Our Plan: Strategic Initiatives

Initiative V: Extend the School into the Marketplace

Follow our progress on this initiative.

To achieve our goal of top-ten status, we are pursuing a series of tactics that extend our reach into the marketplace.

Alumni. We are aggressively building our network of actively engaged alumni. We have more than doubled the size of the alumni relations and development group charged with mobilizing our alumni to identify and recruit prospective students, mentor students, champion hiring Johnson School students, and participate in the classroom. Additionally, we are specifically asking alumni to alert us to potential executive education opportunities, partner with us in designing new program initiatives, and become conduits for corporate funding. A new and more structured approach to alumni development is being implemented to grow substantially the number and size of individual alumni gifts as we grow alumni relationships.
Admissions-Career Management supply chain. We are integrating admissions and career management in a customer-focused supply-chain model that better ties our leading-edge career management, prospecting, and placement initiatives to our new, targeted admissions programs. Increasingly, we will define economic sectors and types of companies with whom to partner and align our admissions efforts with them. We will use real-time data from that matching process to continually reassess and shape our curriculum and teaching approaches. One of our key supply-chain strategies is to create centers of activity in the New York metropolitan area and in northern California to anchor East and West Coast "corridor" recruiting, placement, corporate relations, and alumni activities. In addition, we will establish a corporate alumni network in each of our major corporate partner companies and create an EMBA and alumni career management program to assist those groups with career transitions.
Virtual external relations team. We are intent on strengthening relationships with companies, alumni, and prospective students who can contribute to and benefit from connections with the Johnson School. In pursuing this goal, we are simultaneously demonstrating a leading model for working in an agile organization: a virtual team that can maximize resources and adapt to rapidly changing conditions. To make our efforts more efficient and powerful, we are bringing together staff from admissions, career management, alumni relations and development, corporate relations, marketing and communications, and the EMBA and executive education programs in a dynamic, flexible team. The synergies we generate together will equip us to present a consistent and powerful message to all of our important stakeholders and to increase the levels of their commitments to the school.
Targeted marketing and public relations. We have completed an extensive process to redefine our brand position in a way that clearly links the Johnson School, Cornell, and our distinctive approach to management education. We are aggressively pursuing a plan to build our brand through a more powerful integrated marketing, communications, and public relations program. This comprehensive, multi-year plan is designed to reinforce our brand internally and build visibility and understanding externally. Among our first steps have been to launch a new advertising campaign and web site, introduce a distinctive new logo, and add a media relations position to our marketing staff.