College of Business

From the Dean's Desk

Terence Lau headshot

College of Business Dean Terence Lau

February 22, 2021

Dear friends and alumni,

I hope that this message finds you and your family, healthy and well. The global pandemic continues to impact nearly every aspect of our lives. Even though the arrival of vaccines will help us return to normalcy, the uncertainty of new variants, along with the devastating toll the disease has taken on our health and economy, weigh heavily on the minds of all of us at the College of Business.

In spite of these challenging times, it’s important for us to plan for our future. Looking past the pandemic’s interruptive effects, that future is bright. In order to help us drive towards a certain and planned future, the College recently completed a strategic visioning exercise resulting in a new five-year plan to take us to 2025. You can read the details of the plan here.

The plan is divided into seven key strategic areas: Teaching, Research, Diversity, Community Integration, Measurement, Human Resources, and Financial Management. Each of these strategic areas has a specific tactic to achieve, totaling thirty-five across the seven areas. These tactics include a comprehensive curriculum review, adding additional centers of excellence, creating new learning spaces in a new business building, increasing support for faculty research, improving our four-year and six-year graduation rates, and creating models for our human resources that value our faculty and staff for the amazing people that they are. There’s a lot more there, including an articulation of our desire to move with consensus and due speed to achieve our goals.

Our strategic plan dovetails with the University’s vision to become a preeminent University solving the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century. The vision for the College of Business is to be a leader in business education and scholarship that solves the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century. Along this journey, we’ll measure our progress in a public dashboard so that all of you, our most important stakeholders, will know where we stand on each specific tactic in our plan.

Another feature in our plan is a new Purpose Statement. A purpose statement describes why we come to work every day. A couple of my favorite corporate examples are from GE Aviation (“We invent the future of flight, lift people up and bring them home safely”) and Target (“To help all families discover the joy of everyday life”). In the College of Business, our Purpose is: “We discover new ways of knowing about how business can impact society positively. We educate students one individual at a time, and the result is Company Worth Keeping.” Keep your eye on that last phrase, you’ll be seeing more of it in the coming months.

From our College of Business family to yours, we wish you the best wherever you are. We thank you once again for your generous support for the important work of the College of Business. If you’re interested in exploring how you can support your alma mater, or if you just want to find out more about what we’re doing, please feel free to reach me at tjlau@csuchico.edu .

Sincerely,

Terence Lau
Dean, College of Business
California State University, Chico
Chico, CA 95929-0145

Glenn Hall

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