Tag: Century Club

For more than three decades, the Century Club speaker series has brought business leaders to the school to share their insights and knowledge with the Olin community. According to Sandy Jurgenson, “The Century Club name derived from the fact that the invited guests had donated $100 or more to the business school.” Jurgenson, a longtime member of the Alumni & Development staff, possesses priceless institutional knowledge of all things Olin. Not only is she an Olin alumna (BSBA ’81), but as the producer and director of the annual Distinguished Alumni Dinners for the past 23 years, she really does know everyone at the school, past and present.

The speaker series launched in 1979 with a talk by Bill Emory, a marketing professor who also served as the first director of Olin’s Executive MBA program. Only 50 Century Club members attended that first gathering, but over the decades the audience has steadily grown. Originally held in the living room at the Alumni House, Century Club moved to Simon Hall’s May Auditorium for many years before relocating to Knight Hall’s Emerson Auditorium in 2014.

“I remember in the early 1980s when Sam Fox (BSBA ’51) and John Wallace (MBA ’62) were leading the Century Club committee. They challenged, ‘We can do better. Instead of vice presidents and division heads, let’s make these meetings a forum for CEOs.’ You know what happens when Sam Fox and John Wallace issue a challenge? You meet it!”

– Dean Emeritus Bob Virgil

South West Airlines’ Herb Kelleher speaks at Century Club in Graham Chapel

On several occasions, Century Club events have been held in Graham Chapel to accommodate extraordinarily large crowds. When Carlos Brito, the new CEO of AB InBev, came to speak in 2010, it was standing room only in Graham Chapel, with more than 700 in the audience.

According to the official records, there have been more than 200 Century Club speakers over the years, including annual State of the School presentations by the dean. Many of these speakers have been notable alumni, corporate leaders from a wide range of industries, and CEOs of top companies in St. Louis.

Webster

One speaker, who attracted some of the largest audiences in Century Club’s history, does not fit the typical CEO profile. Intelligence was the coin of his realm and the topics he addressed in his first appearance in 1983 sound very familiar today: computer-assisted crime, technology transfer, and industrial espionage. The speaker was William H. Webster, then Director of the FBI. Webster was a graduate of WashU Law School and member of the University’s Board of Trustees. In 1987, Webster was appointed Director of the CIA by President Ronald Reagan.

Webster warned the business school audience about threats to corporate security and gave several examples of cases the FBI had worked on, including one involving a new breed of criminal, called a “hacker”—a new term in 1983.

The list of Century Club speakers is long and distinguished. Here are just a few names of the top executives who have spoken over the past three decades:

• Margaret Bush Wilson, St. Louis attorney, WashU Emeritus Trustee (1981)
• August A. Busch III, Chairman and President, Anheuser-Busch (1982)
• Richard J. Mahoney, Chairman and CEO, Monsanto (1989)
• John S. Reed, Chairman and CEO, Citicorp and Citibank (1994)
• Herb Kelleher, Chairman, President and CEO, Southwest Airlines (1994)
• W. Marriott Jr., Chairman and President Marriott International, Inc. (1996)
• Jerry Kent, President and CEL, Charter Communications, Inc. (2000)
• Maxine Clark, Founder and then-CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop (2001)

Sharon Price John, President and CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop, will be the first speaker in the Century Club series that kicks off Tuesday, Oct. 4 at 7:30 a.m. – 9 a.m. in Emerson Auditorium, Knight Hall. The continental breakfast club/networking event featuring prominent business leaders has been an Olin tradition since 1979.

Sharon Price John became CEO of Build-A-Bear in 2013. Since then, she has led the company through a successful financial turnaround, while refreshing the nearly 20-year-old brand.

Before joining Build-A-Bear, Sharon was President of the Stride Rite Children’s Group LLC, leading product creation, marketing and distribution. Prior to SRCG, she drove the global strategy and marketing for Hasbro’s preschool portfolio. Prior to that, she held senior roles, including Marketing Director of Barbie and VP of International for the Disney Business Unit.

Her career began in the advertising industry working at top agencies in New York. Sharon holds a bachelors degree in communications from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and an MBA from Columbia University.

Confident in building relationships with the prisoners he was tasked to interrogate, Eric Maddox, current Executive MBA (Class 45) student and decorated veteran, credits innovation in interrogation techniques for the capture of Saddam Hussein. In 2003, while assigned to a Special Operations Task Force in Iraq, Maddox conducted over 300 interrogations and collected the intelligence which directly led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Maddox shared his experience in Iraq at Olin’s Century Club speaker series on Jan. 28, 2016.

Capturing Saddam is the inside story of Maddox’s role as an interrogator in the intelligence gathering operations that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein.

The first current student to speak at Century Club, Maddox talked about being sent to the Middle East after being trained as a Chinese Mandarin linguist. Assigned as an interrogator, Maddox quickly realized he needed to change his tactics to gather intelligence. The biggest change was becoming an excellent listener, a tool every good negotiator should have according to Maddox.

Maddox told the audience in Emerson Auditorium, that innovation can be applied to any field when you have a passion and confidence in  your mission. The challenge is finding out where to change the process, or “find the pain,” the obstacle that is keeping others from changing with you.

Maddox found the obstacle to changing interrogation techniques and gathering intelligence in the Army. He utilized that information and shared it with his team. These tactics not only led to the capture of Saddam Hussein, the “Ace of Spades,” but also changed interrogation tactics used the US military.

Maddox is now integrating knowledge gained from Olin’s EMBA program into his work as a consultant to corporations, organizations, and individuals on interrogation and debriefing techniques.

Learn more about the EMBA program here.

Learn more about Eric Maddox here.

Washington University’s Olin Business School held its Century Club Breakfast on Friday, April 19, featuring Rakesh Sachdev, President and CEO of Sigma-Aldrich. Mr. Sachdev, an Olin Business School National Council member, shared with the Olin community details of Sigma-Aldrich’s roots as well as well gave a glimpse of Sigma-Aldrich’s secret to success. He started with a riddle … what does Sigma-Aldrich have in common with a fruit and a mermaid? Many came to hear Mr. Sachdev’s remarks, including Chancellor Bill Danforth and Enterprise Holdings Chairman and CEO Andy Taylor. The answer to the riddle? The top three NASDAQ performing companies since 2000 are Apple, Sigma-Aldrich and Starbucks.