Vanderbilt Business

Category: Features

  • Sharing the Business Brand

    Sharing the Business Brand

    Skip Culbertson
    Skip Culbertson joined the Owen School in 2014 as EDI’s first full-time executive director.

    It’s time to let you in on the Owen School’s best-kept secret: The school educates hundreds of business professionals every year outside of its traditional MBA and master’s degree programs.

    That far corner of Management Hall with signs that say “Executive Programs?” That’s where the secret is kept: It’s one of the locations for Vanderbilt’s Executive Development Institute, which provides short but intensive nondegree business courses, custom education programs for companies, and challenging certificate programs in key business principles. (The program also has offices across the street from campus at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel office complex.)

    Established in 1978, the institute now has its first full-time executive director, Robert “Skip” Culbertson, who joined Owen in 2014. A longtime human resources and executive education leader, Culbertson aims to grow EDI’s impact, expand the Vanderbilt Owen brand and forge new partnerships with client companies.

    As he does that, there are some things he won’t change: courses taught by the same business faculty and lecturers as the degree programs; content that focuses on leadership, teamwork and core business skills; and the core of the Owen School experience—excellence, collegiality and accessibility.

    “The main thing here is the intimacy you get out of the Vanderbilt experience,” Culbertson says. “We’re not a mass shop. You get to know the people in your courses—your network—and the organization very well. The faculty are accessible. The Vanderbilt experience is based on understanding, knowing and helping each other succeed.”
     

    Classroom dynamics

    Participants range from those wanting to hone skills in a particular business topic to MBAs brushing up their skills. Others want to advance within their organizations, and some want to earn Vanderbilt credentials. Participants can take any of 15 different classes, and Culbertson says more are in development. Those aiming for certificates of excellence take four courses over time. Custom programs developed with company clients can vary in content, instructors and even location based on organizational needs.

    Each class is taught by Vanderbilt faculty and/or subject-matter experts from industry. These two- to three-day classes typically include 20 to 30 participants, with plenty of opportunities for sharing insights—and contact information for valuable networking.

    Bill Stanczykiewicz, president and CEO of the nonprofit Indiana Youth Institute in Indianapolis, says the chance to share a classroom with others was what inspired his organization’s board to send him to Vanderbilt’s EDI program. At first, Stanczykiewicz says, he looked at another renowned school that was closer to home. “The board actually insisted I go to Vanderbilt, to get away from the work environment and learn in person,” he says.

    Since fall 2011, Stanczykiewicz has logged six classes, earning a Vanderbilt certificate in leadership excellence along the way. He worked on a class project that laid the groundwork for his organization’s statewide college and career counseling initiative, learned he was more creative than he originally thought, and learned from instructors who have shaped the way he teaches his own classes as an adjunct professor at Purdue University.

    “It was a remarkable experience,” he says. “I only wish there were more classes for me. Ninety percent of the subject matter transferred directly to my work.” In addition, whenever he didn’t want to burden the rest of the class with a nonprofit question, he says the instructors were readily available to provide personalized insight in private conversations.

     

    Organizations benefit

    Sue Hall, senior leadership and organizational development consultant at Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville, Tennessee, also has seen great growth through the EDI program. In her case, however, it has been from a different vantage point.

    Through a long-term partnership with Vanderbilt, TVA has had upwards of 300 rising middle managers receive a broader view of the company as well as overall business topics. TVA’s custom EDI program has seen roughly 45 percent of its graduates experience lateral or upward movement in the organization within two years.

    The program, currently on hiatus, has included subjects such as accounting, process improvement coaching and strategic decision making. It also has featured team-based action learning projects specific to TVA issues. Better yet, Hall says, participants presented those projects to senior management on graduation day, further increasing their own visibility.

    Custom programs within organizations such as TVA and Nissan give employees a different type of currency than an MBA, says David Owens, professor of the practice of management and innovation. “A program like this gives people face time with executives, people they’d never see otherwise,” he notes.

    Owens has taught in Vanderbilt’s MBA program for about 15 years and at EDI for about a dozen. He says each of the two programs has influenced his teaching style in the other. Early on, he says, he was more philosophical with his MBA students and more applied with those in EDI. Now he’s more balanced with each.

    Jon Lehman, adjunct professor of management and EDI faculty director, says he’s learned that he enjoys all types of students. His specialties are health care, strategy and business economics.

    “I know EDI is going to see expanded programming, that we will develop deeper relationships with more clients, and that we will expand our geographic reach,” Lehman says. “I think we will see a period of significant growth.”

     

    Drawing trans-institutionally

    In expanding the program, Culbertson would like to see not only more partnerships with client organizations, but also greater collaboration university-wide. He envisions instructors from Peabody College, the School of Engineering and the School of Medicine, for example, in addition to those from the business school.

    The Executive Development Institute’s offerings are typically composed of about 60 percent custom and 40 percent open enrollment students. Culbertson aims to move to a 50-50 balance over time. “For that, we’re going to have to expand our open portfolio,” he says. Ideas at various stages of fruition include a focus on health care, strategic leadership and critical thinking, and private wealth management with an emphasis on family succession. Though the on-campus experience is part of EDI’s draw, the program just launched its first online learning program, a version of Owen’s Strategic Innovation course. The program drew students from 15 states within the U.S. as well as Brazil, Mexico, Canada and Africa.

    “EDI is a gem. I wouldn’t have taken this job if I didn’t believe it,” Culbertson says. “There’s a lot of great positive backwind for us to sail on.”

    Find more about EDI at vu.edu/owen-edi

  • Love Amid the Ledgers

    Love Amid the Ledgers

    Liz and Russ Fleischer are living a Vanderbilt Owen love story.

    What began as a chance meeting when they were paired as foursome partners at an Owen-sponsored golf tournament in the summer of 1990 soon blossomed into a relationship set against the backdrop of study sessions for finance class and visits to local hangouts like San Antonio Taco Co. and 12th & Porter.

    Russ Fleischer was a second-year MBA student, while Liz Stapp had just started as a first year. Despite Russ’ graduation in the spring of 1991 and his move to upstate New York to start his career, the two continued to date. By the time Liz walked across the stage at Commencement the following year, they were determined to find their way back to each other.

    The partnerships they built with classmates at Owen helped them do just that.

    “It is the relationships and the people that I value most about my Owen experience,” Russ, MBA’91, says. “When Liz took her job in Atlanta over the summer of ’92, I told her, ‘I will find my way to Atlanta.’ And through the really great Owen network that has always served me well, the wife of one of my best friends from Vanderbilt helped me get a position in Atlanta at Ernst and Young.”

    Fleischers
    Russ and Liz Fleischer at their engagement party.

    The couple married in May 1994. Though the next 20 years brought career changes, moves and the birth of their twins—daughter Amelia and son Alexander, who are now 12—their love for each other and their alma mater remained constant.

    “One of the great things I found about Owen is the lack of competitiveness. You’re really supporting each other,” Liz, MBA’92, says. “You aren’t in competition with your neighbor, but rather working with and learning from your neighbor.”

    A gift back for the gift given

    Recently their gratitude, both for the educations they received and that they met at the business school, inspired them to give back to Vanderbilt by endowing the Liz and Russ Fleischer Scholarship. The scholarship, which will be awarded for the first time this fall, will provide financial support for deserving students to attend the Owen School without the burden of impending debt.

    The gift is one that had been on the Fleischers’ minds for a while. The timing seemed to be right last year when Russ, a longtime technology industry entrepreneur, sold his company, HighJump, to Accellos and went to work with Battery Ventures in Boston.

    “We’ve been very fortunate from a career perspective and a general life perspective,” Russ says. “Vanderbilt, and the Owen School in particular, have been so special to us. Over time we thought, ‘What better way to show that than to create opportunities for deserving students we could assist in some way?’”

    Equipped to tackle the world

    After Commencement, Liz joined UPS in Atlanta as marketing director and oversaw the company’s sponsorship of the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games. Later, she worked in marketing for Staples and NextJet. She volunteers with several nonprofits in the couple’s current hometown of Fort Worth, Texas.

    Both Fleischers know how important philanthropy is and hope that the students who benefit from their scholarship will share not only their passion for Owen, but also for giving back.

    “I want them to take away a joyful experience that makes them want to give back to the school when they finish because they had such a fantastic experience,” Russ says.Liz agrees and adds, “I hope that the students who benefit from the scholarship discover the things they want to accomplish, and then use the great skills they’ve learned at Vanderbilt to go out and tackle the world.”

    Russ and Liz’s Owen story will continue long after the first Liz and Russ Fleischer Scholarship is awarded this fall.

    “I want them to take away a joyful experience.” —Russ Fleischer

    The couple is committed to doing even more for the school they feel has given them so much.

    “For us, this is just the beginning of something. We would like to grow the endowment for this particular scholarship, without question,” Russ says. “Continuing to be attached and associated with the school remains very high on our radar.”

  • Inside the It City

    Inside the It City

    Call it buzz. Call it sizzle. Call it Music City mojo. By almost any measure, Nashville is an It City. Publications from The New York Times to GQ, Southern Living to Rolling Stone and Bon Appetit to Business Insider have sung its praises.

    Downtown Nashville
    Revitalized shops and restaurants along historic Broadway reflect in a panoramic view of the new growth in downtown Nashville.

    Our branding may still have country music at its core (and given the long, loving establishment shots airing weekly on the ABC series that bears its name, who’s complaining?), but it now includes professional sports, the health care and automotive industries, world-class education, fine dining, upscale downtown living and an explosion of entrepreneurship. Combine those with a reputation for safety and civility, and you’ve got everything any convention and visitors bureau might want.

    “We have all the assets of a growing, vibrant city,” says Country Music Association CEO Sarah Trahern, EMBA’04, “and we’ve been able to hold onto the intimate business environment we had before.”

    Sarah Trahern
    Sarah Trahern, EMBA’04, says that the tie between business and the music industry is one of Nashville’s strong points.

    Owen Dean Eric Johnson, who returned to the city after 14 years at Dartmouth College, says the changes were almost like Rip Van Winkle falling asleep. “In coming back, everything was dramatically different,” he says. He cites the Nashville Predators and Tennessee Titans, both of which began play in Nashville in 1998, as well as the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, opening five years later, as among the keys to a re-emergent downtown. The 1994 lifting of a ban on most downtown residential development contributed to transformations like that of 12 South, which Johnson saw go from “a pretty unsavory place” into “the hottest, coolest thing ever.”

    Johnson came back to a business school whose people and programs are an integral part of the city’s transformation. After all, while affordability, climate, far-sighted governance, and attractiveness to a young, upscale demographic all play a part, a great business climate is crucial. A recent Gallup poll ranked Nashville in the nation’s top five metro areas for job growth, and CNN Money called it one of the five “best cities to launch a startup.”

    Nation’s health care manager

    A key component is health care, and there are few stronger examples of synergy than Bernard Health, conceived by Alex Tolbert, JD/MBA’07, in a health law class. The Nashville-based company offers health care planning and advice to individuals and corporations.

    Alex Tolbert, JD/MBA'07, combined two of Nashville's strengths, health care and entrepreneurship, when he founded Bernard Health.
    Alex Tolbert, JD/MBA’07, combined two of Nashville’s strengths, health care and entrepreneurship, when he founded Bernard Health.

    Attracted to the city while visiting his brother, who attended Vanderbilt, Tolbert “got really passionate about the misalignments in health care” while at Owen. He focused on health savings accounts, and when someone asked how he could start a business without raising initial outside capital, “I said I would get my insurance brokerage license and start calling on employers in Nashville to help them understand how HSAs might work for them and their employees,” he says. Bernard became a reality during his last year at Vanderbilt, and he is quick to praise the school’s atmosphere.

    “I don’t think it should be discounted, having an environment that really encourages entrepreneurship and experimentation,” he says, “and having cheerleaders among the professors, who bring students together with entrepreneurs who tell stories about how they did it. That’s a really big deal.”

    The Nashville area is home to more than 300 health care companies that extend the city’s reach nationwide, Johnson says. The dean, who also is the Ralph Owen Dean and Bruce D. Henderson Professor of Strategy, says, “Many cities have world-class health care, but what’s really different about Nashville is that we’ve become a city that manages health care for the whole country, in a quiet way that the average person in Columbus or Kansas City really wouldn’t think about.”

    Health care strategy is a must for businesses and individuals alike, and the Owen School’s role in preparing industry leaders since launching its Health Care MBA in 2005 makes it a key player.

    “We fundamentally believe that health care has become a topic that’s important for all managers to understand,” Johnson says. “Whether you work at GE, Exxon or Amazon, you’ve got to know something about it because the health care equation in the U.S. and what it means for corporate America is changing.”

    The industry’s reach and buzz help feed Nashville’s attractiveness to the best minds, Tolbert says. “Interesting people like to work on interesting problems. We’re attracting and keeping people here, and I like to think our growth and success are a good thing for Nashville.”

    (Continued below slideshow.)

    Power of connectedness

    The possibilities of a wider back-and-forth between industries are part of the approach of Van Tucker, EMBA’96, a consulting strategist and entrepreneur with a background in banking and finance. She’s now CEO of Fierce Company, which helps creative companies build business infrastructure around their products or ideas.

    “The CEO of a young clothing company can learn from a health care CEO running a multimillion-dollar company,” she says, “and that health care executive can learn from that young clothing company about connectedness and authenticity.”

    Tucker is also CEO of the Nashville Fashion Alliance, a trade association for the city’s burgeoning fashion industry—an industry driven by the city’s attractiveness to young, educated professionals. She cites yet another example of synergy in the way the group draws inspiration from the music industry.

    “In the 1950s, entrepreneurial visionaries like Owen and Harold Bradley and Chet Atkins believed the creative spirit could be nurtured in Nashville and an industry outside the chaos of New York and Los Angeles could thrive,” she says. “They started publishing companies, world-class recording studios, record labels, the CMA. We’re the largest concentration of music industry jobs in the U.S. because of their vision. That’s our vision for the Nashville Fashion Alliance—to nurture the infrastructure necessary to support and sustain fashion industry companies.”

    Business and music

    The CMA’s Trahern can attest to the success of the Bradley/Atkins model. Nashville’s history as a seat of government and education goes back to the 19th century, but country music is the foundation of its reputation. While the economics are tricky in an era of downloading, the brand has never been stronger. The genre is played on 2,200 radio stations, and the CMA’s three major network television specials get great ratings. Those, along with the series Nashville and the presence of Blake Shelton and Keith Urban on The Voice and American Idol, respectively, all contribute to the city’s image. Extending that reach is among Trahern’s main goals.

    “I love being able to spend time anchoring the CMA and country music into the fabric of the community as a whole,” says Trahern, who is also a board member of the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. She cites the work of Dr. Jeff Balser, Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and Dean of the School of Medicine and Vanderbilt Medical Center in helping the CMA create Instrumental Health Care, which gives musicians and songwriters the opportunity to get health insurance.

    “That town-and-gown kind of thing, unique strategic partnerships, is a Nashville strong point,” she says. “What’s more, banks support Music Row No. 1 parties, and the CMA has, in turn, created our foundation and given over $8 million dollars to get instruments back in Metro schools. It’s a way we give back to the community that’s given so much to us.”

    Success draws talent

    Vic Gotto
    Nashville’s mix of creative talent, established industries and capital sources makes it attractive to startups, says Vic Gotto, MBA’02.

    Like Tucker, Vic Gatto, MBA’02, CEO of Jumpstart Foundry, a health care business accelerator, and a partner in Solidus, an investment partnership, sees the city’s future in youth and creativity—places where Vanderbilt is well-positioned.

    “Nashville is the place every talented, highly mobile person wants to move to these days,” he says. “I think startups also migrate to where the ecosystem is most conducive to success. In Nashville, we have a very strong mix of creative talent, established industries and capital sources. While it is likely true that San Francisco and New York have more assets, Nashville has grown to be in the next tier of three or four cities that are slightly smaller and friendlier but almost as supportive of startup companies.”

    The city has, in fact, reached a point of critical mass, he says. “All of this talent flowing into our city creates a self-fulfilling dynamic in which great startups are able to hire very strong people, have success and then attract more talent into Nashville.”

    It’s a dynamic that established companies appreciate as well. Bridgestone Americas, long a Nashville presence, announced last November that it would relocate its headquarters and move three out-of-state businesses to a new facility downtown, ultimately installing more than 1,700 employees in the vibrant, growing SoBro district.

    “The fact that many bright, capable professionals call Nashville home is an advantage as we look to expand our workforce and recruit new talent across all of our business lines and support functions,” says Andrew Honeybone, MBA’04, the company’s vice president of talent acquisition. “Between now and the end of 2017 when we move into our new headquarters, we will be filling several hundred professional positions, so having an educated talent pool locally is very beneficial to our overall recruiting efforts and long-term talent strategy.”

    It helps that so many regional firms weave themselves into the structure of secondary and post-secondary education. Jennifer Hill, a 2015 MBA for Executives graduate, is manager of process control engineering at Nissan North America in Smyrna, Tennessee. Hill is adamant about reaching out, particularly to young women and encouraging STEM careers.

    Jennifer Hill
    Is Nashville the new auto capital of the country? Ask Jennifer Hill, EMBA’15, who works as a process engineering manager at the Nissan Smyrna assembly plant. In 2006, Nissan moved its entire U.S. headquarters to the Nashville area.

    “I am fortunate to work for a company that supports the ecosystem of fostering good talent,” she says. “I believe Nissan understands it is important to start in the community and influence the upcoming generation.”

    The It City appellation is one that resonates strongly with her.

    “It’s well-deserved,” she says. “I am a firm believer in the power of diversity, and that is an essential characteristic of Nashville. Focusing on higher learning initiatives and career opportunities is essential to the city’s success, and we are on the right track.”

    Absolutely on fire

    The confluence of industry and culture and the influx of people that makes Nashville a truly multidimensional and rapidly growing city provides challenges along with the opportunities.

    “For the hospitality industry, it’s a challenge to keep up with the growth,” says Rich May, EMBA’87, a food and hospitality consultant and investor whose M Street Entertainment and JHS Holdings represent some of the city’s best local restaurants, including Amerigo, Frothy Monkey, Whiskey Kitchen and Virago. “Although the market invariably finds equilibrium over the longer term, the pool of entrepreneurs is absolutely on fire.” May says that will abate somewhat as the hit rate inevitably subsides, but “it currently provides a refreshing and invigorating jolt of life to the city’s growth and reputation.”

    Helping companies negotiate those challenges is something Johnson sees as a clear part of Owen’s role. “We see tremendous opportunity partnering with companies to supply their management needs,” he says.

    Rich May
    Veteran hospitality entrepreneur Rich May, EMBA’87, is an investing partner, consultant and adviser in local coffeehouse Frothy Monkey and other restaurants in the region.

    He points to the Nashville Entrepreneur Center as a great vehicle to build the school’s entrepreneurship offering. “In a uniquely Nashville way, we do a very good job of partnering with the venture community, the startup community and many of the large companies in town to build a great ecosystem our students can participate in,” he says. He cites, too, the school’s immersive experiences, “where MBA students may spend a week on Wall Street, or in surgery suites or insurance companies, gaining a thorough understanding of what the business means where the rubber hits the road.” (Read “Being There” for more about immersion.)

    Organizations like the Nashville Health Care Council’s Fellows Program, Leadership Music and Leadership Nashville provide educational and networking opportunities, and Johnson says, “really leverage the strengths of what’s here in Nashville and enable us to fight way above our weight class as a city.”

    The ties between Owen, the city and the wide-ranging industries and demographics that comprise it seem to undergird the sound basics behind Nashville’s image.

    “Cool is fleeting,” Tucker says. “Well-run businesses stick around and have a sustainable economic impact. Someone said to me recently that the thing about being an It City is that you have to keep coming up with ‘Itness.’ I’m proud of all of the press Nashville is garnering, and it’s certainly warranted, but the real quality has always been the genuineness and connectedness we all share to make Nashville a great place to live and work.”

    May echoes her words. “Owen is neither the largest nor the oldest B-school out there, but it may very well be among the most tightly knit,” he says. “Its conscious effort to promote and maintain engagement augurs well for both the school and the city.”

    Tolbert says he’s extremely bullish on Nashville. “We’ve got so much going for us, and I think our motto at this point ought to be, ‘Just don’t screw it up.’”

  • The Man Millions of Baby Boomers Turn to for Investment Advice

    The Man Millions of Baby Boomers Turn to for Investment Advice

    If you’re one of the millions of investors who invest in managed accounts or mutual funds at Fidelity Investments, then you know Derek Young’s work. Young, MBA’91, is president of Fidelity’s Global Asset Allocation division and vice chairman of Pyramis Global Advisors. He leads an investment division at Fidelity that provides investors with solutions that can help them meet their financial needs from retirement and college planning to wealth management and tax-sensitive investing. His division’s clients include individuals, intermediaries and institutions.

    “We try to make investments simple for the investor,” he says, “by devising strategies for today and through retirement.”

    Derek Young
    During a roundtable discussion last year, Young talked about the Owen culture and how it shapes leaders. Watch the roundtable video

    Those investment strategies are included in 401(k), 403(b) and defined benefit plans, including the popular Fidelity Freedom Funds.

    Young’s business is responsible for $568 billion in assets under management. His team is responsible for managing an array of investment solutions as well as for the online retirement planning and calculation tools on Fidelity.com. It also provides personalized wealth management strategies for Fidelity’s high net worth clients looking to build, preserve and transfer their wealth.

    “One size fits me” investment plans

    Today’s investors, Young says, are increasingly choosing plans designed specifically for them. “Our clients are transitioning from ‘one size fits all’ to ‘one size fits me,’” he says. “More people are transferring their retirement planning to an investment manager.”

    Whether using an investment manager or not, Young says that the most important piece of guidance he can share is “develop a long-term strategy and stick with it.”

    “Young’s business oversees $568 billion in assets.

    “The problem for most people,” he says, “is that they pull their money out when they see the market falling and get back in when it goes up. That means they’ve sold low and bought high, which is very different from how they make other purchases.

    “In asset allocation, we favor building a well-diversified portfolio consisting of multiple asset classes focused on your unique risk and return needs to achieve your specific investment goals.”

    Instead of “buy and hold,” Young recommends “buy and review.” He points to Fidelity’s Freedom Fund, for example, which targets the investor’s retirement date. The diversified, age-based portfolio of mutual funds is reviewed regularly and the allocation becomes more conservative as the retirement year approaches. After the target date passes, the fund becomes even more conservative.

    Save, save, save

    For young investors, he has three words of advice: save, save, save. “What people save in their 20s and 30s is most important for wealth creation and having enough money for retirement,” Young says.

    “One of the most difficult situations I’ve had to watch is baby boomers who are nearing retirement and find that they haven’t saved enough. That means they’ll have to work longer than they planned, or change their lifestyle significantly, or both,” he says.

    Young keeps a steady eye on market activity and world trends, which affect the balance of assets in any portfolio. He notes that currently, the overall U.S. economy is expanding and benefiting from a decline in oil prices.

    “This backdrop should be generally constructive for domestic equities,” he says, adding that global economic trends remain slower. Young does caution, however, that trying to time the market by predicting change is difficult for even the very best investors. “It is often the source of significant losses for individual investors in particular,” he says.

    Career kick-start

    Young began thinking about a career in investment management following an internship with the State of Tennessee between his first and second year at Owen.

    “I worked with the state pension plan, where we were dealing with large sums of money,” he recalls. “After that I decided to work toward becoming a chartered financial analyst.” His career received a kick-start one afternoon in 1991 at a gathering in the Management Hall courtyard.

    “Bill Taylor from the Federal Reserve Bank spoke to Professor Dewey Daane’s class that day,” recalls Young, who was then in his second year. “After class I invited him to come to the party. We were talking about the tough job market for MBAs at that time, and he said, ‘If you send me your résumé, you’ve got a job.’”

    Young took Taylor up on the offer and after Commencement, became a senior financial analyst in charge of derivatives and capital markets for the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C.

    He later joined KPMG as a senior manager in regulator risk management practice. “I was trading derivatives, which are important tools when used appropriately,” he says. “My finance professor, Hans Stoll, had a strong background in derivatives, which was cutting edge at the time. His instruction was helpful to me at the Federal Reserve and with KPMG.”

    Since joining Fidelity in 1996, Young has served as portfolio manager of various funds, managed multiasset-class asset allocation portfolios, served as co-lead of the Fidelity Canadian Asset Allocation team, led Fidelity’s U.S. Asset Allocation Committee and represented North America on the firm’s global asset allocation committee. Before his promotion to president of the company’s global asset allocation division in 2011, Young was Fidelity’s chief investment officer for asset allocation.

    Drawn by collegiality

    A native of Georgia, Young came to Vanderbilt after earning a bachelor’s degree in 1986 from Troy University in Alabama. He was attracted by the business school’s reputation for faculty and student collegiality.

    Today, the 50-year-old father of two college-age daughters lives and works in Boston. He is a member of the Owen School’s alumni board and says the school’s supportive culture has also stood him well professionally.

    “Vanderbilt MBAs have a unique ability to work in teams and partner with their peers rather than achieving their personal goals at the expense of their teammates,” he says. “The sum of the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

  • High Satisfaction

    High Satisfaction

    Read McNamara
    Read McNamara

    Last year, it was the end of March before full-time job offers for the Class of 2014 approached 72 percent. This year? In January, 72 percent of the Class of 2015 already had offers.

    It’s expected that by 90 days after Commencement, 90 percent of graduates will have full-time job offers, making this the third consecutive year Owen hit that mark.

    While members of the Owen School’s Career Management Center are quick to credit an improved job market and employer optimism, they also acknowledge that the CMC’s strategy of sharpened focus on employers and student coaching is paying off.

    “We’re in our third year of what I would call a bull market,” says Read McNamara, managing director of the CMC and corporate affairs. “What’s changed radically from when I came here in 2010 is a greater confidence in the economy. I think we’re now at a point where firms are finally confident enough to build back to their prior numbers in terms of strength and size of the workforce.”

    “We’re in our third year of what I’d call a bull market.”

    Add to that the quality and stability of the veteran CMC staff, and employer and student satisfaction levels rise. “Being able to attract staff who have succeeded in the corporate world gives them tremendous credibility when they approach students as coaches,” McNamara says. “Regarding stability, career management is a business that undergoes quite a bit of turnover and attrition. There’s a lot of poaching in this field—especially when you get into the top 20-30 schools—so I pinch myself every morning. I am blessed to have one of the best staffs in the business.”

    McNamara and Emily Anderson, MBA’99, director of operations and coaching, also point to the quality of Vanderbilt students and the relationships CMC staff have with them. “The size of our student body allows us to know them and to track them over time,” Anderson says. Those personal relationships aid the staff in helping the students identify and prepare for what paths they want to pursue.

    “We get a wide variety of backgrounds. Students have a varying degree of knowledge of what a business career path is. We try to help them figure out—based on their experience, their skills, their interest areas—what might be possible avenues for them and to understand the longer term career progression,” she says.

    Student prep

    In addition to helping students discover their focus, Anderson and the coaching staff work on preparing students for successful internships and interviews. “You can have a good market, but students still have to go execute,” she says. “They have to know what they want to do and then they have to be able to present themselves to the employer base in a way that makes their candidacy compelling. We work on that a lot.”

    In January 2015, 72 percent of the Class of 2015 already had offers.

    Job Fair
    Students and recruiters value CMC programs like this career fair.

    Anderson says that they coach the students to understand what employers want and how to judge whether the organization’s cultural fit is right. “Is teamwork very important to that employer or is it pure horsepower and raw knowledge they want? If so, how do you go into an interview knowing how to perform in that environment?” Anderson says. “Employers take recruiting seriously and they look for candidates that match their qualities. Sometimes it’s circumstances, sometimes it’s a cultural fit.”

    The coaches and students do similar preparation for internships. Anderson says that all internships have a defined project or role over 10-12 weeks. “That allows employers to see how the students communicate, use teamwork or work independently,” Anderson says. For many employers, the goal of these internships is to convert the internships to full-time offers. In 2014, 53 percent of internships converted to offers—up sharply from less than 30 percent in 2010.

    High satisfaction

    McNamara’s role includes engaging employers and recruiting new corporate partners. “We’ve been able over the past five years to build up a constellation of reliable, consistent employers who are here in good times and bad, looking to not only hire a number of interns but to extend multiple full-time offers,” he says. Five years ago, only two companies hired three or more students. In 2014, six companies hired three or more, with Amazon hiring 12.

    Emily Anderson
    Emily Anderson

    “We serve two customer bases—No. 1, the students, and No.2, the employers. We’re fortunate enough to have performance metrics for both those universes that allow us to objectively gauge and assess how we are doing,” McNamara says. “I’m very proud that we have had four consecutive years of steadily improving student satisfaction—an important measure which is now at an all-time high. Given the quality and quantity of employers who come on campus now, I am confident that we are meeting the talent acquisition needs of our employer base as well.”

    That satisfaction isn’t just with new hires. Employers continue to report high satisfaction with retention and success of Vanderbilt alumni within their organizations.

    “You know one of the most gratifying things for me is to hear Geoff Walker [MBA’94 and executive vice president of global brands] at Mattel saying, ‘We did a study of retention and success, and Owen came out on top in terms of the MBA talent we recruited,’” McNamara says. “DaVita, another key employer of ours, said ‘Read, we went back years and looked at retention and progression of career, and Owen came out No. 1.’ When I see tangible, concrete evidence of the success of our students at premiere employers—when I’m not shown platitudes but the hard, concrete numbers of how well our graduates have done in their company—that is very gratifying.”

    What’s ahead?

    Sustaining that excellence is a top goal for the CMC. “When you get offers and acceptances above 90 percent at 90 days after Commencement, there’s not too much room to improve on those performance metrics,” McNamara says. “If we can continue to operate at the kind of level we are now in those performance metrics while advancing our average salary and bonus numbers, through good markets and bad markets, we would have good reason to be pleased.”

    But the CMC does have another future goal. “Right now we have outstanding relationships with a number of firms who recruit on campus and who will provide us with a speaker for a club or participate in our Distinguished Speaker series, as well as companies who will sponsor case competitions. What we do not have are those comprehensive, all-encompassing company relationships that run the gamut from on-campus recruiting all the way to an executive-in-residence,” McNamara says.

    “The dean and I have discussed that a top priority for me and the Career Management Center will be to play the pivotal role in developing strategic partnerships with key employers, the kind of relationships, for example, that the Sloan School at MIT has had for 50-60 years with General Motors,” he says. Such strategic relationships can pay off for schools in sponsored research, corporate advisory board members and named research centers.

    “If we sustain the level of excellence we have achieved in the key performance metrics we employ and we form those key relationships, I think the future of Owen looks very bright,” McNamara says.

  • Life at Owen, Owen for Life

    Life at Owen, Owen for Life

    Catalina Lizarralde—“Cata” to her friends—seems to operate at the accelerated pace of time-lapse photography. Or at least that’s how it can appear to those who, like Dean Eric Johnson, describe her as a powerhouse of energy and innovation.

    Cata Lizarralde
    Catalina “Cata” Lizarralde, Class of 2015

    Give her just a little time, and Lizarralde, a second-year MBA student, gets a lot done. A native of Colombia who grew up in Ecuador, Lizarralde spent a year in Austria after high school studying music and honing her Deutsch. While there, she found time to volunteer at the 2006 World Cup in Germany. “Who could know when another such opportunity might arise?” she decided.

    The next year, without fully mastering English, Lizarralde was in Columbus, Ohio, pursuing a bachelor’s degree. Amid a difficult job market following the financial crash in 2008, she reasoned, “I thought if I graduated faster it would show employers I could work at a high level.” She graduated from Ohio State with a double major in just three years.

    She was right. After graduation, Lizarralde went straight to New York, where she’d landed a job as a strategy and operations consultant with Deloitte. Working with clients around the United States and internationally, she says, “I learned that companies can be very different across industries and regions, but what drives their success is the caliber of their leaders.”

    Two new chief executives

    She arrived at Vanderbilt in August 2013. Opting to pursue an MBA because she believes it is the best way to grow as a business leader, it’s not surprising that Lizarralde was elected to the Owen Student Government Association three weeks after arriving on campus—or that she is serving this year as OSGA’s president.

    Owen’s other new female chief executive—Erika Bogar King, MBA’99—took a more deliberate approach, both to her career and to her newly assumed leadership of the Owen Alumni Board.

    For one thing, she says, she waited a little longer than most of her classmates (she was in her late 20s) to seek an MBA. For another, she didn’t immerse herself into activities. “I wasn’t hyperinvolved as a student,” says King, who serves as senior vice president of human resources for Avanade, a technology professional services firm established as a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture.

    In fact, though she met her future husband, Rogers King, MBA’99, at Owen—they had classes together during the first two mods—King even took a deliberate approach to their relationship. “We didn’t start dating until much later in the year,” she says, recalling the academic demands of that first fall.

    It was as a student that she realized what a gift alumni give when they come back to campus. She saw, she says, how valuable it was to “have alumni with real-life experience coming in and talking about what they’ve done in the real world.”

    Erika King, MBA'99
    Erika King, MBA’99

    King concentrated her MBA in human resources and organization management and joined Deloitte after graduation. In her two decades with the global giant, she moved from Deloitte Consulting’s Human Capital practice to leading Performance Management, where she focused on best practices, standards and tools, performance programs and effectiveness measures for all Deloitte U.S. firms.

    Shaped by personal experience

    Though Lizarralde and King took divergent paths, their respective presidencies illustrate something quintessentially Owen: They are drawing on their own perspectives, styles and experiences to help shape how students and alumni interact with the school.

    Lizarralde’s international background, for example, has given her a wide-angle lens to view opportunities for new OSGA initiatives. During her year in Austria, and even more as an undergrad in the Midwest, Lizarralde grappled with what she calls the cultural adjustment. But she also gained an acute appreciation for the advantages of working with diverse types of people.

    That shaping experience, in turn, gave Lizarralde a clearer sense of what she might contribute as a leader. “Even though we have an international community here,” she says, “it’s not that large because the school itself is small. I felt like I could add value because a lot of students hadn’t been exposed to other cultures. And I wanted international students to understand you can really make a difference here.”

    Under Lizarralde’s leadership, Johnson says, “OSGA has already launched several initiatives to build the Owen community and expand our global perspective.” And that was before the new academic year even began.

    Connecting students

    After being elected in March, Lizarralde and OSGA senators and committees explored ways to increase the interaction between students from differing years and backgrounds. One of their big ideas—an international immersion and trip for incoming students—was rapidly adopted, and implemented barely three months later.

    “It was the first time we’d had something structured like this,” Lizarralde explains. “We worked with the dean, and we created trips to Costa Rica for July that would be led by faculty and staff. The trips would provide some bonding but also include a component on how international business is done.”

    The OSGA team finished planning the details before the end of April, when Lizarralde left for New York and a summer internship with Diageo, the beverage company that owns such household names as Crown Royal and Guinness.

    Cata Lizarralde in class
    On top of classes and course work, Lizarralde spends 10–15 hours a week on Owen Graduate Student Association business.

    The internship didn’t interrupt Lizarralde’s work for OSGA. During the summer, she and her team worked with the Career Management Center to develop a timeline checklist to help incoming students better organize themselves. She and three members of OSGA’s international student committee also created a guidebook for international students. “When I came here, I didn’t know where to grocery shop, where to bank, where to get a driver’s license, or what I should avoid,” she explains. “We hope that having a guide like this can make the first-year experience easier.”

    And as the first mod in the fall began, OSGA was busy implementing a new program to increase interaction between first- and second-year MBA students. “Our idea,” Lizarralde explains, “was to divide the community into pods of 20 people, and give each pod a budget to do something fun together during the semester. We think this will especially benefit people who are less outgoing as well as the international students.”

    Giving back from day one

    Just as Lizarralde’s ideas for OSGA were influenced by her international background, King’s perspective on the efforts of the Alumni Board were shaped by her own experience as a young alum. While giving back has always been important to her—she and her husband both serve on the board of a nonprofit organization that supports early learning and quality childcare—she found that, in the years after graduating from Vanderbilt, her contributions to the school involved gifts of time more than money.

    Erika King and Rogers King
    King and her husband, Rogers King, MBA’99, in their Atlanta home. Parents of two sons, the couple met in their first year at Vanderbilt.

    Her postgraduation job in consulting enabled her to fly to Nashville from client sites easily. So at first, King maintained her connection with Owen by speaking to the consulting club, then at events for women in business, then as part of a series on leadership, then as an Alumni Board member. “In any area where I had subject knowledge, I’d go back and meet the students and share my thoughts,” she says. “To me, that’s one of the best ways our alumni can give back.”

    Understandably, one particular interest for King as a new board president is engaging more young alumni more deeply into the life of the school. Perhaps looking back on her own experience as a newly minted Vanderbilt MBA, King says, “I think sometimes people think the only way you can participate is with your money, and that’s not true.

    “A recent alum may not be in a position to give money or to make hiring decisions, but they can offer insight to students or help them get an internship. From there, they might be in a position later to come speak to a class,” she says. “We hope to engage people early, in small ways, and then see that engagement grow.”

    The effort is part of a broader diversification strategy that the board is developing in consultation with the dean. Within the next several years, Owen will have more than 10,000 alumni, increasingly dispersed across the United States and around the world. “It calls for a little more formality around how we engage those alumni,” says King, whose own work routine—she travels frequently between her home in Atlanta and Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters—illustrates Vanderbilt’s geographic reach. “We’re not a regional school anymore. We don’t all know each other.”

    Connecting alumni

    One strategy the board is pursuing involves building on the successful City Owen events, which aim to increase opportunities for alumni to meet other Owen graduates in their market. “This year,” she says, “we’re looking at experimenting with events in smaller cities, like Chattanooga, and regional events.

    “The Owen alumni office can’t do it all by themselves, so the onus is on the alumni board to recruit more people to get involved, and then ask each of these volunteers to bring five new people into the fold every year. If we set this up properly, it will sort of take off on its own,” she says.

    In keeping with the evolution of the school’s student and alumni population, King and her colleagues are looking to tweak the composition of the board’s diversity in terms of age, race, gender, business area and location. “That has always been a goal,” she points out, “but we are being more intentional about it.”

    For example, the alumni group has established a goal of filling eight of its 40 board slots with young alumni, including graduates of Vanderbilt’s one-year Master of Finance, Master of Accountancy and MAcc Valuation programs for young professionals.

    Additionally, the board is exploring ways to involve international alumni in particular. “If we have 500 international alums, should we have formal representation for them on the board as a segment, given the time zone and geographical challenges?” King says. “How can we make it work?”

    Erika King and Cata Lizarralde
    In addition to their Owen experiences, King and Lizarralde have more in common: both are Deloitte veterans. Lizarralde will return to the company after Commencement.

    Dynamic leadership

    One reason the Alumni Board and OSGA are both working well, according to Johnson, is the quality of leadership. “I am grateful to have this pair of dynamic women leading at Owen,” he says.

    For their part, King and Lizarralde credit the strong teams of students and alumni working with them, and others in previous years who helped build a strong foundation. But perhaps, too, there’s a cultural factor at work at Owen that makes people want to be involved during and after their years in school.

    “The administration lets us have a real voice,” Lizarralde says. “That’s why it’s easier to get things done here. There is a lot of trust and a lot of communication. Princeton Review named Vanderbilt as having the happiest students, and I think it’s true with Owen, too. It’s because we feel that connection with leadership.”

     

  • Second Generation

    Second Generation

    What parent doesn’t wish for their children to have the best? Sometimes that means encouraging them to follow in the parent’s footsteps educationally and vocationally. That was true with these sets of Owen alumni—parents whose children selected business careers and chose Vanderbilt for their MBAs. The younger alumni, in turn, tell of watching their parents work hard for their degrees, seeing how Vanderbilt helped them succeed and determining that the school was right for them as well. Whether just graduated or nearly retired, these multigenerational alumni share experiences that illustrate how their Owen years made an impact on themselves and their families.

    Emily Davis and Dr. Richard Davis

    Emily Davis, MBA’04, and Dr. Richard Davis, MD’73, Executive MBA’87

    When Emily Davis was accepted to Vanderbilt’s MBA program, her father, Dr. Richard Davis, presented her with a congratulatory gift: an HP-12C financial calculator. He knew firsthand she would put it to good use.

    Richard, a Vanderbilt-trained physician and practicing obstetrician, completed Vanderbilt’s Executive MBA program in 1987. His time there made a lasting impression on his daughter.

    “My dad would have his classmates over at nights and on weekends. They’d hole up in the war room—my dad’s office—in front of computers and flip charts, working on what, I didn’t know,” Emily says. “But I remember thinking they seemed like a real team. They were engaged. And they looked like they were actually having fun solving problems.”

    The experience was significant for Richard as well. “By the time I left Owen, I realized what (Emeritus Professor of Accounting) Germain Böer had once said: ‘This program will change your life. It will give you a 180-degree view of the world,’” he recalls. “And it did. I was able to use what I learned at Owen to pursue entirely new things.”

    Richard went on to serve as a medical adviser to an entrepreneurial startup, Veran Medical Technologies, founded by—coincidentally enough—two members of Emily’s MBA class. He served on the Veran board for nearly six years.

    Emily, who got her bachelor’s degree in biology, was considering her options beyond the medical technology field when her dad advised her to look at business programs. At Owen, she pursued an environmental management emphasis and took classes through the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, which combines coursework in the law, business and engineering schools.

    After a stint at International Paper managing everything from forest conservation to product stewardship programs, Emily is now the sustainability program manager for DHL Supply Chain Americas. She’s in charge of all the division’s energy efficiency initiatives and carbon accounting for operations in the United States, Canada and Latin America. “Thanks to my Owen experience, I was able to jump companies and quickly learn a different field,” she says.

    The latest family member to matriculate at Vanderbilt is Nathan Taylor, husband to the youngest Davis daughter, Allison. A senior sales adviser at Dell, he entered the Executive MBA program this fall.

    Upon admission, Richard gave his son-in-law his own HP-12C calculator. Emily gave her brother-in-law this advice: “Have fun. It’s two years of your life that will—as my dad has said—change you. You will learn so much.”

     

    Allie Noll and Eric Noll

    Allie Noll, MBA’14, and Eric Noll, MBA’90

    Enrolling at Vanderbilt was a homecoming for Allie Noll. As a toddler, she had frequented the hallways, holding the hand of her dad, Eric. Two decades later, Owen was the lone contender when she thought of business school.

    Eric, now president and CEO of ConvergEx, a global brokerage and trading-related services company, entered Vanderbilt in 1988. He’d realized during his second year of law school that he didn’t want to be a lawyer and was working nights at UPS while his wife, Georgie, worked days at Ralph Lauren. The team at Owen told him if he came here, they’d get him through.

    Eric Noll with three-year-old Allie NollThe Nolls created a patchwork of Eric’s classes, part-time jobs—Georgie had three—and caring for Allie. Not infrequently, something would fall through and Allie would accompany her dad to class. “One time, I had a job interview and no one to watch Allie. Peter Veruki (then director of planning and placement) took care of her,” Eric says. “I believe only in a school like Owen could that happen.” When Eric crossed the stage at Commencement, 3-year-old Allie escaped from her mom and spent the rest of the ceremony in her dad’s lap.

    Allie displays the same determination today. After earning her undergraduate degree, she applied for 25 jobs. She joined Coca-Cola in sales and marketing. A few years later, she considered going to law school. “My dad said, “No, don’t do it,’ ” Allie recalls. “He said ‘You’re working for the largest company in the world, and you’re killing it. You belong in business school.’ ”

    Vanderbilt allowed her to build a career in what she had loved all her life—clothing and fashion. “I knew I’d never have another opportunity like this to hit the reset button on my career,” she says. “Clothing and fashion companies don’t typically hire MBAs, but Tami (Fassinger) and Read (McNamara) supported me.” Allie is now in her “perfect job,” as a strategic sourcing analyst for specialty retail company Urban Outfitters Inc.

    Eric was the Commencement speaker for Allie’s graduation. The former NASDAQ executive counseled the newly forged graduates to go ahead and take chances with their careers, saying “you’ll fall down a lot, but the opportunities that come from that will be rewarding.” He reinforced that sentiment with Allie. “I told her that everyone is going to stumble,” he says. “How you respond is the key.”

    Eric gave Allie her diploma when she crossed the Owen stage—again. “It was such a thrill,” Eric says.

    Allie says that for her, Commencement was one part embarrassed, two parts emotional and one part proud. “When they recognized my

    dad’s achievements, it was a really proud, very special moment,” Allie says. “My dad and I are very close. He’s not just my dad, he’s my mentor. I trust him.”

    Watch video at vu.edu/owen-noll

     

    Todd Falk, Vanessa Falk and Robert Falk

    Todd Falk, BE’02, MBA’07; Vanessa Falk, BA’03, MBA’08; and Robert I. Falk, EMBA’80

    When Bob Falk entered the first Executive MBA class at Vanderbilt, he couldn’t have known that one day his children would blaze their own trail at the school.

    Bob’s son, Todd, and daughter, Vanessa, also became pioneers, joining the first and second classes, respectively, in the school’s Health Care MBA program.

    “We would have discussions around the dinner table about school, work and their projects,” Bob says. “I guess you could say they followed in my footsteps.”

    Those conversations resulted in all three Falks succeeding in what has been called the “Silicon Valley of health care.”

    A mechanical engineer, Bob came to Nashville from Chicago as vice president of acquisitions and development for Hospital Affiliates. After earning his EMBA, he founded Healthcare Corporation of Tennessee, a renal dialysis and nursing-home company, which he subsequently sold. That company eventually became Davita Inc., one of the largest providers of dialysis services in the United States. Bob went on to start some 30 other businesses and is currently engaged in several entrepreneurial, investment and real estate initiatives.

    “Owen definitely helped my father in his career,” Todd says, “and that influenced me to attend business school there.”

    Todd, formerly a construction engineer with a degree from Vanderbilt School of Engineering, specialized in strategy and operations at Owen. Coincidentally, he is now division vice president for Davita, overseeing 75 dialysis clinics in Tennessee and Alabama.

    Meanwhile Vanessa, a Vanderbilt premed major and self-proclaimed “numbers person,” opted for finance. Today she is a senior financial analyst with Nashville-based SpecialtyCare Inc., one of the world’s leading providers of clinical services to hospitals.

    The Falks agree that being taught by business leaders at Vanderbilt was a real plus. “Owen does a terrific job of connecting its students with Nashville business leaders,” Vanessa says.

    In addition to working in the health care industry, the Falks also enjoy similar leisure activities like flying planes and deep sea fishing. They also discuss the possibility of going into business together someday.

    That scenario has given Bob second thoughts about one of his early business decisions: “If I had known Todd wanted to go into the dialysis business,” he jokes, “I wouldn’t have sold the company.”

     

    Lucy Hovious and Hayley Hovious

    Lucy Hovious, MBA’83, and Hayley Hovious, MBA’08

    Lucy Hovious is a role model not only for her daughter, Hayley, but also for many of Hayley’s friends.

    “My mother has always inspired me,” Hayley says. “Now she’s also a resource for my friends who are trying to balance career and family.”

    While Lucy was studying business at Vanderbilt, first in a former mortuary and later in the “new” management building, she was also caring for a family that included a son with special needs. She didn’t have many peers nor time to socialize with her fellow students.

    “I had to compartmentalize my life,” she says. “I went to school and then I went home.

    It was a very different experience for Hayley.”

    After earning her MBA, Lucy became an executive with SunTrust Bank. In 2004, she left banking for the private, nonprofit Housing Fund. It finances affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization projects throughout Middle Tennessee.

    “Owen opened many doors for me. I laugh about the fact that I learned more than anyone else, because I knew so little about business when I started,” she says.

    Hayley graduated from her mother’s alma mater, Smith College, in 2000, and worked for the E&J Gallo Winery and other companies before deciding to go business school. Although she considered Harvard, where her father earned his MBA, Vanderbilt’s friendliness and emphasis on teamwork won her over.

    “My mother was very supportive of me going to Owen,” she says. “Even though we had very different experiences there, she often told me about her renowned professors, like Dewey Daane and Germain Böer.”

    Lucy says she was pleased with the direction the school was taking and in particular, its emphasis on working in teams. “That’s so very important in business, and I don’t see other schools giving it as much attention,” she says.

    After graduation, Hayley joined the State of Tennessee as trade director, responsible for the startup and management of the state’s export program, TNTrade. She recently joined the Nashville Health Care Council as executive director of the organization’s Fellows Program, an intensive program that educates and develops leaders in the city’s health care industry.

    In yet another Vanderbilt connection, she works on the Fellows Program with former Senator Bill Frist, M.D., and Larry Van Horn, associate professor of management and executive director of health affairs for Owen. “It’s a really exciting job,” she says.

     

    Jim Stadler and George Stadler

    Jim Stadler, Executive MBA’84, and George Stadler, MBA’91

    Jim Stadler enrolled in Vanderbilt’s Executive MBA program to help him transition to the next phase in his business life. “I needed to restimulate my brain,” the businessman says. “I thought Owen would help me find some answers.” Jim completed the program in 1984, the same year he turned 50, and stepped into the second phase of his career—developing and owning business properties.

    He also urged his son George, then in his late 20s and working at J.C. Bradford, to get an MBA. “We had a young child and another on the way, and all I could think was, ‘how would I do that?’ ” George remembers.

    But in 1989, he realized he would need that MBA to keep advancing in his career. “I had the working knowledge, but I didn’t have the framework to hang it on,” he says. “So I dropped out of the workplace and enrolled in Owen,” focusing on finance. He received his chartered financial analyst designation three years after earning his MBA. “I was able to pass right through,” he says of the three-level examination process that typically has a pass rate of less than half. “Owen prepared me for that.”

    Jim keeps his hand in business; he’s now developing residential lots with a partner. “It’s pretty difficult for me to think about retiring, although I’m 80 years old,” he says.

    After Owen, George was a portfolio manager for 18 years, including six years in the treasurer’s office at Vanderbilt University. In 2009, he founded HMS Capital Management, a registered investment adviser, with two partners. “We felt there was a niche in the market that wasn’t being served as well as it should be and that we were needed,” George says. “We were right.” George credits much of his success to the school. “I use my Owen experience every day in this business,” he says.

    The Stadler family are longtime Vanderbilt supporters, giving to Owen, Peabody, athletics and the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital. They also support the Medical Center through the Canby Robinson Society.

    Thinking back, Jim remembers witnessing the start of personal computers, saying “it was fascinating back then to see how people were using them.”

    George recalls the culture clash between him, a young father, and his much younger classmates. “They would say ‘let’s get together at 10 p.m. for our group meeting,’ and I would say, ‘no we’re not,’” he says with an infectious laugh. “And one time a group member offered to pick me up something to eat, and brought me back black coffee and French fries.

    I had forgotten that people ate that way.”

     

    Are you part of a multigenerational Owen family? Let us know. Send your stories to owenmagazine@vanderbilt.edu and we’ll post them online.  For more family stories, go to vu.edu/owen-secondgeneration.

     

  • The Chief Economist Returns

    The Chief Economist Returns

     

    SEC headquarters in D.C.

     

    Craig Lewis had been the Securities and Exchange Commission’s chief economist for just two months when a federal appeals court threw out an SEC rule that would have given investors more power to oust corporate directors. Lewis had spent 18 months at the SEC as a visiting academic fellow, and knew such a ruling was possible, but the July 2011 ruling was nevertheless a watershed moment.

    The court issued what The Wall Street Journal called “a harsh rebuke” to the agency, essentially saying its analysis was inadequate and short-sighted.

    Craig Lewis 2014
    Craig Lewis

    “That helped set the tone for my tenure,” Lewis says of the so-called proxy-access rule. “It was the catalyst for beginning to rethink the role economists needed to play in rule-making, to get them involved early and make economic analysis an integral part of the process.”

    Lewis served three years as the SEC chief economist before returning to Vanderbilt in July. Lewis, Owen’s Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Management, can look back on a tenure that shifted significant power and enhanced participation in SEC rule-making to a dramatically beefed-up staff of economists.

    “I had to effectively certify whether the economic analysis was up to snuff and we were able to significantly contribute to the process. That has led to a number of big wins for the agency,” he says. “While I was chief economist, there was never a rule that was successfully challenged on the basis of the economic analysis, and the rules that are still coming out today are very robust in their economics.”

    The experience, says Lewis, “will benefit both my research program and my classroom teaching in a number of important ways.”

    The SEC kept calling

    His wide-ranging research interests include corporate financial policy, capital formation and asset pricing, as well as convertible debt financing, stock market volatility and herding by equity analysts. But the catalyst for his tenure on the SEC was a paper he’d written on shareholder reaction to class action litigation. SEC economists invited him to present his research, then asked if he might be interested “in coming to visit for a year or two.” With two children in high school, he declined, telling them “it might be interesting” when he and his wife, Tari, became empty nesters in two years.

    “Two years later they called to see if I was still interested,” he says. He presented another paper and this time accepted their invitation to join as an economic fellow. In that role, beginning in January 2010, he served as an adviser on policy issues and brought analytic tools to bear on the derivatives market and violations of securities laws. In May 2011, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro offered him the post as chief economist and director of the Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation, a think tank and the SEC’s first new division in 37 years.

    Calling him “a distinguished economist with a clear understanding of the complexities of financial markets,” Schapiro said at the time that Lewis would “help to inject strong data-driven analysis into the SEC’s decision-making process.”

    Craig Lewis and SEC Chair Mary Jo White
    At the end of his D.C. tenure, Lewis’ colleagues and staff honored him with a farewell reception. Above, Lewis with his boss, SEC Chair Mary Jo White.

    His job, overseeing the area that performs the economic analysis that accompanies all SEC rule-making, “looked a lot like that of the dean of a business school,” he says. “It was one of managing business processes and project flow, and making sure we were hitting our deadlines and meeting our obligations.” The work was “all-consuming. The hours were massive,” he says, something he attributes to his own competitive nature as much as the task itself. “I worked a lot because I wanted to be successful. I’m hypercompetitive.”

    Much of that work had to do with SEC implementation of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which gave the federal government enhanced regulatory power over the financial industry in the wake of the financial turmoil that followed the 2007-08 subprime mortgage crisis.

    In addition, under the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the SEC is mandated to review corporate 10-K reports, the annual disclosure forms filed with the SEC. Lewis brought textual analysis to bear on the process of determining whether firms found to be fraudulent “use different vocabularies than nonfraud firms” in the management discussion and analysis sections of those reports.

    “We do find evidence,” he says of work he did with Gerard Hoberg of the University of Southern California, “that there’s something of a verbal shell game going on where you talk about certain elements in an attempt to deflect attention from other problems the firm might be experiencing. They tend to overemphasize benign elements in their annual reports and underemphasize things that are probably causing the problems that motivate them to engage in some kind of accounting shenanigans.”

    Proving the power of data

    The credit default database is one manifestation of the efforts he led to incorporate more rigorous analytical techniques into the rule-making process. “It’s an example of a data analytic initiative the division took on that turned out to be very influential in the way various rules were drafted. That was one of the first times people in some of the rule-making divisions saw the power of data,” he says. “We were able to offer financial thresholds for rules that were significantly different from what was proposed but were completely reasonable once you actually saw the data.”

    Analysts, for example, determined a dollar figure for the amount of annual transactions that would qualify someone as a dealer in the credit default swaps space. “Delivering real, meaningful analysis that fundamentally changed rules was really quite a big step forward for the agency,” he says.

    Students in Lewis' class
    Students in Lewis’ Derivatives Market class were the first beneficiaries of his SEC knowledge.

    All of this took a great deal of manpower. Congress, determined that Dodd-Frank would lead to change, “put pressure on the agency to hire additional economists,” according to Lewis. During his tenure, the number of employees in the division increased from 60 to nearly 120 and the division itself was renamed the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis.

    Janet S. Schmautz worked with Lewis as his confidential assistant during his time as chief economist. “Others can attest to how Craig Lewis built the division based on technical ability. As his confidential assistant, I can attest to how he developed the division using interpersonal skills,” she says. “He brought everyone along with a sense of camaraderie and good will, gaining him universal respect and admiration.”

    A certified public accountant who work-ed early in his career for Arthur Young & Company, Lewis earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin­–Madison. He joined the Vanderbilt business faculty in 1986 and has won a number of awards for teaching excellence. A frequent speaker and guest lecturer at industry and academic events around the world, he is an expert on corporate financial policy and asset pricing.

    Front-row seat

    His SEC experience gave him new knowledge about his field and himself.

    “One of the great things about being there is the rate at which you learn,” he says. “I would argue it is very similar to that first year when you’re in your Ph.D. program. I have a much better sense of what’s going on in the financial world. You think that after spending 20-plus years as a finance professor you have a fairly good idea of how markets work and the subject matter that you teach in class. I was quickly disabused of that notion. I realized that there is a lot more that I didn’t know than I knew.”

    The increased knowledge and contacts will have a direct effect on his teaching.

    Craig Lewis teaching
    As head of the SEC’s Division of Economic and Risk Analysis, Lewis oversaw the reorganization and expansion of the division as the breadth and complexity of its activities increased.

    “I had a front-row seat to a lot of important events right after the financial crisis,” he says. “I’ve had conversations with folks who are newsmakers—Ben Bernanke, Jack Lew, all the principals of the large federal regulatory bodies—and those experiences were quite interesting and fun. I think the students will enjoy just a little bit of color around how financial regulators implement the Dodd-Frank Act, for example. All of those things, and the ability to bring in new types of guest speakers to the classroom, are a direct benefit of that experience.”

    Lewis also can continue to watch his SEC accomplishments play out. In July, for instance, the SEC adopted amendments to rules governing money market mutual funds, making structural and operational reforms.

    “At the time, it was almost a guarantee that somebody was going to challenge that rule. We’re still waiting, but it looks like it is not going to be challenged in court, and that the industry is going to accept the rule as is,” he says. “That, to me, is in large part a vindication of economic analysis, because the economics changed that rule in a very fundamental way.”

  • New Frontiers in Finance

    New Frontiers in Finance

    FMRC meeting
    Robert Whaley, the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Management (standing), looks to expand the conference’s role as a forum for the world’s top financial experts to explore and discuss significant financial topics.

    When Hans R. Stoll, the Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker Jr. Professor of Finance, launched the Financial Markets Research Center’s first annual conference in the spring of 1988, he did so in the spirit of wanting to more fully understand the previous year’s sudden stock market crash. Bringing leading academic figures, top government regulators and industry executives to Vanderbilt University for that first conference, Stoll began a rich tradition of assembling thought leaders to explore some of the most pressing topics in finance.

    It’s a tradition that Robert Whaley, the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Management, hopes to strengthen and grow as sole director of the FMRC.

    “We have the opportunity to play an even larger role in the world of finance,” says Whaley, a renowned scholar and creator of the closely watched Market Volatility Index (VIX) who previously served as co-director of the FMRC alongside Stoll.

    “In addition to the top-tier research and expertise from our own faculty, we are able to attract leading thinkers from around the world—from industry, from major regulatory agencies, and from top academic institutions—to discuss the most important topics facing today’s financial markets.”

    Internationally known speakers

    Over the years, Vanderbilt’s annual FMRC conference has hosted speakers such as former Fed Chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan; Nobel Memorial Prize winners Eugene Fama, Robert Merton, Merton Miller, Robert Shiller and Myron Scholes; and industry leaders like Leo Melamed, chairman emeritus of CME Group; William Brodsky, longtime chairman and CEO of the Chicago Board Options Exchange; and Thomas Peterffy, founder of Interactive Brokers.

    The conference attracts leading thinkers from around the world to discuss the most important topics regarding financial markets.

    Participants have been drawn to the event by the school’s distinguished finance faculty. In addition to Stoll and Whaley, Owen Graduate School of Management professors include Bill Christie, whose paper on NASDAQ broker collusion led to a significant regulatory overhaul; Craig Lewis, who most recently served as chief economist of the SEC; and Nicolas Bollen, one of the world’s foremost experts on hedge funds.

    Additionally, Dewey Daane, the Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance, Emeritus, who served as a Federal Reserve Board governor from 1963 to 1974, continues to attract many distinguished guest speakers to campus. Most recently, he helped bring Edward J. DeMarco, who ran the federal agency overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to Vanderbilt. In addition to serving as a visiting professor, DeMarco was a 2012 FMRC keynote speaker.

    Compelling topics ahead

    Whaley says he is already mapping out topics for future FMRC conferences. In October, finance professor Nicholas Crain hosted a conference on private equity which included a keynote by Bruce Evans, a member of Vanderbilt’s Board of Trust and managing director of Summit Partners in Boston. And for the 2015 FMRC spring conference, Whaley is starting to assemble a group to discuss the role that options and other derivatives have played in reshaping markets. “We’re intent on bringing the very best people we can find to the conferences we host,” Whaley says.

    Modern finance legends attend the spring 2014 FMRC
    Three of modern finance’s legends—colleagues with Hans Stoll at the University of Chicago during the 1960s—joined him at the May conference. From left, Eugene Fama, Myron Scholes, Stoll and Richard Roll. Fama and Scholes both received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Studies.
  • Investing in Life

    Investing in Life

    Even with his 50th birthday just around the corner, Mark Tillinger, BA’81, MBA’82, did not have a midlife crisis: He was too busy fighting for his life. Emerging on the other side of a cancer diagnosis and treatment, he sought opportunities to make small investments in the lives of others—with hope that those small changes would build into something much larger.

    Tillinger knew first-hand how investing in someone can make a difference for that person. He came to Vanderbilt as an undergraduate, inspired—and invested in—by his high school math teacher in Atlanta, a Vanderbilt alumnus. Tillinger chose the combined five-year Vanderbilt MBA degree offered at the time—four years for his bachelor degree in economics, the last year overlapping with Vanderbilt’s MBA program.

    Soon after graduation, Tillinger landed at Arthur Andersen in its management consulting information division. He was based in Nashville until he was hired away by Commerce Union Bank as a director of strategic planning. When the bank merged with another, he was recruited back to Andersen’s Nashville office, and then on to Richmond, Virginia, where he headed the banking division. When he became partner—and Andersen morphed into Accenture—he moved to the New York office.

    Opportunities for extraordinary things

    He was working in New York and living in nearby Connecticut when he started cancer treatment. Cancer coincided with reaching the age of early retirement, an Andersen/Accenture benefit for partners at age 50. Although he hadn’t originally planned on retiring right at 50, his illness made him question how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

    The answer was help others. He took retirement.

    One of his first ways to help was creating a need-based scholarship for Vanderbilt MBA students, the Mark A. Tillinger Scholarship Fund.

    “I knew I wanted to make a reasonably significant contribution, but I wasn’t sure how to do it since I was an undergrad as well as an Owen grad. Ultimately, we focused on funding the scholarship at Owen,” he says. “It was exactly for that reason: to give opportunities to students who might not otherwise be able to go and help them launch their own careers.”

    Five Owen students have received the scholarship since he endowed it in 2007. But he’s given more than the funding—he’s invested personally in the lives of students who received it as well. “That’s been on an individual basis and if it’s something the student wants,” he explains.

    Those relationships have helped him to see how his goals for the scholarship program are being met. “It’s a small gesture, but one that hopefully will generate some people who go on to do some extraordinary things,” he said. “I’ve been thrilled to be able to do it.”

    Continuing the fight

    After retiring, Tillinger did something else that has even made the pages of People magazine: He launched the Riedel & Cody Fund, which offers assistance to pet owners whose dog or cat has cancer.

    Why? While Tillinger was in a battle for his life, his beloved Bernese Mountain Dog, Riedel, was fighting her own cancer battle.

    Mark and Theresa Tillinger with Shafer
    Tillinger and his wife, Theresa, with Shafer, their Bernese Mountain Dog, in Nashville’s Centennial Park. After Riedel’s death, Tillinger was reluctant to get another dog until he met Shafer, now three.

    While Tillinger successfully beat cancer, Riedel did not. “She was a special dog and I had a very special relationship with her,” he says. “We were fighting so long together and then, when she was gone, I still wanted to fight. I couldn’t turn it off. I didn’t want to turn it off.”

    The fund has since helped more than 200 pet owners who needed financial assistance to provide cancer treatments for dogs and cats with cancer. “What has been inspiring to me is there have been many owners who have stepped forward and done extraordinary things and changed lives as a result of our intervention and allowing them to have more time with their dog or cat,” he says. “It sounds cliché, but we truly do believe it: By changing individual lives, one instance at a time, we hope to try to effect major change in the world.”

    Back to work and to Tennessee

    Not long ago, Tillinger returned to the workforce as vice president of transforming client relationships at Cognizant Technology Solutions. The role has him traveling the globe and helping to solve client challenges. Accepting the job came with the condition that he be allowed to continue his work with Riedel & Cody. The organization has a full-time executive director and generous financial support from Blue Buffalo Company and Petco, but Tillinger continues to chair its board of directors.

    Tillinger and his wife, Theresa, recently have moved to the Nashville area and he hopes to be even more involved in Owen. In the 30 years since graduating, he has served on Owen’s Alumni Board and currently serves on the dean’s Board of Visitors. “I don’t know what I’ll be doing over time with Owen and Vanderbilt, but I love the school,” he says. “It’s been a huge part of my life and that’s why I’ve stayed involved with it.”

    Whether through a successful career or envisioning a different kind of nonprofit, Tillinger feels he owes much to his Vanderbilt education.

    “Without a doubt, the Vanderbilt undergraduate program and Owen trained me how to think,” he says. “The whole approach to the educational philosophy at Vanderbilt at the time—and I’m confident it still is this way—is all about giving graduates the skills and tools to be analytical, with that core capability to essentially always ask the next question in a very structured way.” ■

     

  • Broader Horizons

    Broader Horizons

    Soon nonprofit leaders from all over the country may line up for the opportunity to earn a Vanderbilt MBA degree tuition-free.

    In spring 2014, the Executive MBA program opened up eligibility for its annual nonprofit sponsorship to those outside the Nashville area for the first time. The sponsorship, which gives deserving executives at 501(c)(3) organizations access to a business education they otherwise might not be able to afford, had previously been reserved for applicants in Middle Tennessee.

    In June, the school announced that Abby Shue, vice president of the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville, was selected as its Class of 2016 recipient. Shue’s selection marked an important new chapter for not only the sponsorship but the school as well. By bringing in the best candidates possible, regardless of geographic location, Owen signaled its intent to play a bigger role in bridging the nonprofit and for-profit worlds.

    Abby Shue
    Abby Shue, vice president of the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville, is the first recipient outside of Middle Tennessee and the first to focus on arts administration.

    “It was the nonprofit alumni—the past recipients of the sponsorship—who came to us and encouraged us to expand our nonprofit reach,” says Juli Bennett, MBA’93, executive director of the Executive MBA and Americas MBA for Executives programs. “They saw the need to strengthen the sponsorship’s impact, and we at Vanderbilt agreed with them. It makes sense to draw from a strong nationwide applicant pool that mirrors the one we draw from for our entire EMBA class.”

    Puts nonprofits on equal footing

    Shue’s interest in earning an MBA stemmed from her work with senior management and the board of directors at the Kentucky Center, which is home to five resident performance companies, including the Louisville Orchestra and Kentucky Opera. The 30-year-old center hosts more than 1,000 events per year. Among her responsibilities are helping oversee general operations and directing strategy.

    “Arts administration is a large field that remains relatively undefined. Like any nonprofit, we need to focus on operational effectiveness and efficiency,” Shue says. “I can’t imagine a better way to hone my managerial skills and learn to tackle complex business issues than in an Executive MBA program like Vanderbilt’s.”

    The sponsorship, which began as a partnership with the Nashville Center for Nonprofit Management in 2006, is a rarity at a business school in the U.S. Unlike other schools that offer partial scholarships for such programs, Vanderbilt covers the full two years’ worth of tuition, or approximately $95,000. The program is currently funded from Owen’s operating budget, although the school would welcome a named sponsor for it.

    Michael McSurdy
    President and CEO of Family and Children’s Service Michael McSurdy, EMBA’09, says he sees how his EMBA experience makes him better at bridging the gap between the social service sector and philanthropy.

    To be considered, an applicant must meet the same criteria as any other Executive MBA candidate, including a strong GMAT score, record of academic accomplishment, previous management experience, professional recommendations and a formal interview.

    Sponsorship recipients follow the same curriculum as their classmates, completing 60 credit hours of coursework over a two-year period and working closely with their peers. Part of that work includes two capstone projects that provide valuable strategic experience. They also have access to the school’s top-ranked Leadership Development Program.

    “Our nonprofit students are exposed to the best practices in the business world,” Bennett says. “They learn the way their board members think and understand the expectations for how a nonprofit should perform.”

    The interaction with their for-profit peers is a crucial part of the experience, Bennett notes. “They must be the voice for nonprofit in the classroom,” she says, “and cause others to ask, ‘How do I give back when I finish this two-year journey I’m on and make good things happen in my community?’

    “But at the same time they must learn from the for-profit voices in the room, too, and ask questions like, ‘How are my challenges different from those in the for-profit world? And what are the challenges that don’t seem the same but really are?’”

    Bridge for nonprofit and business sectors

    Beth Torres
    Beth Torres, EMBA’11, is now CEO of Make-A-Wish Middle Tennessee.

    Former recipient Michael McSurdy, EMBA’09, attests to the difference the sponsorship has made in his career. Today he is president and CEO of Family and Children’s Service, which provides counseling and child well-being services across the state of Tennessee.

    “Five years out from graduation, the benefit of my time at Owen is clearer to me,” he says. “I’m a much more strategic thinker. I’m also more keenly aware of the value of a full team in moving my organization forward. I see daily how my broader understanding of management and finance is applicable in the nonprofit world, and I’m better at bridging the gap between the social service sector and personal and corporate philanthropy.”

    Beth Torres, EMBA’11, another former recipient, shares McSurdy’s convictions about the sponsorship. She credits it with giving her the confidence to assume her current role as CEO of Make-A-Wish Middle Tennessee, an organization that grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions.

    “I had good business instincts before Vanderbilt,” she says, “but Owen gave me the language to communicate. If something didn’t make sense, I learned to ask questions immediately—where I may have waited before. Owen gives you that. You’re in a room with 50 of the smartest people you’ve ever met and they’re asking questions. If they’re asking them, I have no excuse. I can admit what I don’t know.”

    In working with corporate partners at Make-A-Wish, Torres sees more similarities than differences between the nonprofit and for-profit worlds.

    “The nonprofit sector and the traditional for-profit are not that different, and they shouldn’t be,” Torres says. “Too often we’ve made exceptions for nonprofit, saying, ‘If we don’t reach as many people, if we don’t raise as much money, it’s OK. We tried really hard.’ That can’t be OK. If we miss on fundraising or on our mission, people don’t get served. We should be holding ourselves to higher, not lower, standards.”

    Know of someone who would be a good candidate for the nonprofit sponsorship? The Executive MBA team wants to hear from you. Go to vu.edu/owen-nonprofit for more information. Contact Sarah Fairbank at 615-322-3120 or  email sarah.fairbank@owen.vanderbilt.edu.

     

  • On the Road and In the Air for Vanderbilt

    On the Road and In the Air for Vanderbilt

    Kim Killingsworth, Owen’s director of international recruiting and relations, doesn’t let much rattle her as she travels globally to recruit the right students for Vanderbilt’s business programs. The start of the July-through-March recruiting season found her dealing with challenges ranging from tension in Tel Aviv to an airline strike in Argentina and a nonfunctioning ATM card in Rio. Here are some of her thoughts and experiences from the road.

    July 12, 2014

    Kim Killingsworth with Cancellation BoardI am currently on the last leg of a more than 24-hour trip home from Tel Aviv. I was there for a two-day MBA recruiting fair sponsored by EducationUSA, a U.S. Department of State-sponsored network of educational advisors.

    I arrived in Tel Aviv and waited at the airport for my Emory MBA colleague to arrive so we could share a taxi to the hotel. I had been to Tel Aviv for this event last year and prior to that in 2006. I was familiar with the scrutinizing questions at immigration upon arrival and felt I knew the city and culture somewhat.

    In other words, I felt perfectly comfortable traveling there in spite of the previous week’s violence. We dropped our bags at the hotel, went up to the roof to see the sunset over the Mediterranean and then jumped in a taxi to head out to dinner. No sooner did we get in than we ended up in a standstill. We asked our driver what was happening. He made an arcing motion with his hand and responded in his limited English, “Syria missiles.” The air raid sirens sounded briefly, the first of four or five air raid warnings we would experience during our few days there. Reading The New York Times later on our cellphones, we discovered the missiles were from Gaza.

    Tel Aviv July 2014
    Killingsworth hadn’t counted on missile attacks and watching international news being made during her Tel Aviv recruiting trip.

    The MBA fair was immediately canceled after this incident, but then reinstated 12 hours later and reduced from two days to one. Of the 22 MBA programs that had planned to participate, 13 showed and of those, seven schools had admissions reps with the rest covered by local alumni. Those of us who attended were continually thanked by the local attendees for coming to Israel during this crisis.

    I remember one conversation in particular with a young woman who lingered near my table. When I engaged her in conversation about her experience and post-MBA goals, she opened up. She told me she was nervous about the situation because she had completed her military service on a base close to the Gaza Strip and was concerned for her colleagues there. She had been an artificial intelligence officer. She was in the reserves and knew there was a good chance she could get called up.

    Overall, we did not experience any obviously tighter security. Locals continued business as usual. Perhaps there were fewer people on the beach as they did not want to be in an exposed area without easy access to bomb shelters. One early morning I was walking on the beach when the sirens sounded. I had to run from the shoreline to crowd into a public restroom with others. In general people, including kids, don’t panic. They seem concerned with getting cellphone photos of the smoke trails of the intercepted missiles. It drove home to me how they are accustomed to this activity.

    August 6, 2014

    Kim set out on the Latin America leg of her recruiting tour. She visited Santiago, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Lima, Medellin and Bogotá in the nearly three weeks she was away.

    Harp player
    Stopped at a Bogatá traffic light, Killingsworth was serenaded by a harp player.

    On this trip, some of the best conversations I had were with taxi drivers. It started with my arrival into the first city of the trip, Santiago. I had lived there 21 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer so I always feel nostalgic returning. I arrived near midnight after a full day of flying, and despite just wanting to get to the hotel, I had a very engaging conversation with the driver. As we cruised along the highway, my favorite Mercedes Sosa song came on the radio and I was delighted that we both sang along. It was the perfect welcome back to Chile.

    With my taxi driver in Buenos Aires, I had a charming conversation about my two favorite Argentine actors and left the taxi with a list of all the films they acted in together. In a taxi in Bogotá, stopped at a traffic light, we were serenaded by a harp player in the middle of the street.

    The primary focus of this tour was MBA recruiting fairs, but when the schedule permits, I conduct Vanderbilt-specific information sessions or sometimes dinners or receptions with alumni to which I invite prospective students. I take advantage of any partnerships I’ve entered into as a way to meet prospectives, such as one with the Medellin-based Sindicato Antioqueño, which is comprised of over 120 Colombian companies including Grupo Suramericana and Bancolombia. Vanderbilt, along with six other schools (only three in the U.S.), presented to employees who will apply for company sponsorship to pursue an MBA abroad.

    Kim Killingsworth and Thiago Andrade
    Killingsworth usually travels alone but is frequently assisted by local alumni at events. Thiago Andrade, MBA’14, flew from Salvador, Bahia, to help at the fair in Rio.

    Of course I’m always open to meeting prospectives in other, informal ways as well. I’ve been known to meet prospectives on flights, which makes sense given the amount of time I spend flying. I find myself often giving educational and career advice to strangers and it usually seems to be appreciated.

    My first morning in Santiago, I ended up in a long conversation with my waiter at breakfast. His graduate studies focus on scallop production and I learned more than I ever knew about the industry. We discussed how an MBA might make sense for him after he gets a few years’ work experience. An advising session over a perfectly prepared cortado and Chilean raspberry juice.

    At the events, what really makes a difference is having help from alumni. It gives the prospects a perspective they can relate to—somebody who was recently in their shoes and who can speak about the student experience firsthand. I was fortunate to have alumni assistance in Santiago, Rio, Lima and Medellin. Prospects love meeting alumni.

    Gerardo Marthans at Lima fair
    At the Lima recruitment fair, IBM’s Gerardo Marthans, MBA’05, joined Killingsworth and spoke to potential students.

    What was particularly rewarding this trip was that I reconnected with candidates who I met a year and a half ago. Enough time had passed since the first Latin America recruiting tour I did for Owen that now students are ready to apply. At the São Paulo fair, I was able to greet the first person who walked up by name. “Eduardo, it’s great to see you. How is the GMAT prep going? Are you going to apply to Owen this year?” Greeting him by name and remembering that he works in agribusiness demonstrated to him that we really do provide a personalized approach at Owen.

    The theme of this trip seemed to be the interesting conversations with taxi drivers and dealing with the challenges of international travel—more than what seemed normal on this trip.

    For example, I arrived at the city airport in Buenos Aires to chaos—Aerolineas Argentinas (the nation’s largest airline) had gone on strike that morning. There were TV crews filming and lines were a kilometer long. I was told the first available flight to my next destination was 36 hours from then, meaning I would miss my event in the next city. The solution was to buy a ticket on another airline and leave later in the day from a different airport. Leaving the next city, I experienced a five-hour delay for a one-hour flight due to rain.

    Buenos Aires airport
    Arriving at the Buenos Aires airport was chaotic due to an airline strike.

    Then I tripped on the sidewalk in São Paulo and sprained the thumb of my dominant hand—my primary texting digit. I made a splint and taped it up, but then was challenged by the basics of typing, buttoning and opening water bottles. On this trip, my ATM card failed to work in two countries and I found out my banking identity was stolen and used fraudulently.

    I’m good at—and enjoy—finding solutions and don’t let these inconveniences get in the way. While I may have to deal on my own with some of the challenges, there are always colleagues with whom to share the stories at the end of the day. A highlight is reconnecting with alumni, educational advisors, colleagues from other schools and friends in the region. Each trip is so different and memorable due to those I meet along the way.

    Prior to starting this trip I was still thinking about the young woman I met at the Tel Aviv fair, the former artificial intelligence officer. I sent out a message to all the females I had met at the Tel Aviv event, hoping to send good wishes to that woman and find out if she had indeed been sent to Gaza.

    I heard back from almost all but the one woman, saying they weren’t her but they were sure she would appreciate my concern. The responses came in at the beginning of my Latin America trip, then nothing. I assumed she had been sent to Gaza and imagined what that might be like. Then the very last day of my Latin America trip—three weeks later—I received a message from her. She apologized for her late reply but had not yet been sent to Gaza. I felt incredible relief and realized the impact just one candidate’s story can have.

    September 2014

    After Latin America, Kim Killingsworth returned to Nashville for a few weeks, then took off for three countries in Asia on corporate visits and a few recruiting events—all in 10 days. Part of her work is meeting with decision makers in Asian companies to discuss how the Vanderbilt MBA may fit the companies’ and employees’ professional development needs. She then returned to campus for a couple of weeks before heading out again. She says, “I have my schedule memorized of all my planned trips through the end of the year. You can give me a date between now and then and I know what city I will be in.”

  • Dual Strength

    Dual Strength

    The approximately 50 feet between the Owen Graduate School of Management and Vanderbilt Law School just shrunk a bit as the two schools launched a trans-institutional program that offers students the opportunity to earn a master of finance degree and a law degree at the same time.

    Students in Vanderbilt’s new dual J.D./M.S.F. program spend their first two years at Vanderbilt Law School, then take a full semester at the Owen Graduate School of Business and finish with a final semester of both law and finance courses.

    The program’s inaugural four students began their Owen portion at the start of the fall 2014 semester. All four were already working on their Vanderbilt law degrees when they were accepted into the one-year master of finance program.

    Law building and Management Hall
    Students in the new program have a very short commute from one school to the other: Only about 50 feet separate the two.

    For third-year law student Kevin Saunders, the program combines his two career passions, business and law. He comes from a third-generation family business and earned an undergraduate degree in accounting before deciding on Vanderbilt Law School. He had taken four credit hours at Owen as law electives when he heard that the J.D. and M.S.F. program was in the works.

    “I was a huge proponent of the program when I found out about it,” he says. “I was already considering an externship with the SEC in Atlanta but decided to wait, just on the idea that this program might come to fruition.”

    Natural partners

    The program grew out of discussions between Dean Eric Johnson and Vanderbilt Law School Dean Chris Guthrie shortly after Johnson’s arrival last year. Both deans say that in addition to expanding education in business and law, the program expands a natural partnership between the two schools.

    “Owen has long offered courses that introduced business students to legal issues and discussed specific areas of finance that relate heavily to law and legislation,” says Johnson, the Ralph Owen Dean and Bruce D. Henderson Professor of Strategy. “For lawyers heading to Wall Street, understanding markets is critical to building a successful career in financial service.”

    Guthrie, who is also the John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law, says that in addition to appealing to students interested in corporate law, the program’s specific finance focus will give them an added edge and opportunities. The J.D./M.S.F. builds on the law school’s existing Law and Business program, he noted, which includes basic principles of finance and accounting, business operations and today’s regulatory environment. That program offers law students a specialization certificate in business; the school also offers a joint J.D./MBA.

    “I am excited to have the opportunity to partner with Owen and its terrific faculty, and I am very bullish on the opportunities this joint degree program will create for a select group of Vanderbilt Law students,” Guthrie says.

    Scales of justice and business bookThe J.D./M.S.F. dual degree was one of the fastest programs developed and launched at Vanderbilt. The deans conceptualized it in fall 2013, the curriculum was proposed by late winter 2014, and the degree was approved by both schools’ faculty and the provost in time to start accepting applications in April.

    Going forward, interested students will apply to both programs separately and Owen and law school officials will meet to decide who they want to admit to the joint program. All prospective students have to take the GMAT as well as the LSAT and go through the same admissions process as other business and law school students.

    Not for slackers

    The new dual degree is rigorous, says Kate Barraclough, director of Vanderbilt’s M.S. Finance program. She leads the program and was charged with helping set it up and determining the business school curriculum.

    “They’ll take some of our most challenging finance classes, the ones that are the more quantitative classes,” Barraclough says. “When we were putting together this degree—because it’s 24 credit hours opposed to 36 for a standard M.S.F.—we wanted to make sure all those credit hours really counted toward finance.”

    The program kicked off in August with the J.D./M.S.F. students joining incoming M.S.F. students for an intensive two-week orientation. “We onboard them with a Finance Economics I class,” Barraclough says. “That’s kind of a level set for people who don’t have a finance background versus people that do—we do it very quickly in two weeks.” In mod I and II, they take the same classes as the M.S.F. students but also add an additional elective. “This is going to be a big mod for them because the typical load is four,” Barraclough says. “Taking five is a lot. It’s very intense.”

    Worth the work

    Barraclough says she’s interested in discovering how the class dynamic is different with the addition of the law students. “I think they bring a little more maturity,” she says, noting that most M.S.F. students are younger than the typical law student. “My sense from the law school early on in this process is that they feel that these are really some of their best students. It is an interesting mix—I have 41 M.S.F.s and four J.D./M.S.F.s.”

    JD/MSF students
    Patrick Tricker, Anna Drew Derrick, Kevin Saunders and Kyle Ewing are the first law students poised to earn a Vanderbilt J.D./M.S.F.

    The four inaugural students see the value in having a master of finance degree as well as a law degree. Over the summer, Saunders completed a 10-week law internship with BakerHostetler in Cleveland. He worked on a variety of projects, including work involving project finance, mergers and acquisition, buyouts and IPOs. He feels that the J.D./M.S.F. will increase his knowledge and allow him to further relate to clients.

    “Clients with law firms like lawyers that understand their business,” he says. “That was apparent to me even as a summer intern. The hard finance knowledge will really be valuable.”

  • Not that Different

    Not that Different

    Beth Torres, EMBA’11

    CEO, Make-A-Wish Middle Tennessee

    Career Path Milestones: Vice President, Junior Achievement Middle Tennessee and Account Marketing Manager, Reebok

    Beth_Torres
    Beth Torres, EMBA’11

    As a teenage athlete, Beth Torres once dismissed the prospect of a business career as boring.

    A job at Reebok after college was a huge turning point for the competitive gymnast. “Once I figured out business was competitive and I could figure it out, I wanted an MBA,” she says.

    But it took a move into the nonprofit sector with Junior Achievement in Nashville to make business school a real option. Six months into a job with JA, Torres learned that Owen and the Center for Nonprofit Management offered a full scholarship to Vanderbilt’s Executive MBA program for a nonprofit executive. With her boss’s encouragement, she applied and in 2009, earned the scholarship.

    Her appreciation for Owen was immediate and lasting, and it began with its faculty.

    “Owen has unbelievable professors,” she says. “They’re engaged. They’re accessible. There isn’t much they taught that I’m not using, and they still answer our questions three years out. We were very lucky to have them.”

    Making the move to CEO

    She is as effusive about her fellow students, particularly her five-person study group.

    “They are without question the people I call and bounce ideas off,” she says. She sought their counsel when she was offered the CEO position at Make-A-Wish Middle Tennessee in 2012. They helped her reach the decision to accept the role and she’s never looked back.

    “I had that moment where you think, ‘How do I not do this?’” she says, of joining the organization that grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions. “Make-A-Wish is an amazing brand and at my first meeting with the board, I saw the vision they had for growth. I realized I would draft off that energy and leadership.”

    She brought every bit of her competitive nature to bear on the position.

    “The nonprofit sector and the traditional for-profit are not that different and they shouldn’t be,” she says. “Too often we’ve made exceptions for nonprofit, saying, ‘If we don’t reach as many people, if we don’t raise as much money, it’s okay. We tried really hard.’ That can’t be okay. If we miss on fundraising or on our mission, people don’t get served. We should be holding ourselves to higher, not lower, standards.”

    The challenge of human capital

    Leadership, she says, begins with resources—having the knowledge and manpower to succeed, something Owen facilitates.

    “Too often we’ve made exceptions for nonprofit…That can’t be okay. If we miss on fundraising or on our mission, people don’t get served.”

    “Someone in my office says, ‘We need this to be successful.’ Well, I know someone who runs a business, who may have access to that resource and I call somebody in the Owen network,” she says.

    The biggest challenge, she says, is human capital. “Leadership involves keeping people motivated, inspired and engaged. Can I teach my staff to lead each other? If I have to go in every day and I’m the only cheerleader, it doesn’t work,” she says. “But if they can lean on each other and help each other succeed, the results are unbelievable.”

    She also wants to see in them the adventurous spirit she brings to the table.

    “In the culture we’re building, it’s okay to make a mistake,” she says. “It’s not okay to do nothing. I’d rather try something new and if it fails, we don’t do that again. If it works, how do we build on it?”

    Preparation, she says, should begin with the individual.

    “For me,” she says, “college was about the things I could try, organizations I could join. That’s where you learn about networking and about contributing.”

    Prepared to make important decisions

    She sees Owen as another rich opportunity.

    “The onus is on the student. It’s our responsibility to meet as many people as possible—classmates, professors and administration. This is the chance to pick their brains,” she says. “If you’ve been a true student, by the time you hit a leadership role, you can trust your gut.

    “I had good business instincts before Owen, but Owen gave me the language to communicate. If something didn’t make sense, I learned to ask questions immediately—where I may have waited before. Owen gives you that. You’re in a room with 50 of the smartest people you’ve ever met and they’re asking questions. If they’re asking them, I have no excuse. I can admit what I don’t know.”

    Just as in athletics, setbacks can be key to development.

    “If I’d been told how tough that first year as CEO would be, I don’t know if I would have signed up,” she says. “But if I hadn’t had those challenges the first year, I wouldn’t love it as much today. Owen prepared me to make important decisions.”

  • Seven At the Top

    Seven At the Top

    Over its four decades, Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management has produced hundreds of leaders in functions and industries all over the globe. Meet seven of them in the CEO circle.

    David N. Farr, Chairman and CEO, Emerson

    David N. FarrClass of 1981
    Age: 59
    Residence: St. Louis
    Education: B.S., Wake Forest University; MBA, Vanderbilt
    Married to alumna Lelia Farr, MBA’80, two children

    David Farr has been chief executive officer of Emerson, a $25 billion diversified global manufacturing and technology company, since 2000 and chairman since 2004. He joined the company in 1981 and soon earned increasingly significant responsibilities. He served as the company’s manager of investor relations, vice president of corporate planning and development, president of its Ridge Tool business unit, and group vice president for its industrial components and equipment business. After several years as the Hong Kong-based president of Emerson Asia-Pacific and CEO of Emerson’s Astec joint venture, he returned to St. Louis as executive vice president directing Emerson’s process management business. Two years later, he became senior executive vice president and chief operating officer, responsible for the firm’s global operations, and was appointed CEO one year later. Farr also served as Emerson’s president from 2005 to 2010.

    Doug Parker, CEO, American Airlines Group

    Doug ParkerClass of 1986
    Age: 52
    Residence: Dallas
    Education: B.A., Albion College; MBA, Vanderbilt
    Married, three children

    Doug Parker became CEO of American Airlines following the merger of US Airways and American in 2013. The newly formed carrier, headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, is currently the world’s largest airline, operating an average of nearly 6,700 flights daily to 339 cities in 54 countries. Parker is a vocal proponent of airline consolidation, which, he argues, brings more financial stability and competitiveness to the industry. Prior to the merger with American, he was chairman and CEO of US Airways, which experienced record revenue growth under his leadership. In 2005, Parker oversaw the merger between US Airways and America West Airlines, where he had been chairman, president and CEO since 2001. Other professional highlights include four years with Northwest Airlines, where he had two vice president roles, and an earlier five-year stint with American Airlines, which hired him in 1986 after he graduated from Vanderbilt.

    Josué Gomes da Silva, Chairman and CEO, Coteminas

    Josue Gomes da SilvaClass of 1989
    Age: 50
    Residence: Sao Paulo, Brazil
    Education: M.E., Universidade Federal De Minas Gerais; L.L.B., Faculdade Milton Campos; MBA, Vanderbilt
    Married, two children

    Josué Gomes da Silva is chairman and CEO of Coteminas, the biggest textile group in Latin America and a leading bed and bath home fashion products company with more than 15,000 employees and manufacturing operations throughout the Western Hemisphere. He joined Coteminas as chief financial officer in 1989 and became CEO in 1993. Under his leadership, the company expanded internationally, diversified and increased its production, developed strategic alliances with suppliers in Asia, and acquired Springs Global, a worldwide leader in the towels and bedding segment. Gomes da Silva also directed Coteminas in deepening vertical integration to encompass all steps of cotton production and finishing. In 2009, Coteminas started its own retail distribution and today has a complete and integrated supply chain from cotton to the end consumer. Gomes da Silva is also the founder and chairman of the board of Cantagalo General Grains S.A., a company with operations in production, commercialization and logistics of grains.

     

    Maria Renz, CEO, Quidsi

    Class of 1996
    maria RenzAge: 46
    Residence: New York City
    Education: B.S., Drexel University; MBA, Vanderbilt
    Married to alumnus Thomas Barr, MBA’98, two children

    Maria Renz was named CEO of Amazon.com’s Quidsi, a family of 10 online retail sites including diapers.com, soap.com and vinemarket.com, in July 2013. An experienced online retail executive, Renz had been Amazon’s vice president of physical media and was also responsible for Amazon’s Canadian business. In those roles, she directed the parent company’s on-site customer experience; handled merchandising, buying, inventory and marketing for books, movies, music, video games and software; and led Amazon.ca. She has held a variety of leadership positions since joining Amazon in 1999, including managing the company’s consumables group, launching popular categories such as beauty, health and personal care and grocery, and leading its marketing communications department. As marketing director, Renz made the monumental 2011 recommendation to forgo a yearlong ad campaign in favor of offering a new supersaver shipping program—today an Amazon staple. Previously, she held positions at Kraft Foods Inc., Hallmark Cards Inc. and Nelson & Associates.

    Martin S. Craighead, Chairman and CEO, Baker Hughes Incorporated

    Class of 1998
    Martin CraigheadAge: 54
    Residence: The Woodlands, Texas (Houston area)
    Education: B.S., Pennsylvania State University; International Executive MBA, Vanderbilt
    Married, two children

    Since joining oilfield services giant Baker Hughes 28 years ago, Martin Craighead has held a broad range of roles—from technical to operational to executive—before being named chairman and chief executive officer in 2012. Craighead began in the oil industry as a research engineer, then joined Baker Hughes’ predecessor Dresser Atlas in technical sales. He served in a variety of operational and leadership roles in North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Prior to his current role, he was president and chief operating officer of the $22 billion global organization, which has 59,000 employees working in more than 80 countries.

    Rochelle Weitzner, CEO, Erno Laszlo

    Rochelle WeitznerClass of 1999
    Age: 45
    Residence: New York City
    Education: B.S.M., Tulane University Freeman School of Business; Executive MBA, Vanderbilt
    Partnered

    Rochelle Weitzner took over as CEO of luxury skin care brand Erno Laszlo in 2014 after serving as chief operating officer. She is responsible for directing all aspects of the legendary business in its continuing global expansion. Prior to joining Erno Laszlo, Weitzner was the chief financial officer for Gurwich Products, the international skin care company best known for its Laura Mercier and RéVive brands. In that role, she oversaw the organization’s global finance and accounting functions and directed its fiscal business initiatives. She was also responsible for Gurwich’s information technology, legal and administrative teams. Weitzner spent 19 years in a variety of leadership positions for International Paper, where she held vice president roles for $1 billion businesses within the group and where she was the youngest person and first woman to serve as CFO, responsible for finance, human resources, IT and administration for one of the company’s Paris-based operations.

    Tim Murray, CEO, Aluminium Bahrain (Alba)

    Tim MurrayClass of 2003
    Age: 43
    Residence: Kingdom of Bahrain
    Education: B.S., Susquehanna University; Executive MBA, Vanderbilt
    Married, two children

    Tim Murray moved his career and family to the Middle East in 2007 when he joined Alba, one of the world’s top aluminium producers, as general manager, finance and legal. Within a few years, he rose to be chief finance and supply officer, then chief financial officer, chief marketing officer and in October 2012, CEO. Murray weds U.S.-style management with respect for Middle Eastern culture as he oversees a workforce of nearly 3,000 for one of the Middle East’s largest industrial companies. In addition to managing Alba’s initial public offering on the London and Bahrain stock exchanges, Murray has overseen safety improvements, launched new initiatives and directed operations that resulted in record-breaking annual sales of $1.993 billion U.S. for 2013. Before joining Alba, Murray spent 10 years at ARC Automotive, most recently as vice president and chief financial officer.