Vision: To create generations of leaders focused on long-term organizational value.

Mission: To improve organizational decision making through a stakeholder management framework that integrates integrity, leadership, and transparency.

Values:

Collaboration:  Involve faculty, executives, students, and policy makers across multiple institutions in Center activities.

Holistic Perspectives:  Frame business decisions broadly to understand their implications across stakeholder groups.

Integration:  Emphasize an interdisciplinary approach to making business decisions.

Practical Solutions:  Focus on pragmatic approaches to making challenging business decisions by understanding stakeholder expectations.

Relationships:  Develop trusting relationships with stakeholders to create long-term value for organizations.

Integrity, Leadership, and Transparency as Determinants Drivers of Long-Term Value

Integrity—“Who You Are”
Enacting reputational drivers of value for decision-making and behavior that enable an organization to achieve its objectives and strategies consistently within its appetite for risk and responsibility

Leadership—“What You Do or Persuade Others to Do”
Being accountable by making decisions and influencing behavior in ways that consistently convey the organization’s integrity, even when doing so creates temporary conflict among some stakeholders

Transparency—“What You Say”
Communicating decision making and behavior outcomes to internal and external stakeholders as honestly, clearly, and completely as possible without violating the organization’s appetite for confidentiality and disclosure risks

Necessity of Center
Many organizational problems result from an overemphasis on short-term results that often do not sufficiently consider the long-term organizational implications regarding the reaction to strategic and operating decisions by key stakeholders. Leaders struggle to effectively prioritize and manage stakeholder relationships, in particular those involving strong, changing, or conflicting expectations concerning organizational decisions. Executives place themselves in the best position to develop long-term value by consistently conveying its reputational drivers of value to key stakeholders when making strategic and operating decisions.  Accordingly, the CBE helps improve decision-making across the continuum from executives to students, creating generations of leaders focused on long-term organizational value.  

Competitive Advantage of CBE
The mission is pursued through activities performed that emphasize the CBE’s values, creating a unique, competitive advantage compared to other academic centers.  The CBE’s values include an integrative focus utilizing a holistic approach—considering integrity, leadership, and transparency collectively—to improve strategic and operational decisions both within organizations and across entire industries.  Further, the CBE promotes collaboration and relationship building with a wide variety of stakeholders, with a particular emphasis on engaging students, faculty and professionals, to develop generations of leaders focused on long-term organizational value.  Finally, the CBE employs a practical, hands-on approach when performing activities, such as research, CBE conferences, curriculum innovation, student trips and internships, executive education, and other collaborations.

Benefits to Center Partners

• Develop business leaders focused on the CBE’s Vision, Values, and Mission, including existing and future employees. 
• Better understand how to operationalize the integrity-, leadership-, and transparency-related implications of their strategic and operational decisions involving key stakeholders.
• Improve organizational culture and performance by realizing that shareholders want to invest in, suppliers want to provide to, customers want to buy from, and employees want to work for organizations that convey these reputational drivers.
• Influence on CBE research agenda by collaborating with faculty, students, and other organizations
• Better understand and manage industry-wide challenges associated with stakeholder expectations of integrity, leadership, and transparency.
• Attract and retain top quality faculty and students to the Farmer School of Business
• Ensure that faculty members have frequent access to cutting edge ideas from professionals that result in highly relevant, practical research and better-informed students.
• Transform students by opening their eyes to the importance of integrity, leadership, and transparency for consistently achieving professional and personal success during their careers.

Beth Brooke, Ernst & Young Vice Chairman of Global Markets, was the keynote speaker at the EY Business Excellence Student Summit hosted by the Farmer School's Center for Business Excellence. Runtime: 26 minutes, 12 seconds

Last modified on 4/23/13 | Content maintained by CBE