Category: Inside Owen

Warm Welcomes

Cheryl Chunn has been named Associate Dean of Development and Alumni Relations. She previously worked as Director of Development, Departmental Programs, for Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Mark Cohen, Professor of Management and Law, has rejoined the Owen School following a leave of absence as Vice President for Research at Resources for the Future, a noted environmental think tank in Washington, D.C.

Brian McCann, MBA’04, Assistant Professor of Strategic Management, has become a permanent, full-time faculty member.

Fond Farewells

Bob Blanning, Professor of Information Technology, Emeritus, was among 16 retiring Vanderbilt faculty members honored during Commencement May 13.

Tricia Carswell, Associate Dean of Development and Alumni Relations, has stepped down to become Executive Director of Principal Gifts at her alma mater, Furman University.

Jon Lehman, Associate Dean of Students, has stepped down to become CEO of PAX Scientific, an engineering research and product design firm, but will continue to teach at Owen.

Ron Masulis, the Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance, who was away on a leave of absence to the University of New South Wales, has elected to join that university on a permanent basis as the Scientia Professor of Finance.

Mike Shor, Assistant Professor of Management, has accepted an opportunity to become Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut, where his wife is also a faculty member.

Mary Schapiro, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, named Owen professor Craig Lewis the SEC’s new Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Risk, Strategy and Financial Innovation (Risk Fin) this past May. Lewis, the Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Management in Finance, had been working on sabbatical at the SEC since January 2010.

“I am honored that Chairman Shapiro has offered me the opportunity to lead the division and the SEC’s economists at this critical juncture,” Lewis says. “I look forward to fostering durable new analytic models that will promote efficient and effective work throughout the agency, from rule-writing through enforcement.”

Lewis joined the Owen faculty in 1986 and has since been widely published on a range of financial issues. His interests and current research topics include stock and futures markets, margin adequacy, corporate earnings management, corporate financial policy, executive compensation, selective disclosure, and herd behavior by equity analysts.

“This is a great opportunity for Craig, a highly respected professor and researcher here at Vanderbilt who’s deeply admired by his students,” says Jim Bradford, Dean of the Owen School. “His appointment as Chief Economist at the SEC exemplifies a long tradition of high-caliber, real-world work that has earned the finance faculty here a place of prestige among business schools.”

Risk Fin, created by the SEC in September 2009 to help identify market risks and trends in the wake of the financial crisis, was the SEC’s first new division in 37 years. It provides sophisticated, interdisciplinary analysis across the entire spectrum of SEC activities, including policymaking, rulemaking, enforcement and examinations. In addition to this role as an agency think tank, Risk Fin was created to help break down silos that compartmentalized the SEC’s institutional expertise.

Lewis’ position with the SEC is a two-year appointment. He is currently on a leave of absence from Vanderbilt.

A team of students from the Owen School placed third in an inaugural health service case competition held at Northwestern University April 29–30. The 2011 Health Service Case Competition was the first of what the recently formed Business School Alliance for Health Care Management intends to become an annual event. Sponsored by DaVita, a leading provider of kidney care in the U.S., teams of three students each developed strategies to take on a real-world business case related to health care management.

Vanderbilt’s team included Dr. Jennifer Rymer, BS’05, MBA’11, MD’11; Avery Fisher, MBA’11; and Jonathan Cook, an MBA candidate for 2012. The team received a $1,000 award for finishing third behind the University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern University.

Patrick Slay, Senior Associate Director and Director of Coaching, has enjoyed two stints at the Owen School’s Career Management Center (CMC), first in 1999 and then again starting in 2008. A national certified counselor, he works primarily with consulting, general management, operations and strategy MBA students, as well as MSF students. Among his responsibilities is organizing the school’s annual mock interview day each fall.

Q: What is mock interview day? When and how did it originate?

A: It’s an annual event that started in fall 2008. The CMC saw both the need to provide job interview practice to Owen students on a large scale and the opportunity to engage Owen alumni in giving back to the school. Each student gets 45 minutes to practice interviewing with alumni, but there’s also time to network a bit and learn more about the roles they might pursue. In all, 35 to 40 alumni representing different industries and job functions come back for the event, and about half are from outside the greater Nashville area.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you give students looking to improve their interviewing skills?

A: Practice, practice, practice. No matter how good you think you are at interviews, practice is still essential for being able to walk into a room and sell yourself for a job. We remind students that the person who gets the offer is not always the most qualified, but rather the person who best articulates how he or she can do the job at hand.

Q: What have you learned from being part of mock interview day?

A: That everyone seems to enjoy it. It’s great to see the energy in the building on the day of the event. Alumni like being back, catching up with old friends and helping current students. Students appreciate the time alumni put into it and the great advice they receive. There’s not a downside to the event—except maybe it’s not held often enough!

Q: How can alumni get involved in the process?

A: We solicit help from alumni based on the information we pull from VUconnect. I always remind alumni to keep their profile updated online. If they’re interested in helping with this event or in some other way, they can always contact the CMC directly and we’ll figure out how to get them involved.

Bob Whaley, the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Management, and Jacob Sagi, the Vanderbilt Financial Markets Research Center Associate Professor of Finance, rang the NASDAQ OMX opening bell in New York April 19 to celebrate the start of options trading on a new group of indexes the pair developed. Called Alpha Indexes, the new tools are designed to help investors measure performance between individual stocks and benchmark exchange-traded funds. Watch CNBC coverage of the event.

The Owen School has launched a new Master of Accountancy program that focuses on preparing students for highly sought-after careers in valuation services for international public accounting firms. The MAcc Valuation program is currently recruiting students to join the first class starting in August 2012.

Responding to an increased demand for students able to handle functions such as assessing mark-to-model values, measuring brand goodwill and pricing acquisition targets, the new program draws on some of Owen’s core academic strengths.

“The master of accountancy program itself has been a great success story, and this next step is a logical one to take,” says Dean Jim Bradford. “This innovative new course of study will address the changing world of accounting as it relates to valuing assets and risk.”

Under the guidance of Karl Hackenbrack, Associate Professor of Accounting, Faculty Director of the MAcc Program, and Associate Dean of Evaluation and Program Development, the valuation track will graduate its first class in spring 2013. The full-time program runs 12 months and includes preparation for two of three levels of the chartered financial analyst (CFA) exams, as well as the certified public accountant (CPA) exam. Students will have the opportunity to take all three tests while in the program.

“All valuation students aspire to launch their careers with an international public accounting firm in service lines that deal primarily with business modeling, transactions and audit support,” Hackenbrack says. “This program really is at the nexus of finance and accounting. To succeed in a valuation service line, the professional must understand accounting rules and the finance behind those rules.”

Successful applicants must have solid quantitative skills, but also be well-equipped to handle client-facing roles, Hackenbrack adds.

In 2010 Bloomberg Businessweek’s recruiter survey ranked Owen’s accounting program fifth among U.S. MBA programs, ahead of institutions such as Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. This year’s 28-person MAcc class had a 100-percent job placement rate, in part due to the relationships formed with partner firms Deloitte, Ernst and Young, Grant Thornton, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

This past summer marketing professionals and academics gathered at Owen for the 2010 Advertising and Consumer Psychology Conference, titled “Cracking the Code: How Managers Can Drive Profits by Leveraging Principles of Consumer Psychology.” The conference attendees heard presentations on state-­of­-the­-art managerial consumer advice and reviews of up-­to-­the-­minute research on consumer behavior with the goal of ultimately improving managerial decision-­making and organizational performance.

Presenters from Owen included conference organizer Steve Posavac, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Marketing, and Steve Hoeffler and Jennifer Escalas, both Associate Professors of Marketing.

In his presentation called “Managing the Marketing Mix to Drive Brand Consideration and Choice,” Posavac half-jokingly referred to his selection of the conference t-shirt as an illustration of the way most consumers go about buying products. He simply called colleagues from Owen and got a recommendation for a t­-shirt company without thoroughly researching his options according to quality, cost or any other factors. Consumers, he explained, always appreciate an easy decision, and that is one reason end­cap displays in supermarkets are so effective.

“Brands are judged more favorably than warranted when judged in isolation,” he said.

Meanwhile Hoeffler focused on the area of radically new products, his marketing research specialty. He said questions need to be asked about whether these products transform the market or create a new one before a strategy can be devised.

“Does it allow customers to do something they’ve never done before?” he asked.

If a product meets that test, then there is more flexibility in advertising and more opportunity to break new ground, while communicating the basic needs met by the product. When bringing out a new product, a company can start with an abstract idea or concept, but Hoeffler said it is important to create a more concrete message at the point of adoption.

Escalas’ presentation highlighted narrative processing and storytelling in ads. She mentioned a dog food campaign that told stories about pets in need of adoption. The dog food was then associated with a good cause and a good story. Escalas went on to talk about what makes for a good story in advertising and emphasized that research has shown stories can build meaning for brands. A surprising finding was consumer data showing fictional stories persuade consumers just as much as factual narratives.

“You need creative ad execution to get through the clutter,” she said.

Read McNamara, MA’76, a seasoned executive who has held senior positions with such Fortune 500 companies as Gillette, Pillsbury, ConAgra, Revlon and Bausch & Lomb, has been appointed Executive Director of the Career Management Center for the Owen School.

McNamara has lived and worked extensively in Latin America and Asia, speaks fluent Spanish and is conversant in Portuguese. He earned his MBA at Wharton, a master’s degree in Latin American studies from Vanderbilt and a bachelor’s degree from Colgate, where he has worked closely with their career management center as an alumnus.

“We are pleased to hire Read in this critical role for Owen,” says Jim Bradford, Dean of the Owen School. “With a wealth of connections, global experience and unparalleled sales skills, he can undoubtedly help us open doors and build our recruiter base in the U.S. and abroad.

“We also look forward to his role as a mentor and adviser to our students as he helps them match their goals and talents with the needs of business.”

McNamara succeeds Joyce Rothenberg, who led the Career Management Center for the past three years. Rothenberg left the Owen School to relocate to New York with her family. “Joyce has helped strengthen this department in many ways and is leaving a stable team and firm foundation on which her successor can build,” Bradford says.

Click here for an interview with Read McNamara.

Advanced Accounting, 4th ed., New York: Wiley & Sons, 2009.
By Debra Jeter, Associate Professor of Accounting, and Paul Chaney, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Accounting

Managing Projects: A Team-Based Approach, Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin, 2010.
By Nancy Lea Hyer, Associate Professor of Operations Management, and Karen A. Brown

The Executive and the Elephant: A Leader’s Guide to Building Inner Excellence, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010.
By Dick Daft, the Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Professor of Management

Marketing Research: Methodological Foundations, 10th ed., Mason, Ohio: South-Western, Cengage Learning, 2010.
By Dawn Iacobucci, the E. Bronson Ingram Professor in Marketing, and Gilbert A. Churchill Jr.

MM: Marketing Management, Mason, Ohio: South-Western, Cengage Learning, 2010.
By Dawn Iacobucci

The Owen School held its first-ever Welcome Owen Well (W.O.W.) event during new student orientation in August. The event, which was held in the lobby of Management Hall, welcomed members of the Class of 2012, who entered the building and made their way through a sea of cheering onlookers. More than 70 Owen alumni, representing a variety of ages, class years and industries, attended the gathering. Special thanks to Nelson Andrews, BA’89, EMBA’95, and J.P. Lowe, BA’83, EMBA’95, for organizing a “welcoming tunnel” for the new students.