Advanced Accounting, 4th ed., New York: Wiley & Sons, 2009.
By Debra Jeter, Associate Professor of Accounting, and Paul Chaney, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Accounting
Managing Projects: A Team-Based Approach, Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin, 2010.
By Nancy Lea Hyer, Associate Professor of Operations Management, and Karen A. Brown
The Executive and the Elephant: A Leader’s Guide to Building Inner Excellence, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010.
By Dick Daft, the Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Professor of Management
Marketing Research: Methodological Foundations, 10th ed., Mason, Ohio: South-Western, Cengage Learning, 2010.
By Dawn Iacobucci, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor in Marketing, and Gilbert A. Churchill Jr.
MM: Marketing Management, Mason, Ohio: South-Western, Cengage Learning, 2010.
By Dawn Iacobucci
The Owen School held its first-ever Welcome Owen Well (W.O.W.) event during new student orientation in August. The event, which was held in the lobby of Management Hall, welcomed members of the Class of 2012, who entered the building and made their way through a sea of cheering onlookers. More than 70 Owen alumni, representing a variety of ages, class years and industries, attended the gathering. Special thanks to Nelson Andrews, BA’89, EMBA’95, and J.P. Lowe, BA’83, EMBA’95, for organizing a “welcoming tunnel” for the new students.
The EMBA Class of 2010 made history by raising more than $140,000 toward its class gift. Not only is it the largest amount ever raised by an EMBA class, but it is also the first time in Owen history that a class—EMBA or otherwise—has reached 100 percent participation. The gift established the EMBA 2010 Strategy Department Fund, which will be used to enhance offerings within the strategy department at Owen.
The CityOwen program is led by alumni around the country and provides value through networking opportunities, updates on the school and featured faculty or staff presentations. The program also helps strengthen the relationship between Owen and local communities in areas such as recruitment.
CityOwen – Washington, D.C.
Atlanta
March 30
CityOwen Atlanta welcomed Nick Bollen, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Finance, who spoke to the group about hedge funds. The casual kegs and hors d’oeuvres event was held at the Capital City Club in Brookhaven.
California
June 8
CityOwen California, in conjunction with the Vanderbilt Alumni Association, welcomed T.J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The event was hosted by Kimberly Jackson, MBA’01, at JAX Vineyards in San Francisco.
Charlotte
Sept. 16
Libba and Brett Rule, both MBA’88, hosted the inaugural CityOwen Charlotte event at their home.
Dallas/Fort Worth
May 26
CityOwen Dallas/Fort Worth held their third event at Trece Restaurant.
Denver
Aug. 24
CityOwen Denver held a casual summertime social at George Schock Photography Gallery.
Washington, D.C.
June 5
CityOwen Washington, D.C. was launched at a kickoff barbecue.
If you’re interested in launching a CityOwen group where you live, please contact Alumni Relations at (615) 322-7409.
width=”375px;” Margaret (second from left) and Jim (far right) with daughter, Elizabeth, and son-in-law, Thomas Bernstein, MBA’10
When Margaret and Jim Brunstad, both MBM’75, arrived at Owen in fall 1973, little did they know that their paths would soon merge, sending them in a direction that has been unpredictable at times but enjoyable all the same. “We met on the first day of orientation when I borrowed money for a soft drink,” Margaret recalls. “We were very good classroom buddies for about the first day or so, then we were a couple.”
Graduating from Owen during a recession, they had to look hard for job opportunities. Jim landed a post in banking “by default,” he says, and they moved to Winston-Salem, N.C. Margaret found a position there as the Assistant Budget Director for the city. “It was a time in our lives when we still thought we could do anything,” Margaret says. “My advice to graduates in today’s economy is to be creative and meet the challenge head-on.”
Jim’s career led them to Birmingham, Ala., with AmSouth (now Regions). Using what he learned at Owen, he then helped start First Commercial Bank, now part of Synovus Financial Corp. “Owen talked a lot about entrepreneurism back when it wasn’t fashionable. That stayed with me,” he says.
Meanwhile Margaret took time off to raise the couple’s two daughters and then led Youth Leadership Birmingham, a community leadership program for high school students. Soon after, she became President of Portrait Brokers of America, now Portraits Inc., a national portrait-consulting firm.
The Brunstads, both now retired, find that their path keeps leading back to Vanderbilt. Their sons-in-law recently graduated from the university: one from the School of Medicine in 2007, the other from Owen just this spring. And the Brunstads are now leading CityOwen efforts in Birmingham, putting them at the center of alumni activity in their city. Both express excitement about being involved with the school all these years later.
“While we were on campus this year, it was just so neat to feel all the energy at Owen,” Margaret says. “To see it where it is today is very exciting and gratifying.”
When Todd Jackson, BA’96, EMBA’08, joined Cumberland Consulting Group as Director of Operations this past spring, it signaled a new chapter in the company’s growth. The Brentwood, Tenn.-based firm, which assists health care providers in choosing and implementing electronic medical record systems, has more than doubled in size in the last year. The partners recognized a significant strategic opportunity thanks to a key component of the U.S. government’s stimulus plan that encourages health care providers to adopt electronic medical record systems.
“Cumberland started with five people in 2004, and we’re now closing in on 100 employees,” Jackson says. “My role is to put processes and systems in place so that we can continue scaling up.”
One of Jackson’s challenges is ensuring that Cumberland’s unique culture is not lost in the rapid expansion. When the firm was younger and smaller, it was easier for the partners to pick the right people, he explains, in part because they had worked directly with those individuals in previous jobs. Now, though, it is more complicated.
“We’re in phase 2.0. We’re turning to circles of circles of contacts to find employees,” he says. “Once onboard, they have to be trained according to the ‘Cumberland way,’ and that’s not something we can do ad hoc.”
In some sense phase 2.0 could also be an apt description for this stage of Jackson’s own health care career. Prior to Cumberland he served as Senior Director of Annual Giving at Vanderbilt University Medical Center for nine years. While at Vanderbilt, he earned an Executive MBA, which he says taught him, among other things, “how to work well with others—especially those you don’t agree with.” Together, the experiences at the Medical Center and at Owen provided Jackson with a building block for the logical next step in his career—an opportunity to grow alongside a dynamic firm in a dynamic field.
“My career is evolving,” he says. “I’m someone who likes to create and build, and Cumberland has presented me with an amazing opportunity to do just that.”
A team of students from the Owen School came in first place at the 2009 National MBA Human Capital Case Competition, hosted by Vanderbilt last fall. The competition included teams from 10 of the top graduate schools nationwide.
The winning team comprised second-year MBA students Joe Parise, Heidi Wallenhorst and Eric Bilbrey, and first-years Kristen Schaefer, Lindsey Goldman and Sarah Hultquist.
Prior to the competition, teams received the human capital case and were given a week to analyze the issue and prepare solutions for presentation to a team of judges, including Richard A. Kleinert, Kevin Knowles and Erica Volini from Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Corbette Doyle, EMBA’87, Lecturer in Leadership and Organizations at Vanderbilt.
The case, set in 2008, examined how Google worked to avoid the pitfalls of rapid growth, such as bureaucracy, slow decision-making, lack of visibility and organizational inconsistency. At the competition kickoff, an unexpected twist to the case was presented. All students received new information and were asked to reconsider their solutions in the context of the current environment; teams had three hours to make any adjustments for presentation to the judges that afternoon.
The Owen School, which has long offered specialized study in issues of human and organizational performance, established the case competition in 2007. It was the first to be solely focused on human capital challenges. Students organize and lead the event each year. This year’s leadership team included second-year students Chapin Hertel, Hana Crume and Lindsey White.
Bruce Cooil, Dean Samuel B. and Evelyn R. Richmond Professor of Management, co-authored a paper that won the Best Practitioner Presentation Award at the 2009 Frontiers in Service Conference held in Honolulu last fall. Cooil was part of a research team conducting a case study of AXA in Belgium, titled “Because Customers Want to, Need to or Ought to: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of Commitment on Share-of-Wallet.”
Also co-authoring the presentation was Cooil’s former student and Owen graduate Timothy Keiningham, MBA’89, Global Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Ipsos Loyalty, a market research company. Other co-authors were Bart Lariviere of Ghent University in Belgium and Lerzan Aksoy of Fordham University.
The Frontiers in Service Conference is a leading annual conference on service research and was hosted this year by the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii. The winning presentation best demonstrates how research is applied to real-world situations and problems.
“The major thing that’s new about this paper is our finding that share-of-wallet is positively associated with changes in the three dimensions of commitment, especially normative commitment,” Cooil says. In other words, by using answers to specific questions about customer attitudes toward the company, it is possible to predict changes in investment habits more accurately. The data is more limited if one only uses information about how satisfied customers are with different aspects of the company’s services.
“We’re looking at what really drives customers’ decisions about putting their money in a particular bank. If you just look at customer satisfaction, you miss a lot of things,” he says. For example, a bank must be attuned to outside forces, such as changes in individual salary levels or family situations.
“The next step is transforming these models into procedures that can be used by the institution to increase its market share,” Cooil says.
Last fall the Owen School and Korn/Ferry International announced a partnership to provide Vanderbilt MBA students access to the same rigorous leadership assessment and ongoing professional-development training Korn/Ferry provides to C-suite executives of the world’s top organizations.
The alliance—the first between the world’s pre-eminent talent-management firm and a graduate business school—will leverage each partner’s knowledge and experience to cultivate the most competent leaders for an evolving business world, and in the process, perhaps set a new model for career preparation that could extend across other higher education disciplines.
The new arrangement builds on Owen’s successful Leadership Development Program, one of only a few offered to students across the full two years of the MBA curriculum. Through partnerships that, in addition to Korn/Ferry, include Hogan Assessments and an Owen Coaching Network comprised of professional executive coaches, the program incorporates practices and tools used by the Fortune 500 to build the foundation for graduates’ lifelong leadership development.
“Leadership is critical for every level of every business today; while its mix of tangible and intangible elements can make it challenging to teach, it should be a part of a business curriculum just as finance or operations are, so students are ready to take the reins from the moment they graduate,” says Jim Bradford, Dean of the Owen School. “Korn/Ferry’s commitment to share its unequaled global expertise in executive leadership as part of our existing program confirms we’ve been on the right track. Vanderbilt MBA graduates—already cited by recruiters for their leadership—will now have a considerable edge in the competitive global job market due to training far beyond that available through any other business school.”
Working with the Korn/Ferry team and its proprietary executive-development tools enables a deeper, richer assessment of Vanderbilt MBA students’ proficiencies in 15 “competitive advantage” competencies. Selected from among nearly 70 used by Korn/Ferry, these 15 are hardest to develop, yet are most likely to lead to high job performance and promotions to leadership positions. Each falls into strategic, operating or personal/interpersonal categories; the assessment focuses real-work training experiences and ongoing professional development coaching so students can hone these critical skills and apply them in future career positions.
“Our partnership with the Owen School presents an unprecedented and exciting opportunity for Korn/Ferry to work with future business leaders at the earliest stages of their careers. By applying every tool at our disposal we can help give Vanderbilt MBA students a head start on navigating their futures and position-ing themselves against measures currently in use at a corporate level,” says Robert McNabb, Executive Vice President at Korn/ Ferry. “We look forward to the possibilities ahead for our respective organizations and the global business community.”
For more details about Owen’s partnership with Korn/Ferry, see the Campus Visit interview with Melinda Allen.
A team from the Owen School captured first place and the grand prize of $5,000 on March 19 in the Rolanette and Berdon Lawrence Finance Case Competition at Tulane’s Freeman School of Business. This is the third time a team from Vanderbilt has won the competition during the past five years.
Team members were second-year MBA students Dan Bryant and Matthew Clemson and first-years Scott O’Connell and Mark McDonald. They competed with teams from Emory, the University of Texas, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rice, Washington University at St. Louis, Tulane and the University of South Carolina. Emory and Texas placed second and third, respectively.
The case focused on the leveraged buyout of Hertz from Ford Motor Co. by a consortium of three private equity firms. The competitors were given five hours to read the case and prepare a PowerPoint presentation to a panel of four judges who work in investment banking and private equity.
Jim Bradford was reappointed Dean of Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management in December for
a five-year term, effective July 1, 2010. “Jim has worked tirelessly over the past five years to promote the Owen School to a variety of external constituencies,” says Richard McCarty, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost, adding that Bradford managed the school through an especially challenging period during the economic downturn. “I look forward to working with Jim … to maintain Owen’s upward trajectory.”
Bradford, who is also the Ralph Owen Professor of Management, was first appointed in March 2005 after serving as Acting Dean for nine months. During his tenure as Dean, Bradford has spearheaded the development and launch of several innovative programs at the school, including the Health Care MBA and master’s degrees in finance and accountancy. Also annual giving to Owen has increased more than 300 percent under his leadership.
A team of MBA students from Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management took second place this winter in the University of Texas at Austin National Real Estate Challenge, a prestigious MBA case competition.
The team members were second-year MBA students Peter Kleinberg, Gavin McDowell, Johnny Shoaf and Stephen Songy, and first-years Justin Albright and Tim Kilroy. A team from the University of California at Berkeley took first place.
The fictional case was inspired by an actual case: a Goldman Sachs real estate fund’s $400 million acquisition and rehabilitation of the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel and Casino. “We were given three days to work on the case and then submitted our analysis and recommendations,” Songy says. “Then we traveled to Austin to present to a panel of judges comprised of experienced practitioners in the field of real estate, including the key individuals who led the actual deal for Goldman Sachs.”
The Vanderbilt team advanced to the finals for the second time in two years, and won $3,000 for the second place finish. “Given the field of competition, we can be very proud of our students,” says Jacob Sagi, Vanderbilt Financial Markets Research Center Associate Professor of Management.
Woodrow “Woody” Lucas, MBA’07, MDiv’07, a doctoral student at the Owen School, wasone of only two recipients of a Ph.D. Trailblazer Award for 2009 from the National Black MBA Association at the annual meeting in New Orleans last fall.
Lucas, who grew up in New Jersey, graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in mathematical methods and social sciences, and worked as a minister and math tutor with at-risk children through the Urban League following graduation. He has also conducted health services research at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and is the author of two books, A Book of Rhythm and Insane Joy.
Jon Lehman, Associate Dean of Students, (left) with MBA candidates and fellow scooter commuters Jarod Pardue, Mark Harris, BS’03, PhD’09, and Darcy Lincoln
Washington may have enacted health care reform in March, but Larry Van Horn has a different idea for fixing the system.
A version of this article originally appeared in Modern Healthcare on Oct. 6, 2009.
I’m a balding, middle-aged, overweight American male. I have borderline hypertension and high cholesterol. I don’t like to exercise, and I enjoy eating foods with mayonnaise and cheese. I am Everyman. This is not an education problem. I know what I should do and generally how to do it—I just can’t make myself do it. I know the consequences of my short-run gluttonous behavior will negatively impact my long-run health, but like many people, knowing something is bad for me is insufficient to discipline my behavior. What’s worse, I am codependent on my health plan, and they are enabling my unhealthy behavior through the absolution of responsibility for my lifestyle choices.
I start each day with my morning “cocktail” of an ACE inhibitor, beta blocker and statin drug—all grossly subsidized by my health plan. I pay the same monthly premium as every other employee at my workplace with a family health plan. My wages have been reduced to fund the insurance premium behind the scenes, so I never know how much was taken from me. I know the only way to get my money back is to consume the services and drugs. I already paid for them.
It’s ironic that I rarely speed on my way to my favorite fast-food restaurant. The consequence of speeding is real and immediate. I would like to speed and given the opportunity—free of consequences—I’d light up my big-block V8 all the way to the drive-through. Let’s take it a step further. What if I purchased auto insurance the way I receive health insurance—priced independently of conduct, with a true premium cost hidden from view that covered all preventive maintenance?
I would drive like a bat out of hell. The insurance also would be so costly that I wouldn’t be able to afford it.
But unlike my auto insurance, my health insurance rates are not based on my underlying lifestyle choices, which are the primary determiner of how much health care I’m going to consume. We need to get to a world where I’m held individually accountable for the decisions that I make.
If my health insurance was like auto, home or life insurance—meaning it was individually underwritten, used for catastrophic use only, predicated on my behavioral decisions, and the prepaid consumption was instead funded out of my monthly wages after tax—would I be better off? There is little doubt that the marginal effect would be in the right direction.
Though treating health insurance like auto or life insurance would obviously be controversial, folks would change their behavior in a socially desirable way. Markets would form, prices would adjust, and demand for health services would change.
Larry Van Horn
Here’s another way to think of the value of basic health “maintenance” being included in a separate prepaid health plan. It would be as if you packed your auto insurance policy with additional insurance for oil changes, tire rotations and tune-ups. If those elements were part of your auto insurance policy, it would be much more expensive.
I want to do the right thing and make the right decisions to support a rational healthy lifestyle, but I need help. The current set of incentives and subsidies are stacked against me. I need my employer to hold me accountable financially for my slovenly behavior in ways that are currently prohibited by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. I need the government to remove the preferential tax treatment of employer-provided health benefits that make it rational to consume too much health “insurance” and in forms that support poor conduct. I need my morning cocktail to be more expensive than salubrious lifestyle choices. I need to save more of my money to fund my health care consumption rather than looking for ways to spend other people’s money.
We seem comfortable with saving for and funding our retirement. Few count on Social Security to either be around or be the primary source of funding for retirement. We own it individually, yet Medicare is projected to be insolvent in 2017. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services trustee report projects a long-run $37 trillion shortfall. I’m not saving for my post-retirement health care needs in large part because of the fact that I have never felt ownership and personal responsibility for the liability. This is the true health care crisis—a lack of individual ownership and a system that passes the buck.
If we all change our behavior by exercising, eating right and taking responsibility for our actions, we’re not going to solve the health care crisis. But it would be a clear step in the right direction. It is a step down the path toward a cultural change toward individual accountability, ownership and responsibility with respect to both our dollars and our decisions. It is a move away from spending other people’s money and shifting the burden to others.
Associate Professor of Management Larry Van Horn teaches within the Health Care MBA program at the Owen School.
A team of students from the Owen School came in first place at the 2009 National MBA Human Capital Case Competition, hosted by Vanderbilt last fall. The competition included teams from 10 of the top graduate schools nationwide.
Last fall the Owen School and Korn/Ferry International announced a partnership to provide Vanderbilt MBA students access to the same rigorous leadership assessment and ongoing professional-development training Korn/Ferry provides to C-suite executives of the world’s top organizations.
A team from the Owen School captured first place and the grand prize of $5,000 on March 19 in the Rolanette and Berdon Lawrence Finance Case Competition at Tulane’s Freeman School of Business. This is the third time a team from Vanderbilt has won the competition during the past five years.
The fictional case was inspired by an actual case: a Goldman Sachs real estate fund’s $400 million acquisition and rehabilitation of the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel and Casino. “We were given three days to work on the case and then submitted our analysis and recommendations,” Songy says. “Then we traveled to Austin to present to a panel of judges comprised of experienced practitioners in the field of real estate, including the key individuals who led the actual deal for Goldman Sachs.”
Woodrow “Woody” Lucas, MBA’07, MDiv’07, a doctoral student at the Owen School, wasone of only two recipients of a Ph.D. Trailblazer Award for 2009 from the National Black MBA Association at the annual meeting in New Orleans last fall.
