teamwork – Ciocca Center for Business, Ethics, and Society Blog

November 14, 2014

J.R Butler ’08 Translates an HC Degree to a Successful Sales Career

On Monday, October 27^th the Holy Cross Sales Group hosted J.R Butler ’08 in a workshop on translating a Holy Cross degree into a successful career in sales. During his time on the hill, Butler found success both in the classroom as a Sociology major, Art history minor and as a Varsity athlete playing for the Men’s Hockey team. More recently, he has been busy in his professional career, recently being named as Regional Sales Director at VM Turbo, one of the fastest growing tech companies in the Boston area.

To Butler, the three most important things that Holy Cross can offer a student interested in sales are: an inquisitive mind, critical thinking skills, and the ability to interact with a variety of people. As liberal arts students, we are taught to understand a wide variety of topics at a deeper level that allows us to apply these skills in the real world. Furthermore, we learn to make reasonable arguments that would appeal to a wide variety of people. Someone with a successful career in sales utilizes these skills to find why a client may need a service or product and is able to help the client understand why it is necessary to the well being of his/her company.

The Holy Cross Sales Group thanks everyone who was able to attend the event and we encourage those who are interested in sales to attend any future meetings. Our next meeting is Monday, November 24, 2014 at 7:00pm in Stein 120. We look forward to seeing you there!

—

Thanks to Kyle Larkin ’15 and the Holy Cross Sales Club for inviting J.R. Butler ’08 back to campus for a lively talk on the sales industry. As always, don’t forget to “like” us on FACEBOOK and follow us @HCPrebusiness Watch for our next blog post…

Cassie Gevry
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

October 8, 2014

Arts Transcending Borders: Cultural Entrepreneurship

On Thursday September 25th, Cristina Pato – a Galician bagpiper, pianist, composer and Artist in Residence here at the College of the Holy Cross – held a special dinner lecture titled: “Cultural Entrepreneurship: At the Intersection of Business & the Arts.” Pato has an active professional career devoted to Galician popular and classical music and jazz, and her dual careers have led her to perform on major stages throughout Europe, USA, India, Africa, and China.

The night started with Cristina telling the dinner guests about her story. She was the first female Gaita (Galician bagpipe) player to release a solo album in 1999, and she became a huge pop star in Spain. Since then, she has also collaborated on world stages with Yo-Yo Ma, Arturo O’Farril, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Osvaldo Golijov, to name a few. However, she had no idea that she could become this product: Cristina Pato. She was fortunate enough to have a edge in the music industry as the first female, soloist playing a Galician bagpipe. Yet other artists today do not always have this competitive advantage. Thus, she developed the Galician Connection, an annual festival dedicated to promote intercultural dialogue through music and encouraging cultural entrepreneurs to rise.As the night went on, Cristina got all the dinner participants to interact at their tables and gave each table a scenario to discuss. Scenarios included: Being an artist with no initial funding, being an artist with public funding, etc. The fundamental idea was to come up with a way for the artist to market their product and make a sustainable income. After each table presented their plan of action, Cristina posed the question: “What is holding the artist back? What’s stopping all of us from sculpting, from being a famous singer, from being a renowned pianist?” It seemed like the unanimous answer was that in our modern world, most art has funding through public donations or private investments, and that we believed being an artist would not be able to rake in a steady income.That is exactly why Cristina created the Galician Connection. She is passionate about education, and feels that people need to be educated on how important art is, and they need to have a support system while creating art. Participants in the Galician Connection are able to attend classes and workshops that help them grow as artists, and they have a forum where they can connect and grow together.

So what exactly is cultural entrepreneurship? Everyone had a different definition. But if you ask me, cultural entrepreneurship is being able to acknowledge that the arts are an important part of society, and finding a way to creatively present an art form to other people so that you can make a living off of it, and so that others can appreciate and connect with it as well.

—

Thanks to Sophia Jin ’15, for attending and writing this blog post. Great speaker, great dinner and great conversation! As always, don’t forget to “like” us on FACEBOOK and follow us @HCPrebusiness

Cassie Gevry
Associate Director
Ciocca Office of Entrepreneurial Studies

March 7, 2013

Exploring Global Business and Corporate Social Responsibility with Green Mountain Coffee-Keurig on Day 4

Karen Gallagher, Senior Marketing Director at Green Mountain Coffee – Keurig and mother of a current Holy Cross junior, braved the snow on the fourth day of ELW 2013 to make sure the students could learn about global business and corporate social responsibility (or, CSR). As was a theme of the week, the day was focused on group work. Karen kicked off the session giving an overview of GMCR/Keurig, highlighting the company’s mission and values, the way they communicate (or, don’t communicate) these values to all invested constituencies – employees, customers, farmers, etc – and the challenges that GMCR/Keurig is facing. She talked about a couple of particularly interesting initiatives that really showcased how, as an employer, GMCR/Keurig differentiates itself, including the fact that all employees are allotted 52 hours per year to do service work at the location of their choice. As students at Holy Cross, where the idea of being “men and women for others” is important, you could see a lot of the students intrigued that a company would do something like that. Then, Karen also talked a lot about the importance of marketing, using examples of particularly effective television ads, to show how good marketing can clearly communicate who a company is and what they stand for and, as a result, build brand recognition and loyalty.

With the overview complete, Karen sent the students off to work in their teams to put together a presentation on how GMCR/Keurig could to a better job communicating its initiatives internally and externally as well as how the company could create a sustainable competitive advantage. The students were charged with creating a presentation highlighting where the current strengths were and then suggesting tangible action items that could enhance GMCR/Keurig’s communications.

With just two hours to work on this presentation, the results were impressive. The students suggested things like revamping the K-cup box to really highlight what the company is doing, creating an “Employee of the Year” award highlighting someone who really embodies GMCR/Keurig’s commitment to CSR and coming up with ways to better facilitate everyone participating in service opportunities and marketing those experiences so customers are aware they are happening. All of the teams agreed that the “stuff” GMCR/Keurig is doing is positive – they are committed and really incorporate their corporate values into the business, but they need to figure out a way to make the initiatives clearer and broadcast them to a wider audience.

The day wrapped up with an exciting surprise – the two teams of students that Karen deemed the winners of the presentations were awarded their own Vue single cup brewers, the latest product by Keurig! Some of the students asked to have them shipped to Holy Cross – so they’ll be ready to help them cram through the end of the semester – and a couple of the students asked them to be sent home as a nice surprise for their lucky parents!

The snow is going to roll in tomorrow so we’ll see what that means for Day 5 of ELW but, regardless, we’ve had 4 jam packed days of learning and teamwork and I think all of the students have already learned quite a bit about both careers in business and leadership skills.

As always, don’t forget to “Like” us on FACEBOOK and look for our WIB, SBP and ELW groups on LinkedIN!

Helene

Helene Horan
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

March 5, 2013

Ideas for new apps created on Day 1 of the 2013 Executive Leadership Workshop!

Yesterday kicked off the 2013 Executive Leadership Workshop and one of the things the students definitely learned was that working a full day (they started at 8:30 am and were busy until 7 pm) is challenging!

Peter George ’81 started off the week talking about how to start and build a business. He was accompanied by Geoff Oblak and Gary Kramer. The students’ challenge for the day: work with their teams to come up with an educational app and then pitch it to the day’s three executive teachers who were acting as Venture Capitalists.

While all the teams came up with interesting ideas, two teams were ultimately rewarded funding: Michael Biggins ’16, Claudia Bechtold ’15, Maggie MacMullin ’16 and Michael Tucker ’14 came up with the idea for BookChat, an online database for professors to post excerpts of readings and where students can engage in online discussions. Nolan Kiernan ’15, Matt Devine ’15, Brendan McGill ’14 and Sophie Haggerty ’16 came up with the idea for SyncroNote, an online note taking software with an audio recording technology. I’m not going to include too many details, in case any of these teams decide to really run with the idea, but the judges were all impressed.

Stay posted for updates on the rest of this week’s workshop. Today’s topic is “Using Culture and Values to Build a Sustainable Business”. Currently the students are split up in groups prepping for a debate on whether culture should be a primary or secondary concern in companies. We’ll see who comes up with the most persuasive argument…