FEBRUARY 2007
Newsmakers
Danielle Ambro, MBA ’94, made Barron's list of top 100 female financial advisors.
Voters Name Poizner Insurance Czar
Entrepreneur Steve Poizner, MBA ’80, was elected California insurance
commissioner in November. He is the former chairman and CEO of SnapTrack, a
company that developed a global positioning tool to enable emergency
personnel to locate cell phone users. It was sold to Qualcomm for $1 billion
in 2000.
Poizner, who also has spent one year as a teacher and another as a White
House Fellow, financed much of his own campaign and refused contributions
from the insurance industry in his race against a former lieutenant
governor, Democrat Cruz Bustamante. Political analysts have speculated that
Poizner might be the next Republican candidate for governor. In his new job,
he oversees a $120-billion-a-year insurance market and 1,300 employees.
Do-It-Yourself Strategy
After he injured his hip playing basketball, Frank Huerta, MBA
’93, was less than pleased to discover surgery would stop him from playing
competitive sports, so he started looking for a better solution. The result
is a new startup for the cofounder of a security software firm that was sold
to Symantec in 2002 for $135 million. Huerta is now cofounder of Cartilix, a
company commercializing biomaterials for use in the spine and eye and in
reconstructive plastic surgery.
Classmate David Chao, who invested in Huerta’s first company, told
Hispanic Business magazine that Huerta “is one of the most competitive
people I know. Most competitive people tend to figure out a way to win.”
Kicking Tires for a Living
Some wives have a hard time getting their spouses to the mall, but not Kathy Hresko. Jamie Hresko, Sloan ’98, accompanies his wife so he can browse the parking lot. As vice president of quality for General Motors, Hresko told the Chicago Tribune, he makes several trips a week to car dealerships and with his wife to malls to see how well car bodies are holding up. When he spots a hood ornament out of alignment, for instance, he writes down the vehicle identification number and tracks down where the car was made and why it happened. “We’re working to close the quality perception gap with Toyota, and to change the perception, you have to get it right the first time,” he said. “You always pay more later when you have to go back and fix it, or worse, when you turn consumers away from your product.”
Big Business Kahunas
Recognizing that more women are moving up in the securities industry,
Barron’s asked a consultant to select the top 100 women financial advisors
last year. Among those chosen was Danielle Ambrose, MBA ’94, of Merrill
Lynch’s Century City, Calif., office. Barron’s said Ambrose manages about
$620 million in assets for customers whose net worth is typically $10
million to $100 million.
Previously at Goldman Sachs, she developed expertise in working with
“individuals and families of entrepreneurs who had sold their companies for
either cash or stock,” according to a Merrill Lynch press release.
Meanwhile, Helen Weir, MBA ’90, was chosen as the Harper’s Bazaar & Chanel
“businesswoman of the year.” Weir is the group finance director for Lloyds TSB bank.
The Times of London described the former McKinsey consultant and
Kingfisher finance director as “a bit girly but with a don’t-mess edge.”
Magazines love making lists even more than picking one individual to honor.
Three more recent entries: Ann Livermore, MBA ’82, executive vice president
of Hewlett-Packard’s Technology Solutions Group, was named to Fortune’s “50
most powerful women” list. Named to the Forbes list of 400 “titans of
finance” are Richard Rainwater, MBA ’68, and Franklin Otis Booth Jr., MBA
’48. Rainwater invests in real estate, energy, and insurance, according to
Forbes, and Booth has large investments in Berkshire Hathaway.
Virtual Hand Holding for College Students
If your work team has personality clashes, what do you do? Personal coaches
help athletes and corporate executives with such problems, but now they are
also helping college students. Alan Tripp, MBA ’89, and Chris Tilghman, MBA
’04, are cofounders of InsideTrack, a coaching company hired by more than a
dozen colleges to help students, especially older ones, juggle the demands
of work, school, and family. What the schools most want from the service is
to improve their graduation rates, according to the Associated Press, which
reports that barely 60 percent of students who enter four-year colleges earn
a degree within six years.
“We’re trying to help people think through very specific problems [such as]
‘I’m totally stuck in this math class,’” Tilghman says of his weekly
coaching calls with students. “You can hear the frustration in their voice,
and it’s driving their anxiety.”
The company offers in-person coaching at some colleges, but most of the
coaching occurs by phone from call centers in San Francisco and Portland,
Ore. “It can really help navigate university life,” one Northeastern
University graduate student told the press service. “In these big
universities, you can be just a number.”
Is Nuclear Back?
Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, led by Mayo Shattuck III,
MBA ’80, has become the first U.S. utility to order critical parts for a new
nuclear reactor, according to the New York Times. No U.S. reactor has
been built in three decades, but Congress has passed financial incentives in
recent years and Shattuck says his organization has the history and
expertise to do it. Constellation has formed a partnership with a reactor
manufacturer to build and operate cookie-cutter nuclear power plants for
other utilities.
Shattuck also was hoping to create the country’s largest competitive
marketer of power by merging Constellation with the parent of Florida Power
and Light, but he canceled the deal in late 2006 when rising utility rates
led to controversy in Maryland and uncertainly arose over which government
entities had the authority to approve the merger.
Numbered Days for Cookie Monster
In homes with televisions and young children, SpongeBob SquarePants and
Dora the Explorer are bigger household names than Tiger Woods and Paris
Hilton. Behind the scenes, Sherice Torres, MBA ’00, has persuaded
these Nickelodeon characters to spend more time in the produce aisles of
supermarkets, where they might help address the growing problem of childhood
obesity. Sure enough, when Dora and SpongeBob started appearing on packages
of Darling Clementines in 2005, unit sales rose nearly 25 percent, according
to USA Today.
“My goal is to have every fruit a kid would want to eat with a Nickelodeon
character,” says Torres, who recently was promoted to senior vice president
at Nickelodeon & Viacom Consumer Products, the third-largest licensing
business in the world and a major entertainment brand for kids. She is also
president of the New York chapter of the National Association for
Multi-Ethnicity in Communications.
Torres is likely to be cutting even more healthy food licensing deals. Last
November, 10 of the largest U.S. food and beverage manufacturers vowed that
at least half of their advertisements directed at children under 12 would
promote healthier foods or contain messages encouraging healthy lifestyles.
Ken Westrick, MBA ’82
Photo by Marc Beauchamp
He Deals in Hardwood Hand-Me-Downs
It’s not exactly green wood, but builders of lavish homes and office
buildings are willing to pay plenty for antique hardwoods and redwood that
count as green with environmentalists.
Recycled wood is “the only responsible way to get old-growth wood,” says
Ken Westrick, MBA ’82, CEO of TerraMai, a McCloud, Calif., company that
recycles, among other things, wine tanks, railroad ties, and gargantuan fir
timbers from the former Esprit headquarters in San Francisco. “We stand for
gorgeous, unique woods that are good for the environment,” Westrick told the
Redding Record Searchlight.
The company scored a major coup, the San Francisco Chronicle said, when it
bought most of Thailand’s rainforest-harvested railroad ties, which were
being replaced with concrete. TerraMai (the name means earth wood) saws the
ties into flooring that sells for $12.50 a square foot and up.
The Economics of Lechery
Economics is taking some unusual turns thanks to the internet. Michael
Schwarz, PhD ’99, once was a Harvard assistant professor writing about
“synchronization under uncertainty.” Now, reports the Wall Street Journal,
he is “thinking about how to use economics to save attractive women from
unwanted solicitations on an internet dating site. One idea employs the
concept of ‘scarcity,’ rationing the number of free messages each lothario
can send. Another uses full disclosure by displaying how many people a
suitor has already approached.”
Schwarz was hired by Yahoo, partly based on a paper he wrote about markets
where one side of a potential transaction is eager to profess its preference
for the other side, making the unequal relationship complicated and
unpredictable.
$100 Million Is Peanuts but $50 Is Real Dough
Second-year MBA student Hamish Fraser has been publishing his
Stanford MBA diary in installments in the Financial Times. In October
the South African wrote about mounting career angst as he tries to decide if
he should go back into management consulting or change careers, return home
or stay in the United States. He was pleased with his classes and professors
but said he was spending too much time negotiating with a landlord and
roommates over the poor conditions of the house they rented.
“It is very comical,” he wrote, “to see how MBA students can talk
off-handedly about investing hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder
funds, but if it is their own $50 that is needed to fix the door lock, they
balk like mad.”
