programs, and assistance to make graduate school more attainable.

“At W. P. Carey, we are committed to being a place ‘Where Business is Personal,’ ” says Ohad Kadan, Charles J. Robel Dean and W. P. Carey Distinguished Chair in Business. “Reaching out to alumni, making sure they know we are there for them in good times and bad, is an expression of that identity.”

One-on-one career coaching and on-demand career resources are just two of the benefits available to W. P. Carey graduates. Alumni in a career transition are encouraged to reach out to wpcareyalumni@asu.edu to schedule an appointment.

“Our goal is to support alumni individually, knowing that each person has different needs and goals,” says Joseph Kimes, executive director of the W. P. Carey Career Services Center.

Supported by ASU President Michael Crow and Provost Nancy Gonzalez, and led by Rusty Lyon Chair in Strategy Amy Hillman, the lab is a way to consolidate all ESG efforts across the school and a key facet of the school’s strategic plan. W. P. Carey is home to more faculty researching corporate governance than almost any other university.

The goal is to translate the lab’s research findings into practical, nuanced, and accessible ways for organizations to implement better ESG programs. To this end, the lab plans to create and maintain a database of governance research and best practices for private, for-profit firms. Additionally, the lab hopes to involve corporate partners in a Director’s Council of public and private for-profit directors. Council members will guide research and devise ways to gather and disseminate knowledge continuously.

“I’m very proud to be the first ASU student who has received this award,” Hernandez says. “I’m really excited, especially as someone who has done research specifically on Frederick Douglass before; this is a great way for me to learn more, especially about ways that I can come back here and apply what I’ve learned.”

Offered by CIEE, an international study-abroad organization, the fellowship launched in 2017 to increase access to study abroad for students in underrepresented groups. It was inspired by the 1845 meeting between 27-year-old abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the Irish reformer Daniel O’Connell in Dublin. In addition to a $1,500 grant, Hernandez completed a three-continent journey to Washington, D.C., Cape Town, South Africa, and Dublin over the summer for a comparative study of social-justice leadership.

Hernandez hopes to employ all he has learned and empower others to take control of their health through education and advocating for equitable, quality care for everyone. “I want to be that person who cares for others,” he explains, and to support his community by giving them the tools and education to understand their health.

“I was trying to sway people into supply chain and tell them that it was a viable option—that it was a real thing with real jobs that pay pretty well,” he says. “Nowadays, I don’t have to worry about that.”

A lot has changed since the early 2000s. Not only has supply chain become a hot topic, but the W. P. Carey Department of Supply Chain Management consistently ranks in the top three nationally for undergraduate and graduate programs by U.S. News & World Report. Faculty members are globally recognized for their expertise, and the department’s research is crucial in advancing global supply chain management.

Mohan and Hitendra Chaturvedi (pictured above), supply chain management professor of practice, identified a problem: There needed to be a clear way for SMBs to connect to ASU, and they were missing out on critical resources the university could provide. Chaturvedi contacted 30 local SMBs to ask how ASU could help them.

“One of the biggest things we heard was, ‘We have major problems, and right now, we can’t pay for an expensive consulting company,’ ” he says. ‘We would love to brainstorm with some of your faculty.’ ”

Bethany Lares’ (BS Accountancy ’20, MACC ’22) senior staff members recognized her data analytics expertise in a recent performance evaluation by her employer. “My seniors are coming to me asking for help on Alteryx, which is crazy because they have more experience than me. But guess what I have? Knowledge of this program.” When colleagues ask how she knows about all this, Lares has three words, “ASU master’s degree.”

The MACC curriculum has incorporated data analytics training since 2018, thanks in part to its partnership with KPMG, a global professional services firm, and a recent doubling down on technology in the curriculum gives graduates valuable expertise.

How is W. P. Carey‘s approach different? The W. P. Carey School of Business is “Where Business is Personal.” It collaborates with partners to discover their learning goals, co-create learning programs tailored to their needs, and deliver programs that measurably enhance performance.

Imagine a custom program created for you and delivered to your expectations. W. P. Carey provides an exceptional, contextualized learning experience—by working with you to focus on the application and mastery of learning that drives next-level performance excellence. W. P. Carey‘s results include a custom program that improved the performance of professionals, leading to performance outcomes that included more than $2 million in verifiable value creation achieved through a 50% productivity increase among participating employees.

But ask him the common thread that ties it all together, and he doesn’t hesitate: “People skills, it’s what makes it all work,” Kent says. “People who can work with others, grow others, motivate them, develop them, and provide a vision of career paths. That’s what has made us successful.”

In case you’re wondering, the Kent Companies includes convenience stores, truck stops, trucking, wholesale fuel, food service, ice cream, check cashing, urgent care, a sign company, a tire store, automotive services, car washes, and ranching. The convenience stores and travel centers, which sell fuel, are the largest business he owns and operates.

That love of sports is what led him to ASU: Being part of the exciting athletic environment of a PAC-10 school was a priority when selecting a college. In the fall of 1999, the Los Angeles-area native enrolled in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. But in one of his first-year classes, he found out that when he graduated, he could expect to cover small-town high school sports for about $18,000 a year—not exactly a network anchor salary.

Graduating from business school in 2008, in the throes of the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression, would seem a rocky start to any career—especially one in the financial services industry.

But that wasn’t the case for Heather Bronson (BS Finance ’08), who unknowingly began laying the groundwork for a successful career in banking during her senior year of high school when she applied for a full-time teller job at a Bank of America Financial Center in the Phoenix metro area.

“I really enjoyed that job,” says Bronson, senior vice president of credit services at Bank of America. “We were a fairly large center, so we had more than personal banker-type roles; we had small business and investment banking, and they sat on this premier section of the center.”

Carey, the chairman of the New York-based real estate investment firm W. P. Carey & Co., announced a $50 million endowment, which transformed the College of Business into the W. P. Carey School of Business and set the school on a transformative trajectory to become the largest and among the top-ranked business schools in the country.

The New York real estate investor had family ties to Arizona’s history and had already donated to ASU’s law school. His grandfather John S. Armstrong introduced the bill in Arizona’s Territorial Legislature in 1885 that established Arizona Territorial Normal School, which eventually evolved into ASU.

Troy Schmitz, director and professor at the Morrison School of Agribusiness, and his collaborators, Andrew Schmitz and Charles B. Moss, professors in the Food and Resource Economics Department at the University of Florida, decided to look at the effects. The result was “The Economic Effects of COVID-19 on the Producers of Ethanol, Corn, Gasoline, and Oil,” published in late 2020 in the Journal of Agricultural & Food Industrial Organization.

That paper used data from January to May 2020, and then the researchers projected how 2020 would compare to 2019 if oil prices had stayed roughly the same as the average of those first five months.

“When considering buying any product, the first thing people typically do is try to categorize it,” says Amanda Sharkey, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship. “It’s human nature.” And not to be overlooked: Categories and labels help guide sales.

Right now, there are no definite answers to these questions. And this ambiguity is driving oil and gas producers to react in ways policymakers may not intend, says Assistant Professor of Finance Michael Barnett. Barnett’s research demonstrates how the uncertainty surrounding future climate legislation could cause severe economic harm and increase carbon emissions in the near future.

“Expectation about future risk matters,” he explains. “To understand climate policy, you can’t just take a hopeful, optimistic view—you need to consider the potential negative outcomes, too.”

Thanks to the boom in wellness and self-care in recent years, research into happiness has become popular as well. Many studies have found that people get more life satisfaction from experiences, not material goods—things like vacations, the research says, make people feel better than jewelry.

After earning her master’s degree in economics and a doctorate degree in IS at Georgia State University, she came to W. P. Carey. Her research investigated the business value of IT in large institutional settings undergoing regulatory change. In her work, she drew on a diverse set of theories to investigate how firms use IT capabilities to achieve simultaneous outcomes that are in tension, while also experiencing change in their institutional environment. Her research has been published in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals, including MIS Quarterly and Journal of Medical Internet Research.

According to her students, she was “extremely knowledgeable about the subject matter and found unique ways to help us understand the new concepts we were learning. She was always super responsive, and took her time to help with any questions.”

“Jessica had a great heart, maintained a positive attitude, and was always willing to help both within the department and in the IS field,” says Pei-yu Chen, chair of the Department of Information Systems. “She organized a happy hour for junior faculty in the IS department to share and support each other, she helped mentor many undergraduate and graduate students, and was an enthusiastic leader in the doctoral student college programs at the Association of Information Systems. Her services have been greatly appreciated by everyone in the department and in the IS field. Jessica will be deeply missed.”

Pye is survived by her husband, Justin, and a son, Ethan.

As society progresses, so too does the workplace (or so we hope).

Eldar Maksymov, associate professor of accountancy, and Ken Bouyer, director of inclusiveness recruiting at EY Americas, are the co-authors of Navigating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Organizations: Cases and Professionals’ Perspectives for Self-Development and Group Study.

They say their new work may sound like a textbook written for the professional world, but it’s suitable for self-study or group discussion.

Maksymov spoke about the new book, their findings, and how to navigate a career in harmony with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles.

Lares didn’t know what to do. She met with a program administrator who walked her through some options: Stay, request time off, or take a formal leave of absence. As Lares weighed them, she could hear her mother’s voice urging her not to quit.

“I knew I couldn’t take the year off,” she says. “My mother would be very upset if I did that.” She moved forward, finding a support system in the Master of Accountancy and Data Analytics (MACC) program’s students and faculty, mainly clinical professors Janet Samuels and Gregory Dawson.

“All my professors knew,” Lares says. “Janet and Greg kept tabs on me to ensure I was doing well.”

Dawson describes Lares as “joy personified,” while Samuels says Lares was one of the top students in class despite the early obstacles she had to overcome, which included being raised at times by her older sister and being homeless at age 17 due to financial difficulties within her family. Lares’ good grades in high school earned her a full ride to ASU, and she took advantage of a program allowing students to move into their dorms early.

1. Alan Wald (BS Management ’83), membership development manager at Associated Builders and Contractors of Southern California, was Sparky the Sun Devil for three years, implementing the pushups and wearing a jersey with Sparky on the back. “The reputation of the W. P. Carey School carries even more weight now because it is one of the top schools in the country,” Wald says. “It makes me feel good that the value went up. I am proud to know that the school I attended is well known and recognized—that carries validity for other opportunities.”