Detour to the Top

IT'S TOUGH TO REWRITE THE RULES of hard-driving corporate life to accommodate personal issues without being seen as a prima donna or a slacker who just doesn’t want to produce, says Fast Company. But the San Francisco office of Bain & Co. is one example of a corporate culture that has changed to encourage this new paradigm.

Five years after joining the firm, John Donahoe, MBA ’86, asked to work part time to care for his children while his wife worked at a federal court clerkship. His parenting duties kept Donahoe off the corporate travel track, so he turned his attention to working with a firm closer to home that was in the midst of a strategic overhaul. The firm became a major Bain client, the magazine reported, and in the process, Donahoe developed a more savvy management style. In 1992, he was named to head the San Francisco office. Today he gets rave reviews from other Bain consultants.

“I’m not the smartest person in the firm,” Donahoe told Fast Company. “It’s my job to make sure that everyone is working together effectively, and that everyone has the resources they need. That’s a role that comes naturally to me.”

Holding All the Reins

WELLS FARGO chief executive Dick Kovacevich, MBA ’67, will take on the additional title of chairman this spring following the resignation of the bank’s chairman, Paul Hazen. In 1998, Norwest Corp., headed by Kovacevich, bought Wells. Hazen remained as chairman of the new institution.

Kovacevich told the San Francisco Chronicle that Hazen’s willingness to stay following the merger was a great benefit that reassured employees. “Because he did it, we gained tremendous benefits,” Kovacevich said.

Put a Grape in Your Portfolio

TWO BUSINESS SCHOOL ALUMNI are putting their knowledge of the wine industry and their money into a project to invest in choice grape growing land to lure institutional investors looking to diversify their portfolios, says the San Francisco Chronicle.

Richard Wollack and William Hill, both members of the MBA Class of ’69, are putting together a million-dollar fund through Premier Pacific Vineyards, their San Francisco firm. Wollack is a veteran real estate investor, and Hill is a vineyard developer. So far the firm has invested in land in California’s Napa Valley and in Oregon’s Pinot Noir growing region.

Wagons Ho!

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Public Broadcasting made television stars out of 19th-century explorers Lewis and Clark. Now Ted Kaye, MBA ’79, hopes to make the 200th anniversary of their expedition the biggest event of 2005. Kaye heads Lewis and Clark 2005, a nonprofit organization for Oregon with a $136 million wish list to help draw visitors to the state.

Part of Kaye’s job is to help link people and resources to get projects off the ground, reports Oregon Business. It cites one example of Indian tribal leaders who set out to resurrect the art of carving the types of canoes their ancestors used. They needed large logs of Western red cedar, a tree that is increasingly scarce today. Kaye managed to find several private forest land-owners with access to the logs and a passion for history.

The celebration will be “part Oregon Trail wagon train, part Olympic torch, part Cycle Oregon,” Kaye told the magazine.

You’ve Got to Prime the Pump

FACULTY MEMBER Paul Romer visited Washington, D.C., in January to argue for a federal program to encourage today’s most promising high school students to pursue graduate studies in the sciences. “If you believe that ideas drive prosperity, you ask where do ideas come from,” the economist told the Wall Street Journal. “The answer is skilled people. The more people you have prospecting, the more you will be stumbling on rich veins of gold.” Romer argues that the United States isn’t producing enough scientists and engineers to give rise to the ideas and inventions that fuel continuing economic prosperity.

Getting Real

LAST YEAR'S dot-com implosion has taught survivors a few lessons about how the Internet really changes business, argues Fortune. Dave Merriwether, MBA ’00, remembers back to 1997, when he saw a prospectus for a company called Amazon. “I looked at it and said, there’s no way this will ever go anywhere,” recalls Merriwether. “So it’s been an interesting road for me.” He recalls working for AllAdvantage.com as a summer MBA intern. “The interns got an equity bonus for the summer and a full-time offer to stay and quit school—which I actually considered.”

Today, Merriwether is at his second dot-com startup, ExchangeWave, and says the world has changed. The current atmosphere is more of a workplace than “a let’s-go-hang-out- and-do-weird-things-and-have-an-office-that-has-stuff-on-the-walls-and-conference-rooms- that-are-named-funny-things.”

At the Top in Japan

THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE Nikkei Women has named Sakie Fukushima, MBA ’87, one of the top 10 women leaders in Japan. The author of a new book, Ureru Jinzai (The Marketable Executive), Fukushima is a partner in Korn/Ferry International and the Japanese country manager for the firm.

Writing the Text on Entrepreneurship

IN A RECENT REPORT on business education, the Financial Times explored teaching entrepreneurship and wrote that Stanford Business School has taken a good approach, mixing scholarly work with input from practitioners.

“We came to the simple conclusion that small, early-stage, rapidly growing companies have different problems from those of GM or Ford,” Chuck Holloway, codirector of the School’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, told the FT. Today, Holloway said, an important group of Business School faculty is engaged in research and course development in entrepreneurship.

“We have to compete in the realm of intellectual ideas—to present problems the faculty are challenged by. The faculty we have are passionate about it.”

Cleared for Takeoff

AS HE WORKS TO REVAMP unprofitable short-haul European routes, Rod Eddington, SEP ’91, who became chief executive at British Airways last year, was tapped by Business Week as one of the top managers to watch in 2001.

The New York Times noted that Eddington “was praised for being able to find his way around the cockpit as easily as through a balance sheet.” Observers expect him to try to strengthen the airline’s alliances with other carriers and to shift the focus of its London operations from Gatwick to Heathrow airport.

Women Take a Swing at the Game

AS IMPRESSIVE GOLF HANDICAP numbers become almost a part of executive resumes, women business leaders are more likely to take a swing at the game, reports Working Woman.

Janet Friedl, Class of ’01 and president of the GSB student golf club, brings together her women classmates once a week for a nine-hole game. Before coming to the Business School, she told the magazine, she worked in the U.S. Department of Transportation, where “I was one of the only women and one of the youngest people there. Golf allowed me to establish credibility.”

She’s in good company. The Executive Women’s Golf Association reports it has more than 14,000 members.

Forced Time Off: Red or Black Ink?

UNCERTAIN ECOMONIC TIMES have pushed some firms to order employees to take time off, in some cases up to five days a year. Does this really save companies money, the San Jose Mercury News wondered.

Companies set aside vacation pay as it is accrued, Business School accounting professor Maureen McNichols explained. So when employees take vacation, their companies don’t incur extra expenses because they already have the money set aside. “Instead of recognizing a normal compensation expense, they’re going to reduce an existing liability,’’ McNichols said.

A Critical Look at Cutting Class Size

ONE ISSUE OFTEN RAISED in the ongoing debate over the quality of U.S. public schools is class size. Some states have mandated smaller classes, and the idea is often advocated as a way to improve student performance.

Business School economist Edward Lazear set out to develop a model to help understand the relationship between size and what goes on in the classroom. His research paper, forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and described by the New York Times, looks at how student classroom behavior affects learning.

The model explores how likely any given child is to disrupt the learning of his or her classmates. Lazear’s model found that if each student behaves well 99 percent of the time, then in a class of 25, learning is taking place 78 percent of the time. If good behavior drops to 97 percent of the time, learning takes place a mere 47 percent of the time.

Reducing class size makes a much bigger difference for disruptive students than for nondisruptive ones, the Times reported. Cutting class size for the best behaved students to 20 means that they have 4 percent more learning time. In the most disruptive classroom, cutting the class size to 20 means a 7 percent increase in learning.

“I would prefer to see a much more focused effort on reducing class size for kids who have special needs or live in disadvantaged areas,” Lazear told the Times. In schools where students are well behaved and learning is high, he noted, it makes more sense to spend the money on teacher salaries or other classroom improvements rather than simply concentrating on smaller class size.