Fall 2000 - NIU College of Business - Northern Illinois University

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Insidenside This IssueDean’s Message Inside front coverMaking a World of Difference, Lynn Neeley 1Cover Story—Barsemas 2-62000 College of Business Distinguished Alumni 7-8DebraHopkins.com 9Class of 2000—Profile of Our Future Leaders 10-11International Marketing 12College of Business News 13-14Alumni Events 15-16Alumni Updates 17-19College of Business Outreach 20NIU Foundation Introduces Donor Recognition Program 20-21CommencementFrank Porrevecchio (’69 Finance), senior vice presidentand general manager of sales for Xerox Corporation, spoketo the graduates at the College of Business commencementceremony on May 13, 2000.Deanean’s MessageThis is one of the most exciting letters I have ever had theopportunity to write. Dennis Barsema and his wife, Stacey,returned to campus and delivered the best news they couldpossibly deliver—the gift of a new College of Businessbuilding. Deans RobertThistlethwaite, James Benson,Richard Brown, and I, with ourfellow professionals, haveworked over the 40 years of thecollege to establish, build, anddevelop the human and programmaticfoundations of thecollege. The missing foundationalelement was a trulyoutstanding physical facility.Barsema Hall will be trulyoutstanding! The Barsema storyis an American success story.The Barsemas are outstandingpeople who exemplify NIU and the College of Business—bright, hard-working, and community spirited. The bestnews is that they will continue to be part of our campus foryears to come.Thank you for all your feedback on the spring 2000 issue ofBusiness Network. Editor Sue Braffet and I enjoyed thepositive comments you made about the publication and theinterest you expressed about the college news.This issue is structured to reflect a representative sample ofindividual accomplishments of students, alumni, faculty, andstaff. We are fortunate to have alumni continuing to beactive in our activities. Jamie Still and Denise Rundle aregreat examples of the high quality of our business undergraduatestudents. Our faculty continues to see the businesscommunity as an international arena. Debra Hopkinsexemplifies the energy and talent to be found in our college.Pat Delaney leaves us a great legacy and a solid foundationfrom which to build.We are approaching our 40th year as a college of business.We are currently the 22nd largest undergraduate businesscollege in the nation. We have more than 30,000 alumniacross the world. Our faculty and staff talent pool isextraordinary. If we all communicate regularly and continueto help benefit each other, our organizations, and communities,there is no reason why we shouldn’t find ourselvesranked within the top 75 of the more than 1,100 colleges ofbusiness in the nation.We enjoy hearing from you and having you involved!Sincerely,David Graf, Dean
Making a World of DifferenceBusiness has always been part of the familyfor associate professor of management LynnNeeley. The business that her great-greatgreat-grandmotherstarted back in the 1800sis still family owned and operated. ForNeeley, bringing the knowledge and experienceto help people own and operate theirown businesses was a natural progressionfrom business to the classroom. Perhaps onething she might not have anticipated,however, was the global impact her teachingand knowledge could have.Neeley teaches entrepreneurship, newventure management, and strategic managementat the undergraduate and graduatelevels in the NIU College of Business. She isalso an advocate for and provider of entrepreneurshipeducation in the United Statesand abroad—especially impacting andassisting Poland. Because of her knowledgeand involvement as president of the UnitedStates Association for Small Business andEntrepreneurship and as a member of theBoard of Directors for the InternationalCouncil for Small Business, Neeley’s adviceand council are sought nationally and internationally. She hasprovided insights for articles appearing in Business Week, theChicago Tribune, and USA Today as well as provided publicationsof applied research and solutions for the real-worldchallenges of businesspeople and university students innumerous educational journals.One reason for Neeley’s recognition appears to be theeconomic boom of the 1990s. According to an article in theFebruary 14, 2000, issue of Business Week, entrepreneurshipwas one of the driving forces behind this economicboom. In contrast to the aggregate loss of jobs within largecorporations, new and small businesses in the ’90s createdjobs. Technology and the rise of women in the work forcehave helped to make this possible. “Many women want theability to work around the time and demands of a family,and with the help of technology, many have become verysuccessful running the business from their homes,” Neeleyexplained. Women-owned businesses represent 38 percentof all firms in the United States, and a wide variety of thesebusinesses (architectural designers, photographers, andsoftware developers, just to name a few) are run out of thehome.Entrepreneurship is leading the way on a global scale aswell. It has provided a means for the countries of the formerSoviet block to turn their economies around. NIU’s LynnNeeley has been a major player in the success of Poland’scurrent healthy economy. She was selected to participateon one of the teams of entrepreneurship experts assembledby the U.S. federal government to assist Poland in transformingtheir market. The team’s goal was to work withyoung faculty members at Polish universities to train themand bring them up to date on current business practices,teaching them basic concepts of marketing, advertising,management, and financial and accounting principles.Lynn Neeley (far right) with faculty members from Polishuniversities.Neeley’s team assisted in setting up three developmentcenters in regional towns of Poland—Posnan, Rzeszow, andBialystok. These centers are a combination of a businesscollege and a small business development center, and theyprovide education, assistance, and consulting.The results have been phenomenal—it worked! Out of theold Soviet block countries, Poland has the healthiest andmost vital economy. People own and operate their ownbusinesses, there is a stock exchange, credit cards areused, and there is intense competition for products andservices. On a personal level, Krzysztof Kaszuba of theoriginal team of young Polish faculty members has becomedean of his own private school of business. He and facultymembers from his business school, Wyzsza SzkotaZarzadzauia, are coming to NIU this fall to explore anexchange program with the College of Business.It is exciting to watch the growth and success of smallbusinesses, ranging in location from the basement of asuburban home to cities in Poland. It’s even more excitingknowing that Lynn Neeley and the NIU College of Businessare taking part in making this country and this world work!1
Page 1: BUSINESSNETWORKFall2000Barsema Hall
Page 5 and 6: Continued from page 2“We have arr
Page 7 and 8: A Northern Success StoryDennis Bars
Page 9 and 10: 2000 College of BusinessDistinguish
Page 12 and 13: Class of 2000Profile of Our Future
Page 14 and 15: The Ireland ConnectionInternational
Page 16 and 17: 1999-2000 Faculty RetirementsRobert
Page 18 and 19: Alumni EventsNIU Business Alumni Ro
Page 20 and 21: Alumni Updates- not available onlin
Page 22 and 23: Intrntroducing the Collegeof Busine
Page 24: The M.B.A. Programs at NIUQuality-C

Fall 2000 - NIU College of Business - Northern Illinois University

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