Spreadsheet One
*Diamonds Are the Bachelor’s
Best Friend
*Chalk Leaves PowerPoint
in the Dust
*React, Don’t Overreact
*TV May Be Good for Your Health
*How to Beat the Chill

Spreadsheet One

Diamonds Are the Bachelor’s Best Friend

THE WASHINGTON POST called it “trainwreck television” and the TV critic for the GSB Reporter called it just plain “boring,” but 10 million Americans watched the School’s most famous bachelor winnow 25 wannabe wives down to one winner on ABC’s six-week series The Bachelor last spring.

Alex Michel, MBA ’98, played the role of Mr. Right, planning everything from sushi dates to horseback riding with each of the women who agreed to move into a Malibu house and compete for his attention before TV cameras. Michel’s classmate David DiDomenico said his friend was the perfect choice for the role: “He’s an incredibly brilliant guy, and he has a level of charisma that is Clintonesque.”

The serious financiers among Michel’s GSB classmates and current MBA students participated in betting pools that were organized like basketball elimination tournaments around the show. (During each episode, Michel chose which women would be permitted to compete for his attention the following week. In one case, a rejected woman hyperventilated and an ambulance was called.)

“Can I short one woman?” one MBA student asked student pool organizer Dan Ho. “We do not allow shorting,” he responded in an email, because “it would hurt her feelings if she found out. But if you really must, set up a side bet with someone else.” One group of Michel’s friends reportedly were trading options on various contestants in a $1,200 pool that included conference calls, the New York Times reported.

During the hoopla period, Michel came back to campus to attend a conference of media executives and agents hosted by the MBA Arts, Media, and Entertainment club. First-year student Sanam Lari tracked him down for the Reporter to ask if he had any dating wisdom for “GSB boys.” His reply was quick and simple: “Having a diamond necklace on hand never hurts.”

Chalk Leaves PowerPoint in the Dust

MARKETERS PRAISE the latest information technologies as learning tools, but after 27 years of teaching, Professor Edward Lazear believes “the blackboard is far more effective than overhead transparencies or slick PowerPoint presentations.”

“Writing on the blackboard is a signal to students that a point is particularly relevant, and it constrains the instructor to present the material at a rate closer to that at which students can absorb material,” he writes in the introduction to a Hoover Institution book on education reform that he edited. “An overhead or slide presentation often offers too much information in one short interval and, by overwhelming the students, ends up putting them to sleep.”

As for formal research on classroom aids, Lazear writes, “Although it is difficult to argue that additional resources do not have some value, the evidence on technology has been weak at best and more often negative.” His book, Education in the 21st Century, includes a critique of many popular educational reform ideas.

React, Don’t Overreact

EXPECT ACCOUNTING FIRMS to “walk away from clients, even well-respected clients, when they have a different opinion” about accounting practices, the chief financial officer of Costco Wholesale told MBA students at this spring’s Arjay Miller Lecture.

Richard Galanti, MBA ’82, also said he had noticed a change at meetings of the audit committee of the retailer’s board of directors since the Enron/Arthur Andersen accounting scandal erupted. “I see a much greater level of seriousness in their view and more interest in what they should be understanding.”

While he views the fallout from the scandal as “good for everybody,” Galanti said he was dismayed by the number of companies “who early on dumped Arthur Andersen as their auditor after 50 years of doing business with them.” Costco management supported Arthur Andersen, he said, be-cause of loyalty to the Andersen employees they had worked with for 18 years. “The individuals we have worked with have done nothing wrong,” he said. They worked in Andersen’s Northwest regional office, now acquired by KPMG.

TV May Be Good for Your Health

IF YOU ARE one of those TV viewers who swears your government should never have permitted prescription drug companies to advertise their wares directly to you, the CEO of Pfizer Inc. has some statistics he’d like to share:

Pfizer’s ads for Viagra during the past three years convinced 3 million men to see their doctors. Of those, 50,000 had seriously elevated blood pressure and 40,000 had undiagnosed diabetes. “We estimate that [direct-to-consumer] advertising will save 10,000 lives a year,” said CEO Hank McKinnell, Sloan ’66, MBA ’67, and PhD ’69. The media have ignored this, he complained during a View from the Top lecture spring quarter. “If we killed 10,000 a year, that would be considered big news.”

How to Beat the Chill

SOUNDING REMINISCENT OF the generation that survived the Great Depression, venture capitalist Geoff Yang recently gave would-be entrepreneurs some advice on how to survive an economic winter. A founding partner of Redpoint Ventures, Yang, MBA ’85, helped start such media companies as Ask Jeeves, Excite, and TiVo, all struggling in 2002.

Speaking at a campus banquet of the Asian American Business Students Association, Yang predicted no major economic recovery until 2003. In the meantime, he offered the following tips: Reduce your cash burn rate to survive the winter, raise money before you need it, focus on the one thing you do best, and take longer to get your product to market if it saves cash.

Whereas the entrepreneurial mindset in the late nineties was to think of “return on equity as a function of time,” Yang said, today’s entrepreneurs see it as “a function of tangible business progress reaching real milestones.”