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Stanford Business magazine

 

Newsmakers

Who's in the News: A Round-up of Media Mentions

Keeping Vegas Bright
Walt Higgins, SEP ’89, led Sierra Pacific Resources, a Nevada utility company, through energy crises, the repeal of utility deregulation, and potential bankruptcy. Now, with the company back on its feet, he’s retiring. When an interviewer from the Reno Gazette-Journal described him as “the right guy at the right time” for the company, though, Higgins was not so sure.

“It’s always hard to know. I mean, maybe somebody else could have done a better job,” he said. “I was committed to Nevada and wanted Nevada to succeed. And the state has trouble if its power company has trouble. And so maybe it was just a confluence of fortuitous events that I was here and very committed to the company, and the company needed a leader, and I apparently had most of the characteristics it took to lead through that very difficult time. I’m not sure anyone could say I was the best one to lead it, but I was here, I knew the issues, and the board decided to keep me on even when things got very tough.”

PHD Alum to Head Singapore B-School
The new dean of the business school at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University is Jitendra Singh, PhD ’83. Singh, who also holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, has extensive ties to both academia and business in India and China, according to the Financial Times. He has advised Silicon Valley startups and served on the board of Infosys Technologies in India.

Double-Duty Design for New York Digs
When David Carmel, MBA ’02, found a new apartment in New York, he liked the view and the elevator access to the garage where he could keep a hand-operated van. Carmel, who is vice president for business development of StemCyte, which collects and stores stem cells from umbilical cords, was paralyzed in a diving accident eight years ago. He needed to renovate the apartment so he could get around in his wheelchair, and he turned to Andy Bernheimer and Jared Della Valle, architects who are about his age.

“Jared and Andy saw me as a 20-something who wanted a great apartment—it had to be totally accessible but not look institutional,” he told Dwell magazine.

The result is an open apartment with roll-in shower, a table without corner legs and a sliding wall made of light aluminum foam that Carmel can open and close from his wheelchair.

Risky ’98 Bail Out Brought Banks Bucks
In 1998, hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management was on the verge of a collapse with the potential to plunge the financial markets into chaos. Herbert M. Allison Jr., MBA ’71, was one of a handful of business leaders called to a meeting with a Federal Reserve officer to see if the industry could work together on a bailout plan.

“We had to make big decisions under conditions of great time pressure, with large financial amounts involved, and large risks, whether we did it or not,” Allison told Q1, the magazine of the Yale School of Management. Allison proposed having the 16 banks with significant exposure contribute equally to a bailout fund. He appealed to their “civic responsibility” and, after some tense negotiations and emergency board meetings, 14 firms put in a total of $3.6 billion to take a 90 percent interest in Long-Term Capital. “The firms actually made modest amounts of profit on that investment,” he said.

Media Challenged on Creation Controversy
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Patrick Leahy, MBA ’81, took on both the recently opened Creation Museum and the media’s coverage of it.

The Creation Museum claims that humans and dinosaurs coexisted in the early days of the 6,000-year-old Earth. Leahy, managing editor of the online magazine Christian Faith and Reason, disagrees. But he also thinks the media unfairly portray most Christians’ beliefs about creation.

“While it plays to the Los Angeles Times editorial board’s sense of intellectual superiority to pit the ‘caveman and dinosaur’ crowd against the learned professors, it is not an intellectually honest way to cover the scientific and political debate surrounding the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution,” he wrote in an op-ed piece.

Rattled Voter Seizes Palo Alto City Hall
The first experience Yoriko Kishimoto, MBA ’79, had with the city council in Palo Alto, where she lives, was when she was notified that the city was considering raising the speed limit on her street.

“I said, ‘Cars go way too fast already. What in the world are they thinking about?’” Kishimoto told the Palo Alto Weekly. From there she became more involved in city planning, and today she attends ribbon cuttings about twice a week as mayor.

“I feel like I’m the symbol of the changing Palo Alto in many ways,” said Kishimoto, who was born in Japan and started a technology consulting firm.

Roots of an Olympian
“My hockey career began at the age of 4 with a super tantrum at center ice,” Sarah Tueting, MBA ’05, reminisced in the Chicago Sun-Times. “White skates wouldn’t do. I wanted black skates like my older brother.”

Before coming to Stanford, Tueting won an Olympic gold medal with the U.S. women’s hockey team in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, and graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in
neuroscience. She also played cello in several groups. Today, she is a business development manager for Medtronic Inc. in Minneapolis.

Wheeling, Dealing Began with Dirty Dishes
“My two sisters and I had to do all of the cooking and cleaning, and my two brothers only had to take out the trash,” Miriam Rivera, MBA ’94/JD ’95, recalled for the online magazine Latina.com. “I’d engage my mom in a discussion as to why this wasn’t fair—sometimes I went on strike. I actually got away with it for a while.”

That unofficial training—along with her Stanford degrees—has paid off, the magazine said, because Rivera is now a vice president and deputy general counsel for Google, where in May she beat out Microsoft in a reportedly billion-dollar deal with Dell to preinstall Google desktop software on most Dell computers sold in the next three years.

WheelwrightAloha Wheelwright
Brigham Young University–Hawaii has tapped Steven C. Wheelwright (at left), MBA ’69, PhD ’70, to be its next president. The campus on Oahu serves 2,400 students from 70 countries. Wheelwright, an emeritus scholar of business administration and former associate dean at the Harvard Business School, will be the school’s ninth president.

“We are excited because we believe in the mission of BYU–Hawaii because it combines spiritual with secular learning and focuses on the development of character and understanding in these young people,” Wheelwright told the Deseret News.

Mr. Fery Goes to Idaho
The retired CEO of Boise Cascade, John Fery, MBA ’55, is spearheading a fundraising campaign to develop a YMCA camp in Idaho. “I feel that a Y-camp experience for young boys and girls is a very important experience in their maturing process, gaining independence and establishing their values,” Fery told the Idaho Business Review.

Fery and his wife are honorary chairs of the $22 million fundraising campaign for the camp. As of early July they were halfway to the goal. “Idaho businesses will be an important contributor to the camp, although most of the $22 million will come from foundations, individuals, and families,” he said.

Cult Runs Hot and Cold
Running 100.2 miles in temperatures that can range from the 30s to 117 degrees may not sound like most people’s idea of a good time. But when Graham Cooper, MBA ’97, talks about running the ultra-marathon known as the Western States Endurance Run, he says, “To me, the biggest thing is making it fun.”

Cooper, who is the CFO of a pharmaceutical company and lives in Oakland, Calif., trains by wearing three layers of clothing to run up nearby Mt. Diablo. He won the race in 2006 and placed third in 2007. “The race is a cult,” Cooper told the Contra Costa Times.
“It’s the big one—the original.”

Cutting-Edge Advertiser
Brian McAndrews, MBA ’84, knows the power of good advertising. When he was 11 and mowing lawns in Westport, Conn., he didn’t just ask his parents’ friends if they wanted their lawns mowed. The young McAndrews put out fliers with his own slogan—“A professional job without the professional price”—and earned $10 to $15 per lawn mowed.

Today he is on the cutting edge of the next generation of advertising as CEO of aQuantive, the Seattle-based online global advertising company that Microsoft has agreed to buy for $6 billion. The sale has not tamed his ambitions for his company. “TV is still the big kahuna,” he told Washington CEO magazine. “As TV becomes digital, we believe we can be a leader in that space.”

Two School Chums Create Korean Alliance
Two buddies from Stanford have helped their companies, Altos Ventures and DCM, team up to make investments in South Korea.

“There are a couple of minuses to working in Korea, one being it’s a smaller local market. It can only support a certain size of company,” Han Kim, MBA ’94, told the Wall Street Journal. Kim is general partner and cofounder of Altos and a former captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with whom he served two years in Korea.

The smaller market means it makes sense for Altos to work with DCM, where David Chao, MBA ’93, is cofounder and general partner. The firm has strong connections in China, which can provide a larger market for Korean technology.