Elliot Waterbury, MAcc’15, died June 14, 2017, in New York City. He was 25. Elliot was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Fla. He earned a master’s in accountancy and business valuations from Vanderbilt University in 2015 and was named valedictorian.
Before coming to Vanderbilt, Elliot attended Florida State University, graduating summa cum laude in 2014 with dual degrees in accounting and finance and a minor in math. At FSU, he was an investment intern for the Florida State Foundation.
“Elliot was a true gift to the Vanderbilt MAcc community. His positive attitude was infectious, and his impact on the program was great,” said Lindsay Donald, director of the MAcc program. “As an alumnus, he supported admissions efforts and was influential with current students as they made career decisions. The bond formed in the short time of a one-year program is meaningful and impactful; Elliot touched all our lives. He was a vibrant, talented young man who will be greatly missed.”
Following his Vanderbilt graduation, Elliot worked as a business valuation associate at Deloitte in New York City. He achieved his CPA in the same summer that he completed phase two of the CFA exam, going on to earn the CFA. Most recently, he was excited to start a new job at CohnReznick in Manhattan working in the field of renewable energies.
He was an avid runner, completing a marathon while at Vanderbilt and the New York City Marathon in 2016 as well as several Turkey Trots and the Harvey’s 5K in his hometown.
Elliot is survived by his parents, Sandy and Mark Waterbury; two brothers, Ryan and Kyle; a sister, Laura; his grandmothers, Marilyn Greene and Joan Waterbury; and numerous aunts, uncles, cousins and friends.
Charlotte Nicholson (back row, second from right, celebrates with her Barcelona team.
As a six-year member of the U.S. women’s national in-line hockey team, Charlotte Nicholson earned three golds, two silvers and a bronze. After graduating from Duke, she earned her MAcc degree from Vanderbilt in 2010. She joined KPMG’s audit division, but never left her love for the game behind. Now a manager in KPMG’s advisory group, Nicholson took a 3-month sabbatical this spring to lace up for the Rubí Spartans (Barcelona) of the Spanish Elite league.
What fueled your return to the rink?
I played throughout high school and college, but as I got older it became more difficult to play. Over the years, a couple of European teams asked me to play. I always dreamed of doing it, but never considered it a real possibility. KPMG has a sabbatical program, so last year I made the decision to take advantage of the opportunity to play hockey overseas. Spain and France are two of the best women’s in-line hockey leagues, and since I speak Spanish at a conversational level, Spain made sense. Barcelona is a city I’ve always wanted to get to know better.
How did KPMG react when you applied for the sabbatical?
My group leaders were really encouraging and positive. It wasn’t the easiest conversation to prepare for, but the end result was really outstanding. I’m really grateful to have been able to take advantage of this opportunity with the support of my group.
Which skills learned in the MAcc program do you continue to use in your career?
The soft skills, including communication, emotional intelligence and working as part of a team stand out as being some of the most crucial. No matter how much you know and how technically savvy you are, it’s very difficult to be successful if you can’t communicate effectively, build a rapport with clients and colleagues and understand what you bring to, and how to work in, a team environment. I use these skills every second of every day and constantly strive to improve them.
What are some memorable projects and/or teams you’ve worked on during your career?
One of my most memorable projects during my time in audit was working on the Major League Baseball Players’ Choice Awards. My team got the opportunity to personally interact with MLB players as we handed out and collected ballots during a Mets baseball game.
Post-sabbatical, what’s next for you in your accounting and hockey careers?
I hope to continue to expand my experience, knowledge and skill set to be a successful part of my group at KPMG. As far as hockey goes, I’ve been selected to represent Team USA in the 2017 World Roller Games in Nanjing, China, this September, so I will be busy focusing on doing what I can to help my team bring home the gold!
In 1976, less than a decade after the first 10 students enrolled at Vanderbilt’s new Graduate School of Management, Amy Conlee began her business education.
“I was at Owen at a very early stage,” recalls Amy Conlee, MBA’77. Our class size was only about 40 students, and offered some diversity. We had about five women and perhaps five to eight students who would be considered underrepresented, including international students.”
When Lisa McKinnon, BA’78, MBA’87, began her studies a decade later, student diversity at the Owen School was still relatively the same. This is partly why both women recently decided to establish scholarships at Vanderbilt. McKinnon’s fund, the Davidson McKinnon Scholarship, which is named after her and her parents, supports women studying at Owen. Conlee’s fund, the Cecil and Amy Jorgensen Conlee Diversity Scholarship, is named after her and her husband. It supports women from underrepresented groups. In 1990 Conlee also created a scholarship at Vanderbilt to support women in the MBA program.
“In talking with Dean Eric Johnson, I sensed a strong interest in addressing diversity at Owen right now,” Conlee says. “I am very impressed with his commitment to this issue—knowing that more diversity would benefit the school and the students.” For both women, their business careers also proved the need for these scholarships.
“I started out in banking in 1978 and about 1980 I became the first female commercial lender that my bank ever had,” McKinnon says. “I’ve been in banking ever since, and even today I see that once you start migrating to the very top, to the C-suite or executive suite, I see it still being largely male. This is interesting because banking is a service industry. Whereas manufacturing is more male dominated, it was just an expectation that the service industry would be more equal. But it’s 2016, and it still is not.”
“There are glass ceilings that remain,” she says. “The only way we will break them is if we have more and more qualified women in the pipeline. One of the ways we do that is to make sure women are equivalently educated to everybody else.”
Conlee has a somewhat different story to tell through her career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley’s New York office. Though she started out among the first women at the firm, which was actually on the forefront of bringing women to investment banking, over her 17-year career she saw a dramatic increase in diversity as Morgan Stanley became a more international firm. She was among the first female managing directors at the firm.
“Having been in business so many years, I believe every organization—whether it’s a business or a university—is significantly improved by diversity,” Conlee says. “It brings together different opinions, provides better answers by virtue of those different opinions and experiences, and yields a greater ability to achieve your objectives.
“Personally speaking, diversity has also enriched my life as well. One my biggest regrets from my time at Owen is that I didn’t take advantage of the diversity. I think I felt uncomfortable enough being one of the few women that fitting in was my priority rather than getting to know the other diverse students and exploring the viewpoints of others who were different from me,” she says.
“That’s one of the reasons I feel so strongly about diversity today.”
Both women also received scholarships as MBA students, making their Owen educations possible, providing a major motivation for giving back today.
“I’ll never forget what Owen did for me, allowing me to go back to school and approach my MBA as if it were my full-time job,” McKinnon says.
Conlee echoes this sentiment. “I didn’t have any financial resources, nor did my family. My scholarship made the difference in which business school I attended.”
Looking back on her education, Conlee cannot imagine a different path. “I give Owen great credit for everything I was able to do at Morgan Stanley. I learned so much about finance, working with a team and a lot about my own objectives for my career. Basically, I learned about myself.
“One person who was a major influence on me was my finance professor at the time, Jim Davis. Because of him, I felt totally prepared to work at Morgan Stanley and compete with the top people from the top schools.”
Owen’s Diverse Connections
Conlee’s time at Vanderbilt also helped her get her foot in the door of the investment banking world. During her second year at Owen, the school got a new dean, Sam Richmond, who came from Columbia University. At the time, investment banking firms did not recruit at Owen. He gave her names of industry people in New York so she could write letters and get interviews with them.
“I hope my support inspires others to establish similar scholarships, but there are other ways to support underrepresented women, too. I had a successful career because someone helped connect me to important industry contacts,” Conlee says. “It’s important that we, as alumni and friends of Owen, continue to refer diverse candidates for job openings and make those important introductions.”
Lisa McKinnon, BA’78, MBA’87. Photo Credit: Jessica Scranton
McKinnon’s time at Owen played a pivotal role in shaping her as a businesswoman as well. “In my second year I took the strategy class that was taught by Bruce Henderson, who had founded the Boston Consulting Group,” she says. “I thought the class would be easy because I had seven years of experience under my belt and exposure to multiple companies across various industries. It was not. Bruce did not make it easy. He was there not necessarily to give us answers, but he wanted us to think.
“What I learned from Bruce was that the goal is not that you ace every exam,” McKinnon says. “It was less about what is exactly right and more about how to think strategically—and to be exposed to these different strategies because there’s no one strategy that works in all cases. I’ll never forget it.”
Now 30 to 40 years later, both of these alumnae are helping a new generation of women create their own un
forgettable experiences at Vanderbilt.
For more information, please contact Erik Kahill, associate dean of development and alumni relations for Owen, at (615) 343-4072 or erik.d.kahill@vanderbilt.edu.
Would working at a toy company really be all fun and games? Erin Sullivan can tell you.
She has worked at Mattel since landing a marketing internship while a student at Owen. Now senior director for Fisher-Price marketing, she has handled virtually every Mattel brand, except dolls, in her 11 years there.
Erin Sullivan
“There are times when I’m at work, and I think I can’t believe I’m working, because I’m playing with a toy or playing games, and I’m doing it to see if it’s fun. You need to be able to see the world from a child’s point of view,” she says. “At the same time, it is a Fortune 500 company. There are stockholders and expectations, and the job definitely requires a mix of creativity and analytic ability.”
Sullivan, who majored in political science at the University of Michigan, tried numerous occupations that helped her hone her interests to marketing before she arrived at Owen. When the time came for her internship, Mattel rose to the top of her list.
“I wanted a big company that had a group of good marketers, because not having a marketing background, I wanted to learn from the people around me,” Sullivan says. Several Vanderbilt MBA alumni also worked at Mattel, so networking helped her land the internship. “It was a game changer.”
It might surprise people to know she finds similarities in Owen and Mattel. “Both are collaborative. At Mattel, as a marketer working with design, finance and operations, I collaborate with people who don’t report to me and may have a lot more experience. I have to convince them to follow my lead,” she says. “It takes a good mix of humility, confidence and Type A passion. I saw that at Owen as well.”
Sullivan has worked with some of Mattel’s best-known brands, including Hot Wheels; licensed action figures for Batman, Toy Story and Disney Pixar’s Cars and Planes; and created marketing strategy for games such as UNO, Scrabble and Pictionary. Now she is working with Fisher-Price preschool brands.
A new mom, she is finding the Fisher-Price products she markets are the ones she prefers for her infant son. “It brings a whole new level of gratification to the work I do,” she says. “I can clearly see how they impact my child.”
Sullivan says that while marketing fundamentals stay the same, there are differences in marketing techniques for different brands.
“That’s what makes it fun,” she says. “That’s why I’ve been at Mattel for so long. It doesn’t get boring.”
Edward D. Alston Jr., MM’71, says he was simply lucky that his last name begins with A.
On a warm June day in 1971, Alston walked across the dais at Commencement, shook Alexander Heard’s hand and became the first person to earn a degree from Vanderbilt’s new Graduate School of Management.
Before Alston joined the first class of students enrolled in the Graduate School of Management, he was in Vietnam being shelled during the Tet Offensive. Back in the States, the Air Force officer directed Tennessee State University’s ROTC unit and enrolled in Vanderbilt’s new graduate school to focus on finance. He and Perry Wallace, BE’70, the first African American to play basketball in the SEC, became friends. For a year, Alston taught on one campus and took classes on another.
After graduation, Alston worked in Washington on the Ford Foundation-sponsored Minority Contractors’ Assistance Project. Two years later, he purchased a heating and air conditioning company in Atlanta. His success there made the pages of Ebony magazine and generated an offer from a major Chicago mechanical firm to work with them as a minority contractor. That connection led to Alston becoming a union mechanical contractor and working on numerous projects including Atlanta’s MARTA system and a new brewery for Schlitz Beer.
When construction was in a downturn, Alston turned the contracting business over to a partner and moved into an executive position with AT&T. When he left AT&T, he became a telecommunications consultant just at the time Bell was breaking up and new telecommunications companies were forming. One of his first clients was MCI, now part of Verizon.
After running his own consultancy, Alston retired, but a trip to the Caribbean for a friend’s wedding led to a job offer. He and his wife, Sheila, moved to St. Croix and Alston helped a lottery company owned in part by BET founder Bob Johnson and lawyer Johnnie Cochran tackle lottery infrastructure issues in the islands. “It was probably one of the most interesting decisions I’ve made,” Alston says. “It was a great three to four years of running a lottery and being the senior vice president of technology.”
Today, the very first Owen graduate has again retired, lives in Los Angeles, plays golf (after reaching the top levels of senior tennis), enjoys stock and options trading, travels with his wife and spends time with his three children and eight grandchildren. He is also a certified financial education instructor who works to increase financial literacy among young people.
“In all segments of society, financial illiteracy is like an epidemic, but minorities are typically educationally underserved—we don’t have enough minorities in the financial industry,” Alston says. “My finance education at OGSM helped give me a different perspective on the world.”
Around the world in 80 days? Tyler Narveson needs only 17.
The Colorado native, who finished his MBA in May, travels for both business and pleasure, calling his “addiction to travel” his passion. Having circumnavigated the earth five times already—at 28 years old—he was recently featured in an August Wall Street Journal article about the current popularity of round-the-world travel.
“It was fun,” he says, “because I was doing a round-the-world trip the day it was published.”
That trip’s first leg was to Finland, followed by Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Bangladesh and China before he returned home. Using an American Airlines Explorer award, he pieced the trip together based on flights available through American’s flight alliances.
“It was a bit much, to be honest,” he says. “It was just 2 1/2 weeks. The ones for work have usually been three to six weeks.”
Before graduate work at Vanderbilt, Narveson worked for Accenture, a multinational consulting firm serving clients in more than 200 cities in 56 countries.
“I did a project for the U.S. Department of State where I traveled to different embassies,” he says. “In two years, I went to 18 countries. My first round-the-world was China to Paris to Equatorial Guinea to Algeria and back. It was quite an experience.”
Now working for health care firm DaVita and based in Nashville, he’s hoping for more travel opportunities. “One of the things I like about DaVita is that they’re expanding internationally, so there may be travel opportunities down the road,” he says.
Narveson’s taste for travel was whetted by a study-abroad experience in Shanghai when he was an undergraduate at Colorado State University. “Studying in China was still kind of new at the time,” he says. “When I was there, no one spoke English. Now I go and everyone speaks English. The city has grown immensely.”
That rate of change is part of what drives his wanderlust—that, and wanting to get in as many countries as possible before life’s responsibilities slow him down.
“Originally, my goal was 50 countries by the time I was 30, but I passed that,” he says. (His current tally is 54.) “My life goal is now 100.”
Narveson’s main recommendation for other travelers is to find the hidden gems off the beaten path.
“Find those changing parts of the world now,” he says. “Western Europe will always be there, the Eiffel Tower will be there in 70 years, but I was just in Bangladesh, and I’m sure in 70 years, it will be drastically different.”
Career Path Milestones: Vice President, Junior Achievement Middle Tennessee and Account Marketing Manager, Reebok
Beth Torres, EMBA’11
As a teenage athlete, Beth Torres once dismissed the prospect of a business career as boring.
A job at Reebok after college was a huge turning point for the competitive gymnast. “Once I figured out business was competitive and I could figure it out, I wanted an MBA,” she says.
But it took a move into the nonprofit sector with Junior Achievement in Nashville to make business school a real option. Six months into a job with JA, Torres learned that Owen and the Center for Nonprofit Management offered a full scholarship to Vanderbilt’s Executive MBA program for a nonprofit executive. With her boss’s encouragement, she applied and in 2009, earned the scholarship.
Her appreciation for Owen was immediate and lasting, and it began with its faculty.
“Owen has unbelievable professors,” she says. “They’re engaged. They’re accessible. There isn’t much they taught that I’m not using, and they still answer our questions three years out. We were very lucky to have them.”
Making the move to CEO
She is as effusive about her fellow students, particularly her five-person study group.
“They are without question the people I call and bounce ideas off,” she says. She sought their counsel when she was offered the CEO position at Make-A-Wish Middle Tennessee in 2012. They helped her reach the decision to accept the role and she’s never looked back.
“I had that moment where you think, ‘How do I not do this?’” she says, of joining the organization that grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions. “Make-A-Wish is an amazing brand and at my first meeting with the board, I saw the vision they had for growth. I realized I would draft off that energy and leadership.”
She brought every bit of her competitive nature to bear on the position.
“The nonprofit sector and the traditional for-profit are not that different and they shouldn’t be,” she says. “Too often we’ve made exceptions for nonprofit, saying, ‘If we don’t reach as many people, if we don’t raise as much money, it’s okay. We tried really hard.’ That can’t be okay. If we miss on fundraising or on our mission, people don’t get served. We should be holding ourselves to higher, not lower, standards.”
The challenge of human capital
Leadership, she says, begins with resources—having the knowledge and manpower to succeed, something Owen facilitates.
“Too often we’ve made exceptions for nonprofit…That can’t be okay. If we miss on fundraising or on our mission, people don’t get served.”
“Someone in my office says, ‘We need this to be successful.’ Well, I know someone who runs a business, who may have access to that resource and I call somebody in the Owen network,” she says.
The biggest challenge, she says, is human capital. “Leadership involves keeping people motivated, inspired and engaged. Can I teach my staff to lead each other? If I have to go in every day and I’m the only cheerleader, it doesn’t work,” she says. “But if they can lean on each other and help each other succeed, the results are unbelievable.”
She also wants to see in them the adventurous spirit she brings to the table.
“In the culture we’re building, it’s okay to make a mistake,” she says. “It’s not okay to do nothing. I’d rather try something new and if it fails, we don’t do that again. If it works, how do we build on it?”
Preparation, she says, should begin with the individual.
“For me,” she says, “college was about the things I could try, organizations I could join. That’s where you learn about networking and about contributing.”
Prepared to make important decisions
She sees Owen as another rich opportunity.
“The onus is on the student. It’s our responsibility to meet as many people as possible—classmates, professors and administration. This is the chance to pick their brains,” she says. “If you’ve been a true student, by the time you hit a leadership role, you can trust your gut.
“I had good business instincts before Owen, but Owen gave me the language to communicate. If something didn’t make sense, I learned to ask questions immediately—where I may have waited before. Owen gives you that. You’re in a room with 50 of the smartest people you’ve ever met and they’re asking questions. If they’re asking them, I have no excuse. I can admit what I don’t know.”
Just as in athletics, setbacks can be key to development.
“If I’d been told how tough that first year as CEO would be, I don’t know if I would have signed up,” she says. “But if I hadn’t had those challenges the first year, I wouldn’t love it as much today. Owen prepared me to make important decisions.”
Todd Jackson, BA’96, EMBA’08, received the inaugural Alumni Volunteer Award from the Vanderbilt Alumni Association Board of Directors. The award recognizes an alumnus who has positively represented the institution and its mission and has a significant pattern of volunteer service to the university.
As founders and co-chairs of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center Young Ambassadors, Jackson and his wife, EB, helped raise $250,000 and award seven Discovery grants to innovative cancer researchers at Vanderbilt. Those grants have generated an additional $2.4 million in research funding. Jackson, strategic operations consultant specializing in health care at the CTD Group, also helped increase volunteer and giving participation as president of Owen’s Alumni Council. He also served as fundraising chair for his fifth-year Reunion.
Editor’s note: We are sorry to report that Todd Jackson died June 9, 2014, after an extended illness and after the print version of Vanderbilt Business went to press. Our thoughts and condolences are with his family and friends.
Thomas Bernstein, MBA’10, and Steve Berneman, MBA’10, with rescue dog Luke, who often comes to the office with his owner, Berneman
A pro athlete on the road returns to his hotel room and wants to unwind by playing video games on his Xbox or PlayStation video console. How does he get a killer competitive game of Call of Duty or Madden NFL? The OverDog app, which connects professional athletes to their fans in playing the video industry’s most popular games.
OverDog is the entrepreneurial venture of Steve Berneman, MBA’10, JD’10, and Hunter Hillenmeyer, BS’03. Thomas Bernstein, MBA’10, is the Nashville-based company’s chief product officer.
The company has recruited hundreds of professional athletes to play the video world’s most popular multiplayer games, including Call of Duty, Madden NFL, FIFA and NBA2K. When they want to play, athletes issue a challenge to fans via the OverDog mobile application. Fans enter a drawing and a random winner is selected to play against the athlete.
“OverDog creates meaningful connections between sports fans on video games,” says Berneman, OverDog co-founder and CEO. “My co-owners and I all come from the sports world. We tapped into our athlete network and what we found is not only do fans want to play athletes, but athletes want to interact with their fans in this way.”
OverDog research shows that pro athletes demographically fit the profile of gamers: in their 20s, competitive, possessing a little bit of excess income, and having downtime at night. “After working with the unions, we found that 75 percent of the NFL self-identifies as avid gamers, meaning they play one to two hours a night,” Berneman says.
How big is the market? Well, for starters, there are 60 million Xbox live subscriptions in the United States and 69 million PlayStation Network Subscribers.
“The video game industry is significantly the largest entertainment industry,” Berneman says. “Call of Duty: Ghosts, which is the top grossing game, did a billion dollars in sales its first day. They outpace any movie, television show, theatre production or music.”
Merger of sports and business
Berneman worked in sports before attending Owen. Co-founder and president Hillenmeyer played linebacker for the Chicago Bears for eight years and was on the board of directors of the NFL Players Association.
“When he retired, he began working at a startup,” Berneman says. “I was a corporate attorney. I did high-tech mergers and acquisitions in Austin, so I was mostly working with small and growth stage companies, but the goal had always been to move into entrepreneurship.”
“Hunter and I both were in relatively secure positions and we wanted to start the company,” he says. “We had some venture capital interest from a mutual friend and he enticed us by funding the company a little bit on our way in.”
OverDog makes money from sponsorships and advertising. The app itself is free and the athletes are not paid to participate. “They’re going to play tonight anyway and we provide them an opportunity to connect with their fans in an organic, fun way,” Berneman says. “Nothing about our app feels like a promotion. And we work really hard to make sure that it remains fun for the athlete.”
Currently, OverDog has more than 400 active professional athletes onboard and its app has been downloaded more than 25,000 times. Some of the athletes fans can play against include Tampa Bay’s David Price, Major League Soccer Rookie of the Year Austin Berry, Houston Dynamo’s Eric Brunner, and Marshawn Lynch of the Super Bowl-winning Seattle Seahawks. In addition to making connections between pro athletes and their fans, the OverDog app also connects fans to play against other fans.
The company had its public product launch on Labor Day 2013. Since then, OverDog has released a new version of its user experience, continues to add active monthly users and has grown to 10 employees. Plans include continuing to expand the athlete roster and to upgrade with new features on a regular basis.
“We offer something where our fans are thrilled with us and our athletes are thrilled with us,” Berneman says. “What’s fun is our athletes are inquisitive and they’re technology-friendly. Half of them say, ‘I want to work with you guys because I think startups are cool and I just want to be a part of one.’”
Francis Guess, MBM’74, doesn’t shy from uncomfortable topics.
The businessman, civil rights leader, philanthropist, public servant and community leader talks frankly about what it was like to be a Vietnam veteran assigned to work on the Army’s civil disturbance plans for his community, attending Vanderbilt in the 1970s when most students expected a black man to be on campus only if he wore a staff uniform, and how his education at Vanderbilt’s then-new management school was unconventional when compared to today’s B-schools.
That frankness and willingness to engage in dialogue is part of Guess’ effectiveness in business, public service and human rights. Appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by President Reagan, he investigated and made recommendations regarding discrimination. Guess also led Tennessee’s Department of Labor and its Department of General Services, served for more than three decades on the Tennessee Human Rights Commission, and was instrumental in helping corporations become diverse and sensitive to racial inequality.
Guess very nearly didn’t attend Vanderbilt.
“I had applied to the University of Tennessee law school and I had been admitted,” he says. Then he read an article in Black Enterprise magazine about a management school starting at Vanderbilt. A college acquaintance working at Vanderbilt insisted Guess meet the admissions director. He did and soon enrolled.
“UT sent me a letter saying that they’d let me go to school there. Vanderbilt Graduate School of Management made me feel like they wanted me to go there,” Guess says.
In 1973, Guess joined one of the pioneering classes of what was to become Owen. The school was housed in Henry Clay Alexander Hall, a former mortuary on West End. Students either passed or failed courses—there were no grades. The management emphasis was on advising and problem solving.
“Owen at that point in time was heavily oriented toward consultative-type work. As a result, we tended to lead with an attitude of ‘I am an analyst—where are my problems?’” he says.
Ever since, Guess has been a problem solver in business, government, community and nonprofit arenas. The native Nashvillian runs his own helicopter company, Helicorp; worked as executive vice president of the Danner Company, a management and investment firm; and remains executive director of the Danner Foundation, which contributes primarily to Tennessee programs regarding education and health.
Guess serves or has served on boards for the Country Music Hall of Fame, NAACP, Nashville Convention and Visitors Bureau, Nashville Minority Business Development Loan Fund and National Museum of African American Music. He was the first African American to head Nashville’s Rotary Club.
Recently, the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee awarded Guess its annual Joe Kraft Humanitarian Award, adding him to a roster of honorees that includes John Seigenthaler, Martha Ingram, Vince Gill and Amy Grant. The foundation gives the award in memory of Nashville community leader Joe Kraft, BA’48, honored as “a remarkable person who led our community by strength of character and unwavering integrity.”
For Guess, receiving the award is a connection back to Kraft, who died in 1994.
“Joe was very close to my family when I was growing up—both Joe and his brother Cyril,” Guess says. “When I would go with my father, we walked in the back door every place else in Nashville—but when we went to his accountant, Kraft Brothers—we went in the front door. As a 12-year-old, that stuck with me.”
Alumni Jason Reusch, MBA’05, and Steve Berneman, MBA’10, JD’10, were among the Owen alumni who greeted incoming students at the welcome event in August. The incoming class includes 166 full-time MBA students, 53 Executive MBA students, 33 MAcc Valuation students, 43 MS Finance students and 29 Master of Management in Health Care students. More than 31 countries are represented in this year’s programs.
Owen alumni donated $314,694 in honor of their reunion in April 2013. Alumni Board President Brent Turner, MBA’99, (center), prepares to present the really big check to Dean Jim Bradford during the weekend’s kick-off barbecue.
Two years ago, Jane Kennedy Greene, BA’75, MBA’81, went from being shareholder in the family business to running it when her father asked her to take over the company’s reins.
Greene
With 4,000 employees and operations in 30 states and Canada, Greene has her hands full as a third-generation CEO and board chair of Kenco Group Inc. The multinational firm provides logistics services, transportation, real estate management and material handling for Fortune 500 clients like Glaxo SmithKline, Whirlpool, Green Mountain Coffee and DuPont.
“I’ve been on a steep learning curve,” she says. “But there is a lot of personal satisfaction in working in the business my father founded with his brother-in-law 63 years ago. It’s something I grew up in and it’s exciting to be able to do my part.”
Greene chose Owen with the idea of working at Kenco, perhaps in marketing. But after she earned her MBA, a job offer lured her to New York City, where she built a career in the fast-paced world of advertising. She married Owen classmate, Greg Greene, MBA’81, and they moved to Dallas. It was shortly after their oldest child graduated from Vanderbilt that Greene’s father approached her to step in as board chair and CEO.
“It was good timing,” she says. “My nest was emptying and I had time to give. While many of my friends are now looking toward working less, I’m actually gearing up. It’s my next chapter.”
Her leadership earns Kenco the distinction of being the largest woman-owned business of its kind in the nation, a certification the Owen Alumni Board member worked hard to obtain.
“That is a great source of pride,” she says. “To be able to build on the past successes of my father, brother and other family members is important to me. Now with the woman-owned certification, I am bringing my own contributions and adding to the Kenco legacy.”
Current Owen students honored outgoing Dean Jim Bradford on April 18 during their last Thursday Social at Owen of the academic year.
The students surprised him with a specially designed and created Hatch Show Print recognizing Bradford’s tenure as dean. The poster was one of only 100 made using hand-carved images and letterpress printing in Hatch Show Print’s iconic vintage-style, a particular favorite of Bradford’s.
Owen EMBA graduate Nelson Andrews is general manager of Andrews Cadillac and Land Rover of Nashville. For mini profile in spring Vanderbilt Business. (John Russell/Vanderbilt University)
Nelson Andrews III, BA’89, EMBA’95, grew up around the automobile business, but he didn’t see himself making it his career. His father owned a dealership in Michigan before the family moved to Brentwood, Tenn., to establish the area’s first Cadillac dealership. As a teen, Andrews found himself doing whatever needed to be done for the business: mopping floors, manning the parts department, tending the landscape.
When it came time for college, Andrews majored in political science at Vanderbilt and took computer classes at the School of Engineering. The two fields combined research-oriented, big-picture projects with organization and structure, which suited Andrews’ skills and interests. After graduating from Vanderbilt, he moved to Detroit and a job in the computer industry at Electronic Data Systems. A few years later, however, Andrews recognized that he wanted to do more than computer coding. He wanted to know the principles behind industry and be someone who could lead and shape strategy. Looking at MBA programs, he liked what he saw at the Owen Graduate School of Management.
“I had a great experience at Vanderbilt as an undergrad and Owen had what I wanted,” Andrews says. He could also help the family business, Andrews Cadillac, by working there and upgrading and integrating its computer systems.
A funny thing happened during those two years: He discovered he liked the family business. Today, Andrews is general manager of Andrews Cadillac and Land Rover of Nashville, two of Middle-Tennessee’s most successful automobile dealerships.
As general manager, he oversees everything from planning and construction to special events and sales. The role of planner and strategist suit him, he says.
“The biggest thing I learned at Owen was strategy. Everything was strategy. It might be Germain Böer’s Financial and Managerial Accounting course, but he really taught strategy,” Andrews says.
That emphasis on strategy has helped Andrews in the changing world of marketing his business. Where automobile companies used to rely on newspaper, radio and TV advertising to reach customers, Andrews now relies on the wired world. “If a Land Rover customer expresses an interest in off-roading, I can send them an email inviting them to an off-roading event. We can text them when a part is in because that’s how the customer said to reach them,” Andrews says. “It’s much more personal. Customers let us know how they want to be contacted.”
Andrews and his wife, Trisha, are the parents of four children ranging from 15 to 5. He says that although all but the 5-year-old have helped around the dealership, it’s too soon to tell if any will want to take over the family business. And that’s ok with him.
“I’m more concerned that they seem to want to go to Michigan for college,” he says.
Elliot Waterbury, MAcc’15, died June 14, 2017, in New York City. He was 25. Elliot was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Fla. He earned a master’s in accountancy and business valuations from Vanderbilt University in 2015 and was named valedictorian. 
Current Owen students honored outgoing Dean Jim Bradford on April 18 during their last Thursday Social at Owen of the academic year.