BLF x Olive Leadership Challenge Recap

This semester, our ’22 Fellows partnered with Olive, a healthcare technology company, to collaborate on the Autumn 2020 Leadership Challenge. Olive, which has recently attained unicorn status with a $1.5B valuation, is home to BLF Program Alum, Nick Eifel ’18 and Kylen Bailey ’19 who provided leadership and guidance for the program’s first Alumni led challenge.

Our 6 Challenge teams were charged with creating a novel and unique convention that would build awareness and education for health systems executives across the country. The ’22 Cohort presented their recommendations to senior leadership and the executive team at Olive on Wednesday, November 18th. On Friday, December 4th, Olive announced the winners of this challenge—a team consisting of Fellows Tabitha Willis, Lauryn DeLuca, Ose Arheghan, Dierre Blash, and Matthew Egbert.

The team’s Project Manager, Tabitha, reflects on her experience:

“I absolutely loved working on the Olive challenge this semester. Olive is an innovative company doing amazing work so I really wanted that trailblazer spirit to be reflected in our project. This challenge allowed me to combine so many of my passions to be creative and think out of the box. My team was also filled with many busy individuals so navigating school, extracurriculars, and the challenge posed a struggle sometimes but we were always filled with ideas making great use of the time we had together. Ultimately, I was happy to successfully channel the essence of the company in every aspect of the project to create something authentically and undoubtedly Olive”.

Olive EVP, Michael Burnett shared, “I couldn’t be more happy with the level of effort and the product that this team created”, adding, “I thought all of you, whether you picked the ‘right places’ or not, obviously did a lot of research—you understood the company, you understood the people, you understood what we were going for—and that’s the vast majority of the battle...you all should be very proud of yourselves”. Having never worked with a university to do this sort of project before, Burnett concludes, “I am very happy that I get to work with you guys”.