Turney Stevens, Dean

Can you answer the following questions correctly?

1. Which nation had the highest cumulative GDP growth rates over the past ten years?

a. U.S.

b. Germany

c. Japan

d. U.K.

2. Which city is home to more headquarters of Global 100 corporations?

a. New York

b. London

c. Tokyo

d. Hong Kong

If you answered “c” to both questions, you are officially a Japanese business expert.

We’ve heard so much in this country about Japan’s “Lost Decade” and China’s ascendancy, we sometimes lose sight of what an economic powerhouse Japan continues to be.

Several years ago, after Katrina and after counting Japanese companies in each city, the Japanese government decided to move its Consulate-General serving southeastern states to Nashville from New Orleans. There are fewer than 10 Japanese companies in Louisiana, more than 170 in Tennessee.

The Japanese Consul General, now living in Nashville, is The Honorable Hiroshi Sato. He is our guest today on Conversations with the Dean. Consul General Sato entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1973 and has served in embassies in Washington, Malaysia, New Zealand and the Philippines. He assumed his current position in 2008.

We were honored to have Consul General Sato on the Lipscomb campus recently and appreciated his time as he sat down with us to discuss the future of Japanese-United States relations, the business climate in Japan, Japan’s rivalry with its Chinese neighbors, his nation’s recovery from last year’s earthquake and tsunami, and many other topics of keen interest.

Contributions to the Lipscomb Business Blog represent the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Lipscomb University nor the Lipscomb College of Business and its faculty and staff.

By Turney Stevens, Dean

“Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”

So spoke the writer of the Bible’s second book of Samuel in describing the death of the warrior Jonathan. The writer could, however, have been the editor of the Wall Street Journal and he could have been talking about modern-day America because many of the mightiest names of American commerce seem to have fallen too, one by one.

There was once a king called Kodak. Was there any company (other than maybe Disney) that was more a part of your memory making and your parents’ memory making than Kodak? Yet, today, Kodak resides in the bowels of bankruptcy, broken and beaten, no longer a titan.

General Motors, once the maker of the Chevy, the Grand Prix, the Stingray, and the Little Deuce Coupe, is still around, even beginning to thrive again, but only because the federal government pumped billions into it in order to save the company.

Where is Polaroid? Where is Bell and Howell? Where are Eastern Airlines, Braniff Airlines, TWA, and PanAm?

You get the idea. Some of this is natural evolution, some is sheer dumb management. But there’s no doubt that we have seen many mighty corporate warriors fall in recent years.

So, what about IBM? Big Blue was as blue-blooded as they come. An icon of American industry, the company computerized America…and much of the rest of the world too.

Then, along came Dell, and Apple, and so many others. Unlike Kodak and PanAm, IBM had the wise leadership to enable it to reinvent itself. The company exited the computer hardware business, even showing enough steely determination to change course and to sell its much loved and highly successful IBM laptop division to (take a deep breath here)…a Chinese company.

What is IBM’s business today? What is the IBM management secret that apparently so many others failed to learn?

Our guest on “Conversations with the Dean” this week is Daniel C. Day, Vice President and Partner leading the East Region of the General Business Sector of IBM’s Global Business Services. His client list is short (two global corporations) but the two clients’ revenues total $80 billion and he and his team travel the globe constantly assisting his clients to increase efficiency, improve analytics, and transform technology applications.

Dan was on campus recently to speak to student members of our Student Center for the Public Trust, an affiliate of the Center for the Public Trust and the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy. We were honored to establish the nation’s first SCPT chapter here at the College of Business. SCPT, which encourages students to learn about and to develop high ethical principles, is growing with a total of 12 campuses now hosting chapters and more to come. We’re working with SCPT to encourage chapters to be formed on every college campus in America.

Dan Day has been at IBM through it all and he talks about how IBM has remained a paragon of wise strategic leadership and high ethical commitment, not to mention a really great stock to stash away and forget about.

Contributions to the Lipscomb Business Blog represent the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Lipscomb University nor the Lipscomb College of Business and its faculty and staff.

By Turney Stevens, Dean

If you’re a golf fan, you’ve heard a lot over the past couple of weeks about gender equity.

The new CEO of IBM is a woman and, unlike her three male predecessors, she has not been invited to become a member of the all-male Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Master’s Tournament, and to wear a prestigious Green Jacket, the badge of membership worn by the male titans of industry that make up the club’s ultra-exclusive membership roster.

This comes as even more of an insult since IBM is one of only three carefully chosen television sponsors of the golf tournament’s broadcasts and annually spends undisclosed millions which make the tournament possible.

Then, in the past week, just as the Master’s ended and the storm appeared to be quieting, the gender equity uproar stirred again when a prominent Democratic surrogate for President Obama said on CNN, “Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life.”

Mrs. Romney immediately shot back, in what was probably a justified snappiness, by saying that she had indeed very carefully chosen to be a stay-at-home mom and to raise a family of five children. This, she pointed out, was very much real “work” (as any other mom and all honest dads would readily agree.)

And on and on it goes.

Our culture continues to debate the role of women, both in big matters like leading one of the world’s largest corporations and in more private matters like a family’s decision about the assigned roles for each parent.

Our College of Business has tried to let our female business students know that we encourage their loftiest aspirations. And we’ve tried to make a contribution to this national discussion as we have annually conducted research on the number of women serving on public boards in Tennessee and then partnered with CABLE, an organization of women in business, to disseminate the study results.

Kathleen McQuiggan, a former investment banker with Goldman Sachs and now Senior Consultant to the PAX World Global Women’s Equality Fund, was on our campus recently to speak to a CABLE breakfast and she stopped by our studio to speak with us about the challenges of gender equality in the board room as well as in the workplace.

She is this week’s guest on Conversations with the Dean and we welcome her contribution to this ongoing discussion.

By Turney Stevens, Dean

The facts are even more alarming than the rhetoric.

• There are 10,000 Americans who celebrate their 65^th birthdays every day. This wave of new seniors, unprecedented in the history of the planet, will continue EVERY DAY for the next 19 years.
• Social Security payments represent the largest single expenditure of the federal government budget, larger than defense or Medicare/Medicaid. More than 20 cents of every dollar the U.S. government spends goes into checks made out to American seniors.
• The ratio of workers to payees is falling rapidly. Today there are 54 million people receiving benefits and 157 million paying into the system to make that possible. By 2035, the ratio will be one person receiving benefits for every three paying into the system.

Against this backdrop, we recently invited Dr. Andrew G. Biggs, former principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, to come to the Lipscomb campus to speak to our students. Dr. Biggs is my guest on this week’s episode of Conversations with the Dean.

Today, he is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. He served in the Bush Administration as associate director of the National Economic Council (2005) and was a staff member of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security (2001).

The Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program was created in 1935 when Congress passed the Social Security Act. Over the years it has been amended, enlarged, and much discussed, not to mention much misunderstood. For example, who doesn’t remember Al Gore’s famous statement, in the 2000 Presidential Campaign, about protecting the Social Security “Lock Box”?

It turns out there is no lock box. The system is pay-as-you-go, although excess contributions in any given year are invested…in, guess what, debt of the United States government. So, any reserves are dependent on the federal government having sufficient funds to pay—or to borrow—funds to repay itself and its obligations to America’s seniors.

By 2023, total income and interest earned will no longer cover expenditures of social security. By 2036, under current law, the fund will be exhausted unless Congress acts.

So, it is against this backdrop that Dr. Biggs visits Lipscomb to separate fact from rhetoric, to deal with the facts instead of the fiction, and to talk candidly with our students about the world of work and taxes they will move into in the years ahead.

Welcome to the future.

Contributions to the Lipscomb Business Blog represent the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Lipscomb University nor the Lipscomb College of Business and its faculty and staff.

By Turney Stevens, Dean

He was the oldest son, born after a sister and before a younger sister and a younger brother.

The family business, a general merchandise company, had been founded in Kentucky by his grandfather.  His own father inherited the business and ran it with great success while the children were becoming adults.

Like Jacob in the Bible, he held the birthright and, because of that, he eventually succeeded his father as CEO. Later, his younger brother also joined the business and became the chief operating officer. But, the youngest son was destined to report to the older brother and, like many brothers, eventually there was friction.

What happened next is the stuff of novels.

The company grew to a public, multi-billion dollar chain called Dollar General Corporation.

Cal Turner, Jr. and the rest of his family became exceptionally wealthy. Outside investors provided the capital to allow this growth to happen but, eventually, they insisted that Cal had to force his dad, by then the company’s chairman, out of the business and Cal himself concluded that he would also have to tell his brother to leave the company’s employment as well.

How does a family survive such strains? How does a leader lead under such excruciating circumstances? How does a man like Cal Turner become one of the nation’s most respected Christian businessmen despite all this drama? How does the younger brother become one of Nashville’s most respected real estate developers and philanthropists? And how do the brothers continue to value each other…and even to speak?

For the answers, you’ll want to watch this week’s Conversations With The Dean featuring Cal Turner, Jr.

Dollar General was a family business founded in Scottsville, Kentucky with the mission of selling everyday items for a dollar to rural families.  Today it is one of the nation’s great retail juggernauts. The Turner family imprint on the business was all encompassing and remains dominant even to today.

Cal Turner Jr. is retired today but he is certainly not retiring.

By Turney Stevens, Dean

My wife is a Realtor. Several months ago, she told me over dinner one night that she was working on a relocation for a really interesting client she thought I would enjoy meeting.

She went on to say that Bob Harrison was the chairman of a company called RCFS, that he was relocating the company and his family to Tennessee from Chicago, and that his business partner was a former senior executive with McDonald’s and that he is also relocating his family to Nashville.

Ann knows that a big part of a dean’s job is developing strategic relationships for the university and raising friends as well as raising money.

So I was certainly happy to meet some new friends. We arranged dinner and off we went. What I met, however, was not only a new friend at both the personal and professional levels but also a walking history and political science textbook.

Bob Harrison is a Native American, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of Ft. Yates, North Dakota. As we talked over dinner and Bob told me more of his company, I became more and more impressed. RCFS is a manufacturer, marketer and distributor of food products and energy drinks. RCFS is a Prime Vendor to the U.S. military, primarily for the Army in its Southeast Asia area of operations.

Bob’s business partner, Wayne Wolf, has his own impressive credentials. He spent more than three decades at McDonald’s, serving in a variety of operations and executive roles. When he retired, he was serving as the leader of McDonald’s supply chain operations globally.

You’ll enjoy their interview on today’s Conversations with the Dean. Bob talks about issues affecting Native Americans, a subject that too often gets too little attention in the media and one that all should feel a desire to help address. Wayne talks about global issues, specifically from a supply chain perspective. I was especially interested in this topic since we are launching a new supply chain concentration that features one or two semesters in China.

Wayne also talks about his memories of a much smaller and much earlier McDonald’s and how McDonald’s created a culture of excellence that made the company both the biggest and the best at what it does.

But the thing that I found most interesting was why they chose Nashville. They didn’t ask for, or receive, any of those enormous tax incentives we’ve been reading so much about lately. They simply came, they saw, and they stayed…like so many thousands of others who have moved here in recent years. And they are bringing with them 200 new jobs.

Bob and Wayne and their families could choose to live anywhere. You’ll be interested to hear them talk about choosing Nashville.

Bob Harrison and Wayne Wolf are part of a New Breed. Well, actually, it’s now an Old Breed because it’s been happening most of my adult lifetime. Executives choosing to live here, no matter where they may work, are a fascinating phenomenon. Bob and Wayne talk in today’s interview about this and many other topics.

As we settled into our seats on the set prior to recording the interview, Bob handed me a gift. It was a small stick, festooned with feathers and some other items. What is this, I asked. Bob told me he had given me a Talking Stick. He said that only the person holding the Talking Stick could speak in the Native Council meetings.

I told Bob that I don’t get to attend too many Native Council meetings but that I was sure I could put the Talking Stick to good use in our next faculty meeting.

Welcome to Nashville, RCFS and Bob Harrison and Wayne Wolf.

Contributions to the Lipscomb Business Blog represent the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Lipscomb University nor the Lipscomb College of Business and its faculty and staff.