James M. Foster, M.D., ’05 MBA
Chief Medical Officer, Women and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo
Chief of Service, Anesthesiology. Kaleida Health
Buffalo, New York
Dr. James Foster says the Evening MBA Program at Canisius College is “worth a million dollars.” With numerous professional obligations, the Buffalo physician needed an MBA program that would accommodate his very tight schedule. “If you’re working full time, the way the schedule works is incredibly important,” he says. “The flexibility [at Canisius] is gold.”
A native of England, Foster earned his medical degree from the London Hospital Medical College and completed his internship in England before heading to Toronto, where he did a residency in anesthesiology and served as a clinical and research fellow at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children.
Today he is both Chief Medical Officer at Women and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo and Clinical Service Director for Anesthesiology at Kaleida Health. He also heads a private-practice anesthesiology group, and it was the managerial responsibilities of that position that led him to consider earning an MBA. He is among a growing number of physicians who complement their medical training with an advanced business degree so they can run their practices more efficiently.
Initially Foster had doubts about the value of some of the courses required for the Canisius MBA program, including one in strategic planning taught by Dr. Roy Pipitone, but he discovered that “they were some of the most useful courses.” In retrospect, he rates his MBA accounting courses with Gregory Meyer “excellent”; his economics course with Dr. Larry Lichtenstein “outstanding”; and his finance courses with Dr. Richard Shick “first class.”
“I had no economics or business background, ever,” says Foster. “These people took me from zero to a high level of expertise in short periods of time. They obviously were committed teachers. They understood the real world.”
Foster also values the background he acquired in the field of human resources. “Most physicians don’t understand employment law,” he explains. “That’s a very useful course on a day-to-day basis, especially in understanding the [legal aspects] of employment.”
Above and beyond the course work, Foster says the Evening MBA Program brought him in contact with “very interesting people whom I never would have met if I hadn’t [enrolled in the program]—people whose approach to things was different from mine. It’s very good experience to work with someone who looks at the problem from a totally different angle. It makes you question your assumptions. “I enjoyed working with them.”
Darby Fishkin, CPA, ’97 MBA, ’01 MBAPA
Deputy Comptroller
City of Buffalo
Buffalo, NY
As deputy comptroller for Buffalo, New York, Darby Fishkin oversees a $300 million city operations budget. She manages the city’s Accounting, Cash/Debt Management and Internal Audit departments.
“I’m involved in everything: all our long-term borrowing, decisions about how to use available funds—whether to invest them short-term or long-term, and improving efficiencies and general accountability for all the departments,” she says.
A business major as an undergraduate at Buffalo State College, Darby had just launched her career as a project manager with HARD International in Williamsville, New York, when she enrolled in the MBA program at Canisius College.
“I always knew I wanted to get another degree in business,” she says.
In choosing the program, “flexibility was the biggest thing. Canisius is known for its flexibility—you can get done in a reasonable amount of time," Fishkin says. Adding, "the MBA program is structured in such a way that I never took a course that I didn’t think was critical."
When Fishkin moved into the health care industry as a business analyst with Prudential Insurance, the program’s courses in health care were of special interest.
“I was allowed to audit classes in areas that would help me professionally,” she recalls. “I appreciated [the college] helping me to do that.”
She earned her MBA in 1997 and subsequently went to work in health care finance with Oxford Health Plans of Norwalk, Connecticut. Discovering that most of her colleagues were CPAs, she looked to Canisius again to strengthen her credentials in a new field, this time by earning an MBA in public accounting. The college’s MBAPA program is designed to enable people with degrees in areas other than accounting to prepare for an accounting career and sit for the CPA exam.
Early in 2001, while still in the MBAPA program, Darby accepted an internship with Ernst & Young, LLP, where she quickly moved up to a Senior I Accountant position in the firm’s Assurance and Business Advisory Services division. She assumed her current position with the City of Buffalo in August of 2004.
“Obviously for accounting I wouldn’t go anywhere but Canisius,” Darby says. “They have a top-notch program that’s a recognized name in the industry. I can’t say enough about it. It prepared me for the [CPA] exam and for my career in public accounting.”
Lorne Herszkowicz , One Year MBA 2000
VP, New Business Development
Polyair Packaging, Inc.
Toronto, Ontario
Lorne Herszkowicz was only 18 when he started his own business—a chain of car-wash kiosks at high-profile golf courses throughout the Toronto area. The service offered the luxury of hand-washing and detailing, and customers enjoyed the convenience of being able to drop off their vehicles before heading to the links.
The enterprising spirit that helped Lorne launch a company remained with him as he earned a degree in psychology from York University and while he worked as a customs agent at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Eventually he decided he “didn’t want to get stuck in the rut of a typical government job with no upward mobility,” he explains. “I decided it was time to go back to school.
“For the career path I was going in, I believed a master’s degree in business was the best option for me. Canisius was my first choice, because it was a one-year program—a fast-track, accelerated program—and it was accredited. It would meet all my personal objectives for what I wanted to accomplish.”
Of special benefit, he says, was the program’s emphasis on “thinking outside the box and thinking strategically.” Courses in operations and strategy helped him “put theory into practicality,” while other parts of the curriculum provided him with a broad understanding of overall business functions, including financial and managerial accounting.
He began his career with Polyair, Inc., a company with three plants in Toronto and seven across the U.S. As a product manager, he oversaw sales and product development of bubble-lined envelopes, protective envelopes and courier bags. “I was responsible for promotions, advertising, sales plans and budgets for my product line, and I needed to hit those profit and sales targets,” he explains. “The only way I could do that was by working with operations on cost reductions and creating incentives and innovative product programs to drive sales—basically by developing relationships throughout the entire organization.”
Eventually the president of the company promoted him to his current position, in which he develops large national accounts. He quickly realized that many Polyair customers had four or five different business locations nationwide and concentrated on initiating sales relationships with all the locations.
“My goal was to change the way we did business as a whole, from the ground up,” he says. “Instead of driving business at a distributor level, I would drive business from the end-user level.”
Lorne’s strategy for success grew stronger through the Canisius MBA program. He says it gave him “the experience I needed—well-rounded management experience. I can take the theories I learned [through the MBA program] and apply them to any type of business or industry.”
James R. Boldt, C.P.A., ’84 M.B.A.Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
CTG — Computer Task Group, Inc.
Buffalo, New York
Jim Boldt had just been promoted to corporate controller of Pratt & Lambert, one of the largest companies in the Buffalo area, when the 27-year-old looked around the table at the controllers he supervised “and realized that the next-youngest controller was 18 years older than I was. I thought I needed an edge if I was going to manage this group of people who had 20-30 years more management experience than I did. None of them had an M.B.A., so I went back for a graduate degree.”
He enrolled at Canisius College, where, through his work on the college’s Council on Accountancy, he had “interacted a fair amount with the teachers, and liked what I saw.” He also knew the college’s business programs were highly respected in the business community and that the curriculum was accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business – International.
Jim recalls that one course in the M.B.A. program encouraged students to analyze their management styles. He drew on the information to create a blend of styles, which he now adapts to his various constituencies. That flexible approach to management is especially valuable for someone who today directs Computer Task Group (CTG), an information-technology services firm with offices across the U.S. and in Canada, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. The company provides consulting services for clients in the financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, petrochemical, and life sciences industries, including Global 200 companies.
Originally an accountant with Deloitte & Touche in Buffalo, Jim joined Pratt & Lambert in 1976, serving as the company’s internal auditor, corporate controller, treasurer, and chief financial officer before joining CTG. Canisius College named him Accountant of the Year in 1997, and in 2004 he was recognized with the Dr. Bernard L. Martin Award, given to an outstanding graduate of the college’s MBA program. He is a prominent community leader, and among other posts is chairman of Child & Family Services and a former member of the United Way Board of Directors.
As someone who is largely responsible for the fortunes of a major company, Jim values in particular the Canisius MBA program’s concentration on ethics: “In the post-Enron world, I read that a lot of [people] who were going to jail went to Ivy League schools, and those schools were really concerned because some of their most famous graduates were doing perp walks. One of [the schools] announced that, in order to solve the problem, they were going to introduce an ethics course, so they made a three-hour ethics course mandatory.
“I had to laugh, because you don’t learn ethics just because you take one ethics course. It has to do with interacting with the people around you; it’s something you learn over [the course of the entire program]. Canisius has been teaching people how to be ethical since before I was born.”
Experience has taught him that continuing education is essential, because today most corporate careers are increasingly short-lived. While people in his father’s generation tended to stay with one company over the course of an entire career, Jim and his early-Baby-Boomer peers have worked, on average, for five different companies. Members of his children’s generation, he adds, are likely to not just transfer among five different companies but actually pursue five completely different careers over the course of a lifetime.
“I went to school to be an accountant, then I became a C.P.A., and then I went to Canisius and got an M.B.A.,” says Jim. “A lot of people think, I’m going to go to school for four years, and that [education will suffice] the rest of my life. But people have to retrain themselves constantly in order to survive. The MBA is a good way of doing that.”