August 2005

Who's in the News

Fund Ahead by Furlongs

There are sports for everyone, and John Osterweis, MBA ’69, has found two he is good at: investing and “ride ’n’ tie.” When he is not managing $2.4 billion for himself and others through Osterweis Capital in San Francisco, Osterweis is captain of a three-member team that includes his horse Rush Creek Jax and a two-legged teammate, often his son Max. The Homo sapiens alternate running and riding in a race where 34 miles in five hours is a good performance, according to Forbes, but then, what does a magazine like Forbes know about sports? You might be more impressed that Forbes says the Osterweis Fund averaged an annual return of 16.2 percent over 10 years, leaving the S&P 500 in the dust.

Baseball Barons

The Oakland Athletics joined the list of professional teams with Business School connections this year, thanks to the $180 million purchase of the team by Lewis Wolff and John Fisher, MBA ’89. Fisher’s share is about 90 percent but he prefers to stay out of the limelight, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, so Wolff will be the managing partner. Fisher’s father, Gap founder Donald Fisher, revealed in his biography that John, an avid baseball fan, persuaded the family to buy a stake in the San Francisco Giants in the 1990s when he worried the team might move to Florida if local business people didn’t buy it. The family later sold most of its stake, but John kept a small share to monitor the financials, which apparently did not discourage him from the industry.

Another avid baseball fan, David Kaval, MBA ’03, launched his new independent minor league in May with seven league-owned teams in California and Arizona. The eighth team, the Samurai Bears, is always the visiting team in the Golden Baseball League, because the players all hail from Japan.

Familiar Faces Named to Head B-Schools

Former Stanford Business School professor Joel Podolny was named dean of the Yale School of Management in March, and Mahendra Gupta, PhD ’90, was named dean of the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis in April.

Podolny taught at Stanford for 11 years and was senior associate dean of the Business School before joining the faculty of two Harvard schools in 2002. His research and teaching areas are organizational behavior and sociology. The Yale search committee said Podolny’s leadership roles at Stanford were part of what made him a good choice.

Gupta has been senior associate dean at Olin, where students have given him seven teaching awards since 2001. After a management career in India, he came to the Stanford Business School, where his dissertation in accounting was judged best in the field in 1991 by the American Accounting Association.

V-E Day Remembered

To mark the 60th anniversary of V-E Day, the San Francisco Chronicle searched for the soldiers whose names appeared in the newspaper on May 8, 1945. They found on page 11 and now retired in Pacific Heights Arthur Roth, MBA ’49, whose 1945 letter from Germany to his father was published in the newspaper, along with the names of the latest American soldiers to die. Roth was lucky enough to survive the deadly Battle of the Bulge and participate in the surrender of 140,000 German soldiers. He recalls taking a souvenir sword from a German colonel who seemed irritated to surrender to a lowly enlisted man. “He wanted nothing to do with me,” Roth told the newspaper this year. “Imagine if he’d known I was Jewish.”

Video Gamer’s Visionary View

If you think of video games as competing with books for children’s time, you’ll lose a battle you didn’t have to fight, says Bing Gordon, MBA ’78, the chief creative officer of the world’s leading game company, Electronic Arts. In the age of electronic games, such as EA’s best-selling Sims or Madden NFL football game series, Bing says kids slip easily from sports to books to movies to games, and love the latter because they can make their own endings. Instead of asking kids to write an essay describing a Steinbeck character, he suggested in the Washington Post, they might be more creative if asked to imagine Huck Finn taken off the river or Peer Gynt remaining true to Solveig.

Gordon is “the jester in the court of the king,” according to the San Jose Mercury News, an adult who plays video games well into the night himself and who critiques game designers’ ideas, an activity referred to inside his company as “getting Binged.”

Touchy-Feely in China’s Future

A consultant in Beijing now, Shauna Xie, MBA ’04, told Fast Company her dream is to become China’s minister of education. Before then, however, she dreams of providing “soft skills” education, such as public speaking and giving and receiving feedback, to Chinese adults in business.

“A lot of people say relationships are key if you’re doing business in China. They’re key because Chinese people are not straightforward with one another. They don’t tell their true feelings, and you have to guess a lot of the time,” she says. Xie’s views of education changed dramatically when she transferred to the University of Toronto, where creativity was stressed in her architecture courses. As a student in China, she says, she had been focused solely on learning from textbooks.

Business Basics for Churches

“Evangelical churches are borrowing from the business playbook,” says BusinessWeek in a story that cites the example of Greg Hawkins, MBA ’88, a former McKinsey consultant who is the executive pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill. The church, which has been the subject of a Harvard case study, is becoming a well-known brand, the article says. Willow Creek formed a consulting arm that earned $17 million last year, the magazine said, “partly by selling marketing and management advice to 10,500 member churches from 90 denominations.”

Alumni to Know

Faculty

Newsmakers

U.K. Hedge Funds Flex Muscle

Once confined to the sidelines in mergers and acquisitions, hedge fund investors “are taking over the mantle from mutual funds in fighting for shareholder value,” said Suhail Rahuja, MBA ’96, in a Wall Street Journal article. Rahuja is hedge fund manager at Trafalgar Asset Managers, the London-based fund that the Journal said “orchestrated the deal that trumped General Dynamics’ plan to acquire Alvis PLC, a big U.K. maker of armored vehicles.” Fund managers persuaded another company to bid more for Alvis by contracting sufficient shareholder support. Because hedge funds tend to hold derivatives rather than actual shares, they have not been subject to the same disclosure rules as other shareholders, and U.K. regulators are considering changing those rules.

Tailpipe Tariffs

A tax on carbon emissions “makes sense. It’s a no-regrets approach to global warming,” Duke Energy’s Paul M. Anderson, MBA ’69, told the New York Times in May. He added, “If we don’t speak [about such issues], regulators will make rules, and we will have to live with them.”

Under Anderson’s leadership, the North Carolina-based Duke has started to regain some of the share value lost in the aftermath of the Enron scandal. Duke is buying Cincinnati-based Cinergy, a consolidation that, if approved by regulators, would create a company with 5.4 million customers in two-thirds of the country and 54,000 megawatts of electricity generation. “The deal is expected to revive the fortunes of Duke Energy North America, the company’s unprofitable merchant power business,” the Times said.

Engineer Superhero

When the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry looked for engineering “superheroes” to highlight during Black History Month, they found one who is also well trained as a manager. Roy Perry, Sloan ’92, is corporate vice president of global supply chain management for Storage Technology Corp. in Louisville, Colo. Perry also has been named one of the 50 most important African Americans in technology by U.S. Black Engineer and Information Technology magazine, and he occasionally provides supply chain advice in trade journals.

Perry’s own superheroes are his parents and George Washington Carver, who when he was not allowed in the classrooms of Iowa State in the late 1800s, sat outside the door and took notes. “As we go through our careers, it’s always good to look at the past,” Perry said in the Rocky Mountain News. “If we think things get tougher, it totally re-energizes you and provides focus to continue ahead on your journey.”

Where Have All The Type A’s Gone?

What is the biggest misconception about nonprofits? That the sector involves “casual, laid-back, lifestyle kind of jobs,” Laura Pochop, MBA ’97, told the San Francisco Business Times. Pochop is executive director of the Breakthrough Collaborative, a nonprofit that pairs low-income middle school students with college mentors and teachers. She says the nonprofits she knows are “so Type A” because they are populated by “high achievers who really want to change the world.”