A recent independent economic analysis has found that Vanderbilt University had an $8.6 billion impact on the Tennessee state economy during fiscal year 2011-12.
Among the factors measured were Vanderbilt’s direct spending on operations and construction, spending by students and visitors, and spending by businesses as a result of Vanderbilt’s presence in the state.
The analysis, prepared by Austin, Texas-based TXP Inc., reported that Vanderbilt, the second largest private employer in Tennessee, generated an economic impact of $8.6 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012.
The economic activity supported 58,000 total jobs with wages and benefits in excess of $3.4 billion.
Vanderbilt spent $86.6 million on construction, building and leasehold improvements. These expenditures supported hundreds of jobs in the construction and building maintenance sector.
University-related activity attracted 700,000 visitors to campus, including patients, parents and athletic enthusiasts, creating jobs and wages for businesses and vendors in the community.
Tax revenue generated by Vanderbilt and related activities drove estimated Tennessee tax revenue of $221.6 million into state coffers.
The TXP report said that the impact potentially exceeds the calculations, since a university’s economic impact extends well beyond the traditional workplace due in part to factors not easily quantifiable such as “a highly capable workforce, innovation and entrepreneurship, clusters in knowledge industries, and superior quality of life.”
In the 2013 global MBA survey by the Financial Times, Owen climbed five spots to No. 25 among U.S. MBA programs and eight spots to No. 53 globally.
In addition, Financial Times ranked Owen No. 35 globally for job placement and No. 37 globally for academic research.
This continues a strong showing in popular rankings. Bloomberg BusinessWeek just ranked the Vanderbilt MBA program No. 25 overall and No. 9 in leadership. And Vanderbilt once again made it into the top- 30 MBA programs as ranked this year by U.S. News & World Report. Regardless of ranking publication, Vanderbilt can always be found among the top 10 percent of the AACSB-accredited B-schools in the world.
Timothy J. Vogus has been promoted to associate professor of management and organization studies, with tenure, effective fall 2013. Vogus, who joined Owen in 2004, teaches in the MBA core curriculum on leading teams and organizations as well as an elective MBA course on negotiation.
Vogus’ area of research involves the mechanisms through which organizations create and sustain a culture of safety. Currently, he is interested in these dynamics in health care settings and their effects on the incidence of medical error at the point of care delivery.
Vogus was recently named one of the 50 most influential business professors of 2013 and earlier named one of the Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40 by poetsandquants.com.
Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management’s New Dean, Eric Johnson
M. Eric Johnson, current associate dean at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and former Owen faculty member, has been named dean of the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management effective July 1. He succeeds Dean Jim Bradford, who announced his retirement in December.
Johnson said that Owen is a true gem among the world’s best business schools.
“I am honored to be given the opportunity to lead the school to even higher achievement,” he said.
At Dartmouth, Johnson oversaw Tuck’s top-rated MBA program and its nine centers and initiatives. He was responsible for launching several of those centers in the areas of digital strategies, energy, entrepreneurship and health care, and also held a named chair.
Johnson taught at Owen from 1991- 99, first as assistant professor of management, then as a tenured associate professor of operations management. He twice won awards for teaching excellence.
Johnson’s teaching and research concentrate on the impact of information technology on the extended enterprise. His latest book, The Economics of Financial and Medical Identity Theft, examines the security failures and economic incentives that drive identity theft. He holds patents on interface design and has testified before Congress on information security. Additionally, he has held positions with Systems Modeling Corp. and Hewlett-Packard and has consulted for top companies around the world.
An expert in information technology as well as supply chain management, Johnson holds bachelor degrees in engineering and economics and a master’s in engineering and operations research from Pennsylvania State University. He received his doctorate in industrial engineering and engineering management from Stanford University.
A performance of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry is entertainment unlike any other. The Opry broadcasts as a radio show, so the action on stage is geared to a radio audience first, then to the people in the auditorium. The live audience sees announcers reading from behind a podium and performers bustling on stage, plugging in equipment and launching into song or a story. If equipment needs to be moved or adjusted, the audience sees that, too. The transitions are part of the fabric of the evening.
The subject of our cover story knows all about the Grand Ole Opry and transitions. As president of Opry Entertainment and executive vice president at Ryman Hospitality Properties, Steve Buchanan, BS’80, MBA’85, handles the business and entertainment sides of the Grand Ole Opry, celebrated Ryman Auditorium and legendary WSM radio. He was also instrumental in the development of the hit ABC television show, Nashville, for which he serves as an executive producer. As you’ll read, Steve was also responsible for transitioning the historic Ryman Auditorium from a candidate for demolition to an acclaimed performance venue.
Owen itself is going through some transitions. In this issue, we reacquaint (or introduce) you to Christie St-John, MA’94, PhD’99, the new head of admissions. Christie has returned to Vanderbilt from Dartmouth and she has some wonderful ideas for recruiting future Owen students.
The big transition we’re facing, of course, is that Jim Bradford is stepping down as dean of Owen and a new dean, M. Eric Johnson, will soon be at work. Fortunately, Jim is leaving the school in a strong position and Eric will have a powerful foundation on which to build.
We asked Jim to talk about what’s next. What we got instead was a manifesto that every business leader should follow: Jim’s wisdom about how leaders should spend their last 100 days in office is profound and visionary.
Speaking of changes, you’ve probably noticed a new author of this column. Seth Robertson, who edited Vanderbilt Business for more than five years, has joined Vanderbilt Magazine and passed the editorship to me. I’m enjoying learning about Owen and discovering all its wonderful people and stories.
There are other changes ahead for Vanderbilt Business. We are beginning work on a redesign of the magazine. That means a fresh look as well as new features and departments. Are there regular features you like? Never read? Would like to see expanded or changed? Should we do more alumni profiles? More stories about students? Email me at owen.magazine@vanderbilt.edu. I look forward to your feedback.
You never know where a blind ad will lead you. It led Tim Murray from Knoxville, Tenn., to the Kingdom of Bahrain in the Middle East.
Murray is CEO of Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), one of the world’s top 10 aluminium producers. He joined Alba in 2007 as general manager of finance after applying to an ad in the Economist.
Then things moved fast. Murray served as Alba’s chief finance and supply officer, chief financial officer and chief marketing officer before being appointed CEO in October 2012.
In 2010, Murray was instrumental in launching Alba’s initial public offering on the London and Bahrain stock exchanges. “I was responsible for running the Alba team as well as working with the army of advisers to develop the prospectus. When it came to the roadshows, I was the one who did all the presenting,” he says. “The skills I gained at Owen were very helpful, as the IPO Information Memorandum was like doing a case study on steroids.”
Murray says people thought he was crazy to move from Middle Tennessee to the island nation of Bahrain, which he calls the one of the most welcoming places he’s ever been.
“I had a nice life in Knoxville and both my kids were born there,” says Murray, who had spent 10 years at Knoxville’s ARC Automotive, the last as vice president and CFO. “However it was a great opportunity and my wife was very supportive.”
The adjustment to life in Bahrain was easier than Murray expected, he says. “What surprised me the most is how western Bahrain is. I find it easy to relate to most people,” he says. “I have learned how little we in the U.S. understand the world. I have also learned that people outside the U.S. are much more tolerant than we are.”
He’s continuing to learn as CEO. “In my career, I have handled just about every function there is, but when you are the guy at the top, it is a different feeling of responsibility,” he says. “Alba and the aluminium industry contribute around 10 percent of the GDP of Bahrain. It is a humbling experience knowing you are running a company that is so important to the country and the families of Bahrain.”
Jacqueline Parker, recently named Chief Strategy Officer at Covenant, has been with the company since it opened in 1986.
In 1986 Jacqueline Parker had to make one of the toughest decisions of her life: either complete her senior year in college and earn a bachelor’s in nursing, or join her husband, David, in an ambitious startup in the trucking business. Parker chose the latter, setting the wheels in motion for a career at Covenant Transportation Group that has lasted more than 26 years. She hasn’t looked back since.
“At the time I thought, ‘You know what? My efforts are better spent with Covenant. That’s where my future is,’” says Parker, who serves as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. “With a startup, there’s so much work to be done. You need a lot of hands. So I signed up, and I just stayed.”
Covenant opened for business with just 25 tractors and 50 trailers. Since then, the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based company has grown considerably, acquiring other carriers along the way. Covenant now operates approximately 3,000 trucks, which transport a variety of goods across the United States.
Parker attributes much of Covenant’s success to her and her husband’s strong faith. “Some people call it chance; others call it luck. We call it God,” she says. This philosophy is reflected in the name of the company, which she explains is about not only a spiritual commitment but also “an agreement that we have with our customers, employees, vendors and shareholders.”
This sense of commitment is what spurred Parker to enroll in the Vanderbilt Executive MBA program in 2010. When Covenant encountered a rough stretch during the late 2000s, Parker remembers wishing that she could have done more to help the company. “You’re disappointing stakeholders on all fronts, and you feel responsible,” she says. “I had a lot of institutional knowledge, but I knew I was lacking some valuable skills.”
That’s when Parker made perhaps the second toughest decision of her life. “Going back to school was one of the hardest things I’ve done,” she says. “But I thought, ‘It’s going to be worth it in terms of time and money and effort.’
From left, Director of Corporate Relations Peter Veruki; JAMI SMITH, MBA’05, Global Marketplace Program Manager at Microsoft; MAYANK VERMA, MBA’08, Senior Partner and Channel Marketing Manager at Microsoft; Dean Jim Bradford; BOB GROHOVSKY, MBA’90, Worldwide Services Partner Director at Microsoft; and JUDSON RANDOLPH, MBA’91, Web Analytics and Online Customer Satisfaction Analysis and Improvement at Microsoft, gathered at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., on Aug. 3, 2012.
From left, Ziya Alemdar, MBA’98, Managing Director of ProAd Media Solutions; Judy Spinella, EMBA’93, Vice President and Project Leader at B.E. Smith; and Mehmet Baser, MBA’95, Managing Director of BT Global Services, enjoyed a mini reunion along the Bosporus in Istanbul this past June.
Jim Steele, MBA’82, knows what it’s like to be up against tough odds. Eight years ago he was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and spinocerebellar ataxia, both genetic neuromuscular conditions that have since left him disabled.
“I have partial symptoms of both, but the doctors can’t do anything for either one,” he says. “They’re progressive diseases, and unfortunately they’re doing just that—progressing.”
Steele
Steele, however, also knows that even the toughest of odds can lead to surprising outcomes. His work with Uganda Children’s Project, a nonprofit organization that he and his wife, Lisa, founded 11 years ago, is a testament to what can be accomplished in the face of adversity. Thanks to the group’s efforts, countless orphaned and desperately poor Ugandan children have enjoyed educational opportunities that otherwise would not have been possible.
“Something has to be done to help this disenfranchised class climb out of the ghetto,” he says. “Education gives them that chance.”
Uganda Children’s Project, which grew out of mission work at Steele’s church near Chattanooga, Tenn., currently has around 240 children and young adults paired with sponsors throughout the U.S., Europe and Australia. The group’s two full-time Ugandan employees are responsible for identifying potential children for the project, while Steele and his wife focus on the sponsorships.
“I draw upon my MBA experience for all of the finance, marketing and operations that go into this,” he says. “For example, we work in several foreign currencies right now, and trying to manage the exchange rate against a very unstable Ugandan shilling is difficult.”
An unstable currency is just one of the problems facing Uganda these days. Years of political turmoil, corruption and a devastating AIDS epidemic have all left their mark on the country. Yet Steele isn’t daunted by the challenges.
“We’ve never felt like we were called to deal with the big problems in Uganda,” he says. “We can only keep working our own way—child by child, sponsor by sponsor.”
Fittingly it’s the same philosophy that defines Steele’s own personal struggle against tough odds: Take things day by day, step by step, and relish the small victories.
June 4: Every year around this time, a wave of anxiety ripples through most of the nation’s newly admitted business school students: How to depart a job without burning any bridges, and ideally, leaving a positive, lasting impression? Tami Fassinger, Chief Recruiting Officer, writes in this op-ed about how to resign gracefully.
July 13: The admissions interview is the business school’s opportunity to meet potential students face to face and go beyond the pages of their applications. For applicants, the interview is a chance to show their true colors. Consuela Knox, Senior Associate Director and Diversity Recruiting Manager of Admissions, offers tips to students about the interviewing process.
Sept. 25: The number of people taking the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) is on the rise this year, bolstered by a surge of people trying to take the exam before the addition of a new section, as well as by growing interest in the business programs from students outside the United States. Dean Jim Bradfordis quoted.
Christian Science Monitor
Aug. 13: Could “liking” something on Facebook get you fired? That’s what six sheriff’s deputies say happened to them after they liked the political opponent of their boss. A district judge ruled that Facebook likes aren’t protected speech, but the case is being appealed. Bruce Barry, the Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Professor of Management, is quoted.
CNBC
Aug. 29: Many of Paulson and Co.’s investors stayed with the company last year even though its flagship hedge fund lost 35 percent. But with returns continuing to sag amid a rising equities market, some of those investors are now jumping ship. Nick Bollen, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Finance, is quoted.
NBC.com
Aug. 13: As the Olympics wind down, experts are awarding a gold medal in ambush marketing to Nike, which scored with bold commercials, smart PR moves and its distinctive, ubiquitous neon-yellow Volt shoes. Jennifer Escalas, Associate Professor of Marketing, is quoted.
USA Today
May 21: Facebook raised about $16 billion through its IPO, which gave the company a market value of $104 billion. But its lackluster public debut deflated the pre-IPO hype that had floated in the business press and on Wall Street for weeks. Bill Christie, the Frances Hampton Currey Professor of Finance, is quoted.
The Wall Street Journal
May 21: When the economy tanked four years ago, corporations reduced their presence at business schools. So, universities started reaching out to smaller employers—something they had never really done before. Owen alumna Julie Brink, MBA’11, went to a small consultancy firm in Nashville and is quoted.
July 12: Consumer-products companies are turning to new technology to overcome the biggest obstacle to learning what shoppers really think: what the shoppers say. To find out what really draws their test shoppers’ attention, companies are combining three-dimensional computer simulations of product designs and store layouts with eye-tracking technology. Steve Posavac, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Marketing, is quoted.
In May 2012 Vanderbilt’s Financial Markets Research Center hosted its 25th annual spring conference, which featured presentations by former Vice Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Donald Kohn and several other prominent regulators and key industry executives. In honor of the anniversary, Professor Hans Stoll shared some thoughts with Vanderbilt Business about the FMRC’s past quarter century and where it goes from here.
Hans Stoll
Q. What was the world of finance like when you first began thinking about opening the Financial Markets Research Center?
A. It was the mid-1980s, and derivatives were pretty new. At the time, Bob Whaley, who is now the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Management in Finance, and I had developed a bit of a reputation for doing work in this area. But there were a lot of changes, questions and suspicions about derivatives and other newfangled instruments. In 1986 we had just completed a study of the triple witching hour—when three kinds of derivative securities expire at the same time—which we undertook for the major options and futures markets at the behest of the Securities and Exchange Commission. I then went to Chicago to answer questions being raised by those in the industry. That study helped establish Vanderbilt’s reputation in derivatives and provided a path to the FMRC, which I started in 1987.
Derivatives were pretty sleepy then—mostly related to agriculture—until the exchanges developed into financial derivatives, which caused a lot of controversy and discussion about how they work and how you set up a market for them. The other thing that was going on in the 1980s was in the market microstructures area. Stock commissions were under pressure since being deregulated in 1975. At the time, the New York Stock Exchange set fixed prices for commissions, and they had a lot of rules and regulations in place that protected them. All that was in flux.
So there was this sense that there were new instruments, new innovations like derivatives, the securitizing of mortgage-backed securities, and portfolio insurance, which played a big role in the ’87 crash. That was the atmosphere when the FMRC started.
“Derivatives have helped make markets more resilient, deeper,
better, cheaper. Have we protected ourselves against every accident
or mistake? No. There will be future problems. Whenever you innovate, you don’t do it right the first time.”
—Hans Stoll
Q. What was the original goal of the FMRC?
A. The idea was that the academic world could help clarify and bring further understanding to new financial markets. We wanted to be a link to the real world. We wanted to have relationships with companies that would help us understand what was going on and we would help them understand what was going on with our research. Second, we wanted to be connected to the regulators because they were determining exactly what could be done with these new instruments and what constraints they had.
Q. How did the idea for the annual conference come about?
A. I didn’t state it publicly, but my commitment was to have a conference every year. And in fact, it proved to be more successful than I’d anticipated, at least in the sense that it gave the industry an opportunity to talk to academics and also to each other. It provided a kind of neutral territory for everyone.
After several years of the conferences, I was talking to one of the FMRC members and said, “I’m not sure I want to do this conference each year.” And he said, “The conference is the thing. That’s really what makes the FMRC. If you don’t have a conference, you’ll lose the members.” He was right. The conference is what members enjoy, and it’s where the FMRC makes a contribution. We bring together interesting people who are in the trenches when it comes to some of these issues.
Q. So the 1987 crash just happened to provide the perfect topic for the first conference?
A. It wasn’t a full-fledged conference like we have today, more like a panel. But yes, that was the first topic. We held the discussion—and I think a dinner—in April 1988. The title was “Stock Market Crash of ’87: What Have We Learned?” We hadn’t had much time to reflect. So 10 years later, we had the same title.
Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, discussed the Great Recession at the 2009 conference.
Q. And what were some of the key lessons about the ’87 crash that emerged at the discussion?
A. The issue came down to whether the crash was caused by new futures and options instruments or by something more fundamental. Was it Chicago, or was it New York? You had this big battle going on.
For the FMRC, the benefit of the industry panel discussion was that the participants conveyed a sense of the terror that people in the exchanges and the futures markets felt when prices were crashing. I mean it was phenomenal—this was a 20 percent drop in one day. There’s been nothing like that since. I was sitting down in the lobby, and the TV stations were interviewing me. It was remarkable.
So what did we learn? There were opinions. I’m not sure anybody learned anything. But I distill the lessons as follows:
It wasn’t the futures markets. It was a fundamental misevaluation of the stock market. Interest rates had gone up, and when that happens, stock prices usually go down. They went up instead. I think the market realized this and said we’re overvalued, we’ve got to sell. But since the quickest way to get out of the market is to sell stock index futures, that made it look like the futures market was the cause. But it wasn’t. It was just an easier way to trade.
The other instrument that was a problem was portfolio insurance. It was designed to give investors the right to switch from equity to debt when their portfolios started to fall. That caused a self-cumulative effect that caused stocks to fall some more. Portfolio insurance lost its charm after that.
Q. How did the conferences progress from there?
A. They didn’t get too much bigger. It was always about 50 people—industry people and others from Vanderbilt, professors, students and the like. We also began to have FMRC members like the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange.
The topics have been reasonably narrow for the most part—things like securities markets transaction costs, world financial markets and global risk. In 1999 we had a conference on coping with global volatility. This was two years after the Asian and Russian currency crises and the Long Term Capital Management disaster. Peter Fisher of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York spoke. He was the person who had the meeting with the 10 biggest investors to settle the thing with LTCM before it spread to the markets.
The conferences honoring Dewey Daane, the Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance, Emeritus, always drew big names. We had one in 1989 that Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, attended. The Fed Chairman at the time, Alan Greenspan, was there as well, but he only stayed for cocktails. Dewey worked hard to put that conference together. I was impressed. Of course, we had a second Dewey conference in 2009, and Paul Volcker came to that one as well.
Edward DeMarco, Acting Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, addressed mortgage reform at the 2011 conference.
Q. One of the conferences lives in infamy as “financial wrestle-mania.” Explain what happened.
A. That was in 1995, on the topic of odd-eighths and what to do about spreads on the NASDAQ market. Bill Christie, now the Frances Hampton Currey Professor of Finance, had written a paper about the topic (which led to a $1 billion settlement against NASDAQ), and he presented it at the conference. We thought it would be just a normal academic conference. Oh, no. There were lawyers and regulators, and all these people came out of the woodwork that we never invited. I looked up and there were three lawyers sitting in the back—you could tell they were lawyers by the way they were dressed. I said, “Who are you?” They said, “We represent the defendant, NASDAQ. We just wanted to see what was going on here.” Nobel Prize-winner Merton Miller had been hired by NASDAQ to present their point of view, which he did at the conference. His line was, “You don’t buy three-eighths of a pound of bologna, you buy a quarter-pound or half-pound.” Things got pretty heated. The local paper called it “financial wrestle-mania.”
Q. Looking over 25 years of conferences, what are your big takeaways? How has the world of finance changed in that time?
A. It’s dramatic how the market microstructure work that we’ve done here and elsewhere has had an influence on the sweeping changes that have occurred in the business of trading securities. The automated exchanges, the decline in the bid-ask spread, the position of the New York Stock Exchange—the fact that some European company is ready to buy it is a phenomenal event when we think that here’s an exchange that was founded in 1792 under a buttonwood tree. And suddenly it’s gone as an institution that had so much power. Ultimately I think it’s a good thing that some of that power has declined. Look at commissions: You can trade for $8 what used to cost you $800. That’s a tremendous reduction in cost and increase in efficiency.
The other big change that we’ve been involved in is derivatives. I think they have helped make markets more resilient, deeper, better, cheaper. Have we protected ourselves against every accident or mistake? No. There will be future problems. Whenever you innovate, you don’t do it right the first time. So the crash of ’87 was an equity crash, and the crash of 2008–2009 was a fixed income and banking thing. They’re different. You don’t learn very much about one from the other. You just have to be ready to handle whatever comes, to have the mechanisms in place and have resilient markets that can withstand these shocks.
Q. What’s next for the FMRC?
Another 25 years?
A. I don’t know. The future of the FMRC is on good footing in terms of its endowment. It can do interesting things, and I think it will. I don’t want to do conferences just for the sake of doing conferences. They should be interesting, and if people find that they’re not interesting then we should stop and do something else. But my guess—my hope—is that they’ll continue. I don’t know who’s going to do them or how we’re going to do them, but I suspect we’ll try to continue the conferences. The FMRC will continue for sure. This school and this finance group are well-respected and well-connected in the real world of industry and regulators. We have this important link to what’s going on in the business world. The FMRC helps maintain that.
Peter Veruki thanks the attendees at the 2012 Owen Circle dinner as Eric Noll and wife, Georgiana, look on.
Peter Veruki didn’t attend Owen or any other school at Vanderbilt. He doesn’t teach or conduct research at the university either. But ask many alumni which person had a big impact on their lives while at Owen, and odds are Veruki’s name is near the top of the list.
Veruki came to Owen in 1988 at the behest of former Dean Marty Geisel. The two met when Veruki was working on Wall Street, recruiting and training MBAs. Geisel, then at the University of Rochester, was looking for Wall Street jobs for his MBA candidates.
“I was impressed with his style, and when he went to work at Owen he called and asked me to come down,” Veruki says. “He told me that Owen was too good to be just the best school in the Southeast. He wanted someone to help market the school on Wall Street and in California and Chicago.”
Initially Veruki wasn’t interested in leaving New York for Nashville, but eventually Geisel won him over. Veruki came on board to lead Owen’s career center, but running that office was only part of his job. He also was charged with working his Wall Street connections and strengthening relationships with alumni—relationships that could eventually mean internships and jobs for Owen students.
“I’d get out on the road and take students with me,” Veruki says. “Traditionally career centers just sit back and wait for the companies to come to them. We changed all that—we took our students, or at least their resumes, to the companies.”
“Peter was an inspiration to me and he always gave me good advice, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I owe a lot of my career to the start that he gave me, and I will always remember that.”
—Paul Jacobson
During this time Owen’s reputation went from being a regional school to a national one. The rankings improved, and applications from other parts of the country increased. Students received one-on-one coaching and were encouraged to set their sights high. Veruki realized that Owen had turned the corner in 1990, despite a bleak job market. Several students landed noteworthy positions, including Eric Noll, MBA’90, who is now Executive Vice President of NASDAQ OMX Group’s Transaction Services.
“When I left Owen, I had an offer from the Chicago Board Options Exchange,” Noll says. “Before I started at Owen, I didn’t realize that such jobs existed. But Peter and Hans Stoll really opened my eyes. They educated us on what kinds of jobs were out there and how to get them.”
Unfortunately Geisel died in 1999, just as the school was starting to make its mark. Veruki left soon thereafter to take a position at Rice University. Several years later, just as he was ready to retire, Veruki got another call from Owen. Jim Bradford, who was Acting Dean at the time, wanted Veruki back.
“Jim told me that I didn’t necessarily need to return to Nashville. He said, ‘I need you in Seattle and New York, getting alumni reconnected,’” says Veruki, who currently lives in Houston. “He and I both realized that every alum out there is a potential employer, and they’re the ones hiring MBAs.”
Over the course of his career at Owen, Veruki has made a real difference to the school’s alumni. Owen graduates can be found in boardrooms around the world, and many credit Veruki for their success. In fact, a group of them, led by Eric Noll and his wife, Georgiana, established a scholarship in Veruki’s honor—a rare recognition for a staff member. The scholarship was announced at the 2012 Owen Circle dinner.
“I was the last to know. Even when I was seated at the dinner with five of my favorite alumni, I still didn’t suspect anything,” says Veruki, who now serves as the school’s Director of Corporate Relations. “But then they started calling them up to the podium, and I finally realized what was going on. I was so humbled.”
For now, the scholarship is designated as the Wall Street Scholarship. When Veruki retires, it will be given his name.
Paul Jacobson, MBA’97, Chief Financial Officer at Delta Airlines, was one of the first to contribute to the scholarship fund. “When I got the call about the scholarship, I just felt that it was the right time to make a sizeable gift,” he says. “Peter was an inspiration to me and he always gave me good advice, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I owe a lot of my career to the start that he gave me, and I will always remember that.”
Veruki hopes that the type of student to receive the scholarship will be someone “who could go to Wharton or Harvard to study finance,” he says, “but instead chooses Owen because our finance faculty is second to none. We’re looking for a person who appreciates the culture we have here—the camaraderie and teamwork.”
That Owen culture is something appreciated by today’s employers. “What we’ve found at Delta is that Owen alumni really fit our group dynamic,” Jacobson says. “There’s a level of humility that really helps them blend in with our culture. We’ve had a lot of success hiring Vanderbilt MBAs.”
Noll further explains the reasoning behind honoring Veruki. “His longevity, his concern for students and their future and their careers, have been extremely influential,” he says. “There’s always lots of recognition for strong faculty—like endowed chairs—but it’s not always so easy to recognize staff members. That’s why I’m so happy to be a part of this scholarship.”
If you would like more information about the Wall Street Scholarship, please contact the Owen Development and Alumni Relations office at (615) 322-0815.
Read McNamara, MA’76, Executive Director of the Career Management Center at Owen, describes the CMC’s mission as something akin to moving mountains. The days when companies recruited exclusively on college campuses—“when the man went to the mountain,” as he puts it—are long over. Today’s marketplace demands that the CMC “get the mountain to the man,” he says, by figuring out more focused and creative ways of putting Owen students in front of prospective employers. Ultimately it’s about going the extra mile for every customer, including not only students and recruiters but also Owen alumni, who play a key role in the job placement process. What follows is an assortment of facts, figures and other details that highlight the CMC’s efforts.
A personal touch
Fassinger
In 2011 Tami Fassinger, BA’85, was named Owen’s Chief Recruiting Officer, a role that closely aligns the Admissions office with the CMC. The appointment reflects the school’s initiative to take a more personalized, career-centric approach to finding the right B-school candidates and then giving them the resources to land their dream jobs. “Rather than just blindly pursue candidates with the highest GMAT scores and slot them into one of our programs,” Fassinger says, “our team strives to understand the career goals of each person who comes through our doors, and then do what we can to support each one through the enrollment decision, graduation and far beyond.”
By the numbers
No. 19
Vanderbilt’s placement on Bloomberg Businessweek’s rankings of MBA pay by career totals (2012)
$96,500
The median base salary for the MBA Class of 2012 at graduation
2.5
The average number of job offers received by each student in the Class
of 2012 with a Human and Organizational Performance concentration
25
The number of companies extending multiple full-time job offers to the Class of 2012, including Amazon, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Hanesbrands, McKesson, Johnson & Johnson and Nissan
40
The number of companies extending multiple internship offers to the Class of 2013, including Deloitte and Goldman Sachs
AndersonGoreKinnettFend
Coaches’ Corner
The CMC has four coaches on staff, each with their own expertise. All first-year Vanderbilt MBA students select a coach to assist them with their job search strategies and have access to Read McNamara and Tami Fassinger—both with deep industry experience and connections. The four student coaches are:
Emily Anderson, Senior Associate Director, Director of Internal Operations Expertise: consulting, finance and health care
Blake Gore, Senior Associate Director Expertise: finance and international
Sandy Kinnett, Associate Director, Employer Relations and Events Expertise: HOP, real estate and operations
Amanda Fend, Associate Director Expertise: marketing
On the road
Cities where the CMC has arranged interview events in recent years
Mark Cohen, Professor of Management and Law, is a University Fellow with Washington, D.C.-based Resources for the Future (RFF), an independent, nonpartisan research institute focusing on environmental and natural resource economics policy issues. In 2010 he led an RFF research group that consulted with and wrote key position papers for the National Commission on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. He also serves as one of five members of Exxon Mobil’s External Citizenship Advisory Panel, providing strategic and objective advice on the company’s corporate citizenship activities.
What are some of your current research interests in energy?
Most of my recent research in the energy sector is related to deep-water drilling. Right after the BP spill, President Obama put a moratorium on drilling for six months and established a commission to advise him on several things—causes, how to prevent future spills and recommendations on opening up again. One task was looking at the role of risk and insurance. We looked at questions such as, “How do you determine the incentives for firms to prevent a small risk of a highly catastrophic spill?” Those types of spills are infrequent, but they can have disastrous consequences. One of our recommendations was the elimination of liability caps, but Congress did not act on that.
Another area of research is the role of inspections, monitoring and enforcement of spills. One of the questions we looked at was whether deep-water drilling is riskier than the shallow-water kind. Industry was saying it is no more dangerous and that there is no empirical evidence of higher risk. However, from our analysis of the data we concluded that it is riskier. It sounds like a simple question, but just establishing empirically that the risk is higher was important. Continuing research focuses on the role of inspections and monitoring on accidents, spills and noncompliance. RFF also has a big project about hydraulic fracturing—looking at public perceptions, risks and how they match up.
What kinds of issues are at the forefront of the energy business today?
Natural gas has really changed the landscape of the energy markets and in some sense slowed down the push toward alternatives. It has hurt solar and wind because natural gas prices have gone down so much. These new kinds of technologies to extract oil and gas bring with them new issues that are much more localized. Perceptions and fears become important.
How should the energy business address those perceptions and fears?
There’s got to be a much more informed discussion about what the risks are and what’s appropriate for companies to do. In the case of fracking, there’s been a call for disclosure of fracking fluids. Companies initially didn’t want to fully divulge what was in the fluids because they considered it proprietary. But they’ve got to be transparent, or it creates a perception that they’re hiding something. They have to figure out how to address societal concerns and navigate through them in an informed way.
On the teaching side of your academic work, what do you think business students need to understand about the energy sector?
The world is changing. We’re not doing away with traditional energy sources, and yet we’re expanding dramatically in different areas. In my class, we take a look at the entire energy sector both from the point of view of students interested in going into the field and also for students who are going to be consumers of energy in their businesses.
How should tomorrow’s leaders prepare themselves to meet future market demands in the energy sector?
It used to be that energy markets were more insulated. It was very much technology- and engineering-based. MBAs would come in on the finance side, with business plans, contracts, pricing market predictions, those sorts of things. Those kinds of standard finance and accounting tools are still needed, but what I think is changing is that, more and more, the energy sector needs to understand the external environment. Climate is just one issue.
What’s currently happening with renewable energy sources?
It’s going to be a long time before most energy sources are coming from renewables. It may be hundreds of years—or just 10, 20 or 30. A lot has to do with technological development and other factors we can’t predict, such as war. And if climate change gets really bad, really fast, societies may decide to tax carbon very aggressively. Or they might not. Those kinds of things can speed up technological change. Right now renewables are a very small portion of today’s portfolio. A big portion of growth will continue to be from oil and gas because of recent technological innovations. Nobody predicted that was going to happen. With these technological breakthroughs, gas prices plummeted, and alternatives now don’t look so good. But one of the interesting things I learned while serving on the Exxon Mobil citizenship panel is that, as they do their world energy outlook every year, they assume a price on carbon. They’re planning as if carbon will be taxed, and some people don’t realize that is a possible factor.
Corporate social responsibility has been a major research interest for you. What is its role in the energy sector?
Recent evidence is that firms that perform well also do well on the social metrics. It doesn’t hurt you, and it may help you. It’s at the very least a sign of good management. It could also be, in some cases, consumer- or public-driven. People vote with their feet. That whole issue has been around a long time. It’s not how or why you should be good. It’s how firms use corporate social responsibility in positive, strategic ways—whether it’s workers’ rights, safety, the environment or diversity. Voluntary social and environmental disclosures are starting to become more mainstream and almost a cost of doing business. You’ve got to do that if you want to be a leading firm. We are starting to move in the direction of disclosing more of these nonfinancial performance metrics. That is becoming more and more material to investors.
When it comes to the energy sector, companies who are looked upon as leaders take these kinds of issues really seriously because they know that they have to more and more. They put out sustainability reports, measure and manage against a lot of these social performance metrics. All the major oil companies know there are human rights issues in countries where they drill. There are issues about social welfare, issues about governance, even bribery. They have to make sure that they don’t get involved in those kinds of things, and they must maintain strong standards. They are making sure that there’s money and infrastructure built into the communities they go into. There are so many issues in the energy sector that have to deal with social responsibility.
What can the energy sector do to stay ahead of the curve on issues of social responsibility?
What big companies do nowadays is they try to be on top of the current issues, but even more than that, what leading companies are trying to do is figure out the emerging issue. It’s sometimes hard to know what those are, but there are signs. When you start to see some of the fringe nonprofit groups sort of raising questions in any form, you have to ask yourself, “Is that something I’m really going to have to worry about? I would have to really change some of my business operations, and how do I plan for that?” Government is just a reflection of people’s desires, so society’s norms become government regulation in the future.
Do you think it’s possible, given the recent technological breakthroughs and the push for less government regulation, for the United States to achieve energy independence?
It is important to understand that “energy independence” is somewhat of an elusive goal that isn’t even desirable. What we really want is “energy security,” which means that we are not beholden to threats from foreign sources of oil that might dry up due to war, boycotts, etc. Perhaps even more important, we don’t want to be in a position where our foreign policy is dictated by our need for foreign oil. Would we care if much of our oil came from Canada and Mexico—two good friends? So it is more about energy security.
On regulation itself, it is important to ask: What are the benefits and cost of every regulation that is currently in force (or being proposed)? Some regulations are clearly burdensome to industry but good for society. Burning high sulfur coal is just one example—the health risks to the public alone justified reducing pollution from coal-burning power plants. Similarly, high levels of carbon emissions from coal-burning power plants are not in the public interest. Of course, some regulations might impose social costs that outweigh their benefits. But the question should not be what is good for any one industry or, for that matter, what will increase jobs. Regulation of the coal industry not only has improved health but has also created jobs in the pollution control sector, as well as in the renewable energy sector. Thus, the question should be on balance, over the entire population: Do the winners from regulation outweigh the losers?
The analysis, prepared by Austin, Texas-based TXP Inc., reported that Vanderbilt, the second largest private employer in Tennessee, generated an economic impact of $8.6 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012.
Owen itself is going through some transitions. In this issue, we reacquaint (or introduce) you to Christie St-John, MA’94, PhD’99, the new head of admissions. Christie has returned to Vanderbilt from Dartmouth and she has some wonderful ideas for recruiting future Owen students.
