Three Women at a Table
The Gothic towers and rarefied intellectual atmosphere of Northwestern University in suburban Chicago envelop many a first-time visitor in a certain kind of imposing atmosphere. “Intimidating” is how some have described it. For a visiting young woman raised in one of the rougher precincts of that town, possession of an MBA from another top university…
Read MoreRoad Less Travelled
The littlest people in Dr. Charles W. Richardson’s Marketing Principles class at the business school of Clark Atlanta University sat on the floor in the back, quietly sipping from juice boxes and playing with sticker books. Occasionally, they bicker over who gets to hold the Barbie doll. They are the toddler sons and daughters of…
Read MoreThe Diner Dishes
Research is the raison d’être and lifeblood of the academic firmament’s upper strata, where doctoral candidates and professors reside. Undergraduates, it has been said, absorb and process knowledge and MBA students apply it—but PhDs. create it. One important outcome of The PhD Project has been the development of a generation of minority professors contributing increasingly…
Read MoreMentorship: Pass it Along
When a young Miriam “Mimi” Stamps was still of an age when maternal influence is real and present, her mother advised her to become a teacher. The future Dr. Stamps promptly rejected that advice. It was a time when women were first beginning to think beyond the pre-feminist era stereotypes that had limited their career…
Read MoreSpecial Issue
The academy lost these two amazing scholars. Both Dr. Henderson and Dr. Williams left a wonderful legacy of research and mentorship that has inspired many.. They were considered “giants “ in the field of Marketing and are sorely missed. The May 2013 arrival of the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Public Policy and Marketing in business professors’…
Read More“If She Can…”
As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Kimberly Dillon Grantham admits she “had no clue what a Ph.D. was—or what I could do with it.” What she did know was that attending her favorite professor’s class ignited an unexpected spark for her. “I liked his job, and I wanted to know what I had…
Read MoreOne City
One city. How hard could it be?, IBM executive Harriette Bettis-Outland wondered. Riding the wave of a successful, ten-year sales and marketing career in computer software, she had begun considering other options when her baby son was born. At the time, she was traveling five days a week—which didn’t leave much time to experience, much…
Read MoreThe Investment
Through more than five intense years as a doctoral student, Kendra Harris could not help but notice that her old friends in corporate life were driving newer cars, and living in bigger houses than she was. And every time a former colleague jetted off for another lavish vacation, she needed to check in with her inner value…
Read MoreOther-mindedness
The booming 1990s were a heady, exciting time to be an advertising executive for Fortune 500 companies and top agencies. But for Andrea Scott, there was an unsettling undercurrent to those go-go years. She subscribed to a viewpoint she calls “other-mindedness,” and she wasn’t seeing enough of it in her environment. “I was troubled by the…
Read MoreFulfilling
The dollars—offers of them, that is—were flying at Constance Porter. Comfortably situated in a prominent management consulting firm, she found herself the object of an unsolicited, escalating bidding war by two companies seeking to recruit her. The offers were growing increasingly attractive. Uncertain of how to respond, she sought her father for guidance. What she…
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