The Best Little Firm in Washington
IT'S NOT EXACTLY a household word, but Viox Corporation of Seattle has been recognized by Washington CEO as the best small company to work for in the state. President Bill Coats, MBA '64, and senior vice president Lester Filion, MBA '56, head the 40-employee firm that manufactures tiny pieces of glass for use in electronic components. Employee feedback is one of the keys to success for Viox in a highly competitive market that includes firms such as Corning and Nippon Electronic Glass, Coats told the magazine. Employees are urged to provide regular feedback; annual surveys measure the firm's performance. Customer satisfaction "goes beyond simply getting a quality product out the door on time," he said. In 1996, Viox also received Washington's quality award, based on the same criteria as the Malcolm Baldrige award.

Capitalizing in Russia
HIS GRANDFATHER was chairman of the U.S. Communist Party in the 1930s and early '40s until he was ousted for his "revisionist" thinking. Today William F. Browder, MBA '89, is revising some other thinking about Russia, making his mark in Moscow's nascent capitalist system. In April 1996, armed with $25 million from private investors, Browder formed the Hermitage Fund, called by Business Week "one of the best-performing offshore funds this year." The fund closed last summer after growing to $816 million. Browder is now working on Hermitage II, also aimed at investors who can stake more than $1 million each on stocks such as oil company Lukoil, phone company Rostelekom, and Sherbank, which now holds 75 percent of Russia's bank deposits.
       What is frustrating for many investors is what Browder likes best about Russia--the lack of reliable information. "Here information is so obtuse and difficult to obtain that you can have good information to yourself, not because you are an insider but simply because you bother to ask someone the right question," he told the Financial Times.

Watch Your Language
"PEOPLE ARE HIRED for what they know and fired for who they are," wrote organizational behavior professor and PhD '72 Jeffrey Pfeffer, in a Los Angeles Times piece exploring work and workplace patterns for the next century. Pfeffer, whose latest book, The Human Equation, will be published in February, said that in spite of conventional wisdom that seems to support downsizing employees and looking for technological fixes, many studies have shown that motivating and retaining talented employees typically increases productivity. "Work should not be a four-letter word," he wrote.

The Most Influential Woman in Finance
WITH EMERGING MARKETS taking shape from Shanghai to São Paulo, Business Week proclaimed that young, primarily American financial leaders are helping reshape the world's financial services. "This new fast-track cadre of financiers, who are almost as likely to reside in Madrid as Manhattan, is Americanizing global finance with a revolutionary zeal that would have dazzled Adam Smith," declared the magazine.
       The October 1997 cover story lists "The New Stars of Finance," men and women in their late 30s or early 40s, and quotes one "prominent finance professor" who calls the GSB's Anat Admati, professor of finance and economics, "probably the most influential woman in finance." The article described some aspects of her work: her study of the effects on companies when large shareholders become activists, and research done with her colleague and frequent collaborator Paul Pfleiderer on portfolio manager compensation (Stanford Business School Magazine, September 1996).
       Admati told Business Week she had never taken a finance course when she began her PhD in operations research at Yale. She became intrigued and "began using mathematics and statistics to look at simple mar-ket questions in complex ways."
       Two GSB alumni were also cited: Arthur Shaw, MBA '87, who leads Charles Schwab & Co.'s online services, and Jack Levy, MBA '78, of Merrill Lynch's global mergers and acquisitions, who is credited with helping make the firm one of the world's top deal makers.

And the Winner Is...
WITH HOME BOX OFFICE nominated for a network high of 90 Emmys, it wasn't surprising that cable channel chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes, MBA '77, was on hand in Hollywood last September for the gala awards show. Bewkes accepted the President's Award for socially worthwhile programming, given to HBO for the movie "Miss Evers' Boys," depicting the study of syphilis among black men in Tuskegee, Alabama. Bewkes also hosted a post-Emmy celebration on the Warner Brothers' lot, reported Variety.
       In October, the magazine named Bewkes for the first time to its list of 50 Leaders of the Information Age. Also named were Intel chairman and CEO Andy Grove, a Business School lecturer; Micro-soft executive VP Steve Ballmer, '81; Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, MBA '80; and America Online president and CEO Steve Case, EPSC '90.

Home Office Is an Understatement
MBA '95 CLASSMATES Jeff Skoll, Phil Levinson, and Dave Zinman have taken networking to new heights. The three transformed a rented house in Los Altos Hills into "a laboratory for human networking in the cyberspace age," wrote the San Jose Mercury News. Each has cofounded an Internet-related company. In the process they have exchanged advice on raising venture capital, passed along names of people who have become customers or partners in their various firms, and structured deals and helped find people to hire.
       "It's really hard to start a company in a vacuum," said Zinman. "You need to bounce ideas off people. You need people to challenge you."
       Today, although the ties remain close (they serve on one another's corporate advisory boards), the living arrangements are changing. Levinson is getting married and has moved. Zinman and Skoll were preparing to buy the house.

Think Like a Lawyer
EVEN THOUGH A SMALL FIRM may hire lawyers to draw up contracts, GSB senior lecturer Constance Bagley advises entrepreneurs to always "think legal." Lawyers don't think like businesspeople; they think like lawyers, Bagley told Working Woman, citing Apple's fateful move in the early 1980s. The firm had asked Microsoft to create some software using Apple's graphic interface. Unfortunately, the four-page legal agreement setting up the deal didn't specify that Microsoft could use the interface only once. The rest is history.

No News Is Bad
STOCK ANALYSTS are more likely to stop covering a company than to issue a negative sell rating, Maureen McNichols, associate professor of accounting, told the Wall Street Journal. They have "no incentive
to cover companies that aren't doing well." In a six-year study of analyst coverage (see Stanford Business, June 1997), McNichols still found that 9.5 percent of the 3,774 stocks she examined had a sell rating at least once during the six years.

Jockeying for Jobs in Japan

Photo by Ann Knudsen

FOR ALL HER SUCCESSES in filling executive slots for major Japanese corporations, Sakie Fukushima, MBA '87, has some concerns about people who don't get jobs. As a vice president and partner of the search firm Korn/Ferry International and head of the firm's Tokyo office, Fukushima sees problems the traditional Japanese job structure poses for young, well-educated Japanese women trying to launch careers and for men with long, successful careers who have been nudged into retirement. Her advice? As she told the Japan Times: Build individual career skills and a personal track record--at small firms if necessary. Don't depend on the traditional path through a major corporation.
       Filling top executive slots for Japanese corporations is tough, said Fukushima. Since many firms are looking for multilingual and multicultural executives, Korn/Ferry often searches for executives of overseas subsidiaries of Japanese firms. In many cases, she told the Japanese trade publication ACCJ Journal, these executives find it hard to move into key positions in their own firms when they return to Japan.

Drilling for Dollars
THE LATEST "Homerun Hitters" list from Institutional Investor included Michael Breard, MBA '65, of Dominick & Dominick. Breard was one of the first to recognize the potential for the stock of oil drilling contractor Global Marine as it grew tenfold in the past decade. After tracking the oil drilling industry through its booms in the '70s and '80s, Breard spotted some significant changes that foreshadowed good news for Global Marine's fleet of modern oil rigs, which were in high demand worldwide. "A lot of Wall Streeters were watching oil and gas prices, ignoring the supply and de-mand for rigs," Breard said.