Cardinal Perspectives with Dean Andrew Abela

Skye Diego 
Hello, I'm Skye Diego, assistant director of Leadership Annual Giving at the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America. Welcome to this episode of Cardinal Perspectives, a series featuring in-depth conversations with alumni, students, faculty, staff, and the extended family and community of Catholic University.

In this addition, we're featuring a conversation with Andrew Abela, dean and ordinary professor of marketing at the Busch School, and Katie Garvey, assistant dean of advancement for the Busch School. Dr. Abela is the founding dean of the Busch School of Business. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Harvard University Human Flourishing Program and a contributor at Forbes.com.

His research on the integrity of the marketing process, including marketing ethics, Catholic social doctrine, and internal communication, has been published in several academic journals, including the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Journal of Markets and Morality. He's the winner of the Novak Award, a $10,000 prize given by the Acton Institute for “significant contributions to the study of the relationship between religion and economic liberty.”

He has authored books including Super Habits: The Universal System for a Successful Life from Sophia Press, and a Catechism for Business from Catholic University Press. Prior to his academic career, Dr. Abela spent several years in the corporate world as brand manager at Procter & Gamble, management consultant with McKinsey & Company, and managing director of the Marketing Leadership Council of the Corporate Executive Board.

He holds a B.S. from the University of Toronto, an MBA from the Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, and a Ph.D. in marketing and ethics from the Darden Business School at the University of Virginia.

He and his wife Kathleen, have six children, three of whom (thus far) have graduated from Catholic University.

Katie Garvey
I'm Katie Garvey, assistant dean of advancement here at the Busch School of Business, and I’m here with Andrew Abela, the dean. Andrew, you were the founding dean of the Busch School in 2013, is that right?

Dean Andrew Abela
Correct.

Katie Garvey
How has the school grown since it was founded?

Dean Andrew Abela
We already had about 300 students when we were the Department of Business and Economics, part of what was then the School of Arts and Sciences. Now we're around 800 students, so it's grown quite substantially.

Katie Garvey
Why did we launch a separate business school in the first place?

Dean Andrew Abela
The Catholic Church has some really amazing teachings related to business and the economy, and they used to be referred to as the Church's “best kept secret” because they were hard to find. It was clear that the world really needed these teachings, but there was no business school that was created specifically for that – for bringing the treasures of the faith into the business world.

And we thought, as The Catholic University of America, as the Church's university in the United States, that the Church needs a business school. So that's why we started it.

Katie Garvey
Talk a little bit about those dreams and goals that we had set out to do. Looking back now a dozen or so years later, where did we fall relative to those initial expectations?

Dean Andrew Abela
I think the biggest ambition I can articulate is in the words of an undergraduate student. After the first-ever CEO lecture that we held around the time of the founding of the school – we bring in CEOs monthly to talk about the kind of impact of faith in their own business lives – a student came up to me. He was a theology student, and he told me he was so amazed to find out that you can be a faithful Catholic and be successful in business. It's shocking that people would think those two things can’t co-exist, but they did. I think in large part, due to the success of the Busch School, that's not as common of a view anymore.

People have started to realize that you can be a faithful Christian and be successful in business. I think I would say that has been the biggest accomplishment: that we changed the understanding of what it means to be a person of faith in the business world.

Katie Garvey
Our motto is, “businesses a force for good,” and our slogan is, “businesses a noble vocation.” Can you talk a little bit about how those two sayings tie in practice to the way that we form and teach our students?

Dean Andrew Abela
So the phrase, a force for good, is now so common. I would claim we were the first to say that, now other business schools make that same claim. But even up to about a dozen years ago when we were starting, there was still this notion that business was just about profit maximization.The idea of business being a force for good without contradicting giving a strong return to your shareholders, because if you're not giving a return to your shareholders, then you're not gonna be around for very much longer. Pope Francis came up with this beautiful line: business is a noble vocation. And then he goes on to say, so long as we see in that a higher meaning.

And so we've adopted that. We have a plaque in our lobby that  says, “business is a noble vocation, Pope Francis.” And, the higher meaning – we see this in research, we see this in just the wisdom of experienced successful entrepreneurs, we know this paradoxically – when you focus on just making money, you may be successful in the short term, but longer term, you're not so successful. Whereas when you focus on a higher meaning, a bigger idea, you tend to be more sustainable long-term, even financially sustainable.

Katie Garvey
That's what attracted me to come and work here actually. So the Busch School was accredited by the AACSB in April 2025. What is the significance of that and what does it mean for the school?

Dean Andrew Abela
The significance is very great. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business is the premier accrediting agency for business schools and it's different from the University’s accreditation. Catholic University is an accredited – here's certain kind of accreditation that you have to have in order to open your doors. Obviously we have that, and the Busch School had that as part of Catholic University. AACSB is different from that. It's not required to give a business degree.

But what it does is it says, you are part of the elite. You are part of the top business schools in the world. Only about 6% of all business schools in the world have AACSB accreditation. It is considered to be the finest level of accreditation for a business school. And even though we're only 12-years-old, we thought if we want to be doing what we say we're doing, provide a world class education, then we need that accreditation.

We don't ever want people to think that because this is a religious or faith-infused education, that somehow there's a compromise. Quite the opposite. The accreditation gives affirmation that there's no compromise here.

We're on par with the best business schools in the world, which is super exciting.

Katie Garvey
And it took us a fair amount of time to get it right.

Dean Andrew Abela
It takes years of effort so we were working really hard in the last four years, but even prior to that, preparing takes a ton of paperwork.

Business people who are familiar with the ISO 9000 – it's a similar process. Tons of documentation. You have to basically prove that you're up to the standards that AACSB has set, and it includes a visit by other deans. They come to spend several days looking in all the corners, talking to students, faculty, staff, and so on, just to make sure that we are top-notch quality. So that was a great achievement.

Katie Garvey
In addition to the AACSB accreditation, this past year we've been preparing for and developing our Catholic MBA, which launched in fall 2025.

Can you tell us a little bit about that, what people can expect, and how it is different from all the other MBAs on the market?

Dean Andrew Abela
We're very excited about this. This will be the first MBA that is built from the ground up embedded with and grounded in Catholic worldview and also accredited by AACSB.

Prior to this, we had a smaller program we called the Master of Science in Business. What we've done now is we upgraded that program and it's now a full-fledged MBA. We're labeling it as an “emerging leaders MBA,” so it's targeted at people who are either straight out of undergrad or one or two years out.

It's different from other MBAs you might have heard of, like at Harvard or Stanford, where you're required to have two to five years of full-time experience. This is open to graduates of undergraduate business programs, but it's also open to liberal arts grads and so on, who decide they want to go into business and want an MBA to do that.

Katie Garvey
What's the vision for the MBA program?

Dean Andrew Abela
Our vision is to be basically the number one faithfully Catholic MBA program, where there's no compromise between preparing you for a successful career and grounding it in the Catholic faith. All of the professors teaching the program are people of faith, all of the materials, all of the content is grounded in Catholic social doctrine and faith, the natural law, and so on.

Katie Garvey
That's great. We talked a little bit about who the kind of ideal students are for this MBA, as it's currently envisioned for emerging leaders. As I understand it, there will be a 4+1 aspect of the MBA, is that right?

Dean Andrew Abela
Yes, that's for existing Catholic University students, whether in the business school or in any of the other undergraduate schools at Catholic University. Starting in their junior and senior year, they can take some of the MBA courses and have them double-count for their undergraduate program as well, so that they can finish the course in slightly less than a year.

The 4+1 program: four years as an undergraduate, one year as a graduate, and you've got your MBA as well as your undergraduate degree.

Katie Garvey
That's awesome. Can you discuss the vision for where we're going to grow from here? What are all the different aspects and areas where we may expand from this current “emerging leaders” program?

Dean Andrew Abela
Within that program, the MBA is designed to be modular so that there are different directions you can take it. We're adding modules. So for example, right now we're working on a collaboration with our nursing school. Where you get a doctor of nursing practice and an MBA, so D.N.P.M.B.A. for people who want to go into, say, hospital administration.

We're working with our law school on a J.D.M.B.A., so combine those two degrees. And then we're also thinking about things like not-for-profit administration. There are a variety of possibilities that we will roll out over the coming years.

Katie Garvey
In August 2024, the University received a $1 million dollar grant from Wake Forest through the Lilly Foundation to expand the character building of our undergraduate students through the integration of virtues into courses across the campus, different areas of study, campus ministry, and campus life.

Can you share a little bit about what the plan is, what's already underway in terms of implementing that grant?

Dean Andrew Abela
We're very excited about that grant. What the grant allows us to do is take work that we had already been doing in the Busch School and spread it across the entire University.

So our University, since the beginning, has been very good at teaching our students about the virtues, right? Those habits of excellence like courage and generosity and friendliness and so on, that are at the heart of all human flourishing. We’re very good at teaching about them.

But teaching about the virtues is like teaching about swimming. It’s almost as if you watch a video of somebody swimming and see a diagram and an explanation of how to do the breaststroke, but you never go in the water. Would you really learn to swim if that were the case? No. And likewise with the virtues. There are about one hundred faculty participating, which is enough to reach every single one of our undergraduate students in all of our schools. What this program allows us to do is embed, within the course curriculum, opportunities to practice different virtues like resilience or gratitude or generosity as part of doing their schoolwork.

They're building these habits that are ultimately the components, the content of our character, as Martin Luther King said. The virtues, these habits of excellence are the content of our character. So we're giving our students opportunities to practice these.

Katie Garvey
Do you have any “for-instances” that you can give?

Dean Andrew Abela
For example, the virtue of temperance, otherwise known as self-discipline. We often associate the word “temperance” only with alcohol or drinking, but broadly speaking, it means self-discipline.

In a finance class, our professor gives the students opportunities to practice self-discipline through investing in a mock investment account, because one of the surest ways to lose money on the stock market is to lose self-discipline and start chasing a declining market, for example.

So there are deliberately exercises to test and practice self-discipline. That would be one example. Other examples would be things like growing in the virtue of friendship through a team project.

Katie Garvey
Resilience in one of our core classes, The Vocation of Business. We have our students launch businesses on the very first day in the very first class, is that right?

Dean Andrew Abela
I'm not sure if it's exactly the first day, but it's early. You arrive at the Busch School and within a very short period of time, within your first semester of your freshman year, you are required to start a business. And that takes some guts. And so that gives you practice in the virtue of resilience, among other things.

Katie Garvey
And I think Professor Widmer even has a homework assignment where he has them go somewhere where they know the answer is no, but they have to actually go and ask for, you know, goggles at Starbucks.

Dean Andrew Abela
There's nothing like being told “no” again and again to realize that it doesn't matter, you're still alive.

Katie Garvey
Can you share a little bit about your book Super Habits, which came out last year?

Dean Andrew Abela
Yes. So, this was based in part on the work we had been doing on the virtues. And there are a number of very popular books about habits. Lots of people read about habits and focus on growing in habits.

But something we noticed with all of this is habits work tends to focus on habits of diet, exercise, and sleep. But if you think about those three things,they are what we have in common with the animals, right?

Animals eat, animals move, animals sleep. Yet the virtues are the habits that are unique to us human beings. They're the virtues of thinking, acting, and feeling. Prudence, or practical wisdom, is the virtue of making wise decisions. Justice is a habit of treating others fairly as God guides all of our actions. And then courage and self-discipline guide us in managing our feelings. They are at the heart of all human success. And so what I wanted to do is write a book to show that it’s good to know about how to develop habits, but what you should really know most of all, is which habits are the most important?

And the virtues are the most important habits. So I wrote the book in large part based on the writing of St. Thomas Aquinas on the virtues and marrying it with modern positive psychology, which studies all the virtues and shows how they are at the heart of all of our success. And I put it together in the style of a self-help book.

Katie Garvey
When I think of the super habits that you talk about in your book that I see exemplified in our all-star sales program are resilience and fortitude, for sure.

Can you tell us about the success and incredible growth of that program? And where do you see it going from here?

Dean Andrew Abela
The sales program was founded by Professor Mark Weber, who himself had a long and illustrious career in sales and who has been so successful.

We now place about a third of all of our graduates in some sales or sales-related career, which is pretty astounding when you think about it. Whenever we have a first-year class or a group of visiting families, I will ask the parents, “How many of you have or have had a career in sales?” And usually about a third of the parents will raise their hands. Then I'll say, “how many of you majored in sales?” And there'd be nobody raising their hands. Why is that?

The program has been hugely successful. Students make really good salaries coming out of the program. We have graduates from the program three or four years out making $300,000 to $500,000 a year – which is fabulous.

We want our graduates to make good money when they come out. That's certainly true with the sales program, and we tend to focus on placing people in technology sales and medical device sales. Those are the most demanding, most growing. And the program, like the rest of our program, is very interactive, so there's a lot of role playing.

What we hear from the hiring companies is when our students show up, they're ready, compared to everybody else. They don't have to teach our graduates as much. In fact, we've had several companies coming back and saying, “Can we have more?” And we say, “sorry, they all have jobs, come back next year.”

Katie Garvey
A 100% placement rate – which is outstanding.

We also recently received a very generous donation from an alumnus Patrick Narus and his wife Krista, as well as a couple of our board members, to hire a new sales director and program manager.

Tell us a bit about that and what your hope is for growing the sales program even more.

Dean Andrew Abela
Pat was a graduate of the very first year of our sales program, and he really is in some sense a poster child for how successful one can be with this program. So he graduated in 2016 I think, so nine years ago, and has just been burning up the tracks and is phenomenally successful, moving from higher and higher positions of responsibility. What his investment and other board members of ours are going to allow us to hire more faculty and grow the sales program further.

Sometimes it's hard for people to realize when they see the cost of tuition, but amazingly, the cost of tuition alone does not pay for the cost of our education. We have to rely on philanthropy to make up the difference. And so with gifts like Pat's, what it does is allow us to hire ahead and bring in more faculty to meet the demand for this sales education.

Katie Garvey
We really do have more interest from students than we have professors to teach those students.

Looking ahead at the next five years, what are the key initiatives at the Busch School and how can our supporters, alumni, friends, and partners get involved?

Dean Andrew Abela
One is with the sales program, we actually have a $200,000 matching gift, so every dollar given to us will be doubled. That will help continue to grow that sales program.

Katie Garvey
Thanks to Pat and Kristin Narus.

Dean Andrew Abela
That’s right. And our Ciocca Center run by Professor Andreas Widmer has been phenomenally successful in terms of giving entrepreneurship education to our students.

A number of businesses have also been launched through our VentureLab, so there are a number of opportunities for growth there as well, which we're excited about.

Always a priority for us, but we're trying to make it even more of a priority, is making sure that no one us denied a Busch School education because they can't afford the full tuition. We have had some success with impact scholarships that make up the difference between what a student can afford and the amount of aid that we can afford to give them. We're trying to grow that program significantly as well.

And then, the last thing I’ll mention is we have a very thriving Board of Visitors, an advisory board to me and to the school. The board contains some alumni from Catholic University, business and otherwise, but most are not. They're just people who love the mission of the Busch School of Business.

We are starting a junior version of that board, the sort of emerging leaders for alumni only. And we're looking for the ideal folks who would want to join that. Again, in an advisory capacity, as a way to stay connected to the Busch School and provide input from the front lines, if you will, to make sure we continue to be provide what our students need.

Katie Garvey
I'm really excited about that in particular. And, finally, what are the signature events along the academic year that you would want to make our alumni and friends aware of?

Dean Andrew Abela
Every year in October we have our alumni weekend, which is always a fantastic time for alumni to come back and meet current students, as well as their old professors. We always love that weekend. Around November, we typically have our CatholicU on Wall Street event where we take students to New York City and visit a number of alumni in there, and we’re  always looking to expand that as well.

And then in April, every year, we have Founder's Day, which is an exciting celebration of the birthday of the University.

Katie Garvey
And twice a year is our Family Business Consortium.

Dean Andrew Abela
That's right. And also our sales program, twice a year, have its networking nights.

Katie Garvey
The Sales Networking Reception and Family Business Consortium are usually around Cardinal Weekend. If alumni are in town, they are welcome to join the activities!

Thanks so much, Dean Abela.

Dean Andrew Abela
My pleasure.