Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | March 6, 2023 | Worcester Business Journal 9 The Heart Dance Love & support for families battling childhood cancer Evening to include... dinner, live & silent auction, wine pull, live music, dancing and more! $75 per person $550 per table of ten Tickets available... AC Hotel, Worcester 04.29.23 Sponsored by... TERRY SHEPHERD Managing Partner, S&G, LLC on an honor that is well deserved! Congratulations As the Chief Visionary responsible for our mission and strategic vision, Terry has led our organization for over 40 years. Congratulations Terry! We are honored to have you, and proud of your recognition as a Business Leader of the Year and Hall of Fame winner. Worcester • Framingham • 508-757-3311 • www.sgllp.com "Avatar" movie. At the center of the class is the guest speaker. Norman, a former adidas executive, wearing fresh-looking Puma sneakers, conducted an interview with Giorgio, the Puma executive, and then opened up the floor to questions from the students. Giorgio not only answered questions from the students, but turned their questions back to them and engaged with their answers. "What an opportunity to hear from them," said Giorgio during a break in the class. Puma has a robust internship pro- gram, she said. "It's real jobs, and real work," said Giorgio. "We love hiring interns and co- ops. We test them, and they test us." Norman's class has had a number of instances where guest speakers picked interns directly from the class. Brendan Tuohey, co-founder and president of Washington D.C.-based nonprofit PeacePlayers International, was a guest speaker in a previous semester. He watched the student presentations and was impressed with the talent. Aer an interview process, he selected a student intern. It happened again during this current semester when the founders of Slate Milk, a beverage startup in Boston, visited the class. ey are in the final interview process with three students and will select one for an internship. During the last part of each class, aer the guest speaker portion, students are split into teams and are assigned a project where they have to create a product and a marketing scheme for that product. ey have just over 30 minutes to establish team dynamics, develop a strategy and a pitch, and create slides, and then they deliver a three-minute pitch. On this Valentine's Day, the assign- ment was to come up with a musical romantic comedy for Broadway. Some students put together a short video, as part of their pitch. "What I ask them to do is harder than anything they'll have to do on the job," said Norman. e number one thing students take from the class is confidence, Norman said. "Being forced to constantly pitch makes me more comfortable in my own skin," sophmore Clarissa Ko said. Ko, along with two Worcester Polytechnic Institute students, has started a com- pany called 360energy, which helps people living in rural Indonesia generate electricity using small-scale hydropower. It's daunting for students to pitch to professionals, she said, but the class prepares them by pushing them out of their comfort zone. Norman encourages his students to be motivated and persistent. Katz said one of the most important lessons Norman teaches is to not take no for an answer, within professional boundaries. From Clark to Israel to adidas e professor teaches from his own experience. Aer Norman earned his MBA at Clark in 1995, he went to Israel to play professional basketball. With practices at night, he set out to find an internship. "I printed out 100 resumes. I had a suit on. It was 100-plus degrees. I went door to door. Any building I could find that had a corporate logo," he said. e search led him to adidas, where he landed an internship. During this time he was on the go from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. He took three buses every morning to the internship, then three more to bas- ketball practice, and three buses home. It was a time when buses were being attacked in Israel aer the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Norman has been an executive with adidas and Reebok, a CEO at German child-safety company CYBEX, and an advisor to startups. At Clark, he sees it as his role to use his expertise to inspire the next generation of business leaders. "I remember when I went to Clark, my first internship, which was writing comedy at [Fitchburg radio station] WXLO, it was a memorable experience. I had a great mentor there who inspired me," he said. Once he had that experience on his resume, it led him to the next thing and the next and eventually led him to adidas. "I know how important that first in- ternship can be. I know it affects people's lives. I love that," said Norman. e other thing that drives Norman is his desire to create. "I love to write. I love to present. I love to challenge myself and try to get speakers that I never thought I could have gotten," said Norman. "If I'm in a position, it doesn't matter if it's a CEO role or adjunct professor, if I'm not able to create, my gas runs out." Norman spoke about Katz pitching his social media company and said something that seems to apply to his own classes. "It's educating and inspiring. Not one or the other," he said. "You just educate; it's boring. You just inspire; it's fluff. So if you're going to educate, inspire." Marketing to You professor Lawrence Norman, a former adidas executive W PHOTO | TIMOTHY DOYLE

• Cover