Steven Cole-Schwartz
University of Michigan, Ross School of Business
Age: 44
“Philanthropy leader moving capital to communities for power and equity. Very serious person. Devastatingly handsome.”
Hometown: Seattle, WA (current); Minneapolis, MN (originally); Washington D.C. (for long enough that it deserves an honorable mention).
Family Members: My immediate family is my husband, Michael, and my mom, Jeanne
Fun fact about yourself: At one point my career goal was to be a theologian. I attribute this to the crush I had on my high school theology teacher. Shout out to the Academy of Holy Angels in Richfield, MN.
Undergraduate School and Degree: Creighton University, B.A. in Theology (see above in re: fun fact)
Where are you currently working? Inatai Foundation, Vice President of Grantmaking
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles:
- Board Chair, Assets Under Movement Foundation, DC & NYC
- Board member, Native American Youth and Family Center, Portland, OR
- Board member, Inatai Investment Management Company, Seattle, WA
Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I’m most proud of leaning hard into teams and collaboration to do meaningful work. It started with my first EMBA team. Ross rotates students through teams each term. That first group made a deliberate commitment to vulnerability, openness, and growth. We were intentional about how we built trust and made decisions, which helped each of us re-enter academic life, stay focused, and have a successful first term.
A year later, during the fall of 2025, I was part of another team that partnered together on an action-learning project in Ireland. We supported a seasoned CEO to explore opportunities to acquire and strengthen medical education companies. We combined research, strategy, and practical structuring options in a way that honored his past work, future ambitions, and the realities of the field. It was challenging, collaborative work that required us to bring different perspectives to bear on an ambiguous problem and to produce something useful. (It also took us to Dublin, Galway, and beyond, which didn’t hurt.)
These experiences changed how I operate. At work, I pay even closer attention to how we design the conditions for shared success and individual accountability, especially in complex, cross-functional efforts.
What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? Since leaving my role as Barnes & Noble’s most-distracted bookseller when I was 18, I’ve been the first person to hold every role I’ve had. I have been a founder, a builder, a strategist, and an operator. I have led nonprofit organizations, a consulting practice, a start-up philanthropy, and divisions of larger organizations. The purpose-driven teams and organizations I helped to create operate far beyond anything I could have built alone, advancing a more equitable future despite social, political, and economic forces aligned against many of our communities. I’m proud to have built platforms that queer people, gender-expansive leaders, immigrants, and leaders of color—particularly women of color—now lead and own. My role has been to create the conditions for others to exercise power, and then get out of the way.
Who was your favorite MBA professor? Dr. Maxim Sytch teaches Personal & Organizational Leadership and brings rigor and immediacy to the classroom and coursework. The course teaches organizational alignment, social capital, influence, and leadership in high-performing teams. He pulls real expertise out of class participants and combines it with research insights and frameworks. That helped us understand our own observations and experiences of leadership with greater clarity; it gave me language to describe organizational dynamics more clearly and make leadership decisions more deftly.
Why did you choose this school’s executive MBA program? The reputation, global access, rigor, and people. I have a strong no a**holes rule about where I spend my time, so I seek spaces that are authentic, challenging, and rooted. The roots at Ross are in strategy and in leadership, which comes to life in the Michigan Model of Leadership. That model was the deciding factor for me. Our first orientation included rich leadership content alongside the results of our first 360-degree assessments, executive coaching, and team coaching. Ross builds strategic leadership into the structure from the start, using methods that make it useful to seasoned managers and organizational leaders in our day-to-day.
What is the biggest lesson you gained during your MBA and how did you apply it at work? The lessons that most changed how I operate came from Strategic Thinking and Competitive Analysis, taught by motorcycle enthusiast and proud Canadian-American Dr. Brad Killaly. An assignment, based on the HBR article “Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?”, exposed gaps in how I was articulating and aligning strategy in my organization. I took that directly back to my job and led a process to clarify our objectives, scope, and approach to making our unique value work better for the communities to which our foundation is accountable. That, and related strategy development, is reshaping how we organize more than $70 million of grants to more than 400 nonprofit organizations each year. Over time, applying classroom frameworks in real time became second nature. I still hear myself saying to my boss, other VPs, and directors, “I learned something at school that might help us here…” and putting coursework into practice.
Give us a story during your time as an executive MBA on how you were able to juggle work, family and education? Last fall, I found myself in a real squeeze. In a five-week stretch, I delivered a keynote, led a 150-person conference, finalized and secured Board approval for a five-year, $400 million strategy, launched another major initiative, completed a major MBA team project, and began my term as Board Chair of a national philanthropic foundation. Those weeks also included my 15-year wedding anniversary. All of these milestones for which I was accountable were shared across groups of people. I knew I wasn’t alone. Yet the juggling act felt very lonely, as it so often can.
One night, my MBA team paused a difficult working session to check in on how we were actually doing. We revisited priorities, reset expectations, reallocated our resources, and redistributed work. That reset gave me the permission I needed to gut-check projects and support teams at work, let go of perfection, and refocus on creating value for the stakeholders of these different milestones. I threw some of what I was juggling to other people, and they caught the balls more gracefully than I could have. And luckily, my husband was very understanding about us celebrating our anniversary at the Great Wolf Lodge water park and conference center the day before my keynote.
What was your biggest regret in business school? I regret not exploring L.A. more deeply. I traveled to Los Angeles 16 times for class weekends. I went on a couple hikes, walked on the beach, shared good food with great friends, and befriended a dog called Eleanor. But I spent too many nights doing coursework and not enough nights exploring L.A. with my people.
What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Inspired by classmates’ learning and several professors’ encouragement to test its boundaries and strengths, the program encouraged judicious use of LLMs in many contexts. My main insight is that over 21 months, AI capabilities have improved much faster than we can clock, but mostly these programs still don’t know anything. For now, I find it to be the smartest, fastest intern I could ever hire. But like an intern, it has no practical wisdom on which we should rely. It needs close management. We outsource learning and judgement to AI at great risk.
What was the main reason you chose an executive MBA program over part-time or online alternatives? I wanted to be in-person, maximize time with other senior-level professionals inside and outside of the classroom, and be in a structured program with clear progressions.
How did you finance your EMBA and what did you do to make tuition and associated costs more affordable? My terrific boss and generous employer sponsored a portion of my tuition. Ross offered me a scholarship to help me fit the program into my and my family’s budget. We self-funded the rest of the program, as well as travel costs. My family started by knowing our willingness to pay up front, which helped me figure out the negotiations around the other components. (Note: I would like post-degree credit from Dr. Ari Shwayder for my use of willingness to pay in a plain English sentence.)
What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? I want to build teams and organizations that make the world a more equitable, racially just, gender-expansive, welcoming, and brave place. I believe that we—the big we—will win in the truly long run.
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