SAEL Students Win National Ethics Competition

by John Ferguson

Just wanted to let you know about some of the great work our students are doing.  As you know SAEL puts on an ethics bowl each year.  This year, the ethics bowl was changed to a new format and was turned into an ethics video competition.  The first and second place winners were encouraged to submit their videos to the National Ethics In Action competition, hosted by the Student Center for the Public Trust.  Both submitted and they ended up winning the Grand and the first place prizes in the competition.  The first place team is all Huntsman Scholars, as were most of the participants at our local competition.  The winners are announced here.  Winning videos below: 

The students of SAEL have done a great job these past few years supporting the pillar of ethical leadership in the Huntsman School and it is good to see their efforts getting national attention as well.

Resiliency for Entrepreneurs and Careerists

By Scott Hammond, Clinical Professor, Huntsman School of Business

Dr. Scott Hammond

Resilience is a choice. Almost every case we studied of people who survived being lost in the wilderness said they “decided" to survive. Even an eight-year-old boy lost overnight at 11,000 feet said, “I knew I wanted to live.”

The same is true for entrepreneurs and careerists who face what are seemingly insurmountable challenges. They make a choice. They say to themselves, “I want to get through this. I will do what it takes to survive until I can find a way to thrive.”

Of course making the choice to be resilient does not guarantee a positive outcome, but it does have two interesting effects on individuals in “survival” situations.

First, they report envisioning the ideal future. A good example of this is the famous canyoneering climber Aaron Rawlston who cut off his arm with his pocket knife when he was trapped in a narrow canyon. His story can be seen in the documentary “126 Hours.” Rawlston reports that while in a space between sleep and hallucination he saw his unborn son running towards him. He saw himself holding the young boy and laughing. He remembers a vivid sense of joy as he held his child. When he awoke he realized again his predicament, and also that he had no son, no wife and no future. But he did have a vision of the ideal that motivated him to action. Rarely do we realize the ideal in our lives, but visualizing the ideal creates hope and hope motivates resilience.

When an entrepreneur feels like their business is hitting a brick wall, impossible to see through and discouraging to look around, they must stick to the vision of the ever-promising future. Go back to the roots of why the business was started. And for the careerist, remember your dreams. Envision yourself working with the people who will get you to the top. Envision yourself accepting the promotion and how that will feel.

Second, making the decision to be resilient helps us see our situation differently. In my book Lessons of the Lost: Finding Hope and Resilience in Work: Life, and the Wilderness, I tell the story of Victoria Grover who was lost in the wilderness for five days with a broken leg. Victoria, who is a hero of mine, broke her leg at the base of a dry waterfall, 100 yards from water. She was in a place where she could not see or be seen, nor could she get to the needed water. Unable to climb up and over the rocks with her broken leg, she wondered what to do. “There has to be a way,” she told herself. Then she reported to me that she saw herself backwards, as if in a mirror. Backwards. Yes. Backwards. “I can turn around and go backwards over the rocks.” It took her 12 hours, but she got to water and warmth. The “backward” thinking saved her life.

Our creativity is sometimes the only differentiator we may have. As a careerist always look for the next best way to move ahead, stand out or do something that has never been done before in your field. Entrepreneurs have it in their blood to be different. Don’t be afraid to take the well-calculated risk. “Backward” thinking has made many entrepreneurs successful, such as Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, or Billy Beane, general manager for the Oakland Athletics.

There are tragic tales in the wilderness of strong people who chose not to be resilient – who gave up. Four in five business startups fail. But four in five are not bad ideas that will not work in the market. Some portion of those failures come because the entrepreneur or careerist was not resilient enough. When it seems like your arm is caught in a rock or that resources are out of reach, remember to envision your dreams and don’t be afraid to go where no one has before.

Dr. Hammond’s work on resiliency was recently quoted in Fast Company.

Teacher Recognized for 19-Year Winning Streak with Huntsman IMA Chapter

By Steve Eaton

Frank Shuman has been on a roll. In fact, he has been part of a winning streak is as old as some of his students.

While he has been the Huntsman IMA advisor, the chapter has won the “Gold Level Award of Excellence” 19 years in a row, the longest winning streak in the nation. To achieve the Gold Level Award, student chapters must document community service they have done and meet other high standards set by the organization.

Frank Shuman with Huntsman student, Michael Bills

Each year the organization recognizes just four chapters as being outstanding. The Huntsman IMA students have won that designation five times. In another national IMA competition last year the Huntsman chapter took first place in three out of three “best practices” categories.


This year those at the IMA are giving Shuman one of their highest honors, a sort of advisor-of-the-year award for the entire organization. Shuman was recently notified that he will be getting the Ursel K. Albers IMA Campus Advocate of the Year Award.

Shuman said he was pleased with the recognition but quick to credit the students for his award.

“I am honored but I feel like I am just the coach of a winning team,” he said. “For me, the most rewarding thing has been to see these students growing and developing as leaders.”

While Shuman, who is a principal lecturer at the Huntsman School, has been honored, in part, for the chapter’s success, many of the students he has worked with say he has helped them with their own personal victories too.

Michael Bills, president of the Huntsman IMA chapter, wrote a letter of recommendation, explaining why he felt that Shuman deserved the advocate of the year award. He wrote that when he had just returned from a two-year mission he had to miss his first week of school, including Shuman’s class in managerial accounting. He was trying to remember what he had learned in his last accounting class before he left on his mission and struggling to keep up in the class. It was frustrating enough that he was considering changing his major. He went to Shuman for assistance.

“Frank was very helpful and encouraging, and was more than willing to spend extra time with me to help cover the material that I missed or didn’t understand,” he wrote. “Also, because I started school late the book store was sold out of the managerial accounting textbook, so Frank let me borrow his copy until I was able to purchase one.”

This is not the first time Shuman has been recognized for his work with students. He was also named the School of Accountancy Teacher of the Year in 1994 and 2007, and the Jon M. Huntsman Advisor of the Year in 1995 and 2013.

Wells on Leadership

By Steve Eaton

Hundreds of business leaders and students gathered on the USU campus in March to see what they could learn about management and leadership from a football coach whose team has been able to continue winning despite serious adversity.

What they got from Utah State University Head Football Coach Matt Wells, ’96, Marketing, at the Partners In Business Leadership Conference was clear, concise and direct advice on leadership from the perspective of a coach. Coach Wells said that the people you lead must trust you and that everyone has to be prepared to meet high standards even in the face of adversity, which will always come.

Coach Wells presents at Huntsman School luncheon

Later in the day Coach Wells was recognized by the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business with a Professional Achievement Award.

Coach Wells led his team to 9-5 record and a 21-14 win against No. 24 Northern Illinois in the 2013 San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, despite the fact that five starters from his offense were lost to season-ending injuries during the year.

“You know adversity is coming,” he said. “The minute you get comfortable or the minute I get comfortable and think this thing is going smooth, boom, something hits.”

He said that he teaches his players to mentally prepare for rough times that come to everyone.

“It’s just adversity,” he continued. “It’s called life. Deal with it.”

He said there will always be stress but a leader’s job is to “reduce the drama” that can come with challenges.

“There are only two things you can control in life and I’m not talking about death, and I’m not talking about taxes,” he said. “I’m talking about attitude, and I’m talking about effort.”

Throughout his speech he emphasized the importance of leaders earning the trust of the people they work with. He said from January to August his coaches meet weekly, one-on-one with each player, and in those meeting they do not discuss football. They talk about academics, family life and other aspects of life.

Coach Matt Wells with Dean Douglas D. Anderson

“You’d better have a relationship (with those you lead),” he said. “If you don’t, all your knowledge, all your degrees, all the stuff that you have learned, goes right out the door; forget it.”

“Give them something they can do and then demand that they do it,” he advised. “Give your staff something that they can do physically, mentally and then demand that they do it.”

At a private luncheon that day Dean Douglas D. Anderson presented Coach Wells with a Professional Achievement Award, saying that he was being given the award not just because of his wins on the field but because of the way he has succeeded.

He explained to Wells that he earned the award because of the “leadership you are providing and the leadership you are developing with our student athletes, and also the examples that you and the team are setting for this university.”

“It’s a huge honor, but I’m just the head coach of those guys and that staff, and it’s a team effort,” he said. “I couldn’t do it without them. I couldn’t do it without their attitude and their effort.”
Coach Wells graduated in 1996 with a bachelor’s in marketing, cum laude, from the Huntsman School of Business.
When people trust their leaders they will work hard to meet high standards.

World champions

By Steve Eaton

Five Huntsman School students competed in another March Madness, going beyond the “final four” to claim an international championship.

Two student teams claimed first and second place in a competition sponsored by the Association for Information Systems that drew students from 28 universities and three countries.

“It’s nice to have some international champions roaming our hallways,” said David Olsen, head of the Management Information Systems Department. “This is the second year in a row students from our AIS student chapter have come out of this major competition with a first and second place win.”

Huntsman students Allan Follett, Conner Sorensen and Chad Williams, entered a contest that required them to create a video about information systems. Their production focused on explaining what the phrase “big data” means and why students who study in this area have increased job opportunities.

“We go through our whole education wondering if we are getting better at what we are doing,” said Williams. “We want to know how we’ll compare to the competition when we graduate. So this was a validation for us from a large organization and it was gratifying to know the judges liked what we created.”

Vishal Patel and Divya Reddy competed in the IT security category and took second place. To qualify as finalists they were asked to take on a case study that involved a company with very complex IT problems that wanted to simplify its systems and get a better return on investment. For the final competition Patel said they spent hours refining his group’s original proposal and after their presentation the judges told them that they were among the best prepared of any of the students at the event.

“It’s sort of hard to sell soft skills in a job interview,” noted Williams. “Companies want people who can work in a team and this win, which required lots of teamwork, is something we can point to as an example of what we are capable of doing while working with others.”

The contest was part of the AIS 2014 Student Chapter Conference and Competition that was hosted by Arizona State University and sponsored by major companies including Wal-Mart and State Farm.