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Jacob currently works as the Leadership and Organizational Development Consultant for  Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where he supports a population of 5,000+ individuals, providing one-on-one coaching and group workshop facilitation to clinical and non-clinical leaders.  Jacob leverages his experiences in education, the performing arts, and corporate learning and development to his work.  As a performer, Jacob has sung as a backup vocalist for musical artists such as Josh Groban and Patti LuPone, at venues including The United Center, The Chicago Theater, and Chicago Symphony Center, and as a recording artist on Netflix’s Sense8.  In the education space, Jacob has served as an educator and guest lecturer for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students throughout the Midwest. As a Learning and Leadership Development Consultant, Jacob has worked with organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies in the technology, healthcare, non-profit, and fashion/apparel industries.  

Why was MSC the right program for you?

One of the reasons I decided to go with the MSC program was that I liked the variety of thought that was in the room. I loved that my cohort was such a diverse group of people, from early careerists to seasoned professionals. The program provides you the opportunity to gain perspectives from individuals in many different industries with varying years of experience, which really challenges you to think differently and try to grow as individuals. As a leadership development professional, I work with people in sales. I work with physicians. I work with marketers. And to hear, in my classes, the perspectives of individuals who are coming from these different industries and different stages of life was fascinating for me and helped me learn how to articulate particular leadership development messages to these different types of audiences.

Did you have a favorite class?

Professor Michelle Shumate’s class on non-profit leadership is the one I consistently use the most. In fact, I just recently taught a class about influence and motivation, and the majority of my research came from that class.

I decided to take the class because at the time I was consulting with a lot of startups. I found that startups and nonprofits are actually pretty similar — they’re both externally funded, and both types of organizations are very cause-driven. Individuals at startups are there because they truly care about their mission and they truly care about what they’re creating, and typically are focused on maximizing their resources and funding for that purpose.

One of the things I found so impressive about Professor Shumate was that on the first day of class, she told us, “I have a syllabus prepared, but I want to hear from everyone about what they are looking to get out of the class.” After that, she ended up changing over 60-70% of the curriculum to focus on things that we were really interested in learning about, even building brand new topics. That was so transformational — I have never had a professor so invested in their students’ development and learning goals that they would create a class so highly tailored to what we were looking for.

What is something you’ve learned from the class that has made an impact on your professional life?

One of the things from the non-profit leadership course I remember being most impactful — it was like a lightbulb went off in my head — was a great exercise about motivating and empowering our employees. There was a case study and the questions were, what can we do to really make an impact on people we work with as leaders and managers? When there’s a situation where certain individuals are acting out of line, what do we do? Everyone came up with great ideas on how to handle the situation. Professor Shumate said to us, “Did you come up with this idea because that’s the best idea for them, or because that’s what you would want your manager to do to you?”

That was an eye-opening moment for me. So often, we want to become the types of managers that we would want to have ourselves — for example, I don’t want someone who micromanages me, so I would give my direct reports a lot of autonomy. But in reality, your direct reports might want to check in with you, or prefer additional details, etc., I realized that managing is all about tailoring your style to the specific individuals that you’re leading and getting to know those individuals to figure out how you can better support and nurture them. Even now, a few years later, I’m still seeing the impact that that class has made on me.

What advice would you have for anyone considering the MSC program?

Once you’re in the program, encourage yourself to step outside your comfort zone. Take a class that you maybe might not have gravitated towards originally — it might push you and make a major impact. MSC is a safe-to-fail environment. This is your place to take risks and try something new. Because we only met once a week 40 times a year, which was such a finite period of time, when we were together we were all incredibly focused on learning and growing as much as possible. No one was checking emails from work or addressing other commitments and responsibilities. For me, those Saturdays were really my time to be selfish and focus on learning, growing, and expanding my boundaries.

Jeff is the CEO of CIMC Capital, the finance partner for China International Marine Containers, headquartered in Shenzhen, China. CIMC, the largest container and trailer manufacturer in the world, has 200 subsidiaries worldwide. Jeff was recently invited to the join the Wall Street Journal CEO Council as its 143rd member.

Why was MSC the right program for you?

I had spent 10 years in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a trader and I wanted to transition out of that, so I was looking for something to help differentiate myself. That’s when I heard an ad for the MSC. I had always wanted an advanced degree but I didn’t see how it would be a possibility for me. I never wanted to go away to school somewhere else for 2 years, stop my career, drop everything, and start over.

Once I heard the name Northwestern and I came to the open house, I didn’t need to hear anything else. I couldn’t pass up the pride of having a Northwestern master’s degree. To me that’s like having gold. And most importantly, the classes were very interesting to me. I’m in finance but I’m not an analyst. I don’t need to crunch numbers, so the relationship, communication, and management side was much more valuable than advanced math that I might have learned in other programs.

What is something you’ve learned that has made an impact on your professional and/or personal life?

During the program I got promoted in the workplace so I could see tangibly how harnessing the information I was learning was helping me. The MSC was especially helpful because in class we constantly discussed ways to use information we were learning in the workplace. I learned a lot about communication and persuasion, and that you have to frame how you write. Framing your writing and understanding who you’re writing or talking to is key, because everyone has a different mentality. I saw a huge difference in the way I was writing and how I was communicating with my customers, my managers, and my teammates, because I was actively trying to understand where they came from.

At CIMC Capital we have a very global team, meaning we have a staff in China and an American staff here in Oakbrook. The cultures between them are very different, so in shaping their communications with each other, I try to stress empathy for each other and try to encourage them to have informal conversations. I also took a class called Managing Global Teams where we learned about clashes of culture. It really made you realize how cultural differences can harm a company, which is something I always try and think of today in my current position. I actually took a couple things I learned from that class when I interviewed for my position in China – for example, the proper way of holding a business card (with two hands), the way you sit down in order of rank, just some nuances that I would have never known. These things might seem like small things, but they were all so impressed that I knew how to do them.

In the end, one of main things I learned is credibility. Things can come back to you way down the road. Every single thing you say or do affects your credibility. I have to have credibility in mind with every decision I make and every communication I have, no matter how small, because everything affects your brand. The formal training I received from the seasoned professionals that were my professors at MSC really solidified that for me and sharpened my skills.

What was the most challenging part of the program?

There’s always a little bit of intimidation when you start a program, especially at a school like Northwestern, after being out of school for 13 years. You ask yourself, can I do this? I remember when I wrote my first MSC paper it took forever. But in the end, I loved being back at school. In undergrad, I had a double major and a minor, played football, was involved in extracurricular activities, but I didn’t have the same level of focus and care that I put into this program. I mean, I found this program, I volunteered time to come to this program, and took money out for this program. If I had done an MBA, there would have been so many required classes that I knew I would just have to get through to get the degree. But with the MSC, every one of these classes was of high interest to me, and spurred lots of thought based on my years of work.

Can you talk about the value of the MSC network?

Coming into it I knew that getting to know my classmates and professors was going to be as important as the classes in the MSC. In this world, networking is the most important thing as far as getting a job goes. So the better you got to know people, the more value was added to the MSC program in general. I actually used to organize an outing for all the classmates after every class, and a lot of the professors would actually come with us too! For example, Professor Roloff, who is wonderful, is a beer brewer and so he would come out and we would drink beer. We had fun, we consistently had 30 to 40 of us who went all over Evanston, to places like Prairie Moon and Bat 17.

In fact, we still have lots of get togethers now. I travel much more now and have a family, which is great, but it means getting together is harder, and it’s kind of a regret of mine that I can’t see my old MSC classmates as much as I used to. But we put together Facebook and LinkedIn pages for our class and always keep in touch, and to this day there are always people from my class in HR or management positions who are posting and informing people about open positions. There’s people all throughout the world from Brunei to Peru, and there’s always ongoing events, from meetings to Northwestern tailgates. We all maintain very close relationships.

Bob Rowley is often introduced as “This is Bob Rowley, who spent a life in communication.” Bob Rowley is the Northwestern Assistant Vice President of Media Relations and a Medill School of Journalism lecturer. He spent 30 years working for the Chicago Tribune, was a White House correspondent, Pentagon correspondent, national correspondent based in Dallas, lived in Mexico covering Latin America, where his daughters were born, and in Toronto and Jerusalem, going back and forth covering a dozen wars and different kinds of stories. He has worked in higher education for about eight years, first at Elmhurst College and now Northwestern University. After graduating from the Northwestern MSC program at age 59 in 2013, he became the first president of the MSC Alumni Association.

At what point did you enter the program and why was this the right time for you?

After I came back from living abroad in 1998 and was working in Chicago, Elmhurst and Evanston for more than a dozen years, it was time for me to do something I always wanted to do: get a Master’s degree to learn and in order to be able to teach.

Communications, specifically, came up in a couple of ways. When I left the Chicago Tribune, I had a wife and family to support and two daughters in college. So, I needed to find something that wasn’t unstable like print journalism. I found my skills were valuable in other fields, such as higher education. My journalism skills were valuable in a field I used to believe was very different from journalism.

I came to Northwestern with a plan: to swim in a bigger pond working at a larger research university, to do things I hadn’t done yet in journalism, to get my masters, and to teach at Medill School of Journalism. I originally thought, “Am I too old to do this?” While younger people in my cohort  were quicker with technology I brought much more practical experience, and we were able to learn a lot from each other that way. I learned as much from my cohort, in some ways, as I did from my professors.

Why was Northwestern MSC the right program for you?

Out of all the programs I looked at, the MSC degree stood out, because it had so many interesting courses. I shopped around for programs, but I realized everything I was looking at had something to do with communication. The MSC program was a way to look at the best that was known and thought in the world about communication.

In the 33 years I was working in print journalism, technology changed everything.

It’s common to learn about communication only from the little perch of one’s career, but my professors looked at it in an academic context and most importantly, a global context, and kept up with the changing world. I was so enamored with this degree, my cohort, and professors, that I was so excited to go back to school at age 58. The program made me a better teacher now at Medill.

What is something you’ve learned that has made an impact on your professional and/or personal life?

I took a course about managing information for innovation, which became extremely valuable to the work I do. Our final project was to apply this to somewhere in our lives. An MSC colleague and I interviewed everyone at my Northwestern office and did a report on how to bring more innovation to the office and make people completely open to new ideas. We learned how to best nurture new ideas, be more creative, and encourage our employees. I applied some things we learned in class into our report on how we do things in this office. I found now that I’m a better manager because of this class and others. Instead of being closed to new ideas, I’ve learned to say “yes, and?,” not simply “no.” I also observed how my professors taught, to learn effective teaching strategies for current Medill classes I teach.

What was your favorite aspect of MSC at Northwestern?

It made me understand the big picture of communications, the business world, and my own profession and job here at the Northwestern. They teach you the best that is known and thought in the world, the latest cutting edge technology, why communication is important, how to communicate well, the best practices, how to think strategically, and how to lead. It’s not just communicating one on one, but it’s also how to gather all those ideas and knowledge you take in, keep them in mind, and think about what message you want to take out there on the road.

What advice would you have for anyone considering the MSC program?

If you’re interested in communication, leadership and strategic thinking, and want to understand a very complex media world that is changing every nanosecond and how to navigate in that world, this is the program for you. If you’re strictly interested in business school, this is not the program for you. The difference between the MSC and an MBA is that the MSC is more broad and will teach you those necessary skills about leadership, but also more broadly about the communication landscape in 21st century. You can get bits of many other programs through the MSC, but it’s much more than that.

We are in an age where communication is all the more important. We live in an era of fake news and alternative facts, which makes it even more important to understand the tools of communication and how to use them effectively to cut through all of the noise and get your strategy and message out there. It’s a great program for that — thinking and navigating in a complex communication world.

Can you talk about the value of the MSC network and whether you’ve been able to keep in touch?

The class of 2013 was a very tight cohort, and the idea for an alumni association came about after we graduated. We wanted to create an alumni association to create the same cooperative, collaborative affinity as we had with our cohort. In March 2015, I became the first president of MSC Alumni Association, and now am co-chair of mentoring panel for the MSC Alumni Association. I have had a number of meetings with current students or fellow alumni who are interested in getting involved in networking for future career purposes.

We host a lot of events. We just had MSC Professor Jason DeSanto speak to us in an extraordinary two hour lecture. No one wanted to take a lunch break, but instead we all wanted to keep asking questions. That’s just one example of how much the program energized me and the different cohorts, to the point that some of us would’ve gone into a PhD program if they offered one.

I stay in touch with three quarters of all the 84 people in my cohort. Every year I hold a tailgate party for our 2013 alumni. The MSC Alumni Association has made staying in touch both among cohorts and across cohorts much more doable. We often have an event in which alumni are invited to be panelists and to network with current students, which helps connect the different generations.

Sonny is the CEO of design communications agency SONNY+ASH in Chicago, which he co-founded in 2011 in the middle of his time in the MSC program. The company helps people communicate their ideas to the masses. His undergraduate background was also in Communication Studies at Northwestern.

Why was MSC the right program for you?

Think of a young kid who was pretty much an introvert, who wouldn’t speak in class, but at home was a chatterbox to the point that my mom would have to give me a dollar to shut up. That was me. I had to go into communication because there were two things I loved: 1) talking and 2) observing. Communication was who I was and my nature. Prior to communication I was an engineering major. I had all the grades and did what I needed, but it didn’t feel like I would get up in the morning and really like what I was going to do. After undergrad I was working in engineering and sales and it was more technical than it is sales, so I wasn’t really doing communication at my job. After about 5 years I was bored, so I went into the MSC program. It felt like a good fit for me and after studying communication as an undergraduate at Northwestern, it felt like the right thing to do.

I went into a communication graduate degree instead of business for a couple reasons. Firstly, it felt like home to me. Secondly, I didn’t see benefit of the financials part of a business degree. Thirdly, there’s enough black and white decisions in life and I wanted that insight into grey zone situations, and the soft skills to take my company to the next level.

As an entrepreneur, do you think that the program had a significant and unique value for entrepreneurs?

I think every entrepreneur should go through this, especially for small business owners. This is your gamut of classes you should take in life to run a business effectively. If I would put it in numerics, I would say it will help you learn how to best manage employee retention, the ability to see and mitigate risk through communication, the management of crises that may happen throughout your organization, and the effective introduction of products and services. All of these topics are part of any entrepreneur’s struggles, and often a typical small business owner can’t afford to always hire consultants. So, to all the entrepreneurs out there, why not spend the money and have that knowledge base for yourself. That’s something people can’t take away from you and I think that becomes an amazing part of your core to run any business.

What is something you’ve learned that has made an impact on your professional and/or personal life?

This program gives you a direct application of theories. It’s had a significant impact on way I see the world. For instance, the way I relate to people. I saw the biggest benefit in my soft skills, because I chose classes that weren’t coupled with my nature, but very challenging for me as an individual and my values.

How have you grown from the program?

I had a model of the world – a very big financial model of the world about running a business. It was all about profits. The process of going through the MSC taught me that wasn’t the only model that worked, and that there’s more to profits than the dollar and cents of it and that other attributes have to be juggled and pieced together, because they all lead to the same kind of numbers.

What was your favorite aspect of MSC at Northwestern?

I really enjoyed the cohort. I got to meet a lot of interesting people and formed close relationships with them. I still have a few of them as friends and we connect from time to time. I have enlisted some of them as consultants in my company. One helped me interview potential candidates, one was a technologist who helped me create a server infrastructure. Everyone in each cohort has a different career and their own path. Very diverse interests are represented, and it’s great when you’re stuck with a question because there is always someone there who can answer it.

What advice would you have for anyone considering the MSC program?

It’s not really about a particular business path. It’s more about soft skills than it is about the career path. It’s the track of what all leaders should go through in all organizations. You’re going to use this stuff whether you like it or not. As a leader, the more tools you have, the better you can run an organization. The program gives you not just one tool, but a whole toolbox.