Health care students benefit from a mix of professionals in the classroom. In addition to his Medical Center responsibilities, C. Wright Pinson, MD’80, draws on his experiences as a liver transplant surgeon to teach courses in ethics. R. Lawrence Van Horn has an appointment as associate professor of health policy at the School of Medicine. And U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper team-teaches with Van Horn at Owen six months of the year in an ongoing conversation—often animated—that “pulls back the veil on the nature of the challenges facing health care,” Van Horn says.
The pair teach two courses within the Health Care MBA program—Health Care Economics and Policy, and Health Care Law and Regulation. The classes are billed as an overview of the health care sector, with Cooper and Van Horn facing off with very different viewpoints. Van Horn teaches a similar course to Master of Management in Health Care students with Cooper as a regular guest speaker.
Cooper
The intense engagement of faculty members such as Van Horn and Cooper makes the out-of-classroom experience just as valuable as the coursework, says Alon Peltz, MD’12, MBA’12, now in residency in Boston. “One of the absolute highlights was every couple of months when we would get together over pizza with Larry and Jim to talk informally about health care, the landscape, ideas that we had, questions that we were encountering,” Peltz remembers. “Every time, it turned into several hours of incredibly engaging, thought-provoking discussions. I still sometimes think back to conversations we had, to things they’d bring forth to challenge the paradigm.”
Ryman Hospitality Properties Executive Vice President Steve Buchanan at the historic Ryman Auditorium.
The man the crowd knows as Deacon from the popular television show Nashville takes the stage at the Grand Ole Opry to screams of recognition. He starts with a sensitive ballad, and women of all ages stream past the lip of the stage and take his photo before being urged by ushers to make way for the next in line. Charles Esten looks to be having the time of his life. Is he a country music star, an actor playing a country music star or something in between?
Who knows, and really, why would it matter? Everybody is having a good time. Esten segues into a drinking song. “Pour, pour, pour some more,” he sings, “just like the four you poured before.” The crowd eats it up.
Off to the side of the stage, a low-key, conservatively dressed man looks on. The man is Steve Buchanan, BS’80, MBA’85, president of Opry Entertainment and co-creator and executive producer of ABC’s nighttime TV drama, Nashville.
The TV show gives audiences a new look at the city–and reasons to visit.
At Ryman Hospitality Properties, Buchanan is also a music business executive, a type represented on Nashville as the heartless and manipulative character Marshall Evans, head of fictional Edgehill Records. But Evans, Deacon, Rayna, Juliette and the rest of the television Nashville world exist only because of the vision of this real-life executive with a heart for the music and a business sensibility forged at Vanderbilt University and Owen Graduate School of Management.
Scientific Beginnings
Raised in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the son of a nuclear engineer and a chemist, Buchanan first enrolled in Vanderbilt as an undergraduate in the engineering school, intending to become an environmental engineer.
“I loved music and I very quickly got involved in the concert committee as a freshman,” Buchanan says. “In fact, that and the fact that engineering school was very challenging contributed to less than stellar academic performance for me.”
Buchanan and his cohorts brought many memorable shows to campus. Some of his favorites include Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt, Muddy Waters, Pat Metheny, Lester Flatt, David Bromberg, George Thorogood and Karla Bonoff.
“We were freshman hallmates in 1975 at Vanderbilt and immediately became best friends,” remembers Ken Levitan, now an artist manager whose clients include Kings of Leon and Emmylou Harris. “We were both involved on the concert committee and Steve was unbelievably hardworking at everything he did.”
“Steve brought Bob Marley to town,” Levitan says, still sounding astounded decades later that the reggae legend played Vanderbilt. Buchanan shakes his head, calling the Marley concert “an amazing experience.”
Buchanan says a course with Vanderbilt’s legendary cultural sociologist Richard “Pete” Peterson led him to transfer to the College of Arts and Science and major in sociology and psychology.
But it was really his extracurricular activities promoting music shows that allowed Buchanan to discover his vocation. “It was enlightening for me because despite my complete love for music, I had never necessarily thought of it as being a business,” Buchanan says.
First Job on Music Row
Fresh out of Vanderbilt, Buchanan worked with new and legendary artists at booking agency Buddy Lee. From left, Buchanan, Dwight Yoakam and Bill Monroe.
Upon graduation, Buchanan rejected suggestions that he move to Atlanta or New York, where he was told he could probably find work at a promoter or record label. Instead, he placed his bets again on Nashville. Levitan had already graduated and gone to work at Buddy Lee Attractions, a booking agency on Music Row.
“I helped Steve get a job at Buddy Lee,” Levitan says. “At that time there were still a lot of independent booking agencies in Nashville and you could make a mark there.”
At Buddy Lee, Buchanan was in a position to meet music industry people in Nashville, New York and Los Angeles.
“Two of the agents I worked with had played with Hank Williams (Sr.),” he recalls. The two, Jerry Rivers and Don Helms, still worked weekends as the Drifting Cowboys. “So I was both learning the business and learning the history of the business.”
Still, Buchanan had a nagging feeling that there was too much he didn’t know. He questioned if he even wanted a career in the music industry.
Once Again, Vanderbilt is the Answer
“I made the decision to quit my job and go back to school full time because I wanted to do a specific concentration and immerse myself,” he says.
Buchanan entered the MBA program at the Owen Graduate School of Management, focusing on marketing and gaining a strong foundation in the fundamentals of management.
Like his undergraduate career, getting started was rough.
“It was a rocky start, because it’s very difficult to just disconnect yourself when you’re still in the same playground that you were in before,” he says. “You’re still in your mid-20s and you still like to go out and listen to music, and your friends are still around and you’re supposed to be totally bathed in academics. It finally kicked in second semester.”
At Owen, Buchanan learned to be disciplined in his approach to business. “It really made me focus,” he says. “I learned to be methodical and strategic about things.”
Coming out of Owen, Buchanan faced a crossroads between a managerial training program at Northern Telecom and becoming the first marketing manager in the history of the Grand Ole Opry.
“Coming out of Owen, Buchanan faced a crossroads between a managerial training program at Northern Telecom and becoming the first marketing manager in the history of the Grand Ole Opry.
Today, sitting in his office dominated by a picture-window view of the Cumberland River, Buchanan explains what made him choose the Opry. “You want to know what it was?” Buchanan says. “I just loved Bill Monroe.”
Monroe, for those who don’t know their bluegrass, is the legendary musician whose band, the Blue Grass Boys, put together the high lonesome elements that became bluegrass music in the 1940s. By the time Buchanan crossed paths with Monroe in the 1980s, the master was in his 70s.
“Buddy Lee booked Bill Monroe. I would come out to the Opry to see Bill and I developed a deep appreciation of what the Opry is,” says Buchanan, casual in jeans and blue sweater. “That was a passion that would only grow.”
“It ultimately wasn’t a hard decision to pass on the Northern Telecom job,” Buchanan says. “Yes, it was a better paying job and had a more defined career path. But I thought that the Opry job offered me the opportunity to be in a more traditional business environment while at the same time being engaged in the entertainment and music industry.
“It felt like it was the perfect fit, especially because Bill Monroe, who I’d grown to love booking at Buddy Lee, was a member of the Opry as well,” he says.
Marketing from Scratch
Buchanan found himself walking into a unique situation.
“The Opry had never had a marketing manager, meaning it had never had a marketing budget,” he says. “Most freshly minted MBAs don’t really want to go to work for a place where they don’t have a budget. That doesn’t fit in with the typical scenario.”
Hal Durham, then general manager of the Opry, put aside a modest amount for an advertising budget. Buchanan created a small, simple campaign, which started to address the identity problem his market research showed was holding the country music institution back.
First broadcast in 1925 as a radio show and for many years a national broadcasting powerhouse, the Opry was part of Gaylord Entertainment, today Ryman Hospitality Properties. By the 1980s, the Opry was overly dependent on Gaylord’s Opryland USA theme park and hotel for its audience. Both brought thousands of tourists to the area regularly, which translated into tickets sales for the Opry.
Buchanan’s efforts to revitalize and separate the image of the Opry from the theme park were successful business strategies, which was fortuitous as the park closed in 1997.
“We were also dealing with a much more competitive marketplace from a destinations perspective,” Buchanan says. “Branson, Missouri, became a major competitor. There was huge investment in the ’80s and ’90s in Orlando and then there was the proliferation of casinos around this country. That is still what we deal with today.”
The Ryman Auditorium
If there’s a proudest moment in Buchanan’s early Gaylord career, it would have to be the revitalization of the historic Ryman Auditorium. Along with much of downtown Nashville, the legendary building—former church and for years home of the Grand Ole Opry—had fallen into disrepair during the 1960s and ’70s. The Opry itself had left the building in 1974 for a new facility on the grounds of the Opryland theme park.
“I had never even been in the Ryman Auditorium, and suddenly it was part of my responsibility to market it,” Buchanan says. “This was way before it was fixed up. We charged a couple of bucks and people could tour through it. You could go stand on stage and there was a little gift shop in the back.”
Buchanan was captivated by the Ryman, even though it was in obvious physical distress. It had sat empty for almost 20 years and had been recommended for demolition several times. The building was rundown and the downtown area in which it sat was decidedly seedy.
In 1992, the centennial of the building’s construction, Buchanan was instrumental in arranging for the Ryman to be used for a series of concerts and a live album by Emmylou Harris, her landmark At The Ryman.
He also organized a one-man play with musical performances that included Bill Monroe performing “Working on a Building.”
“Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill went on just before Bill doing ‘Drifting Too Far from the Shore’ and did such a great job that I think Monroe wanted to one-up them,” Buchanan says. “He did. He was outstanding.”
The two events were fortuitously timed. Downtown Nashville was about to undergo urban renewal, and Gaylord and Buchanan had the vision to lead the way.
“It was life- and career-changing for me because I was appointed general manager of the Ryman and got to develop the first business plans to oversee the renovation of the Ryman Auditorium,” Buchanan says. “There was a companywide belief that it was a worthy investment regardless of what it took, that it would be a meaningful and impactful undertaking for the company and city.”
If there’s a proudest moment in Buchanan’s early Gaylord career, it would have to be the revitalization of the historic Ryman Auditorium.
Under Buchanan’s direction, the old building came back to life. Structural issues were addressed. High-tech sound, lighting and engineering were installed, along with the addition of a proscenium for the stage. Central heat and air were added to the now 102-year-old former church. A 14,000- square-foot support building was attached to house ticketing, offices, restrooms, concessions and a gift shop; proper dressing rooms were built (previously, a sole ladies’ room backstage had done double duty as a dressing room for the Opry’s female performers). The building’s original wooden pews were refinished and stenciled artwork on the balcony was faithfully recreated. The Ryman reopened in 1994 to public and performer acclaim, quickly earning a reputation as one of most prestigious performance halls in the world, esteemed for its astounding acoustics.
“We’re sitting here and that was basically 20 years ago and it’s great to be able to look back and see what a visionary decision that really was for (former Gaylord Entertainment CEO) Bud Wendell to make that $8.5 million commitment and investment,” Buchanan says. Gaylord also built the Wildhorse Saloon on Second Avenue in downtown Nashville during that era.
“Both of those investments were critical for the redevelopment of downtown Nashville,” Buchanan says.
Television’s Nashville
What might be remembered as the opening of the second act of Buchanan’s career began with a meeting in late 2010 between the Gaylord executive and some West Coast talent executives. Buchanan was then president of the Grand Ole Opry and senior vice president of Gaylord Entertainment. Again, like in the 1980s, he faced the need to draw people to Nashville and the Opry.
“The first thought was film opportunities,” Buchanan says. “We were kicking around maybe a period piece that captured a moment in time of the Opry’s history and building something around the characters that made up the Opry.” That led to discussions about other film projects, television and theatrical ideas. Rejected concepts included a 30 Rock-like take on the Opry.
“In looking at shows like American Idol, where country artists were sometimes winning, and shows like Glee and Smash—there was an acceptance of performance within a scripted show,” Buchanan says. “It was my feeling that with country music, so many of the barriers had fallen by the wayside. Younger generations are not as identified by genre. They’re interested in artists and songs.
“It’s important to realize that you are creating a drama for network television … that means that things are exaggerated and a bit over the top.”
—Steve Buchanan
“And it just felt like Nashville was really being accepted and regarded as a cool place, a very strong creative community and a place where the popular music of the day is being created.”
After finding a production partner with Lion’s Gate and a writer in Callie Khouri (Thelma and Louise, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood), they pitched Nashville to all three major networks and received offers from ABC and NBC. They chose ABC.
The Nashville cast and crew film on a soundstage located just a few miles from downtown. From left, Director of Photography Ross Berryman, Buchanan and Transmedia Producer Lindsay Mayer monitor a scene being shot.
“I really didn’t fully understand about the Nashville vibe until later,” says Loucas George, a producer of Nashville, who says he had misgivings initially about filming the show in its namesake city—mostly because of the lack of film industry infrastructure. It took Buchanan in his role as one of the show’s executive producers to demonstrate how and why Nashville itself was an important character in the series.
“I didn’t understand about the (important songwriter’s showcase) Bluebird Cafe being in a strip mall. That didn’t make sense to me,” he says. “Steve took me to the Grand Ole Opry and all these other places and I started to realize that it was important to film here.
“When I first came here, I thought Steve was going to be a silent extra production partner. He’s been anything but. He’s been the salt of the earth. He is Nashville. He constantly reminds us of the niceness of the people here.”
Khouri says that Buchanan helps to keep it real.
“He is so well-versed in Nashville that we would be very unwise not to call on his knowledge,” she says. “Personally, Steve is an absolute joy. He’s thoughtful, famously low-key and soft-spoken but with a tremendous sense of fun. He’s a fantastic ally.”
Actor Charles Esten, who plays the show’s Deacon Claybourne, calls Buchanan “the face of connectivity and the face of kindness to all of us.”
“From the start, he made everyone involved in the production feel instantly welcome in Nashville. He handles what could be an extremely demanding and stressful job with ease and grace,” Esten says.
From left, Nashville cast members Jonathan Jackson (Avery Barkley) and Charles Esten (Deacon Claybourne) talk with Buchanan following Esten’s February performance on the Grand Ole Opry.
People in the fictional Nashville are not always so nice. “It’s not a documentary, after all,” Buchanan says. “It’s important to realize that you are creating a drama for network television. You have got to be able to do something that is compelling and captures people and the genre is that of a prime-time soap opera, so that means that things are exaggerated and a bit over the top.
“But it can still have heart, passion and emotion, and the city and music community don’t have to be disappointed in the portrayal from the perspective of the characters being stereotypes that are inaccurate or dated,” Buchanan says.
Putting the characters aside, almost everyone in Nashville agrees that the cinematography of Nashville represents the city beautifully. “One of the most common comments I hear from people is that they love the way the city looks,” Buchanan says.
That’s no accident. Millions of music fans, tourists and now television viewers have been influenced to see Nashville the way Buchanan sees it—as a deep musical wellspring, a must-visit destination, and now the hip town where the cast of Nashville spins webs of deceit and music each week.
It’s a classic case of supply and demand, with Vanderbilt meeting the demand for sharp human resources professionals with a supply of MBAs trained in human resource. The crunch is driven equally by changes in the corporate world and the reputation of Owen’s Human and Organizational Performance program.
The HOP concentration is among the highest ranked programs at Vanderbilt’s Owen School. Financial Times, for instance, named it No. 4 in specialty MBA programs in the U.S., and No. 7 globally.
That reputation creates competition to land Owen grads for the working world.
“Employers want to get here before anyone else and skim off the cream of the crop, find those qualified students and lock them up for internships,” says Read McNamara, executive director of the school’s Career Management Center. “They feel if they can lock them up for an internship, they have a pretty good chance of having that particular student convert the internship to a full-time offer and a good chance of the student accepting that offer. Companies will push us as hard as they possibly can to get to campus as soon in the school year as they can.”
Case in point: By January 2013, every second-year HOP student had accepted a full-time position. About 60 percent of them came back from their summer internships in the fall with offers for jobs. Vanderbilt’s rate for all MBAs is 40 percent receiving offers after summer internships.
HOP has virtually caught up with other MBAs in salaries, too; McNamara says that the average starting salary for a Vanderbilt MBA grad with a HOP concentration is about $90,000, just shy of the $92,000 average for all MBAs. He expects HOP to be on par with other MBAs by 2015.
“It’s not just the salary. The number of offers per HOP person and the credentials of the people applying to Owen with the stated goal of HOP are certainly on the rise,” McNamara says. “We’re delighted with that and if we keep doing the things we’re doing, there’s no limit to what we can do.”
And no limit to the need, either. Changes in corporate America have shifted views of the workforce. Technological improvements that handle typical HR functions have created opportunities for HR professionals to claim a seat at the table of the upper echelon of company management.
Barry Salzberg, CEO of Deloitte Touche Tahmatsu Limited
“The HR function has been elevated,” says Barry Salzberg, chief executive officer of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and a former member of the Owen Graduate School of Management Board of Visitors. “Ten to 15 years ago, human resource directors in large organizations reported to COOs or CFOs; today chief talent/HR officers report directly to CEOs, reflecting the increasing importance of talent. While leading a winning organization looks radically different today versus five years ago, business still relies on people to succeed.”
New demands on HR professionals include using predictive analytics to identify high performers early in their careers or to identify which employees may be likely to leave, Salzberg says. “This model allows for overall workforce planning, which is just as critical to a business’ bottom line as financial planning. Human resources has become a broad and strategic driver in business. This has not only helped us identify and cultivate careers of high-performers, but shifted our development approach from reactive to proactive.”
Reflecting Current Business Needs
Whether a company is growing rapidly, winding down a segment of its business or trying to do more with less to remain competitive, people issues are at the forefront and HR professionals are finding sometimes that seat at the table means at the head.
When Virginia “Ginger” Barnes, EMBA’91, began her career as a contracts administrator at Boeing, she recalls that “empowerment and encouragement thoughts existed only in small pockets and they certainly weren’t popular.” In her first program management job of overseeing early phases of Boeing’s involvement in the International Space Station, she began to understand the importance of people management as she worked closely with Russian counterparts. “That was a real people kind of epiphany,” she says. “We didn’t look alike, but we had the same values.”
Barnes
As CEO of United Space Alliance (USA), Barnes has had the unenviable task of retiring NASA’s space shuttle program. At the peak, USA—an alliance between Boeing and Lockheed Martin—employed 10,500. That number now stands at less than 2,000.
“What I’m most proud of is that we’ve done that with an intense focus on taking care of our people,” Barnes says. “Before I got here, USA benchmarked other companies that had shut down big programs. We didn’t find good examples of people who did it well. We went out to the workforce and said, ‘What do you need from us?’ I have an 11-by-17 spreadsheet of all the initiatives that we have implemented, and I have to say, we have been wildly successful. People come back and thank us for the ways that we helped.”
In 2011, when the shuttle flew its final mission, USA garnered five perfect performance scores from NASA; it marked the first time that USA had received even one perfect score. “I’ve been criticized by some for focusing more on people than I did on profits,” Barnes says. “But at the time that I did, we received the 100 percent award. As hard as this job is, and as unglamorous as it is, it’s the most rewarding experience of my career. Part of that has to do with the people I’m doing it with. We’ve made deliberate decisions about the people that we kept on board to finalize the closeout. In every case, each of those employees has come to me and said, ‘I will take on more, and do whatever you need me to do.’”
Crises, especially over the last five years, have certainly influenced the importance of staffing in companies, whether navigating external challenges or internal issues. “Those kinds of reactive developments have made companies, at the board level, look at the alignment of their own human capital, the importance of human capital and the importance of succession,” McNamara says. “And they’ve reached the conclusion that human resources is no longer a compliance function, but an absolutely essential element in the quiver of a company in terms of the elements it has available to ensure its own success. Visionary companies that recognize the importance of human capital and human capital deployment and planning are way ahead of the curve.”
“Attracting and retaining game-changing talent is at the top of the CEO agenda, as companies and clients expand exponentially in key markets—particularly in Asia and the Middle East.”
—Barry Salzberg
Those visionary companies are using their human relations personnel for entirely new functions. “Attracting and retaining game-changing talent is at the top of the CEO agenda, as companies and clients expand exponentially in key markets—particularly in Asia and the Middle East,” Deloitte’s Salzberg says. “In our global knowledge economy, the right employees make or break organizations, and we’re in the midst of a talent paradox: While layoffs continue and unemployment is high, many jobs still go unfilled because of skill shortages.
“For instance, in the United States alone, 3.6 million jobs were unfilled as of December 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even though the unemployment rate was at 7.8 percent,” Salzberg says. “Globalization and the proliferation of new technologies have forced companies to radically reconsider traditional talent and organizational models to distributed, crowd-sourced models.”
A Need to Understand
As HR gains visibility in upper management, it’s equally important that HR professionals know and understand all facets of business just like their peers with MBAs.
King
Erika Bogar King, MBA’99, began her career as a recruiter before moving into more of an HR generalist role, where she found herself recruiting those with graduate degrees to fill banking positions. “I hadn’t really thought of it before, but one turned to me and said, ‘So when are you going (to graduate school)?’ I looked at Owen because the professionals that I knew came from there were more accessible, more balanced in their approach,” says King, now talent director for Deloitte Consulting. “I liked the cultural sense that I was getting from the talent as well as the quality. I knew it fit would me.”
She also was attracted to the business background that embodied the HOP concentration. “I knew I wanted to stay in professional services and Owen’s HOP program was not from a psychology or people basis, but from a business basis first with the people element,” she says.
Nancy Abbott, EMBA’91, wanted to change fields and move out of the IT function at her company, GE. Her undergraduate degree in behavioral science made human resources the logical choice. “I wanted to immerse myself in areas I hadn’t studied in undergrad. I needed to know how to read a balance sheet, get better grounded in economics and learn the language of business,” she says. “That was my goal in choosing Owen. In the job that I had, I realized I didn’t truly understand finance, business metrics and key drivers. I wanted to build my skills to be a credible business partner. We continue to have a strong relationship with Owen and recruit here every year because of the talented, business-focused HOP graduates.”
“I think I’ve been lucky to be in a company where it’s assumed that HR has a seat at the table,” says Abbott, who leads organization and talent development for GE Capital. “Although it’s expected that you have a seat, you have to understand how the business works and contribute broadly to the business’s success, or you’ll lose that seat.”
When Abbott worked on an acquisition, one of the biggest learning curves was helping the new employees to understand the role of HR. “They viewed HR as very tactical, more about benefits and payroll transactions,” she says. “They had no vision of the value we could add, such as attracting, growing and developing terrific talent.”
Abbott
Abbott sees traditional human resource functions such as payroll and benefits as activities many companies are outsourcing to specialists or centralized centers of excellence. “That’s an evolution that has allowed HR people at GE to focus on the most critical and strategic needs of the business,” she says.
In her role, Abbott must have a clear understanding of the company’s worldwide business goals. “Without really knowing the needs of a particular business unit, and its plans for the future, I can’t help to identify the best possible talent to help it reach its goals. In my role, I’m one of the few people in GE Capital who looks across the top performers in all our businesses to see where in the world they might be matched with a great new opportunity,” she says.
Success Secrets
In business, timing is everything and Vanderbilt has a strategic advantage: It’s growing its HOP concentration at a time when other business schools have eliminated programs. “A number of premier programs either de-emphasized or dropped human resources,” McNamara says. “I think they’d love to have that one back and do it again.”
McNamara
Vanderbilt has a strategic advantage: It’s growing its HOP concentration at a time when other business schools have eliminated programs.
While others may have stepped out of the HOP studies, Vanderbilt has stepped up. McNamara sees the possibility of doubling the number of students specializing in HOP to as much as 15 to 20 percent of its MBA class. The secret to the success? “No. 1 is faculty,” McNamara says. “If you look at the accomplishments of our management department faculty, and specifically people who teach HOP, these are folks who have gained a reputation inside the classroom and out, in terms of research and recognition. The kind of people who come to study HOP do their homework and understand the value of the faculty.”
McNamara also cites Owen’s forward-looking curriculum and association with Peabody College of education and human development, which is widely recognized for its organizational performance programs. “There’s a spillover effect of the wonderful reputation of Peabody on Owen,” he says. “We’re recognized as having two of the premier organizational programs. Finally, it’s the self-perpetuating excellence in that our HOP people go on to great careers in corporate or consulting, and they’re people who come back and get involved. The alumni involvement will not permit this great program to slip.”
Transforming the Future
Human capital has risen in importance along with other corporate functions, but it is not without unique challenges.
“Because people associate HR with the touchy-feely things, it does not get the respect that finance does,” King says. “I do think there are probably HR organizations that still are the people who organize the company picnic and other events. It’s hard to pull away and tell your clients that you’re not going to do this anymore.”
At Amgen, the transactional aspects of HR have been moved back to the staff level, and human resources has shifted to coaching and advising. Centers of excellence handle recruiting and scheduling job interviews, says Joe Parise, MBA’10, Amgen human resources manager. “Having a business background helps you speak the client’s language much faster. Transactional work is not what our clients need,” he says. “Clients come to me for decisions on what they want to do. My job is really to hold a mirror up to them, to explore unintended consequences, to be a sounding board.”
Parise
And to be a sounding board requires a strong understanding of the issues, the kind of understanding gained through an MBA.
“It’s doubly important here at Deloitte,” King says. “My clients have the degree. My clients are advisers to their clients. They expect that I have the ability to manage change, to be able to craft a vision, to understand project management and how we extract value from our practitioners.”
When all the elements come together, the role that HR professionals play in their corporations can—and will continue to—be a formula for success. “When an organization becomes known for cultivating and developing talent, the market brand is strengthened,” Salzberg says. “This ultimately increases their ability to attract and retain high performers. When a company attracts top talent, it can quickly fill new and open positions without missing a beat. Keeping unfilled positions to a minimum can lead to increased productivity and profitability, greater innovation and faster time to market.”
After nine years as dean of the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, Jim Bradford is stepping down from his position at the end of the academic year in June. Jim recently discussed some of the highlights of his time as dean with
Vanderbilt Business magazine. He also laid out some of the broad areas he thinks will shape Owen in its next era of leadership. Here’s Jim in his own words.
On Passages
When we were writing the announcement that I’d be stepping down, it felt at times like crafting my own obituary. What do you say about a 40-year career in both the private sector and academia in just a couple of paragraphs? It reminded me of the book Tuesdays with Morrie.
What’s been great fun and interesting is visiting with alumni. My message to them is simply that this is an incredible school worthy of their time, energy and support. And in that process, I’ve greatly enjoyed hearing how Owen has influenced people’s dreams and how appreciative they are of the education they received here.
Of course, anytime there’s change you’ll find pockets of worry. But I tell people this is a team sport, that whatever course a new dean charts, the intimate, collaborative culture of Owen will carry the school forward. That’s one of the most valuable lessons the alumni taught me when I started my tenure: Make whatever changes are necessary to help the school thrive, but don’t lose the culture.
On Strategy
I believe the school—or any organization—has to be guided by two things. First, it needs a mission or a vision that works for it. What are we about? What are we doing? Second, there needs to be a sustainable business model that allows for smooth functioning. If those two priorities get out of whack, it doesn’t matter how great the mission is if you can’t make it work financially. Likewise, if you are rudderless and just go where the wind blows, you might get through in good times, but if you forget who you are and what you’re doing, you won’t be able to make it through in hard times.
For me personally, it has been gratifying to see the Leadership Development Program reach the levels it has. It’s sustainable and it’s something that we’re now being noted for by incoming students, employers and peer schools. We’ve also been fortunate that—starting with the Accelerator program in 2004, the Health Care MBA and MS Finance degree in 2005, then adding a Master of Accountancy, Master of Management in Health Care and the Americas MBA—all these new programs continue to thrive. They may need to morph over time to accommodate what the global economy demands. But I feel like we have met an obligation to build programs that business wants.
On Priorities for the Last 100 Days
The last 100 days are a wonderful time to look back at what has been accomplished and what’s still left to do. When I began thinking about this notion of the last 100 days, I remembered when I sent my own kids off to college. As a parent, you want to impart every article of wisdom that you can. Of course, you can’t do that in the last hour—the morals and values you instill have to begin at a very young age.
So while I certainly can’t plot a strategy for Dean Johnson, I want to do whatever I can to leave Owen in the best condition I possibly can. Right now that means communicating just how strong this school is. You can see that in the quality of our faculty, our students, and our staff. The rankings have all validated our strengths as well.
Bradford (center) joined students for the last Thursday Social at Owen in April. He also presented the 100% Owen Clash of the Class Trophy to the Class of 2014.
Second, I feel confident that as some optimism comes back into the economy—and we at least know that we’ll see some interest rate stability—our base of giving will continue to grow. It’s important to keep raising money for scholarships as a way to help recruit the best students possible.
I also have an eye on the faculty recruiting process. We have three major faculty members taking emeritus status this year—Germain Böer, Dick Daft and Hans Stoll—and I want to ensure that we are supporting and identifying the next generation of stars.
On Areas for Growth
The levers are there to ensure the continuing quality and vigor of the faculty. Along with that, you want to have the resources and facilities to attract the best students and stay plugged in to the employment market. Those types of levers can be pulled to guarantee our continued status as a highly ranked, intellectually robust school.
And when I talk about facilities, I don’t just mean a new building or additional classrooms. I also mean technology. What is Owen’s role in the world of MOOCs (massive open online courses)? Vanderbilt University and Owen have already taken a lead in this. So while technology may ultimately help lower the cost of providing an education, we want to make sure we protect the quality of what we offer. How, for example, do you stay in control of a classroom with 40,000 students? The school will need to understand those hurdles and be able to jump over them.
I think you’ll also see the nature of global education change. We’ve already come down that path somewhat with the Americas MBA, where students are having more immersive experiences and working with teams across borders, for example.
In addition to being dean of the Vanderbilt Owen School of Management, Jim Bradford is the Ralph Owen Professor of Management. He plans to take a yearlong sabbatical before returning to Owen, where he will once again teach strategy.
— Ryan Underwood
One of the integral parts of the Executive MBA program is a weeklong group immersion experience outside the United States. These international residencies, which take place during the spring of the students’ second year, include in-depth corporate visits that help explain the complexities of doing business in the global marketplace. This past April the Executive MBA Class of 2012 traveled to China, where they toured Beijing, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Macau. What follows is a collection of photos and observations that capture their experience.
A section of the Great Wall near Beijing
April 29: Beijing
Although the buildings were beautiful, what struck me most on this part of the visit were the Chinese people. The younger people clamored to have their pictures taken with us. Parents would bring their small children to say hello, and we were obvious objects of attention. ~Sherie Edwards
The Great Wall
April 30: Beijing
Today marked the first day of visits to businesses—the true reason for the trip. I joined the health care group since my career for the past 19 years has been in risk management and medical malpractice. Our first stop was Peking Union Medical College Hospital. It was well-equipped, clean and similar to hospitals in the U.S. ~Sherie Edwards
Peking Union Medical College HospitalApple StoreStreet foodHong Kong skyline
May 1: Hong Kong
Once we landed in Hong Kong, it quickly became apparent that there was an entirely different mentality here than in mainland China. Buildings towered into the clouds, and the influences of British rule were starkly felt. We took a tram up a near 45-degree slope to the peak of the island, where hot and humid jungle trails were interspersed with shops and eateries. ~Brett Wade
Victoria Peak
May 2: Hong Kong
We started our first full day of business tours in Hong Kong with a visit to the American Chamber of Commerce. We were presented information on business challenges facing both Hong Kong and the mainland. It was interesting to learn how high the cost of living is in Hong Kong and the amount of lavish wealth there is in turn. ~Brett Wade
View from JPMorgan officeVictoria HarbourAmerican Chamber of CommerceChina International Marine Container headquartersHuawei headquarters
May 3: Shenzhen
Huawei is developing cutting-edge communications products to integrate into all aspects of a person’s life. It was fascinating to see the products that will be launched in the next year. It was also unnerving to realize the potential applications of such technology and the implications these applications could have on individual privacy. ~Sherie Edwards
May 4: Macau
With more than six times the gaming revenues of Las Vegas, the casinos of Macau are immense, impressive structures. The Venetian is no different. We were given time to explore its casino, shops and restaurants before a quick Q & A and a behind-the-scenes tour of the kitchen, the built-in stadium and an impressive 6,000-square-foot “high roller” suite. ~Brett Wade
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and economics in 2011, Tim Maloney decided to stay at Vanderbilt for one more year. Having a master’s in finance, he believed, would be an important differentiator in a difficult job market.
Turns out he was right.
“It’s definitely a really tough job market, but the master’s helped me get the job I wanted,” he says. This past summer Maloney, BS’11, MSF’12, began working at Morgan Stanley as an Analyst. His focus is largely in fixed income, foreign exchange and emerging markets.
Preparing students to enter a variety of finance jobs is at the core of the yearlong Vanderbilt MS Finance program—a goal made all the more important after the financial sector was hit particularly hard with job losses during the recession.
“What we aim to do is give students a broad-based skill set so that they can go into almost any area—banking, investments, corporate finance—and start tackling real problems right away,” says Kate Barraclough, Senior Lecturer of Finance and Faculty Director, MS Finance. “We want them to be able to deal with any type of problem that comes up and deal with it quickly and effectively. They may be starting at entry level, but they should be star performers.”
MS Finance versus MBA
For Maloney, the MS Finance program was not merely a stepping stone to an MBA. “In my field, sales and trading, it may not help to have an MBA,” he says. “Even if I do eventually become a manager, I don’t think I’ll pursue an MBA.”
He’s not alone. Students in the MS Finance program are “seeing it as a terminal degree and they’re not coming back for an MBA,” Barraclough says. “In the six years of the program, there have only been a handful who have come back.”
When compared to MS Finance students, those on the MBA track typically have a bit more job experience, with most pursuing the degree about five years into their careers. MS Finance students, on the other hand, tend to come with fewer than two years’ experience. “There is the benefit with the MS Finance that students don’t have to take two years off to go to business school and then come back to the job market,” Barraclough says.
While the comparisons to the MBA program may be obvious, there’s no sibling rivalry between the two. Students in both programs take classes together, and the MBA students often mentor those in MS Finance. In fact, the MBA program was somewhat responsible for MS Finance being developed in the first place.
“One of the benefits of going to a school like Vanderbilt is that the alumni are so great. Staying connected and keeping the program successful is an important way to give back, but I’m doing it because I think it adds value to my degree.”
—Zach Eskelson
“Having a smaller MBA program allowed us to expand our offerings through a portfolio of one-year master’s programs, including the MS Finance,” Barraclough says.
Besides filling an important niche among specialized postgraduate programs, a one-year degree in finance makes sense because Owen is well-stocked with professors who are among the world’s leading experts in the field. The close alignment with the MBA program, however, causes some confusion over which degree a student should pursue.
One rule of thumb for deciding is the student’s career goal: “If someone comes to us with a few years of work experience wanting a less specific finance education or a job in consulting, we’ll typically suggest the MBA path,” Barraclough says. “Do they want a more generalist business education so that they can move into a higher position, or a targeted master’s and an entry-level position? That’s usually the determining factor.”
The MS Finance program also can be useful in switching career focus. Zach Eskelson, MSF’07, Assistant Vice President at Redwood Trust near San Francisco, had worked in account management but found that he wanted a more quantitative finance role. “I started looking at job opportunities and educational options and decided, based on what I wanted to do and my experience, that MS Finance was a better fit for me,” he says.
Master’s degrees in finance are growing in popularity at colleges and universities throughout the country. “It seems like every week we’ve got a new competitor,” Barraclough says. Yet Vanderbilt made Eskelson’s list even though he graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. He had visited Nashville several times before, and all it took was an official visit to campus to help him make up his mind.
“My decision was made,” he says. “The program is part of the business school. I wasn’t attracted to programs where they were part of the math or engineering schools. The fact that some of the classes were MBA classes—that attracted me. I’d be getting that exposure. There were only a few schools that had that.”
Access to the Very Best
Most students who enroll in the MS Finance program have received their undergraduate degrees elsewhere. In fact, only five of the 41 in last year’s class had attended Vanderbilt for their undergraduate studies.
“Our students tend to come from all over,” Barraclough says. “Students are attracted to the Vanderbilt brand and the strength of our alumni network.”
Kate Barraclough, Faculty Director of MS Finance, has helped the program fill a niche among specialized degrees offered at Owen.
In addition to Vanderbilt’s overall reputation, it helps that students have access to professors who have authored landmark studies on virtually every aspect of finance. For example, the faculty includes Bob Whaley, the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Management in Finance and Co-director of the Financial Markets Research Center. Among his many industry innovations is the development of the Market Volatility Index (VIX) for the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
“The classroom was generally a really interactive environment,” says Tony Cox, MSF’09. “It was really challenging, so we had to have a lot of interactions outside normal class hours or just talking to faculty in their offices. That kind of interaction was helpful. Being able to pick their brains whenever I wanted was definitely a great part of the experience. Bob Whaley’s class was one that I wanted to take just because he was teaching it. Having the opportunity to be around those people every day made Vanderbilt stand out.”
For Cox, a Financial Analyst with Goldman Sachs, another valuable benefit of a Vanderbilt education is access to the alumni network. “I know I wouldn’t be at Goldman without it,” he says. A graduate of the University of Kentucky, Cox connected with a fellow Kentucky alumnus who had received a master’s from Vanderbilt. Though the two had both schools in common, it was the Vanderbilt alumni network that connected them. “That’s how I was introduced to him and to Goldman and the office here in Atlanta,” he says. “Without that, I don’t think I ever would have had the opportunity to get the job here.”
“The program is a really short runway. Students can come out of undergrad pretty green, and in a short time they have to become accustomed to grad school and be ready to go into the job market.”
—Kate Barraclough
Cox represents his class as an Owen Alumni Council representative to ensure that the network remains helpful for those who follow. “Coming in, one of the things that I heard about Vanderbilt was the alumni network was really strong, and not just that they had a lot of alumni at great places, but there was a huge sense of community and people willing to return your calls,” he says. “The alumni network was a big drawing point for me, and I think it will be a big selling point going forward. If someone’s looking at any number of great schools, being able to show that you have an alumni network that’s willing to help you out, that’s something that you can use to compete against anyone. That’s the best resource you can have. It helps to keep the school strong and helps the school recruit.”
Eskelson, an Alumni Council representative for the Class of 2007, agrees. “One of the benefits of going to a school like Vanderbilt is that the alumni are so great,” he says. “Staying connected and keeping the program successful is an important way to give back, but I’m doing it because I think it adds value to my degree.”
Pursuing a master’s degree in what amounts to nine months creates an intensity, with every minute made to matter. It also forges deep relationships that carry on for years after graduation. “At University of Kentucky, it was easy to go through and not make a lot of connections,” Cox says. “Part of it was that you went from semester to semester and may never have had another class with someone. At Owen we had classes with the same people all the time. You really had to rely on your fellow classmates to make it through.”
Exposure to MBA students also makes a big difference, both inside the classroom and in extracurricular activities like the Owen Finance Club, which offers programming specifically for MS Finance students. Since many of the MBA students have had several years of work experience, their insight as mentors and career coaches is particularly valuable.
“Coming out of an undergraduate program and into a master’s is a different teaching environment,” Barraclough says. “Being in a classroom with a group of people who have, on average, five years under their belts is a wonderful experience for MS Finance students. They get a different style of learning, and they’re exposed to people with some background in their areas of interest.”
Ready for the Working World
Students in the MS Finance program usually fall into two categories: economics and finance undergraduates who want to differentiate themselves in the job search, or liberal arts majors wanting to home in on a career. The first semester follows a core curriculum, while the second allows a student to specialize in an area of finance based primarily on where they’d like to work, such as in corporate finance or at an investment firm.
Much of the academic year is devoted to the job search process. In fact, for many the job search often begins much earlier. Owen’s Career Management Center is in contact with students before they arrive on campus, and quite a few pursue internships the summer before classes start.
Sheila Swedberg landed a position as a Financial Analyst at Caterpillar Financial Services more than six months before graduation.
Sheila Swedberg, MSF’12, didn’t start quite that early, but might as well have. After receiving a bachelor’s in business from Boston University, she worked in accounting at a university for two years—long enough to determine she didn’t want that as a career. Arriving at Vanderbilt in mid-August 2011 (MS Finance students come two weeks early to plan for courses and career preparation), she immediately set to work on finding a job.
“We were told that there has to be an equal balance of school work, personal life and job search,” she says. “You can’t put too much effort in one area. That approach was new to me. When I’ve been in school, the message has been, ‘Focus on school work. Everything else will work out later.’”
Swedberg took advantage of the exposure to MBA students and the Owen Finance Club. She also participated in mock interviews through the club and set goals for herself, which she then emailed to the CMC’s career coach assigned to MS Finance students.
By November 2011—more than six months before graduation—she had landed a position as a Financial Analyst at Caterpillar Financial Services in Nashville. “There’s a lot of emphasis on networking, which was somewhat new to me,” Swedberg says. “I was terrible at it before, but it became a process of learning how to talk to people, making connections, reaching out and hoping that something will materialize from it.”
The MS Finance program is perhaps best described as a “really short runway,” says Barraclough. “Students can come out of undergrad pretty green, and in a short time they have to become accustomed to grad school and be ready to go into the job market.”
With such a rapid turnaround, every interaction with students matters—and translates into the working world. For Cox, it was the emphasis on communications. “The curriculum stressed it so much early on, from orientation and all the way through the first set of classes,” he says. “It was one of the biggest insights I got.”
He also gained technical skills, like something as simple as using Excel, which has helped him in his work. And then there is the intangible aspect that comes with the confidence of being able to engage in high-level discussions with fellow students and professors. “Because it was such an interactive and dynamic environment, being able to take the things that we were learning and turn them into a conversation was hugely helpful,” Cox says. “I interact with clients every day where I’m able to take what we see in the markets and distill it.”
For Eskelson, working at a small boutique firm has required virtually every aspect of his degree. For instance, the accounting courses have provided a high level of understanding about financial statements. “That has probably been the one single skill that lots and lots of people with high titles don’t have. Understanding complex financial instruments and being able to talk intelligently helped me get the job. It’s not that I can come into the job and do it immediately, but it is valuable being able to understand what, to most of the world, is very opaque.”
Vanderbilt MS Finance graduates may not be ruling the world of finance just yet, but they’re working their way up the ladder, reaching a hand behind to help those a few rungs below on the alumni network.
“Most of the people in my class have been lucky and have had some success in their careers over the last couple of years,” Eskelson says. “If I were to look for another job, that would be one of the first resources I would reach out to. I know people keep in touch and let each other know when they’ve moved. If someone came to me, I’d try to help them out, and other people would do the same.”
A photograph of a smiling young man standing beside a gas pump at a Spur Gas station in Henderson, Ky., sits in the offices of Gigi Lazenby, BA’67, MBA’73. The year was 1931 and the young man—her father, Paul Banks Jr.—would eventually work his way to President of that same company, Spur Distributing.
Years later, in 1988, Lazenby would found her own oil and gas production company, Bretagne LLC. A second photograph reminds her why she keeps going when prices sag and equipment breaks. In that photo, 40 oil field workers—blue-collar guys in overalls living off the sweat of their brow—look happily into the camera at lunchtime. “Without Bretagne, they wouldn’t have a job,” she says. “This is why I keep going.”
In addition to running her own company, Lazenby has a national advocacy role in the oil and gas industry, serving as Board Chair of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Often the only woman in the room, she promotes understanding about industry concerns, including taxation, accessibility and regulation.
“My job is to help lead the organization so that we explain ourselves to the larger community and to Congress and presidential candidates in a way that helps them understand the importance of the industry,” Lazenby says. Policymakers, she explains, don’t always fully comprehend the risky nature of the business, like the fact that most exploration doesn’t lead to discovery.
The energy business is not for the faint of heart, as Lazenby and many other Owen graduates who’ve gravitated to the industry can testify. Cyclical by nature, it is filled with controversies, challenges and setbacks. Yet energy is also a dynamic and growing sector full of opportunities for the next generation of leaders, and Vanderbilt is a part of that—from the brain trust of students who formed the thriving Owen Energy Club to an impressive cadre of Vanderbilt alumni and friends who are leaders in the field.
Unlocking Reserves with New Technologies
Contributing to a domestic energy business boom are new technologies for gas drilling that have unlocked untapped gas reserves, including so-called “tight gas,” which is difficult to access because of the geology surrounding the deposit. The increase in production, jobs and profits has been accompanied by some controversy about pollution and public health, particularly in regards to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process involves drilling a deep vertical well, followed by a horizontal well, and next injecting large volumes of water, sand and chemical gels into the ground to help break the rock apart and release the gas.
Gigi Lazenby examines a traveling valve for a down-hole pump system with Bretagne employees Eric Spencer (left) and Larry Oliver.
New technologies like this one are being used to unlock long dormant reserves across large swaths of the country, from the Marcellus shale covering parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia to the Barnett shale in north Texas to the Bakken shale in North Dakota.
The current boom is creating new jobs and will ultimately lessen the United States’ dependence on foreign crude imports, says Tim Perry, MBA’81, Managing Director for Credit Suisse in Houston. The outlook for the energy industry in North America is “very bright,” he says, adding that North Dakota is a case study in how recent technology innovations can boost growth and lower unemployment.
“The Bakken reservoir is an old reservoir that many of us in the energy business have known about for 30 years, but it was considered too expensive to drill, and now it’s not,” Perry says. “As a result, there’s a huge amount of drilling going on there now and, with that, a substantial amount of job creation.”
Martin Craighead, IEMBA’98, agrees that the energy market has been permanently changed by technological innovation. “The reservoirs that our industry targets today are more challenging, the environments are harsher, and the technology required to produce oil and natural gas is increasingly more complex,” he says. “The term ‘unconventional reservoirs,’ specifically with regard to shale development, seems to be on the tip of nearly every tongue in the energy industry. The so-called ‘shale gale’ hit the U.S. about five years ago today. The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology has enabled operators to produce wells more economically, particularly in the U.S. and Canada. Now this revolution is spreading to China, Argentina and Europe. Even Saudi Arabia plans to exploit both shale gas and tight gas eventually.”
CraigheadPerry
Craighead adds, “While the geology of these reservoirs is lower risk than traditional wildcatting, say in an offshore environment, many of the shale plays are difficult to reach—often lying more than a mile underground—and even more difficult to produce. Hydraulic fracturing is simply a method of stimulating the reservoir to enhance oil and gas production.”
Craighead, who grew up in Pittsburgh near some of the world’s largest gas reservoirs, in 2012 became President and CEO of Baker Hughes, a leading supplier of oil field services, products, technology and systems to the oil and gas industry. Baker Hughes allocates nearly 3 percent of revenue toward research and development annually.
“We spend about $400 to $500 million annually on R&D, and our facilities are some of the best in the world,” he says. “When Baker Hughes goes on campus to recruit, we invite students to our research centers around the world and show them what we’re doing. Our ability to attract brilliant young minds to our industry has never been greater because helping the world find and produce the energy it needs is a very noble cause, and people want to be a part of that—maybe now more than ever.”
Craighead was a self-described “expat” living in Venezuela when he enrolled in Vanderbilt’s short-lived but visionary International Executive MBA program in Miami, flying in every third weekend to take classes. “I didn’t appreciate it as much then but it had a real international bias to it,” he says. “For the energy sector, a key criterion for success is having global-minded executives.” Last year Vanderbilt launched a successor program, the Americas MBA for Executives, which also has an international focus.
Perry also took a nontraditional road to Vanderbilt and the energy business, enrolling in the MBA program immediately after receiving a degree in finance from the University of Arkansas. When he left Owen in 1981, the U.S. economy in general was sluggish, but Texas was booming. While many of his fellow commercial banking aspirants gravitated to New York, he headed for Texas, to smaller but fast-growing banking opportunities.
“It wasn’t planned out when I was at Owen, as happens in most careers,” Perry says. “I gravitated from general corporate banking into energy corporate banking and from there into energy investment banking,” where he’s been for two decades. He is one of two energy heads for Credit Suisse, heading up operations in North and South America.
Making Connections through Owen
Jeff Olmstead, BE’99, MBA’06, for a long time resisted the call of oil and gas that was in his blood. Last year, however, he took Dallas-based Mid-Con Energy public as its President and Chief Financial Officer.
Olmstead’s father, Mid-Con CEO Randy Olmstead, got into the oil business in the early 1980s, working as an independent CPA but managing about 15 rotary rigs on the side. His son grew up helping with grunt work in the summers, building fences and painting alongside the guys in the field. “Having worked in the hot sun and watched my dad’s fortunes go up and down, I wanted to do something different,” Olmstead remembers.
The younger Olmstead majored in engineering at Vanderbilt and put that degree to work for several years in telecommunications before getting interested in the finance side of the energy business. He returned to Nashville for his MBA and then went to work for Bank of Texas, where he was an oil and gas lender. One of his customers, Primexx Energy Partners LLC, hired him as Chief Financial Officer in 2010. It is a family-owned company but many times bigger than the company his father began.
GillilandOlmstead
“I had intended to make a career there (at Primexx) but by that time Mid-Con, as it neared maturity, had entered its first round of private equity funding. Having the opportunity to work on an IPO with your dad is pretty unique and special,” Olmstead says. Going public was quite a ride, he admits, and there were parts of the process “I’d be happy never to do again.” On the upside, he says, a smaller company such as Mid-Con has the opportunity to make meaningful smaller acquisitions and even delve into some innovative research and development opportunities.
For example, the company has formed a partnership with researchers at the University of Oklahoma who have developed a surfactant—a surface active agent that makes it easier for water to interact with oil—to use in individual oil wells to increase production. The technology works, Olmstead says, but is not yet economically viable. Currently most of Mid-Con’s properties produce oil using a secondary method called water-flooding—injecting water in oil and gas wells and filling up the space voided by previous production to repressurize the reservoir. The process is not new or unique, he says, and the time from acquisition to production can take several years.
Representing a new generation of industry leaders, Tracey Gilliland, an MBA candidate for 2013, approached Olmstead when he visited Owen and asked him if he would consider hiring an intern for the summer. He accepted, and she soon was plunged into assignments that ranged from preparing investor relations reports to writing press releases to putting together an evaluation of a potential acquisition in the wake of the public offering.
The internship gave her renewed appreciation for her core curriculum at Owen. “My boss asked me to do a regression analysis and all I could think was, ‘Thank God for Bruce Cooil and statistics.’”
Like Olmstead, Gilliland initially resisted joining her family’s energy business, planning a career in government after graduation from the University of Texas at Austin. She spent two summers working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C., before being pressed into service at her family’s power plant development company, Federal Power Company LLC. After a year, she helped work through the company’s sale to Australian-based Macquarie Group Limited, a global provider of banking, financial, advisory, investment and funds management services. Gilliland then spent the next three years working for Macquarie. Her decision to go back to school for her MBA “was about me taking control of my career,” she says.
She chose to pursue her MBA at Owen rather than a Texas school because, she explains, “at Vanderbilt I would have to choose to stay in energy.” Her choice seems clear now. She’s vice president of the Energy Club and in that role helped plan Owen’s first Energy Trek to Houston, along with Peter Veruki, Director of Corporate Relations, and Sylvia Boyd, Assistant Director of Employer Relations. The trip was part of a targeted effort to link the large Vanderbilt energy alumni network in Texas with current Owen students. The first stop was Gilliland’s former employer, Macquarie Group. The student group also visited Baker Hughes, JPMorgan Chase, Exxon Mobil and Credit Suisse.
The Right Kinds of Energy Leaders
Exxon Mobil has long been a pipeline for Vanderbilt MBA graduates, and there are numerous connections between the school and the oil and gas company. In fact, Mary Humphreys, daughter of Exxon Mobil’s Senior Vice President and Principal Financial Officer Donald Humphreys, is an Owen student on track for graduation in 2013.
Donald Humphreys has been with Exxon Mobil for 36 years and relishes being part of an industry that produces something people need. “It’s an industry that’s not always loved, but there’s a lot I can help people understand,” he says of his regular interaction with business students, including those at Vanderbilt.
People often are surprised by the analytical nature of the oil and gas business, he says. “We have a lot of MBAs at Exxon Mobil, but a lot of the MBAs have engineering, science, business and financial backgrounds,” he explains. As the energy sector’s workforce ages, Exxon Mobil and other companies, large and small, will be seeking out a new generation of leaders.
While he’s weathered some definite highs and lows during his long career, Humphreys has never seen a period as dynamic as the current one. Technology innovation has been a huge factor, but he also credits the industry consolidation that took place in leaner times for increasing efficiencies.
He predicts increased domestic energy production will have a continued positive impact on manufacturing and job growth. A next focus for energy companies, he says, will be advocating for “reasonable regulation” to protect jobs and balance of trade.
Perry agrees. “We literally could become energy-independent in this country, given less government regulation,” he says.
Meanwhile Lazenby is among those knocking on doors in Washington on that score. The industry has a responsibility to have a place at the table, she argues. “You have to be an advocate, you have to be a manager, you have to be able to explain what you do, have the facts, be civil,” she says. “You have to understand world finance and economics. That’s one of the exciting things about this industry—that you’re not insular. You have to understand what’s happening in the world, in politics, in regulation, in government. You can’t just plunk your oil well down and calculate your numbers.”
Her workers operate “stripper wells,” which produce less than 15 barrels a day by injecting nitrogen into the wells, letting it soak with the oil and then “puff” it back out. It’s slow going, but as much as 18 percent of the oil in the United States is produced in such a fashion, she says, adding that she sometimes begins presentations by jokingly referring to herself as “queen of the strippers.”
While a technological background would be beneficial to the next generation of industry leaders, Lazenby, Humphreys and Craighead say that the ability to think critically and strategically is the most beneficial. Perry notes that the energy business currently is experiencing “a real shortage of people” due to recent growth, but some of this, according to Craighead, can be attributed to the fact that the industry is looking for just the right kinds of leaders.
“There’s going to be a need going forward to develop leaders who can think critically and who are sensitive to more issues than just an income statement,” Craighead says. “We want leaders who are willing to do the right thing and who are open and transparent with the communities in which they live and work.”
Public scrutiny of the oil and gas industry has only heightened since the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which exposed the dangers of deep-water drilling. (For more about the spill and other energy controversies, see the sidebar.)
The nature of the energy business is that there’s always going to be constant change and the potential for surprise, both of which Olmstead likes. “Most exciting is what some of us like to call the stumble factor,” he says. “Many times, you might be drilling a well and happen to drill through something you didn’t know was there and you make a new discovery. It can happen anytime, anyplace.” He chuckles and adds, “You try to keep it quiet so you can lease everything around it, but suddenly 10 of your best friend competitors are trying to beat you to it.” That, too, is the nature of the business.
Olmstead advises new graduates to be willing to start at the bottom. “There are so many things you would miss otherwise,” he says. It’s important as well to understand and embrace the risks. “There are plenty of booms and busts, and lots of very good business people get caught on the wrong side of a cycle, and it will happen again. It always does.”
Starting at the bottom is a humble lesson that Lazenby will never forget, thanks to her father. “You can always work—he always told us that,” she says. “You can find something. You should never stop trying.”
His persistence and dedication are characteristics that Lazenby has taken to heart in her own career, and one doesn’t have to look very hard to recognize the same traits in her fellow alumni in the energy business. Bust or boom, they will tell you that it’s important to carry on with what you believe in because you never know when you might hit pay dirt.
Experiential learning has long been a point of pride for Owen. Case competitions, extracurricular club activities and in-class simulations are just a few of the opportunities afforded students throughout the academic year. Each fall, though, students can go a step further by signing up for an intensive hands-on experience in one of several disciplines. Immersion Week, as it’s known, gives students a competitive edge by exposing them to real-world situations outside a traditional classroom setting. This past October’s Immersion Week encompassed health care, finance, marketing and global education, all of which are highlighted in the photo essay that follows.
Health Care Immersion
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“The Health Care Immersion is a valuable start to the Vanderbilt Health Care MBA program. It leverages our unique position in Nashville as the nation’s hub of health care delivery. During the week, students gain many different perspectives on the challenges facing the health care delivery system and leave with a better context for the business education that follows.”
—Larry Van Horn
Larry Van Horn, Associate Professor of Management and Executive Director of Health Affairs, and Scarlett Gilfus, Program Coordinator for Health Care, organized this weeklong course for students pursuing Health Care MBAs. The course examined the real world of U.S. health care delivery through the perspectives of physicians, nurses, patients, scientists and administrators. On day one, students changed into scrubs and headed into the operating rooms at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where they stood next to doctors and nurses and watched surgeries being performed. Other activities included visits to the LifeFlight Operations Center, which manages Vanderbilt’s critical-care helicopter service, and the Mass Spectrometry Research Center, which provides laboratory support for researchers across the university.
“It was a one-of-a-kind experience that prepared us for the rest of our curriculum at Vanderbilt,” says Garrick Berberich, an MBA candidate for 2013. “We got to see all aspects of the health care industry and discuss the front-line interactions between providers and patients.”
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Wall Street Week
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“Wall Street Week is the primary mechanism for introducing careers in financial services to first-year MBA students. When they meet alumni and other firm representatives, it brings a sense of reality to career paths they may have only read about. Students come back much better educated about their options and what it takes to get to Wall Street from Owen.”
—Emily Anderson
The Career Management Center’s Executive Director Read McNamara, MA’76, and Senior Associate Director Emily Anderson helped coordinate this weeklong trip to New York for 34 first-year MBA students exploring careers in finance. The group met with representatives of 11 different financial services firms: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, Citi Commercial Banking, Citi Investment Banking, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Guggenheim Partners, JPMorgan Chase, Paulson & Co., Petrus Partners and UBS. Representatives of the firms gave presentations about the economy and discussed MBA career paths within their organizations. Students gained additional insight into Wall Street from alumni who joined Dean Jim Bradford for the annual Wall Street Week Alumni Reception at the Union League Club.
“Wall Street Week was very important for my internship search,” says Neena Sinha, an MBA candidate for 2013. “Not only did I learn more about the banking industry, I gained a valuable network that will help support my career in the future.”
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Brand Week
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“The key to a good immersion experience from a pedagogical perspective is to foster interaction between business leaders, such as our presenters from Brown-Forman, Papa John’s, GE and Mars Petcare, with bright students who work on problems that matter—like understanding the ROI behind social media marketing activities.”
—Steve Hoeffler
Associate Professor of Marketing Steve Hoeffler and Jack Kennard, Principal at White Oaks Brands, a Louisville, Ky.-based brand strategy firm, organized this three-day event for marketing students. Executives from spirits and wine company Brown-Forman, pizza restaurant chain Papa John’s and appliance manufacturer GE gave talks on issues such as social marketing and consumer engagement. The highlight of the experience was a team case assignment for pet food manufacturer and veterinary care company Mars Petcare.
“It was exciting when our team was voted by Mars Petcare as having the winning strategy,” says Ashley Welnhofer, 2013 MBA candidate and President of the Vanderbilt Marketing Association. “We were invited to research and assemble a social media ambassador program for the company as an independent study during mod 2. Working hand-in-hand with their brand management team definitely enhanced my education.”
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Global Business Association Trip to Turkey
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“There were many eye-opening experiences for our group. One of my favorites was learning firsthand about socially conscious initiatives at Turkcell and seeing how those initiatives reinforce the company’s mission as well as its bottom line. Of course, the generosity of the Turkish people and Vanderbilt alumni who helped plan our visit also made lasting impressions on us all.”
—David Parsley
The Global Business Association, a student club focused on international business, helped plan this weeklong trip to Istanbul to learn about the Turkish economy. Accompanying the 18 students on the trip were David Parsley, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Economics and Finance, and Assistant Professor of Operations Mumin Kurtulus, a native of Turkey. Among the highlights were tours of the Istanbul Stock Exchange; Turkcell, the leading mobile communications company in Turkey; and MyNet, the largest Internet company in the country. The group also had time for a few cultural stops, including a cruise around the Bosporus and visits to architectural landmarks like the Hagia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque.
“I didn’t know much about Turkey before going there (except that I liked Turkish coffee),” says Aaron Fung, an MBA candidate for 2012. “The trip gave me a great deal of insight into Turkish thinking. It’s partly European, Asian and Middle Eastern—just like its geographic location.”
For David Owens, innovation on a personal level can be hard-wired.
“I am genetically an engineer,” he says. “My wife remarked one day as we were traveling, ‘Why do you always have a bag full of wires when we go on vacation?’ It’s just always been part of my identity.”
On a business level, innovation is a much slipperier commodity, says Owens, who studies the subject as Professor of the Practice of Management and Innovation at Vanderbilt. Although all businesses rely on timely innovation, most of them too often block it, according to Owens’ latest book.
Creative People Must Be Stopped: Six Ways We Kill Innovation (Without Even Trying), published in 2011 by Jossey-Bass, takes a clear-eyed look at six levels of stumbling blocks we unintentionally place in front of new ideas and their implementation. “I believe that everyone is creative, that everyone can and will move toward positive change given the opportunity,” Owens says. “My interest is understanding ways we stop people from doing that.”
At each of those six levels—self, group, organization, industry, society and technology—innovation faces resistance. “Take the organizational level,” he says. “Imagine the monumental courage it would take at Kodak in the ’80s to say, ‘Guys, I think we should stop doing film.’ It would be hard even for those people who knew that film’s days were numbered.”
He cites the Segway, a two-wheeled electric vehicle, as an invention whose potential on paper hit the brick wall of societal realities. “The Segway was too fast for the sidewalk and too slow for the streets,” he says. “That’s not a technical problem. They didn’t need the battery to last longer or to make the handlebars more comfortable. It was the societal restraints that they failed to address.”
Fighting the roadblocks that we and others throw in front of our own and each other’s creativity is at the core of Owens’ work as a teacher, mentor and consultant to organizations like NASA and the Smithsonian Institution. His is an almost counterintuitive approach.
David Owens
“It’s not, ‘Here’s how to be creative,’ but rather ‘Here’s how to stop your existing creative ideas from being blocked or killed,’” he says. “The punch line of the book is that there are at least six different ways to look at innovation, and you should pay attention to all of them because each one has the power to help you find the hidden barriers your innovation will face. What I find is that it’s the one perspective you ignore that ends up biting you.”
He sees creativity and innovation play out in real time as a mentor at the Entrepreneur Center, a Nashville-based nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs with investors and resources, and as Faculty Director of the Vanderbilt Accelerator Summer Business Institute for undergraduates and recent college graduates.
“Projects in the Accelerator,” Owens says, “touch all aspects of business—marketing, finance, operations, HR, manufacturing, strategy, design—and the program allows these students to experience the entire span of what happens in business in just a few weeks.”
He has watched any number of students carry ideas generated, refined or actualized at Owen into careers. He points to students who have gone on to do innovative work at places like Apple, Mattel, Microsoft, Google and Nissan. Another he cites is Jerome Edwards, MBA’04, Founder, President and CEO of Veran Medical Technologies, a St. Louis-based company that has developed cutting-edge imaging technology for surgical procedures.
Surgical Precision
Before earning his MBA at Vanderbilt, Edwards worked for Medtronic, one of the world’s leading medical technology companies. There he built a voltage-based navigation system that guided catheters inside the heart to burn tissue and regulate heartbeat. That technology, however, was spun off into another company and ultimately acquired by a Medtronic competitor in a $273 million deal. It was then that a frustrated Edwards decided to start a new chapter in his career.
“I wasn’t going to let that happen again,” he says. “Medtronic had been a great company to work for, but I decided to leave and go back to business school.”
“For us, innovation is about getting people into the field,
having them see surgeries, and coming back and sharing ideas
without barriers and without process.”
—Jerome Edwards
A Dean’s Scholar, Edwards enrolled at Owen in 2002 because he says, “I felt at home and felt the entrepreneurial spirit.” That feeling was shared by fellow student Evan Austill, BS’93, MBA’04. The two teamed up and started writing business plans for the type of technology Edwards developed at Medtronic, but for different organs. Edwards and Austill were encouraged by Germain Böer, Professor of Accounting and Director of the Owen Entrepreneurship Center, as well as former faculty member Bruce Lynskey, MBA’85. Edwards says Owen’s center “kept putting me in great opportunities in terms of business plan competitions and showcasing the plans to alumni.”
After receiving $65,000 in grant money, Edwards and Austill founded Veran Medical Technologies and paid for the first patent, which was written in the 810 Café at Owen. That patent was for a device that acts like a GPS system for the human body. An electromagnetic field and sensors are used to steer the device inside the body and then help sample or excise tissue that is suspected of being cancerous. The innovation is in making the device work in the lungs, which continue to move during surgery.
“With cancer,” Edwards says, “it’s about diagnosing as early as possible. In this case, we can get to the deepest, darkest regions of the lungs, get tissues from suspect lesions and progress to therapy if it’s cancerous.”
With just 28 people on staff, Veran is a small company where, Edwards says, “everybody participates in R&D—everybody does everything.” The company’s small size and flexible approach have helped it overcome the types of adverse group dynamics and organizational missteps that, according to David Owens, hamper innovation.
“One engineer in a small company can do the same amount of work as three in a big company because you’re freer,” Edwards says. “Process is good but it can be burdensome. Here, rather than meeting after meeting after meeting, you just walk in and ask a question, then go back to your desk and get to work again.
“For us,” he adds, “innovation is about getting people into the field, having them see surgeries, and coming back and sharing ideas without barriers and without process. Once you get to a level where it’s going to be turned into a real product, then you fold it into effective process.”
Renter’s Paradise
Adam Albright is helping RentStuff.com get a foothold in the marketplace with an unconventional business model.
For a small number of students, innovative ideas and an entrepreneurial spirit lead to the business world prior to graduation. That has been the case for Adam Albright, BE’10, an MBA candidate for 2012. Albright is Co-founder of RentStuff.com, which he describes as “a marketplace similar to eBay for renting rather than selling household items.” He teamed up with his two fellow co-founders when they needed someone with a technical background. Albright, who has been doing freelance software and website development since he was 10, earned his bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering.
Participation in a summer-long incubator program at the Entrepreneur Center provided RentStuff.com with $15,000 in seed capital, mentoring and networking, and the chance to refine their presentations with the help of Michael Burcham, Lecturer of Entrepreneurship and President and CEO of the center. The program also gave them temporary office space.
“We have a couple of desks and white boards, and we make a lot of to-do lists and brainstorm ideas,” Albright says. “Part of my job is to explain the technological complexities behind what we want to do.”
The RentStuff.com model takes advantage of a fundamental shift in the way people access everyday goods. Albright cites a phenomenon called “collaborative consumption,” which he says is when “people try to own less stuff and rethink how they consume assets.” He and his partners have drawn inspiration from Zipcar, a membership-based car-sharing company, and Airbnb, which matches people needing short-term lodging with those offering everything from sofas to castles.
RentStuff.com handles payment transfers and security deposits, and offers reviews of people who use the service and the items rented, which include bicycles, cameras and even cocktail dresses. Recognizing that the target demographic skews younger means part of the innovation lies in finessing potential backers.
“Someone making six figures is not going to be renting golf clubs for $20 a day,” Albright says. “You have to explain to investors how it would work and who would be interested because it’s a new model and the math doesn’t add up for them. The investors aren’t the ones using it, but they’re the ones we need on our side.”
In other words, Albright and his business partners have faced some of the societal innovation constraints that David Owens writes about in his book. Society’s adherence to a conventional way of doing business sometimes prevents more creative approaches from gaining traction.
In the case of RentStuff.com, part of the solution lies in bringing small stores on board and offering to link them to potentially large audiences through the website. “We can emphasize the rental business side of RentStuff.com to investors, and then add that individuals can do it, too,” Albright says.
He finds that as a businessman, youth can be a mixed blessing. “Being young, you get a lot of helpful advice,” he says. “People are very willing to tell you about experiences they’ve had and pitfalls they’ve faced, and it speeds up the learning process. But when you go to an investor looking for half a million dollars, maybe they’d feel better if you were 50.”
Nashville, he adds, has been a good place to get attention and work out the kinks before carrying the concept to a larger city, where high-density neighborhoods and apartments concentrate the potential market for rental items like carpet cleaners and sporting goods.
Albright also attributes their early success to the company’s domain name. He believes that it has been crucial in driving people to their website. “RentStuff.com is a pretty identifiable name,” he says. “It’s easy to figure out what we do.”
Wallet Allocation
A great name is also the capstone of a highly regarded customer loyalty measure developed by Bruce Cooil, the Dean Samuel B. and Evelyn R. Richmond Professor of Management, and alumnus Tim Keiningham, MBA’89, with marketing research firm Ipsos Loyalty.
The Wallet Allocation Rule, as it’s known, came about because traditional metrics gauging customer satisfaction and loyalty “do a terrible job of linking with the share of category spending that customers allocate to the brands they use,” says Keiningham, the firm’s Global Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President.
Bruce Cooil and his co-authors won the Next Gen Market Research “Disruptive Innovation” Award for their work on the Wallet Allocation Rule.
That need prompted a two-year study in collaboration with Lerzan Aksoy, Associate Professor of Marketing at Fordham University, and Alexander Buoye, Vice President of Analytics at Ipsos Loyalty. The study examined more than 17,000 consumers in nine countries and covered purchases in more than a dozen industries. A key datum was the number of brands being considered along with relative rank.
In the end, Cooil and his collaborators found that companies would be better served paying attention to how well they rank in comparison to rivals, rather than concentrating on achieving high customer satisfaction levels. According to their research, being a customer’s first, rather than second, choice can have a significant financial impact.
“What we found shocked us,” Keiningham says. “Our research uncovered a heretofore unknown relationship between customers’ perceptions of the brands they use and their share of wallet that could be easily calculated using a simple mathematical formula: the Wallet Allocation Rule.”
The rule makes it simple for managers to determine the financial implications of rank and of moves up or down, he says. Its implications include the fact that customer satisfaction is best understood in the context of competition, since it can rise even while per-customer spending declines.
“We looked seriously at alternatives,” says Cooil, who analyzed the data. “You see other papers that look at converting ranks to market shares using industry-specific parameters. We were expecting to have to go that way, but Alex suggested this other approach, and more complicated methods couldn’t do any better.”
Tim Keiningham
It’s an approach that breaks through the kind of industry constraints and societal barriers that David Owens studies. “We all start out with an idea of how things work,” Keiningham says, “and this view causes us to seek out information that supports that view and discount information to the contrary. As a result, we get a lot of ‘motivated’ research to prove what we want to believe.”
Keiningham and Cooil have become close friends through the years: Cooil was a best man at Keiningham’s wedding in Istanbul and has collaborated often with Keiningham and Aksoy, who are husband and wife. Their collaboration plays off their differing approaches and personalities.
“They get me interested in projects I might not find interesting otherwise,” Cooil says. “I have very different talents from Lerzan and Tim. They’re much more organized, much more focused on what industry really needs to know about, what would really help companies—and they get projects started.
“They’re the ones asking the questions and telling me what the current theory is. I go through and see how the models are working. Then they ask, ‘What can we do? We have this really interesting data. Can we come up with another approach or do something different with the data or clear up an issue that everyone’s convinced they understand but we’re convinced they don’t understand?’ They’re pretty demanding. They want answers and they keep projects going.”
Their four-way collaboration with Buoye on the paper “Customer Loyalty Isn’t Enough. Grow Your Share of Wallet,” published in the October 2011 Harvard Business Review, earned them the Next Gen Market Research “Disruptive Innovation” Award. It’s a major acknowledgement, although Cooil laughingly dismisses one of the accolades that went with it.
“They called us ‘thought leaders,’” he says, “It’s a mixed blessing because I’ve always hated the phrase. Doesn’t it sound Orwellian? But they did give us these really artsy trophies. I can’t even put mine in my study because my wife wants to put it on the mantel as an art piece.”
Special Resonance
Cooil’s and Keiningham’s work is another example of the worldwide impact of innovation with Owen ties. It is a key to what makes Nashville a city with special resonance as a business center for David Owens.
“I feel a real energy here once again,” he says, “with new startups and tech companies and a level of creativity in Nashville that really make it exciting for me.”
His work in breaking through innovation barriers is aimed at helping to keep the Owen School in the thick of that creative energy, as a meeting place of education and innovation that is as good for human development as it is for business development.
“With Accelerator, as with everything else,” he says, “we want to help students find that part of the wide spectrum of business that talks to them. I try to expose them to a lot of things to do, to give them enough diverse projects and experiences that they find something that makes them say, ‘I like marketing’ or ‘I’m good at managing teams.’
“I want to offer a perspective on business’ role in society, one that often gets lost,” he says. “It’s so much more than making money. It’s about feeling good about what you do and helping make the world an amazing place. How can you be a contributing member of society? Business is a great way to do that.”
For a guy from Middle Tennessee, Brent Turner, MBA’99, sure uses a lot of nautical terms. That may be the impact of having lived near the Puget Sound in Seattle for the past 12 years, but his choice of words is fitting nonetheless. Turner is helping steer the future of Owen as chair of the school’s Alumni Board, and his enthusiasm, drive and leadership are just the types of invaluable assets you’d want in someone at the helm.
When Jim Bradford, Dean of the Owen School, asked him to lead the board last year, Turner was both honored and surprised. Even Turner’s assistant good-naturedly asked him if he was absolutely sure Bradford was serious. (Those are the kinds of self-effacing stories Turner likes to tell about himself.)
“I didn’t immediately tell [Bradford] yes, but I didn’t have to think about it long,” says Turner, Executive Vice President of Call Products for Marchex, a Seattle-based digital call advertising company.
That’s because of his deep-running zeal for all things Vanderbilt. Turner is one of the youngest members of Owen’s Board of Visitors, composed of corporate leaders from some of the world’s most prominent companies, who advise the dean on curriculum, the needs of the business community and the overall strategic direction of the school. He also serves as a class representative on the school’s Alumni Council, which encourages alumni participation and promotes philanthropic support. He even keynoted last year’s Discover Weekend for prospective students and has helped hire Owen graduates. And as if that isn’t enough, this marks his third year on the Alumni Board and second as its chair.
“He’s a passionate guy,” says Dave DiFranco, MBA’99, a Principal at private equity firm Blue Point Capital Partners. “Whatever he decides to spend his time on, it’s 100 percent. That’s true about SEC football, the Titans, the Owen School. That’s how he is, and he inspires others, like me, to get involved, too.”
Having a well-respected classmate lead the Alumni Board gives DiFranco a sense of confidence. “He’s not afraid to deal with tough stuff,” he says of Turner. “You might not always like what Brent has to say, and he doesn’t shy away from the tough issues. But that’s what a leader does.”
Turner’s decision to immerse himself in board activity at the school was fueled in part by Bradford’s all-hands-on-deck approach to bringing Owen closer to its goals. “He understands,” Turner says, “just how important it is to have as many people in the boat as possible if you’re trying to turn it.”
Part of the Returns
Turner was inspired to accept a leadership role because he saw that Bradford valued alumni input and sought answers to difficult questions. “I was impressed,” Turner says, “that he was willing to tackle what had been the central issue at Owen, which was: ‘What is the school’s strategy going to be? What’s going to be the role of rankings in determining our success?’ That’s a very hairy conversation to have, but I noticed him having it at both the Alumni Board level and Board of Visitors level as well as with faculty and staff.”
“The period in my life when my perspectives on the business world, and the world in general, opened the most was the two years I spent at Owen.”
—Brent Turner
“Brent is a doer, a no-nonsense guy who is passionate about Owen and committed to its success,” Bradford says. “These qualities are the reason I picked him for this job.”
Turner bears in mind that many of his fellow board members travel thousands of miles for meetings because of a strong desire to “move things forward,” as he says. He has redesigned the Alumni Board into a working board, with teams to help support the school in targeted areas, such as alumni connectivity, student recruitment, career placement and fundraising.
Members have assignments and goals and report their progress regularly. “The idea is to make it meaty enough that it’s appealing but not so bad that it smacks of volunteer labor,” Turner says.
Fellow Alumni Board member Russ Fleischer, MBA’91, who is CEO of HighJump Software, a supply chain management software company, offers his own take on Turner’s style. “He’s not shy about reaching out and getting people involved,” Fleischer says. “Like so many of us, he has a strong passion for the school. That’s the attribute we both share—a deep passion for the school and a deep willingness to do whatever will help the school succeed and thrive in the future.”
Turner’s personal focus as a board member—improving alumni engagement—is approached with his usual fervor. His challenge for his fellow alumni: “I’m going to invest now with my time, talent and treasure because I want to be part of the returns.”
Turner’s board experience has helped him see the value of every contribution. With classmate Alli Zaro Fitzgerald, MBA’99, he hosted a well-attended webinar in 2011, in which he presented his thoughts about the school’s strategy. He followed with a live presentation to Seattle alumni.
“I think that everyone who attended left the call with a renewed enthusiasm for Owen,” says Fitzgerald, Director of Finance and Marketing at SecuriCheck LLC, a background research company. The positive vibe was created in part, she says, by Turner’s characteristically frank discourse, particularly about the elephant in the room—the perception by some alumni that the Owen School is undervalued in rankings. His message was clear: Any advancement will come about in large part from increased alumni involvement on many levels.
Turner is quick to say that no one considers rankings the only end goal, knowing that a school’s position can ebb and flow for no apparent reason. However, he says most people acknowledge that some of the rankings contain legitimate, objective measures of success and have to be heavily considered when planning and building strategy. In particular, they matter to prospective students and recruiters, who often perceive rankings as a litmus test of a school’s performance.
“The philosophy for a long time has been to build a world-class business school and the rankings will follow,” he says. “There’s a lot of that that’s true, and a big part that’s not true. There are some tough choices that have to be forced by the market. The dean’s big contribution is the message that we ought to take these more seriously, but we shouldn’t sell out.”
Alumni support is “the real chicken or the egg issue,” Turner likes to say. He believes that, if Owen is to make significant strides forward, alumni need to engage and support the school now instead of waiting to see if the new strategy works. It won’t be successful, he says, without their participation.
After receiving some lackluster class alumni giving numbers via email in January, Fitzgerald recalled that it took about 30 seconds for another email to hit her inbox. This one, from Turner, simply said, “Let’s talk.” Within minutes, a five-point plan was in place to stimulate class participation.
“He’s not afraid of difficult truths and approaches them head-on,” Fitzgerald says. “Yet he’s very approachable. He doesn’t lead by intimidation or try to impress everyone.”
Getting Somewhere Together
When analyzing problems, Turner relies on his training as an engineer to help him remain dispassionate. “That’s a gigantic asset in the business world,” he says. In the same breath, though, he admits to being not as strong in other areas. “On the other end, I struggle a lot with ideation and creativity,” he says. “I’m completely lost in a marketing meeting or going over advertising copy.”
Turner majored in electrical engineering at the University of Memphis and went to work for Porter-Cable, a power tool company in Jackson, Tenn., after graduation. He was with Porter-Cable for nearly four years as parent company Pentair positioned the brand for sales in big-box stores.
“As an engineer, I had a chance to be in a lot of the management meetings,” he says. “But I also walked the shop floor a lot and got to understand the differences between what the management team was trying to accomplish and what was actually happening on the front lines. It was very valuable. I learned how important it is to care about the people you are working with and who work for you. I learned the importance of clarifying their roles and making them feel safe if you wanted their best performance.”
That perspective led him to think seriously about entering management. “I can do this,” he thought.
Turner got to know an MBA intern from Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern who was sent by Pentair to evaluate Porter-Cable’s progress. The intern encouraged his interest in business, and Turner enrolled in some accounting classes locally. Surviving those, he then decided to take the GMAT, apply to “the big MBA schools,” as he says, and see what happened.
“The best fit, easily, was Owen,” Turner says. His interview was affirming and straightforward. Everyone he met “was being real with each other,” he says, “and I did not forget that.”
His Vanderbilt degree gives him a great deal of pride these days. “I will say that easily the period in my life when my perspectives on the business world, and the world in general, opened the most was the two years I spent at Owen,” he says.
His classmates were “phenomenal,” he says, and his training matched that of his peers in the industry, adding, “I can’t imagine it being much better.”
While there was pressure on Turner and his classmates to do good work, “what emerged was a collaborative, participatory environment,” he says. “It was a culture where everybody kind of understood we were all trying to get somewhere together. That’s not necessarily true in a lot of schools.”
Ray Friedman, the Brownlee O. Currey Professor of Management and Associate Dean of Faculty and Research, remembers Turner as a stellar student, respected by his classmates. “He was focused on managing people and had a sense of the importance of relationships,” Friedman says.
“Brent’s got a level head about him and a way of building relationships. He’s focused on what we have to do and the need to get beyond planning and brainstorming to saying, ‘Let’s make things happen.’”
—Ray Friedman
He’s been equally impressed by Turner’s work as an active alumnus. “He’s got a level head about him and a way of building relationships,” he says. “He’s focused on what we have to do and the need to get beyond planning and brainstorming to saying, ‘Let’s make things happen.’”
After graduating from Owen, Turner did a short stint with a private equity group in Dallas before moving to Seattle and a company called Avenue A, a startup focused on Internet advertising. Over the next nine years, Avenue A became aQuantive, which in turn became the biggest acquisition in Microsoft’s history at a reported $6 billion in 2007.
Turner, who had been Vice President of Operations for aQuantive, moved into the role of General Manager for Search and Media Network Businesses for Microsoft. He was part of the 2008 global rollout of Microsoft Media Network, Microsoft’s online display media business. Then, in 2009, he helped lead the global launch of Bing, a Microsoft Web search engine that now also powers Yahoo! Search.
From Microsoft, Turner headed to Marchex, a publicly traded company that is experiencing rebirth through a focus on digital call advertising. Marchex helps companies reach the right prospective customers using mobile media.
Instead of advertisers calling customers, smartphones provide the opportunities for consumers to place calls through the digital ads that they encounter while searching and browsing the Internet. “Most advertisers are intimidated by the complexity of figuring out how to place all those ads effectively,” Turner says. “That creates a role for an intermediary. We develop relationships with publishers of mobile advertising and make placing ads with them easy. Our job is to drive phone calls for our advertiser partners in a way that works for them economically and is not overly complex.”
Turner enjoys being on the front end of this new frontier in advertising. “There are a lot more opportunities than most people realize in these early stages,” he says.
Understanding the Conversation
Not surprising, Turner directs his energy into volunteer work in Seattle as well, chairing the board of REST, or Real Escape from the Sex Trade, a faith-based organization that seeks to divert at-risk minors from being trafficked into prostitution. There are a surprisingly large number of minors working as prostitutes in the Seattle area: REST puts current estimates at 450.
“In the garden variety case, a girl has a broken relationship with her parents and becomes a runaway,” Turner says. He explains that she might take a job in a strip club or a bikini barista stand where she is then befriended by a pimp who makes her feel special, at least initially.
Turner channels his business acumen into understanding, as he says, “the demand side of the equation so we can come up with strategies for reducing the number of ‘johns’ hiring the girls.” REST also works to proactively identify girls who are at risk and give them alternatives.
“We want to find choke points where we can prevent them from entering the life. We want to help them find work and understand their identity—that they are children of God,” he says.
The work is difficult and emotionally demanding—“This ain’t for everybody,” he explains—but it’s ultimately rewarding when girls come out of life on the streets.
Although Turner loves Seattle and is connected to the city in many ways, he relishes each opportunity to return to Nashville. When not in meetings at Vanderbilt, he often hops in his car for a visit to Columbia, Tenn., where his mother lives.
“I probably see her more often than most parents with local children,” he says with a laugh.
That filial devotion is not unlike the commitment he feels toward Owen. Turner believes that the school and its focus on an intimate community should not be taken any more for granted than a parent. It’s a message he hammered home in a speech to last year’s graduating class. “Make sure you appreciate just how special our culture is at Owen. Don’t forget just how awesome your classmates, faculty and fellow alumni are because you have had the opportunity to get to know them so well,” he said in the speech.
Turner is frequently reminded of the high caliber of people associated with the school, particularly in his work with the Board of Visitors. “This is an impressive stakeholder group,” he says. “These people are used to board seats and understand the conversation. They’re very good at getting their fingers right on some of the key issues or root drivers of problems and then stating their views on how to solve them. It’s pretty amazing in that crowd how quickly you go from stating an issue to some fairly clear and prescriptive input at a tangible level.”
As deserving as Turner is to be among those Board of Visitors members, he can’t help but inject some self-effacing humor into the discussion of his own place on the board. “They’re lowering their standards to have me on this thing,” he says. And then, he pauses to reflect on the scope of his alumni work at Vanderbilt.
“In my life, I’ve had the opportunity to do lots of things that are pretty amazing,” he says. “This is one of them.”
Mario Ramos has a hard time containing his excitement about the freshly unveiled Americas MBA for Executives program at Vanderbilt. To hear him talk, you’d think that he’s among the inaugural class of 12 Owen students who’ll be traveling to Brazil, Canada and Mexico in the coming months to learn about those economies. He’s not, though: Ramos, EMBA’10, already has earned his business degree, and if there’s any disappointment in his voice, it’s because he never had a chance to reap the Americas program’s benefits.
“I had to learn it the hard way,” says Ramos, Vice President of Engineering at Schneider Electric, one of the multinational companies that not only have a huge Nashville presence but also make Vanderbilt and Music City an ideal hub for this new style of international education.
Schneider Electric brought Ramos, a native of Mexico, to Nashville, and he has since grown with the company, tasting the increasingly global flavors of modern business firsthand. His experiences have afforded him valuable insight, which Tami Fassinger, BA’85, Associate Dean of Executive Programs and head of the Americas program at Owen, gladly welcomes. Ramos is among several alumni who have helped shape the program with their advice.
Mario Ramos
Fassinger stresses that businesses cannot rely on the same old parochial strategies in this global era, and so the Owen School has tailored the Americas program, which officially launched in early August, to offer its participants something new and different. To borrow a phrase from modern combat journalism, the program “embeds” students in international experiences while they work toward their MBAs. In addition to learning about global business management practices in the classroom, students gain real-world preparation on the ground, both in Nashville and thousands of miles beyond.
“One of the important things about this program is that by having discussions with people who do business directly in those countries, we’ll have debate and ask questions as to what is the right answer.
The conversations will be diverse.”
—Mario Ramos
The Americas students spend the first year at their home schools, with some interaction with one another via the Web. Global study teams are then formed during the second year by making use of technology for conferences and virtual meetings. The second-year students also rotate together to each campus for immersion in weeklong residencies that incorporate each locale’s cultural advantages and challenges.
Fassinger says that students will work both virtually and hands-on “across borders, language, culture and time zones … on various coursework assignments and a yearlong capstone project.” The academic payoff is that each student will graduate with an Americas certificate conferred by the four participating universities as well as an MBA from his or her home school.
“More important,” she says, “they will have taken a deep dive into expert topics by Americas region and school, spanning everything from family-owned enterprises unique to Mexico to cross-cultural negotiations in Canada to sustainability models in Brazil to launching new ventures in the U.S.”
As a practical matter, managers will be sharpening international networking skills each step of the way. Learning how to apply those skills across linguistic and geographical borders is one of the most important aspects of doing business globally, says Ingrid Calvo, EMBA’09, a native of Colombia who works as International Controller for Gibson Guitar.
“In other countries it’s mostly about relationships,” as opposed to in the U.S., where “you get down to business right away,” she says. In her work, which now has her heavily focused on China, it’s critical to establish and maintain business relationships with government officials and business partners.
Ingrid Calvo
Calvo can testify to the effectiveness of her Vanderbilt MBA in these situations. “It has provided opportunities for me, has strengthened my core skills in managing global business, and has better prepared me for additional expatriate assignments,” she says.
She admits, though, that the international component of the Americas program would have been ideal, had it been available. “If given the choice,” she says, “I would have preferred to have been part of the Americas program.”
Ramos, who hopes to direct Schneider employees into the program in the future, knows from experience how valuable cross-cultural pollination can be. “When Tami first mentioned the possibility of opening up an Americas program, I was pretty excited,” he says. “It’s a tremendous opportunity. There are a lot of people in Latin America who could benefit from this type of program.”
And it’s equally valuable for Americans looking to the greater world market for production and distribution, Ramos adds. “It will help companies managing teams or trying to build their businesses in Latin America,” he says. “It will give them a lot of insight into the local environment—how to do business there, how to deal with the government, how to do business in a different culture.”
Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, has 130,000 employees worldwide, producing a variety of systems that are designed to manage and conserve energy. The company has spread into markets like India and China, but Ramos says the Americas program’s lessons will translate anywhere. “There are various ways of going to market. Organizational behaviors are affected by different cultures with different values,” he says. “You need to understand how that works to really be able to do business in these countries.”
Looking at an Entire Hemisphere
As new as the Americas program is, international business has long been a focus for Owen. The idea for such a program was first planted soon after the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada and Mexico in 1994. “About 15 years later, we were finding that our Executive Development Institute client companies were looking at an entire hemisphere rather than individual countries for management decisions,” Fassinger says. “When we started to notice that, we thought that we needed to address it pragmatically.”
In the late ’90s, Owen experimented with a short-lived International Executive MBA program based in Miami. The IEMBA students were bright and hard-working—many of them have since gone on to prosperous careers in the Americas—but the logistics of the program itself proved too challenging. Among the roadblocks to the Miami venture were the lack of a Vanderbilt facility in the city and the added complications of monthly travel time and expenses for participants.
After talking with IEMBA alumni, Owen took steps to ensure that the Americas program is more practical than the Miami experiment. Fassinger says physically locating the new program at Vanderbilt is important because the university already has an acclaimed Center for Latin American Studies with which Owen can share human and academic resources. Also the decision to schedule weeklong residencies during the second year, as opposed to biweekly or monthly classes in each location, means less travel for those involved.
Tami Fassinger
In all, the Americas program provides a more balanced approach than its IEMBA predecessor—as Fassinger says, it’s “a complete immersion experience and a complete Vanderbilt experience.”
Of course, practical concerns, such as tuition, credit and diplomas, had to be worked out prior to launch. “One of the things institutions struggle with is: How do you transfer credit? How do you figure out admission differences?” Fassinger says. “We decided only to enroll our own students and not share revenue, so we went with schools that have great admissions standards of their own. Second, we figured out a formula where we all are responsible for an equal part of the delivery of the second-year residency experience.”
Each of the partners brings something unique to the residency weeks. For example, in Vancouver, an international city with strong Asian business interests, focus will be placed on cross-border negotiation and collaboration. Meanwhile Brazil will offer lessons in sustainability and bottom-of-the-pyramid marketing. In Mexico, where most of the businesses are family-owned, attention will be paid to global competitiveness among such companies.
“When they come to Vanderbilt, they will look at American innovation,” Fassinger says. “We’ve been talking to the big companies that make Nashville great: Nissan, Bridgestone, LP, Schneider, Gibson. And we will use the Nashville Entrepreneur Center to show how to launch startups that can become the next multinational companies.”
Interaction with prospective students in the U.S. showed there was a need for the Americas program. “They wanted a deeper global experience than what we had previously offered,” she says. “We surveyed our pool of candidates, and it was clear there was a demand for it.”
Ramos says that Vanderbilt already has an international mindset, but in the past, much of the discussion was “very U.S.-centric” by nature. “One of the important things about this program is that by having discussions with people who do business directly in those countries, we’ll have debate and ask questions as to what is the right answer,” he says. “The conversations will be diverse.”
William Thomas
Universal Business Principles
William Thomas, BE’92, EMBA’11, Executive Director of Quality and Sales Engineering for Bridgestone Americas, just graduated from the Executive MBA program in July. Like Ramos, he is somewhat envious of the opportunities that await the students enrolled in the new Americas program.
“If this international program had been available when I was starting in ’09, I absolutely would have taken it,” he says. “Our business, the tire business, is becoming more of a global game. The managers in the 21st century need a global perspective.”
Bridgestone provides training to prepare employees for the international market, but Thomas emphasizes the value of the Americas program. “By having them physically take classes in Canada, Mexico and Brazil, it puts them in contact with other cultures and begins the process of changing the way they think about doing business in another country,” he says.
With Bridgestone, Thomas learned international business by serving as Assistant Plant Manager, Responsible for Quality Assurance, at the company’s Buenos Aires facility. “What I discovered with my experience in Argentina is that there are universal business principles that can be applied across borders,” he says. “But the cultures you operate in require you to modify your approach to make yourself more effective.”
Thomas is now investigating how this new program might benefit his staff. “I’m talking to two of my managers in Argentina who are contemplating going back to school and getting their MBAs in Buenos Aires,” he says. “I asked them to consider going to Sao Paulo and getting in this Americas program instead [through FIA, Vanderbilt’s partner in Brazil].”
Thomas also looks around the Nashville office to identify Bridgestone managers who are hoping to supplement the international preparation they already receive at the company. One such employee is enrolled in the inaugural Americas class: Bridgestone’s Phillipia Pundor, Section Manager, Global Mobility and Immigration.
Phillipia Pundor
“We have a number of teammates who work on foreign assignments outside their home countries,” Pundor says, pointing to the approximately 50 expatriates she assists throughout South and Central America as well as in the Netherlands, Portugal, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Thailand and Japan.
Pundor, who has a background in industrial/organizational psychology, says the Americas program offers precisely what she needs. “I’ve looked at a number of different graduate programs, and Vanderbilt was definitely the most attractive,” she says. “This will put me in a position of growth and opens a lot of avenues into roles across the organization.”
Fellow student Jon Haworth has a similarly positive outlook on the program. He, however, took a more indirect path to it. The Vice President of Product Innovation and Plant Operations at Des-Case Corp., which manufactures filtration products for industrial lubricants, was set to enter the Executive MBA program a year ago, but the birth of his son put his enrollment on hold.
It was a fortunate turn of events.
“As they rolled out the Americas program, I quickly jumped over to that, because the international component of our business has been growing so fast. There will be things I learn from Day One in this program,” he says. “It’s exactly what I need to move up in this company.”
“It’s not just a typical international program where you talk about how business is done elsewhere. In this case, you actually experience it.”
—Jon Haworth
Jon Haworth
The son of Baptist missionaries, Haworth grew up in Brazil and is fluent in Portuguese. He also has worked abroad quite a bit for Des-Case, which sells products in 52 countries. His experiences overseas have impressed upon him the need for broader international skills.
“The American way doesn’t always get the job done,” he says. “On the other side of the world, they approach it from a totally different perspective.”
His understanding of this fact has made him appreciate the opportunity at hand all the more. “It’s not just a typical international program where you talk about how business is done elsewhere,” he says. “In this case, you actually experience it.”
He adds, “I haven’t heard it stated this way elsewhere, but in my opinion, while this program focuses on the Americas, the things you learn can transfer elsewhere. It’s really a global program, even though it’s not marketed that way.”
Fassinger agrees. “Jon is right that the learning can transfer,” she says. “We just made the decision to be more thorough about the nuances in the Americas, rather than spread ourselves too thin across many cultures.”
Michael Bowling
Congruent to the Culture
Michael Bowling, EMBA’97, grasps the idea of transferring knowledge as well as anyone. He talks with satisfaction about his experience as an Executive MBA student and how it helped him prepare for his current role as President of AT&T Mexico—a remarkable leap considering that he had never traveled outside the U.S. prior to his Owen experience.
Bowling went to work for AT&T 21 years ago with an electrical engineering background, but it was his desire to explore a different career path that brought him to Vanderbilt.
“I looked for a program that had the kind of impact that I thought I wanted on my career,” he says. “I wanted an executive program to learn the business half to help in my progressions.”
The lessons he learned were invaluable, he says, adding that Owen planted the seed that led him to work in Venezuela, Peru and now Mexico. “On our class trip [the required international residency], I think it was the first one for the EMBAs, we were here in Mexico City,” he says, recalling that he sat in the city center and “sketched out a plan to be an expat.”
After that trip, he became determined to take his career global.
“And here I am,” he says with a laugh.
These days, he’s loaning his expertise to Fassinger and her colleagues at ITAM in Mexico City. “I’m very positive about the program,” he says. “I think it will be great.” In particular, he believes the expanded international study component will pay off.
“It’s critical for leaders in business today to not just understand, but to be able to be effective in a global environment,” he says. “What you’re trying to do is reach your business objectives, but they should be congruent to the foreign culture you’re operating in. You aren’t going to be able to change the foreign market to fit your paradigm.
“The ones who aren’t successful are the ones who can’t drop out of their own mindset, the ones who say, ‘This is how we do it in the U.S.’ You might as well say, ‘This is the way we do it on the moon.’”
From left, Faith Rhoades, Carol Slivka, Kelli Powers and Nat Richardson
Few people get to witness the evolution of a brand new hospital from an insider’s perspective. Even fewer get to play a hand in how it takes shape. Yet, thanks in no small part to Vanderbilt’s Master of Management in Health Care program, four health care administrators from Huntsville, Ala., have had just such an opportunity.
Kelli Powers, Nathaniel “Nat” Richardson, Faith Rhoades and Carol Slivka—all members of the MM Health Care Class of 2011—spent the better part of the yearlong program collaborating on a capstone project to evaluate a new facility being built by their employer, Huntsville Hospital. Their project has continued to influence decision making in the organization well after graduation, but it isn’t the only part of their studies that has left a lasting impression. During their frequent trips up Interstate 65 to the Owen School, the four forged deep bonds with each other and their classmates, and the resulting friendships and experiences they’ve taken back with them on the southbound return have been life-changing.
“I haven’t felt so pumped about a program and the educational experience in a long time,” says Richardson, Vice President of Operations at Huntsville Hospital. “What’s been energizing has been the number of individuals in the classroom who are so spread out across the health care spectrum. We sit in a room with so many dynamic minds.”
Richardson was the first from the Huntsville team to commit to the MM Health Care program, which is designed to provide students with the business fundamentals and skills to manage people, programs and processes within health care organizations. While firmly entrenched in his present position, he wanted to further his education through a degree that would have direct benefits for his current job and career trajectory.
Jeff Samz, who had previously worked at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, brought the MM Health Care program to the attention of his colleagues at Huntsville Hospital.
Richardson heard about the MM Health Care program from Jeff Samz, Chief Operating Officer of Huntsville Hospital and former CEO of the Vanderbilt Heart and Vascular Institute. “He knew I was seeking the next level in my career,” says Richardson, who aspires to a C-level position at a large hospital system. “This program seemed to provide the most value and also aligned with where I am in my career.”
Samz’s and Richardson’s enthusiasm soon caught the attention of Slivka, Huntsville Hospital’s Director of Finance; Rhoades, Director of Medical Staff Services; and Powers, CEO of Athens Limestone Hospital, which is affiliated with the Huntsville system. Rhoades had begun graduate work elsewhere but readily switched gears for the chance to study at Vanderbilt with her colleagues.
“When the human resources director asked me if I was interested in changing to Vanderbilt, I said, ‘In a nanosecond,’ because of the reputation of the school and because I had a chance to take it with three other people from my organization. That’s life support,” Rhoades says. “The other contributing factor was the health care focus.”
Slivka shares this sentiment. “I don’t see myself doing something outside of health care. If you’re going to do this at this point in your life, you want to have some immediate take-away and provide some real-life value back to your company,” she says. “Huntsville Hospital has been willing to make an investment in me for knowledge I’m going to bring back and use. I really like that part of it.”
Huntsville Hospital enthusiastically backed the team approach to graduate education as it naturally aligned with the organization’s succession planning. “They’re interested in advancing their careers, and it’s a way for us to retain some of our top people,” Samz says. “Investing in them, we think, will pay off not only in the skills they learn in the program but it will keep them with us.” Samz also believes the fact that the four formed a “working pod” will continue to benefit the organization in the long term.
The program was appealing to Huntsville Hospital in other ways, too. There was Vanderbilt’s stellar academic reputation to consider, as well as the MM Health Care program’s flexible format, which is geared toward working professionals. Plus, the students were exposed not only to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which is widely regarded for its patient care, research and biomedical education, but also to Nashville’s dynamic health care business community, which includes Hospital Corporation of America and a variety of other health care companies.
“There’s just nothing else like the Nashville market,” Samz says.
The Future of Health Care
“What the world needs is changing,” says Dr. Mark Frisse, MM Health Care Faculty Director, Professor of Management and Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt. He explains that the MM Health Care program helps students see way beyond the limits of their institutions to the future of health care.
“First we expose them to a radically broader view of the world,” he says. “Then we bring the world into the classroom. This can only be done a few places in the country.”
Larry Van Horn played a key role in launching the MM Health Care program.
Larry Van Horn, Associate Professor of Management and Executive Director of Health Affairs at Owen, adds, “The cost, quality and access problems facing the U.S. health care system are monumental. The clinician who understands the science of medicine and the science of business is in a position to create more value for our health care system.”
MM Health Care students attend classes every Thursday night and one weekend each month. Traditional B-school classes—such as marketing, finance, accounting, logistics, operations and leadership—are taught on weeknights, while the weekends are dedicated to health care. Frisse believes the classroom experience serves as a great leveler for everyone in the program. “You can’t tell the doctors from the administrators,” he says. “They have a uniform identity. They’re all students.”
The classroom benefits the faculty as well, he adds, noting that the high caliber of students helps energize the instructors. “The best teachers want to run these classes because they learn from these experiences,” he says.
Mark Frisse
During the course of the year, students develop close friendships, becoming sounding boards for one another. “Every day we’re texting or Skyping or emailing. Everyone relies on one another. Everyone wants everyone to succeed,” says Rhoades, who came into the program with a bachelor’s degree in health care management.
Richardson echoes that sentiment. “There’s a wealth of knowledge in that room. Everyone is from different walks of life and different regions of the country,” he says. “You can’t put a price on that much mind value.”
For Rhoades, the lessons of the classroom often can be implemented at work on Monday morning. She credits the high-quality instructors. “That started from Day One in the very first class. That is what knocks the socks off me. They are beyond experts,” she says.
Powers agrees. “It could not have been timelier. I’m looking at productivity and wait time [at Athens Limestone], and I’ve been able to bring what I’ve learned back to work,” she says. “It’s wonderful to be able to discuss ideas with people who don’t necessarily report to me.”
Meanwhile Slivka’s co-workers noticed a positive change in her right away. “I have a different set of eyes and I analyze things a little bit differently,” she says. “My boss said he can tell a difference in the way I look at things and in the comments I’ve made.”
“First we expose [students] to a radically broader view of the world. Then we bring the world into the classroom. This can only be done a few places in the country.”
—Mark Frisse
The degree is perfectly suited for students like the four from Huntsville, says Sarah Fairbank, MM Health Care Program Director. “I tell prospective students we are designed for two kinds of people,” she says. “It’s for people who have been ‘siloed,’ who are working in a narrow field with lots of specialization. That might be a contracts person, a supply chain specialist, someone from the finance side or a physician with a narrow specialization in medicine. These are people who need a broader view of health care, along with management tools.
“The other type of person we see is someone who is coming into the health care field with a generally technical background—an operations specialist or IT specialist who has worked in other industries and is now in health care.”
Students range in age and experience. Some are young professionals preparing for a future in health care, while others are midcareer and ready to move up the ladder. There are also physicians who later in their careers want to use their accumulated wisdom in new and different ways.
A key element of the curriculum is personal coaching since the students are often transforming their own roles within their organizations. “The coaching was phenomenal,” Powers says. “It has helped me get on track and be more productive. I’m a very organized person, but I’ve learned that I need to devote specific time to reading articles and delegating.”
Sarah Fairbank
The average time commitment outside the classroom for the MM Health Care degree is at least 10 to 15 hours per week, though the initial learning curve may be steep at first for students who have been out of school for many years. In addition to these hours, the Huntsville students had to shoulder the extra commitment of traveling further than most students—approximately 100 miles each way. The routine is intense, Rhoades admits, but still very doable. “It’s such an achievable goal, so it takes the pain out of the travel,” she says.
Rhoades says it helped that members of the Owen community were standing ready to ensure their success throughout the whole process. This was no more evident than when deadly tornadoes ripped through northern Alabama last April. Staff, faculty and fellow students rallied to assist the Huntsville team and their communities.
“The support has been incredible. They pay such close attention to the needs of the students,” Rhoades says. “We in Huntsville have especially realized that. In bad weather, when it became clear we couldn’t get there, they quickly rounded the wagons and got some technology together. We had a live class by tapping in electronically.”
Breaking New Ground
As professionals make their way up the ladder, Fairbank explains that the challenge becomes, “How do you get people to look at you differently?” An integral part of fast-tracking that change in perception is another key part of the curriculum: the capstone project, an eight-month consulting engagement during which a team, usually of four people, takes on an institutional problem as if they were professional consultants. Through the project, the students are able to demonstrate immediate economic value by tackling important organizational issues.
“We seek to ensure that everyone coming out of our program projects a dramatically enhanced identity within their organization,” says Frisse, who oversees the teams’ work.
For the Huntsville team, their capstone project’s focus was evaluating the potential impact of a brand-new hospital in Madison, Ala., a community outside of Huntsville. The Madison area is growing, vibrant and affluent, with an average household income of $90,000. Many residents are scientists and engineers working for NASA, the defense industry or technical firms.
“When the human resources director asked me if I was interested in changing to Vanderbilt, I said, ‘In a nanosecond,’ because of the reputation of the school and because I had a chance to take it with three other people from my organization. That’s life support.”
—Faith Rhoades
The group concentrated specifically on how to position obstetrics services in Madison. “This is the first hospital to be built in Alabama in many years,” Rhoades says. “Not very many people get to participate in building a hospital from scratch. But we also had to consider that we belong to a hospital system with other hospitals that we need to be concerned about. It’s not all about us. This is about creating the best business for everyone so that we’re all successful.”
The Huntsville system first built a wellness center, physician office building and urgent care center on the property in Madison. The success of those ventures demonstrated the viability of a hospital. “Owen helps you think strategically, and that’s what [the new hospital in] Madison is all about,” Rhoades says. “Many years ago, the strategic planning began with a purchase of land. It began with a vision and a goal. Everything you gain from Owen classes and programs ties into that kind of scenario. I put it into practice every day in my job.”
For Powers, the capstone project was particularly interesting since the new hospital in Madison had the potential to impact her facility, Athens Limestone Hospital, the most. While some factors will remain unknown until the facility is up and running next year, Powers says the planning process helped alleviate undue concern about the new hospital’s potential impact and shifted the focus to the strategic side.
Richardson adds that building obstetrics services around the strategic mission of each of the hospitals makes sense, since the birth of a child often provides a family’s first exposure to a medical facility. “We have to get it right so that the mother and the child have the absolute best experience,” he says. “And we have to make sure that we design it so we don’t hurt the other hospitals. We may eventually find that it’s best to provide those services primarily at one hospital. It’s a very delicate situation, and we have to get it right.”
Besides generating practical ideas for Huntsville Hospital to implement, the project also helped the students learn how to work together as a team. “The strength of our team is that we’re coming at the project with different knowledge skill sets. We all come from diverse areas that are all important to the outcome we seek,” Richardson says. “I love writing and doing the research and pulling things together. Kelli has a global perspective on what other organizations are thinking. Carol looks at everything from the financial standpoint: What’s the bottom line impact from the standpoint of income statements or the balance sheet? Faith brings the whole physician perspective to the table.
“Now I appreciate my team members at a whole different level.”
Richardson also appreciates just how far he himself has come during a year’s time. It has been a journey marked not so much by miles logged on the odometer or hours in the classroom, but rather by immeasurable moments of progress. In the end, the MM Health Care program delivered him closer to his lifelong goals and gave him something that should pay dividends the rest of his career—confidence.
“I know I’m ready for my next project,” he says, “no matter where or what that’s going to be.”
Bappa Mukherji is the CEO of Gics Foods, which packages food into convenient microwaveable retort pouches.
Ashoke “Bappa” Mukherji is no stranger to pressure. Soon after graduating from Vanderbilt with both an MBA and a law degree, he was thrust into one of the more challenging roles a budding young attorney could ask for—sitting second chair in a first-degree murder trial. It was his first trial ever.
When asked about the stress he was under, he laughs, “It could have been worse. At least I wasn’t the one on trial.”
Mukherji spent the ensuing years at a Nashville law firm, where he concentrated mostly on mergers and acquisitions. Advising clients on these deals suited his Owen School background, but he always wondered what it would be like to “move to the other side of the table,” as he puts it, and go into business for himself.
In 1997, with the help of two business partners, Mukherji did just that, launching a startup that manufactured recycled toner cartridges. That idea eventually blossomed into Guy Brown Products, a Brentwood, Tenn.-based office products distributor that had revenue close to $200 million in 2010. Mukherji served as CEO of the company until he stepped down last fall.
“At Guy Brown we differentiated ourselves from competitors by focusing exclusively on selling to large, geographically dispersed organizations and doing it better than anyone else,” he says. “It’s similar to what I’m doing today—studying the market and figuring out where our company has room to operate.”
The company he’s referring to is Gics Foods, a food packaging business in Greenville, S.C. Appropriately enough, this latest venture is all about pressure—albeit a different sort from what Mukherji is used to.
Under his guidance as CEO, Gics packages food into retort pouches, which are plastic laminate and metal foil containers that can withstand the high temperature and pressure used to cook what’s inside them. Convenient microwaveable bags of rice are just one example of this growing technology that’s revolutionizing not only how food is preserved but also how it’s prepared.
“We’re the first company focused solely on retort packaging,” he says. “That’s what makes us stand out.”
In chemistry, if you want to get a reaction, you have to find a way to bring the right molecules together and have them bump into each other with sufficient force. Sometimes you need a catalyst to get things started.
It turns out that the process of encouraging entrepreneurship is remarkably similar, according to Germain Böer, Professor of Accounting and Director of the Owen Entrepreneurship Center. “One of the best ways to stimulate a lot of entrepreneurial activity is to create occasions for entrepreneurs to bump into one another,” says Böer. (Watch Böer’s video about entrepreneurship.)
These days entrepreneurs in Middle Tennessee have lots of opportunities to rub elbows, thanks to Vanderbilt and its collaborations with two local organizations: the Nashville Capital Network (NCN) and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (NEC). NCN supports entrepreneurs and startup companies by providing feedback on business plans and assistance with raising capital. NEC, on the other hand, is a 501(c)(3) public-private partnership that gives its members access to training classes, mentoring resources and networking events.
In addition to the school’s own classroom offerings and funding opportunities, Owen students can get a taste for entrepreneurship by participating in internship programs at both organizations. These internships give them direct exposure to the process of refining a business plan, securing financing and getting a new venture off the ground. Meanwhile the organizations (and entrepreneurs they serve) benefit from the intelligence and enthusiasm that the students bring to analyzing business plans and improving presentations or pitch materials. In sum, it is a winning formula for everyone involved, and at the center of the equation is the Owen School, providing just the right catalyst to spark business growth in Middle Tennessee and beyond.
Germain Böer
NCN: Matching Entrepreneurs with Angels
Getting a business off the ground is always a challenge, particularly for first-time entrepreneurs without the network or connections to raise capital. That is where NCN comes into play. Started as a joint initiative between private investors and the Owen School, NCN maintains close ties with Vanderbilt. Its Executive Director Sid Chambless, BA’96, MBA’03, and Director Chase Perry, MBA’08, are both Owen alumni. Dean Jim Bradford and Professor Böer sit on its board of directors.
NCN has an interesting hybrid structure. The organization is structured as a taxable nonprofit but also manages two venture capital funds: NCN Angel Fund and a TNInvestco Tennessee Angel Fund. The first fund pools the resources of angel investors who also invest individually in NCN-supported companies. The second fund represents the proceeds from $20 million in tax credits that NCN accessed through Tennessee’s competitive TNInvestco program, which seeks to foster entrepreneurial “innovation clusters” across the state by awarding tax credits to a select group of venture capital funds. In addition to the economic development benefits, the state also shares any profits from TNInvestco investments.
To ensure that worthy entrepreneurs have access to an enthusiastic network of angel investors, NCN must provide those angel investors with high-quality, well-vetted investment opportunities. Interning as NCN associates, Owen students work with entrepreneurs to refine their presentations and clean up their business plans. The interns also participate in meetings where experienced local advisers give the entrepreneurs feedback on their ideas. Meanwhile, on the other side of the deal, the students provide deal context and analysis to help angel investors assess the quality of a potential investment. Since its founding in 2003, NCN has helped 23 early-stage companies secure financing, with NCN angel investors providing more than $20 million in funding.
Alumni Chase Perry (left) and Sid Chambless direct the Nashville Capital Network, which supports entrepreneurs by providing feedback on business plans and assistance with raising capital.
Chambless credits Professor Böer and Dean Bradford with forging a strong partnership between NCN and Vanderbilt. “For Owen students who may want to start their own businesses, an NCN internship provides a great opportunity to learn all about the process of capitalizing and growing a business,” Chambless says. “The real benefit for students is to be in the room with entrepreneurs as they pitch to investors, to see the kinds of questions that investors ask. I really think this program is one of a kind in the way it enables business school students to work on live venture capital funds and influence the deployment of those funds while simultaneously working with entrepreneurs in the community.”
NEC: Students in the StartUp Studio
Founded in fall 2009, NEC has met with more than 150 companies and helped 13 of them raise $3 million in angel financing. Four of those companies have since officially launched their businesses. “That’s a pretty good hit rate,” says NEC President and CEO Michael Burcham, who has firsthand entrepreneurial experience himself. Burcham founded three separate venture-backed health care companies before taking on the leadership role at NEC. Burcham also serves as Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship at Owen, teaching classes about health care innovation and launching ventures.
Michael Burcham
From formal internships and independent study programs to extracurricular volunteer projects, Owen students are involved at NEC in numerous ways. As part of its mission to promote entrepreneurship and economic growth in Middle Tennessee, NEC evaluates new business ideas and offers a series of popular classes and coaching sessions on basic topics, including starting a business, raising capital and building a leadership team. Students assist with these services by organizing classes, delivering training, assessing business plans and offering feedback.
Burcham says there are typically several Owen students working at any one time with the entrepreneurs in NEC’s StartUp Studio incubator space. This temporary work arrangement gives the highest-paying members a business address, access to meeting rooms and classrooms, and face-to-face time with mentors. Students also help organize and run NEC’s technology microfund, which invested in seven new technology startups in 2010, including a company founded by Mark Harris, BS’03, PhD’09, an MBA candidate for 2011.
“A lot of these students either want to work in a startup company or have some interest in moving into investment banking or venture capital,” Burcham says. “By working with NEC, the students gain valuable experience that can give them a competitive advantage when they graduate.”
Learning Entrepreneurship in the Classroom—and Beyond
Henry Oehmig, an MBA candidate for 2011, used his summer stipend to develop a business plan for an environmentally friendly charcoal lighter fluid.
“Our goal in teaching entrepreneurship is to create wealth in the region,” Germain Böer says. “We want to help lots of startups and ultimately create a lot of very successful companies.” In the Vanderbilt MBA program, a lot of this learning takes place inside the classroom in courses such as Launching the Venture, Business Plan Development, Product Design & Innovation, and Accounting & Finance for Entrepreneurs.
Many Owen students, however, learn just as much if not more about entrepreneurship through the aforementioned internships with NCN and NEC. The school also offers its own Summer Enterprise Development internship program. Instead of taking a typical internship in a corporate environment, students can apply to receive a stipend of $15,000 to work on their own startup ventures during the summer between the first and second years of their studies.
Henry Oehmig, an MBA candidate for 2011, was one of three Owen students to receive a stipend last summer. He entered the process with a business plan for an environmentally friendly charcoal lighter fluid made from recycled restaurant grease. Oehmig had been thinking about building a business around a green lighter fluid product for a couple of years, but the Walmart Better Living Business Plan Challenge provided the impetus to build a true business plan around the idea. The annual competition encourages students to invent sustainable products or develop sustainable business solutions and present them to a panel of Walmart executives, suppliers and environmental organizations. The plan developed by Oehmig, fellow 2011 classmate Ian Prunty and three other Owen students won the regional level of the 2010 competition and made it to the national semifinals at Walmart’s headquarters.
After the competition, the other students peeled off to pursue their own summer plans, but Oehmig felt the lighter fluid idea had potential, so he revised the business plan and prepared to make his pitch to the panel of Owen professors, alumni and local businesspeople, including investment bankers and marketing analysts, who were awarding the summer stipends.
“The application process was a great learning experience,” Oehmig says. “Going through the process of pitching our businesses and trying to convince potential investors gave all the applicants a taste of what it is really like to try to raise money when starting a business. There was a lot of camaraderie among all the students who were pitching business plans, and I really enjoyed hearing the other pitches.”
It’s actually pretty easy to get in front of C-level people at almost any company in Nashville. In fact, I believe that the entrepreneurial environment in Nashville now rivals almost any place in the country.
—Chris Rand
A couple of days later Oehmig was thrilled to learn that he had been awarded one of the stipends. “If you have a business idea that really excites you, there’s no better situation than to be given $15,000 in seed capital without having to give up any ownership stake in the company,” he says. “As a student, it’s terrific because it really gives you a chance to practice entrepreneurship with a safety net in place. If the business does not work out as you’d hoped, you can still go back to your second year of business school with valuable skills and experience, plus a great story to tell recruiters.”
Of course having that safety net did not mean that Oehmig rested on his laurels. To the contrary, Oehmig dove wholeheartedly into making his business a success. He ended up plowing all of the stipend into the venture and then even supplemented it with his own personal funds. During the course of the summer, his vision for the business evolved. Where Oehmig had originally planned on setting up his own manufacturing facility to create the lighter fluid, his talks with biodiesel marketers and manufacturers convinced him that he could launch his venture more quickly and more cost-effectively by outsourcing manufacturing to third-party manufacturers.
His biggest change in direction, however, came when Germain Böer introduced Oehmig to Nashville-based consultant Rick Neitz, who suggested that Oehmig consider licensing the intellectual property behind the product rather than attempting to produce and market the product on his own. For Oehmig, who had a provisional patent on a green lighter fluid formula, the licensing idea had several attractions: He could launch his product faster with less upfront capital and earn revenue from sales royalties. When Oehmig saw that Clorox, which dominates the lighter fluid market through its Kingsford brand, was soliciting ideas for an eco-friendly lighter fluid, he made the decision to pursue the licensing route.
The bulk of the stipend money went toward hiring a professional chemical development lab that could formulate a biodiesel product that closely matched Clorox’s environmental and performance considerations. Although the product formulation was originally supposed to take only six weeks, it ended up lasting more than four months, teaching Oehmig a valuable lesson that product development can take longer than anticipated.
With the product in hand at the end of November, Oehmig has since been in serious discussions with representatives of Clorox and the senior management of other manufacturers. He recognizes that the success of his company will ultimately hinge on whether he can land a licensing deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m definitely interested in working with venture capital or private equity firms on investing in early-stage companies,” says Oehmig, who recently interned with Nashville-based venture firm Mountain Group Capital. “I also think I would really enjoy working for a startup company, but a venture capital job might give me a bit more stability while also providing an avenue to stay plugged into the world of entrepreneurship.”
A Great Place to Be an Entrepreneur
As recently as 2009, Christopher Rand, MBA’04, was working in Vanderbilt’s Office of Technology Transfer and Enterprise Development (OTTED), helping the university create and invest in companies based on its faculty’s intellectual property. Today Rand is a Partner at TriStar Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that focuses on health care innovation including biotech, pharmaceuticals, personalized medicine, medical devices, health care information technology, and health care services. Both of Rand’s partners have Vanderbilt connections too: Dr. Harry Jacobson, former Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, and Brian Laden, former Assistant Director in Vanderbilt’s OTTED.
Like NCN’s Tennessee Angel Fund, TriStar is a recipient of TNInvestco funds. During the past year TriStar has used the proceeds from its sale of TNInvestco tax credits to invest in five health care companies. Four of them were already local and one—VenX—relocated to Nashville from Florida to receive funding from TriStar. (TNInvestco rules mandate that companies receiving TNInvestco funds must have their headquarters and at least 60 percent of their staff based in Tennessee within one year of receiving funding.)
“We have seen a great number of opportunities from companies outside the state that are willing to relocate to Middle Tennessee,” Rand says. “Not just in order to receive our investment, but also to take advantage of the strategic value that our group can bring, particularly the connections of someone as well-known and respected as Dr. Jacobson.”
Alumnus Christopher Rand is a Partner at TriStar Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that focuses on health care innovation.
Rand and his partners may no longer work at Vanderbilt, but they are still more than willing to invest in great ideas that come from Vanderbilt researchers. One of TriStar’s other portfolio companies is Pathfinder Therapeutics, a company that has developed a trademarked image-guided device called Explorer to help physicians deliver ablation therapy within soft-tissue organs. The technology behind Pathfinder came from the lab of Robert L. Galloway Jr., Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt. In the company’s early stages, Rand worked with Pathfinder’s current Chief Operating Officer Jim Stefansic, MS’96, PhD’00, who happened to earn his doctorate working in Galloway’s lab.
Rand also represents the close ties between Vanderbilt, Nashville’s venture capital community, and groups like NCN and NEC. While working at the university, Rand joined NCN’s board as a Vanderbilt representative and collaborated with Sid Chambless to get promising Vanderbilt-based entrepreneurial concepts in front of NCN investors. Now Rand looks at NCN’s deal flow more from the perspective of a potential co-investor. In his spare time he also serves on NEC’s finance committee and tries to be a resource for that organization’s members.
Rand would like to encourage more involvement between Owen students and Vanderbilt researchers looking to commercialize their ideas and build business plans. He acknowledges, though, that the students already have plenty of entrepreneurial opportunities— not only through Owen’s efforts to promote entrepreneurship, but also thanks to the exciting business climate that has taken shape in Middle Tennessee in recent years.
Before attending Vanderbilt, Rand worked in Atlanta during the dot-com boom, and that experience has afforded him insight into Nashville’s stature as a business hub. “Atlanta had a pretty entrepreneurial environment back then, but I think Nashville is still a much easier business climate to maneuver in,” Rand says. “It’s smaller, more open and more welcoming. It’s actually pretty easy to get in front of C-level people at almost any company in Nashville. In fact, I believe that the entrepreneurial environment in Nashville now rivals almost any place in the country. With TNInvestco, NEC, NCN, the angel investor community … and other programs at the state level, Nashville and Tennessee overall are simply great places to be an entrepreneur.”
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and economics in 2011, Tim Maloney decided to stay at Vanderbilt for one more year. Having a master’s in finance, he believed, would be an important differentiator in a difficult job market.
A photograph of a smiling young man standing beside a gas pump at a Spur Gas station in Henderson, Ky., sits in the offices of Gigi Lazenby, BA’67, MBA’73. The year was 1931 and the young man—her father, Paul Banks Jr.—would eventually work his way to President of that same company, Spur Distributing.
Mario Ramos has a hard time containing his excitement about the freshly unveiled 
In chemistry, if you want to get a reaction, you have to find a way to bring the right molecules together and have them bump into each other with sufficient force. Sometimes you need a catalyst to get things started.
