MAY 2006
Newsmakers
The DISH on Lifetime’s Bryson
Louise Henry Bryson, MBA ’79, recruited customers to her side
in a battle with DISH Network.
Photo courtesy of
Lifetime Television
She distributes dramatic soap operas and movies that appeal to
women, but Louise Henry Bryson, MBA ’79, was a star in her own drama
in January when contract negotiations broke down between her
network, Lifetime Television, and EchoStar Communications, the
parent company of DISH Network satellite television service.
Claiming Bryson was asking too much for a contract renewal, Dish
pulled two popular Lifetime channels off its service on New Year’s
Eve. Bryson accused Dish of not listening to its customers, and her
unit launched a “Take Back Your Lifetime” campaign that urged Dish
customers to switch to another satellite or cable provider. When the
parties finally reached a multiyear distribution agreement in late
January, Bryson thanked “our loyal viewers, women’s advocates, and
community leaders for their outspoken support, which is a testament
to the importance of these two networks to American women.”
According to Multichannel News, Bryson began her TV career writing
and producing documentaries but then “went where I was needed.” She
advises young women to be flexible in their careers. “There’s no
straight line to the top.”
Google’s First Suit
How does the first business guy get hired into a high-tech company? For Omid
Kordestani, MBA ’91, the offer came in 1999 following a five-hour interview
around a Ping-Pong table with Google’s entire staff of 11 engineers, after which
he took the entire crew to dinner. Three years later he negotiated a search
partnership with America Online that seemed risky to Google’s founders but
turned out to be very profitable.
As the company’s senior vice president of global sales and business development,
Kordestani is known today inside Google not just for his business acumen but for
his sharp wardrobe, habit of hugging colleagues, and peacemaking skills when
executives disagree, according to a recent profile of him in the Wall Street
Journal.
Island Hopping by Car
After seeing high-speed ferries succeed in Europe (like the one
pictured here in the Canary Islands), Timothy Dick, MBA ’89, brought the concept to Hawaii.
Photo by
Julie Loo
Imagine piling your family in the car for the trip from Maui or Kauai to
Honolulu in just three hours at about half the price of flying. That may be
possible in 2009, thanks to Timothy Dick, MBA ’89, a consultant who first saw
the latest generation of large, high-speed catamaran ferries operating in 2001
from Spain to the isle of Majorca. On a later trip to Hawaii, Dick was surprised
that no similar ferry operated, so he recruited Hawaiian partners to tackle the
project. After many government hearings and other meetings, Hawaii Superferry
secured a $140 million federally guaranteed loan in 2004.
“It took someone that wasn’t tied to the way things worked in the past to bring
the idea from blank paper to the table,” John Garibaldi, a former Aloha Airlines
executive that Dick recruited to the project, told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
“This project has excited the whole state.”
Grads Go Gung-Ho on Green Startups
Business student clubs devoted to exploring green energy ideas at Stanford and
the University of California at Berkeley have led to the formation of new
eco-friendly businesses, according to the San Francisco Business Times. Among
the green entrepreneurs are Jeremy Sokulsky, MBA ’04; Carl Palmer, MBA ’03; and
Alicia Seiger, MBA ’02.
Sokulsky launched Environmental Incentives, a consulting company working on land
conservation, wind energy, and ecological trading systems. Palmer founded
Beartooth Capital, a for-profit that invests in protecting ecologically
sensitive land through ranch real estate investments near Yellowstone National
Park. Seiger is vice president of corporate sales and business development for
TerraPass, a new company that sells yearly passes to people who want to offset
the carbon dioxide pollution of their cars with investments in projects that
produce cleaner energy.
Musical Riffs
Sometimes it can be a very small world. A recent Boston Globe profile of jazz
trumpeter Phil Grenadier notes that he began playing with family members,
including his guitar-playing brother Steve Grenadier, who today is the School’s
William F. Sharpe Professor of Financial Economics.
Phil said he regretted studying liberal arts and not music in college, although
he did take some professional lessons from trumpeter Tom Harrell, who today is a
Grammy-nominated composer and trumpet player. Harrell is the son of the late
Thomas W. Harrell, a member of the Business School faculty for 50 years until
his death in 2002.
Not Really What the Doctor Ordered
The call that sent Ann Livermore, MBA ’82, rushing to the hospital came last
July. A kidney, which she had waited months for as a result of complications
from a childhood disease, was suddenly available. Organ transplant or not,
Livermore was phoning her lieutenants at Hewlett-Packard’s Technology Solutions
Group within three days. HP CEO Mark Hurd told Business Week that he “finally
asked if someone would please go in there and take her laptop away.”
A few months later, HP reported great success for Livermore’s unit when it
posted operating earnings of $405 million, about four times the total of a year
earlier. “Livermore’s unit is now a key reason HP’s stock is on a tear,” the
magazine said in January.
Stepping In, Not On the Founders’ Shoes
Successful entrepreneurs often face the realization that they don’t have the
skills to greatly expand their companies. If they don’t want to sell out, one
option is to hire an executive to share the power. Derek Mercer, founder of
Recruitmax Inc., a maker of software for human resource professionals, chose Jim
Philip, MBA ’95, to replace himself as president because of Philip’s investment
banking and technology start-up background.
Philip helped the company raise $17.2 million and quadrupled its workforce
within 28 months. “The first challenge,” he told the New York Times, “was to
stop thinking like a private company and to start thinking like a public
one—making sure all the controls are in place in the post-Enron world of public
companies, making sure we’ve got a management team that would play well in front
of Wall Street analysts.”
The experience was not easy for Mercer either. “Bringing in Jim required trust
in someone else to see and execute the vision,” he said. “You’ve got to
relinquish some control of the company, just like I did with my kids when they
got older, and that’s hard to do.”
Microsoft’s Game Guru
Within Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division, they refer to Feb. 14,
2000, as the Valentine’s Day Massacre. That’s the day that Robert “Robbie” Bach,
MBA ’88, and allies managed over three hours to convince Microsoft founder Bill
Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer, Class of ’81, to let them build a game-playing
machine around a specialized operating system rather than Windows. “None of us
have ever forgotten that meeting,” said Bach, who launched the second version of
Microsoft’s game console, the Xbox 360, simultaneously last November in the
United States, Europe, and Japan.
Promoted in 2005 to president of the Entertainment and Devices division, Bach
has “emerged as the bridge between Microsoft’s past success and future
ambition,” BusinessWeek said. He is focused on competing with Sony not just on
game products but on the convergence of TV, video, and music in the digital
living room.
Bach doesn’t live his whole life digitally, however. He prefers playing real
basketball a couple times a week, the magazine reported, and doesn’t let his
three children play videogames during the week.
The Camera Never Lies
When he was laid off for the second time, Daniel Markovitz, MBA ’92, decided to
treat his job search as a job, complete with scheduled time for research,
meetings, and fun activities so that the search wouldn’t slide. “I did mock
interviews with friends and reviewed videotapes of them to see how to improve,”
he wrote in a column on the Wall Street Journal’s CareerJournal.com website. “I
couldn’t see it until it was on video, but I had a beaten, pessimistic air about
me.”
Markovitz also advises laid-off job seekers to get out of the house, limit their
time on the internet, and get dressed at least in business casual, even when
spending a day working at home. He is now a New York–based trainer for IBT-USA
Inc., a corporate-efficiency training company.
Behemoth Brewer Sets Sights on Bud
Belgium-based brewer InBev promoted Brazilian Carlos Brito, MBA ’89, as the
group’s CEO in December. InBev was created in 2004 as a merger of Brazil’s AmBev
and Interbrew of Belgium. According to Latin Finance, “Brito’s challenge is to
increase sales and allow InBev to overtake Anheuser-Busch of the U.S. as the
world’s biggest brewer by sales.”
Brito was named AmBev CEO in January 2004, shortly before the merger with InBev,
and was later promoted to president for the Americas, where he is credited with
turning around Labatt’s, the company’s ailing Canadian brewer.
No Joystick Required
Seattle may be known for its coffee but it is also becoming known as
a hotbed for “casual gaming” startups—companies like PopCap, headed
by David Roberts, MBA ’87, and Big Fish Games, headed by Paul Thelen,
MBA ’95. Their goal is to expand computer gaming to an older crowd
that casually plays games like canasta, Scrabble, or poker rather
than the intensive videogames that draw a younger demographic. One
analyst predicted the casual-game market will double to $2.2 billion
in the next two years, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
PopCap’s easy-to-play puzzle, word, and card games have been
downloaded more than 175 million times, Roberts says, but he has his
eyes set on a much bigger market. “Good software companies should
get half of their business from outside the U.S., and PopCap is
sitting around 10 percent … so it really meant let’s go and do that
in a big way,” he told the Post-Intelligencer shortly after
announcing the opening of a new office in Dublin, Ireland, to
translate games into French, German, Swedish, and other languages.
The 6-year-old Seattle-based company has 60 employees and expects to
add 50 over five years.
Meanwhile, 3-year-old Big Fish has 55 employees and announced a $5
million round of financing in December to translate its games and
expand internationally.
