Spreadsheet Two

Pat on the Back for Start Up

ON ITS FIRST FIELD TRIP TO San Francisco, the President's Initiative on Race paid a call on Start Up, the nonprofit entrepreneur training center in East Palo Alto founded by members of the MBA Class of 1994. Start Up was one of only four Bay Area locations selected for a visit by members of the presidential panel.
       Start Up is the kind of program that reestablishes the family as it reestablishes the neighborhood, said presidential advisory board member Robert Thomas, executive vice president of Republic Industries. Thomas is also chairman of the Nissan Foundation, which he helped found in 1992 to support community agencies in South Central Los Angeles. "You should be very proud of yourselves," he told a group of Start Up participants that included founders Steve Kessel and Mike Zimmerman, both MBA '94; board member Jim Thompson, MBA '86; and students Nehal Desai and Tim Bernstein of the MBA Class of 1998. In the four years since its founding, Start Up has graduated 133 people from its training courses and has made 24 loans of up to $5,000 each to entrepreneurial community members.

Computer Disaster Damages Files

COURSE MATERIALS, including cases, reading lists, and some research, were accidentally deleted from network file servers at the Business School in early March. Some of the data has since been restored, but an estimated 15 GSB faculty and doctoral students suffered serious losses.
       The loss occurred while outside contractors for the Business School were performing maintenance procedures to consolidate servers and to add more storage space to the servers in preparation for moving them to Stanford's Forsythe Data Center.
       When the servers were brought back online after the work was performed, the operating system did not recognize the original drives on the machines. Technicians then reformatted the disks to force the system to recognize the drives, thereby erasing the original material without first determining the state of the backup tapes. Backup tapes were available to restore most MBA and Sloan student directories. However, the backup information for faculty and doctoral student files was either not available or not complete, causing the loss of some files.
       Some of the lost materials were restored later by staff on the School's faculty support team, who located additional copies on other computers, floppy disks, e-mail attachments, or paper.
       To prevent any future incidents, the School has moved its core servers to the Forsythe Data Center, which provides increased security and an improved backup process, and has also stepped up efforts to fill key technical positions, including that of NT systems administrator and director for computing services.

Creativity Knows No Bounds

MBA STUDENTS have had a place in their hearts for Mike Ray's course in creativity since he introduced it 18 years ago. The GSB marketing professor has published it as a book and seen it featured in Bill Moyers' public television series on creativity, and now he's getting valentines for the digital version. On February 14, Ray accepted a Cinema in Industry (Cindy) Award for Creativity in Business, the CD-ROM.
       Teamed with Hal Louchheim, MBA '64, Ray formed Insight Out Collaborations to develop and market the interactive 10-week course for corporate audiences. Participants gather only at the beginning, middle, and end of the program. In between, they use the interactive software for exercises, online personal coaching, and electronic group conferencing.
       The new version sounds great, but surely it can never beat being led blindfolded through the Oval just after the grass has been mowed.

Touchy-Feely, Indeed

Illustration by David Sheldon

SEX, VIOLENCE, Harvard. Could one ask for anything more? The Student Body, published last month by Villard, is a murder thriller about a student prostitution ring at the Stanford of the East, and it features, among its many villains, the deliciously venal Harvard MBA student Dora Givens, madam extraordinaire. The book's author is Jane Harvard (no relation to Jane Stanford), pen name of four graduates of Harvard's Class of 1986, one of whom is Michael Francisco Melcher, Stanford JD/MBA '94.
       Melcher, perhaps best remembered at the GSB as the cofounder (with his MBA classmate Polly Arenberg) of the George Stephanopoulos Fan Club, describes himself as a "kinda funky hedge fund lawyer" in New York. Melcher started working on The Student Body during his first year at the GSB. "How do four people write a novel?" he asks. "I can only say that I have fully implemented all of Professor Jim Baron's OB lessons on commitment, anchoring, and getting people to do what you want, and tempered them with the skills of honoring and checking in on the feelings of others that I developed in touchy-feely." Aw, c'mon, Michael. We would've read it anyway.

Sisterly Advice

WHEN GSB ALUMS WRITE books about business, they tend to write to managers. In To Our Little Sisters with Love: The Young African American Woman's Guide to Achieving Early Career Success, Tracy (Howard) Wise, MBA '93, and her sister-in-law Karen Jenkins are writing to a different audience: African American women who are just entering the workforce.
       Little Sisters is a primer for young women from 16 to 24, but older women who are returning to work after a number of years may find it helpful, says Wise, an insurance company marketing manager in Pennsylvania. Educators and human resource managers are also likely readers. The book takes young women from preparation for the job market while they are still in school through discovering the un-written rules of an office to recognizing "When It's Time to Roll." The book is available through Amazon.com or by faxing 302-475-2869.