Canadian Titan
IN HIS NEW BOOK, Titans, author Peter C. Newman describes the men and women who have created the new Canadian establishment in the 1990s--including Kombiz Eghdami, MBA '75. Eghdami "loves to read and philosophize, and considers the greatest accomplishment of his life to be his successful six-year struggle to get his parents out of post-Shah Iran by smuggling them through the mountains of Kurdistan into Turkey," writes Newman.
       The Eghdami family owns the development firm E-IV Industries Ltd. in Vancouver, B.C., and Oregon-based Rockmore International, a major manufacturer of drill bits.

Help for the Common Investor
HE WORRIES about the 30 million Americans covered by 401(k) retirement plans who, without adequate investment advice, are trying to make decisions that will affect their financial futures.
       "The average employee spends more time choosing a restaurant for lunch than thinking about how to invest his savings," Nobel-winning finance professor William Sharpe told Red Herring.
       Sharpe has launched an online advisory service called Financial Engines that is available to companies trying to provide employees with better advice. The system computes the returns of different investment strategies to help consumers analyze their options. "I simply want to offer a service that will help the average investor--who tends to be overconfident--plan for all possible outcomes," he said.

Renaissance Man
VICE PRESIDENT for business development at Cisco Systems Michelangelo "Mike" Volpi, MBA '94, is seen by many as one of the most influential wheeler-dealers in Silicon Valley. For many high-tech firms, getting Volpi's attention means a lot. "He wields power," says Vinod Khosla, MBA '80, of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
       The New York Times reports Volpi has been instrumental in negotiations for 27 of the 29 companies acquired by Cisco since 1993. But friends say he doesn't live the typical high-flying Silicon Valley lifestyle. "Mike just does his job and goes home and lives a reasonable life," says classmate Greg Waldorf.
       Volpi, born in Italy and raised in Japan, draws warm praise from his friends--many of whom are MBA classmates. Gene Frantz joked with the Times that because Volpi was not raised in the United States, he doesn't understand American social icons like the Brady Bunch. Classmate Jane Schuchinski doesn't mind. "He makes the best risotto in the world!" she said.

Point, Click, Buy, and Drive
IN OCTOBER 1997, Ann Pattyn, MBA '87, created what the magazine Business 2.0 calls "the first major change in an automobile sales methodology that has varied little since General Motors started hawking the 1903 Curved-Dash Oldsmobile Runabout." In just over a three-month period, Pattyn's team connected the auto giant's legacy auto inventory systems with a Web front end to create GM BuyPower (http://www.gm.buypower.com). Reliability, not the expense of creating the new system, was her main concern, Pattyn told the magazine http://www.icomputing.com. According to Fortune, GM's rush online was prompted by Microsoft's new Carpoint Web site, which allows consumers to comparison shop for cars online.
       Whatever the motivation, Pattyn is being heralded for being the brains behind the site, which has about 3,000 customers in California, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho kicking tires electronically each day.

Cybercouple
DUBBED THE "the first power couple of the Internet Age" by the Wall Street Journal, David and Ellen Siminoff, both MBA '93, cringe at the description. David is an Internet and media analyst for a unit of Capital Group Inc., guiding the investment dollars that fuel growth in cyberspace. Ellen is vice president of business development for Yahoo, turning thumbs up or thumbs down on proposals from companies looking to connect with the nation's most successful Internet portal company. They are described by friends as the best-connected pair in Silicon Valley.
       The couple met as classmates and soon formed a company trading American television programs to Eastern European television broadcasters in exchange for advertising time. They then sold the ad time for a nice profit.
       Asked what they would do if they could have different jobs, David says he'd run a hedge fund or be a novelist or a swimming coach. Ellen is more focused. She'd opt for being head coach of the Green Bay Packers.

News Moves Slowly in Small-Stock Sector FOR YEARS, OBSERVERS HAVE argued that when it comes to the investing public, news travels slowly. If a stock has out-performed the market for six months, it will continue to do so, while losers will continue to lose ground, regardless of recent events. Business Week described the work of Harrison Hong of the GSB's finance faculty and two other researchers, who studied the phenomenon known as the momentum effect.
       Hong, Terrence Lim of Dartmouth, and Jeremy Stein of MIT compared the prices of stocks among a group of high-performing and low-performing firms of different sizes. They learned that the momentum effect was most pronounced on stocks covered by relatively few analysts, where news indeed traveled slowly. They also found that the smallest firms in the group produced the highest cumulative return.

Dual-Purpose Degree
AS AN AIR FORCE ENGINEER, Ian Blasch, a second-year MBA, realized he wanted to run a business, not simply design systems. Blasch, who expects to earn dual graduate degrees in business and engineering, was profiled in a Wall Street Journal article on student entrepreneurs. Blasch hopes to start a business making equipment for outdoor sports, with a sideline specializing in equipment for the disabled. "I'll have the autonomy of running a business, but I'll be able to be an engineer," he told the paper.

Bionic Boss
WHEN THE DELTA AIRLINES in-flight publication, Sky magazine, set out to create the perfect high-tech CEO, it included traits from several members of the GSB community, starting with the intellect of lecturer Andrew Grove, who has steered Intel down a winning path.
       The ideal CEO also has the guts of America Online CEO Steve Case, EPSC '90, who has survived many corporate setbacks, and the passion of Scott McNealy, MBA '80, CEO of Sun Microsystems, who continues to fight for his belief that the industry needs an alternative to Microsoft.
       Finally, a good CEO has the staying power of Douglas Burgum, MBA '80, who for 16 years has headed Great Plains Software, a highly regarded company with a miniscule turnover rate of 7.2 percent. Great Plains was named in Fortune as one of the nation's best 100 companies to work for.

Midriff Bulge
WHEN THE OUTCOME OF THE November U.S. elections surprised many pundits and most of the news media, the Washington Post turned to Associate Dean David Brady for some explanation.
       "The American people are in the middle," observed Brady. "The Republicans who lost were too ideological--too far to the right. There was an adjustment back toward the middle." Exit polls showed that the number of voters who described themselves as moderates rose from 45 to 50 percent in 1998.
       Voters were willing to vote on President Clinton's political values but not on his personal moral standards, and they ousted candidates who took extreme views, the Post observed.

Schizophrenic Silicon Valley
WHEN THE DOW BEGAN ITS decline last fall in the face of crashing international markets, the PBS program NewsHour turned to venture capitalist Mary Bechmann, MBA '85, and other regional analysts to discuss the impact.
       Bechmann characterized Silicon Valley as being "schizophrenic." Some large semiconductor firms are being hit hard by factors like the drop in sales caused by the sagging Asian economy, while the Internet is feverishly driving a different segment to new heights.
       "If you looked at the small and emerging growth companies out here in Silicon Valley, you would think that Asia or Brazil or Russia was barely a blip on the radar screen," she said. "All I hear is that business is booming and profits are high; the Internet is going to keep growing and there's frankly no end in sight."