Young, Smart, and on Their Way
THREE STANFORD BUSINESS School alumnae have been named to Working Woman's list of 30 high-achieving women in their 20s who are likely to become future leaders. They are Susan Athey, PHD '95, Eleanor Manson Keare, MBA '95, and Rebecca Zucker, MBA '94.
       Athey, an assistant professor of economics at MIT, is highly regarded both for her teaching skills and her research on the long-term effects of diversity in the workplace. Athey told the magazine she made the right choice in selecting academia over the business world. "I get to teach, to shape the way my students look at the world," she said. "I wouldn't take an extra $100,000 in salary to give all that up."
       In her career with McKinsey & Co., Keare has helped an Argentine snack food company expand, bolstered a Brazilian electronics manufacturer's fight against foreign competition, and specialized in helping retail clients penetrate Latin America. She's still proud of the $70,000 she raised while at the Business School to help a struggling Mexican fishing village form a cosmetics firm when its traditional business of fishing for sea turtles was halted by a government ban.
       A two-week vacation in Paris in 1996 turned into a new career for Zucker, who took time out from sightseeing to land a job as manager of the daily operations for Disney Consumer Products in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. A former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Zucker said she knew she wanted two things in life, shorter working hours and to live in Paris. She got both.

He Goes Looking for Trouble
AS MANAGER of a Dallas hedge fund, Richard W. Fisher, MBA '75, outperformed the market two-to-one, Business Week reported, by finding failing companies and helping turn them around. "I'm a distress guy, going into situations others view as hopeless," he told the magazine.
       Today, as deputy U.S. trade representative, Fisher is trying to turn around another type of situation. With David Aaron, undersecretary of commerce for international trade, and Stuart Eizenstat, undersecretary of state for economics, business, and agricultural affairs, Fisher is one of a trio of "Carter Kids" who first joined the government during the '70s. Now the trio is dedicated to salvaging the Clinton Administration's trade policy. Efforts are centered on persuading a critical mass of countries to voluntarily liberalize specific market sectors, the magazine reported, particularly environmental services, medical equipment, and fish, toy, and jewelry markets.

Westward Ho for New Wells Fargo Driver
THE $30 BILLION-PLUS merger of Norwest Bank and Wells Fargo created the nation's seventh largest bank and has made an instant celebrity out of Dick Kovacevich, MBA '67, CEO of Norwest, who will run the new organization. "The man is unique in American banking," Thomas Hanley, an analyst at UBS Securities, told Fortune. "Norwest's management arguably has the most credibility in banking today," echoed analyst Sean Ryan at Bear Sterns.
       Kovacevich, who was lured to the struggling Midwestern bank in 1986 after turning Citibank's New York branch system into a big moneymaker, is famous for saying "Banking is necessary, banks are not." He persuaded Norwest to think of its branches as stores where customers come to buy financial services and concentrated on chasing after retail customers in rural areas to rebuild Norwest's strength.
       Observers immediately began worrying about how Kovacevich, who once aimed for a career as a major league baseball player, would fit with Wells Fargo's more traditional banking style, as led by CEO Paul Hazen. Kovacevich is reassuring. "We have the best community bank mode. They have the best alternative distribution model. Together we're a power-house," he told Business Week.

Smokin'!
THE MAGAZINE Red Herring tells the tale of how Steve Jurvetson, MBA '95, and his venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) hit a multi-million-dollar jackpot with two Web-based e-mail startups.
       The firms Hotmail, featuring a free e-mail service, and Four11, an Internet directory service provider, formed a partnership after being introduced to one another by their mutual venture capital partner and promptly began focusing on building the free e-mail services both offered.
       Soon outside firms came calling, trying to acquire the two startups. As a result, DFJ had to take an unusual step to maintain its separate relationships with the two firms. Although DFJ partners had always worked as a team, Jurvetson agreed to work strictly with Hotmail, while partner Tim Draper worked with Four11 so the two would not be privy to information from a competitor.
       Four11 eventually agreed to be acquired by Yahoo for approximately $93 million. Meanwhile, Microsoft was courting Hotmail, which it eventually won with an offer rumored to be about $400 million.
       Despite the trickiness of managing two competing companies through the acquisition process, Jurvetson told Red Herring, his firm would do it again. "This enthusiasm undoubtedly is fueled by the fact that the money DFJ earned from the two deals doubled its $25 million fund," observed the magazine.

The Best Little Loft in New York City
WITH OFFICE SPACE on the upper floors of New York's World Trade Center renting for an impressive $37 per square foot, New York City's tallest buildings generally have a vacancy rate of about 10 percent. Cherrie Nanninga, MBA '76, saw an opportunity in the empty space with some of the most spectacular views in Manhattan. Nanninga is director of real estate for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the Trade Center. She is also a board member of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
       The World Views project, sponsored jointly by the Port Authority and the Cultural Council, put 19 handpicked artists into vacant space in the Trade Center rent free, setting off an epidemic of sensory overload as the artists looked at sunlight splashing New York harbor or fog parting to reveal the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. "We were all so seduced by the views and the space that in the first three months it was like a beehive," painter Carl Scorza, who brought the idea to the cultural council, told the New York Times.
       Nanninga told the paper that once the current space is rented to permanent tenants, the project probably will continue, utilizing other open space in the towers to house additional artists selected by museums and art schools in the city.

Moneymaker Reigns on Another Parade
IT WAS WHEN STEVE JOBS visited his GSB class "waving the prospectus for Apple's IPO and telling the class how personal computers would change the world" that then-student Frank Quattrone, MBA '81, decided to get into high-tech investment banking, Quattrone recently told Fortune. Jobs had just traded his VW van for stock, Quattrone recalled.
       Quattrone has become legendary in the world of initial public offerings. Last year, the magazine reported, he and his team realized $204 million in revenue for Deutsche Morgan Grenfell and its parent, Deutsche Bank. One of his efforts was the initial public offering for amazon.com, the year's best performing IPO.
       Fortune dubbed him "The Man Who Rains Money on Silicon Valley," but after his boss, Carter McClelland, MBA '73, resigned from DMG in March, rumors circulated that Quattrone was unhappy. On June 30 the rumors proved true when Quattrone left to join Credit Suisse First Boston.

Photo by Kurt Andersen

Fair pay is key to keeping good managers, says Charles O'Reilly.

Executive Comp-- the Debate Goes On
IN BOARDROOMS, bars, and the columns of business magazines, the debate over effective systems of executive compensation has raged for years. This spring Business School professor Charles O'Reilly and Jerre L. Stead, chairman and CEO of Ingram Micro Inc., of Santa Ana, Calif., explored the issue in a dialogue sponsored by the Wall Street Journal.
       "Executives need to feel that the pay-setting process is fair," said O'Reilly. "If they don't, then it doesn't really matter whether you have designed an optimal incentive contract." Corporate leaders who don't think their pay package is fair may leave or they may "simply cease to put in 100 percent of their effort."
       Boards must set objective measures and establish a specific reward system for the CEO and make sure the CEO delivers against those measures and rewards, said Stead. But these duties raise problems when the CEO is also chairman of the board, said O'Reilly. "In principle, the more reciprocity there is between the board and the CEO, the harder it is for the board to monitor pay. This is especially true when you have a strong CEO, for instance, chairing the nominating committee for a board of directors," said O'Reilly.