Vanderbilt Business

Category: Features

  • True North: Minneapolis is becoming a hub for Owen alumni

    True North: Minneapolis is becoming a hub for Owen alumni

     

    Is it the bustling economy? Beautiful lakes? Great quality of life? All that, and more

    By Susannah Felts

    Photos by Steve Woit

    Minneapolis may surprise you. Sixteen Fortune 500 companies call the area home. The economy is diverse and strong. Housing is affordable. The population skews younger than the U.S. average. Then there’s the beautiful lakes—more than a dozen inside city limits—and the top-rated parks system. Three major-league teams. It’s second only to New York City in the number of theater seats per resident. At No. 17, it’s the top-ranked Midwestern city in U.S. News & World Report’s latest edition of best places to live.

    The evidence is unassailable: Minneapolis has a lot going for it.

    Increasingly, Vanderbilt’s Owen School graduates are answering the city’s siren call, pursuing careers in the City of Lakes, each adding to the thriving alumni network in the area. While their professional roles vary widely, they uniformly voice a newfound appreciation for this Midwestern metropolis and a gratitude for the MBA program that prepared them. Meet five Vanderbilt MBA grads who call Minneapolis home.

    The Consumer Goods Buyer

    Armed with a mechanical engineering degree from Vanderbilt, Vanessa Rosario, BE’05, MBA’16, spent eight years at General Electric before coming back to campus for a business degree. The Cincinnati native thought, like many MBA grads before her, she’d settle in the South after business school—perhaps Nashville or Atlanta. But after completing a summer internship at Target halfway through graduate school, she couldn’t say no to Target’s offer of a role as senior buyer and a return to the Midwest. “It’s almost like running your own business within the business,” she says of her position.

    Originally planning to go into marketing, Rosario found her interest in brand management piqued once she started at Vanderbilt. Coaches at the Career Management Center urged her to explore the world of career conferences. It was at one such gathering where she first explored merchandising. “Going into business school, I hadn’t thought of that as an option I could have after getting my MBA,” she says. But the career path met a lot of her interests.

    Rosario enjoys the breadth of involvement her role buying seasonal toys at Target requires. This spring, she planned the company’s product transition to fall, focused on what licensed properties might be hot six months into the future. Her work keeps her up on cultural trends and takes her to the annual New York Toy Fair, where innovators attempt to shake up the marketplace.

    Back at the office, she keeps an eye on product margins and plans for how new products will appear in Target stores. “Strategy is a big piece of it,” she notes, “and I like that I’ve taken things I learned in all my courses at Owen and applied them to my career.”

    Rosario lives in downtown Minneapolis, where she can walk to the Twins and Vikings stadiums and to work—even in the deep freeze of winter. “Downtown has miles of indoor skyways that connect the buildings,” she says. “I can pretty much walk everywhere. I don’t use my car much.”

    Not that she hasn’t learned to embrace the (cold) outdoors. She and several friends tried ice fishing last winter, sleeping overnight in a cabin on a frozen lake. “It’s one of the things I just had to experience while I’m here,” she says.

    The Cereal Marketer

    As a senior associate marketing manager at General Mills, Devin Kunysz, MBA’15, manages a $400 million–dollar business: all the chocolate cereals produced by the company, including Cocoa Puffs, Reese’s Puffs and Cookie Crisp. The job involves a lot of marketing strategy, but Kunysz also works closely with the technological teams that develop products for the next generation. While he looks toward the future, there’s a long history of cereals in the marketplace to consider. Recently, Kunysz developed a campaign around the 60th birthday of Cocoa Puffs’ mascot, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird.

    “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t go to Owen,” he says. “A Vanderbilt MBA is pretty much a chance to learn how to think about business in a new way, a chance to develop leadership skills and critical thinking skills, and Owen did a great job of that.” Kunysz found that projects he worked on at Vanderbilt, such as a revamp of the school’s social media strategy, gave him strong strategic thinking and leadership skills to put to use at General Mills. “It’s all about thinking about a problem, solving that problem and executing the solve,” he said.

    Before accepting the job at General Mills, Kunysz considered several other states—Texas, Georgia, Ohio and California were all on the table. But Minneapolis was the one location that checked all his boxes. “There had to be major sports, a great food scene and a good network of young professionals, and Minneapolis has all of those,” he says. He loves the many lakes, parks and greenways, and he wasted no time purchasing an annual pass for Minnesota’s beautiful state park system. Just as appealing is a dining scene that’s high on quality but not necessarily on expense and long waits. “I can walk into a great restaurant and be seated in 20 minutes,” he says. “It’s an easy place to live.”

    The Health Care Product Developer

    Originally from Virginia, Kendall Bram, MBA’14, had very little in the way of expectations for Midwestern living when she moved to Minneapolis after earning her business degree. She joined a leadership development program at 3M, a huge science company with five business groups (including, yes, the consumer one, responsible for Scotch tape and Post-its). During the program, Bram worked on projects across the company as an internal consultant, giving her grounding in the range of industries where 3M operates. The diverse business landscape presented unique challenges, says Bram, “but Owen prepares you really well to embrace that ambiguity and find ways to contribute.”

    Thanks to the leadership program, Bram has put down roots in Minneapolis with a group of friends already in place. Her network feels established and growing. Today as a global procedure marketer, she handles new product marketing in the health care business group, helping develop and bring to market new materials used in dental fillings and restorative procedures. The position requires Bram to communicate regularly with global teams, adapting to and interpreting a range of business practices and working styles. In navigating these worlds, she’s found her business school training invaluable.

    “I looked to Owen to round out my knowledge of marketing and strategy, but also the core business competencies. It also opened the door to industries and businesses I hadn’t had exposure to,” she says. “I continue to take lessons from Owen on working with groups and how to influence and understand ambiguous business challenges.”

    Bram cites Vanderbilt’s emphasis on collaboration as a particular boon. “A lot of that is represented here in my role, which is largely of a team nature, learning from the technical side of our organization and translating that knowledge to marketing to meet the needs of our customers,” she says. Bram notes that her training in how to influence others has also come in handy.

    Echoing Rosario and Kunysz, Bram has found much to love about her adopted city. Living in the downtown neighborhood of the North Loop, she enjoys easy access to paths and green spaces along the Mississippi River, as well as plenty of nearby coffee shops and restaurants. No ice fishing yet—but Bram has dabbled in some cross-country skiing. “I hadn’t done much winter stuff before,” she says. “People here are really into the outdoors.”

    The Mission-Driven Manager

    Miller wasn’t new to the medical world when she started at Vanderbilt. She had worked as a medical device sales representative for many years but realized she’d need an MBA to move ahead. When she heard that Vanderbilt offered a dual master’s in marketing, strategy and theology through Vanderbilt’s Owen School and Divinity School, she was all in.

    While in graduate school, Miller attended the National Black MBA Association Conference, where she received introductions to the major Fortune 500 companies that would be recruiting a few months later. “You needed to show up and be ready to stand out, and I feel like Owen prepared us for that with our elevator pitch,” she recalls. “They made sure we knew what it meant to have executive presence. They also did a great job of preparing us to translate the classroom work we were doing into the career we wanted to create.”

    Much like Bram at 3M, Miller learned the ropes at Medtronic through an 18-month leadership development program, which placed her on projects in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. Today, she leads marketing strategy for the company’s U.S. region. “From a mission perspective, it goes far beyond the development of products,” Miller says. “It ensures that patients have access to those products. Regardless of how hard the problems are that we have to solve, when you realize that the impact of your work actually saved someone’s life, that makes it worth it.”

    For Miller, whose work is all about achieving better health and health care equity, Minneapolis is an ideal home in many ways. “It’s one of the healthiest cities in the United States,” she says.

    The Banker

    As a member of the Owen School’s Alumni Board, Ben Reichenau, BA’92, MBA’97, sees a lot of freshly minted MBAs look southward to start their new careers. But he’s become a strong advocate for Minneapolis. “It has four seasons, and the people are nice, smart and friendly,” he says. Reichenau loves the “outdoor mindset” of the city and even plays platform tennis outdoors through the winter.

    Reichenau, who holds both his undergraduate and MBA degrees from Vanderbilt, has been at U.S. Bank since 2013 and in Minneapolis since 2014. Earlier in his career, he was a consultant with KPMG/BearingPoint and Ernst & Young and held leadership positions with Wells Fargo. At U.S. Bank, he works in wealth management with high net worth individuals. Reichenau’s team is in charge of developing strategy to build U.S. Bank’s base among these highly desirable customers, including products that fit their unique needs.

    “Right now, customers can get everything they need from the bank, but it’s all siloed,” he says. “We want to deliver a unified experience for them throughout the branch.”

    Reichenau credits the MBA program with teaching him how to solve problems by taking a holistic approach to business. “I look for answers across all fields,” he says.

    Like Bram, he notes the importance of teamwork: “The team is so important, and you have to look at the reward system.” He also relies on the critical communication skills gained while pursuing his MBA at Vanderbilt. “Listening is a two-way activity,” he says. “You may feel like you’re getting something done in a meeting, but if you’re only talking and not listening, you are not solving problems.” ■

  • It all comes down to the four P’s

    It all comes down to the four P’s

    Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman, MBA’93, uses her finely honed product management experience to keep the company competitive in a rapidly changing industry

    photo by Daniel Dubois

    If anyone doubts the value of a business degree, look no further than Nasdaq CEO Adena Testa Friedman.

    At nearly every step of her career, starting as an intern at Nasdaq after graduating with her Vanderbilt MBA in 1993, she has consistently drawn on the skills she honed in Management Hall. From working through real-world business cases in former Owen professor David Rados’ marketing class to learning about valuation models with Bill Christie, the Frances Hampton Currey Professor of Management in Finance, Friedman says her business education has played a vital role in her success.

    “If you want to make it to the top of an organization, and if you want to have a broad mandate, an MBA is the best education that you can bring to the table,” says Friedman, who assumed the CEO role at the start of 2017. “If you need to hire someone with legal expertise, you hire a lawyer, but if you’re looking for someone who’s an up-and-comer who brings a variety of financial and business skills, and someone whom you want to bring up the organization, you hire an MBA.”

    Yet, Friedman’s introduction to a graduate business degree came about almost by accident.

    The summer before her senior year at Williams College, the political science major assumed she was destined for a career on Capitol Hill and secured an internship at Al Gore’s Senate field office in Nashville. In part, she came to be with her boyfriend at the time (now husband), Michael Friedman, JD’93, who had just completed his first year at Vanderbilt Law School.

    Once she returned to Williams for her senior year, Friedman’s perspective had shifted dramatically.

    “I think I realized a few things,” she says. “I asked, what’s the first job you get out of college when you come and work on the Hill? It’s basically that you become a database entry person, at least back then. You’d take all those postcards and letters people would write and just enter them into databases all day long.

    “That didn’t sound particularly compelling and, literally at the time, the pay was $15,000 a year. You couldn’t earn a living. That was a little bit shocking. The second thing was that I realized government wasn’t quite as idealistic as I thought it was.”

    Adena Friedman in her NYC Nasdaq office (Daniel Dubois)

    That’s when she turned to the idea of business school. She applied only to Vanderbilt so that should could spend the next two years with Michael as he finished law school. “I was really lucky to get in because otherwise I wasn’t quite sure what I’d do after I graduated,” she says.

    From the beginning, Friedman was hooked on business school, joining numerous clubs focused on many of the same types of international topics she studied as an undergraduate. And with the small class size, she was able to get to know fellow classmates and faculty members.

    “Business school just clicked with me right away,” Friedman says. “I felt like Owen was the first time I went to school every day and loved everything I was learning. It felt very different from college, where it was important to put yourself in uncomfortable situations—taking classes that were interesting but outside of your comfort zone and figuring out what you like.”

    She also found the amount of group work to be surprising. “But the tools I learned while working in groups were extremely valuable and ones that I have applied to my career countless times over,” she says.

    Friedman also stood out to her business-school peers and professors. Maria Pugeda Connor, MBA’92, recalls meeting Friedman while working on a project for one of their marketing classes. The two soon discovered they both lived in the same apartment building (20th and Grand) and have been friends ever since.

    “She’s like a gentle giant. She has an enormous ability to get things done and be successful,” says Connor, now an executive with Cox Automotive in Atlanta. “But unlike some others in business school, she didn’t have to put herself above others to make it to the top.”

    Christie recalls Friedman as someone who made a lasting impression. “I remember her being exactly the kind of person she is now, which is intense, but in a really good way,” Christie says. “She always knew what she was talking about. She was very articulate and just a joy to be around.”

    While Friedman took her share of finance classes, she found herself increasingly drawn to marketing, specifically product management. She says the “four P’s” of marketing (pricing, promotion, place and product) offered her a window through which she could better understand the inner workings of a business. “I just found it so fascinating,” Friedman says. “At the end of the day, I look at being a product manager like being the CEO of your own little company within a larger company.”

    Most people who become product managers, however, oversee sales of consumer products like cereal or dish soap. That held no interest for Friedman. Instead, she took a cue from her father’s career at T. Rowe Price and started thinking about how to apply the skills she’d learned as a product manager to the financial services industry.

    “That’s when I got the idea that Nasdaq is a little bit more like a product company,” Friedman says, adding that she targeted her post-MBA job search for the Washington, D.C., area. “The product is the market. Is there a way for me to get involved there?”

    Adena Friedman celebrates with PayPal executives as PayPal goes public. (© 2015 Nasdaq OMX. All Rights Reserved.)

    Charting a career at Nasdaq

    When Friedman joined Nasdaq in the summer of 1993, at first as an intern, the company itself was in the midst of explosive growth that had transformed it from an automated quotation system used by a patchwork of broker-dealers to one of the world’s most dynamic financial exchanges.

    Despite the heady times, Friedman’s first boss pointed her to a sleepy corner of the business that involved marketing a handful of trading products for which Nasdaq had received SEC approval, though the company hadn’t done much with them.

    “We’d built up all these systems and different capabilities for clients, but we hadn’t really optimized them from a product perspective,” Friedman says.

    Drawing on her MBA education, Friedman wrote a business plan mapping out a successful sales strategy. By the time she turned 27, Friedman had become a product manager overseeing three new Nasdaq products. After McKinsey & Co. helped reorganize the company in the late 1990s, Nasdaq was left with four distinct divisions: trading, listing, indexing and data. Out of that new structure, Friedman was tapped to lead the data division in 2000. “Becoming head of the data product division was, on the one hand, a big step. But on the other hand, it was very much a continuation of what I had been doing,” she explains, “which was to develop products and bring them to market, price them, promote them, and make sure they’re being distributed the right way.”

    Friedman’s CEO predecessor, Robert Greifeld, was appointed in 2003, and one of his first priorities was to change the way Nasdaq set the closing price of shares. It was an important project that needed to be done correctly with as little disruption as possible for Nasdaq-listed companies, brokers and investors. Because data played a big role in the shift, Friedman volunteered to take on the task.

    “Frankly, it was a very successful project,” she says. “I think that project gave Bob [Greifeld] the confidence to say, ‘I think you’re really good at project management.’ And a large part of corporate strategy is project management.”

    Recognizing her potential, Greifeld named Friedman head of Nasdaq’s corporate strategy in addition to her role leading the company’s data division. While many of her new responsibilities fit comfortably into Friedman’s wheelhouse, she also would now be in charge of acquiring other companies. For that, she had to brush up on the finance skills she had learned at Owen, which included modeling companies to determine a fair price range at which to buy them. “That was the big stretch for me,” Friedman says. But it also increased her exposure to Nasdaq’s financial and operational side, setting her up to take over as the company’s chief financial officer in 2009.

    Two years later global private equity giant The Carlyle Group snatched Friedman away from Nasdaq to become its CFO. She then returned to Nasdaq as president in 2014, establishing her path to become CEO.

    Adena Friedman spoke at Bloomberg Invest about the future of financial technology. (© 2017 Bloomberg Finance LP)

    Riding the waves of change

    Now that she’s running Nasdaq, which has become a publicly traded company itself, listing more than 3,500 companies on its exchanges around the world, Friedman wants to build upon the company’s roots as a technology innovator, exploring ways to improve how capital markets function for all the players involved. The key to doing that lies in its products.

    Speaking at a Silicon Valley conference in April, Friedman told the entrepreneur-heavy crowd: “We were, in fact, probably a very early fin-tech [financial technology] company. … We then grew into becoming more of an exchange company. I would argue today we’ve grown and matured again back into much more of a multinational financial technology company.”

    Friedman says she sees four interrelated technologies that will reshape markets and financial services going forward. The first is the continued rise of cloud computing, giving organizations the ability to access computing power and storage on demand. That in turn will help facilitate the second major wave she sees coming: machine intelligence.

    “I think it changes the way people make investment decisions, how they access the markets, and it allows us to give our clients much more sophisticated capabilities,” Friedman says. Layered onto both of these areas will be quantum computing, which is poised to offer market participants unprecedented processing capacity to model various business outcomes in real time, leading to quicker and more advanced decision-making.

    The fourth area that likely will have a significant impact on the financial services industry lies with the blockchain. This is a robust record-keeping system—a secure digital ledger, essentially—that is best known for powering the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. While Bitcoin itself doesn’t enjoy a pristine reputation, blockchain technology is already being explored and used by industries ranging from health care to banking.

    “Many of the biggest payment-processing firms and banks are creating this concept of a digital currency that allows for them to transfer cash, create digital cash, and then transfer that money through a new mechanism,” Friedman explains. When that same technology is applied to recording market transactions, she says, it could streamline many back-office functions.

    One key example involves issuing equity to employees at privately held startup companies. Today people still get a physical certificate of ownership—but the blockchain makes all of that electronic, Friedman says, “allowing you to keep a perfect record of ownership.”

    As futuristic as Friedman may sound at times, the premise underlying her plans for the company really harken back in some ways to the four P’s she learned in business school. In other words, she looks at Nasdaq as she has since the time she graduated from Vanderbilt—as a products company.

    “You own your own destiny” as a product manager, Friedman says. “And within a company like Nasdaq that’s a great way to help bring the business forward.”

  • Moving in all the right (policy) circles

    Moving in all the right (policy) circles

    Vanderbilt’s finance and business economics faculty have deep roots among the best minds in international policy, and they continue to carry the torch today, fully grounded in theory and deeply connected to the dealings of everyday business.

    Just five years after the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management opened its doors, acting dean James V. Davis hired a former U.S. Federal Reserve Board governor and widely respected expert on monetary policy named J. Dewey Daane. Though Daane, who died in January 2017 at the age of 99, came to Nashville with the intention of splitting his (43-year) retirement between Vanderbilt and Commerce Union Bank, his presence immediately helped establish the new business school’s reputation in Washington policy circles.

    Today, those connections remain strong as several current members of the Vanderbilt business school’s faculty have served in top roles for agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve. In addition to informing their academic research, students, alumni and private industry alike all benefit from these faculty members’ policy expertise.

    Parsley

    David Parsley, E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Economics and Finance, and a veteran of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the International Monetary Fund and the South African Reserve Bank, among others, has assumed Daane’s monetary policy legacy most directly. In the last few years, Parsley has taken over one of Daane’s longstanding classes that regularly brought Washington speakers such as former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and former vice chairman Donald Kohn to campus. Other guest speakers have included the executive vice president of the American Bankers’ Association and the chief economist of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Students not only hear from these influential leaders, but typically participate in a robust question-and-answer session. “Students love this class,” Parsley says. “And the speakers say they love it, too.”

    More recently, Parsley has begun traveling with a group of students each year to meet with top industry and policy leaders in Washington, D.C. The trips include stops at the World Bank, the IMF and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve system. “When we go visit Janet Yellen and the Board of Governors, we actually meet her in the room where the [Fed] holds its policy meetings,” he adds. “It’s a spectacular room, and addressing one of the most powerful women on the planet is a great opportunity.”

    Also like Daane, Parsley has spent his career working on international monetary policy, focused primarily on the mechanics of exchange rates. “Once I got to the Fed, I was in the international section of the research department,” Parsley explains. “From that point, I haven’t gone back. Almost everything I’ve done has been international.”

    Using big data to detect ‘cooked books’

    When Craig Lewis, Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Finance, was tapped to become the chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2011, he was also assigned another task: Create a new identity for the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis (formerly known as the Division of Risk, Strategy and Financial Innovation) that would fully embrace the potential for academic-style research to inform policymaking and enhance the SEC’s investor protection mandate. One transformational example is the enhanced role of data analytics to detect anomalous behavior by SEC registrants and filers.

    In accepting the position with the SEC, Lewis saw an opportunity to translate his research interests into policy progress. He went into the job with an inkling that the data analytic tools that he and other researchers used could be adapted to spot “cooked books” and other signs of securities law violations. During his three-year stint at the SEC, he and his research colleagues developed an arsenal of smarter weapons for combating securities fraud. These include models that draw on hedge fund performance data to flag suspicious activity, quantitative analytic tools that identify anomalous financial reports, and even text analytic tools that parse the language of disclosure documents for telltale signs of fraud.

    Lewis

    This novel approach has drawn praise from peers. An analysis in the CPA Journal described the work as initiating “a new era for the detection of accounting fraud and improper disclosure.” In short, the tools developed during Lewis’ time at the SEC allow regulators to catch more bad guys sooner, reducing risk in the market. Since returning to Vanderbilt in 2014, Lewis says his time at the SEC—and the connections made there—continue to guide his research interests. “You just learn a ton at a place like the SEC,” he says.

    Like Parsley, Lewis also hosts policy leaders on campus to participate in his Financial Services Industry course. Panelists have included multiple acting and former commisioners from the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “Thousands of people would pay big money to see a panel of these guys in D.C.,” Lewis says. “But here they are at Vanderbilt talking with a group of 25 students.”

    Staying close to real-world issues

    Antitrust expert Luke Froeb, William C. Oehmig Professor of Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, takes a different tack to his academic work: He lets real-world problems be his guide. As a former regulator and consultant, Froeb has examined countless antitrust cases. “Almost all of my research has been inspired by cases that I’ve worked on,” Froeb says. “The questions I try to answer are questions that real people are asking.” (A recent paper in the RAND Journal of Economics, for example, grew directly out of antitrust work on a parking company merger in 2007.)

    Froeb

    Froeb’s research approach took root during the eight years he spent at the U.S. Department of Justice, beginning in 1986, where he served as one of the many economists tasked with reviewing mergers for their potential anticompetitive effects. But he was one of the first to develop tractable models that could predict how mergers would affect prices. Froeb’s models gave regulators a new method for analyzing mergers—one that soon became very popular. “After I left the DOJ for Vanderbilt,” Froeb explains, “people just started calling me asking, ‘Will you analyze this merger for us?’” And he often did. His models played a role in a variety of blockbuster mergers, from L’Oréal’s acquisition of Maybelline to Carnival’s purchase of Princess Cruises. When Froeb took a leave from Vanderbilt in 2003 to serve as the director of the Bureau of Economics for the FTC, he was tasked with developing guidelines for the agency’s now-frequent use of the merger models that he had helped develop.

    Froeb’s focus on real-world problems provides the foundation for his unique approach to teaching. “I give students real-life situations starting from the first day of class,” he says. “My main goal is to teach them that economics is a tool that they can use to solve real problems.”

    (Editor’s note: At press time, the DOJ announced that Froeb is now the deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division. He is currenty on leave from Vanderbilt.)

    Another faculty member who relies on economics to solve real-world issues involving the intersection of policy and business is Mark Cohen, Justin Potter Professor of American Competitive Enterprise. “My whole interest in academia was doing policy-relevant research,” he says. “I wouldn’t be happy if I weren’t engaged in policy issues at some level.”

    Cohen’s extensive experience includes roles as an economist at the Environmental Protection Agency, the FTC and the U.S. Sentencing Commission. In 2008, he was named vice president for research at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan research institute focused on energy and environmental policy and staffed by Ph.D. economists. Cohen describes RFF as being “heavily involved in the economic analysis of proposed laws and regulations, and looking toward emerging issues and how we might go about tackling them.” For example, Cohen led a research team at RFF that advised the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. He returned to Vanderbilt in 2011 and continues his work at RFF as one of the organization’s research fellows.

    Cohen

    Cohen says his scholarly research is often informed by his policy work, and vice versa. For instance, a recurring topic in Cohen’s scholarly work involves looking at “ways in which businesses take on what traditionally look like government roles when it is in their interest to do so.” One line of research in this area explores the extent to which disclosure requirements can prompt businesses to engage in a desired conduct, such as reducing emissions, more efficiently than direct regulation would. He traces his interest in this area back to his time at the EPA, where he observed, firsthand, the limits of conventional regulation.

    CohenCohen says he can’t help bringing his varied policy experience into the classroom. “Having these kinds of experiences brings in war stories to students, brings in relevant research topics to the business school,” he says, “and helps me be a non-ivory-tower academic.”

  • Owen courtyard gets spruced up

    Owen courtyard gets spruced up

    Photos by John Russell and Terry Wyatt

    Owen’s H. Laird Smith Courtyard has provided light and beauty to the
    school for more than three decades. This spring, thanks to a $100,000 gift
    from the Henry Laird Smith Foundation, the courtyard received a makeover.
    The project was a collaboration among the campus planning department,
    the Owen Student Government Association and the university landscape
    architect. Students wanted a space that was more suitable for gatherings,
    from everyday student get-togethers to more formal lectures and receptions.
    The space, which connects the historic Old Mechanical building with
    the modern Management Hall, now sports a new patio, modern furniture
    and upgraded lighting. The new design was unveiled in May just before
    Commencement.

  • Owen’s origins

    Owen’s origins

    The idea of establishing a business school at Vanderbilt was first broached in the late 1800s. Decades later, a dauntless group of university trustees took up the mantle to get the school approved. Owen’s story includes a Carnegie report, a cocktail-party caucus and decades of dogged dedication.

    Images provided by Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives

    This is the first in a series of articles leading up to the 50th anniversary of the opening of Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management in 1969.

    Board of Trust member David K. Wilson in 1976, announcing a $150 million capital campaign for Vanderbilt University as Chancellor Alexander Heard looks on

    Fifty years ago, in May 1967, Chancellor Alexander Heard acquiesced to a group of trustees who for years had been pushing Vanderbilt to establish a “first-class” graduate school of business.

    “The University will be taking a calculated risk, based on interest that has been shown in the School, and will be agreeing to use funds, if necessary, that would be otherwise available for the existing budgets of the University,” Heard warned the Board of Trust just before it voted to approve the measure.

    Despite Heard’s cautionary nod of assent, the board’s action marked the first real steps Vanderbilt took in launching what ultimately became the Owen Graduate School of Management. It also capped an internal discussion at the university that had stretched as far back as 1881.

    That was the year the University of Pennsylvania opened its Wharton School of Finance and Economics, sending a ripple of interest in business education throughout American universities, including Vanderbilt. Yet, an early proposal to open a “Commercial College Department” at Vanderbilt failed to gain traction. The question languished until the late 1950s, when a postwar economic boom once again prompted American universities to explore management programs.

    It was against this backdrop that Chancellor Harvie Branscomb formed a Board of Trust committee in 1957 to begin investigating whether Vanderbilt could sustain a business school and, if so, what it might look like in terms of curriculum, student population and staffing. The group consisted mainly of prominent Nashville businessmen and was chaired by Eldon Stevenson Jr., a 1914 Vanderbilt graduate who rose to become president of National Life & Accident Insurance Co. Other committee members included Sam Fleming, a 1928 graduate and president of Third National Bank (now part of SunTrust); O.H. “Hank” Ingram, founder of today’s Ingram Industries; Maxey Jarman, CEO of Genesco; and Justin “Jet” Potter, a 1919 alumnus of the College of Arts and Science and founder of Nashville Coal Co. Branscomb and Associate Professor David Steine, who taught in the business administration program, also sat on the committee.

    Stevenson in 1951

    In addition to assessing the university’s undergraduate business major, which at the time resided in the economics department and was the most popular course of study on campus, the committee surveyed local and national business leaders, including “more than fifty corporation personnel officers who regularly recruit Vanderbilt graduates,” according to the minutes. Members also spoke with current students and Vanderbilt alumni who had majored in business administration within the previous decade.

    One of the most pressing questions, however, was informed by an ongoing study that had been commissioned by the Carnegie Corp. to examine the state of business education in the United States. That watershed report, written by Swarthmore economics chairman Frank Pierson and eventually published in book form in 1959, sharply criticized American business schools for their low academic standards and urged the adoption of more theoretical, research-based curricula. In fact, one of the major concerns of the 1957 Vanderbilt committee was that any business education program not be too “vocational” in nature.

    By May 1958 the committee was ready to issue its findings at a meeting of the Board of Trust. “It is … recommended that as rapidly as funds can be secured, the University strengthen its present undergraduate curriculum and proceed with the establishment of a graduate program in Business Administration,” the group reported. “Your committee is convinced that as a University dedicated to the needs of the community at large, Vanderbilt has a responsibility in this area of education, and, by its educational stature and geographical position, is uniquely equipped to meet the challenge.”

    So while the desire was there, the seemingly innocuous phrase—“as rapidly as funds can be secured”—wound up becoming a major sticking point that slowed momentum for establishing a business school during the remainder of Branscomb’s leadership.

    Heard took the reins as chancellor in 1963 and was soon overseeing a major campus development plan and fundraising campaign on the one hand while coping with social upheaval and racial integration issues on the other. The idea of launching a new business school was crowded out by more pressing needs early in Heard’s tenure.

    A core group of trustees, however, was not quite ready to abandon the idea of a separate Vanderbilt business school or the work done by the 1957 committee. At a 1965 Board of Trust retreat in Hot Springs, Virginia, this group hatched a half-joking plan over cocktails to launch the school themselves, voluntarily serving as faculty members.

    Wigginton

    According to a history of the Owen School commissioned by Dean Sam Richmond in the mid-1980s and written by the Nashville-born novelist Madison Smartt Bell, the plan went as follows: William Waller would chair Corporate Law, Ralph “Peck” Owen would oversee Finance, Madison “Matt” Wigginton would be in charge of Marketing and Merchandising, while Sam Fleming and Andrew Benedict would take on Banking. “Well, of course that was just strictly cocktail talk and never would get off the ground,” Wigginton recounted to Bell.

    But it did revive interest in pursuing a business school. This time around, though, the task had moved from exploring philosophical questions of curriculum design to figuring out how to gather the necessary funds to hire a dean, open a new building and absorb financial losses for the first several years of the school’s existence.

    Yet another Board of Trust committee was appointed to answer this question, and it determined that the university would need about $5 million to $7 million ($40 million to $55 million in today’s dollars). Heard and some other board members felt that was an unrealistically low estimate of the true costs.

    During the first day of Board of Trust meetings in the summer of 1965, Heard accepted the committee’s findings but recommended no action be taken. However, the next day other board members bristled at the short shrift given to discussion of the business school. Frank K. Houston, a 1904 Vanderbilt graduate and New York banker, lamented the “crying need” for a high-quality business school in the South. Wigginton and Waller spoke of the feasibility of starting a “small, but excellent” business school at Vanderbilt.

    During the next few months, plans for the business school began to grow more concrete, with trustees citing recent successes by the University of Virginia and Tulane University in launching programs, saying well-heeled alumni were inclined to support these new business schools. Heard, meanwhile, continued to parry these arguments, suggesting that a 1964 Fortune magazine article found that business schools did not augment university fundraising and that deans of other Vanderbilt schools may ultimately lose funds for years to come as the university kept a new business school afloat.

    At this point, Vanderbilt had reached a kind of chicken-and-egg stalemate. Positions hardened.

    Heard insisted that starting a business school would not be prudent until sufficient funds could be raised without cannibalizing other donations to the university. He wanted enough funding to open and operate a business school for at least five years that could compete with the likes of Harvard, Wharton and Dartmouth. Fleming and others suggested that the people who were in a position to provide the kind of funding Heard envisioned would not do so unless they could see a strong upfront commitment by the university, such as hiring a prominent business school dean and several core faculty members.

    Board of Trust member Sam Fleming poses with a portrait of Chancellor Alexander Heard.

    Finally, it was Fleming, Wigginton and David K. Wilson (a son-in-law of Justin Potter) who broke through the impasse. They met privately with Heard in the spring of 1966 and each promised to be responsible for raising $250,000 per year in the first few years of the business school’s existence. Heard, questioning the three businessmen on why a school was even necessary when they all succeeded just fine, finally gave in and agreed to support the effort. He also agreed to make the business school one of the signature items in a $55 million capital campaign that began in 1966 and was chaired by Fleming.

    Within a year the full Board of Trust was presented with a detailed proposal to start a new business school outlining the education objectives and a funding plan. Trustee Robert L. Garner, a 1916 Vanderbilt graduate who became a vice president at the World Bank, abstained from voting, while Dr. Rudolph A. Light, graduate of Vanderbilt School of Medicine and a surgeon—Light Hall is his namesake—provided the single “no” vote.

    It was the otherwise unanimous board action, however, that set the wheels in motion for Vanderbilt to begin recruiting its first business school dean and establish the school’s two-year Master of Management (MMgt) degree, which led to today’s flagship Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. The school opened its doors in 1969 and graduated its first class in 1971.

  • Commencement 2017

    Commencement 2017

    Owen Dean M. Eric Johnson congratulates Founder’s Medalist Aaron Dorn as Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos looks on.

    Owen Graduate School of Management celebrated Commencement May 12. All told, the Class of 2017 received 173 MBAs and 39 Executive MBAs, 48 master’s of science in finance, 47 master’s of accountancy, and 14 master’s of marketing. Members of the 2016 master’s of management in health care and EMBA programs also participated.

    After a welcome from Dean M. Eric Johnson, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman, MBA’93, gave the Commencement speech. She urged graduates to follow careers that “will carry you through the many twists and turns that your life and your career will inevitably bring you.”

    Graduates gather in their regalia.
    Zheng “Prince” Huang, MBA’17, proposes to Jie “Jessica” Su, MBA’16, after the Commencement ceremony. She said yes!
    Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman, MBA’93, and Dean M. Eric Johnson pause before the Owen Commencement ceremony.
    Soon-to-be graduates gather outside before the ceremonies begin.
    The 2017 EMBA class documents its status as the first EMBA class to participate in Commencement.
  • The ties that bind

    The ties that bind

    As the inaugural member of a new corporate partnership program at Owen, Cardinal Health’s relationship with the school has moved beyond year-to-year hiring

    Read McNamara, MA’76, (left)assistant dean for corporate partnerships at Owen’s Career Management Center and Sam Samad, senior vice president and treasurer at Cardinal Health and a member of Owen’s Board of Visitors. Photo Credit: John Russell

    Just over a decade ago, when Jeff Greer, BA’94, MBA’00, decided to leave the world of management consulting, he called a contact at Cardinal Health, one of the world’s leading global health services and products companies, to explore new career opportunities. Having worked on past engagements at the Dublin, Ohio-based company, he’d come to appreciate Cardinal Health’s rare combination of maintaining a collegial, collaborative feel within the setting of a company consistently ranked in the top 25 of the Fortune 500.

    “One of the things I’ve loved about Cardinal Health is that it reminds me of the atmosphere at Owen,” says Greer, who is now vice president of enterprise architecture and IT strategy at Cardinal Health, and believes he was the first alumnus from Vanderbilt’s MBA program to land at the company. He has been a member of the Owen recruiting team ever since.

    “In business school, I never felt like there was cutthroat competition among classmates, nor were there barriers to getting access to the people or resources you needed,” he says. “I find that things are very much the same at Cardinal Health.”

    Greer isn’t the only one who has recognized the similarities between Cardinal Health and Vanderbilt’s Owen School. This fall, Cardinal Health became the inaugural member of a new corporate partnership program at Owen designed to deepen ties between the school and companies that recruit Vanderbilt business talent.

    “This partnership formalizes a lot of what we were already doing with Owen, but takes it to the next level,” says Sam Samad, senior vice president and treasurer at Cardinal Health and a member of Owen’s Board of Visitors. “It puts the things we’re doing together in a bit more of a strategic context.”

    Read McNamara, MA’76, assistant dean for corporate partnerships at Owen’s Career Management Center, says Cardinal Health is an ideal company to help launch the new initiative—a program he hopes to grow to about 25 companies. The genesis for the idea came in 2013 around the time M. Eric Johnson was named dean of the business school.

    “I’d begun to network with my peers at other top-25 business schools and learned about engagement programs they had with corporate recruiters,” McNamara says, citing Harvard Business School’s longstanding partnership with P&G as an example. “There are many different routes a program like this could take, but Dean Johnson and I decided that developing qualitative engagements—things like mentoring opportunities with executives, speaker opportunities, case competitions, joint research projects—would be the cornerstone of our partnership program.”

    The primary goal is to attract companies to campus in a way that goes “above and beyond” the cyclical, transactional nature of simply recruiting graduates, McNamara says.

    That’s a trajectory Cardinal Health has followed since the company began recruiting Owen graduates on campus in 2011, Samad says, noting that the lone Vanderbilt graduate who went to Cardinal Health that year, Eric Messinger, MBA’12, continues to thrive at the company.

    In the years since then, Cardinal Health has extended its ties to Vanderbilt in numerous ways that go beyond hiring—though that role is growing too as the company has augmented its internship program and broadened its MBA recruiting pool from strictly finance majors to graduates concentrating in areas like strategy and marketing.

    Some of those nonrecruiting activities included former Cardinal Health CFO Jeff Henderson joining the Board of Visitors (Samad has taken over his place on the BOV); Cardinal Health CEO George Barrett delivering a keynote address in 2014 for the student-run Vanderbilt Health Care Conference; and Cardinal Health partnering with Vanderbilt’s Executive Development Institute to develop courses for high-potential executives within the company.

    “The foundational element in all of this is that you need people who enjoy working with each other,” Samad says. “Once we started working with the team at Owen, we realized we had a very strong cultural fit. We saw that from day one.”

    A Good Deal for Both Sides

    The partnership between Owen and Cardinal Health is not just about mutual admiration, however. Like any good business deal, both sides stand to gain.

    Samad participates in his first Owen Board of Visitors meeting with Dean Eric Johnson in November. Photo Credit: John Russell

    One big advantage for Cardinal Health’s involvement with Owen is that it helps sell the students on the company. That’s important, Samad says, because in the next year alone he hopes to double the number of interns from Owen, as well as the number of graduates coming into full-time roles at Cardinal Health.

    Another critical benefit: diversity. “Cultivating a diverse and inclusive work environment is crucial to our success,” says Samad. “In our efforts to ensure diversity in the workplace, Cardinal Health strives for a workplace that accurately reflects the communities where we live and do business. As I look at the list of Vanderbilt MBAs that we’ve hired, there is a lot of gender and ethnic diversity, which helps us thrive as an organization.”

    Internally, Cardinal Health has been exploring ways to put more structure around its internal leadership development efforts to foster a pipeline of homegrown executive talent, and MBA recruiting plays an important role in that. “If we attract somebody into finance, if we attract somebody into strategy, we want them to have the expectation that they’ll be rotating,” Samad says. “They need to understand that they’re not coming into a strategy firm. At the end of the day, they’re joining a health care company.”

    The other key area for Cardinal Health is tapping into Owen’s teaching and research. Samad says the company wants to continue to develop customized learning programs for the company’s internal use, as well as access to cutting-edge research around the health care industry, especially now that Cardinal Health has operations in Nashville that include a distribution center and a recently acquired health care services company, naviHealth.

    For Owen, having high-quality companies on campus regularly recruiting graduates is a key motivator for entering these kinds of partnerships, McNamara says. Developing a stable group of top companies with which Owen has formalized partnerships helps recruit students for admissions, and ideally helps guard against severe hiring dips during economic downturns.

    These partnerships also create opportunities for students and companies to get a much better feel for working together before either side commits to a full-time job.

    McNamara says case competitions offer a good example. “They are perhaps one of the most productive forms of the kind of qualitative engagement we have in mind,” he says. “Over a two-day period, the company—which ideally provides the judges for the competition—will get a really good look at our talent.” Even watching how the students organize, market and run the competitions offers employers valuable insight, McNamara says. Similarly, case competitions let students get a good feel for a company’s culture and values in a way that an hourlong interview in a library conference room can’t replicate.

    McNamara says Deloitte’s annual Human Capital Case Competition, hosted at Owen, has been a great success for students in the Human and Organizational Performance track. He’d like to see those efforts replicated with other companies in different management concentrations, such as finance, health care, marketing and operations.

    Summer interns and current MBA students Mark Fergason, BA’08, Kartik Varma, and Sid Shetty, join Cardinal Health CEO George Barrett (third from left) for a group photo. Fergason and Shetty will join Cardinal after graduation, while Varma is joining American Airlines, another company that enjoys a strong Owen alumni network. Photo Credit: Sid Shetty

    One other key outcome Vanderbilt hopes to see emerge from the corporate partnership program is the creation of an executive-in-residence position. McNamara and Melinda Allen, executive director of the Owen School’s Leadership Development Program, are putting the final touches on that initiative. “This would involve a senior executive from a corporate partner spending anywhere between 48 and 72 hours here on campus meeting with small groups of students, faculty and administrators,” McNamara says. “That would give the company a terrific look—at a very senior level—at the range of talent and research Vanderbilt has to offer.” For students it would also help reinforce the school’s close-knit, collaborative culture.

    McNamara says each organization that becomes a corporate partner should include a few common components, such as a history of recruiting Owen students in good times and bad; a willingness to hire international graduates; a leadership development program at their organization; and a willingness to engage with Owen through things like speaker series or case competitions.

    In exchange, companies designated as corporate partners will receive preferential timing for on-campus interview and information sessions; priority for event sponsorship; and invitations to participate in an annual dean’s dinner for corporate partners that will offer an inside look at Owen’s plans and priorities.

    “Companies like Cardinal Health—and many others Owen has had fantastic relationships with over the years—have expressed a real desire to be involved with the school, whether it’s related to curriculum, hiring students, or working with faculty on teaching and research projects. Usually it’s all of those things and more,” Johnson says. “Read and the executives he is talking to for this corporate partnership program have done a wonderful job putting a structure and strategy around a set of mutually beneficial engagement activities. I look forward to seeing this grow into a meaningful, productive program that leads to long-term success for everyone involved.”

    Editor’s note: As this issue of Vanderbilt Business magazine was going to press, Sam Samad was named senior vice president and chief financial officer of Illumina, a global leader in the field of genomics.

     

  • Reunion 2016

    Reunion 2016

    For the past eight years, Owen has celebrated its Alumni Weekend in April. Last October, Owen rejoined the rest of Vanderbilt in celebrating Reunion in the fall.

    In addition to Owen’s traditional wine and cheese night—as well as the Saturday night dinner honoring this year’s Distinguished Alumni Award winner, Virginia “Gigi” Lazenby, BA’67, MBA’73— alumni were able to participate in a range of events, from Vanderbilt lectures to football tailgates.

    Save the date for the next Reunion on October 6 and 7, 2017.

    Virginia “Gigi” Lazenby, BA’67, MBA’73, receives the 2016 Distinguished Alumni Award.
    2015 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient Heiki Miki, MBA’96 (right), is pictured with Sylvia Boyd (center), associate director of alumni career services, and Roman T. Goate, EMBA’15.
    Ed Alston, MMgmt’71 (left), speaks with Nancy Lea Hyer (center), professor and associate dean of MBA programs, and Nancy Johnson, wife of Dean Eric Johnson.
    Alumni Board Chair Erika Bogar King, MBA’99, addresses the crowd.
    John Sappenfield, MBA’91, receives a hug from Owen’s Chief Admissions and Recruiting Officer Tami Fassinger, BA’85.
    New Alumni Board members David Walker, MBA’89, and Janet McCormick, MBA’88, return to Owen for Reunion and their first board meeting.
    Alumni Board member Derek Young, MBA’91, speaks at the Opening Bell networking breakfast.

    Photos by Kristi Irving and Terry Wyatt

  • Health care disrupted

    Health care disrupted

    iStock, RetroRocket

    Vanderbilt faculty and alumni are exploring new innovations to raise health care quality while lowering costs

    What is the right price to put on a child’s life?

    That may be a deeply unsettling question, but to start to fix the U.S. health care system, we have to begin to think in ways that confront uncomfortable realties, says Larry Van Horn, executive director of health affairs at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management.

    For renowned pediatric cardiac surgeon Dr. Devi Shetty, such a question is hardly theoretical. In a presentation to this year’s class of Nashville Health Care Fellows—an invitation-only program for health care executives co-founded and co-directed by Van Horn and former U.S. senator Dr. Bill Frist—Shetty described the reality of caring for India’s poor.

    When he tells a mother that her child needs a surgery that costs 80,000 rupees (about $1,200), but knows she can’t pay that, “the way I solve that family’s problem is by getting the cost from 80,000 to 40,000,” says Shetty, founder of Narayana Health, which operates 23 hospitals and seven heart centers across India. To cut costs, Shetty must find innovations that will help strip away every medical step that isn’t absolutely essential to providing the best result for the patient.

    American doctors are going to have to start factoring affordability into their protocols, too. Sweeping changes in the health care landscape are already challenging the business models of many current health care companies. As they do, Van Horn believes a new class of businesses will rise to meet the challenge.

    To help these companies and organizations find new ways of working, this summer Vanderbilt launched the Center for Health Care Market Innovation. Van Horn and Vanderbilt marketing professor Steve Hoeffler will run the corporate-funded, research-driven center with the goal of investigating the disruptive forces facing health care companies today.

    Owen professors Steve Hoeffler (left)and Larry Van Horn. Photo Credit: Daniel Dubois

    Rather than focus on government policy, however, Vanderbilt’s center “is focused on the 180 million Americans with commercial insurance, the way their financial exposure is changing, and the way that’s translating into how they consume medical care,” Van Horn says.

    He explains that the private sector—not government agencies—has a history of developing innovation that ultimately reaches the masses. “This is why I’m hopeful about what the private sector will do,” Van Horn says. “We’ll solve the problem and we’ll keep innovating. We’ll bring the cost structure down so that at some point, we can provide these services to everybody.”

    The roots of the new health care landscape in the U.S., with steadily rising health care premiums and the advent of more high-deductible plans, go back nearly two decades. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, employer-sponsored health coverage premiums skyrocketed 203 percent between 1999 and 2015. Over that same time, workers’ contribution to their premiums increased by 221 percent. Their earnings, by contrast, have only increased by 56 percent. The Affordable Care Act, signed into law in 2010, accelerated these trends.

    “The consumer hasn’t historically been involved, because health care has been a business-to-business transaction,” says Michael Burcham, who has led several successful startups and teaches health care innovation and entrepreneurship at Vanderbilt’s Owen School. “Consumers today are paying about one-third of all their medical costs, so they should have a seat at the table. We’re entering a market where the consumer has freedom to choose.”

    Incentive to Innovate

    These changing dynamics have shifted the way people understand health care. Take the recent controversy surrounding the price of an EpiPen, a device manufactured by pharmaceutical company Mylan used to treat severe allergic reactions. Since 2007 the price of the standard two-pack of EpiPens has risen from $100 to $600. Patients and parents of children with allergies, newly clued into the cost increase, are furious.

    Alex Tolbert, JD/MBA’07

    Much of the price furor is a direct result of patients paying a higher deductible, says Alex Tolbert, JD/MBA’07, founder of Nashville-based health care advisory company Bernard Health. “We never would have read about that in the age of the $20 co-pay.” Patients will not only demand price transparency, he adds, but they will also demand better health care services. He bases this on his personal experience. “I don’t feel intimidated in very many settings, but I do when I’m in a medical provider setting,” he says. Part of that feeling, Tolbert adds, comes from having past unpleasant experiences.

    He cites one notable exception: his local dermatologist who recently stopped taking insurance. She now answers directly to her patients, the people who cut the checks, Tolbert says. In her office, “I’m treated like a human.”

    Tolbert founded his company, in fact, to bring a little humanity back to the health insurance business. He and his Bernard Health team members help people sort through the many confusing health insurance products to select the one that will give them the best coverage for their money. The best product differs depending on the person.

    Other Vanderbilt graduates are already addressing consumer needs on the provider side. Travis Messina, MBA’08, is the CEO of Contessa Health, a home hospitalization startup that aims to redesign delivery and payment for specific episodes of care.

    Contessa changes the consumer experience because it enables patients with certain conditions, such as congestive heart failure or pneumonia, to leave the hospital after an acute episode and receive hospital-level treatment in their own homes. This puts patients at ease—most people do not want to stay in a hospital longer than necessary—and it provides patients the high-touch, one-on-one care that helps prevent readmissions. Low readmission rates benefit the patient and look good for the hospital, which also shares in Contessa’s cost savings and quality scores.

    When managed right, Contessa’s method offers a win-win. But even solutions that should work in theory can be difficult to roll out. “Health care is a system that is somewhat set in its ways,” Messina says, “but people want these change agents. Hopefully, we can be the change agent for a lot of different communities.”

    Contessa, which received its first round of seed funding in January 2015, launched in its first market in Marshfield, Wisconsin, this summer. Messina is currently in conversations with other provider networks. Those conversations can be tough, he says, but, “it’s a lot of fun when they realize that this is the way we should deliver care. That’s been the most fulfilling part.”

    Contessa’s is just one of many patient-centered health care models to come. Another, according to Bernard Health’s Tolbert, is one that enables people to purchase a subscription to a primary care provider rather than paying per visit. In this model, doctors would answer patient questions via text and email, often avoiding a more expensive in-person exam. They would also quarterback interactions with specialists. Tolbert says, “I think ultimately, the healthiest market won’t be consumers on their own, but consumers coupled with their primary care doctors.”

    The means to the healthiest, happiest health care consumer is exactly what Van Horn and Hoeffler’s new center will explore. “Sometimes academia gets accused of creating research that isn’t tied to real managerial problems, but in this industry, we can get past that,” Hoeffler says.

    He and Van Horn are in conversations with seven local health care companies who want to participate in the center’s new research effort. Ultimately, the two directors want to collect data from willing companies and share it in ways that, without risking proprietary information, shed new light on consumer behavior.

    Michael Burcham

    Because of its location in Nashville, Vanderbilt is primed for collaboration, says Burcham: “It’s a city built on health care services. What better place is there to take these services and fuse processes and technology to innovate?”

    The new generation of health care problem solvers are already coming up through the ranks. Ahead of much of the industry, students and professors at Vanderbilt are thinking in new ways about patients with purchasing power.

    “I’m teaching a health care marketing elective at Owen,” Hoeffler says. “Today’s topic is: Patient as consumer—how does this change the world?”

  • Big dog

    Big dog

    Vanderbilt MBA graduates are helping lead Rover on a path of quick growth, but it’s not always easy to keep up

    (Left to right) Rover Vice President Megan Teepe, MBA’11, Chief Operating Officer Brent Turner, MBA’99 and summer intern Sarah Eaton. Photo Credit: Brett Israel

    When you walk into Rover’s office in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, the first friendly face to greet you belongs to Dublin. She’s a 6-year-old Chiweenie (part Chihuahua, part Dachshund), whose owner smiles from behind the reception desk in the lobby. It’s a nice welcome to one of the hottest companies in tech.

    Rover, whose business involves matching dog sitters, walkers and caregivers with dog owners, might seem a little canine-crazy to outsiders; a lap around the office reveals about a dozen dogs of various breeds displaying various levels of enthusiasm for office life. Yet, the office is quieter than you’d think it would be for a space filled with dogs. There’s little barking or roughhousing. For the most part, dogs lie on pillows near their owners’ workspaces. The humans, for their part, are focused on computer screens, perfecting Rover’s code or resolving issues between sitters and owners.

    Rover has pioneered the on-demand dog sitting business, and propelling the company forward are graduates from the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management. Led by Brent Turner, MBA’99, Rover’s chief operating officer, Owen alumni are shaping Rover’s culture on the fly as the company grows at breakneck speeds.

    Rover works like this: Dog owners set up a profile for themselves and their pet on either the Rover website or the mobile app. When they need someone to watch or walk their pooch, they search for available sitters in their area who can either drop in for a quick visit, take the dog for a walk, or watch the pet overnight in either the owner’s house or at the sitter’s house. Sitters can send updates to the owners throughout the stay, including text messages and pictures, or report any incidents to Rover’s support team. After the stay, sitters and owners give each other starred ratings and can provide further feedback.

    Anyone can sign up to be a sitter or dog walker for Rover, but Rover requires background checks, screens potential candidates for red flags, and spends a lot of time educating sitters on how to be successful while pet-sitting. Sitters set their prices, preferences and availability. Anyone familiar with online dating services will quickly recognize Rover’s user interface; it’s a matchmaking service, but for dogs and caregivers.

    Pet pictures abound at Rover’s Seattle headquarters. Photo Credit: Brett Israel

    Since its founding in 2011, Rover has become the largest marketplace in the U.S. for pet-sitting services, with over 65,000 registered sitters. It has raised $90 million in total venture funding after closing an investment round in October that was co-led by Foundry Group and Menlo Ventures, whose other investments include Uber, Siri and Roku.

    Rover has also been shaped by Vanderbilt grads, with Turner leading the way as COO. His job is to make sure Rover pursues its annual plan. On any given day, he attends to the business rhythms of Rover, checking in on the company’s teams, which include sitter success, marketing and operations among others. The Rover annual plan is broken down into a set of key performance metrics that departments and individuals are trying to hit. Turner can quickly see who is ahead and who needs help. He then turns his attention to pursuing his own projects in support of people on his team or his boss, Rover’s CEO.

    Rover is a five-year-old company, and Turner has been COO for the last three, during which time Rover has made a name for itself on the tech scene. The company has experienced greater than or equal to 200 percent growth in revenue every year that Turner has been COO. “It’s the first legitimately hypergrowth business that I’ve been a part of,” Turner says. “With past businesses, my role had been to get everyone aligned in the right direction to push the company uphill. At Rover, it’s more like holding on for dear life and trying not to let anything come apart.” He’s focused on looking at the demands of Rover’s steep growth curve and identifying potential hurdles.

    “Between March 1 and the end of July in 2016, our business doubled,” Turner says. “When you’re looking up at the start of March and you say our company will be twice the size in terms in terms of revenues at end of July, you have to start thinking about what we need to work on now to meet those scale challenges.”

    At the moment, Turner is focused specifically on the marketing challenges facing the company. For example, most tech companies rely on the power of search engines to drive customers to their platforms. The problem for Rover is that not many people actually search the internet for dog sitters; they’re more likely to call a friend, neighbor or nearby kennel. So, instead of search engine advertising, Rover relies on mid-funnel or up-funnel channels, such as their blog, Facebook videos, TV and other local ads. That leads to many channels, so Turner is trying to tackle the complexity of this kind of marketing approach as the company grows.

    “You hear a lot of people talk about not boiling the ocean, meaning you can’t work on all of your problems at once,” Turner says. “But when you’re growing so fast and all your known problems are going from immaterial to material so fast, and in the meantime unknown problems are coming out of the woodwork, you have to boil the ocean.”

    The first person Turner hired to help him chart Rover’s course and define its values was fellow Vanderbilt grad Megan Teepe, MBA’11. Today she’s Rover’s vice president of sitter success and safety, charged with building out Rover’s junior and midlevel leaders. That means helping them develop the skills that will help Rover scale up by staying focused on performance and outcomes—and helping these leaders maintain their humanity at the same time.

    At Rover, Teepe tries to identify with a strong set of soft skills that are harder to measure on paper. She’s looking for aptitude. “One of the most important things I’ve learned is how important it is to get the right people in the right roles from the beginning, and to learn your lessons quickly if you didn’t,” Teepe says.

    “At Rover, if I’m hiring you for a leadership role where you’re going to be managing people, I want to know if you live and breathe leadership,” Teepe says. “I see that in the way you talk about why you want to lead people. Can you articulate that or is it just something you think you need to do to build your career? I’m eagle-eyed about that.”

    And more Vanderbilt MBA talent may be on the way to help Rover grow.

    This past summer, Sarah Eaton, MBA Class of 2017 and Owen’s student government president, interned at Rover, helping shape the educational aspects of the company’s sitter success program. She was charged with developing videos for social media that help explain to sitters what to do in in potentially sticky situations that arise during dog sitting. Hiring the right people is so important at fast-growing Rover that the company has painted its core values on a wall in the office. One of Turner’s most important values is a ban on personal agendas in the workplace. Pathological honesty and bias toward action are others.

    “Errors of inaction are always unacceptable,” Turner says. “If you’re trying to solve a problem and you make a mistake, that’s OK, but don’t be intimidated by failure. If you don’t screw up something every month, I’m going to wonder if you’re trying hard enough.”

    Owen student Sarah Eaton poses with a pooch during her summer internship at Rover. Photo Credit: Brett Israel

    These values are especially important to Turner in his role as COO. He’s talked about them during a recent Taco Tuesday series held at Rover where a different employee presents to the team on a topic of their choosing. His main responsibility, after all, is to keep Rover plowing ahead without losing the characteristics that helped the company achieve success in the first place.

    “Defining and living our values is important to me because Job No. 1 is to get the right people in the right roles,” Turner says. “We’re doing that here at Rover.”

    In the next five years, Turner thinks $1 billion in revenue across the platform is realistic, along with a multinational presence and a rollout of other services. “When I got here almost three years ago, the idea that Rover would have revenue of $200 million across the platform seemed like it would be so amazing,” Turner says. “Now, we’ll roll right through that, and who knows where the top is?”

  • Owen sharpens career-skills courses

    Owen sharpens career-skills courses

    Professor Kimberly Pace speaks to MBA students about the art of business communications.

    More than ever, employers are seeking candidates who can work in teams, adapt to new situations and think fast on their feet

    When Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management began developing a strategic plan two years ago, alumni and employers felt confident that MBA graduates excelled in their majors, from marketing to finance. But as anyone in the working world knows, there are often many more factors that make for career success beyond the narrow confines of a single discipline.

    “We want our folks to be ready to hit the road running,” says Jon Lehman, director of Vanderbilt’s Executive Development Institute and instructor for Learning to Thrive, an elective course which requires MBA students to take a deeper look at themselves. In a recent blog post, Dean M. Eric Johnson cited Learning to Thrive and Professor Kimberly Pace’s Advanced Management Speaking as courses designed to strengthen students’ business communication and presentation skills.

    Brian McCann

    Another class being piloted is Associate Professor Brian McCann’s Managerial Decision Making. Critical thinking skills are important for any professional, but a key finding from the strategic planning process was their growing importance for MBA students. McCann’s course is designed to provide an opportunity for students to improve their analytical thinking skills in the context of solving managerial problems and making better decisions. The class starts with the topic of developing, understanding and evaluating arguments supporting managerial decisions. It also covers topics like the definition of managerial problems and a comparison of intuitive and rational decision making processes.

    “A significant goal of the class is to have the students leave as more reflective thinkers,” says McCann, MBA’04. “But even more importantly as more effective decision makers.”

    Emily Anderson, MBA’99, director of Owen’s Career Management Center, agrees. “We do a recruiter survey every year, and being a smaller school we have a lot of avenues and forums,” she says. “There’s a lot of conversation around expectations and how they actually perform once they’re there.”

    What those conversations identified is a need to equip Vanderbilt MBA graduates with the ability to do things like deliver formal presentations, work effectively in teams, and quickly draw on their grasp of facts and figures to make a cogent business case. “It’s not just technically being smart and having book knowledge. It’s how that is applied in an organization and how that makes them more successful,” Anderson says. “That’s the stuff employers are paying a premium for—managers who can make an impact in their organization.”

    Finding that right combination of skills is not easy. In a recent Wall Street Journal survey of nearly 900 U.S. executives, 92 percent of them said soft skills—like teamwork, adaptability, creativity and sociability—are equally or more important than technical skills. Yet 89 percent of that same group said finding people with those skills, no matter what age or gender, is difficult.

    Recent graduate Hudson Jones, MBA’16, says the training he received during his time at Vanderbilt has already proven beneficial. “I was coming from a small boutique consulting world,” he says. “So things like building political capital and traversing the bureaucratic red tape of a publicly traded company were things which Owen prepared me for that I probably otherwise would have been worried about.”

    BEGINNINGS

    The training in communication begins before MBA students even arrive on campus. “As soon as the MBA candidates are accepted, they have to write a personal brand pitch,” Pace says. “We have five professional writing coaches who meet with every student one on one for 30 minutes to give them feedback before school even starts.” Giving effective and persuasive presentations is also a must. Pace teaches a core course on management speaking and also an advanced class. About 30 percent of students dislike public speaking, and she says that 5 to 10 percent experience “true fear” at the thought of doing it.

    “They do four presentations within seven weeks,” Pace says. “They’ve got to do their own personal pitch—how they would pitch themselves in a real career situation. They also have to give an impromptu speech, where we give them a topic and they have to do a speech based on the topic.

    “And the final one is a true business pitch, an executive summary. So if you’re a strong presenter, you become an advanced presenter. If you have stage fright, we at least want people not to know you have stage fright.”

    The importance of being a competent presenter is reinforced during internships, Pace says. “Many times at the end of an internship, they have to do a presentation to the executives about the internship,” she says. “And basically it is a job interview.”

    SOFT SKILLS

    MBA student Chris Culver says he values the soft skills he’s learning at Owen.

    “The softer skills are along the lines of asking good questions, knowing how to collaborate with people, and really working in an environment where there’s not a lot of guidance and always a lot of work to be done,” Culver says.

    Jon Lehman

    The Learning to Thrive elective course can help students put it all together, and also assist with transitions down the road, Lehman says. “I don’t want to call it soul-searching, but it’s getting at deeper stuff. It’s not an accounting class.” The curriculum includes writing poetry, self-reflection and a private session with Lehman. “Executive coaching is part of what I do,” Lehman says. “I sit down with them and talk to them about my perception of them as individuals and what it’s going to take [to succeed].”

    Learning to Thrive is best taken “as your last mod before you go in the big world,” Jones says. “I think it’s even more helpful if you take it once you’ve settled on your career path, or at least your job.”

    The class helped Jones, a business strategist at Cerner Corp. in Kansas City, Missouri, deal with an early career dilemma. “Part of my transition out of business school was moving my wife, who is a Carolina girl, out West. I was trained in Learning to Thrive to stop and think about what that portends for her, and make sure I’m not just dragging her down my career path—that we’re embracing this change together.

    “So it helps personally and professionally, which is different from most business classes.”

    IDEAS, NOT EGO

    There’s another quality prominent at Owen that sets its students apart. It’s a message seen on a banner hanging in the lobby of Management Hall: “Ideas, Not Ego.”

    “There’s a general bias that MBAs are going to be full of themselves,” Pace says. “You don’t see it so much at Vanderbilt. From a recruiter standpoint, they love that, because it means you’re more coachable in a team. If you’re willing to listen and you’re relatively self-aware and don’t have a huge ego, then you can move up maybe quicker than others.” Being humble and amiable is also taught by participation in clubs at Owen.

    “I think one of the more important things you learn is your leadership style,” says Sarah Eaton, president of the Owen Student Government Association. “Before I was president, I was a member of the Tech Club. I still am. And there’s also the Cork and Barrel Club—the more fun clubs.

    “It’s nice having the mixture of professional clubs that help you with recruiting and getting opportunities to practice through alumni that are in the field. For example, they brought in some alumni and we did case competitions with the Consulting Club.” A NEW DIRECTION Like many MBA students, Chris Culver came to Owen pursuing a change in career direction. “I was doing engineering before this, and I’m using this as a way to transition my career with the idea of getting more into the business side of the company,” Culver says. “Most people at Owen are trying to make a transition into a different industry than they worked in before.”

    Eaton is moving from education and “looking to go into a more-profit sector,” adding that “at Owen, my background is valued, and I feel supported every day.”

    The evolution of skills, hard and soft, never really ends as long as a career is in motion, Lehman says. “Work environments change along with the stress and pressure. A lot of it follows economic cycles. I don’t think you’re ever done in these areas.” Lehman should know: He’s writing a book based on his Learning to Thrive class and hopes to see it published this year.

  • Analyzing the analysts

    Analyzing the analysts

    Nancy Edmonds, iStock
    Nancy Edmonds, iStock

    Once a quarter, the top management of nearly every publicly traded company in the U.S. gathers around a speakerphone or webcam in a conference room and talks to brokerage firm analysts about earnings. The calls begin with prepared remarks that provide an overview of last quarter’s performance, followed by a question-and-answer session.

    The ritual started in the latter part of the last century and has become a leading way for firms to communicate to investors. Although the companies’ prepared remarks summarize the high points, what else is revealed in those earnings calls?

    Three Owen professors are on a quest to find out.

    Catherine Lee and Michael Stuart are two of the three Owen Professors working with Vanderbilt Libraries’ Clifford Anderson (right) on data extraction and modeling for the project. Photo by Steve Green

    Catherine Lee, Michael Stuart and Richard Willis are working with the Vanderbilt Libraries on a cutting-edge trans-institutional research project that makes the content of more than 15 years of earnings’ conference calls accessible and available for analysis.

    Their intent is to examine whether the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) of management responses to analysts’ questions are associated with the magnitude of the analysts’ forecast revisions. “We also want to see whether individual analysts on the same call revise their forecasts differently based on the sentiment of the response they receive to their specific questions,” says Stuart, assistant professor of management.

    For their research, the team needed access to a large number of earnings’ conference call transcripts and the ability to read and analyze the reports efficiently and consistently. They turned to Hilary Craiglow, director of the Walker Management Library, who provided guidance and helped Vanderbilt negotiate a deal with top electronic information company LexisNexis to provide greater access to its academic databases. Clifford Anderson, director of scholarly communications for the university library system, helped the researchers think through tools they could use to read these documents.

    Richard Willis
    Richard Willis

    As a result, the business professors are using advanced technological tools to extract and analyze huge amounts of text. Lee, Stuart and Willis access the library’s LexisNexis Academic database via a new application program interface. The API removes the built-in interface on the LexisNexis database and allows the researchers to set up their own methods for querying and collecting information. Anderson is assisting with data extraction and modeling for the project.

    “Earnings conference calls of publicly traded firms contain a wealth of information that is just beginning to be explored,” Stuart says. “These tools have put us on the cutting edge of accounting research.”

    Lee, assistant professor of management, says that the project will increase knowledge about the role of communication between analysts and managers in providing information to current or potential firm stakeholders. “Our research will be the first study to investigate the direct interchanges between analysts and managers on earnings conference calls,” she says.

    The earnings project utilizes only a small portion of the LexisNexis database. “We can think of the LexisNexis API as a back-door portal to large amounts of information available in a semi-structured format,” Craiglow says. “Our researchers are capturing massive amounts of text in a machine-readable format for analysis and detection of patterns.”

    LexisNexis Academic content includes text of thousands of newspapers, journals, transcripts and wire services covering a wide breadth of disciplines, including business, law, education, political science and others.

    The project has spawned solutions for research by other Vanderbilt faculty. Jonathan Gilligan, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences in the College of Arts and Science, wanted to analyze text in published news stories regarding water conservation in U.S. cities. The libraries’ Anderson put him in touch with Craiglow.

    As a result, Gilligan and his team are using the LexisNexis API for a comprehensive study of newspaper coverage of water issues.

    John Sloop, associate provost for digital learning, says he’s interested in using the technology for his own research in communications studies but that he’s more impressed by the trans-institutional orientation of the project. “Here we have a project initiated by Owen researchers that led to a solution negotiated by the management library, which came to the attention of a team of researchers in Earth and environmental science—and they shared it with other faculty,” he says. “Our trans-institutional orientation and emphasis on digital technologies can make for fruitful—and often unexpected—outcomes.”

    Integral to the Owen research project and others is the libraries’ growing digital expertise. “We are pleased to be able to license huge amounts of text for many different disciplines,” Craiglow says. “These tools have tremendous potential for cross-disciplinary research.”

  • Speed still matters (and other topics)

    Speed still matters (and other topics)

    Joseph D. Blackburn, BE'63, the James A. Speyer Professor of Production Management, Emeritus. Photo by Daniel DuBois.
    Joseph D. Blackburn, BE’63, the James A. Speyer Professor of Production Management, Emeritus

    Joseph D. Blackburn, BE’63, had a much better idea. Blackburn, the James A. Speyer Professor of Production Management, Emeritus, declined to draft the content of a last lecture (he said it sounded too much like writing his own obituary) but offered to give Vanderbilt Business a transcript of what he’d say in a presentation similar to a TED talk.Here are excerpts from Blackburn’s “The Continued Relevance of Time-Based Competition,” which can be read in its entirety at vu.edu/blackburn.

     

    Faster than the other guy

    Time-based competition was once a buzzword, and many now consider it passé. A recent article in the Economist claimed that speed had lost its importance as a business strategy. I would argue precisely the opposite—that the speed with which businesses can respond to customers has never been more important.

    To win this competition among suppliers with equal capabilities, you simply have to be faster than the other guy. No one wants to wait any longer than necessary. From the Middle Ages on, competition among international traders has been based upon time. The principles of time-based competition are, ironically, timeless.

    Although the term first attained prominence through the practices of Japanese firms, many firms in America and elsewhere adopted a strategy based on speed that allowed them to dominate their industries (think of Toyota, Dell and Amazon).

    In the financial world, the time to analyze data and execute trades has become so important that firms will spare almost no expense to shave microseconds off their transaction times.

    With their convenience and exceptional delivery speed, Amazon continues to gobble up huge chunks of business in all segments of retail from their conventional brick-and-mortar competitors (including their online divisions).

     

    A new direction

    Through conducting studies of time-based competition, I became interested in the value of time in an industry—that is, what is the value to a firm of a specific improvement in response time? Taking it one step further, how does the issue of time impact businesses that are trying to develop more sustainable operations?

    This has been the basis for my latest and possibly last research projects. It is an interesting new area because of the need to improve the environment by making more efficient use of production resources and products. Our research has focused on how to extend the life of products beyond their initial use through remanufacturing, reuse and recycling. We found that, in industries with high time-value products such as computers and cell phones, delays in recovery and reconditioning of those products caused significant losses in profitability. Time-based recovery processes are needed to make reuse economically sustainable. I—and my fellow researchers—have explored the barriers to sustainability in these recently published articles in Science Direct  (vu.edu/blackburn1) and California Management Review (vu.edu/blackburn2).

    I remain interested in applications of value of time for product development and for supply chains, but I am doubtful if any major new projects will emerge. In retirement, the value of time takes on a much different, more personal meaning. I can play as much tennis as I’m physically able and travel as much as I’m financially able. Although I thoroughly enjoyed my teaching and research career at Owen, I haven’t found another teaching opportunity that is as appealing as having the free time for other activities.

     

    And now, lessons learned

    The pioneering work on time-based competition was done by visionaries at Toyota and the Boston Consulting Group. If I made a contribution, it was to describe and communicate the relevance of these concepts to business and academia. Hundreds of papers, conferences and several books have been written on the subject, and the principles have been adopted worldwide. For me and my career, time-based competition changed everything.

    Among the important lessons I’ve learned from research and teaching, three things stand out. First, the best research and teaching are informed by practice. You have to be in touch with, work with and learn from industry. Teaching, especially executive teaching, is enriched by an ability to relate the concepts to actual company experiences.

    Second, most of the major advances in the practice of business operations have come not from academia, but from industry. The time-based competitive practices we know today were first developed at Toyota. The quality movement of the 1980s and the development of modern supply chains also were practice-driven. The time I spent in industry learning about time-based competition gave my writings more impact on practice and changed my view about how to conduct research. Time in the field working with practitioners and learning from them can pay huge dividends.

    Finally, researchers should be bold and seek out interesting collaborators. Unless you are that rare innovator, you will not find the new, counterintuitive idea that characterizes good research—the research that changes how people think about things. Any success I had in research is because I have had outstanding collaborators or mentors. Chief among them was the late Bruce Henderson, founder of Boston Consulting Group and a great friend of Vanderbilt and the Owen School. ■

     

     

  • Secrets of the tech sector

    Secrets of the tech sector

    TechSector1
    First-year MBA Winston Ling views Earth from an outer space point of view while visiting Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. “Googlers” can spend 20 percent of their time working on side projects related to the business. One of Google’s engineers created the viewing booth—an interactive toy essentially—so people could use it to go around the Earth from space. Google’s Heather Webb, MBA’07, hosted the Vanderbilt visit. Photo Credit: Samantha Levine

    Former Apple executive Mike Janes, MBA’84, still remembers the message Sam Richmond, former dean of Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, delivered to students on their first day of classes.

    “You’re going to work really hard and you’re going to learn a lot of stuff—and within five years it’ll all be obsolete,” Richmond told the students assembled in Averbuch Auditorium. “We’re not here to teach you facts: We’re here to teach you to be efficient absorbers of experience.”

    Janes took the dean’s words to heart. When he joined FedEx after graduation, the company was just starting to track packages digitally. Little more than a decade later, as its first VP of e-commerce, his division had emerged as one of the company’s fastest growing segments.

    mikejanes_CC_fmt
    Mike Janes, MBA’84

    By 1998, Apple snatched him away as the first VP and general manager of the tech giant’s global online retail operation, working for now-CEO Tim Cook. After Apple, he moved on to senior executive roles at StubHub, FanSnap, and is now chief marketing officer at the startup Vacatia, which has attracted significant Silicon Valley investment to launch an AirBnB-like resort marketplace for vacationing families.

    For all his success in the tech industry, Janes says he continues to enjoy innovating, disrupting and creating value. “I like to lay the tracks. I don’t want to drive the train,” he says.

    In many ways, Janes’ career path has also foreshadowed today’s explosion of interest in tech jobs, both among Vanderbilt business school graduates and vast new companies that either didn’t exist, or barely existed, a generation ago.

    In 2015, Amazon hired more Vanderbilt MBAs than any other company, and a full 19 percent of the class reported going into the technology sector with salaries roughly equal to financial services. By comparison, 11 percent of Vanderbilt graduates accepted technology jobs in 2007, often at lower starting pay than other fields.

    Dean Eric Johnson, himself a well-known presence in Silicon Valley, says Vanderbilt’s management programs are well-positioned to teach the skills necessary to thrive in the tech sector. “Technology is changing not only how business is conducted but how it’s taught,” Johnson says. “The learning styles of millennials are pushing them toward experiential, immersive curricula.”

    The school has added curriculum including marketing analytics and optional seminars where students can learn to use developer tools, like the popular Ruby on Rails, to create their own web apps. And this year, Vanderbilt is offering a class called Innovation Realization, which brings together students from law, engineering and business to develop a commercialization strategy around a new technology that’s been developed at the university.

    Outside the classroom, an annual Tech Trek—a whirlwind week of visits to Google, Amazon and other tech titans on the west coast—has been growing more popular each year, often leading students to first-year internships, and ultimately, full-time jobs.

     

    Future focused and full speed

    Despite the move to help prepare students better for a career in tech, it’s impossible to fully keep pace with the industry. “You’re always innovating, trying to be on the cutting edge,” says Brad Rosenfeld, MBA’13, general manager of Amazon’s publishing venture. “In tech, you’re building and launching rather than sustaining and maintaining.”

    Speed is one trait that sets technology apart from other industries. There’s always pressure to be ahead of the curve, says Keith Whitman, MBA’11. He says he forecasts multiple industry outcomes about the future of tech on a regular basis in his job as a manager in long-range planning at Intel.

    Intel maintains massive portfolios of intellectual property—game-changing technologies still years away from turning into tangible products. “There’s a huge risk that you will miss a major find, which may not become apparent until years, decades even, after it’s missed,” Whitman says. At Intel, he is constantly looking out for the impact of global trends on technologies that aren’t even to market yet. “For better or worse, I think we’re always looking forward.”

    Along with the fast pace and future focus of the tech industry, it is uniquely diverse, Whitman adds. Companies that build hardware versus those that create software, for instance, differ tremendously in their day-to-day operations. Also, he says, overlap within the industry is common. Fortune 500 tech companies are enmeshed—Apple is one of Intel’s largest customers, for example.

     

    Constant adaptation

    While many tech companies are intent on speeding towards the future, their organizations often have to play catch up in traditional business functions like finance and HR—sometimes putting their own twist on things.

    20120327SU013_CC_fmt
    Latia Harris, MBA’13

    That’s what led Latia Harris, MBA’13, to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where she jumped into human relations work in the company’s new customer advocacy department. Harris says she’s essentially a storyteller—communicating how HPE can strategically solve problems for customers. “There aren’t clear-cut answers,” she says, since each customer brings unique challenges to the table. To be good at her job, she says she must be comfortable doing what she calls “living in the gray.”

    Harris credits her Vanderbilt education for helping her navigate this role. “I didn’t learn ‘how to do HR,’ I learned how to think through messy things,” she says. “I apply that every day in this role because we’re learning it as we go.”

    HP’s customer advocacy department is an example of a major player in tech reinventing itself internally. In fact, tech companies of all sizes must constantly adapt—though blue-chip companies like Intel, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard do so differently than Box, Pinterest, Salesforce and Snapchat.

    “Tech’s kind of a monster on its own,” Intel’s Whitman says, adding, “in a good way.”

    The common thread is people. Amazon’s Rosenfeld says the most important skill in the industry is the ability to connect well with others who see the world differently. Vanderbilt is very good at developing those traits in students, he adds, because the school is fundamentally collaborative rather than cutthroat. “In the tech space, it is critical to be able to relate to individuals who have different incentives. To reach a common goal, you must have that ability to form human connection,” he says.

    Frank Lawrence, MBA’99, chief compliance officer at Facebook and an alum of Google and Coinstar, says at most tech companies you’ll never be in some office by yourself clicking away on a computer. “Everything happens though relationships and collaboration. At any of the Silicon Valley giants, you have got to get that skill set down.”

    Lawrence says top minds at tech-centric companies understand how to leverage the strengths of a diverse team. “Leaders in tech are not very hierarchical. They think in flat terms,” he says. “They want input from people no matter what level they are.”

    Frank Lawrence, MBA '99
    Frank Lawrence, MBA ’99

    A strong team, he says, is a diverse one, which is why graduates from Vanderbilt, with its collaborative culture, do so well in these flat organizations. Good companies like Facebook and Google are looking for diverse employees who solve problems in unique ways.

     

    Data-driven with human heart

    The ability to communicate and work well, and quickly, with people from many different backgrounds, makes Vanderbilt graduates stand out, says Dean Johnson. The school’s long-established collaborative culture develops graduates well-suited to thrive in the massive, unusually diverse and breakneck-paced technology industry.

    “The skills we teach and the way we live here are centered on collaboration, which fits in well in the technology sector,” he says. “Those companies all live and breathe that—it’s very much the way they see the world.”

    Google, for example, is famous for its collaborative culture. They really do walk the walk, according to Heather Webb, MBA’07, who moved to Google as a human relations manager nearly a year ago. Much of her career has been spent at GE, and throughout it, her job has involved coaching corporations through major transformations. She says that one of the tools from business school that sticks with her and remains on her desk is The Heart of Change, a book Professor Dick Daft assigned to read at Vanderbilt.

    The trick to change, she says, is to understand that people are driving it. “I think people will tell you they’re very data-driven, but at some point, you have to have add a human heart and touch to everything,” she says. “At the end of the day, people are people, and they want to know there’s someone there to listen to them.” ■

  • Where the grads are

    Where the grads are

    PHOTOS BY DANIEL DUBOIS AND JOE HOWELL

    Students-VU-hands

    Like the stock market and the world economy, the marketplace for MBA talent is in constant flux. For Vanderbilt and its students, preparing for the future means keeping a constant eye on hiring trends, technological developments and geographical shifts, among a dozen other parameters. With employment figures in for the Class of 2015, Vanderbilt Business decided to look at job placement and trends in the years before and after the 2008 financial crisis.

    This year’s economic environment is still evolving, but Vanderbilt’s 2015 full-time MBA graduates entered a business world viewed as stronger than any since before the recession. In fact, Bloomberg Business Week called it “the best job market in a decade.”

    One sign of the rebound, according to Emily Anderson, MBA’99, director of Owen’s Career Management Center, was visible in the internships that are such a key part of the MBA program at Vanderbilt.

    A full 100 percent of the Class of 2015 looking for internships had offers during the summer of 2014. Those impressive figures correlate to employment stats. “In 2010, less than 20 percent of internships turned into full-time job offers,” Anderson says. “In 2015, it was more than 50 percent.”

    Where they’re going

    Woman-listeningJob offers for the Class of 2015 reveal interesting shifts and the results of where grads are accepting employment.

    Individual companies help drive those geographical trends, and the most obvious takeaways in the recent list of top-hiring companies for Owen grads are the No. 1 hiring position of Amazon and the presence of firms like AT&T, Citi, Deloitte, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Johnson & Johnson as the ultimate destinations of many Owen grads.

    “We are impacted by individual company hiring needs and expansion,” Anderson says. “The most obvious example for Owen is Amazon’s expansion. Amazon has multiple MBA-level management development programs and is able to provide a lot of geographic flexibility for the students. They certainly have corporate functions in Seattle, but other opportunities throughout the U.S. as well because of their extensive distribution footprint.”

     

    PLACEMENT BY INDUSTRY (2007: blue | 2011: gold | 2015: white)

    Placement-by-industry-graph

     

    Top hiring companies

    Let’s begin with geography and a growing shift westward for Owen grads. Nashville remains the top city for Vanderbilt MBAs (as is typical for any national MBA program, the largest alumni base is always in its own region). New York and Atlanta have jockeyed for second place as employment destinations throughout the past decade, and San Francisco has become a steady top-five presence. Now with Los Angeles and Seattle both making the top 10, the pull in that direction is obvious.

    TOP DESTINATIONS FOR CLASS OF 2015 GRADUATES

    Destinations-Class-2015

    TOP HIRING COMPANIES IN ORDER OF NUMBER OF GRADS HIRED
    2007
    • Bank of America: 6
    • Citigroup: 6
    • Deloitte: 6
    • Capgemini: 3
    • General Electric: 3
    • Harrah’s Entertainment: 3
    • Johnson & Johnson: 3
    • PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP: 3
    2015
    • Amazon: 12
    • Deloitte: 9
    • AT&T: 4
    • Citi: 4
    • The North Highland Company: 4
    • American Airlines: 3
    • General Electric: 3
    • Hewlett-Packard (HP): 3
    • Johnson & Johnson: 3
    • KMPG Consulting: 3

    Student-interviews

    Trends in operations and tech

    The Amazon connection figures prominently in the visibility of operations management as a job function.

    “Employment in operations has increased primarily because we are a major partner in recruiting with Amazon and they have hired a lot of students over the past three years—mostly in operations roles,” Anderson says. “There are a few other firms as well, especially in technology, that have increased hiring, but the majority of the impact comes from Amazon. They became our largest employer three years ago and will be again this year.”

    Technology is, of course, a prime driver of economic growth and change, and it has had an increasing role in employment decisions. The field saw dramatic change over the past decade, with employment for graduates falling by half between 2007 and 2009, and then climbing—first slowly, then dramatically—between 2011 and 2015.

    “The growth and excitement in technology has certainly led to increased interest in the tech sector, and we see more of our students heading to tech hubs in Seattle and San Francisco,” says Owen Dean M. Eric Johnson. “Our annual tech trek to visit companies keeps growing, with this year’s trek being the biggest—both in terms of the number of companies visited and students participating.”

    Consulting blossoms

    Gaining new skills was key to the career plans of second-year MBA student John Von Euw. A Massachusetts native who taught in New Orleans with Teach for America, Von Euw moved into administration and then decided he needed to expand his quantitative and technical skills.

    “Once I got to Owen,” he says, “I decided to pivot away from education and focus my job search on strategy consulting in the private sector. I think what really motivated me was the opportunity to work for a consulting firm on projects in a number of different industries.”

    Consulting, in fact, has seen a strong uptick among Owen grads after a downturn during the recession.

    “Economic downturns impact consulting first,” Anderson says. “Companies shift discretionary spending away from projects they would normally use consultants for—like big software implementations. Consulting hiring out of business schools decreases.”

    The bounce back was just as dramatic. By 2015, a quarter of all Vanderbilt MBAs were going into the consulting field.

    “Coming out of the recession,” Anderson says, “we have changes in the regulatory environment that impact how companies do their business and may cause them to seek outside help to understand and react. I believe the Affordable Care Act in health care and the financial reform bill did impact and increase hiring for consulting firms.”

    SALARY BY INDUSTRY
    Salary-by-industry

    Health expectations

    With an aging population with increasing medical needs, health care is expected to be the fastest-growing industry in the next decade. Owen’s expertise in health care management makes its students attractive to established firms and startups alike.

    “The rise and growth of new firms in the industry has also increased hiring,” Anderson says. “These are not hospitals hiring, but firms like McKesson, DaVita, Cardinal Health and Medtronic, which provide products and services to the health care industry.”

    Health care hiring at Owen spiked as the recession hit—perhaps because health care is seen as recession-resistant—going from 8 percent in 2007 to 19 the following year. It dropped again dramatically in 2012 and 2013, then rose in the past two years.

    Attraction of finance

    “We still have many students heading into finance and accounting,” Johnson says. “Wall Street beckons many students, and we had a solid group of first-year students visiting the banks this fall. Even so, fewer are focused on traditional Wall Street firms. Rather, we see more students taking finance roles in technology and health care.”

    In parsing the numbers since 2007, Anderson adds, “I think the core number of those interested in investment banking was stable. In my observation, student career aspirations did not change that dramatically due to recession. Students continued to seek MBAs and use the degree to redirect their careers in line with their interests.

    “Financial services recruiting decreased during the last downturn,” she says. “That was due to slower recruiting but was also impacted by graduates deciding to look elsewhere.” Those students who were marginally interested or for whom finance was a second choice chose other industries and functions, she says. “I believe Owen, like most MBA programs, has seen those students gravitating to technology and consulting.”

    SALARY BY GEOGRAPHY

    Salary-by-geography

    What’s ahead?

    Like the class before them, the Class of 2016 saw a full 100 percent of those seeking internships accept one. Approximately half of those students returned to campus in August having received full-time job offers from their internship companies. By graduation, that number had soared. (In 2015, nearly 90 percent of the graduating class had received job offers.) Current trends in location, hiring companies, metro areas and industries are expected to continue for the Class of 2016.