Cheryl Stallworth-Hooper (MBA ’81)

Stallworth had uncles in the U.S. Navy, and letters would come to her family in distinctive envelopes from other countries or ports of call. Sometimes they came with photos and gifts, and they always sparked the young girl’s imagination.

“I thought, ‘When I grow up, I am going to see the world,’” Stallworth says. “And I’ve been fortunate because I have seen the world.”

Stallworth’s wanderlust turned her into a global business leader who has worked throughout much of the world, either in promoting power brands such as Coke in senior marketing roles at The Coca-Cola Company and Colgate as vice president of multicultural marketing at Colgate-Palmolive, or working with companies to help them gain consumer insights.

Stallworth is CEO at Firefly, North America, based in Norwalk, Connecticut, which handles qualitative research for Kantar Millward Brown, a WPP company. Firefly innovates by using emerging technologies and has pioneered research through the use of consumer theater, partnering with the famed Second City improvisational troupe.

“Our goal is to work with clients to uncover the deep, universal human truths that unpack the inherent tensions people have in their lives and how clients can respond to them,” she says.

It’s the latest act in a stellar career for Stallworth, who came to the WSB as a Consortium MBA student wanting to shift from a career in radio into marketing and beyond. She remains connected to the School, having served on the advisory board of the Center for Brand and Product Management as well as mentoring students.

Stallworth says her staff at Firefly is diverse, something she’s proud of in an industry where she says there is much progress yet to be made.

“You have to impact it at the corporate level and the recruiting level, and the way to do that is for companies and business schools to work together,” she says.

At the Wisconsin School of Business, Stallworth says she found the intellectual stimulation, collaboration, and applied learning opportunities with local companies inspiring, which gave her an opportunity to build her global career upon a strong foundation. Even so, though, she kind of misses it.

“If I could rewind and go back to grad school, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” she says. “It was nirvana.”

Jorge Cardona (MBA ’96)

Even though Jorge Cardona is a numbers guy, it’s his words that can make the greatest impact.

Each year he speaks with high school students at Madison College’s annual Latino Youth College and Career Fair and knows his presence makes a difference.

“It’s like letting them open a book to see what the world has to offer them so they can envision it in a Hispanic face,” says Cardona, vice president of finance at the World Council of Credit Unions in Madison, Wisconsin.

Cardona’s career was enhanced by the MBA he earned at the WSB as a Consortium for Graduate Study in Management fellow. While he still uses the technical skills he gained from his MBA, he says he values the relationships and collaborations he experienced at WSB most.

“I learned from my classmates here, not just the professors,” he says. “That’s why having high-quality classmates is so important.”

The MBA helped put Cardona on track to move up in his finance career, most of which was spent at Oscar Mayer and its parent company, Kraft Heinz.

Finance was always part of the equation for Cardona, who grew up in Milwaukee.

“I was the little kid in junior high who would walk around with a calculator,” he says. “I would read the newspaper because the SALT II treaty negotiations were taking place, and I would take out my calculator and do the math myself.”

His first job after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was working in collections and customer service for Toyota Motor Credit Corporation in Deerfield, Illinois. He enjoyed it, but wanted something better and decided to pursue an MBA. He was recruited by Oscar Mayer immediately after earning his Wisconsin MBA in corporate finance and investment banking. Though he moved up the ladder in finance over his 19 years at Kraft Heinz, he still found himself in a unique situation of rarely encountering others who were born and raised in areas with few Hispanics.

“When we’d get Hispanics or people who spoke Spanish at Oscar Mayer, they were always from out of town, from another country, or a state with a heavy Hispanic population,” he says.

He hopes that changes for future generations, and does his part to ensure that it will. That’s why he tells students about his career, in English and Spanish.

“It almost doesn’t matter what you say,” Cardona says. “They see you, they realize anything is possible, and say, ‘We can do that. We can go to college.’”