Michael Kunigonis

Corning Cable Systems is a leading manufacturer of fiber optic communications system solutions for voice, data and video network applications worldwide. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Corning Incorporated and part of its telecommunications segment based in Hickory, N.C.

The company’s vice president of Americas manufacturing, strategy development manager, director of information technology and its vice president of sales and marketing for the Americas Public Networks Group all have found that the skills they gained at UNC Kenan-Flagler allowed them to excel at Corning Cable Systems.

"To get anything done, you need to build consensus across different functional areas," noted Michael Kunigonis (EMBA ’07), Corning Cable Systems manager of strategy development. "The skill sets you learn at UNC Kenan-Flagler enable you to excel at Corning, which is a very collaborative company. The ability to work across a matrixed team and to influence teammates to work toward the same objectives are necessary skills for success at Corning."

Kunigonis was an engineer officer in the U.S. Army for eight years before he joined Corning’s Optical Fiber division in New York as a product line engineer. He served as market development manager in Asia and later worked in the access networks team. In 2005, Kunigonis was transferred to Corning Cable Systems in Hickory, N.C., as a product line manager. While starting his new role, the company offered to send him back to school for an MBA.

While at UNC Kenan-Flagler, he used tools gleaned from operations and finance courses to improve his forecasting of customer network deployments and their subsequent product purchases. "The course work helped me to better anticipate customer needs externally and internally to best align our manufacturing assets to customers’ demand," he noted. "I was getting some real-time advice from some of the professors at UNC Kenan-Flagler from an operations standpoint."

After completing his degree at UNC Kenan-Flagler, Kunigonis continued to use course materials from the executive MBA program for the market and business model analysis work where he identified new markets for Corning Cable Systems to target.

Michael Bell

Michael Bell (EMBA ’00), vice president of Americas manufacturing at Corning Cable Systems, also put much of what he learned at UNC Kenan-Flagler to immediate use at the company. Bell studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate and joined Corning as a process engineer after working in the Navy as a submarine officer.

"A lot of the strategic thinking that I use every day came from the general management and strategy courses at UNC Kenan-Flagler," he noted.

Bell completed the MBA for Executives Program at a time when Corning Cable Systems supported Corning’s Japanese customers with cable products made in the United States. To better compete and increase sales, the company had to improve its access to Japan while offering customers better prices. This put into question whether Corning Cable Systems should manufacture in the United States or Japan.

Bell used the lessons he learned from UNC Kenan-Flagler’s Mergers & Acquisitions course to help set up an equity venture in Japan. "There is no way I would have been prepared to even consider a project like the equity venture in Japan without my MBA," he said. "I really do attribute my success since 2000 largely to the education I received at UNC Kenan-Flagler."

Darren Schmidt (EMBA ’00) is director of information technology (IT) at Corning Cable Systems. While he had a strong technical background, Schmidt opted for an MBA to gain a deeper understanding of how investments in IT impact the bottom line of the company.

Since graduating from UNC Kenan-Flagler, Schmidt has held a number of positions within Corning to reduce IT costs, standardize basic IT service offerings and leverage the assets within IT to support Corning’s innovation and business strategy. He has used the skills from the program to help establish an IT operating model that flexes with the business demand and is considered top quartile in more than 80 percent of the IT service offerings benchmarked in the industry.

"Applying what I learned from the MBA program at UNC Kenan-Flagler has helped bridge the gap in communications and investment planning between IT and the business," he said. "The team dynamics of how we worked virtually through the school’s program set the context for how Corning locations are working today across different time zones and cultures."

Billy Pyatt

Billy Pyatt (MBA ’88) is Corning Cable Systems’s vice president of sales and marketing for the Americas Public Networks Group. He has worked at Corning for 25 years and spent his first years at the company in engineering before returning to school to earn his MBA.

"At UNC Kenan-Flagler, I was matched up with some of the smartest people I’ve ever been surrounded with in my life," he said. "In addition to the fine faculty, I had a chance to learn from fellow students with tons of experience in the industry and people with backgrounds spanning every discipline from finance to marketing. Those student-to-student learnings served me well early in my career and still carry me through many business issues today."