People

Jon Abbott, MBA ’88

FLAT-SCREEN MONITORS ON the wall display everything from talking heads to war footage to cartoons. Jon Abbott points toward the array and explains, “That’s digital television.” He is smiling because this is the wave of the future and he is already on top of it.

As vice president and general manager for television at Boston’s public broadcasting station WGBH, Abbott, MBA ’88, oversees two channels, 2 and 44. The latter runs cultural programs and independent films; the former airs more typical PBS scheduling.

With digital television, however, not only are programs presented in high definition but stations can “multicast,” Abbott says. Channel 2 will have channels 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and so on. One section will air children’s programs all the time, another documentaries. The possibilities are endless.

The Federal Communications Commission set a deadline of spring 2003 for public stations to begin broadcasting digitally. Knowing the move required substantial capital investment, Abbott conducted a major campaign separate from the station’s annual pledge drive. He raised $13 million, and now one of the station’s two channels has its digital version, while the other easily will meet the FCC deadline. His experience facilitating change, some of it obtained while he was at the Business School, is clearly paying off.

When the president of KQED Radio, San Francisco’s public station, came to lecture at the School in 1987, Abbott offered his help in converting the station’s format from a combination of newscasts and classical music to all-news. “They didn’t have the money [for an intern],” Abbott recalls, so he volunteered to apply for summer internship assistance through the Stanford Management Internship Fund (SMIF). Previously student-funded, the 20-year-old program that supports students who choose to work in nonprofit summer jobs is now funded also by the School.

“It was a great summer. I just lived at the studios,” Abbott says of 1987. Working on a marketing plan, he facilitated the format change by mapping its potential benefits and stayed on after graduation.

“It’s great when you take a set of re-sources and try to figure out how to make the most of them,” Abbott says. “Television is changing and it’s fun [to figure out] how to change with it.”

—BRIAN EULE

Laura Esserman,
MD, MBA ’93

LAURA ESSERMAN pushes back from her computer and swivels toward the desk. Like every other surface in her office, it is covered with physician stuff and kid stuff, research papers mixed with family memorabilia. Perched on a bookshelf, a cookie-tin carousel with tongue depressor struts completes the theme.

Esserman has been working on a grant proposal, due the next day. “This part of my life is all about management,” she reflects. “Managing my house, managing the people who work for me, managing my expectations of what I can accomplish.”

Esserman, mother of a 7-year-old and an 11-year-old, is associate professor of surgery and radiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center.

Collaboration is the key to care at the Buck Center—among specialists in a dozen fields as well as between doctor and patient. The center, which has as many as 30 different clinical studies going at any given time, offers one-stop, multidisciplinary care—from single-day assessment of suspicious lumps to a multidisciplinary second opinion panel through medical and surgical care and follow-up. “We offer all the possible services you could need for a person who is worried about or has a diagnosis of breast cancer,” Esserman says.

Using information technology, Esserman is trying to extend the concept of real-time collaboration to other medical centers. She has been working with the data visualization company MAYA Viz and database giant Oracle as she plans a database where medical centers can share information instantly to help patients identify trade-offs, evaluate risks, and make informed choices about their own treatment. She also is working with Business School Professor Emeritus James R. “Jerry” Miller, who has developed a methodology to create individually tailored patient prognoses from a database.

“Medicine is about risk management and information,” Esserman says. “The tools we learned in business school are applicable to medicine. The problem is, in medicine we have not yet learned how to leverage technology in an appropriate way.” She leans across the desk for emphasis. “You know, if the CEO of Macy’s can know how many red dresses a sales clerk in Wichita is selling at any given time, we ought to have that kind of capability in medicine, where the stakes are far higher.”

 —JANET ZICH