Vanderbilt Business

Category: Class Acts

  • Worth It

    Lucy Haynes
    Lucy Haynes

    Lucy Davis Haynes, MBA’88, meant for her sales job to be something of a timeout, a way to keep her hand in the business game as she relocated to Nashville while pregnant with twins. Seventeen years later she is still with the same company.

    “I never did go get that real job,” she laughs.

    Haynes is a Sales Associate and National Trainer for The Worth Collection, a leading women’s luxury fashion company that brings in $95 million annually through private, invitation-only sales. She ranks at the top of its 750 sales associates and conducts national training sessions for other associates several times a year.

    Why is Worth so successful? Haynes believes many women find shopping in department stores to be time-consuming and frustrating. “With Worth you can shop for the season in 15 minutes,” she says. Haynes has a customer base of about 700 women, and about 200 clients attend each of her four annual sales.

    Before joining Worth, Haynes loved her career as a Brand Manager for Schering-Plough, an international health care company, and The Promus Cos., a hospitality company. But when her mother, Caroline Davis, started Worth in 1991, she jumped at the opportunity to be a part of the sales team in Tennessee. Haynes was successful from the start. “The beauty of sales is the harder you work, the more you make. That appeals to me,” she says. The flexible, work-at-home nature of the company has been a bonus as well.

    Haynes’ favorite class at Owen was a leadership seminar her last semester. That’s where she learned that the best way to manage people is to listen. She puts that knowledge to use every day: “The customer will always tell you what she needs and wants, if you listen.”

  • The Right Tools

    Hugh Tanner

    Hugh Tanner

    Hugh Tanner, MBA’85, is Managing Director in the Fixed Income Banking Group at Morgan Keegan & Co. Inc. in Nashville. He credits Owen with teaching him how to think critically and creatively. Those skills led him to create the first publicly offered, privatized student housing project on a college campus.

    “Colleges know that students do better when they live on campus rather than in an apartment five miles away,” Tanner says. “I work with universities to develop financing plans for on-campus housing projects. Whether it’s bond insurance, stand-alone financing or private placement, we find the avenue that makes the most sense for the school.”

    The economic downturn has affected Tanner’s business, but housing projects are still moving forward. “University housing has an identifiable source of revenue, so they can use those revenues to finance the projects. It’s not something you can really do with a chemistry building,” he says.

    Tanner also owns Moody Packaging, which creates custom corrugated containers. “We do a lot of work with the local auto manufacturers and build containers to ship everything from engines to rear ends to transmissions,” he says.

    Despite this full workload Tanner also finds time to serve on Owen’s alumni board. “I think it’s important to give back,” he says. “Vanderbilt and Owen are such integral parts of our community that you want to do everything you can to help them succeed.”

    “I always viewed an MBA as basically having the right tools in a tool box or arrows in a quiver. You take them out when you need them. I doubt I’d be an investment banker today without my Vanderbilt MBA.”

  • Signature Style

    James Hoffman

    James Hoffman

    James Hoffman, MBA’83, has spent more than 25 years in the health care industry. Today he is Senior Vice President of Signature Hospital Corp., based in Houston.

    In the course of his career, Hoffman has developed definite opinions about the state of health care and health care delivery.

    “The dirty secret of health care is that we actually do have universal coverage,” Hoffman says. “It’s true that there are 40 million uninsured Americans, but they do get health care. If you show up at an emergency room with a life-threatening condition, that hospital—by law—will take care of you.

    “But somebody will pay for it,” he adds.

    Hoffman joined Signature, which owns three community hospitals, because of what it does differently from other companies.

    “Every hospital will tell you that their goal is to deliver the highest quality patient care,” he says, “but I haven’t seen anyone actually document or measure that quality.” Signature Insights is the company’s proprietary software system that improves safety monitoring and reporting, which in turn improves the quality of health care that the patient receives.

    “In the past, hospital staffs have been reluctant to file reports when mistakes are made,” Hoffman says. “But we’ve learned that mistakes generally occur because the system is flawed—not the individual. We fix the system instead of penalizing the individual,” he adds.

    Signature has also adopted “lean” processes modeled after Toyota. “It’s a common sense approach to increasing efficiency,” he says. “Today the average nurse only spends about 30 percent of his or her time with patients. We want to know about the other 70 percent.” By studying and actually diagramming nurses’ routines, Signature has increased efficiency. The same processes have been put to use in outpatient areas as well, helping patients by more efficient layouts and fewer forms to fill out.

    Whether through innovative software or improved processes, Hoffman is helping Signature put a personal stamp on hospital care, and that’s encouraging news in an increasingly impersonal world.

  • Watershed Moment

    Jeff Recker

    Jeff Recker

    Jeff Recker, MBA’08, can point to the moment when environmental issues became personal to him. It was Labor Day weekend,and the creek that runs through his backyard in West Nashville suddenly began filling up with dead fish. As he would later come to find out, a toxic spill had occurred at a construction site upstream.

    This negligence prompted Recker, a member of his local watershed association, to take action. He convinced the company believed to be at fault into donating several trash cans as a goodwill gesture to the park area surrounding the creek. While park officials agreed that more cans would help cut down on trash entering the creek, they were unable to accept the donation due to the high cost of additional trash collection.

    He remembers thinking then, “There has to be a better way.”

    In his first year at Owen, Recker founded Flatstone Creek LLC, a consulting firm named after the waterway in his backyard. He later added “sustainability” advising to his expertise after taking one of Professor of Management Germain Böer’s entrepreneurship courses. Among the case studies was a product called BigBelly, a solar-powered trash compactor that reduces pick-ups because it has five times the capacity of a conventional trash can.

    “It was a very practical case. In class you’re not always thinking about how to apply these cases in the real world, but this was the type of product that you could,” he says.

    Recker was so impressed by the BigBelly’s potential—not only the cost savings of fewer trash collections but also the “green” benefits of the resulting lower emissions—that he contacted the manufacturer about the rights to sell them. Today he distributes the compactors and recycling units throughout Tennessee and two neighboring states. The BigBelly can be seen at food courts, airports and even at Vanderbilt, where use of the compactors is being explored.

  • From a Smile to a Grin

    Polo Romero

    Polo Romero

    If anyone understands the changing face of America, it’s Polo Romero, MBA’02. In the decade since studying at Owen, the Mexico native has witnessed not only a boom in the Hispanic population of the United States but also a profound shift in the country’s demographic map. No longer are Hispanics concentrated solely along the southern border of the United States, in places like California, Arizona, Texas and Florida, or in major metropolitan areas like New York. Today some of the fastest growing Hispanic communities are located further inland, in states like Arkansas, Illinois, Colorado, Georgia and Tennessee.

    “When more job opportunities started developing for Hispanics in other areas, the migration patterns changed,” Romero says. “If you picture the population of 10 years ago on the map, it looked something like a thin smile. Today that smile is a wide grin.”

    And that wide grin means economic opportunity for Romero and his company, Univision Communications Inc., the premier Spanish-language media company in the United States with operations that include broadcast and cable television, radio and Internet. As Vice President of Marketing & New Business Development, Romero helps Mexican companies understand the potential of the U.S. Hispanic market. “This market has nearly $1 trillion of acquisitive power. If it were an independent economy, it would be the 15th largest in the world,” he says. “Take a few minutes to think about that—45 million Hispanics generating nearly $1 trillion.”

    Among Romero’s responsibilities are presenting media opportunities to Mexican companies that already have a presence in the United States and educating those that do not. But Romero views his role in a much broader sense. “My daily role may be evangelizing to companies about having a clear marketing strategy that caters to the needs of Hispanics,” he explains. “But it’s also about getting people to look beyond the immigration debate and start reflecting on the fundamental changes the United States is undergoing as a result of Hispanic influence. As a daily witness to these changes, I can say that the positive effects far outweigh the negative. The success stories are simply breathtaking.”

  • Owen Alumni Weekend

    Owen Alumni Weekend

    Join us for Owen Alumni Weekend.

    April 17-19, 2009

    owenweekend2009

    Visit the Owen Web site for more information »

  • A Piece on Peace

    A Piece on Peace

    HuynhA 2,500-year-old text called The Art of War may strike some as an unlikely source of advice for today’s business leaders, but Thomas Huynh, EMBA’04, believes that there are valuable lessons to be learned from Sun Tzu’s masterpiece. Huynh has recently penned a new translation of the work, titled The Art of War: Spirituality for Conflict, with the hope that it will bring the Chinese general’s message to a wider audience.

    Although the ancient document sounds as though it might glorify war, Huynh says it’s actually a treatise on peace, offering practical strategies for circumventing and diffusing conflict, whether on the battlefield, in the boardroom or at home. It is required reading for officers in the United States Marine Corps, as well as students at a number of B-schools, because of its innovative, still-relevant strategy for overcoming conflict. Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, who wrote the foreword to Huynh’s book, uses its classic principles to manage his company in an often hostile, highly competitive technology industry.

    The text itself is a lesson in economy: 13 short chapters comprise The Art of War, but each is full of important lessons that teach the reader how to avoid conflict and resolve inevitable hostile situations using self-control, intelligence, courage and benevolence. Huynh’s annotations alongside the translation offer practical application of Sun Tzu’s philosophy.

    Huynh enjoys a career in finance as Group Controller for Skyline Steel in Georgia, but has been dedicated to the study of Sun Tzu’s masterwork since he encountered the text as a teenager. In 1999 he launched Sonshi.com to provide Web space for authors, scholars and readers to gather and share information about Sun Tzu’s timeless approach to conflict resolution.

    Says Huynh, “Conflict is part of life, but it is our response to the disagreement that has the greatest effect on our inner peace and personal happiness.”

  • An Investment in Experience

    An Investment in Experience

    Marchese
    Dave and Liz Marchese

    Leverage. The power to get things done. That’s how Dave Marchese, BE’95, MBA’00, views his experience at Owen and his ability to switch careersfrom engineering to finance. Currently a Vice President at Haddington Ventures, a Houston-based private equity fund focused on the midstream energy sector, Marchese assists with deal sourcing, transactional work and portfolio company management. Prior to joining Haddington, he was Managing Partner at Eschelon Energy Partners, a company of similar ilk which he co-founded, as well as Reliant Energy, which was the launching pad for his industry changeover.

    Marchese credits the late Elizabeth Powitzky, Owen’s beloved Associate Director of Admissions, for helping him shift his focus toward finance. Powitzky, who, sadly, lost her battle to breast cancer in 2001, steered him toward his summer internship at Reliant. “Elizabeth had a huge impact on my career change and helped me leverage my engineering experience and Vanderbilt MBA to get into energy finance,” he says.

    His pre-MBA work with Jacobs Engineering translates into his current job, and he often draws on that knowledge in the development and construction of the energy infrastructure companies in Haddington’s portfolio. Additionally, he uses both his finance and engineering backgrounds to assist his wife, Liz, BA’95, in their development of a lakefront community, called The Point at Rock Island, on Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau.

    Marchese chose Owen because of people like Powitzky, as well as the opportunity to work with high-quality students, and says he greatly benefited from the diverse professional backgrounds his classmates brought to the table.

    “My previous experiences combined with the people I encountered at Owen have allowed for my current success.”

  • SIRIUS Business

    SIRIUS Business

    LavelleIf you are a SIRIUS Satellite Radio subscriber, then you are likely benefiting from savvy strategy developed by award-winning marketing veteran and Owen alumna, Vance LaVelle, EMBA’91. As a Senior Vice President, she is helping SIRIUS grow its subscriber base through service, sales and marketing. She also is helping the company prepare for its recently approved merger with XM Satellite Radio.

    A quick glance at LaVelle’s bio shows a career path punctuated by a diverse range of experiences across a number of sectors, including technology, telecommunications, financial services, media and entertainment, and government, but the anchor throughout has been marketing.

    Although she began her career at AT&T in operations, she has always been keenly interested in understanding consumers’ needs and building organizations around the experiences those consumers want to have. “I have always had good instincts about consumers and an ability to see the obvious path,” says LaVelle. Indeed, her marketing acumen has enabled her to successfully launch over 100 brands and turn the tide on flagging market shares and profits.

    LaVelle’s instincts have been on point internally, too, in terms of recognizing when she has needed to change jobs, and she advises others to be aware of their own internal compasses. “We are the architects of our work life. We can be proactive or reactive, but regardless, change is inevitable.”

    LaVelle has chosen the proactive path, joining SIRIUS after serving as Chief Marketing Officer with PNC Financial Services Group. She realized she was ready for a change, but after 10 months of exploring other options, including launching a consulting business, she also recognized her desire to get back into corporate life as an operator, not just an advisor.

    She’ll no doubt continue to listen to her own internal cues, but for now, though, it’s SIRIUS business.

  • Banking Is in Her Blood

    Banking Is in Her Blood

    Mary CohronWhen asked what put her on the career path to her current position as CEO of Citizens First Bank in Bowling Green, Ky., Mary Cohron, EMBA’88, points to two pivotal factors: family and the Owen School.

    Cohron’s predilection for banking comes naturally, by way of paternal DNA. Her father spent his life building a successful community bank in Glasgow, Ky., and she has fond memories of learning the business at his knee, from the ground up. But Cohron also credits Owen with shaping her career. “My MBA is the reason I was hired to run Citizens,” she says.

    Interestingly, she did not receive a college degree prior to her graduate work at Vanderbilt. Cohron jokes about “the bad old days” when she was denied a scholarship at another university because her husband was already in dental school. Not one to let adversity hold her down, she worked her way up in a local bank and spent a number of years serving on the Bowling Green Board of Education and the Kentucky School Boards Association, as well as the bank board that would later spin off as the group of investors behind Citizens First.

    Cohron made the decision to apply to Vanderbilt, having learned that some B-schools admit non-degree candidates. Her then-role as a Corporate Director made her an appealing candidate to the Executive MBA program, and after clearing a number of required high hurdles, she was admitted.

    “Without doubt, Owen has enabled me to leverage my gifts and talents to their fullest potential.”