In business, tunnel vision is the kiss of death. Executives who don’t manage the operations end or who fail to engage in strategic planning, whatever their business, simply don’t achieve the level of success of which they are capable. For Helen Murray, who earned her MBA from Notre Dame in 1995, that’s never been a problem. Early in life, she learned from her mother, an English war bride, to look at the big picture rather than take a parochial view. That instruction has stood her in good stead through the years, along with the financial prudence and love of family and friends that she learned from her father.

Currently the President and Chief Operating Officer of Indiana Michigan Power (I&M), Helen began her career with I&M, a subsidiary of American Electric Power (AEP), in 1977. She began her career as a junior programmer, eventually working her way up to systems analyst. In the early 1990s, she moved to the operations side of the utility business and became the administrative assistant for I&M’s South Bend, Indiana, division manager. While in South Bend, she became acquainted with the Executive MBA program at Notre Dame through a friend who highly recommended it. With her company’s support, she decided to enroll.

“The Executive MBA program at Notre Dame is highly rated, and it benchmarks well,” says Helen. “The education I received was extremely beneficial and came at a time when I was moving into management. The finance, statistics, and economics courses taught me to understand and interpret financial and operational reports.”

Helen credits not only the professors, who “made the courses interesting and challenging,” but her fellow students as well. “My classmates were productive, successful individuals, already working in their careers. I worked closely with bank vice presidents, company controllers, and others who were experts in their fields while I was in the MBA program. I probably learned as much from my fellow students and their business experience as I did in my classes.”

The vicarious learning from classmates, top-rated education from Notre Dame, and varied experience Helen gained from “leap-frogging” through AEP (from programming to accounting to operations to corporate services) have all provided her with the ability to view Indiana Michigan Power’s business with the wide-angle lens necessary to achieve optimum results.