Leading economic thinkers, including President Obama’s Senior Economic Advisor Paul Volcker and Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Donald Kohn, came together this spring at the Owen School to talk about the current financial crisis for the 22nd annual Financial Markets Research Center Conference.
Volcker (back row, center) and other economic and political heavyweights came to Owen for the 22nd annual Financial Markets Research Center Conference.
In his remarks, Volcker, who was Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987, said that the United States’ economic recovery would be a “long slog” but that the rate of decline should slow. He added that the country was not in another depression, but “in a great recession for sure.” He also talked about the outlook for the Federal Reserve’s role as a regulator of financial markets and accounting standards. (You can watch Volcker’s full speech at www.youtube.com/Vanderbilt.)
Kohn said that the federal government’s heavy financial bailout of banks and other businesses would help the stock market and was “necessary, safe and effective.” Kohn also talked about the impact of the central bank’s emergency lending programs on taxpayers, credit market capital allocation, the stress tests of U.S. banks and the outlook for the U.S. economy.
Kohn and Volcker had a lively back-and-forth following Kohn’s speech when Volcker questioned statements he made about a 2 percent inflation rate being appropriate for the economy in the long term. (The exchange and Kohn’s full speech are on Vanderbilt’s YouTube page.)
Volcker, Kohn and dozens of current and former members of the Federal Reserve, along with other economic and political heavyweights, came to Owen to honor Dewey Daane, Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance, Emeritus, and former Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, for his 90th birthday. Many of the economic leaders have lectured in Daane’s seminar on monetary and fiscal policy. The seminar has been in continuous operation since Daane joined the Owen faculty in 1974.
In seventh grade I learned to avoid using the word “great” whenever possible in writing. My English teacher argued that it was a trite adjective. Of course she was thinking more of its popular usage (as in “he’s great at tennis”), but even in its formal sense the word has lost some luster through the years. In a way it’s ironic: A word, which by its very definition should be reserved only for the rarest of occasions, has been used so often that its meaning is now diluted.
Why the English lesson, you may ask? When the recession struck in 2008 and references to our so-called “Great Recession” became commonplace, I began to wonder about the implications of tacking that word onto the front of our economic problems. I’ll grant that it’s a clever turn of phrase—one that stands out in this age of sound bites by recalling the Great Depression. Yet I can’t help but feel as though we’re being premature, as well as a bit presumptuous, in likening this downturn to what happened 80 years ago.
As unprecedented as this recession is in terms of its scope and complexity, the Great Depression stands alone in severity. No turn of phrase, regardless of how catchy it is, should imply otherwise. During the Depression the Dow dropped almost 90 percent over a three-year period, and unemployment reached an astonishing 25 percent. By comparison our downturn has resulted in a 50 percent drop in the stock market (which has since rebounded considerably) and just under 10 percent unemployment.
Numbers tell just one part of the story, though. To get an idea of how difficult it was then, I only have to look to my own family. During the 1930s my great-grandparents were among the hundreds of thousands who migrated to California in search of work. For the better part of a decade they went from one backbreaking job to another, and their home was often a dirt-floor tent. My grandfather’s stories about his childhood were like something straight out of The Grapes of Wrath.
It’s little wonder why we refer to these individuals as the Greatest Generation. Even if you disregard World War II, the Depression was more than enough to earn them that nickname. Perhaps our desire for a similar distinction explains why we’ve latched on to calling this the Great Recession. Whether we admit to it or not, we all have high expectations for our lives and wish to be part of something historic, even if it comes about through hardship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” Those words still ring true today, but not just in the way he intended them. Somehow we have misinterpreted the true meaning of greatness. Applying that label correctly requires perspective—something we are in short supply of these days. We ourselves can’t say if we’re living in great times. That’s for a future generation to decide.
When investment banker Rob Louv, MBA’97, met with a Texas entrepreneur in 2008 about selling a company, neither was aware that they shared an important common link: Both had graduated from the Owen School. The entrepreneur, Jack Long, MBA’83, had contacted Louv’s San Francisco firm, Montgomery & Co., on reputation alone, but the coincidence helped him make up his mind about using Louv to shop his company to potential buyers.
Rob Louv
After Montgomery & Co. successfully sold 70 percent of the equity in Long’s company, Louv and Long sealed a second deal soon thereafter—one that was arguably more significant than the one they had just finished. Together with Long’s wife (and fellow Owen graduate) Carolyn, MBA’83, they established the Long and Louv Summer Enterprise Entrepreneurial Fund, which aims to help aspiring entrepreneurs at the Owen School. The fund provides a $15,000 stipend to students who want to pursue an entrepreneurial idea rather than a traditional corporate internship during the summer between first and second year.
With the help of the fund, Thomas Bernstein and Miguel Coles, BS’02, both MBA candidates for 2010, have established their own marketing company, Great Glass Media LLC (www.greatglassmedia.com), to launch an iPhone application aimed at young people looking for the perfect nightspot. A third student, Andrew Bouldin, also an MBA candidate for 2010, used the fund over the summer to continue work on his own company, My College Road Trip (www.mycollegeroadtrip.com), a travel Web site designed for students.
Jack and Carolyn Long
These are just the sort of big ideas that Jack and Carolyn hoped to encourage by establishing the fund. Giving a leg up to budding Vanderbilt entrepreneurs made perfect sense to the couple, since they themselves had used the skills they learned at Owen to launch two successful companies. Their decision to honor Louv in naming the fund was an easy one as well. After all, he brokered the deal to sell their company. He also was the one who encouraged the Longs to give back to Vanderbilt in the first place.
Lone Star Overnight success
Vanderbilt holds a special place in the Longs’ hearts. Both of them come from a long Commodore tradition. Carolyn’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather all graduated from Vanderbilt, as did Jack’s mother and uncles. Jack and Carolyn also owe their marriage to the Owen School. They met as first-year MBA students in 1981 and married four years later.
After graduating from Owen, Jack and Carolyn went to work for Texas Commerce Bank (now part of J.P. Morgan Chase) in Houston, but Jack knew all along that he wanted to own his own company someday. In 1989 First American Bank recruited Carolyn, and the couple returned to Nashville, living off one salary until Jack came up with a business idea.
“Jack got a little office, his own desk and a nameplate and he sat there like Pooh Bear so he could think, think, think,” Carolyn says. “He thought about carpet fiber. He thought about rural post office development. He thought about cattle futures trading. Those were just some of the ideas that didn’t work.”
In the process of searching for undervalued businesses to acquire, Jack looked at an air-freight company that was for sale in Houston. He realized, though, it was more of a freight courier, hiring independent contractors to pick up and deliver. “It was a big business, but it wasn’t attractive to us because it was basically a brokerage,” he says.
That experience started the wheels turning for Long and his business partner Gary Gunter. They were fans of the Southwest Airlines concept of keeping things smaller and cheaper. Long and Gunter decided to start their own business, a package express company serving only the state of Texas. They set up headquarters in Austin, and Lone Star Overnight was launched in 1990. That same year, the Longs’ first child, Adam, was born. Within a span of five months, Jack and Carolyn had started a family, started a business, moved to Austin and purchased their first house.
The years that followed were equally busy and exciting for the Longs. Their daughter, Carlen, was born in 1993, and three years later Lone Star Overnight made the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing privately held companies at No. 331. Carolyn, meanwhile, began fundraising and serving in leadership roles for various Austin nonprofits.
In 1997 the Longs and Gunter sold Lone Star Overnight for a nice sum. Jack, ever the entrepreneur, began looking for ways to invest that money in the next big opportunity. In 2000 he settled on the idea of starting a new company once again. Partnering with Jeff Carpenter, he launched PeopleAdmin, a software technology company aimed at creating tools for human resources at colleges and universities. The company grew quickly. In 2007, with total revenues of $10 million, it made the Inc. 500 list at No. 419.
PeopleAdmin had tapped into a very hot area: software as a service. Long began to field dozens of phone calls a week from companies interested in investing or buying. That’s when the decision was made to hire a small- to mid-size investment bank focused on emerging-growth technology. After vetting numerous candidates, the Longs went with Rob Louv and Montgomery & Co.
The entrepreneurial side of banking
Like the Longs, Louv’s connection to Vanderbilt began before he was born. His father, Art Louv, JD’72, graduated from Vanderbilt Law School, and his mother, Barbara, had Rob while she was a student at Peabody College. Although Rob grew up in Florida and attended the University of Florida, his Vanderbilt roots drew him back to Nashville for graduate school.
“When I went to Vanderbilt, my career objective was to go into investment banking. I thought I would end up in the South, but through the alumni network I was able to set up some interviews in New York,” Louv says. Director of Corporate Relations Peter Veruki, then working in the career center, encouraged him to get some internship experience in New York, even though his original plan was to live elsewhere.
When I went into finance, I was always thinking about building a practice. I never thought of myself as a kind of large cap banker on a large platform. I saw myself on the entrepreneurial side.
—Rob Louv
“My Citicorp internship was directly linked to an Owen alum going to bat for me,” says Louv, who before that summer had never been farther north than Washington, D.C. The internship opened doors for him and led to a career opportunity in investment banking with Chase Securities, later J.P. Morgan. But Louv, with no signing bonus and no paycheck until he passed the company training course, was cash-strapped.
That was when a favorite professor from Owen, Ron Masulis, stepped in. Masulis, Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance, was starting a mergers and acquisitions course and needed background material—case studies, detailed articles and trend pieces. “It was perfect for me,” Louv says. “I got paid a fair hourly wage to do interesting work and used what I learned to better prepare myself for my M&A career.”
Masulis says Louv was among his best students at Owen. “I was very pleased to have him help me research potential topics and cases for the new course I was developing,” he says. “His research was very solid and led me to use several very interesting cases in the course.”
Louv bootstrapped himself through the J.P. Morgan system and became Vice President of Global Mergers and Acquisitions in New York before moving to San Francisco to lead the firm’s West Coast merger and acquisition efforts for the information technology services and Internet sectors. With significant M&A deal experience representing $150 billion in transaction value, he then joined Montgomery & Co. in 2004 as the Co-head of the Technology Banking Group and a member of the firm’s Executive Committee.
Recently Louv and several senior partners at Montgomery & Co. split off from the firm to establish a new investment bank called ArchPoint Partners, also based in San Francisco. The separation was amicable, as ArchPoint continues to execute deals that were engaged under the Montgomery platform. Louv and fellow Managing Partner John Cooper are the owners of the new bank. “I am now like my clients—running a startup,” Louv says.
Louv sees M&A as the entrepreneurial side of banking—one that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s balance sheet. “When I went into finance, I was always thinking about building a practice. I never thought of myself as a kind of large cap banker on a large platform. I saw myself on the entrepreneurial side,” he says.
Culture of giving
The sale of PeopleAdmin “was a long, tedious process,” remembers Carolyn Long. Several deals got close and fell apart before an agreement was signed with Summit Partners of Boston in summer 2008. “Rob stuck with them and kept working on all the details,” she says. “Throughout this process, Jack and Jeff never got to the point of throwing their hands up because Rob never did either. He kept working on it.”
A member of the Owen Alumni Board, Louv saw an opportunity to leverage his hard work in a positive way. Prior to the close of the deal, while hashing out some final fee matters, he approached Jack with a proposition. Louv told him, “Since we know that neither one of us would be here if it weren’t for Owen, what if, in addition to compensating Montgomery & Co., you also compensate Owen for the value it added to our lives?”
Long was intrigued by the idea. Between the sale of Lone Star Overnight and the launch of PeopleAdmin, he had been involved in establishing an entrepreneurship program at the University of Texas, but the bureaucracy of the large state school had cramped his style. In 2002 he and a group of professors left the university and formed the Acton School of Business in Austin to teach an entrepreneurship-only program.
The thought of doing something to encourage entrepreneurship at his alma mater was an enticing prospect. He called Carolyn to get her opinion. “Carolyn and I had not been active alumni up to this point,” he explains. “But one of our motivations for selling the business was to pursue some philanthropic objectives while we were still young enough. After I talked to Carolyn, I called Rob back 10 minutes later and said, ‘Deal.’ ”
It’s been such a pleasure working with three alumni whose culture of giving is obvious, who know how blessed they are and want to give back. These are people whose personal successes and whose value systems are aligned.
—Tricia Carswell
Louv was grateful but surprised when the Longs decided to share credit with him in naming the fund. “That was not expected or requested. I was taken aback,” he says. “I give Jack all the credit. It was his generosity as much as mine that really drove the gift to the school.”
Jack, though, is just as quick to compliment Louv. “Even though the donation is coming from us, we want it to be more about Rob,” he says. Carolyn agrees, adding, “Rob and his team did so much work. He had the idea (to create the fund). He asked for it. It makes perfect sense for us to view it as a joint gift.”
Tricia Carswell, Associate Dean of Development and Alumni Relations, acknowledges that the credit should go to all three. “It’s been such a pleasure working with three alumni whose culture of giving is obvious, who know how blessed they are and want to give back,” she says. “These are people whose personal successes and whose value systems are aligned. They are true philanthropists, and it was a privilege to be at the table with them.”
From left, Thomas Bernstein, Miguel Coles, Andrew Bouldin and Professor Germain Böer
Confidence boost
Louv and the Longs hope other alumni will be inspired to give to the new fund. They also hope the fund will help spark an entrepreneurial focus at Vanderbilt without eschewing the traditional business curriculum.
“Most important is it adds value for the students,” Louv says. “Over time an entrepreneurial bent could differentiate the Owen brand and improve the experience for all of the students.”
Most MBA programs are designed to train students going to work for a large Fortune 500 company, says Germain Böer, Professor of Accounting and Director of the Owen Entrepreneurship Center. “It’s not that the content of the courses doesn’t fit the needs of an entrepreneur,” he says. “You still need to know the same stuff. It’s just that the examples all tend to be from big companies. If I could dictate how we’d do it, I’d say every course would have to have a case or two about how to operate a startup company.”
The classroom learning experience is bound to be greatly enhanced for students able to kick-start a business with a boost from the Long and Louv Fund, Böer says.
“When you start a business, you have to learn about every piece of the business. It’s a really good educational experience to try to put a company together and learn how to motivate people,” Böer says. “It’s excellent training even if they work on a business idea and they get all the way to the point of launching and find some critical factor that keeps it from working.”
Andrew Bouldin, one of the beneficiaries of the summer stipend, has always seen himself as “an entrepreneur-type guy.” He grew up in Nashville, running a lawn-care business through high school and college. He also participated in the Accelerator program at Owen and spent another summer working for Silicon Valley-based Uloop.com, a craigslist-type site aimed solely at college students.
While planning a trip with friends a few years ago, he realized “sites like Travelocity or Trip Advisor are oriented toward businesspeople or moms,” he says. “I couldn’t find anything that would tell me the best restaurant and things to do in an area for a college student.”
Recognizing this market need, he developed a travel site that would appeal to college students and launched it in January 2009 using Vanderbilt as a test school. Immediately 2,000 students signed up. The Long and Louv Fund allowed him to spend the summer focused on the company, building relationships with others in the Web-based travel industry, doing some traveling himself and meeting other students to find out what their specific needs are.
Meanwhile Thomas Bernstein and Miguel Coles, the other recipients of the stipend, spent the summer launching a marketing platform to kick-off their mobile phone application, Nashville Pulse. Their original idea was to install low-cost digital media screens in residential elevators, but they ultimately redirected their energies toward consumer mobile phones.
Bernstein and Coles hired three Vanderbilt undergraduates—Will Green, Mike Slade and Riley Strong—to help shape an application that delivers event information, including descriptions and coupons, to smart phones using GPS-tagging capabilities. “A student down at Broadway and Fourth leaving a restaurant and looking for a music venue would find out there are 15 bars around playing great music. They could access our tool to see which three have deals. It’s a powerful tool because you’re delivering the message at the moment and location of the sales decision,” Bernstein explains.
Bernstein says more important than the grant money is the confidence boost they received from their idea being selected for the stipend. “When you’re sitting there with what you feel is a great idea and plan, but with no money to fund it, you can’t help but doubt your ability to make your vision a reality,” he says. Coles adds, “This experience has been much better than any internship I could imagine.”
Testaments like these remind the Longs and Louv why they decided to create the fund in the first place. Just as Owen has left a lasting impact on their own lives, their gift is now doing the same for others. Although it is only in its second year of existence, the stipend program is already putting students on a bridge to entrepreneurial success.
Or as Coles puts it: “It moves us into a different dimension of creating jobs rather than seeking them.”
Academics often like to talk about providing “real-world experience” for their students, but the real estate program at the Owen School has ventured beyond the standard rhetoric.
During the 2009 spring semester, a group of 10 second-year students took part in the inaugural Real Estate Capstone course that saw them devise a long-term growth plan for downtown Lebanon, Tenn., a city just east of Nashville. The specific thrust involved transit-oriented development. The course was led by Jacob Sagi, Vanderbilt Financial Markets Research Center Associate Professor of Finance, and Thomas McDaniel, MBA’02, Adjunct Professor in Real Estate Finance and Partner with Boyle Investment Co., a real estate investment firm with offices in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn.
“The motivation for the course,” Sagi says, “is to challenge the students with realistic development projects with tough issues—from working with professionals in diverse and often very different fields to trying to balance the value added to developers and communities.”
The Owen students teamed with 16 advanced urban design students led by Associate Professor T.K. Davis from the University of Tennessee’s College of Architecture and Design. Working in a truly collaborative process, the Owen and UT students devoted the semester to identifying four potential infill development sites within a half-mile radius of Lebanon’s Music City Star commuter rail transit stop. The stop is located near several key attractions—the historic town square, a greenway, a 200,000-square-foot retail facility, and Cumberland University—all potential drivers of future development.
While the UT students handled the design aspect of the project, the Vanderbilt team conducted a market analysis, developed marketing strategies and detailed pro forma financial analyses of the four sites, and researched legal implications and potential public/private partnership strategies to make the development projects feasible. The process was very practical, Sagi says, as the students earned hands-on experience, interacted with a variety of respected officials and—perhaps most important—made potential professional contacts and friendships that could prove invaluable.
At the semester’s end the Owen and UT students presented their proposals at the Nashville Civic Design Center to an audience of about 100, including many from the Nashville chapter of the Urban Land Institute. ULI members critiqued the student recommendations for the four sites, and the proposals were exhibited at the design center.
“Our final presentation at the Civic Design Center was very well-received,” says Shelby Pool, MBA’09, who graduated in May with an emphasis in real estate and finance. “As a group, we presented many well-researched projects and were able to touch on both the positives and negatives of the various proposals.”
Pool describes the Capstone course as “real world-based.” She says, “There was a lot of room to think outside of the box and present creative ideas and solutions.”
Building a program
Sagi says the course took the students beyond academia to help prepare them for working within a challenging economy. Real estate development focuses on uncovering opportunities and minimizing risk in a highly complex environment with various stakeholders whose interests often conflict, he adds.
“It is hard to appreciate this from a completely theoretical or traditional case-based academic approach,” Sagi says. “There are few programs in the country that offer such an opportunity to their MBA students. We’re hoping to continue and improve on our experience this year, and hopefully create a sustainable model for such a course that would be the envy of other schools.”
Sagi says the idea for the program stemmed from his interactions with colleagues in the real estate program at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Haas stresses an interdisciplinary experience of real estate development and investment. The program interacts with the UC schools of architecture, urban planning, law, and construction engineering.
At the time, Sagi foresaw Owen as allowing for a different model, but one that could take cues from Haas. “Because we do not have access to such a diverse set of schools at Vanderbilt, I floated the idea of collaborating with the UT architecture students to T.K. Davis (then Design Director of the Nashville Civic Design Center). He was very excited about the idea, and the rest was simply a matter of coordination.”
Still, a star was needed since Sagi admits he has little expertise in development. To fill this role he tabbed Thomas McDaniel, a fellow professor at Owen. “Thomas is truly the brain and brawn behind it, and the course could not have been managed without him,” Sagi says. “While I tried to keep abreast of the progress of the course during the semester, in the end my contribution to the whole thing was minimal.”
Sagi’s modesty aside, his visionary move resulted in an important learning experience, according to Owen students who participated in the course.
Matthew Treble, MBA’09, says the academic experience helped him better understand the challenges developers face in a tough economic climate. Those challenges were amplified by the architecture students, who approached the effort more from a creative perspective.
“The UT students were immensely talented and did great work,” says Treble, who graduated with an emphasis in real estate and finance. “However, many of the designs were not economically feasible, and it was difficult to rein in their vision for each site’s end product. I found that to be the most interesting part of the course.”
Treble says McDaniel helped the students model the project by effectively defining the parameters of each site and the projected elements expected to yield success for those sites. “We were also forced to research different sources of funding, public and private, in order to make many of the site plans feasible,” Treble adds.
Pool says the course provided substantial experience for those students wanting full-time jobs in commercial real estate. “Many students already had some prior real estate experience,” she says. “But for those who may have just worked on the finance side in the past, this course gave them the opportunity to dig into, say, the construction and/or development side of the industry.”
Pool believes the program is a benefit not only to the students but also, potentially, to would-be employers. “The Capstone course is a great addition to Owen’s growing real estate program,” she says. “I think it will help local developers become more aware of the talent at Owen and [their] growing interest in local real estate opportunities.”
There are few programs in the country that offer such an opportunity to their MBA students. We’re hoping to continue and improve on our experience this year, and hopefully create a sustainable model for such a course that would be the envy of other schools.
—Jacob Sagi
McDaniel shares Pool’s enthusiasm for the course’s long-term potential. He and Sagi continue to meet to discuss feedback. The duo wants to refine the two introductory courses: Real Estate Finance & Capital Markets and Real Estate Investment & Development. “Our new initiative is to further strengthen the school ties with real estate alumni, perhaps the one last missing link,” McDaniel says.
Creating that linkage is a worthy goal, one from which the graduate program could benefit. Given his career in the commercial real estate industry, McDaniel seems suited for the task. The adjunct instructor says Vanderbilt has made a concerted effort to ramp up its real estate course offerings. That work has resulted, he believes, in the program’s competitiveness with those at other top-tier graduate business schools.
“We want the real estate program specifically to hold its own with the top programs,” McDaniel says, recalling the creation of a formal Owen real estate program two years ago. Today Owen students can take courses within the real estate MBA emphasis (one of four emphases and eight concentrations).
The real estate emphasis comprises three required courses (Real Estate Financial Analysis, Real Estate Investment & Development, and Real Estate Finance & Capital Markets) of two credits each. At least two additional hours of course work are required from six elective courses (Urban Transportation Planning, Construction Project Management, Construction Estimation, Construction Planning, Property Law for Business Students, and Commercial Real Estate Transactions). The first four courses listed are four credits each, with the latter two being one credit apiece. The Real Estate Capstone course can be taken for four elective credits.
“We are competitive with other top-level MBA programs that offer a concentration in real estate,” says McDaniel, who graduated from Owen himself in 2002. He describes the Capstone course as the equivalent of a thesis project: “It’s intended to be a culmination and summation of all the tools the students were equipped with during their two years at Owen.”
Ryan Seibels, MBA’09, who recently obtained his MBA from Vanderbilt with an emphasis in real estate and finance, says he feels the real estate program holds its own with any other similar graduate program in the nation. He says the curriculum prepared him well for a difficult economy.
“The challenge now is growing the number of students who are interested in pursuing a career in real estate,” Seibels says. “If that number can continue to increase and those alumni are willing to give back to the school, then the real estate alumni network will only grow. That’s how the top-tier real estate schools excel.”
From left, Professors Jacob Sagi and Thomas McDaniel
Future developments
Seibels describes the partnership with the UT architecture students as unique. He also says interacting with Lebanon officials and community members—and assessing how the Music City Star transit stop could one day greatly benefit the town as a mixed-use node—proved interesting. “It greatly helped shape the developments that we proposed at the end of the course,” Seibels says.
However, such a major academic undertaking does not come without its difficulties, he adds. “The logistics alone made the course somewhat challenging,” he says. “While working with UT students provided great benefits for us, it was difficult because we could not just call or e-mail them and set up a meeting to really dive into their designs. Instead we were left to assemble about once a month to hear new ideas and designs and to try to solve problems and discuss all issues.”
The Capstone course is a great addition to Owen’s growing real estate program. I think it will help local developers become more aware of the talent at Owen and [their] growing interest in local real estate opportunities.
—Shelby Pool
Sagi says the concept for the project course was very fluid and experimental. He and McDaniel anticipated the challenge—and, at times, difficulty—in coordinating between the UT and the Owen students. Lebanon officials helped ease the occasional stress.
“I think we were all pleasantly surprised by the interest paid to the endeavor from the community in Lebanon,” Sagi says. “There was significant participation in the various meetings held, and it was important for our students to see how the planning process unfolds and experience the potential excitement and tension associated with a mixed-use urban revitalization project.”
Magi Tilton, Planning Director for the City of Lebanon, served as the local coordinator for meetings and public input. She praises the Owen students’ work, which included potential lease rates, rate of return on investment and analysis of potential project phasing. Though her contact with the Owen students was minimal, Tilton came away impressed with their presentations and professionalism.
“The feedback I received from residents and business owners was that they were excited about the possibilities that were presented,” she says. “This was an educational experience for our citizens to learn about development and design opportunities. The City of Lebanon Planning Department plans to build on this work by keeping the communication lines open and continuing to provide information regarding alternative design and funding options.”
As to what the Owen students’ proposals might one day render, Tilton is optimistic. “I hope the ideas and information presented by the Vanderbilt and UT students will spark an interest and lead property owners and developers to build on the student projects in their plans for development here in Lebanon,” she says.
Time will tell if the Owen students’ analyses and recommendations actually will be realized. However, UT’s Davis, one of the state’s most respected architects/planners, says the Owen students did a “fantastic” job of learning how to balance design, construction and city planning with the art of real estate deals and the often arcane elements of the industry.
“I was very impressed with the Vanderbilt students, and I would say things went as well as could be expected given the logistical challenges,” he says. “In some ways we simulated the real world of design and development, where the client investor may be based in one city and the design team in another, with periodic face-to-face meetings supplemented by telephone and Internet communication.”
From left, Ryan Seibels and Matthew Treble
Davis says the students’ work revealed that transit-oriented development of a very high quality could be profitable for a developer if the existing Music City Star Lebanon station site (which is controlled by the Nashville-based Regional Transit Authority) could be either purchased or leased for development.
“This would be a win-win for the city and for ridership on the Music City Star,” Davis says, adding that about 250 dwelling units could yield as many as 375 daily commuters on the train.
The three other sites within a 2,500-foot walking radius of the station did not project to be profitable for high-quality development without the use of tax increment financing, he says. Tax increment financing uses future gains in taxes to finance current improvements. It is the primary urban redevelopment tool in use today in the United States.
“With the designation of an urban revitalization area in and around the historic town center of Lebanon, tax increment financing could be utilized as a tool to make other sites viable for profitable development,” Davis says.
The Owen students would be pleased to see such a scenario unfold. Actual future development that takes into consideration their financial, market and legal analyses would validate their academic labor.
“We were pretty certain if anything comes out of it, it will be years down the road,” Treble says. “But we’re hoping something happens. We’ve done most of the heavy lifting, so it would be nice if a developer could hit the ground running in the future. It would add legitimacy to the Owen program and our efforts.”
Regardless, the team benefited greatly from the experience, one that will be repeated in some form as Owen continues to use the Capstone course to elevate its real estate presence.
“The Capstone course is crucial to the real estate experience at Owen,” Sagi says. “After a ‘burning-in’ period in which we learn to maximize the value of the students’ time and how to coordinate between the various disciplines, we’re hoping to also involve at some point—in addition to architecture students—graduate students from the School of Engineering, Peabody College’s Community and Research Action [program], and the Vanderbilt University Law School.
“Yes, we like to dream big. We will have something worthy of national renown in the education of real estate MBA students.”
Jeff Dotson is an expert on marketing research and theory. His research focuses on the development and application of Bayesian statistics to a variety of marketing problems, including linking customer satisfaction to firm financial performance and developing more accurate models of consumer decision making. He joined Owen after completing his Ph.D. in marketing at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University, where he taught marketing research and served as a Teaching Assistant for courses in Bayesian statistics and marketing.
His research has been published or accepted for publication by such journals as Quantitative Marketing and Economics and Marketing Science, and he has presented his work at leading academic institutions including Brigham Young University, Harvard Business School, University of Iowa, University of Southern California, and INSEAD. In addition Dotson is actively involved in the marketing research practitioner community. He presented papers at the American Marketing Association’s Advanced Research Techniques (ART) Forum in 2007 and 2009, where he was runner-up (2007) and winner (2009) of the award for best presentation.
In 2007 and 2008 Dotson was honored as a Haring Symposium Fellow. He was also an INFORMS Doctoral Consortium Fellow in 2006. From 2005 to 2009 he was the recipient of the Davidson Doctoral Fellowship from the Fisher College of Business, and is currently a member of INFORMS, the American Marketing Association and the American Statistical Association.
Prior to his academic career, Dotson worked as a Category Manager and Senior Analyst for a national consumer packaged goods firm. He also has extensive professional experience in retail banking and recently completed a three-year term as Vice Chairman of the board of directors for a regional credit union.
Miguel Palacios
Miguel Palacios
Assistant Professor of Finance
Miguel Palacios’ primary research interests are in the areas of asset pricing and labor economics, particularly as they relate to human capital. He joined Owen after completing his Ph.D. in finance at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as a Graduate Instructor for several finance courses and received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Dean Witter Fellowship and the Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award.
He is the author of Investing in Human Capital: A Capital Market’s Approach to Student Funding (Cambridge University Press) and co-author of the monograph Investing in Emerging Markets (Research Foundation of AIMR).
Palacios has presented at conferences at universities and private and government organizations such as the World Bank, International Finance Corporation, University of Virginia, Libertad y Desarollo (Santiago, Chile) and the Korean Education Ministry. He has also served as a Referee for The Economic Journal and Management Science.
In 2001 Palacios co-founded Lumni Inc., which structures and manages innovative investment vehicles for financing education in which students agree to pay a percentage of their future income in exchange for financing of their education costs. He has also worked as a Summer Associate at ValuePartners LLC and an Economic Studies Analyst at Sigma S.A. He began his academic career by teaching physics at Colegio Los Nogales in Bogotá, Colombia.
Palacios is an instrument-rated pilot and has been a member of Colombia’s water-skiing team. He recently ranked third (2006) and fourth (2008) on the West Coast in Men’s II Trick Water Skiing.
Mark Ratchford
Mark Ratchford
Assistant Professor of Marketing
Mark Ratchford is an expert in consumer behavior and game-theory-based models of marketing strategy. He joined Owen after completing his Ph.D. in marketing at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, where he taught marketing research and consumer behavior and was awarded the Gerald Hart Research Fellowship and the University Fellowship.
His primary research interests include the impact of social networks on coalitions among firms, perceptions of firm fairness and the optimal strategic marketing mix for branded input products. He has also conducted behavioral research on the impact of goal setting and self-regulatory resource depletion of subsequent task performance.
Ratchford has presented his work at several major conferences, including the Association for Consumer Research Conference and INFORMS Marketing Science Conference. In 2006 he was an invited speaker at the Robert Mittelstaedt Marketing Doctoral Symposium in Lincoln, Neb., and was honored with the Best Paper Award at the American Marketing Association Winter Educators Conference. He is an AMA-Sheth Doctoral Consortium Fellow and serves as a Conference Referee for the Association for Consumer Research.
Earlier in his career Ratchford held analyst roles for ATX Telecommunications, Boat America Corporation, Teligent Inc. and PacifiCorp. He also served as Director of Industry Affairs for the Wireless Communications Association International in Washington, D.C.
Ratchford is affiliated with several other professional organizations, including the American Marketing Association, Association for Consumer Research, Society for Consumer Psychology and INFORMS, and is a member of the professional business fraternity Alpha Kappa Psi.
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Charles Holliday, Chairman of the Board at DuPont (video)
Holliday addresses the Class of 2009 at Commencement.
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Debora Guthrie, MBA’79, President and CEO of Capital Health Management Corporation (video)
Guthrie speaks at the annual barbecue during Alumni Weekend.
Tami Fassinger, Associate Dean of Executive Programs at the Owen School (audio)
Fassinger talks about Owen’s decision to transition its Executive MBA program from an alternating Friday-Saturday schedule to an alternating Saturday-only format.
Featured Research
Lobbying expenditures yield big returns (audio)
When it comes to lobbying, more firms are getting into the game. Recent research by David Parsley, E. Bronson Ingram Professor in Economics and Finance, provides a picture of just how profitable such activities can be.
Thinking like a CEO (audio)
Leading a company often involves a paradox. The skills that propel a person to the top—whether an entrepreneur building a new business or someone rising through an established program—may not be the skills most essential for guiding the entire enterprise as a chief executive. Michael Burcham, Professor for the Practice of Management, David Furse, Adjunct Professor of Management, and Kimberly Pace, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management, reflect on qualities that characterize how CEOs think and behave.
Hiring advice for employers (audio)
Even in a tight job market, high-pressure recruitment tactics can poison the employer-employee relationship. Research by Ray Friedman, Brownlee O. Currey Professor of Management, shows that a perceived mistreatment during the recruitment process can prove costly for the employer months or even years down the road.
Owen on YouTube
Watch Owen’s faculty discuss their areas of expertise:
Innovation – David Owens, Clinical Professor of Business Strategy and Innovation
Process design and improvement – Nancy Lea Hyer, Associate Professor of Operations Management
Health care – Larry Van Horn, Associate Professor of Health Care Management
Leadership – Dick Daft, Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Professor of Management
Marketing – Dawn Iacobucci, E. Bronson Ingram Professor in Marketing
RecruitAtOwen.com allows recruiters to post jobs and order student resumes.
In this day and age, searching for the right job entails a lot more than just sending out resumes. And in this tight economy, it is not always possible for companies to send out recruiters. In light of this, the Owen School is taking a new approach to promoting its students and enticing recruiters through a new Web site: RecruitAtOwen.com.
The site highlights some of Owen’s best and brightest in the Student Spotlight section. It also links to more information about Owen’s graduate degrees, including the MBA, MS Finance, Master of Accountancy and Health Care MBA.
RecruitAtOwen.com allows recruiters to post jobs and order student resumes easily. The site also offers a Recruiter’s Toolkit section, featuring an on-campus recruiting checklist, recruiting calendar, guidelines for job offers, information on hiring international students, employment reports, ways to connect with student organizations, contact information for the Owen Career Management Center team and more.
“Our goal was to create a Web site that would answer all of the recruiter’s questions in a well-organized format,” says Joyce Rothenberg, Director of Owen’s Career Management Center. “Business recruiters I’ve talked to love that everything they need is just one or two clicks away.”
Rothenberg says the site is also helping Owen to be more environmentally responsible by dramatically cutting the amount of paper the school prints and mails out. Recruiters say it is much easier to find information on-line in-stead of having to store and file printed materials.
Jim Bradford, Dean and Ralph Owen Professor of Management, has been appointed to the board of directors of the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), the association of leading graduate business schools worldwide.
William (Bill) Frist, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, has been named University Distinguished Professor in Health Care. At Owen he is leading a first-of-its-kind academic experience for Health Care MBA students, having created a unique class that combines business students with fourth-year medical students to examine the financing, delivery and quality of health care.
Chad Holliday, a nationally renowned business leader who has been championing the business case for sustainable development and corporate responsibility, has been named Executive in Residence. Holliday serves on the boards of directors at DuPont (Chairman) and Deere & Co., and has led numerous collaborations focused on harnessing business for social good.
Dawn Iacobucci, E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Marketing, has been named Associate Dean for Faculty Development. In this role she is responsible for all faculty evaluation, promotion and tenure recommendations and collaborates with directors of the school’s degree programs on curriculum development.
Brian McCann has been named Visiting Lecturer in Strategy after serving as Adjunct Professor of Management at Owen since 2005. His areas of expertise span strategic management and entrepreneurship. He is the co-author (with Luke Froeb, William C. Oehmig Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise) of the leading textbook Managerial Economics: A Problem-Solving Approach.
David Owens, Clinical Professor of Business Strategy and Innovation, has been named Faculty Director of the Vanderbilt Executive Development Institute. In this role Owens oversees the curriculum for and delivery of all nondegree professional development offerings and works to expand Owen’s portfolio of programs in key industry sectors such as health care, law and sustainability.
Dean Jim Bradford has been named to the board of directors of the Graduate Management Admission Council, the association of leading graduate business schools worldwide. Bradford is serving a one-year term on the board of the nonprofit organization, which is dedicated to creating access to and advancing graduate management education. Representing academia and industry, GMAC also owns the GMAT exam, which is used by more than 4,600 business programs worldwide as a key part of the admissions process.
“I am honored by this appointment and look forward to working with my colleagues to underscore the essential role of business education, particularly in periods of great economic flux as we’re experiencing now,” says Bradford, who is also the Ralph Owen Professor of Management. “As business school educators, we are charged with grounding tomorrow’s industry leaders with sound management practices, judgment and values, and fostering a sense of responsibility to contribute to the greater good of society.”
Since his appointment as Dean in 2005, Bradford has spearheaded the launch of several market-driven and immersion-based programs, including a Health Care MBA, master’s degrees in finance and accounting, and Accelerator, a month-long summer intensive program for high-performing undergraduates. Previously Bradford served as President and CEO of United Glass Corporation and AFG Industries Inc., North America’s largest vertically integrated glass manufacturing and fabrication company. He currently serves on the boards of Clarcor Corporation, Genesco and Granite Construction, and the Harpeth Capital Investment Banking Advisory Board. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and Vanderbilt Law School, and has completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.
“Jim’s role as Dean and his significant corporate experience give him an unusual perspective and make him a most welcome addition to our accomplished board,” says David A. Wilson, President and CEO of GMAC. “We look forward to tapping his expertise in the months ahead amid a continually changing landscape for management education.”
Bruce Barry Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Professor of Management Barry has conducted vast research and written extensively on social issues in management. He is the author of Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace, which examines free expression and workplace rights from legal, managerial and ethical perspectives.
Paul Chaney E. Bronson Ingram Professor in Accounting An expert in financial accounting and financial statement analysis, Chaney recently co-authored a landmark study that found a direct correlation between the public perception of an auditor’s reputation and a company’s market value.
David Parsley E. Bronson Ingram Professor in Economics and Finance Parsley’s current research focuses on exchange rates and the integration of goods and services markets, financial markets and labor markets. He has also measured the effects of political connections on firm financial performance.
Steve Posavac E. Bronson Ingram Associate Professor in Marketing Posavac is an expert in the field of consumer judgment and decision processes, including perceptions of value, and advertising and persuasion.
Jacob S. Sagi Vanderbilt Financial Markets Research Center Associate Professor of Finance Sagi, an expert on financial economics and decision theory, has conducted extensive research on asset pricing and decision making under risk and uncertainty.
Gary Scudder Justin Potter Professor of Operations Management Scudder’s research interests include business strategy and operations management. He has consulted with a number of large corporations, primarily in the areas of managing new product development and strategic planning.
Richard H. Willis Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker Jr. Associate Professor of Accounting Willis has studied the effect of security analysts’ earnings forecasts on analysts’ performance evaluation, the determinants of persistence in analysts’ stock picking ability, and the effect of investor sophistication in interpreting analysts’ stock recommendations, among other topics.
Inserted form tools may not be a familiar concept to most, but the products they help manufacture are integral to our everyday lives. Inexpensive turned metal parts for everything from spark plugs to bullets to bearings would not be possible were it not for the technology pioneered by Nashville businessman John Peterson Sr. in the 1950s. Today John Peterson Jr., BA’78, EMBA’82, carries on his father’s legacy as President of Peterson Tool Company, the world’s largest designer and manufacturer of inserted form tools.
In the past, cutting blades for metal lathes, shapers and other equipment had to be sharpened by hand—a time-consuming process that held up production. Peterson Tool, however, discovered a way to use electricity to machine accurate, repeatable blades that are easily removed and replaced by the manufacturer.
“Envision a razor,” Peterson says. “We sell you the holder, and then we sell you the repetitive parts—the blades—with free engineering in the box.”
Peterson admits that he may never have gone into the family business had his father not passed away unexpectedly in 1979. At the time John Jr. had some sales experience under his belt, but the thought of helping his newly widowed mother, Nancy, run Peterson Tool was daunting. So he enrolled in the then-new Executive MBA program at Owen.
“I learned more from the other students at Owen than anything else. They taught me some basic things that I was able to apply right away,” he says.
Over time Peterson has grown to love the business he is in. He is passionate about the innovation that goes into his products and cares deeply about the customer relationships that he has built over the years. More than anything else, though, he enjoys his employees.
“I love the people I work with,” he says. “I’ve grown up with most of them. That’s one thing you get to have in a family business.”
Country music singer and entrepreneur Kix Brooks of Brooks & Dunn has an issue most businesses would love to have. His Nashville-area winery, Arrington Vineyards and Winery, is so popular that it is considering growing to accommodate more events.
Brooks took a unique approach to this expansion. He turned to students from the Vanderbilt Accelerator Summer Business Institute to create a physical space plan and operating plan that would produce new earnings streams without jeopardizing the integrity and mission of the vineyard and winery.
Kix Brooks (inset) turned to Accelerator to help him expand his Nashville-area winery.
The Accelerator Summer Business Institute is an intense monthlong business boot camp run by the Owen School. In the program, college students and recent graduates from across the country are immersed in a competitive business environment, working to create the winning solution to real challenges from top local and national companies. The students hone essential skills in marketing, sales, finance, real estate, research and corporate strategy, while participating companies receive the brain power, creativity and proposals of at least eight teams of highly motivated millennials.
Other 2009 Accelerator projects included:
Sony Music Nashville: aiding Sony Music to further develop the 360-degree concept of building artists’ brands
Coca-Cola Enterprises: creating marketing ideas to help promote Coca-Cola’s corporate responsibility and sustainability (CRS) goals
BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee: creating a social network for BCBST and its subsidiary Gordian that links people with similar illnesses, interests and wellness goals
Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce: helping rebrand the city as an entrepreneurial hotbed, while respecting the “music city” brand
Cisco & Presidio: creating a marketing message and go-to-market program on the intersection of WebEx and TelePresence technology.
Nick Bollen, E. Bronson Ingram Professor in Finance, received the Faculty Research Impact Award. One of his early papers, an analysis of the impact of decimal pricing on mutual fund trading costs, proved especially groundbreaking. His most recent work showed that mounting restrictions on hedge fund withdrawals can erode investor value by as much as 15 percent.
Michael Burcham, Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, was selected by the Executive MBA Class of 2009 to receive the Executive MBA Outstanding Professor Award.
Dewey Daane, the Frank K. Houston Professor of Finance, Emeritus, has been honored for more than three decades of service to Owen. He was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the Federal Reserve Board and represented the United States from 1963 to 1974 as one of the two U.S. Deputies of the Group of Ten in their frequent meetings related to the international monetary crises.
Michael Lapré, E. Bronson Ingram Associate Professor in Operations Management, received a 2008 Manufacturing & Service Operations and Management (M&SOM) Meritorious Service Award for providing timely, unbiased and thoughtful reviews of manuscripts submitted to the journal.
Craig Lewis, Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Management in Finance, was selected by the MBA Class of 2009 to receive the James A. Webb Excellence in Teaching Award. Lewis teaches Corporate Valuation, one of the most beloved (and feared) classes in the MBA program.
Richard Oliver, Professor of Marketing at Owen since 1990, has been named Professor, Emeritus. A renowned researcher and pioneer in the field of consumer psychology, Oliver received the prestigious 2008 Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award for his work, titled “Whence Consumer Loyalty.”
Jacob Sagi, Financial Markets Research Center Associate Professor of Finance, received the Faculty Research Productivity Award for his extensive analyses on financial economics and decision theory.
Like a lot of record label veterans, Doug Howard, EMBA’85, has a good sense of timing—not just in terms of having an ear for music, that is, but in understanding the business trends as well. As the Senior Vice President of Artist & Repertoire for Disney’s Lyric Street Records and Disney Music Publishing, he has helped launch and develop the careers of some of country music’s biggest talents, including Rascal Flatts, all while navigating an increasingly competitive marketplace.
“When I first started out, a new artist could release four singles a year and build a fan base that way. But today we can spend up to $250,000 making a first album and another $500,000–$750,000 on marketing, promotion and a radio tour. Then it may take 25 weeks just to find out if we’ve got a hit on our hands,” he says. “In this business you have to know when to keep fighting and when to let go and try something else.”
In many ways Howard’s own career has benefited from this line of thinking. After graduating from the music business program at Belmont University, he tried his hand at different jobs in the industry. However, it was at the Welk Music Group—one of the major independent publishing companies at the time—where he found his true direction.
“Bill Hall, my boss at Welk, saw where the industry was heading with the mergers and acquisitions on the creative side and consolidation on the radio side. He knew that strictly creative guys like me would get killed if we didn’t bring anything else to the table. That’s why he encouraged me to enroll at Owen,” he explains.
Earning an Executive MBA at Vanderbilt proved to be “the turning point of my career,” Howard says. His degree helped him succeed as the Vice President/General Manager of Polygram Music in Nashville. It also served him well when fellow music executive Randy Goodman picked him to help start Lyric Street in 1997.
“My education and overall experience at Owen have opened a lot of doors for me,” he says. “I gained the confidence that I could ask the right questions, focus on the real issues and compete in both good and bad times. It allowed me to follow my bliss . . . and that is great music!”
Alexander Heard, an adviser to three U.S. presidents who, as Vanderbilt’s fifth Chancellor, guided the university smoothly through the stormy period of the 1960s and 1970s without the unrest and violence that afflicted many college campuses, died July 24 at his home after a long illness. He was 92.
“For more than 40 years, Alex Heard was a powerful presence at Vanderbilt University,” Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos says. “Through his intellect and calm demeanor, he raised Vanderbilt’s stature on the national stage during his 20-year administration. And even after he stepped down as Chancellor he graciously made himself available to his successors for advice and guidance. I was gratefully one of the beneficiaries of his wisdom, and his loss is one I feel deeply.”
Under Heard’s direction, Vanderbilt grew and prospered, adding three schools to the seven it already contained, including the Owen School. “Chancellor Heard was a builder, someone who understood the value of all of the elements of a great university,” says Dean Jim Bradford. “Under his leadership, the Owen Graduate School was founded and took its early steps toward becoming one of America’s leading graduate schools of business. We strive to perpetuate and improve the legacy of his vision and wisdom.”
Heard had been serving as Dean of the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina when Vanderbilt tapped him for its top job in 1963, succeeding Harvie Branscomb. A giant in the field of political science, Heard was the recipient of 27 honorary degrees from various colleges and universities over the years and published numerous books on the presidential election process.
Heard is survived by his wife, Jean Keller Heard, and four children: Stephen, a Nashville attorney; Christopher, an acknowledgements coordinator for Vanderbilt’s development office; Frank, BA’75, MBA’80, a Florida businessman; and Cornelia Heard, Valere Blair Potter Professor of Violin at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music; and two grandchildren: Alexander Michael Heard of Boca Raton, Fla., and George Alexander Meyer of Nashville.
A memorial service was held on July 29 in Benton Chapel on Vanderbilt’s campus. Donations may be made to the Alexander Heard Memorial Fund at Vanderbilt. By arrangement with the university, Heard’s ashes were interred at Benton Chapel.
Academics often like to talk about providing “real-world experience” for their students, but the real estate program at the Owen School has ventured beyond the standard rhetoric.
Building a program
