Spreadsheet One
*School Backs Interns in Nonprofits
*GSB Loses Long-Time Adviser
*Guilt is a Sunk Cost
*Accessing the Global Workplace
*Prom Night Redux

Spreadsheet Three

Not Your Typical Summer in Georgia

JIM TWISS SPENT part of his summer arguing with oilmen while waiting for Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze to arrive in Baku, Azerbaijan. Classmate Liana Downey was embroiled in negotiations, conducted partly in Russian, arguing the validity of net present value. The two members of the Class of 2002 spent 10 weeks in Tbilisi, Georgia, pondering problems of the former Soviet republic.

Downey worked for the Georgian International Oil Corporation, the state-owned energy company, on the right-of-way negotiations for the natural-gas pipeline that is to be built across Georgia from Azerbaijan to Turkey. Twiss split his time between the negotiations, organizing a restructuring of Georgia’s debt to Austria, and selling two state-owned telecommunications companies. Downey’s task was to negotiate with the consortium of oil companies on payment to Georgia. She worked with Jenik Radon, a GSB lecturer in international business who led the negotiations for the Georgian government.

The importance of negotiating a 60-year contract was reinforced for Downey in a smoke-filled room with heated discussions being conducted in Russian, Azeri, and Georgian. “Arguing the validity of the net present value concept was an unexpected and fascinating collision of business school and real world.”

Twiss recalls: “At one point in Baku, it was 6:00 in the morning. We had been negotiating for 16 hours—fighting about the definition of force majeure [act of God]—with the president of Georgia scheduled to arrive in five hours for a signing and 10 exhausted oilmen on the other side of the table. ”

Both students received stipends from the Stanford Management Internship Fund and participated in GMIX, a program that gives students the opportunity to receive academic credit for research projects related to work in foreign countries.

A Novel Look at a New Military

MARINES PREFER military to humanitarian missions, according to Owen West, MBA ’98, in his first novel, Sharkman Six, set in Somalia during Operation Restore Hope.

West, a former Marine captain who came to the Business School rather than serve a required turn at stateside duty, now takes his risks as an energy futures trader for Goldman Sachs by day and as a writer by night. It isn’t enough. He also climbed the north face of Mt. Everest last spring, wisely turning around at 28,000 feet, and in 2000 completed his fifth Eco Challenge, arguably the world’s toughest expedition race, with three Playboy Playmates as teammates. “I’m a restless person, and it’s hard to find out who you are when you sit in front of a computer screen all day,” he says.

The risk-seeking Marines in West’s book, just released by Simon & Schuster, are sent to Somalia with orders that force them to stand by and merely watch mayhem unless their own lives are threatened. Their adventures provide insight into the problems of using the modern military to carry out humanitarian policy.

Esperanto, Anyone?

Illustration by Terry Colon

ONE WAY MBA students prepare for the global economy is to take foreign language courses while studying business. Over the last nine years, MBAs have averaged 315 foreign language enrollments a year. Spanish is the favorite, constituting a third or more of the enrollments most years. French has been the second favorite in most years, but Chinese took second place in 1992–93, 1993–94, and 1996–97. The Russian/Slavic languages, popular after the fall of the Berlin Wall, have declined in more recent years, but Japanese enjoyed a healthy rebound with 15 enrollments this past year after nose-diving to 1 the year before. Other languages taken include Hindi, Hebrew, Persian, German, Korean, Italian, and Portuguese, according to Betsy Scroggs of the MBA Program office.