Steve Christensen is full-throated—like his hometown.
“Yep, born in Brooklyn,” he says when asked about his accent.
The recently appointed dean of Concordia University Irvine’s business school has nonetheless become quite the Orange County educator.
He graduated from California State University-Fullerton and worked at the University of California-Irvine and Chapman University before joining Concordia, where he was executive vice president for external relations before taking the top job at the business school in February.
Christensen said he considers Chapman President James L. Doti his mentor.
Doti speaks highly of his protégé.
Steve is a “very energetic and visionary kind of guy,” Doti wrote in an email. “He is a change agent who is able to see the big picture and then get into the trenches to get the job done.”
The big picture for Concordia’s School of Business now includes 358 undergraduates and 145 MBA students.
It offers bachelor’s degrees in accounting, finance, international business, management, marketing, and sports management.
MBAs
It’s MBA has been a general degree in business practice. That’s changing, with one specific MBA launched and another now in the works. Concordia introduced an MBA with an emphasis in public policy last fall. Christensen plans to offer one in healthcare management in 2015.
In between will come a one-year “incubator internship” for students starting a company, a program expected to start when school resumes this fall.
“It’s like working for a company, but in this case, the company is themselves,” he says.
Next, Christensen wants to add short-term international internships for all business students. And he hopes the business school will, within two years, begin offering a three-week business elective on basic business principles for nonbusiness students.
The school has Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation and will file for additional specific accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business in coming months.
The rollouts point to the reputation for energy and vision Christensen brought to the job.
He traces another skill that’s expected of college deans these days—fundraising—back to his New York roots.
“I started with the Boy Scouts in New York when I was a kid,” he says.
He was a horse wrangler at one of the group’s summer camps. In college, he began raising money for city youth agencies. Then he worked on a $300 million project at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
His personal fundraising efforts in OC have helped companies and nonprofits, including the Olive Crest home for neglected and abused children and the Santa Ana Zoo.
Christensen’s combination of experience in fundraising, community service, and education has come together in a program he started at the business school before he became dean: the Teen Entrepreneur Academy.
The academy is an annual summer project at Concordia predating his appointment as dean.
It gathers 75 teens for a week each summer to learn how to start a business. They write a business plan and get guidance from Orange County entrepreneurs and business leaders.
Some of the kids have never set foot in Irvine—about half are Latinos from working-class homes where Spanish is the primary language.
The goal is to teach the students to see with “entrepreneurial eyes,” Christensen says, whether they end up starting businesses or not.
“It’s a way of life to see problems as opportunities.”
Some of the lessons are counter-intuitive, according to Christensen, who tells kids, “It’s OK to get an F” in launching a business.
He also has the teens read and discuss stories of startups, especially technology companies. He cites PayPal, for instance, which didn’t click with consumers until its fourth business model.
“Everyone is going to make mistakes and not get things right the first time,” Christensen says. “The way we handle this defines us.”
Wing Lam, a cofounder of the Costa Mesa-based Wahoo’s Fish Taco restaurant chain, serves as one of the entrepreneur-mentors. He’s a fan of Christensen’s approach.
“He’s a thinker who wants to inspire,” Lam says.
Now Christensen wants a “Start Up Saturday” program in order to help students launch the businesses they plan.
40 Acres
Concordia has its origins in the early 1970s, when its governing body, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, bought the land for the school.
It paid $7,000 an acre for 40 acres, Christensen says.
When they came out to a still undeveloped Orange County, Christensen says, “they couldn’t figure out why they were paying so much for hills you couldn’t farm.”
The school has grown into one of several local options for OC undergraduate business students, as well as MBA candidates, including many from the working world.
“Concordia was convenient and affordable for my family and life,” says MBA
student Chau Schwendimann. “I got to know more people, and it was a broader approach.”
Concordia’s part-time MBA program costs $790 per unit, or $31,600, giving it some advantage on price compared to other programs in the area.
Schwendimann kept working and gave birth to a child while navigating Concordia’s two-year program.
Nearing graduation, she was hired as controller at The Centennial Group, an insurance broker in Costa Mesa.
“It’s hard to transition from a nonprofit to the private sector,” she says. “The MBA got me there.”
