People

November, 2003

LUCASFILM LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK HUNDLEY

Behind the Scenes
Micheline Lim Chau, MBA '76

Micheline Chau's road to the top of the entertainment industry was, in her own word, circuitous. As a 16-year-old Singapore schoolgirl, Micheline Lim found herself halfway around the world at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Four years later she took her bachelor's degree in English directly to Stanford, where she earned her MBA and, incidentally, met her future husband, Armand Chau, also MBA '76. Now she is second in command at Lucasfilm Ltd., known worldwide as the home of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series.

"I had very little real-world experience before I went to B-school," Chau recalls. She learned on the job. Over the next 15 years she worked in retail, restaurants, venture capital, financial services, and software. And when in 1991 Lucasfilm was looking for a chief financial officer with diverse experience, Chau's roundabout route served her well.

Early this year founder and chief executive George Lucas announced he was uniting what had been four companies into one. Lucasfilm Ltd., the film and television production company, would now include sound and visual effects, interactive software, and licensing and merchandising. Lucas tapped his CFO as chief operating officer of the restructured company.

"My job is mostly strategic," Chau says. "It's to provoke, to ask the right questions. I spend a lot of time with the business unit heads thinking about how we can best organize their businesses and the enterprise as a whole." She also spends a lot of time in her car commuting several hours a day from her home in San Mateo County, where Armand has his insurance business, to Lucas Valley in Marin County. But she wouldn't have it any other way.

"We MBAs are taught that career track is important," she says, "that it's all about what's my next job and what's my next step up the ladder. But I think what's really important is to find a place that fits your skills and values and then to be passionate about it.

"Lucas is a unique place. It has the old-fashioned values that have gone missing. Everybody here is family. Everybody succeeds on merit. I think the challenge for us is to keep those values going. As we grow, we can't forget where we came from."

JANET ZICH

Alumni to Know

Faculty

Newsmakers

Hi Tech to Hamburgers
Ben Nemo, MBA '98

"Are you toasting it twice?" Ben Nemo asks another Burger King employee, who is holding sourdough bread. Classmate J. J. Ramberg is videotaping the scene for a TV news segment on former dot-commers in their 1998 MBA class. She has left the Internet frenzy for a reporting job with CNN Financial News, and Nemo has escaped from Silicon Valley to Burger King's corporate headquarters in Miami, where he is manager of U.S. product marketing. On this summer day, he is out in a restaurant, however, because "in this business the little decisions we make can throw off operations and impact the customer."

Nemo came to the Business School from investment banking in New York and Brazil with the idea of joining a consumer brand, but the Internet boom waylaid him. Shortly after graduation some classmates were collecting seven figures from investors, and those who weren't were asking each other why. "I felt I was going to miss out on my chance not only to make money but to have an impact at a young age," he recalls. "It gave me a lot of anxiety to see success stories about my classmates in the newspapers when I didn't expect them to be there for 20 years."

So he joined an Internet startup—a Los Angeles company with two short lives. The first published free Web home pages. "That business model fizzled because a lot of competition emerged, and so we tried to reshape ourselves as an application service provider hosting software for companies that didn't want to buy it." The challenge was to "figure out how to stay alive in a dynamic environment," he says, which was fun, but eventually he felt limited by the intangibility of PowerPoint presentations envisioning how a business might work.

Friends like to tease him about flipping hamburgers, he says, "but everyone can relate to our products, and I love seeing the brand on street corners and talking to customers in our restaurants." Burger King measures sales performance and check averages every day in 8,000 domestic restaurants and keeps a close watch on competitors too. "It's really nice," Nemo says with hard-won appreciation, "to be able to see immediately the impact of what you do."

KATHLEEN O'TOOLE