Logan » The first thing Doug Anderson noticed when he stepped into Utah State University's business school as its new dean was a useless relic of the 20th century that summed up everything he wanted to change.

"There was an old phone booth from 1970 when the building went up. There was this wire from where the telephone had been taken out, and it had been like that forever," Anderson said during a recent interview at his office in USU's George S. Eccles Business Building.

Needless to say the booth was removed from the Eccles lobby, but so was Anderson's former office as part of a $3 million renovation that the dean hopes is a precursor to a $58 million expansion, the Legislature willing. Today in their places are a student lounge and group study rooms, but more is needed to square the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business with its ambitions to become a "top-tier" school.

"We want to send a message that our students are our first priority," said Anderson, a USU alumnus and Logan native who was a member of Harvard's economics faculty for 10 years. "This building just doesn't work. It's an old style of management. It's very vertical, hierarchical. The customer doesn't count, the students. It made you feel like you were on a commuter campus, even though we are a residential campus."

Anderson returned to USU in 2006 after 20 years at the helm of the Center for Executive Development, a Boston-based firm he co-founded. He also served in the Treasury Department early in the Reagan Administration.

The USU business school opened in 1889 as the Utah Agricultural College's Commercial Department and was recently renamed in recognition of a $25 million Huntsman pledge. Hardly a year into Anderson's tenure, USU announced the blockbuster gift from the Utah chemical magnate whose name has become synonymous with higher-education philanthropy.

"It's not an endowment. It's actually to be spent in the next 10 years on programs rather than bricks and mortar," Anderson said. "It came with the proviso that we build a top-tier business school. Our challenge is to find the bricks and mortar."

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Immediate impact »Although a fresh building remains lines on paper, the impact of the Huntsman gift was immediate for USU's 2,000 business students, such as Landon Essig of Centerville, who is among the 30 students chosen each year to participate in the school's premier undergraduate program, the Huntsman Scholars.

"The program allows students to do things, visit places in the world and meet people, that they would never have an opportunity to do otherwise," Essig said.

Among the school's international programs are the Shingo Prize, a kind of Nobel for manufacturing excellence named in honor of Toyota executive Shigeo Shingo; a partnership with three Chinese institutions to make USU's economics degree program available to hundreds of students in China; and service learning abroad targeting three continents.

One recent foray included a tour of Brazil, Chile and Peru to show students how business works in South America. In Peru, students teamed with local entrepreneurs to help launch three businesses, a yogurt factory, a bakery and a guinea pig farm.

"In the marketplaces in Peru, they roast guinea pigs on a spit. They are quite a delicacy ... I'm told," Anderson said. "[Students] invest their own money in small business startups in Lima, then go back as interns to support them, then go back to do consulting."

The idea behind this program, known as Small Enterprise Economic Development, or SEED, is to leverage experiences many Utah students already have. It includes travels to Asia and is branching into eastern Europe.

"Our students come to us already oriented to the big world. A lot are former LDS missionaries, half speak a foreign language fluently," Anderson said. "If you have been to Brazil on a mission, what can we do as a school to turn that into an asset so it doesn't turn into a stranded experience, disconnected with the rest of your life?"

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Making an impression » The students and the Huntsman School are making an impression. The new head of the accountancy school, Larry Walther, learned about USU while serving on its accrediting panel when he was a professor at University of Texas, Arlington.

"I was struck by the students here in a deep and meaningful way," Walther said. "It goes to the culture and concern for ethics and work ethics. A lot of these kids come from a rural environment and work well together."

He left Logan so impressed that he decided to follow up on a job opportunity at the Huntsman School, which he perceived as a business program whose star was rising.

"It's more than at a crossroads, it's at the point of being catapulted because of the Huntsman gift," Walther said. "At the end of the day it's about helping good people succeed and become leaders."

In Utah that means connecting students at all universities with the state's entrepreneurial spirit, according to Jack Brittain, the University of Utah's former business dean and current vice president for technology commercialization at the U.

Utah students are "interested in starting businesses and participating in the financing in the startup of businesses," Brittain said. "That's the state's differentiator and makes us unique nationally."

Utah has a noticeable lack of Fortune 500 companies and its economic strength lies in its diverse array of medium-sized firms and small startups. But the affinity for risk can be a two-edged sword.

"There's this entrepreneurship that drives what happens here [in Utah], but we don't want to continue perpetuating the idea of failed entrepreneurship. We want to give them the skills they need to succeed," said Ken Snyder, the Huntsman School's executive dean.

Utah is notorious as a place where startups proliferate and die, and Dan Holland, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Huntsman, wants to find out why.

"We're looking at the way entrepreneurs think and why they might persist in the face of adversity," Holland said. "There is good persistence and bad persistence. Sometimes there's this escalation of commitment where you keep going, even though all the signs say you should quit. But then there is good persistence where you overcome those challenges and you're resilient."

In his quest to take the business school to the top, Dean Anderson has no intention of replicating Harvard, Stanford or Wharton,

"If you're trying to duplicate that kind of thing, you would need $500 or 600 million to get going, and that doesn't include the infrastructure. So we have to be selective. We have to develop our own focus area."

Anderson identified USU's niche as leadership, a concept that he believes should be associated with Utah the way oil is associated with west Texas. In that regard, Utah State stands with the state's other leading business schools, rather than apart.

"We are part of unified brand called Utah. I feel good about the relationship we have with the U. and BYU," Anderson said. "We'll compete for students and for faculty, but we have more in common and a source of cooperation than a source of competition. We want Utah to stand for something. I think it stands for leadership."

bmaffly@sltrib.com