AT HIS 10th GSB REUNION in 1999, Tim Ling says venture capitalists and dot-commers who were flying high teased him with comments like “What the hell are you doing in the oil patch?” For this generation, joining the boom-and-bust oil industry requires a “thick hide and a wide contrarian streak,” Fortune observed in an article on young oil executives like Ling, MBA ’89, who are shaking up the industry’s culture and replenishing the graying ranks in the management suites.

As president and COO of Unocal, Ling has forced the company’s drillers to become more attuned to the financials and hopes to use the Web to employ some of the talented geologists who fled the industry during one of its bust cycles.

He is not the only new blood from the GSB in oil. Natural Gas Partners, a Dallas-based financier of small oil and gas companies is led by three GSB alumni: managing partners Ken Hersh, MBA ’89, and David Albin, MBA ’85, and managing director Billy Quinn, MBA ’98. According to the magazine, NGP made a profit of $200 million on companies it sold in the past boom year.

Contingency Planning for Supply Chains

IN A WORLD with terrorism as well as floods and earthquakes, how can a business ensure its supply chain will meet unexpected demand for flashlights or American flags? “We have emphasized the efficiency side too much, and flexibility is sometimes overlooked,” GSB Professor Hau Lee told Internet-Week shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Companies need to develop the capacity for their e-business networks to pool resources so that if a shortage occurs in one place, a surplus elsewhere can be easily tapped, he said. Businesses also need intelligent electronic tools that have “special optimization and statistical techniques to do the proper trade-offs.”

Engineering Yet Another Turnaround

ROBERT "STEVE" MILLER has put his model railroad on hold again. Miller, MBA ’68, was named chairman and CEO of Bethlehem Steel Corp., the nation’s third-largest steel company, in September, shortly before the company that built the girders for the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Miller, who negotiated the government bailout of Chrysler Corp. in the eighties, said Bethlehem could not overcome the damage done by low-cost imports and the slowing economy. As usually happens, his latest assignment came with no advance notice, he told Portland newspaper the Oregonian. But before joining Bethlehem, he had “six months of tranquility” working on the elaborate model railroad in his basement in Sunriver, Ore. (See Stanford Business, June 1998.)

Talk Isn’t Cheap

COMPANIES ROUTINELY PAY $50,000 or more a day to have a popular business guru speak, a craze started by the “antic” Tom Peters, reports Business 2.0. Peters, PHD ’72, wasn’t the first author of a mass-marketed management book, but he was the first to use a best-seller (In Search of Excellence, 1982, by Peters and Bob Waterman, MBA ’61) to blaze a new trail on the lecture circuit. Though he wrote more books, the magazine says, they were merely “loss leaders” for his more profitable speaking business. The magazine also counts Jim Collins, MBA ’83, among the current gurus but describes him as more “scholarly” than Peters. Gurus satisfy a deep need for making business seem less confusing, the magazine says. “We are still primitives around a campfire,” adds Collins.

The Internet: What’s Next?

WHAT WOULD the second generation of the Internet revolution look like? Fast Company suggests looking at eONE Global LP, where Garen Staglin, MBA ’68, is CEO and president. The company was created in 2000 by First Data Corp., an electronic payments giant, and iFormation Group, a consortium of the Goldman Sachs Group, the Boston Consulting Group, and General Atlantic Partners LLC, to leverage venture capital and new technologies with the assets of established companies.

eONE has bought up start-ups with new technologies and hopes to get ahead of the competition in the wireless payments arena. As a director of First Data, where there was concern about not keeping up with emerging technologies, Staglin sought out partners by making his first call to General Atlantic’s Steve Denning, MBA ’78, with whom he had served on the GSB’s advisory council. The resulting marriage of established assets with new technologies and venture-management skills has been like “attaching a speedboat to a battleship,” Staglin said.

Schwab Tinkers with Business Model

KNOWN AS a discount broker with great Web services but no stock market advice, Charles Schwab & Co. has started offering advice without the commissioned brokers and staffs of research analysts that full-service brokers maintain, according to Fortune. Schwab, MBA ’61, has long preached that traditional commissioned brokers do not have their customers’ best interest at heart. His firm will use salaried investment specialists and software that reportedly can scan portfolios and screen stocks for investors without the investors having to manually input their screening criteria, Fortune says.

People spend less when facing risk, says marketing prof Jennifer Aaker.

Photograph by Anne Knudsen

People Who Need People Spend Less

STRONG FEELINGS of community brought on by a threat can prompt consumers to spend less, Jennifer Aaker, GSB associate professor of marketing and PHD ’95, told the San Francisco Chronicle in November, when anthrax and hijackings, along with war in Afghanistan, were dominating the news. “When people are feeling very strongly independent, they tend to search for excitement and achievement,” Aaker said. But when the group is more important, individuals become risk averse. Under the mood that prevailed in October, regardless of how much money you make, she said, “you’re less likely to buy a Porsche.”

CEOs Take the Fall

WITH MANY PUBLIC FIRINGS of CEOs in 2001, the Washington Post asked if boards of directors were making CEOs scapegoats for unforeseen developments. That may be, but “the evidence is that when firms begin to fail, it takes a new senior management team to rescue it,” GSB professor Charles O’Reilly told the newspaper. “Even if the old managers know what to do—and they often do—people aren’t going to believe them. They’re too much associated with the past. Their identity and pride and friendships are so tied up with the way things are that they resist change.”

Move Over, Jack

WALL STREET long has considered Jack Welch the superstar of CEOs, but when Fortune looked around for executives whose companies might have performed as well as or better than General Electric’s 21.5 percent total return during Welch’s 1981-2001 tenure, it found six, including Phil Knight, MBA ’62. With Knight at the helm, Nike Inc. also returned 21.5 percent. Knight attributed his successful collaborative business style to his early interactions with Japanese culture. But he added that “without the Swoosh, we’d be nowhere.”

Fighting Words from Poet

"DANA DRESSES like a businessman, and it drives some people crazy,” a poet friend of Dana Gioia, MBA’77, told the Los Angeles Times in a September article on the latest literary storm surrounding the Santa Rosa poet and essayist. One poet even challenged Gioia to a fistfight because of Gioia’s latest essay, which describes California as a mediocre literary backwater, with no “great” poets compared to the East Coast.

Gioia, the son of a cab driver, was raised in Los Angeles, but his business career took him to New York, where he was an executive for General Foods until his growing reputation as a poet led him to retire nine years ago. The author of three books of poetry, two essay collections, translations, an opera libretto, and the editor of numerous anthologies, Gioia told the Times he is the “most widely attacked poet of my generation. But, you know, it doesn’t bother me. For me, literature is a conversation. And the richer, the more energetic, the more diverse that conversation, I think the healthier a literary culture. What the poetry wars are about is a challenge to the status quo, which needs reforming, and no institution wants to be reformed.”

Training Daddies

WITH 12 SIBLINGS and four children of his own, Greg Bishop, MBA ’81, has had lots of experience caring for babies. Noticing many men were less comfortable, the IBM executive founded Boot Camp for New Dads at the Irvine, Calif., Medical Center in 1990 and has volunteered as a coach ever since, teaching such subjects as baby safety and family bonding, as well as hands-on care. Now a video and manual make the boot camp transportable. Bishop has been interviewed by many magazines and all the major networks, including an appearance on Live with Regis and Kelly.

Cashing In on Web Searches

GOOGLE, ONE OF THE MOST popular Internet search engines, has built a “no-nonsense path to profitability by treating advertising just like search.” The unsung hero behind it all is Omid Kordestani, MBA ’91, says Wired magazine. An engine that conducts 100 million Web searches a day, Google was started by Stanford students who devised a search technique that tends to get people quickly to the information they want. It does this by ranking Web pages according to how many other pages link to them.

The dilemma, however, has been how to make money off the service. Other search engines sell advertisers placements in search results, but Kordestani says this undermines the usefulness of the search. “Someone buys a ‘cancer’ keyword and then sells term life insurance on it.” Under his plan, Google sells ads that show up when they are related to a query but are visually separated from other results. Businesses also can buy a spot in a separate advertising search list off to the right of the main search results. An automated program counts the click-throughs so that ads users find most relevant move up the list.