Lou Barkan: Leading in the Digital Age

Leaders take responsibility.
Leaders have a bias for action.
Leaders have strong ethics and a low tolerance for those who cross the line.
Leaders do not look alike and are not easily stereotyped.
Leaders find creativity in themselves and elsewhere.

These are some of the tenets cited by the Dean of our Business School, Robert Mittelstaedt, Jr., when he talks about leadership and what is required to successfully manage a cross-functional team in a highly uncertain environment. Having served as an officer in the U.S. Navy submarine fleet for many years before becoming a dean, he should know what it takes to lead, since there are few jobs in the world filled with as much danger and that require as much precision teamwork as that of the submariner.

There are many other leadership attributes that he discusses, but the one on which I want to focus here is, "Leaders Leave Something Good Behind."

At the W. P. Carey program, this is a principle that we take to heart. A first-year classmate, Katie Mueller, especially embodies this idea. In addition to being married, Katie is an MBA/MSIM dual degree candidate and typically carries a pretty heavy load. Yet, somehow she finds a way to be fully involved in and out of the program adding value wherever she goes. She's the MBA Association President, she sits on the Board of Volunteers Council, she teaches Junior Achievement, she's an active member of Graduate Women in Business, she works for the Women's Empowerment Seminar, she's earned a Graduate Assistantship, she's active in Toastmasters, she provides part-time consulting to local businesses and she still finds time to raise a stein at The Vine every now and then. In short, she's a force of nature, and the program is better off for her leadership.

Jonathan Burks is another very strong leader among our first-year cohort. Not many work harder than Jon, who has always been referred to as a great teammate. As incoming Co-President of the Logistics Roundtable, a logistics think tank officially sponsored by Union Pacific (www.up.com/), Jon's thought leadership is widely respected by the MBA class. Given his supply chain expertise and his passion for Asian culture (he's teaching himself Mandarin among other things), Jon has blazed his own trail to business success in Asia. During our winter and spring breaks, he traveled to business schools in China, Japan, and Korea, where he developed new working relationships in order to facilitate his own study-abroad program, to understand how to add value in Asia and to lay the groundwork for a future career there. As a result, he has opened many doors for the benefit of future W. P. Carey MBAs.

So, notwithstanding the frenetic pace of B-school life which I described in my last essay, I have chosen to participate in a few meaningful extra-curricular activities in order to leave something good behind. Stretch is good, and I'm here to push myself as hard as I can, just as Katie, Jon, and many of our other classmates do.

For me, it's been an interesting year holding office as the Junior Senator representing the MBA program in the Graduate Professional Student Association, a legislative assembly serving all of ASU's graduate programs. I've enjoyed the opportunity to discuss and debate issues that are important to the broader student body while representing the interests of the MBA community.

Also, I recently was nominated to serve as VP of Corporate Outreach in the MBA Marketing Association, and I look forward to working with the other Vice-Presidents - Rachel Mueller, Lu Guan, Eric Berger - and our newly elected President, Chris Pascale (all future business leaders) to create professional development and learning opportunities for those in our specialization. Of course, Katie has volunteered to help where we need her. Our faculty advisor, Dr. James Ward, a beloved marketing professor whose work includes social influences on consumption, e-commerce, perception of service environments and market research methodology, has been outstanding with his support and guidance.

The work I've done with The Digital Society at Arizona State University has been some of the most exciting though, especially because of my passion for all things related to digital convergence. Reaching out to industry leaders and experts, The Digital Society facilitates, with working executives, a dialogue and exchange of ideas regarding the impact and future ramifications of digital convergence on various business functions and industries. Then, the club convenes to discuss what we have learned. Sometimes, we host educators, executives or entrepreneurs, such as Peter Slate (CEO, Arizona Technology Enterprises, www.azte.com), who share their experiences at the intersection of business and technology. We're very excited to present, at the end of this month, Carlos Baradello to the broader university and community audience. Having led high-performance teams as a Corporate VP & GM of Motorola Latin America & Caribbean, Carlos is a general partner in the The Sienna Hispanic Fund (a venture capital firm), an inventor with six US and EU patents and is a frequent lecturer about Global Digital and Technology trends and "The Hispanization of the USA."We are deeply grateful to all of the executives who in giving their time and resources have supported a community of sharing in order to leave something good behind. Such mentorship is invaluable, and perhaps the most significant impact of their collective example is engendering, among us, similarly strong leadership qualities.

I'm also very pleased that the club has generated opportunities for some of my fellow MBAs to hone their management skills. One of The Digital Society's first projects has been to introduce podcast technology across all W. P. Carey MBA platforms in order to enhance learning and boost academic performance. Two members of the club, Ian Monat (Marketing) and Duhyun Jung (dual MBA/MSIM), have really asserted themselves and shown a great capacity for leadership, initiative and insight as we have guided this project from idea to active research and implementation project. Helping us along the way, Drs. Julie Smith-David (CIS) and Stephen Nowlis (Marketing) both have been very gracious with their time and advice and reinforce the idea of the W. P. Carey program as a community of collaboration where innovation is welcomed and leaders are nurtured.

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Not surprisingly, my passion for innovation and digital convergence has become the camp from which I have launched my internship search. For reasons which I'll explain below, Services Science has become the scope I use to survey the surrounding business terrain, and from this place I am peering across a vast and fertile valley of opportunity. Not only are the forces of industry and innovation coming together to create one of the most interesting and important paradigm shifts in recent history, but a change is happening in me as well as I continue to understand and map the links between my experience, my education and my ambition in a digitally convergent world.

I am fortunate to have started my internship search early and to have been very proactive in it. Beginning in October, I renewed my subscription to The Hollywood Reporter (www.hollywoodreporter.com). I read everything about convergence in the entertainment industry. I then investigated the noteworthy companies I read about, and the subsequent process of combing through corporate Web sites led me to other companies which, in turn, led to an endless trail of white papers which really opened up entirely new worlds of possibility and ultimately led to a notion of how to harness the power of convergence in industries other than entertainment. It didn't matter what industry or need I contemplated, I found myself constantly relating opportunity with services creation or deployment, and those thoughts somehow always revolved around the bright star of content.

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