You Mean CEOs Aren’t Scary?

The ostentatious characteristics and icy demeanor of business magnates such as Donald Trump and fictional characters like Miranda Priestly of The Devil Wears Prada can’t be found in most CEOs.

That’s one of the things that the 31 Holy Cross students who participate in the Executive Leadership Workshop, sponsored by the Ciocca Office of Entrepreneurial Studies, will learn first-hand during spring break.

“Students get to meet real CEOs, CFOs, and other top executives and find that they are very approachable, down to earth, and smart,” says David Chu, director of COES. “The media stereotype of a CEO is simply not indicative of the real business world.”

The Executive Leadership Workshop, which coincides with the launch of a new Web site for the Ciocca Office of Entrepreneurial Studies, also allows students to “obtain fundamental and basic understanding of how a business is started at the ground level and taken through successive stages to becoming a global enterprise,” says Chu.

As participating students forgo their annual one-week vacations during spring semester, they will be handed a Student Team Project on Sunday and, by Friday, several student groups will need to deliver a presentation in front of a panel of five distinguished alumni — Tom Flynn ’87, partner at Ferrer Freeman & Company; John Mullman ’82, managing director at Jennison Associates; Bill Maloney ’59, a strategic consultant at MullinTBG and William J. Lynch & Associates; Terry Waters ’81; Donna Winn ’76, president and CEO of OFI Private Investments, Inc.

Students will be asked to identify an opportunity to provide a brand new product or service geared at the baby boomer generation — people born between the years 1946 and 1954. They will need to build a business with venture funding to be the first ones to offer this product or service. In order to do that, they will need investors willing to provide the necessary start-up capital. Venture capitalists are willing to provide funding if they see the potential for a good return on their investment in the company.

From Monday through Thursday, students will soak up information from the four presentations featuring different alumni each day. Taking all that into account, they will make a presentation known as a “pitch.” The goal is to get the venture capitalists — the alumni panel — sufficiently interested to set up a hypothetical second meeting in which funding will be discussed. The best team will earn a cash prize.

While the alumni instructors may not shout out “You’re fired!” à la Trump, the week promises to be rigorous.

And Chu knows students are up to the challenge.

“These students are extremely motivated because they are giving up their spring break to participate in this program,” he says.