Brittany

There is no denying the Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation has a long name, but it does so for a reason. The facility is referred to as a “campus” rather than a “building” because of the intention to create a place for students to congregate, in addition to attending class and meeting with professors. With an on-site café, soft seating areas and team rooms, the campus was built as a place for students to work on team projects, eat, socialize and maybe even nap. It is a place meant to foster a Baylor Business culture that values collaboration, innovation, leadership and ethics.

In the Atrium

Student Commons
Au Bon Pain provides coffee, snacks and quick meals on the first floor. With soft seating and tables, students can collaborate or socialize in the heart of the building, the Ed and Denise Crenshaw Student Commons.

“I am most excited for the atrium and the main common area of the new building. The openness throughout the building is bound to give students, like myself, a sense of community, and a place to not only thrive academically, but also to interact socially…I can’t wait to spend a majority of my next 3 years at Baylor in the new Foster Campus! It’s beautiful.” – Tayler Berman, sophomore

Career Management
The new Career and Professional Development Program expands key strategic recruiting partnerships with firms seeking prepared student interns and graduating students with the aid of the new recruiter lounge and 10 interview rooms.

“I chose Baylor not only for the faith-based education, but also for the resources available. Having a dedicated career management area that assists me in achieving my career goals ensures me that my possibilities are endless.” – Jonathan Cole-McKay, BBA ’13, MBA Candidate

Hodges Capital LLC Financial Markets Center
A state-of-the-art financial markets center simulates the environment of an investment firm, giving students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in managing a multimillion-dollar portfolio.

Team Rooms
Thirty-six team rooms are available for students to schedule for meetings and group projects. Each room includes a card swipe that allows students to schedule the rooms by swiping his or her Baylor ID card. Team rooms are located throughout the building, including adjacent to the atrium and overhanging the atrium on upper levels.

“As an alum, I can vouch for the importance of the team meeting rooms. Teamwork is a big part of the business school curriculum, and now there is ample space for groups to meet and practice for presentations. I would have loved to have had the team meeting rooms in undergrad!” Brittany Parks, BBA ‘12

Wayfinding

Upon entering, an interactive, 84-inch touchscreen allows visitors to find offices, classrooms and conference rooms with the touch of a finger.

Video Wall

Next to the Hodges Capital LLC Financial Markets Center, a 13.5-foot wide and seven-foot tall video screen displays information about happenings at Hankamer.

In the Classrooms

New classroom features include the following:

• screen sharing capabilities
• flexible classrooms with movable tables and chairs
• removable white boards
• video conferencing capabilities
• lecture capture capabilities

Baylor’s Academy for Teaching and Learning and the Hankamer School of Business partnered to host a workshop series entitled, “Reimagining Education: Teaching Paradigms for Innovative Spaces” last fall. The workshops prepared Hankamer faculty for teaching in new state-of-the-art classrooms.

“I am most excited to work in the flexible classrooms. We do a lot of current issue debates in my accounting theory class, and there’s nothing quite like the company, auditor, investor and regulator “representatives” actually sitting around a table and looking each other in the eyes as they advocate for their financial reporting needs. Being able to quickly modify the room arrangement will improve the quality and effectiveness of many of our most fun activities.” -Gia Chevis, Accounting & Business Law Clinical Professor

Conference Areas

With a global perspective, the Paul and Jane Meyer Conference Center at the Foster Campus hosts events to bring together students, faculty, community leaders and professionals from around the world to discuss topics at the forefront of today’s business landscape. Next to the conference center, the 350-seat McClinton Auditorium provides additional space for speakers and events.

Entryways

Outdoor fountains and shade from mature trees provide entrances as well as study areas at the Steve and Penny Carlile Plaza and the Riley Family Plaza.

“As a Baylor business alumni abroad, I’m really excited to see this come to completion from afar, and I’m looking forward to my next visit to central Texas–hopefully in the not-too-distant future!” – Mark Peters, MBA ‘01

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2015

Determination Places Student Among Angels

By Franci Rogers

Anyone who meets Hannah Dickey knows one thing: she is determined.

Going to high school in her hometown of Sedalia, Colo., Dickey found herself in a unique situation. She realized she would have enough credits to graduate halfway through her senior year, so she began to look at colleges. She’d always imagined going to school close to home, but was encouraged by a family friend to look at schools in Texas.

At the urging of the friend, a University of Texas (UT) graduate, she and her parents made arrangements for college tours in Texas, and at the last minute, added Baylor University to the list. They made the stop in Waco, Texas, on their way to Austin.

“I got to the Baylor campus and fell in love,” Dickey said. “Once I learned about Baylor’s business school and the [Baylor] Business Fellows Program, I wouldn’t even go on the UT campus tour.”

In December of what would have been her senior year, rather than spending a “bonus” semester in high school, Dickey graduated and headed to Waco.

“I came halfway into the year, which was scary,” she said. “But it was the right choice.”

That year is when she first heard about the Baylor Angel Network (BAN).

“It became a goal for me. I knew I had to get in,” she said. “Being an analyst is not a normal experience for students in college. I had to have that experience.”

BAN is an investor network that provides early stage capital to entrepreneurs. Angel investors use their own capital to invest in start-up businesses, as well as use their expertise to guide not only the entrepreneurs, but also the student analysts who work with the network.

Each year, six Baylor juniors are chosen to become junior analysts. They spend a semester-long apprenticeship, assisting the students who are senior analysts to run the program, under the guidance of the executive director.

“We are partnered with a senior and an angel, and mentored for each round of funding that first year,” Dickey said.

The student analysts do research and interview people who are looking for funding.

“Our angel mentors are there to help us think of things to look for and to teach us how to ask clarifying questions,” Dickey said.

Dickey is looking forward to her turn as a senior analyst this fall, after completing an investment banking internship over the summer. She is eager to get back to the people she is learning with and from.

“Our angels are such great people,” she said. “I think sometimes in business, there is a stereotype that to be successful you can’t be moral or care about people. But these people shatter that stereotype. It makes me hopeful for the businessperson I can become.”

In the spring, when she graduates as a Baylor Business Fellow with a double major in Finance and Accounting, and a minor in Corporate Communication, she will miss her classmates who have grown so close to one another during this process.

“I just love being associated with such amazing people,” she said. “Since everyone has different majors, we bring different things to the group, but we are all exceptionally driven and passionate. The people are the best part!”

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2015

From Information Systems to Human Resources: An Accidental Bear Succeeds in Real Estate

By Becca Broaddus

Grace Dadebo, BBA ’12
CBRE Group, Inc.
Chicago, Ill.

Grace Dadebo hadn’t dreamed of going to Baylor University. It hadn’t crossed her mind. Born in Ghana, she moved to Canada at five-months-old, and then to Buffalo, New York, in middle school. She lived there through high school. But when her parents found out they’d be moving to Houston, they encouraged her to apply to universities in Texas. As luck would have it, she missed the application deadline for every Texas school she looked up online… except Baylor.

“I ended up visiting Baylor after getting in, and I fell in love with it,” she said. “There’s a reason for it—a reason I missed the other deadlines. Baylor has given me a lot of opportunities to grow and explore. I really enjoyed my time at Baylor.”

At Baylor, Dadebo took advantage of every opportunity to learn. She changed her major twice, starting out in the College of Arts and Sciences before landing in the business school. After some trial-and-error classes, Dadebo decided to major in management information systems (MIS).

“My MIS teacher, Dr. [Hope] Koch, is a really great teacher,” Dadebo said. “I think it was [Dr. Koch] who made me realize I could have this as my major. It struck me that with MIS you can go into a lot of different industries. There’s always a need for those skills. I liked the idea of improving processes by using technology, so MIS intrigued me.”

Like many upperclassmen, the summer between her junior and senior year, Dadebo sought out an internship. Allstate Insurance was on campus recruiting for the first cohort for a leadership development program. She applied for one of their posted internships and got it. She spent the summer in Chicago with the company as a business analyst intern.

As if she wasn’t busy enough with her participation in Student Foundation, the Hankamer Student Organization and professional business fraternity Delta Sigma Pi, among other activities, she decided to add a second major in human resources management (HR) her senior year.

After graduating, she earned a position in the leadership development program at Allstate, a three-year rotational program that gives recent graduates exposure to different aspects of the company while learning leadership skills. But soon after beginning the final year of her rotation in Chicago, she was offered a position with CBRE, Inc., the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm. She accepted.

“I had never thought about real estate as a career,” Dadebo said. “I’ve had to work on learning a new job, industry and company. It’s been one of the most exciting parts about coming to work here.”

In her current role as the enterprise facilities management program manager within Global Workplace Solutions at CBRE, Dadebo provides facilities management business development support and coordination for pursuits. She also leads the facilities management platform knowledge center activities, which includes the global newsletter, calls and the best practices program.

“My new position with CBRE combines a lot of the skills I gained in previous roles into one role,” she said.

If there’s one factor driving Dadebo’s career path, it’s her love of learning.

“I’m always interested in learning new things,” she said. “Continuing my education is a big goal of mine.”

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2015

(And a Lot of Other Things)

By Paul L. Foster
Founder and Executive Chairman, Western Refining, Inc.
Chairman, Western Refining Logistics, LP
Chairman, Northern Tier Energy, LP

Even when I was a kid, I knew I wanted to work in the oil and gas business. And like many, I dreamed of someday owning my own company. I was fortunate. That opportunity came in 1997 when I founded a company to handle the assets of a bankrupt refinery in El Paso, Texas. For the next three years, I put together business plans and worked to get financing, and in 2000, Western Refining bought the El Paso refinery. My dream had become a reality. And one of the first things I wanted to create and instill—throughout the entire company—was a business culture that would be unique to Western Refining, a culture that would define us, and our brand.

It was up to me to build that culture. Corporate culture is created from the top down, and then promoted and “lived” by the company. So, what was our culture to be? And how was I going to create that? It was something that I classified as critically important, and I’m glad I did. To a significant degree, Western Refining today is well respected in the industry and appreciated in the communities where we work and live. There is also a very special company pride among our employees. It is my belief that the respect and positive company image—the Western Refining brand—we have today started with, and is continually built upon, a corporate culture of doing what is right. That may sound simplistic, but it actually involves a well-defined process of making our culture more than just a mission statement on a wall. We strive to make our culture a real and tangible environment.

Since day one, I wanted the culture of our company to support, in every way possible, four core values: safety, environmental stewardship, high ethical standards, and commitment to the betterment of our communities. The first thing I did was hire very smart people who shared the same standards of conducting business that I believed in. Even after 15 years, our leadership team continues to instill in our employees a laser-focus on those original four values. It is that focus which has enabled us to build a corporate culture where everyone in the company is engaged in supporting our values. Our employees, in every department and business segment, get a clear and real sense that they count, that their jobs are important, and that they are an integral part of our success—collectively and individually. In turn, innovation—and a lot of other positive attributes—are driven from the bottom up.

Because of the culture we’ve created and continually work to maintain, I believe our employees feel a true freedom to be innovative. Ideas can come from everywhere, and from everybody. For the most part, our employees embody our culture and become the fabric of Western Refining. They are aware that they are our best brand ambassadors – inside and outside of the workplace. Their engagement in the process creates a cycle, and they know it starts with them: being innovative differentiates them and makes them (and our company) unique. In turn, that uniqueness creates a better value, which attracts better customers, and ultimately makes us a better company. A positive corporate culture that allows for innovation to broadly and randomly bubble up is not just important, it’s critical.

In a way, my donation to Baylor University to fund the Foster Campus for Business and Innovation stems from the core values and culture we built at Western. The Foster Campus is intended to help students, right from the start of their higher education, get on a path to building and practicing their own core values. From those values, young entrepreneurs and future business leaders might just create their own business cultures, ones that will encourage and inspire workplace innovation.

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2015

By Barbara Elmore

Twenty-somethings, forgive your grandparents for thinking the open office you describe at your work sounds just like their office of the 1940s.

Because similarities exist. At one point in American history, office workers plied their trades side-by-side in giant warehouses without walls. Pictures in the online Early Office Museum demonstrate this—or just ask your grandmother.

Still, vast differences between today’s open workplaces and those of an earlier time present themselves. Whereas early office workers were more likely to sit in a straight row facing one direction—a bit like a factory line—today’s workers might not sit at all, or they can carry chairs and notebooks from place to place. Their work area is everywhere—nameplates, electrical cords and offices not required.

And whereas the goals of earlier open space creators were to place as many workers in a room as possible, the object of today’s free-flowing office is more likely to enhance entrepreneurial interaction.

To this end, some companies on the cutting-edge of technology design their work areas like villages, with laundromats and dry cleaners, yoga studios and cafés, thus providing convenience and blurring the line between work time and off-time.

Enter the new Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation, a 275,000-square-foot campus designed to prepare business students for the work world of today and beyond, and you will see a thoughtful mixture of openness with the addition of privacy. With public spaces on the bottom floor and areas that become more private as you move upward, the new campus strives for balance between the need for collaboration and socializing, and for quiet and conversations that need not be overheard.

“We could define the open office movement as no walls,” said Sara Perry, assistant professor of Management. “But there needs to be a hybrid approach of public and private space, and that’s what the Foster Campus is.”

Faculty offices are private, but more open than traditional office space because they are interconnected, with glass walls that allow a student to see if the professor is in. There are other transitional spaces as well. Classrooms allow for different levels of collaboration, meeting rooms can convert from public to private, and public meeting spaces allow for incidental interactions. Chairs and couches in open public spaces invite conversation.

“It seems like a nice balance and consistent with what research is showing,” Perry added. “People need autonomy, so if you have the freedom to choose what kind of space you are going to work in, that need will be satisfied.”

The intention of the Foster Campus was to provide spaces where people want to hang out, to enhance the idea of a community and to allow for more cross-pollination and the sharing of ideas.

Architects approached the design through study and inquiry. “We’ve done a lot of listening,” said Rick Archer of Overland Partners/Architects, the San Antonio firm that designed the campus.

During the eight years Archer and his team have worked at Baylor, they have gained a deep understanding of Baylor’s culture and values. Overland incorporated into the design the kinds of classrooms, offices and meeting rooms that encourage flexibility and flatten barriers, planning the campus from the inside out rather than the outside in. “We’ve talked to department chairs, students and faculty about their aspirations, and we designed the new building based on what we heard,” Archer said.

Perry, who teaches Negotiation and Conflict Resolution and a human resources (HR) management class called Human Resource Staffing and Labor Relations, is working with Associate Professor of Management Cindy Wu to develop partnerships with companies to enrich the curriculum. Students will organize into teams to study an HR-specific problem raised by an industry partner, such as workforce planning or job analysis, and compete to find a winning solution. “They may also look at designing recruitment programs, using social media to recruit a more diverse workforce,” Perry said.

The Foster Campus’s use of public-private spaces and flexible classroom setups enhances this kind of teamwork, as well as the team activities that Perry and Emily Hunter, an associate professor in the Human Resource Management major, use with students in Negotiation to demonstrate how companies accomplish tasks via virtual connections.

Perry and Hunter co-authored, with two others, a book titled “Organized Innovation: A Blueprint for Renewing America’s Prosperity,” which studied university-industry collaborations called Engineering Research Centers to discover how leaders can coordinate technology breakthroughs to advance American competitiveness and prosperity.

“You have to be deliberate and actually plan for innovation, in order for innovation to succeed,” Perry said. In the workplace, this means everyone is empowered, but there is a “logistical structure that allows everything to run.”

The principles the authors researched and detailed in the book are applied at the Foster Campus, she said. These include “channeled curiosity,” or having a goal in mind when beginning research on a project; “boundary-breaking collaboration,” which is multidisciplinary in practice and crosses all types of boundaries; and “orchestrated commercialization,” or creating new processes or products for public consumption.

Hunter helps smooth the path to career development and placement, and keep HR students up-to-date with the workplace by bringing in guest speakers from HR departments at companies such as Microsoft, Dell and NASA to discuss new HR practices. She also provides students with a job-shadowing program, where students spend a day with executives from Dell’s HR department and discuss current workplace challenges.

Hunter believes the open concept of the Foster Campus will help encourage research and innovative teaching practices because of its team-based work environment design that encourages meetings throughout the day and after hours.

Faculty and students sharing space improves both teaching and research, she said. “Foster [Campus] is not only on the cutting edge of technology to facilitate teaching, but we are preparing students for a highly technology-focused working environment where comfort with and ability to adapt to new technology is critical.”

Sharing across disciplines was a driving factor in the design of the new campus, Archer said. Although each department wanted its own identity, openness is accomplished through receptionists and signage instead of walls and office suites. “Behind the scenes, all of the offices are interconnected. The real beauty is in how it functions, with spaces designed for planned collisions.”

Baylor is in the forefront among business schools training students for the new world of business, which is about entrepreneurship, innovation and solutions for complex problems, Archer added. “This is a shift in academic thinking—equipping people across spectrums—for example, marketing people and accountancy people, to get them working on the same project.”

“The business school wanted faculty and classrooms together, so that students could move from a classroom to a professor’s office without having to break artificial barriers,” Archer said. “That is Baylor’s philosophy—very hands-on.”

The space also is designed so visiting business leaders can watch students engaged in active learning. “Leaders love to see students doing what students do, and the new building creates multiple opportunities for that to happen naturally,” Archer said. “This way we can showcase the mission. It’s an exciting experience for everyone in the building, and truly transformational for the campus.”

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2015

Part of our mission at the Hankamer School of Business is to foster a culture of innovation. Our students, faculty and staff cultivate a culture of excellence through rigorous classroom learning, real-world experience, a foundation of Christian values and a global perspective. An environment of collaboration and forward thinking further supports our mission.

This issue of the Baylor Business Review delves into the relationship of environment and climate, and ultimately, how our new home, the Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation, will help us fulfill our mission. This climate of innovation is the foundation for our work and the means through which we provide the Baylor experience. The concept of culture extends beyond the walls of the Foster Campus, though. From corporations that promote values-driven workplaces to managers who encourage out-of-the-box thinking, creating a shared experience is not accomplished with a single action or policy. This issue explores how different organizations and people, in addition to Baylor Business, establish cultures.

As you read on, you may notice the home of the School isn’t the only thing that has changed. Thanks to valuable reader feedback, we’ve altered the magazine to ensure it is what our readers desire. For more in-depth information about our readership survey results and the changes, see the editor’s note.

We’re incredibly proud of the Foster Campus and the culture of innovation we’re creating, so we hope you can see it for yourself at the annual Hankamer School of Business Homecoming Reception Oct. 23.

Terry S. Maness
Dean, Hankamer School of Business

Baylor Business Review, Fall 2015