Spring 2008 issue of Terry Magazine - (Page 3)

editor’snote Jones is the drum major for OneAthens he Terry College is a business school. Our mission is to prepare leaders for the world’s private enterprise system. But when we look at our alumni database, it’s interesting how many times we see a BBA degree leading to an LLB or a JD, as Terry grads add a law degree to their skill set. The man who kicked off Terry’s new Leadership Speaker Series last fall, former Synovus CEO Jimmy Blanchard (BBA ’63, LLB ’65), is a good example of a Double Dog making it big in business. And Superior Court Judge Steve Jones (BBA ’78, JD ’87), who is featured in this issue beginning on page 38, is emblematic of how an aptitude for business can lead to success in the legal profession. Jones entered the Terry College intending to become an accountant, but switched to management because he wanted greater involvement with people. Suffice it say, that goal has been realized. After distinguishing himself as director of the Child Support Recovery Unit, where instead of declaring war on deadbeat dads he figured out a way to make them more responsible, Jones decided to go to law school at UGA. Thirty years removed from his Terry undergraduate degree, this softspoken, fair-minded jurist is, by all accounts, the most looked up to person in Athens-Clarke County. And he was already doing his part to make this community a better place to live when in December 2005 Mayor Heidi Davison and UGA’s community affairs director Pat Allen made him an offer that they were betting he couldn’t refuse. Davison and Allen carried with them a set of depressing economic indicators that placed the city-county’s poverty rate at nearly 29 percent — eighth highest among Georgia’s 159 counties and more than double the state’s poverty rate of 13 percent. As Jones says in the story, “If you live outside Athens and all you do is come to school here — or attend football games at Sanford Stadium — you never see what’s on the other side of the Arch.” Jones knows something about being poor. He was raised by a divorced Jones started as an accounting major, but switched to management wanted greater involvement with people. His OneAthens mother under less-than-ideal conditions on Athens’ west side, and he knows because hecredit him with fostering a bottom-up management style colleagues what it’s like to be bused to schools far from his home. that has allowed the community to participate in decision making. Davison and Allen saw Jones as the perfect person to chair a new anti-poverty initiative that was originally called Partners for a Prosperous Athens. Already overcommitted through service to nine different boards away from the bench, Jones nevertheless accepted the challenge. And at his suggestion, PPA has now been replaced by a new name, OneAthens, which symbolizes the collaborative, public-private partnership that will be needed to free Athens-Clarke County from the stranglehold that poverty has on nearly 11,000 households in this community. “Poverty is not just an economic thing . . . poverty is a state of mind,” says Jones, who thinks that serving as chair of PPA/OneAthens has made him a more effective jurist. “Oftentimes, the person standing in front of me in court isn’t a bad person, they’ve just made bad decisions. In many of these cases, I can’t just sentence a person to prison because that doesn’t do the person or our community any good. I need to give that person a mechanism that will keep them from coming back to my courtroom. “In cases where I have some flexibility, such as drug possession, I may sentence a person to, say, five years probation instead of jail time. And the conditions of that probation may be that the person has to either return to high school or get his GED. Counseling and regular drug testing are typical conditions of probation, and I may stipulate that the person has to get job training and then be employed in order to stay out of jail.” If you join the OneAthens initiative to fight poverty in Athens-Clarke County — as a number of Terry College students have [see sidebar on p. 43] — Steve Jones will be seeking your input and also leading the way. ■ josh weiss Kent Hannon khannon@terry.uga.edu Terry College of BuSineSS Spring 2008 • 3

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Terry School of Business - Spring 2008

Terry School of Business - Spring 2008 Contents Quick Bites Research & Innovation Gatherings Best CEO in America An Unlikely Rock Star Fire & Flavor Beyond the Bench Terry Memo Economic Scorekeeper Class Notes

Terry School of Business - Spring 2008

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