Vanderbilt Business

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Unconventional Wisdom: Riding the ups and downs of the energy industry still gives Tim Perry, MBA’81, a thrill

Tim Perry has never been one to follow convention. When most of his high school classmates in Kansas City decided to attend nearby state universities in Kansas, Perry instead went south to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he majored in finance. Upon graduating, he again bucked the trend, choosing to enroll directly in what was then a relatively young business school, rather than seek an entry-level job at a bank or investment firm.

“I didn’t want to go to work and then come back to business school, because I was afraid if I started a job that I’d get caught up in it and never leave. Owen ended up being the best possible choice. It was an up-and-coming school at the time, and I got an excellent education,” Perry says, adding that he still relies on the critical thinking skills he developed while earning his MBA.

Perry’s instincts have served him exceedingly well, even when conventional wisdom might have suggested a different path. Today he is Credit Suisse’s global co-head of oil and gas investment banking—the latest accomplishment in a distinguished 36-year career, half of which he has spent with the Swiss financial services company.

“I have been very fortunate,” says Perry, who was promoted from co-head of the Americas oil and gas group in December. “Most of the people I work with attended Harvard, Wharton or University of Chicago.

“The exciting thing, though, is that Owen is on an upward trajectory. It’s become well-known and respected on Wall Street, and the Vanderbilt grads we’ve hired have done very well.”

Based in Houston, Perry has spent the past two decades raising capital and executing M&A transactions for many of the leading private and public companies in the energy industry. In 2016 alone Credit Suisse executed approximately $15 billion in oil and gas equity offerings, which equates to about half of the sector’s global equity offerings completed that year. Credit Suisse’s oil and gas investment banking group ranked No. 2 in the world in 2016.

“Geopolitical events can have dramatic effects on our industry,” he explains. “For instance, when OPEC [the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] decided to increase its market share in 2014, the price of oil went down significantly, and it didn’t really recover until March 2016.”

Another factor that has impacted Perry’s business of late is the development of new technologies for oil and gas extraction. Specifically, the industry has been transformed by the combination of horizontal drilling—in which wells are turned horizontally to access hard-to-reach deposits—and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”—the process of injecting liquid at high pressure into subterranean rocks to force open existing fissures. The new technologies, which now account for more than half of all oil and gas output in this country, have allowed the U.S. to increase its production more rapidly than at any other time in its history.

“We hear talk about energy independence in America, and I believe it really is within reach,” Perry says. “For a long time we have been a big importer of oil, but now we’re actually exporting it. These new extraction techniques have revolutionized the industry over the last few years.”

The oil and gas industry has seen its share of ups and downs over the past few decades, and it would have been easy for Perry to step away when times got tough, parlaying his investment banking experience into something else. But then again, that’s never been in his nature. When others zig, he zags, and because of that he now finds himself at the pinnacle of his field, engaged as ever in his job.

“People always ask me why I’m still in it, and I tell them that I find the industry to be extremely stimulating, thought-provoking, innovative and energetic,” he says. “Plus, I work with an amazing number of super-bright people who are highly motivated. It keeps things interesting every day. That’s why I’ve done it for so long.” ■

August 18, 2017
Russell Fleischer, MBA’91, advises on how he keeps companies moving forward: Think. Decide. Act.

Russell Fleischer, MBA’91, is a three-time software CEO and currently a general partner at Battery Ventures, a global investment firm, where he focuses on investments in enterprise software.

Building a business is challenging, and mistakes are inevitable. Sometimes those mistakes are catastrophic, and your entire business model gets scrapped. This is politely termed a “pivot,” and many successful CEOs have pulled off one (or several). But these days, in a volatile stock market, investors are scrambling for safety, and a CEO courting big-time “failure” in any industry inspires less confidence. Bouncing back from a substantial failure just may not be possible.

So how do you avoid catastrophic failure? Somewhat counterintuitively, I think it’s through a series of smaller failures. As a software company CEO who navigated up and down markets, I always urged my teams to “fail fast,” but small. In other words, don’t deliberate excessively— be thoughtful, but make key decisions and move on, knowing you can fix some mistakes later.

Now that I invest in software companies, instead of managing them directly, I still like this approach. I don’t believe it’s very tough to implement—as long as you can focus on it and block out external distractions.

At a high level, creating an environment that encourages decision-making without the fear of failure frees up an entire organization to execute against its objectives and, most important, take care of customers. But most operations I’ve seen are surprisingly reluctant to experiment in big and small ways—let alone make quick decisions.

I saw this constantly when I ran my businesses. Many of my teammates felt they needed to conduct an exhaustive study on the smallest of decisions before bringing an answer back to the broader team. Pricing a new product, for example, was always a source of consternation. My marketing teams would want to scour the landscape, find every possible competitive example, enlist consultants, spend time with industry analysts and create complex algorithms before making a pricing decision. You get the idea.

I’d reorient them by reminding them we weren’t dealing with a heart transplant patient on the table. I told them that if we make a mistake, we can fix it—so let’s run a few test cases, find real-world situations where we can work with live prospects and test pricing that way. After a couple of sales cycles, we’d have it right and could go to market more broadly. That iterative approach served us well and helped us get the details right for a broader audience.

Another thing I liked to encourage my team to do was “act,” instead of “meet.” We were so incredibly busy, we didn’t realize how many minor decisions we tabled through endless discussions—or how those everyday delays gummed up the works.

Now, as an investor in midsized software companies, I see this same scenario play out all the time. When you’re leading a business in growth mode, every decision feels enormous. It’s easy to become paralyzed. But you shouldn’t. Instead, you should opt to Think. Decide. Act. Here’s how my motto works in more detail, and how it allowed the companies I ran to move forward more efficiently, try more new ideas and make real progress toward goals.

Think.

For every 10 decisions you make, get seven right and fix the other three later. I’m not encouraging you to make rash decisions, but you can’t spend too much time on the thinking stage. Discussion and deliberation all matter. However, the key is to move through this phase quickly—go over the evidence, discuss pros and cons, and determine exactly what’s holding you back from making a decision and whether that’s important. Schedule the moment of decision in your calendar, and set a timer for discussions if you have to. Keep the thinking stage active, concentrated and time-delimited.

Decide.

If you let the pressure of running a project or a company get to you, you’ll keep putting off the decision. That delay can be fatal. Once you’ve processed the evidence in favor of each potential option, just choose. Remember, we’re aiming to make 10 decisions and get seven of them right. That’s a 70 percent success rate. That’s a C on a multiple-choice test. Decide and move on.

Act.

Once you’ve decided, put that decision into action immediately. Come up with a plan, calendar it out, and get moving. I’ll take a good answer today versus a perfect answer in a month. You can’t fix your three mistakes until you’ve made them. Take action fast. If it looks like your plan isn’t working, go back to step one, think some more, and repeat.

The only way to realize your company’s full potential is to keep making the small decisions that move you forward incrementally every day. So Think. Decide. Act. It’s that simple. ■

This article originally ran July 23, 2016, on Fortune.com. http://vu.edu/russell-fleischer

August 18, 2017
Lessons in Leadership

Whenever a business or organizational leader comes to campus, whether as part of the student-run Distinguished Speaker Series or simply to meet with students and faculty, Dean Eric Johnson always has one favor to ask: Sit down for a 10-minute video interview. This idea stemmed from Johnson’s wish to capture snapshots of leadership challenges people in the working world are facing—and what key lessons they’re drawing on to solve them.

Derek Young, MBA’91, Vice Chairman for Fidelity Institutional Asset Management and head of investment client strategy for the asset management organization at Fidelity Investments

The industry has changed so much. What are some of the things you have focused on with that change?

The demographics of the country are changing. The baby boomers have worked so hard to save and accumulate wealth. Investors have looked for “right-sized” solutions in asset allocations in a general sense, by using target date funds and letting other people manage their portfolio allocations. That’s been an important strategy for wealth creation.

But now baby boomers want more certainty as they are entering and approaching retirement. The questions are more personal—when should I retire? Do I have enough money to retire? The shift is from a one-size-fits-most strategy to “give me the size that fits me.” That’s the shift to personalization in the investment industry. We expect to see more of that over the next decade. We are going to see the expectation that we provide more and more personalization, and by the way, do it at a cheaper and cheaper cost.

Tell me more about your role with the global asset allocation organization at Fidelity. What did you learn in getting your MBA that prepared you for your work today?

At its core, global asset allocation is combining strategies and different asset classes together. You have a lot of different portfolio managers, and you combine them together. When you are running an asset allocation stratey, you have to think about the team orientation to build the strategy that delivers the right risk and return profiles. I attribute that focus to my time here at Owen, where there is so much emphasis on teams. I think about how do you build a team, how do you make it better and stronger? When your team members are strong, they pull up the whole group. I saw that with the teams at Owen. You knew you had to pull your weight, and your team members did the same. I want teams where everyone thinks “I want to make the team stronger, I want to build my partners up.” That’s what I love about what I do at Fidelity. I take the principles that I learned at Owen and overlay them on my business.

One of the greatest pleasures of meeting leaders like you is asking them to share one of their most important leadership ideas or principles. What are some basic principles that are applicable to everyone?

Here’s five principles of leadership that can apply to any industry: Integrity. Client-centric. Creativity and nonconformity. Accountability. Finally, have fun.

Integrity: There’s no time in the investment industry’s history that it’s been more important to have integrity. It’s other people’s money, and they have to trust us. Your integrity has to shine through in everything you do. When people give you their money, that represents a huge level of trust.

Client-centric: You can’t solve people’s challenges unless you talk to them and understand their challenges. That allows you to build solutions that help them. You can’t do that without listening.

Creativity and nonconformity: This is about innovation. Historically, for example, fixed income investments have been a great asset class for risk and return tradeoffs in diversified portfolios, with a better risk profile than equities. The question is—will that continue? How do we continue to provide that risk and return stability in asset allocation strategies as the market changes? Innovation is going to continue to be the competitive advantage. The amount of money chasing new ideas creates a lot of opportunity in most all industries, and asset management is not an exception.

Accountability: What gets measured gets managed. People love to be held accountable and rewarded. They earn respect, and it provides personal satisfaction.

Have fun: Life is too short. You should have more good days than bad days at work, and you should love what you do. I love teams that are cohesive enough to build friendships. I think that’s the ultimate measure of success as a manager—that you build management teams that are close. If they are close, they trust each other, and they can have candid conversations that make them successful.

The full video interviews with Young reside on Owen’s website, but Vanderbilt Business wanted to share some of the highlights from these conversations with the wider alumni readership: vu.edu/owen-interviews.

Lieutenant General Ronald L. Bailey

Deputy Commandant of Plans, Policies and Operations for the U.S. Marines.

“I’ve been in the Marines for 40 years, and some things have changed, but our leadership foundation is solid. We make sure that everyone understands the legacy of the Marine Corps. It helps us hold the line and maintain our edge. But millennials think differently, and that’s for the better. The value is when you take all that expertise and combine it with ideas. It’s a recipe for success. We’ve observed at companies like Amazon and Google, too, and use that information to take a comprehensive look at what we’re doing. We have to be able to adapt, and ideas to do that come from the top and the bottom.”

Paul Connelly

Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer of Hospital Corporation of America

“I try to not sound like the prophet of doom, but the stakes have never been higher for the data that we create. Ten years ago, it was viruses and worms. Then it was stealing personal data, and 2016 was the year of ransomware. What’s coming next are attacks to shut down our operations. We defend against that by making our staff savvy, by raising the bar so we can defend against a threat. We are constantly working with all other parts of the organization—our doctors, our nurses—helping people understand and become advocates. We are leading through influence, asking ‘how are we together going to solve this problem?’”

Charles Lebo

Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer of Kindred Healthcare

“The sheer amount of data concerns me. We have increasing requirements to retain data, and the amount just keeps growing and growing. If we have to store it, we have to protect it. We’re trying to protect all of it and determine what we can get rid of. Think about it—if a bad guy gets into your system, he can steal your data. But if you don’t have the data—if you’ve deleted it—he can’t steal it. I’m also concerned about the increase in linkages between systems—our data support systems. How do we protect not just our data center, but also protect the companies that support us?”

Rick Moss

Chief Financial Officer of HanesBrands

“Early in my career, I was a banker here in Nashville. One of my young product managers had developed an annual product plan. I went through it and marked it up and gave it back to her, and she wasn’t expecting that. I looked back at my changes and saw that I wasn’t correcting her errors, I was writing it the way I would have written it. I realized my job as her boss was to develop the talents inside of her, and not try to make her do things the way I would do it. I’ve tried to remember that lesson as I’ve developed young talent. Let them be their best selves.”

Jose Munoz

Chairman of Nissan North America and Executive Vice President of parent company Nissan Motor Co.

“When you work in so many countries, it can be a challenge to get people to follow you. But if you want to have impact, you can’t do it by yourself. No matter how smart you are, no matter how hard you work, you cannot deliver results without a team around you that understands what they need to do, not only when they are with you, but when you are not there. In my case, I like very much to work with a team and lead by example. You will rarely see me alone. I work with all levels of the organization. I want to know the root causes. So I go to the dealership, I talk with the customer, the technician, the salesperson and then share that information with engineering.”

August 18, 2017
Keeping the door open for opportunity: Renee and John Hawkins, MBA’92, endow scholarship

Zach Alrutz, MBA’17, with his scholarship donor, John Hawkins, MBA’92.

By Becca Jensen

As a second-year MBA student and father of a baby girl, Zach Alrutz has had a lot on his plate this past year—interviewing for jobs, wrapping up classes, changing diapers at 2 a.m. Sleep is often not on his to-do list.

John Hawkins, MBA’92, is familiar with the juggling act. During his time at Vanderbilt, he was balancing the life of a newly married husband with the demands of business school. So it’s particularly fitting that the scholarship Renee and John Hawkins established now supports Alrutz, and by extension, his family.

“The scholarship has made a huge difference in my life and will continue to do so for a long time,” Alrutz says. “When I opened my envelope from Owen, first I saw that I was accepted, and I was over the moon. Right behind the acceptance letter was the scholarship letter. You can imagine, if the acceptance letter was exciting, the scholarship letter turbocharged that. I could attend Vanderbilt without putting a financial strain on my young family.”

Part of why students such as Alrutz and Hawkins have always flourished at Owen is the close-knit community the school fosters. That environment helped draw another Hawkins scholarship recipient Fred Gehrig, MBA’18, to Vanderbilt.

“One of the things Owen talks about in the recruiting process is the school’s family-oriented environment. That’s not just a marketing push. Everyone cares about you and will take time out of their busy schedules to support you in any way they can,” he says. “That’s so unique in such a typically cutthroat environment such as business.”

From generation to generation

The Hawkinses established their scholarship in 2010 for exactly these reasons. “We have a real sense of pride about what Owen does,” Renee Hawkins said. “The school served my husband well, and we made some lifelong friends there, including one of my husband’s current business partners.”

But Renee’s’ own experience also motivated the couple’s decision to establish a scholarship. “I was the first person in my family to attend college, so I understand the need for scholarships,” she says. “To afford college I lived at home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and also worked part time. While I was very happy for the opportunity to go to college, financial considerations did limit what school I could attend.

“Ultimately, you hate students’ opportunities to be limited by their financial capability and hate for the school’s opportunity to attract quality students to be limited by what that student can pay.”

The Hawkinses also have a different perspective about the value of Owen because of their son’s time as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt.

“It’s very tough for college applicants these days,” says John Hawkins. “They are taking all these tests which tell them what they should do in life before they get a chance to figure it out on their own. Our son was a really good math student, and so he was told he should consider majoring in engineering, which he did.”

But by the end of his sophomore year, John Hawkins Jr. knew he needed to pursue a different field. Owen and its 28-day Accelerator summer program provided answers. During the program, he worked on a team of students acting as consultants to solve problems for companies, ultimately presenting their ideas to the company’s management. That work led to a consulting internship opportunity, which became a full-time job after graduation.

The gift of an open door

That experience echoes John Hawkins’ own time at Vanderbilt, or as he puts it: “Owen definitely opened up possibilities for me.”

The same is true for Alrutz, who recently received six job offers ranging from asset management to brand strategy. He ultimately decided to take on a brand management role for Johnson & Johnson after graduation. He landed that job after a summer internship, during which he developed a valuation model for the company’s pipeline projects.

“It’s really tough to make that transition from a great idea to an actual product. My project took those ideas and assigned financials and market size to them. I would not have been able to do it if it were not for classes at Owen. I also reached out to some of my professors for advice. That type of relationship—being that close to your professors—is incredibly valuable and speaks volumes about Owen’s culture of camaraderie,” Alrutz says.

Gehrig, who flexed his entrepreneurial muscles early with paper delivery and lawn care businesses in high school, says he felt Owen’s community support when he was prepping for consulting internship interviews. “There wasn’t a single person that I spoke with that wasn’t willing to take some time to help me out, whether that was giving me some interviewing tips, introducing me to someone in the industry or walking through practice case interviews,” he says.

As a way of thanking the community that supported him, Gehrig hopes to help grow Owen’s consulting network. “I want to be a resource for future students,” he says. “Having a strong network is so important, and I think it would be unfair and unfitting of the community we have not to help with that.”

Gehrig also sees giving back to the Owen School as a way to thank the Hawkinses. “It means a lot that someone I’ve never met has invested in my future,” he said. “It’s given me a lot of confidence that I’m going in the right direction. I want to do the same for future students.”

What began a quarter-century ago with the newly married Hawkins’ journey at Vanderbilt is now creating new opportunities that will last for years to come. ■

Scholarship support is a key priority for the Owen Graduate School of Management. Today, only a third of the school’s scholarships are funded through endowment. For more information on creating scholarships, contact Erik Kahill at erik.d.kahill@vanderbilt.edu or 615/343-4072.

August 18, 2017
Charlotte Nicholson, MAcc’10: MAcc alum swaps spreadsheets for skates

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!

August 18, 2017
Lasting Impression

Students on Professor David Parsley’s DC Trek in April met with several notable economic figures in the nation’s capital, including Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, who shared perspectives on leadership and monetary policy. The trek is open to students in Parsley’s Business and the World Economy and Seminar in Monetary and Fiscal Policy courses. The immersive experience also stopped by the World Bank to visit with William Mahoney, one of its top economists, as well as the International Monetary Fund, to meet with another leading economist, Prakash Loungani.

August 18, 2017
Elliot Waterbury, MAcc’15

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.

August 18, 2017
Intellectual Capital: Jessica Kennedy busts the myth that women are bad negotiators

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Who: Jessica Kennedy is an assistant professor in organization studies who came to Vanderbilt in 2014, following two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which is also her undergraduate alma mater. Before embarking on an academic career, Kennedy worked as an analyst with Lazard and Goldman Sachs. It was her investment banking experience, in fact, that propelled her toward pursuing a Ph.D. studying how organizations impact behavior.

“I never expected to be working on these topics, I’ll admit, because I studied business for undergrad and was really interested in finance,” Kennedy says. “But I then went and worked in investment banking for a few years, and while the deals were really interesting, I also saw these dynamics surrounding how groups accorded power and status and how people made decisions—and how those factors were driving performance in teams.”

Ultimately, she got so interested in these questions that she went back and talked with professors from her undergraduate days about their research projects before enrolling in University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where she received her doctorate in 2012.

What she’s researching: Kennedy’s research falls into two main areas. One involves studying power and status hierarchies, examining the factors that elevate individuals within organizations and how that influences their decision-making. “In organizations there are a lot of social dynamics that make the pursuit of excellence in one’s work more complicated. I think that competition for social status is one such factor,” she says. “Hierarchies can also hinder decision-making. For instance, I have research currently under review that looks at how holding a position higher in the hierarchy influences a person’s willingness to express disagreement with an unethical course of action embraced by a group.”

The other key topic Kennedy explores is the role of gender in career and negotiation outcomes. In a study from 2014, Kennedy looked at how gender affected the likelihood a person would be the target of deception in negotiation. She and her co-authors found evidence of a stereotype about women being more easily misled than men, and it corresponded with more unethical behavior in negotiations with women. “We found that men and women alike were targeting women with more deception than men,” Kennedy says, explaining that low expectations about a negotiator’s competence (not high expectations for warmth) drove deceptive intent.

In one of the experiments, MBA students held mock real estate negotiations where buyers decided whether to reveal that the “real” intention for the use of the land in question contradicted the seller’s wishes. Buyers admitted to being deceitful to 22 percent of female sellers, compared to 5 percent of male sellers.

While stereotypes are difficult to “disconfirm,” as Kennedy puts it, she suggests there are things women can do in negotiation to avoid deception. These include persistently questioning information, asking for verification from multiple sources, writing critical terms in contracts and signaling a willingness to retaliate against deception.

Kennedy’s most recent paper on this topic argues that the perception of women as inherently bad negotiators is a myth. Instead, women possess the same inherent skills as men, but they face various impediments that negatively affect outcomes. One barrier that Kennedy identifies is “cognitive.” Building on her earlier research that stereotypes about women in negotiations lead to more deception, Kennedy says that negative stereotypes about women negotiators depress their confidence and create a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies that undermine women’s performance.

Another impediment that women face in negotiations is created by negotiating counterparts’ motivations. This speaks to the psychological need for negotiation counterparts to believe that women lack skills in this area as a way to explain why women are often underpaid compared to men. “We generally need to believe that we live within a fair, stable, understandable, controllable social order,” Kennedy says. “The idea that people doing the same type of job—and performing equally well at it—get paid differently is really threatening to most people.”

The third bias facing women in negotiation has to do with the way research has been conducted in this domain. Kennedy says studies in negotiation are often conducted using short-term contexts in which only economic outcomes matter. “In the real world, of course, we care about the relationships that we build through negotiation,” she says. “Because our negotiation simulations aren’t capturing the value that positive relationships bring within longer-term, higher-stakes environments, we may be underselling women’s negotiating abilities.”

Why it’s important: The field of organizational behavior—which draws from disciplines like political science, sociology and psychology—started in part because researchers realized that people in organizations often don’t behave in rational ways that maximize self-interest. Kennedy says they bring a variety of other motives that affect their behavior and attitudes toward others.

In terms of her work on gender and negotiations, Kennedy says there are significant real-world issues involved. There is an economic toll in the sense that women may receive a lower salary or have to pay more for high-cost items like a house or a car. There is also a psychological toll in the sense that negotiators are less satisfied with their working relationships when deception is part of the interaction. Ultimately, biases against women negotiators damage relationship building and undermine the satisfaction of both parties with the outcome of the interaction. Because relationships are such an important part of why people enjoy working in business, these biases could ultimately reduce interest in the work at hand.

Although she hopes to encourage negotiators to identify and correct the biases that may undermine women’s performance, Kennedy has a few recommendations to help empower women negotiators. “Women perform as well as men in negotiations when they believe that negotiating skills are a product of hard work, rather than innate ability,” Kennedy says. “Women negotiators should keep in mind that negotiating skills can be developed, and that a single negotiation isn’t a test of their skill. Instead, it’s a learning opportunity that can help them overcome the impact of some of these negative stereotypes that they face about their abilities.”

February 21, 2017
Hallmarks of a great career

Kim Newton, MBA’96, took a very different path than most MBA graduates when she joined the world’s largest greeting card company

Kim Newton, MBA’96, speaks to prospective students at an Owen recruiting event in 2014. Photo Credit: John Russell

Kim Newton might be consulting with a greeting card executive at Hallmark in Kansas City one day. The next day, her team might be addressing a challenge for the company’s Crayola, ornament or home décor businesses. Then, the following week, she might be focused on the digital intersection of greeting cards and Silicon Valley.

It’s all part of the routine for Newton, vice president of corporate strategy and business development at Hallmark. And if it sounds much more complex than the average consumer might expect from a company whose reputation was built on printed cards sold on retail racks, Newton can quickly set you straight.

“Hallmark is a very diversified business,” says Newton, who has been with the company now for two decades. “We have a cable network. We have a home and gifts business. We have a jewelry business. We own about 500 stores and have an independent owner network where retailers license the Hallmark name. And we’re in 90 countries internationally. We have a lot of permission to be part of people’s lives.”

In her position, Newton leads a strategy team that fulfills the role of internal consultant, helping various business units within Hallmark address challenges and opportunities, helping leaders within the company build their capabilities, and helping the company evolve in a changing field.

“There is a misperception about our business,” Newton says. “The greeting card industry has been in decline for a long time, but the decline is less than 1 percent a year. It’s not like DVDs or film. It’s still a relatively healthy category. People still send cards—even millennials send cards—and now they’re connecting more than ever with digital options.”

In fact, she says, one of her responsibilities (at least one of the ones she can talk about; “most of my work is pretty confidential,” she says) involves cultivating partnerships across categories with West Coast companies such as Amazon to strengthen Hallmark’s digital capabilities.

Newton’s diverse array of experience within the organization prepared her well for her current role. When she joined Hallmark in 1996 after earning her MBA, she went into the company’s rotational leadership development program. That enabled her to work in a variety of positions—from marketing manager of Hallmark’s ethnic business center to senior manager of Hallmark Gold Crown Stores to product director of everyday greetings.

A decade ago, Newton joined the company’s business transformation team, which was tasked with looking at Hallmark’s business end to end. “We changed about 80 percent of our processes as a company,” she says, “and that experience gave me an opportunity to look at how our entire company worked—and should work.”

In many ways, Newton’s work has an entrepreneurial flavor—and her time at Owen helped equip her for that responsibility. “I think Vanderbilt really nurtured my entrepreneurial spirit,” says Kim, “and I think that fueled my confidence.”

Bolstering and validating her confidence to press boundaries, in fact, was perhaps one of the most important lessons from Newton’s Vanderbilt experience. Going against conventional wisdom, she eschewed an offer from Morgan Stanley after completing her undergraduate degree from Nashville’s Fisk University and applied to the MBA program at Vanderbilt instead.

“I was one of five people in my class at Owen who went straight through from undergraduate,” she recalls. “After majoring in accounting, I realized I didn’t want to make a career of it. “

A part-time job in college with an African American art gallery piqued her interest in combining business and the arts, and that in turn attracted her to Hallmark. Channeling that boundary-pushing spirit, she directly approached the company. “They didn’t recruit at Owen at that time,” Kim recalls. “I knocked on their door.”

She became the first of six Vanderbilt MBAs to join the company. “I think a lot of people (at Owen) became interested in the brand after that,” she says.

In retrospect, she’s very happy she didn’t listen to others’ advice to start a career before pursuing an MBA, or to pursue opportunities after Vanderbilt to follow a more traditional management path, including an offer from Procter & Gamble that she declined. And, for that matter, she’s happy she went against convention and has spent her entire career with one company rather than following her initial plan to move to her native Northern California after two years.

“People will put limits on you if you allow them to,” she says. “If you listen to what everyone tells you, you can miss out on great opportunities. Vanderbilt didn’t put any limits on me. In fact, they helped me break down walls.”

February 21, 2017
Diversity at Owen

Amy Conlee, MBA’77. Photo Credit: Martina Tannery

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.

Captions
Amy Conlee, MBA’77

Lisa McKinnon, BA’78, MBA’87

February 21, 2017
Intellectual capital

As members of one of the nation’s top research universities, Owen faculty always have something interesting on their minds. Here’s a portion of what two faculty members are currently considering.

Jennifer Escalas

Who: Jennifer Escalas, associate professor of marketing.

Escalas came to Vanderbilt in 2004 after eight years as a professor at the University of Arizona. She earned two undergraduate degrees at UCLA, one in Spanish and linguistics and the other in economics. She stayed at UCLA for business school, earning her MBA from the Anderson School of Management. Before starting her journey in academia, Escalas was an assistant vice president at Union Bank in Los Angeles.

Escalas’ research focuses on how consumers process narratives in advertising. Super Bowl ads are an example of brands using storytelling to evoke an emotional response in viewers. And for that reason, the media regularly calls Escalas for critiques of Super Bowl ads, as well as other buzzworthy TV commercials. She has published her marketing research in top academic journals and has served on many journals’ editorial and review boards. Escalas is also the director of Vanderbilt’s eLab, an academic research center dedicated to the study of human behavior, particularly in online environments.

The power of storytelling is not something that Escalas just thinks about as an academic. She’s also an entrepreneur, where she applies the power of storytelling to Agon Sport, a competitive swimwear company she owns with her husband, a former Olympic swimmer.

What she’s researching:

Escalas is interested in how storytelling is used in online reviews of products or services by consumers. She examined online reviews on Trip Advisor, a popular website where travel reviews from the public can make or break businesses in the hospitality industry. Escalas hypothesized that a Trip Advisor review will be more compelling if it tells a good story. The idea is that the reader of the review will get lost in the story, called “narrative transportation” in the marketing world, and that can lead to an attitude change in the person reading the review, according to previous research on the subject.

“In reading a review of a trip to Las Vegas, you would perceive the trip as being better or more entertaining— and, therefore, a good vacation for you—if you were transported into the story,” Escalas says.

Escalas’ team pulled more than 1,000 Trip Advisor reviews of experiences in Las Vegas. First, they measured the helpfulness votes on the reviews, which is a reader’s way of giving a review a thumbs up. These helpfulness votes served as a proxy for narrative transportation. Then her team picked apart the reviews, doing work in narratology, which is a marketing term for deconstructing narratives into their parts. Her research team looked for telltale signs of narrative storytelling such as characters, plot and genre.

The preliminary results from the study suggest a positive correlation between telling a good story and helpfulness votes on Trip Advisor.

“My advice to people is, when you’re writing a review, tell a good story if you want people to take you seriously,” Escalas says.

Why it’s important:

The results might seem obvious, but in a digital world where attention spans are short and brevity is often valued, this research has identified an area where people still have a desire for storytelling. As people grow weary of traditional advertising and seek out authentic reviews online when researching travel, brands should be increasingly aware of how they are perceived.

“Most of my work is on advertising, but people trust these peer reviews so much more than they trust advertising,” Escalas says.

Potential customers, whether hotel guests or casino gamblers, find good stories about a trip they are considering very helpful when making travel plans. Providers of travel services should know that a Trip Advisor review that tells a story about them could be the deciding factor in someone booking with them or not. Escalas also thinks the research would translate beyond just travel reviews.

“Experiences like vacations are particularly well-suited for stories, but I think our research would apply to tangible products as well, because you can imagine the experience of using the product,” Escalas says.

Nicolas Bollen

Who: Nick Bollen, the Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance and an internationally recognized financial expert on hedge fund fraud.

Bollen joined Vanderbilt in 2001 after taking what some may consider an unusual route to becoming a finance professor: He earned a degree in physics from Cornell University before getting his MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He then went on to earn a Ph.D. in finance at Duke.

Since joining Owen’s finance group, Bollen has become a prolific researcher and was quickly awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor in spring 2005. He was the 2005 recipient of the school’s Research Productivity Award and has published more than 40 papers during his time here, including 15 papers in top finance journals. In 2009, he received the Owen Research Impact Award, and in 2010, he was promoted to full professor. Earlier this spring, Bollen was named the Frank K. Houston Chair in Finance.

Bollen is also a leader of Vanderbilt’s Financial Markets Research Center, which hosts some of the financial world’s most respected thinkers during two conferences annually.

What he’s researching:

Lately, Bollen is interested in how the gender of financial advisers affects their financial advice. Behavioral finance is increasingly important due to the rise of defined contribution plans, which have displaced defined benefit plans. Individual investors are now forced to take more responsibility for their financial health than they have in the past. Trillions of dollars in capital is now invested in retirement plans that are ultimately under the control of individuals.

Bollen says when he teaches personal finance, he talks about gender differences in financial behavior that have roots in psychology. One study found that men tend to be more overconfident than women, and that has been shown to affect the financial decisions that men make. Other research shows that men, on average, are more risk-tolerant than women, which affects the composition of their investments. To understand more about how gender affects behavioral finance, Bollen decided to investigate whether gender affected how individuals give financial advice to their clients.

Bollen sampled financial advisers and graduate students in business school. He asked them questions about the financial advice that they would give to hypothetical clients. He also asked them questions about the financial strategy they would choose for themselves.

Among the students, many gender differences were apparent. Male subjects chose a riskier blend of investments for themselves compared to the female students. Male students, on average, recommended a riskier allocation to their hypothetical clients regardless of the gender of those clients. Neither male nor female students differed in their advice depending on the gender of the clients.

Among professional financial advisers, those gender differences disappeared, but the recommended risk-level increased. Bollen’s study found no gender difference between the asset allocation risk that the advisers choose for themselves, and both genders chose a riskier allocation for themselves than the students chose.

“The results suggest that a person who chooses to become a financial adviser is risk-tolerant, regardless of their gender,” Bollen says.

The pros also did not differ in their advice depending on the gender of their clients.

“It’s natural to think about gender differences given what we know about risk preferences, on average, of men versus women,” Bollen says. “But in the context of financial advice, it’s a red herring.”

Why it’s important: Many of Bollen’s students work in financial management, so the study suggests they should understand that their own risk tolerance might differ from their clients. The research also tells investors something about the risk tolerance of the people that are doling out investment advice.

“Finance appears to be a profession that doesn’t appeal to risk-averse people,” Bollen says. “Our research shows a projection effect, where financial advisers project their risk tolerance onto their clients.”

This implies that financial services firms need to do a better job understanding the preferences of their clients, Bollen says. ■

July 14, 2016
The three biggest mistakes risk-takers make

Owen alumni consistently explore and gain lifelong learning. In this issue, Vanderbilt Business turns to Brendan Moynihan, adjunct professor of management, for lessons from his best-selling co-authored book, What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars. Although that book focuses on investing (and losing), the lessons Moynihan imparts are applicable to any type of risk or uncertainty.

Risk is part of life. How one deals with it—whether in the workplace, on Wall Street or in personal life—can make the difference between anxiety and healthy thinking. Financial risk-takers—business people, entrepreneurs and investors alike—try to mimic successful predecessors in making money, often without realizing those folks made their fortunes in vastly different ways. The Walton billions came from a low-margin business; the Gucci fortune was made in a high one. John Templeton’s advice to “Diversify your investments” clashes with Warren Buffett’s advice to “Concentrate your investments. If you have a harem of 40 women, you never get to know any of them very well.”

While there are a myriad of ways to make money, there are relatively few ways to lose it. And those few spring not from the business model or investment approach, but from psychological factors that relate to any kind of risk-taking.

It’s not personal

First, risk-takers are prone to personalize a loss and thereby internalize what is actually external. Losing one’s keys or money is external; losing a loved one is internal.

People personalizing a loss may exhibit the five stages of internal loss. Originally applied to patients diagnosed with terminal illnesses, these stages relate to any kind of loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Compounding this is that most people equate loss with being wrong, a mistake that starts in childhood when we lose points for wrong answers on tests in school. Thinking of the loss this way internalizes what should be an external loss.

What kind of risk is it?

Second, risk-takers confuse the two main types of risk activities and behave more like risk-makers instead. Inherent risk is associated with the normal course of running a business or investing in the capital markets. Management guru Peter Drucker describes it as risk that is coincident with the commitment of present resources to future expectations.

Created risk arises from people betting or gambling. In betting, the person proved right about the outcome of an uncertain event wins the stakes.

Similar to the first mistake, this personalizes decisions; people want to be right, not wrong. Entrepreneurs and investors sometimes make the mistake of thinking that they are dealing with inherent risk in their ventures, when in fact they are actually creating risk by betting or gambling. In other words, it is a function of why they are making certain decisions rather than the venue which determines whether they are betting or gambling. They become more interested in being right than in making money.

Success can be built upon repeated failures when the failures aren’t taken personally; likewise, failures can be built upon repeated successes when the successes are taken personally.

Avoid emotionalism

Third, be cautious of making emotional decisions. Some risk-takers mistakenly believe that greed and fear are the two driving emotions when committing capital to an uncertain future. Instead, it is hope and fear that drive the risk-taker. Both emotions are at work constantly and simultaneously.

For example if you own a stock and its price is rising, you hope it will continue to rise but simultaneously fear it will not. Whichever emotion is dominant dictates whether you will hold the position or sell it. If fear dominates and you sell the stock, you will immediately start to hope that it will decline (so you can be proved right), but fear it won’t.

The emotions of hope and fear are neither good nor bad; they simply are. Emotions per se cannot be avoided. On the other hand, emotionalism, decision-making based on emotions, can and should be avoided.

Forget right and wrong

The key to understanding how external losses become internalized, why one confuses the different types of risk activities, and why one makes emotional decisions lies in knowing the subtle differences between facts and opinions.

A fact is something that has been objectively verified. Facts are neither right nor wrong; they simply are. Opinions are personal assessments and are right or wrong depending on whether they actually correspond with the facts. Therefore, only opinions can be right or wrong; facts cannot be.

Right and wrong are inappropriate descriptions of business operations and investment decisions, and so are the terms win and lose. These business activities are about making decisions that will prove profitable or unprofitable only in the future. In making decisions and taking risks, avoid thinking of them as fraught with potential loss, as right or wrong. When you characterize decisions as right or wrong, you trigger these three biggest mistakes.

July 14, 2016
Classmates that Adventure Together, Stay Together

Eleven incoming MBA students traveled to Costa Rica for an optional Vanderbilt pre-orientation trip in July. While getting to know each other, the intrepid adventurers sped along ziplines, visited local businesses, toured a coffee plantation, conquered white-water rafting, peered inside a volcano and encountered local wildlife, including crocodiles. Here the future classmates kayak on Lake Arenal.

November 24, 2015
Owen News
Standing on StrengthTIPs Off and Running

Vanderbilt business faculty are working with other Vanderbilt colleagues in three projects selected for the initial set of awards from Vanderbilt’s Trans-Institutional Program.

The TIPs initiative supports cross-disciplinary research and collaboration, a core pillar of the university’s Academic Strategic Plan. TIPs applicants were encouraged to identify projects that only could be pursued through collaboration and that still may be in the incubation phase.

The three TIPs programs involving Owen faculty are:

Kelly Haws

Vanderbilt Institute for Obesity and Metabolism

Owen Faculty: Kelly Haws, Associate Professor or Marketing
Collaborating Schools: College of Arts and Science, School of Law, Peabody College, Owen, School of Medicine
The team will examine what can create real behavioral change that leads to intervention in—and ultimately prevention of—the nationwide epidemic of obesity.

Bart Victor

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Assessing Health Care in Brazil

Owen Faculty: Bart Victor, the Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership
Collaborating Schools: College of Arts and Science, Owen, School of Medicine
The researchers will look at the effectiveness of health care beyond the clinical to determine how it impacts Brazilian society in multiple ways.

Mark Cohen

Private Governance Approaches to Climate Change

Owen Faculty: Mark Cohen, the Justin Potter Professor of Competitive Enterprise
Collaborating Schools: College of Arts and Science, Owen, School of Law
Drawing on research in law, social psychology, economics and behavioral science, the interdisciplinary team investigates battling climate change by focusing on nongovernment solutions.

Expanding Diversity

Owen’s 2015 Executive Leadership Foundation Business Case Competition team

The Owen School has partnered with Management Leadership for Tomorrow to help attract more minority MBA students and support them through school and in their careers.

MLT is a nonprofit organization that assists talented black, Hispanic and Native American men and women succeed at each career stage and advance to senior leadership. It will work with prospective Vanderbilt MBA students, as well as first- and second-year students.

Vanderbilt joins Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Wharton School and other top MBA programs working with MLT.

MLT says that despite representing 30 percent of the U.S. population, black, Hispanic and Native Americans hold just 6 percent of the top entry-level business jobs, represent 8 percent of students enrolled at top 50 MBA programs and hold just 3 percent of all senior executive positions at corporations, nonprofits and entrepreneurial ventures.

Latin American Recognition

Vanderbilt MBA ranked No. 10 among U.S. schools in this year’s American Economia ranking (No. 21 globally, up from No. 30 last year). The ranking methodology takes into account four components: academic strength, selectivity, networking power for Latin Americans and cost benefit. American Economia is Latin America’s top business magazine.

Wanted: More Women in Business

Owen is making concentrated efforts to attract female students for all its degree programs.

Vanderbilt joined 45 top business schools at the White House Aug. 5 to announce efforts to help women succeed in business school and throughout their careers.

The Vanderbilt team, led by Associate Dean Nancy Lea Hyer, collaborated with other business schools to develop a set of best practices designed to advance women in business.

Dean Eric Johnson joined other business school leaders at a White House meeting about women in business.

Dean Eric Johnson attended the White House meeting and committed Vanderbilt to the new best practices document.
- The best practices grew out of discussions among business school deans. They focus on four key areas:
- Ensuring access to business schools and business careers
- Building a business school experience that prepares students for the workforce of tomorrow
- Ensuring career services that go beyond the needs of traditional students
- Exemplifying how organizations should be run
Strength in Teaching and Scholarship

Professors Tae-Youn Park and Richard Willis have received Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Research. The school awards are given annually in recognition for outstanding research contributions.

Park, assistant professor of management, received the award for his recent work on the organizational consequences of compensation, human capital theory and employee-organization relationships. Willis, the Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker Jr. Professor of Accounting, received the award for his recent articles examining financial analysts as information intermediaries in capital markets.

Professors David Owens and Rangaraj Ramanujam have been awarded Dean’s Awards for Teaching and Learning. These teaching awards are given annually to recognize individuals for contributions both inside and outside the classroom. Owens, professor for the practice of management and innovation, was recognized for his work with massive open online courses through Coursera and the use of that technology to flip the traditional classroom. More than 100,000 students have enrolled in Owens’ course during the past two years and he is now integrating the online material into both the MBA and Executive MBA programs.

Ramanujam, professor of management, received the award for his innovative course design of Organizational Learning and Effectiveness. The timely course provides an actionable understanding of the personal and collective capabilities for deliberate learning. He has taken an experiential learning approach, focusing students on the importance of learning to learn. Both professors received high marks from students.

Welcome Professor Munyan

Benjamin Munyan

Benjamin Munyan has joined Vanderbilt as assistant professor of management. His research interests include financial intermediation, banking and shadow banking, government regulation and fixed income markets. His job market paper “Regulatory Arbitrage in Repo Markets,” was a finalist for the Arthur Warga Award for Best Paper in Fixed Income at the 2015 Society for Financial Studies Cavalcade conference. Munyan earned a bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University and his doctorate at the Robert H. Smith School at the University of Maryland, where he was the recipient of the Frank T. Paine Award for Academic Achievement. During graduate school, Munyan worked at the U.S. Treasury Office of Financial Research, where he helped analyze money market funds and fixed income markets.

Chairman of the Year

Former dean Jim Bradford

Congratulations to former dean James Bradford for being named the Non-Executive Chairman of the Year by the New York Stock Exchange Governance Services. Bradford, JD’73, professor for the practice of management at the Owen School, was honored for his role as chairman of the board of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc. Eligible candidates for the award include chairmen of publicly traded companies in the United States that are listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ.
November 24, 2015
Working for Play: Erin Sullivan, MBA’04

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.”

November 24, 2015