It’s possible that one of the most prestigious business schools in the country began over a round of cocktails.
It was the summer of 1965, and the Vanderbilt University Board of Trustees was enjoying a retreat in Hot Springs, Virginia. A small group within the board had been lobbying for a graduate business school since 1958 — in fact, the idea was floated as far back as 1881 — but the plan had stalled. Half-jokingly, with drinks flowing, the trustees suggested launching the business school themselves, with each of them serving as volunteer faculty. An ambitious (and no doubt ill-advised) plan that never materialized, but that did light a fuse. Because four years later, the Vanderbilt Graduate School of Management (VGSM) opened in earnest, launching the American South’s first full-fledged, fully staffed business school.
Though not quite the renegade outfit dreamt up at the Virginia retreat, the VGSM was certainly more ambitious and, dare it be said, more experimental than the traditional business school of the day. A forward-thinking institution playing outside the lines of the standard graduate business school blueprint, with a driving philosophy that was less about understanding the inner workings of business and more about minting graduates with a holistic understanding of management. A philosophy devised by the school’s first dean, H. Igor Ansoff, a Russian American applied mathematician from Carnegie Mellon’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration, who was known as the father of corporate strategic management.
Looking back from a 55-year rearview, it’s hard not to appreciate the moxie of both the students and the faculty during those early years. A group of ambitious people trying something new, in uncharted waters, and just trying to imagine, during a turbulent time in American history, what a different sort of business school could look like. And though the DNA of that ambition exists in Vanderbilt Business today, the fact that it survived at all is, frankly, a miracle. And a reflection of the talent and determination of that first graduating class, the class of ’71. A group of six who took a leap that nearly landed them flat on their faces. But who, in the end, proved that it wasn’t just posh New England schools that could produce top business minds. And thanks to two of those minds — Owen Class of ’71 grads Ed Alston and Stanley Frazer Rose — we can get a glimpse of what those early years looked like.
Master of Business or Manager of Change?
“The big question that came out as we went through the first two years was: What kind of curriculum are we going to offer?” says Ed Alston, the literal first graduate of the VGSM (graduates walked in alphabetical order by last name). “And we decided that it would be ‘manager of change.’ That’s the key term [the school] started with. The reasoning was that the only constant in life is change, so you create a manager of change.” Alston had enrolled in this new experimental business school straight out of the Air Force, where he’d served as a captain on the engineering side in Vietnam.
Though the ambition of this new VGSM (it wouldn’t be renamed Owen until 1977) intrigued Alston, it was far from the standard curriculum that the Harvard Business Schools and Whartons were cooking up in the late 1960s. But this was a moment famously ripe for political, cultural, economic, and even academic transformation. So, why not rethink the blueprint of a graduate business school as well? And, to Dean Ansoff’s thinking, why not create a place where actual leaders were produced rather than just people who were good at business? “If you’re a good manager with the right skills, who understands the behavior of people, you can manage any type of organization,” says Alston. Specifically, you become a manager of change.
“They taught you a different way of communicating with people,” says Stanley Rose, who’d enrolled at the VGSM after reading about it in a student newspaper article. He was in his third year of law school after serving in the army. Both his father and grandfather were graduates of Vanderbilt Law School and his family had been prominent in Nashville since the 1790s. But he was looking for something other than a traditional life at a law firm in Nashville or New York. He saw this experimental new school as something different. A way to not only learn business, which he was interested in, but also to learn how to manage people in a more effective manner. “My communication skills were based on being a lieutenant in the Army — a very different skill. But Owen had a lot of people who gave you good ideas, and I think I benefited a lot from that.”
The problem with this revolutionary new approach to B-school, however, was that it was a little too revolutionary. “Nobody got recruited,” says Rose matter-of-factly about his class. Turns out that an ambitious academic startup school with an innovative dean and an experimental curriculum was not quite what midcentury businesses were looking for. “I don’t think it was a great surprise,” says Rose without bitterness. “We didn’t have a lot to offer anybody.”
Underqualified or Overqualified?
For all of Dean Ansoff’s brilliance in corporate strategic management, what he didn’t fully grasp was that businesses typically wanted business school graduates to have business training. They didn’t want “managers of change,” mostly because they didn’t know what that meant. “That probably contributed to the controversy between Ansoff and the other businesspeople,” says Alston, who nevertheless sings Ansoff’s praises. “You’re the dean of a school creating people who don’t have the skillset a business needs, so why would they hire them?”
To some degree, it wasn’t that the students lacked business training. It’s that they overshot the mark on management training. According to The History of The Owen School, by Madison Smartt Bell, which covers both the birth and the early days of Owen, students were given a management education useful for someone 15 to 20 years into their career, not a recent business school grad closer to the beginning. As legend has it, an IBM executive once pointedly asked Dean Ansoff, “What kind of monsters are you creating?”
Ultimately, it wasn’t that the first class of Owen was underqualified; it’s that their qualifications didn’t fit the standard picture of a business school graduate circa 1971. “It’s like starting a business,” says Alston. “You want to manufacture a product, and you hope that product is in demand. But if you create something that’s not immediately attractive to the population you’re serving, nobody’s going to hire your graduates.” Of course, to Ansoff’s credit, what he did produce were students who were remarkably resilient, and who were capable of figuring out how to thrive when circumstances ran counter to the norm.
It All Worked Out in the End
That summer of ’71, the scramble was on. Without job offers, both faculty and board members pulled every string imaginable to stir up opportunities for their freshly minted grads. And for Stanley Rose, his string was a long one, long enough to pull him all the way to Lima, Peru.
Madison “Matt” Wigginton, one of the original trustees from that 1965 Virginia retreat, was an executive at Genesco, the biggest company in Nashville at the time. He’d recently returned from a trade mission to Peru and sent Rose’s resume to a contact who worked there for Price Waterhouse Peat. “They hired me, but my salary was quite low because I was a very young, inexperienced foreigner,” says Rose. “But I learned things there that kept me going for the rest of my life.”
For Ed Alston, a lifeline came from one of his favorite Owen professors, Flournoy Coles, who would become the first Black faculty member to gain tenure at Vanderbilt University. He was also an official at the U.S. Department of State. “Coles was big-time in D.C. and global economics, and he got me an interview with the Minority Contractors Assistance Project,” says Alston. “They’d received a lot of money from the Ford Foundation and worked with the Small Business Administration to help minority contractors with management, finance, and technical expertise. That was my first job.”
For both Rose and Alston, it was really just a matter of needing that first domino to fall. Once it did, their careers took off. And, as they both tell it, it was their unorthodox business education that helped them thrive. While in D.C., Alston used what he’d learned about mergers and acquisitions at VGSM, plus his mechanical engineering background buying air conditioning equipment for the Air Force, to acquire an air conditioning and heating company in Atlanta. After that, he launched a telecom consulting firm and eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he now golfs and teaches financial fundamentals to young people.
Stanley Rose may have had the most adventurous career of all. While in Peru, he combined his law degree with his business education and began advising his foreign clients on Peruvian tax law. He earned a law degree from the University of San Marcos in Lima and became a Peruvian lawyer. This led him to a law firm in Venezuela, and then back again to Peru where he worked for Occidental Petroleum. During this time, Rose immersed himself in foreign political systems and began advising international clients on how to navigate government bureaucracy in South American countries. Eventually, Rose returned to the U.S. where he worked in the International Legal Department at Warner Lambert and then opened a law practice in Florida, where he advised foreign companies and foreigners on navigating offshore tax havens. Across his career, Rose has published three books and written more than 100 articles for various tax, legal, and real estate journals. In 2026, to honor his time at Owen and everything it did for his career, he made a gift to the school to establish the Stanley Frazer Rose Scholarship.
According to both Alston and Rose, the other four members of their ’71 cohort mostly fared well too, albeit in ways that, like them, were somewhat unorthodox. But such is the manner of things when you’re the inaugural class of a brash new business school turning out “managers of change.”
Today, Vanderbilt Business is one of the preeminent business schools in the country, minting graduates who find success in both traditional career paths and on more entrepreneurial avenues. But none of them would be able to do so without the vision of Igor Ansoff, the dedication of the first Owen faculty, and the adventurous spirit of that first Class of ’71. And also, maybe a few cocktails on a balmy summer night in the mountains of Virginia.