Dear Alumni,

Thanks to all who participated in our recent Alumni Week. Alumni and current students benefited greatly from the many opportunities for interaction. For names of participants and audio podcasts of several talks, go to http://business.udmercy.edu.

The College of Business Administration (CBA) continues to focus on two key areas this semester:

Building Our Future

• College faculty, staff, and administration have been actively engaged in determining the future of the CBA, focusing on increasing enrollment in all of our programs and examining our curricula. The effort began last September with an honest assessment of the current state of the College. The team participated in a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) analysis. Priority was determined to be enrollment. Teams are working on different aspects of increasing enrollment at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
• Alumni can help by talking about our programs with family, friends and colleagues. Encourage them to consider UDM, where we focus on developing the whole person. One way to do so is to forward the last dean's message, "Together We Travel," to them!

Ongoing Programs

• Our traditional part-time MBA program continues to attract business leaders through its reputation for excellence, flexibility, and individual attention. Details are available at http://business.udmercy.edu/mba.php.
• The third cohort of our integrated Executive MBA program began in January. We have incorporated our initial cornerstone strategy of Leadership and Systems Thinking into the curriculum at the start of the program. Students benefited from a four-day, intensive leadership program conducted jointly by Bob Thomas, executive director of Accenture’s Institute for High Performance Business, and me. All EMBA classes are problem-focused and team-taught, crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries. More information about the EMBA program can be found at http://business.udmercy.edu/exec_mba.php.
• We have launched an exciting program in Business Turnaround Management (BTM), which is unlike any other in the country. Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing Oswald Mascarenas, S.J., and a team of business leaders from the community are developing and teaching the program. BTM seeks a holistic and systemic solution to business turnarounds, thus uniquely training students to exercise leadership in rescuing and restructuring ailing businesses and non-profit institutions. To learn more about this groundbreaking program, please visit http://business.udmercy.edu/bus_turnaround_manage.php.

Warm regards,

Hossein Nivi, Ph.D.
Dean, College of Business Administration