The Leadership and Business Strategy course at WMU meets weekly at Sleeping Giant Capital in downtown Kalamazoo.
Western Michigan University’s Leadership and Business Strategy Program (LBS) immerses students in an experiential learning opportunity that elevates students for the professional world.
LBS is a program run through the Haworth College of Business that puts students in a position where they can experience hands-on learning.
“The Leadership and Business Strategy Program is an innovative experience and an experiential learning space,” said WMU and LBS student Wyatt Adamski. “First in Michigan to have a space like this, where you solve real business problems for real companies with real assets and real money.”
He continued: “In the practicum, which is the 3010 course that you’re usually in, you work as a business analyst for that firm technically. You work to solve their business problem, whether that’s a market entry strategy, whether that’s growing their company in another way.”
Students in the capstone course of the program get to meet with an executive mentor bi-weekly.
“The leaders that are taking the capstone course, we get a executive mentor,” said WMU and LBS student Miles Cramer. “Our executive mentor is a senior partner at McKinsey, which is one of the largest consulting firms. Anybody in consulting knows what McKinsey is. We meet bi-weekly with him for an hour to ask him questions, to discuss topics.”
Craig Hopkins, chief information officer for the City of San Antonio, helps to guide students through challenges in the program. Hopkins is a WMU alum.
“He’s incredibly smart technically, but he’s also very emotionally intelligent,” Cramer said. “He helps guide us when there’s conflict in the team or there’s interpersonal conflict between people. You can go to Craig and be like Craig, how do I deal with this?”
Hopkins helped build the LBS program after being contacted about bringing alumni back to WMU.
“I was brought in, kind of as an executive mentor to help with some of that,” Hopkins said. “That’s how I got started. And then I just got the bug, right? I want to mentor, I want to give back, I want to help.”
To Hopkins, the program helps students to build the confidence to become great future leaders.
“This program helps you build confidence and competence to be a principal leader in our world. Period,” Hopkins said. “That’s what this program is about. Gives you the opportunity to experience being in a team, experience being in a kind of a high pressure situation in real world projects.”
He continued: “Our goal is to help teach and coach you, that when you go out into the world, into your first job, you are more competent, you are more confident, and you can be a principal leader on the first day you’re at work.”
The program requires students to have another major. Students can major in anything and are interdisciplinary in application to those majors, according to Cramer.
“What’s a really important thing, is you cannot take this program by itself,” Cramer said. “You have to have your primary major, and this is an additional major.”
He continued: “That’s what’s really amazing about it, is it’s not taking away from anything in your primary major. It’s adding to it. It’s a compounding effect, anything you’re doing in your primary major, if you’re supply chain, product design, Spanish, it’s building you up in ways that your primary major doesn’t.”
The grading system for the LBS program is different from a typical WMU course experience. Students in the first class are graded based on a narrative of impact, as well as attendance and assignments.
“They also have something at the end of the semester called an NOI, a narrative of impact,” Adamski said. “It’s a one page paper that they write to me and Doug, and we read it and they tell us what grade they think they deserved based on all the assignments.”
Doug Lepisto is a professor and a co-founder of the program. He teaches courses in the LBS program.
For Lepisto, the program allows students a competitive edge in the job market and provides coaching.
“We think of the practicums competition as internships and first jobs,” Lepisto said. “To be better than a first job or an internship. You need to one give students an incredible amount of coaching, which we do. It’s support as they do that, so there’s rapid learning. You don’t get that often at your first job.”
He continued: “Number two, you get a really important project, so it’s something involving millions of dollars in terms of an investment that has a strategic importance. You don’t get that at your first job. You are client facing, so you interact directly with the CEO and the decision maker.”
For more information about the LBS program, visit their website.
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