Creativity, innovation, resilience, and purpose help organizations meet disruption with solutions. This edition of Business, a magazine produced by WMU’s Haworth College of Business, highlights opportunities that Western students, alumni, faculty, and staff have embraced to be the best versions of themselves in business and beyond.

From new course formats, to examples of experiential learning at its finest, to industry connections, to accolades for programs, students and faculty, the 2021 edition showcases the many high points of the past academic year at WMU Haworth.

Features include:

• Outperforming the S&P 500 and gaining confidence: Participants in WMU Haworth’s Student Managed Investment Fund learned about investment decisions with both the pandemic and election looming, gaining the research skills and other fundamentals necessary for long-term success.
• Reimagined MBA program offers students options: The recent relaunch of the MBA program delivers maximum flexibility for students to craft their MBA experience, providing in-person and HyFlex instruction, credit for experience and courses in areas most in demand for managers: leadership, analytics, negotiation, and communication.
• A new recipe for success: Disruption to business is one of the defining characteristics of post-pandemic life. This is especially true for the food industry, which has experienced one of the biggest shifts of all. WMU’s first-ever virtual Food Marketing Conference drew more than 1,000 participants to address this topic and more.
• New fund affiliated with WMU aims to raise $50M: Sleeping Giant Capital, a private investment firm affiliated with WMU Haworth, is on its way to raising $50 million with the aim of generating economic, social and educational returns in West Michigan.
• Digital revolution: “The world is becoming more digital by the minute,” says Dr. Bidyut Hazarika. That was true before COVID-19—and since the pandemic, every minute counts as organizations shift their digital strategies, business models and customer interactions in ways that may be temporary, permanent, or somewhere in between.
• Plus: Stories about student achievements, faculty impact, alumni accolades, community outreach in the time of COVID-19, and more.

This year’s edition is available exclusively online. Read the 2021 issue of Business magazine and visit our archives.