Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Oregon Executive MBA


Last Friday (2/27/2009), I have the opportunity to tag along with my boss, Darcy Winslow, to a class taught at the Oregon Executive MBA, a partnership between University of Oregon, Oregon State, and Portland State, where Darcy was a guest speaker. It was a little weird to be there since everyone was older than me and I have aspirations to go to graduate school and everyone there has aspirations to work for a successful (and sustainable) company, which is where I'm at right now. Team Evolution, a group of students, presented a Stanford Case Study about Darcy entitled "Nike's Global Women's Fitness Business: Driving Strategic Integration." I've seen one other presentation of this case, last year at the University of Oregon, and this group rocked it.

The great thing about this case begins in 2004 and I interned for Darcy the summer of 2005, right smack dab in the middle of the case. That was my first internship and at 18, I can say I honestly didn't have a clue what I was doing for Nike, but now I can look back and read a case study and see what was happening both to our department, Global Women's Fitness as well as the organization, Nike, as a whole. Pretty interesting stuff.

The presentation was followed by a Q&A session which focused on making change to an organization "under the radar".

How would you change an organization?

2 comments:

Josh Groth said...

Was that weird helping present a case study on something you worked through?

What were the sustainable touch points in the case study?

Jenna said...

I wasn't presenting. A group of MBA students were. I was being presented too. But it was weird.

While the case focuses on culture change within an organization. It does highlight some of Darcy's previous work. And we also talked about sustainability when we introduced ourselves and talked about what Darcy has been doing since she "graduated" from Nike.