Great businesses are built on great stories.
For 25 years, the Terry College of Business has offered a stage where executives, entrepreneurs, politicians, coaches and a pair of Hall of Fame quarterbacks contributed lessons in leadership, innovation and resilience that inspire audiences long after the applause fades.
Debuting in March 2000 as a breakfast series by the UGA Alumni Club and later the Terry Executive Education Center, the original mission of Terry Third Thursday (TTT) endures: to bring nationally distinguished speakers to offer local and global perspectives on business.
With 252 events to date and more ahead, here are a few speakers whose big ideas still resonate.
The Beginning: March 16, 2000
Jeff Arnold (AB ’18)
Then CEO, Healtheon/WebMD; co-founder and executive chairman, Sharecare
The series’ goal was to weave the Terry College into the fabric of Atlanta’s business community, and choosing Jeff Arnold as its inaugural speaker more than fulfilled that purpose.
An entrepreneur who founded his first company at the age of 24, Arnold came to TTT as the founder of Atlanta-based WebMD less than a year after its multi-billion-dollar merger with Healtheon, where he served as CEO of the combined company. While Arnold paused his speech communications studies at UGA in 1993 just a few credits shy of graduating to pursue a job opportunity in the pharmaceutical industry (he later earned his degree), in his TTT, he noted the importance of UGA and the state of Georgia when forming WebMD in 1998, as well as the first company he started, Quality Diagnostic Services, in 1994.
Recently reflecting on his TTT speech, Arnold recalls how his time at UGA provided the building blocks of his success, empowering him to “overcome fears, take risks and think big.”
“Through the classes I took for my major, I learned that it takes much more than just having a ‘big idea.’ You have to be able to anticipate opportunities as well as obstacles to chart a clear path – and articulate that plan to your team in a way that motivates and aligns them to execute on a common vision,” says Arnold.
For WebMD, that exercise was centered around a single question: What if health had a homepage? And even with the majority of the dotcom boom happening on the West Coast, Arnold stayed committed to his Southern roots.
“Obviously, Silicon Valley was a hotbed for tech, but I wanted my businesses to be based in Georgia, especially WebMD; because I believed in the people and was confident that what I learned at UGA could apply to the business — like the paramount importance of relationships and purpose, which are core principles we knew would make our ‘big idea’ successful. And that philosophy hasn’t failed me yet.”
After leaving WebMD, Arnold formed The Convex Group (with a deep bench of other UGA grads), which was instrumental in the growth of HowStuffWorks, an award-winning online resource used by millions of people each month, which he sold to Discovery Communications. And then in 2010, he co-founded Sharecare, a digital health company that improves care quality and access across the health care ecosystem.
“The promise of eliminating the fragmentation and making health care more frictionless and accessible to everyone is the idea that fueled WebMD – and it’s the same premise at Sharecare,” he says. “However, now we have much more advanced enabling technologies to power that concept. Today, I’m doing it with AI; before I was doing it with a web browser. As people realize the potential of these technologies and their ability to democratize knowledge, I get even more excited because the pace of change in health care is much faster than it used to be.”
Arnold has accomplished much in the decades since his TTT speech, but he is not resting on his laurels.
“It’s been 25 years, and a lot of progress has been made,” he says. “But there is still so much left to do, and I don’t feel like I have as much time to get it done as I did in my 20’s. There’s a sense of urgency — and responsibility — that comes with that.”
“Managing Successfully Through an Economic Crisis”: July 17, 2008
Ken Jackson (BBA ’79, MAcc ’80)
Then CFO, Shaw Industries
If ever there was a time for serious discussion about the future of business, it was 2008. Amid the Great Recession triggered by the collapse of the housing market, Ken Jackson took the TTT stage to counsel a roomful of wary businesspeople.
Shaw, a leader in flooring and other surface solutions for residential housing and commercial spaces, is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, and Jackson remembers preparing financials to share with Warren Buffett.
“We prepared this exhaustive analysis,” Jackson says. “During that meeting in the fall of 2006, we told him we saw a bit of softening in the marketplace. We were concerned about the next six months. Warren says, ‘I don’t think I’d be worried about the next six months. You might need to be concerned about the next two years.’ And of course, he was right.
“It’s amazing to look back,” Jackson continues. “The quote I told was a classic Warren Buffettism: ‘Only when the tide goes out do you find who was really swimming naked.’ A lot of businesses tied to the housing industry did not survive that economic downturn.”
Jackson detailed strategies to oversee the downturn: manage cash flow, learn from past cycles, look at every expense, and broaden your business. But it was people he stressed the most.
“We made it through that, and the company continues to do exceptionally well. I think it was because we didn’t panic,” Jackson says. “We communicated most with our customers and employees.”
Jackson recalls attending a CFO meeting where he learned a nugget of strategy that changed his company’s approach. He sees TTT similarly: an opportunity for business leaders to discover one idea that improves their market position.
“If people are serious and want to improve the results of their businesses and operations, they can learn about new, timely topics, listen, and get an idea that helps their business.”
“Developing the Atlanta BeltLine”: April 16, 2015
Jerald Mitchell
Then economic development director, Atlanta BeltLine; founder, Beaten Path
Turning abandoned landscapes into thriving connectors requires community support, which can be challenging to inspire. Jerald Mitchell, experienced in economic development with the Atlanta BeltLine, highlighted how effective public-private partnerships and targeted investment in affordable housing and distressed neighborhoods can unlock economic transformation.
“The BeltLine serves as a good blueprint for other communities as they try to think through who and what they want to be,” Mitchell says of the 22-mile loop of trails, parks and transit that connects Atlanta neighborhoods. “Its successful outcomes garnered a level of support and engagement that I think many people may not have expected. … I have an enormous amount of pride and gratitude for the opportunity to be one of the people who developed the economic development strategy for the BeltLine.”
Mitchell recalls an instance when a local grocer resisted a plan to link the BeltLine with the store, arguing that traffic came from cars, not pedestrians. But his team enlisted trail counters to show nearly 70% of traffic was coming from the BeltLine through pathways created by walkers over time.
“People will tell you what they want and what they will abide, and if you are too rigid about your process or your construct, they’re going to circumvent it,” he says.
After seeing the impact of the BeltLine, Mitchell applied his approach elsewhere. He left the BeltLine in 2020 to work his magic in Columbus, Georgia, as Chamber of Commerce CEO and head of the Columbus Development Authority, where he helped enliven the city’s riverfront and rejuvenate the historic minor league baseball stadium. He has since founded Beaten Path, a company dedicated to promoting redevelopment potential and opportunities to communities.
He sees events like TTT as a way to pull yourself out of the weeds and see new courses of action.
“(It) gives people the opportunity to connect with and communicate with other leaders who might be going through similar things and help them understand ways to resolve challenges or issues more effectively and more quickly.”
“Insights in Leadership”: Jan. 17, 2019
Linda Matzigkeit
Chief administrative officer, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta
TTT speakers often tell the audience about their roles and how they achieved them, but other speeches explore professional growth. Children’s Healthcare’s Linda Matzigkeit explained the skills required to oversee human resources, legal, marketing, compliance, wellness, communications and strategic planning.
“I felt like the audience was really engaged in wanting to become better leaders and excited about getting tips about how to be a leader,” she says.
One tip was dreaming big, which in 2019 included improving childhood obesity, for which Georgia ranked 49th in the country. Matzigkeit’s charge was finding ways to lower that ranking, which is now 30th.
In years since, dreaming big manifested itself in other ways. The biggest: the Arthur M. Blank Hospital.
“A year ago we opened on a 75-plus acre campus, and it’s beautiful,” Matzigkeit says. “That was dreaming big.”
During the pandemic, Children’s stepped up to address the mental health issues of Georgia’s kids. It hired a renowned psychiatry expert, launched an effort to prevent behavioral mental health from becoming a crisis, and used a comprehensive approach to train parents, physicians, teachers, school nurses and counselors to better address mental health, while also launching an ad campaign on raising resilient kids.
“We have taken on behavioral and mental health from a prevention standpoint and from a care standpoint,” says Matzigkeit. “We opened a new outpatient center for kids in crisis, trying to keep them out of emergency departments, and that has been very successful.”
She sees TTT as a valuable source for gaining and sharing information.
“It provides access to a number of different industries and issues, but also some of the top issues… tangible things people can walk away with,” she says. “Certainly, child health is something that is very important, because kids are our future.”
“Fireside Chat with Genuine Parts Company”: September 18, 2025
Paul Donahue
Non-executive chairman, Genuine Parts Company
Will Stengel
President and CEO, Genuine Parts Company
As TTT passed 250 events, listening to the executive leadership from Atlanta’s Genuine Parts Company proved a fitting testament to notions of value and longevity.
“We’ve been around for a long time, and we just keep on keeping on,” said Paul Donahue, who stepped down as CEO in 2024.
“The culture at Genuine Parts is one of the pieces of its special sauce,” said Will Stengel, the company’s sixth CEO in its 97-year history. “What was important for me to do well was respect the past and balance the future.”
During the chat, Donahue and Stengel considered topics discussed by previous TTT speakers.
Like Arnold, Stengel addressed the need to remain relevant in the world of artificial intelligence. “As business leaders, we have a meaningful responsibility to make sense of it … so we aren’t waking up one day seeing someone create something that is a surprise to us.”
Like Jackson, Donahue discussed the importance of employees. “All of our revenue is generated by our front-line workers,” he said, “If you want to understand your business and what works and what doesn’t, get out and work with the front-line workers.”
Like Mitchell, Stengel emphasized “understanding the needs of your customers and designing technology around those needs to make sure you’re solving the right problem and getting a return on your investment.”
Donahue reflected on the process of ensuring a smooth CEO transition, noting continuity is crucial for long-term success. And Stengel stressed the importance of people. “There’s nothing more important … probably 60-plus percent of my time is focused on people.”
This shared focus is foundational — not only to Genuine Parts’ near-century of success but also to initiatives like TTT, which has thrived for 25 years by telling great stories about strong leadership.