Lunch with a legend: Jack McDonough
I started at UCLA Anderson in 2002, and one of the first faculty members I worked with was Jack McDonough. Today, we had lunch at Palomino’s in Westwood.
In 2002, Jack was stepping down from overseeing all three MBA programs–FEMBA, EMBA and the full-time MBA–but he was still very active, running Leadership Foundations with Tony Raia and Bill Broesamle (former President and CEO of GMAC) for all three programs, as well as teaching in Executive Education.
Over lunch today, we talked about Jack’s appreciation of how Anderson makes management education practical–applicable right-here, right-now, to a person’s career trajectory. He championed for field study, for ropes courses, for all the interpersonal-savvy/EQ components of an Anderson MBA that help our graduates be effective in their careers.
My favorite memory from working with Jack was hearing him talk about getting his own MBA at Dartmouth. Very pragmatically, during his Dartmouth orientation, he found a “buddy” and together they decided that they’d “have each other’s back” during the blur of the MBA experience. That advice always stuck with me, “Don’t go it alone. Forge partnerships, in school and in life, and things go much better.”