UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Gang Green: UCLA Honored for Sustainability Curricula

Joining faculty from notable peer schools like Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School and Michigan's Ross School of Business, UCLA has received the 2010 Dr. Alfred and Lynn Manos Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business Curricula. The Page Prize encourages efforts to expose business students to state-of-the-art environmental sustainability knowledge.

In Westwood, this state of the art curricula is the Leaders In Sustainability certificate program now housed in UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability where UCLA Anderson Professors Charles Corbett (pictured right) and Magali Delmas serve as co-directors. Corbett credits UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian for her -- and Anderson's -- commitment to the program. "The dean has been very supportive," Corbett said, "and early on (Judy) provided much of the seed money that got the program started."

According to Corbett, who also serves as Anderson's chairman of the faculty and is the Joseph Jacobs Term Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies, the program was created five years ago and was/is aimed at graduate students with an interest in sustainability. 

To earn the certificate, students must take (in addition to the core course) three other classes, at least one of which is outside their "home school." The must also complete a project that "demonstrates some form of leadership" as it pertains to sustainability. 

Crucial to the program's curricula is its interdisciplinary nature. There are currently about 130 graduate students enrolled in the program with about one-third coming from among Anderson's various MBA and PhD programs. The rest of the participants come from across campus, including (but not limited to) students in urban planning, public policy, molecular toxicology, sociology, environmental health science and civil engineering. "The point is to get students to know each other (across disciplines) and to become expose to a broader perspective," Corbett said. "In my class (which is the core class in the certificate program) we bring in different guest lecturers. One day we'll discuss the Gulf oil spill with a public health expert and the next class we'll discuss obesity with a sociologist."

UCLA Anderson Highlights 100 Inspirational Alumni and Faculty

As part of our celebration of our 75th anniversary, UCLA Anderson is pleased to reveal its "100 Points of Inspiration." According to the press release that accompanied the announcement, it is "an extraordinary list of faculty and alumni whose approach to business, community, and life, is not business as usual, but Business Beyond Usual."

 The 100 Points list is a "Who's Who" of renowned managers, leaders and innovators who made their mark across the gamut of industries and endeavors. From BlackRock's Larry Fink ('74, '76) to Google's Susan Wojcicki, from China's Si-Wei Cheng ('83) to U.S. Congressman James (Jim) Matheson ('87) and from Oracle's Jeff Henley ('67) to the Lakers Mitch Kupchak ('87) these alumni represent what Anderson Dean Judy D. Olian calls " ... the remarkable impact our alumni have had around the globe across all walks of life.  They inspire us all, starting with John Anderson ('40), whose legacy of entrepreneurship while 'doing the right thing' is a lesson I experience every day." 

Senior Associate Dean Alfred E. Osborne, Jr. added, ""With over 37,000 alumni, it would be impossible to provide anything more than a window of illustrative experiences from the last 75 years. We believe, however, that this representation of the wide variety of contributions made by Anderson graduates both represents our traditions, and will inspire future generations of alumni over the next 75 years."

To read the entire press release regarding the Inspirational 100, click here. 

For more on this extraordinary group, click here. 

For more on UCLA Anderson's 75th Anniversary celebration, click here. 

 

Robert Spich Reflects on his Peace Corps Experience

2011 marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy issuing and signing the executive order that created the Peace Corps. The UCLA campus and community played a key role in the creation and launch of the Peace Corps as an original site for training and preparing volunteers to go overseas.

UCLA Anderson Senior Lecturer Robert Spich joined the Corps in 1966, traveling to Chile where he remained until 1969. Spich's connection to the country remains strong today, traveling there often (and to other South American countries) to lecturea and teach. He recently joined the UCLA Anderson blog to reflect on the impact his Peace Corps experience had on his life and career.

"The question that camp to me while in the Peace Corps that reallys haped my thinking and my interest -- and where I went in the academic world -- was 'Why are some people rich and some people poor? Why are some nations successful and others not?'"

Spich's query began in a small village, where he would muse about the inequities of Chilean life with a bee keeper who asked him simply "Don Roberto, how long can this go on the way it is right now?" -- referencing the unfairness, inequality and poverty rampant in Chile at the time. It continued when he returned to the country a few years later as a teaching fellow from Tuft University's Fletcher School of Diplomacy. On this second trip, Spich worked with the elites and got a look at Chile from the other side of the equation. 

Video: Robert Spich and others from UCLA reflect on their Peace Corps experience in a video narrated by Vice Chancellor Emeritus/UCLA Anderson faculty member Dr. Elwin Swenson:

 

Johanna Wright ('05) Manages Google's Search In An Instant

Google Instant is the name for the immediate results you get when you start typing something to search. By the time you get to the "A" as in C-h-a ... " the search results for the seemingly ubiquitous Mr. Sheen appear on your screen. Johanna Wright ('05) is Google's product manager on the team that brought us Instant and recently Fast Company interviewed her as it cited Instant's innovation in naming the company Number Six on its list of "The World's Most Innovative Companies." 

Wright told Fast Company how Google improves its search experience:

• "We make about 100 quality upgrades to the search engine each quarter, and we're running between 50 and 200 experiments at any one time. So many of the things I'm most proud of are the hidden quality changes that no one can see.
•  "The idea of search as you type has been around Google for a long time, but the magical innovation moment came when one of our engineers realized that we should tie searching as you type to autocomplete. All of a sudden, you could see how this would be a compelling product.
•  "The perfect search engine needs to be intelligent, personal, and interactive. The more we understand what you want, the more we can anticipate. But there's still a lot of room for us to grow and so much more we can do.

Fast Company Interviews Johanna Wright

Fast Company's List of the World's Most Innovative Companies

(photo courtesy Google)

 

California's Undergoing A Transformation, Is Poised for Rapid Economic Growth, Will Lead U.S. Out of Recession

UCLA Anderson Senior Economist Jerry Nickelsburg has scaled Kilimingaro and gone cave diving in Africa. He does not shrink from a challenge. To test this theory, we asked him to tell us something we don't know about the California economy as the state battles high unemployment and slowly recovers from the recent recession. Like a man about to plunge into dark water and traverse an underwater cavern, Nickelsburg first takes a deep breath and ponders before answering.

"I think that the one thing that is overlooked in the midst of this recession in California is that California is actually very well poised for rapid economic growth. Since the 1980s, California has been undergoing a transformation in the kind of work that is done here because land is now expensive in California, because labor is now expensive and traditional kinds of repetitive manufacturing is being done elsewhere.

"But California’s knowledge communities and design communities have nurtured whole new industries, industries that are going to lead the United States out of the recession, industries that play to California's advantages sitting on the edge of the Pacific Rim. There are tremendous advantages for California and we tend to lose sight of that because this recession hit California so hard. But why it hit California so hard is because we had a very acute housing bubble and that masked or obscured the fundamental changes that are happening in California. The housing bubble created a lot of jobs in producing houses and created a lot of lost jobs in the subsequent implosion. That’s a big splash and that big splash obscured our vision and the true transformations that are happening in California.