State Farm career event succeeds on many levels.

When Florida International University (FIU) and State Farm recently strengthened their relationship with a plan for more activities between the university and the company, everyone involved was excited. And now, after the first of those activities, a career event in early February 2011, the enthusiasm has grown. “Eighty-five people, 56 of them business students, attended […]

Personal plans for advancement help Baptist Health executives be "Women on the Move."

When Roymi Membiela attended the executive leadership development program “Women on the Move” at Florida International University (FIU), she was an assistant vice president at Baptist Health South Florida. At a recent reunion of program participants from Baptist Health, Membiela was now the organization’s new corporate vice president of marketing and public relations. Giving women […]

Women’s summit affords opportunity for male point of view.

Over the course of the two-day Empowered Woman Success Summit and Expo in November in Miami, hundreds of attendees heard dozens of accomplished women share multiple insights on career success. Amid the presentations by women, “The Male Panel” brought together six men—including Garth D. Headley (MS ’07) industrial psychologist and associate director of marketing and […]

Passionately Pursue Customer Captivity

There are three primary sources of long-term sustainable competitive advantage: customer captivity, economies of scale and preferential access to resources. Lock on to one of these early and you can build a potentially insurmountable barrier to competitive threats. WebMD intelligently focused early on one of these three: customer captivity. When I pushed CEO Wayne Gattinella […]

Hurry up and slow down

As secretary of Yale University in the 1990s, Sheila Wellington often negotiated with city officials in New Haven, Conn., home to the prestigious school. One item they tangled over was the fate of a couple of campus streets. Yale wanted to close the streets to traffic; the city did not. Every time Wellington raised the […]