Sacramento, Calif., woman of the year Viola Sanvordenker.

PHOTOGRAPH BY SAUL BROMBERGER AND SANDRA HOOVER

From Rocks to Stocks

SHE HAS A DOCTORATE IN mineralogy, but Viola Sanvordenker, Sloan ’84, became fascinated with investments when she followed her father into the Hong Kong Futures Exchange in the 1970s. Now a fee-only financial planner working from her home in Citrus Heights, Calif., Sanvordenker recently was named Woman of the Year by Sacramento’s Downtown Capitol Business and Professional Women. Financial planning is an excellent field for women, she told the Sacramento Bee, because more women are seeking financial counseling, and many of them “don’t relate well” to male financial planners.

Professor Chides Cancer Institute

BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR Jeremy Bulow took the National Cancer Institute to task for distorting the facts in a recent Forbes essay titled “The Anti-tobacco Jihad.” If a private company distorted scientific claims similarly, it would be prosecuted, writes Bulow, who directed the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission during the Clinton administration. Bulow agrees with the Institute that “smoking kills” but says the agency’s latest monograph on cigarettes claims that light or low-tar cigarettes are no safer than regular cigarettes, despite research to the contrary.

On Watch @ Marketwatch

WITH WIDE-RANGING experience in news media, Kathleen Yates, MBA ’81, was recently named president and chief operating officer of MarketWatch.com Inc., one of the leading providers of financial news on the Web and also a provider to television and newspapers. Marketwatch.com quoted Yates as saying she saw “great potential for new revenue growth” in the company. Yates cofounded a technology firm called ITPro Inc. and has been a vice president in Knight Ridder’s news media division and at Women.com Networks.

Some Like It Steep

DESCRIBING HIS CAREER AS “nothing if not bold,” the Baltimore Business Journal named Mayo A. Shattuck III, MBA ’80, its Businessperson of the Year for 2001. An investment banker at Baltimore’s 200-year-old Alex. Brown until September, he felt the firm was too small to survive a global shakeout, so Shattuck led it through two mergers in the 1990s, including a 1999 sale to Deutsche Bank AG. Last October, he was named president and CEO of Constellation Energy Group Inc., a new field for him. Analysts said his banking experience would come in handy, and Shattuck said he relishes “steep learning curves.”

Dig Deeper Than Your Checkbook

“WRITING A CHECK is only the tip of the iceberg,” Laura Arrillaga, MBA ’97 and a lecturer at the GSB, told the San Jose Mercury News in a recent article about the new breed of nonprofit giving circles. Arrillaga founded and cochairs Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund, SV2, a group that has raised more than $1 million for social causes. Its 135 members are expected to donate their time and expertise as well. Members include Mayfield Fund partner Kevin Fong, MBA ’82, and former eBay president Jeff Skoll, MBA ’95.

The Bay Area is a hotbed for similar funds, the newspaper said, despite the high-tech slowdown. Some funds, such as the Full Circle Fund cofounded by Josh Becker, MBA ’98, have reduced their minimum yearly donation for membership but are still exceeding fundraising goals. Says Becker: “Our philosophy is, you may not have the millions of dollars in stock options, but you are still working” and earning a salary.

Dr. Manager

TRAINED FIRST in pediatrics in the United Kingdom and at Howard University, Dr. Andrew Agwunobi graduated from the GSB last June and immediately signed on to revitalize Atlanta’s South Fulton Medical Center. The hospital had large debts and had lost staff before Tenet Healthcare brought it out of bankruptcy last spring.

Part of Agwunobi’s management style, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, has been to investigate every complaint and to work one or two hours every other day in someone else’s job. “I want a classless culture in the hospital,” he told the newspaper.

Being Small Relies on Big Support

CALLING THE GSB'S educational programs “intense, intimate, and life-changing,” the Financial Times asked Dean Robert Joss to explain why the School chose to keep its programs smaller than those of its competitors and how it could afford to do so.

The general management knowledge taught by faculty “scales well in terms of ideas,” Joss said. “What we haven’t figured out is how to scale the learning experience. You can televise or stream the class, but it does not replicate the experience.”

The GSB’s model of education “will not pay for itself on a user-pays, upfront basis,” Joss explained. “It relies on people being willing to pay throughout their lives. We rely on one generation feeling responsible for the next to keep it going. It’s not an easy model, and it’s not without risk.”

Risk Is Relative

ENTREPRENEURSHIP MAY SEEM more risky than corporate consulting or banking jobs, but GSB faculty member Irv Grousbeck “asks his students to compare the risks of entrepreneurship with the slim chance that they’ll ever become partners at a large firm,” according to an article in Fortune Small Business.

Grousbeck and a partner pooled $3,500 in 1964 to start a small cable TV company. Continental Cablevision had become one of the biggest cable companies in the nation when he stepped down as president 16 years later.

Building the New China

“IF MY GRANDMOTHER found out what I’m doing, she would probably jump out a window,” Eric Li, MBA ’95, told the San Jose Mercury News. Li is cofounder of a Shanghai-based venture capital firm, Chengwei Ventures, and one of the “sea turtles,” as Chinese call citizens who were educated abroad and are now being lured back by China’s strong economy and entry into the World Trade Organization. Raised in a Shanghai house shared by four families, Li said his family valued scholarship and government service, not entrepreneurship.

Globalization Critic

ONE DAY IN 1992, David Korten looked out his Manila office window and saw the diesel- polluting cars of multinational executives on the clogged street below and a few blocks away people living in shacks atop a garbage dump. After three decades training business managers in Africa, Central America, Asia, and at Harvard, he decided instead to become active in the antiglobalization movement.

In October, Worth magazine listed Korten, MBA ’61 and PHD ’68, as one of the “100 people who have changed the way Americans think about money.”

Critics call him a misguided idealist, but his 1995 book, Why Corporations Rule the World, and speeches provide intellectual backing to groups who have protested at meetings of the World Trade Organization. Korten told the New York Times he attended the GSB because he believed modern business management would help impoverished countries, but he gradually came to believe multinational companies aren’t accountable and hold tyrannical power over the future of undeveloped countries.

Fattening Up in a Downturn

“PEOPLE ARE REALIZING that to get out of the downturn you don’t just need a puny version of the organization you had before. You actually need to do some new stuff,” says Robert Sutton, a professor at the GSB and the School of Engineering. Speaking to the Financial Times about the counterintuitive ideas in his new book, Weird Ideas That Work, Sutton cites Sun Microsystems and Intel Corp. as examples of companies that spend more on research and development as they are cutting jobs in manufacturing. Companies need to strive to fail the way Procter & Gamble does, Sutton says. The shampoo and detergent maker strives to test 10 ideas in the supermarket rather than kill them off in development, he says, because it does not know which of the 10 won’t fail.

Critical Turnaround

“WE MADE IT through the valley of the shadow of death,” William McGlashan Jr., MBA ’90, told the New York Times in January when the venture capitalist moved from acting to permanent CEO of Critical Path Inc. Once a high-flying provider of corporate email systems, the San Francisco-based company first ran into trouble in January 2001 when it widely missed earnings projections. The next month, it suspended two top executives, and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of its accounting practices that eventually forced a restatement of earnings.

McGlashan was brought in as a turnaround specialist, and the company secured a $95 million bailout from investors in November that allowed it to quietly settle more than 50 shareholder lawsuits. The newspaper quoted one analyst who called it a “remarkable pullback from the abyss.”