The David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, home of the Goff Strategic Leadership Institute. Its programs are open to students in any major across campus. Courtesy photo
When Greg Goff left the University of Utah for his first job at Conoco in Denver, he joined a management development program that felt like school all over again. It ran a year, in three-month blocks. At the end of each, a panel of 10 or 12 people grilled new hires on what they had learned and how well they could communicate it.
Conoco hired 60 to 70 graduates a year for the program. It kept about a quarter of them.
“So 75% of the new hires didn’t make it,” Goff, now 69, says. “Looking back on it, it was a fairly grueling way to do it.”
What struck him was who was washing out. Many had been at the top of their class, in finance or chemical engineering or whatever they had studied. “But they really weren’t prepared to work,” he says.
One of them became one of Goff’s closest friends. The two met in Denver after both were assigned there. His friend lasted about six months before Conoco let him go. He went on to become the CEO of a public company, but Goff never forgot the sense of failure the firing left him with.
“Everyone tells themselves that it’s not going to be me,” Goff says.
Decades later, after a career that took him to the top of Tesoro – later Andeavor – Goff decided to do something about it at his alma mater, where he’d earned both his bachelor’s degree and MBA. The result is the Goff Strategic Leadership Institute at the David Eccles School of Business, which he launched with a $6 million gift and expanded into an institute with $10 million more.
‘THAT’S NEVER GONNA WORK. THEY’RE TOO YOUNG’
The institute’s mission, as Goff and Managing Director and CEO Ruchi Watson put it in a wide-ranging conversation with Poets&Quants on the Utah Eccles campus, is to help students become “more successful faster.” It doesn’t teach finance or marketing. It teaches how to work: how to frame a problem, work with people, influence them and create value.
The bigger bet was the audience. Watson says the data she and her colleagues reviewed showed people typically get their first leadership development at around age 41 or 42. In the academic literature, she says, strategic leadership was mostly studied as something for top management teams.
“We thought, well, really?” Watson says. “Could we bring this to young people?”
Not everyone agreed. Early on, Goff pitched the idea to a professor he was trying to recruit to Utah from Washington University in St. Louis.
“He said, ‘That’s never gonna work. They’re too young,’” Goff recalls. “‘You need to get MBA students.’ And I said, ‘No, actually, we probably need to go younger.’”
Just as important, Goff says, is that students choose to be there. “If they were forced to do it, it probably would have zero value for them,” he says.
Greg Goff: “We can’t ever lose sight of the fact that our purpose is to create value for students”
FROM MBA PROGRAM TO INSTITUTE
Watson came to the U about 15 years ago with a background in consulting and corporate strategy. She started as associate director of the full-time MBA program and taught its capstone course. Then-Dean Taylor Randall, now the university’s president, soon asked her to work for him. For the next seven or eight years, she handled strategic initiatives under a series of titles. Along the way, she earned a doctorate in higher education from the University of Pennsylvania.
About six years ago, she took on a new question: what would a one-of-a-kind leadership institute at Utah look like? She developed the answer with Goff and Todd Zenger, now the institute’s academic director.
They chose to focus on strategy. When people name what leaders need, communication usually comes up first, Watson says, but the research she cites ranks a strategic approach ahead of it.
“We talk about communication, we talk about teams, but what are we communicating about?” she says. “What are the teams working towards?”
The institute teaches six principles of strategic leadership – the same ones Watson teaches in executive education, positioned differently. One is “relentless value creation.” To explain it, Watson borrows from Ron Popeil’s old rotisserie infomercials.
“You can’t set it and forget it,” she says. “What brought you value? Keep being relentless about what that looks like.”
Students learn the principles through real projects with organizations: hundreds of them so far, in Utah and beyond. The programs are open to students in any major across campus, not just business, and they’re tiered, since freshmen and seniors are at very different stages. The institute’s guiding principles include value creation, experimentation, and what Watson calls “a real focus on care and trust.”
The numbers are growing fast. Last year about 130 Goff students graduated, the largest group yet, and Watson expects more this spring. The institute counts roughly 400 to 500 “Goff grads” in all. About a third have come back to engage with the institute, and more than half of those have done so more than once.
Grads return as mentors and “thought partners” for current students, and upperclassmen mentor younger ones. Watson is also launching a leadership exchange where grads bring real challenges from their new jobs and work through them together.
“We practice what we preach,” she says.
FROM SNOWBOARDING TO WALL STREET
For Matthew Timpa, a senior, Utah started as a snowboarding decision. He came from Las Vegas without a firm plan, started as a journalism major and switched to finance in the spring of his freshman year.
He has since done all four Goff programs and served on the institute’s student staff. After graduation, he heads to New York for a job in investment banking.
“Goff has a very natural progression that coincided with my college career,” he says. “And set me up to be in a good place by the time that I was recruiting.”
Anika Rao, also a senior, grew up in Salt Lake City and attended a competitive International Baccalaureate high school downtown. She had out-of-state options but found Utah’s opportunities competitive with those at far more selective schools. Goff was part of the draw. So was the Hinckley Institute of Politics.
She entered as a political science major and added quantitative economics, housed in the business school, at the end of her freshman year. She spent last summer interning at Goldman Sachs and plans to return.
Indiana Plant, a junior majoring in quantitative economics and anthropology, chose Utah for the business economics major. It’s formally known as QAMO – Quantitative Analysis of Markets and Organizations – and students call it Quant Econ. Its founding professor came from Northwestern and built the program from scratch, she says.
“I realized I could get a world-class education here at the U for a great deal and stay close to home,” Plant says.
She interned at the Walt Disney Company last summer and will intern at Bain & Company next summer. She hopes to return to Bain after graduation.
All three, it turns out, were journalists in high school.
Ruchi Watson: “When something is sticky, it just becomes the next problem to solve. I love puzzles. I’ve always been that person”
‘IT CLICKED IMMEDIATELY’
Goff projects aren’t typical internships with a defined role, Timpa says. Students work in teams on open-ended problems, and it’s on them to figure out how to add value. Professors coach them on how to find the right problem and how to structure and tackle an ambiguous one.
He admits the payoff wasn’t obvious at first. Then came his internship this past summer.
“I was in environments where I wasn’t being directly told what to do, and where my peers in the internship were maybe a little more lost,” Timpa says. “It clicked immediately, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s what I’ve been learning.’”
He says he was able to hit the ground running much faster and teach himself things on the job.
“That’s kind of what we would hope to happen,” Goff says.
THE HEDGEHOG AND THE CEO
All three students reached Goff Scholars, the institute’s top tier, where teams take on consulting projects throughout the year.
Rao points to one project in particular: a small, values-driven Utah maker of natural skin care and body products. The company had about 1,000 SKUs and a staff of four.
The team dug into academic strategy texts with help from their professor and landed on Jim Collins’ “hedgehog concept” from Good to Great: the idea that a business succeeds by focusing on the intersection of what it’s most passionate about, what drives its economic engine and what it can be best in the world at. Then the students presented their recommendations directly to the company’s CEO.
It resonated. The team still has a good relationship with her, and she’s actively implementing the ideas, the students say.
Plant says that’s the difference. Plenty of programs promise students end-to-end ownership, she says, but few deliver it.
“Goff really delivers on that, to a scale I’ve never seen before,” Plant says. “You’re working with the CEO, you are completely in charge of the outcome from start to finish. You identify the problem, you solve the problem.”
And the work comes with what she calls a rich academic layer, supported by strategy professors. “It’s kind of the MBA for undergrads,” she says.
For Rao, an earlier program made the same point. She started as a Goff Explorer, which pairs students with internships and mentors inside the host organization, with a Goff curriculum layered on top. Problem finding is the skill she took away most.
“That combination of this facilitated internship, but then also having this curriculum attached to it, was what differentiated Goff for me,” Rao says.
THE BEEHIVE NETWORK
Asked what outsiders miss about the institute, Plant points to the state’s nickname.
“We’re the Beehive State, so we’re very industrious and very entrepreneurial by nature,” she says. “We’re natural networkers, and we’re natural collaborative thinkers.”
That network has delivered for her. A Goff alum helped her land the Disney role, she says, and Goff alumni were central to her networking for Bain.
“We really care about each other,” she says. “And we’re also very industrious and ambitious people, and that combination is really powerful.”
Ruchi Watson: “Whether you’re an engineer or a science student, fine arts or humanities, you want to create value and have an impact,” she says. Courtesy photo
THE SUIT
Greg Goff traces his own leadership education to one experience, not a class. As a junior, a business professor asked him and a few other students to speak to business organizations – Kiwanis clubs and the like.
Goff didn’t own a suit, so he bought one. The professor took one look and asked, “Oh, my God, where did you get that suit?”
“I think he was right,” Goff says. “It was horrible. But I actually learned how to go out and speak. No class prepared me for that.”
That’s the kind of experience the institute tries to create, he says. And it has to be measurably different from what other schools offer, because leadership “is a dime a dozen, really,” Goff says. “There’s a jillion books written on it.”
THE NEXT CHAPTER
Goff isn’t involved day to day. He prefers informal brown-bag lunches with students and working with Watson on where the institute goes next. He also plans to keep investing in it.
What matters most to him, he says, is the university’s commitment. Deans come and go, and a new one could deemphasize the institute. That’s not a worry today, he says. He credits Randall, whom he calls an idea person, with getting it started, and calls current Dean Kurt Dirks strong on execution.
Watson’s next goal is to make Goff a reason students choose Utah in the first place. There are early signs. Employers that recruit at the school now ask to meet Goff students specifically, she says, though the institute doesn’t steer students toward any industry or function.
Prospective students are noticing, too. At a nonprofit mentoring event this past summer, a former business school board member sat with a young woman headed to the U in the fall. Asked what excited her, the student mentioned something called Goff. The board member brought her straight over to Watson.
“Here I was, sitting three tables away,” Watson says. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing.’”
Next, Watson wants to work more deeply with the business community, find local problems the institute can help solve, and possibly take the model beyond Utah.
What keeps her up at night, she says, is making sure the institute lives up to that potential. Setbacks don’t rattle her. She has absorbed what the institute teaches.
“When something is sticky, it just becomes the next problem to solve,” Watson says. “I love puzzles. I’ve always been that person.”
Goff keeps it simpler. “We can’t ever lose sight of the fact that our purpose is to create value for students,” he says.
Watson argues that value isn’t limited to business majors. “Whether you’re an engineer or a science student, fine arts or humanities, you want to create value and have an impact,” she says. “And so to learn how to do that is valuable to anybody.”
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