UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Susan Wojcicki: Anderson alum named one of Forbes' 100 Most Powerful Women

When Susan Wojcicki graduated Anderson in 1998, she relocated to Menlo Park in Northern California. There, she met a couple of Stanford computer science graduate students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

That same year, the tech duo set up their home base in Wojcicki’s garage. The company they created: Google (Just – ahem -- Google it if you don't believe it!)

In addition to being recognized as one of Anderson's "100 Inspirational Alumni", she has now been named one of Forbes' 100 Most Powerful Women in the World. At number 16 in the rankings, she edged out heavy hitting female contemporaries including Argentinean President Cristina Fernandez, singer Beyoncé Knowles and Editor-In-Chief of AOL Huffington Post Media Group Arianna Huffington. 

 

The Forbes list describes Wojcicki's qualifications saying that she is:

"The most important Googler you've never heard of." Susan Wojcicki, SVP of Advertising at Google, oversaw the company's acquisitions of YouTube and DoubleClick, acquired for $1.65 and $3.1 billion, respectively, and is the brain behind crowd-pleaser Google Doodles. Wojcicki leads all new product development including Google's two main advertising vehicles, AdWords and AdSense, and is responsible for responsible for 96% of Google's revenues, $28.2 billion in 2010. She is currently focusing on the growing business of mobile advertising.

Wojcicki is a member of the UCLA Anderson Board of Visitors.

Read a full Q & A with Susan on Forbes' website here 

 To see who else made the list of 2011's Most Powerful Women according to Forbes, click here

 

Vince, E, Drama, Turtle -- and Bhagwan? ... UCLA Anderson Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry On Entourage This Sunday ... Plus, It Takes a Village to Write A Scholarly Academic Paper

Pictured from left: Adrian Grenier, UCLA Anderson Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry, Saransh Chowdhry, Jerry Ferrara, Rhys Coiro, UCLA Anderson Assistant Professor Bruce Carlin, Paheli Chowdhry, Kevin Dillon

For eight seasons, fans of the HBO series Entourage have followed the exploits of fictional movie star Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his band of buddies that included his best friend/manager "E" (Kevin Connolly), his brother Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon) and his driver/pal Turtle (Jerry Ferrara). The series currently hurtles towards its conclusion with only three episodes remaning.

This week's episode, "The Big Bang" (which airs Sunday night on HBO), includes a very special guest: UCLA Anderson Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry, who joins a host of entertainment superstars, from Eminem to Matt Damon to Larry David, who have portrayed themselves on Entourage. Earlier this week, Chowdhry spoke to The UCLA Anderson Blog regarding his appearance.

"I received an email from (casting director) Susan Abramson," said Chowdhry. "She said 'I read about FAB and love what you're doing. Would you like to make a cameo appearance on Entourage?" 

FAB -- Financial Access at Birth -- is a program developed by Chowdhry. It is a social and economic innovation that seeks financial inclusion. FAB's website defines "inclusion" like this: "Full financial inclusion is a state in which all people who can use them have access to a full suite of quality financial services, provided at affordable prices, in a convenient manner, and with dignity for the clients. Financial services are delivered by a range of providers, most of them private, and reach everyone who can use them, including disabled, poor, and rural populations." You can learn more about FAB by accessing their website.

Jim Stengel Named CMO on Fortune’s First-Ever Executive Dream Team

Jim Stengel joined the UCLA Anderson faculty two years ago. Stengel, the former global marketing officer of Procter & Gamble and current president of Jim Stengel, LLC teaches a brand marketing course along with his colleague, UCLA Anderson Professor Sanjay Sood. The course has its roots in Stengel's forthcoming book "Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies." 

In 2010 Stengel (along with Bob Gilbreath, chief marketing strategist at Bridge Worldwide) participated in the Cannes International Advertising Festival and asked "The Burning Question" -- How can we, in marketing and business, hold ourselves to a higher standard to create a positive impact on those we serve, our employees, and even the world? The results of their query may be found at The Burning Question web site. 

Now, Stengel is a first round draft pick of Fortune's Fantasy Executive League.

Huh?

It seems the magazine, in the spirit of the fantasy football drafts everyone seems to be participating in this week has created it's own league -- a league of top executives to fill the roles of their own corporate fantasy team. Stengel, made the first-team as Chief Marketing Officer, joining such luminaries as American Express CEO Ken Cheneult (CEO), McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner (COO) and ArcelorMittal CFO Aditya Mittal (CFO).

Of Stengel, Fortune wrote:

At P&G, Stengel, 56, oversaw an $8-billion-a-year advertising budget. Today Stengel runs his own consulting company and sits on the boards of AOL and Motorola Mobility, which makes him current on wireless and social-media trends now reshaping marketing -- so we snapped up this free agent for our Dream Team. 

To read more about Fortune's  fantasy executive team, click here. 

 

Eric Sussman Selected By Bloomberg BusinessWeek As One of the Most Popular Profs at Top Business Schools

Since 1995, Lecturer Eric Sussman has been teaching accounting and real estate at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, where he has been voted Teacher of the Year ten times by Anderson’s MBA students, and has been awarded the Citibank Teaching Award (1998) and the Neidorf Decade Teaching Award (2008), both voted upon by a committee of faculty members.  He has also received recognition by Business Week as one of the Anderson School’s ‘Outstanding Faculty'.

Now, Sussman's popularity has gone national, as Bloomberg BusinessWeek has named him one of the most popular instructors on any management or b-school campus. According to the site, "surveys (were) sent to 2010 graduates asking them to identify their two favorites. Professors were ranked in order of absolute popularity. In all, the responses of 3,732 students were used to calculate this ranking; only schools that had more than 60 student responses were counted. At least one in every five survey respondents from each of the schools listed wrote down these names chosen for our top ten list as their favorite professor—pretty amazing considering they had hundreds of faculty members to choose from."

Regarding Sussman, the publication wrote:

Sussman teaches advanced accounting and fundamentals of real estate and has been known to start singing '80s songs in the middle of class, according to a former student. In 1995, Sussman returned to the school where he received his BBA (graduating summa cum laude in 1987) to teach. One former student, Kate Stephenson, says Sussman wins Anderson's "Professor of the Year" award every year he's eligible; he'd win it every time if the winner wasn't required to sit out for a year. Sussman is also the president of a real estate company. In 2007, a landlord-tenant dispute resulted in a protest outside one of his classes. He used the experience as a teaching lesson.

He teaches in the areas of cost/managerial accounting, financial accounting (beginning through advanced), financial statement analysis, corporate financial reporting, and real estate investment and finance to undergraduate, graduate, and Executive Education students.  He is the creator of Insight FSA, an analytical software tool which automatically and critically measures, evaluates, and reports upon the financial accounting and corporate reporting risk for all public companies via Edgar On-line.  

To read all of Sussman's bio on the UCLA Anderson website, click here. 

Paola Giuliano on The Origins of Gender Roles

UCLA Anderson Assistant Professor Paola Giuliano understands why her recent working paper "On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough" (co-authored with Alberto F. Alesina and Nathan Nunn, both of Harvard University) made headlines.

"It's a provocative topic," Giuliano said. "Gender issues are always controversial."

The working paper acknowledges a point made by the historian Fernand Braudel; namely that the agricultural shift from the use of hoes to the utilization of the plough in ancient Mesopotamia caused that society to shift from a matriarchy to a patriarchy as physically stronger men (able to handle the plough) replaced women (who used hoes) in the grain fields. What Giuliano and her co-authors found in their recent work is that those attitudes seem to persist today, thousands of years after the introduction of the plough. 

The paper first confirms that societies that traditionally used plough agriculture had lower female participation in agricultural activities. It then draws a connection between the past and the present, stating, "To this point, we have shown that historical plough use is associated with less female participationin agriculture historically and with less female participation in the labor force today." Or, as The Economist puts it, "Long after most people have stopped tilling the land for a living, the economists find, their views about the economic role of women seem to line up with whether their ancestors ploughed or whether they hoed. Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than their counterparts in countries at similar levels of development who happen to be descended from hoe-users." 

The research has present day implications. For example, Giuliano told The UCLA Anderson Blog that these rooted-in-history beliefs persist in communities even when the populations immigrate. In other words, if a group of people living in the U.S. immigrated from a nation where plough-agriculture existed and women are still under-represented in the workforce, those beliefs will persist among those now living in the United States, though she added the effect is "not as much as it would be if they were still living in their country of origin." A more frightening notion was that female infanticide still persists in in some "plough societies." 

~~~

Giuliano was also a recent guest on public radio's Air Talk. On that program she discussed a prior research paper "“Growing Up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy” (written with the IMF's Antonio Spilimbergo). The paper details the impact of dire economic conditions on the younger generation.

To hear Professor Giuliano on Air Talk, click here. 

To read The Ecomomist article on Professor Giuliano's work, click here. 

To read On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough, click here. 

To read Growing Up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy, click here. 

UCLA Anderson Presents: "Leaders On Leadership" -- PepsiCo's Frank Cooper III

In the newest Leaders On Leadership podcast, Dean Judy Olian and Professor Peter Guber are joined by Frank Cooper III. Cooper serves PepsiCo as chief marketing officer of global consumer engagement. His responsibilities include leading brand marketing strategy, brand development, and brand activation for global platforms across all beverages.

In the video, the trio discuss all manners of marketing and brand management, including the evolution from traditional branding to what Cooper calls "actual engagement." Responding to an early question (0:38 mark) from Dean Judy Olian who asks him about the company's new "consumer engagement strategy." Responds Cooper:

"We think something really fascinating is happening in the marketplace today. Consumers are not only empowered to have more choices and to make those choices on their own, they actually want a relationship with their brands. But they want it on their terms. We see that as a really interesting opportunity, so instead of marketing in a traditional way in which we actually shout from the mountain top our message, we're actually looking at going deeper into communities, doing deeper into culter and establishing an authentic relationship with consumers. That's the transition from what we call traditional brand marketing to actual engagement."

 

 

 

Follow this blog and the UCLA Anderson web page as we release new segments of “Leaders on Leadership” all summer. Still to come, such luminaries as television and radio host Larry King; Los Angeles Lakers General Manager Mitch Kupchak; Kent Kresa, chairman emeritus Northrup; and Pat Woertz, chairman and CEO, Archer Daniels Midland.

Leaders on Leadership

Leaders on Leadership with Milken Institute's Paul Irving

Leaders on Leadership with POM Wonderful's Lynda Resnick

Leaders on Leadership with UCLA Hospital CEO Dr. David Feinberg

Leaders on Leadership with Disney's Robert Iger

Riding the Financial Roller Coaster: UCLA Anderson Faculty (Klein, Trueman, Leamer) Comment on the Wild Week On Wall Street

The markets are closed for the week. Today's headline on CNN reads: "Dizzying Week Ends On a Whimper," as the markets closed up for the second day in a row.

The story below that headline reads in part, "Friday's action paled in comparison to the wild 4-5% swings investors were faced with earlier this week. On Monday, the Dow plunged 635 points, only to reverse course and jump 420 points the following day. On Wednesday, the Dow sank 520 points followed the next day by a 420-point recovery."

Throughout the week, the news media sought the expertise of UCLA Anderson faculty to provide insight into stock market's rollercoaster ride. In addition, the latest version (July) of the Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index^TM was released, allowing UCLA Anderson Forecast Director Ed Leamer (also the chief economist for the Ceridian Index) to offer some wider perspective on the economy.

Lecturer Gordon Klein is an expert in tax planning, entrepreneurship, and commercial law. In the video below, he spoke to ABC News about Standard and Poor's decision to lower the credit rating of the United States. At about the 2:07 mark he says:

"The administration and Congress have to come together and reassure people we're going to get our budget problem under control. That will keep S&P happy. That will keep the world markets happy. It doesn't have to be done instantly, it doesn't have to be done precipitously, but it does have to be done in a fashion that says to people we're serious about getting our budget problem under control." 

 

 

Ynon Kreiz ('93): "A Goal Without A Plan Is Just A Wish"

Between 2008 and June 2011, Ynon Kreiz ('93) served as chairman and CEO of Endemol, the world's largest independent television and digital production company. If you aren't familiar with the name, you'll be familiar with some of Endemol's productions, which include Big Brother, Wipeout, Deal or No Deal and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

Kreiz began his ground-breaking entertainment career while at UCLA Anderson, where he met American-Israeli media mogul Haim Saban, who hired him in 1996 to launch Fox Kids Europe as part of a joint venture with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Within three years Kreiz had hired nearly 400 people in 17 countries and built a kid-vid juggernaut. By 1999, Fox Kids Europe was floated in the Amsterdam stock exchange and eventually sold to Disney in 2001.

Due to his remarkable career in television production, Kreiz was named one of Anderson's "100 Inspirational Alumni" in association with the school's 75th Anniversary. On July 30, 2011 Kreiz honored Dean Judy Olian's request to be the commencement speaker for the 2011 Executive MBA Class. Kreiz opened by telling the graduates that "you are about to enter a new phase in your life, a new chapter, one that will set a new direction for your career."

At about the 13:00 mark, Kriez says, "The last point I want to make may sound trivial. And that is, you must have a plan, because a goal without a plan is just a wish. But I can tell you a secret, the only thing we can be sure of, is that plans do not actually materialize actually as you planned them ... leave room for improvisation and make that part of our plan." 

Be sure to watch the rest of the video -- there is a great story about the birth of Ynon's child and how the best plans don't always work out the way they were conceived.

 

 

Bill Ouchi and the Ecosystem for Entrepreneurs At UCLA

 

When UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, James S. Economou and Kathryn A. Atchison, D.D.S, M.P.H., UCLA's Vice Provost, Intellectual Property and Industrial Relations decided to commisson a study of the university's current methods for fostering entrepreneurship, it's of no surprise they turned to UCLA Anderson, where fostering entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking is one of the pillars upon which the school's approach to management education is built. It's also no surprise that they asked Professor Wiliam Ouchi to do the research and write the paper, asking him to "study our current successes, what is being done elsewhere, and what we might do or change to improve upon our current way of handling discoveries and inventions."

For the last decade, Bill Ouchi, UCLA Anderson's Sanford and Betty Sigoloff Chair In Corporate Renewal, has focused his attention on public school education reform, doing research, writing papers and authoring two books, Making Schools Work and The Secret of TSL: The Revolutionary Discovery That Raises School Performance. That Ouchi would dedicate so much time to an issue traditionally outside the parameters of traditional management is not a surprise, as he if of the belief that that's what tenured faculty should do; they should turn their attentions to the important issues facing society. 

The result of Ouchi's current effort is a work titled "An Ecosystem for Entrepreneurs at UCLA -- An Invitation for Campus-wide Input." In the paper, Ouchi advocates for a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching and research. He writes, "We must create new structures that bridge the gap from one culture to another, and we must embrace a culture that encourages and rewards team research. We must achieve a new understanding that our enterprise requires both curiosity-driven scholarship and problem-driven scholarship, and that each prospers only in partnership with the other."

UCLA Anderson's New Curriculum Is A Market-Facing Curriculum That Offers Flexibility in Career Preparation (UPDATED)

As the culmination of a years-long strategy aimed at best feeding the leadership pipeline of today's established companies and entrepreneurial ventures, UCLA Anderson School of Management has evolved a new core-curriculum design and approach.  According to a statement released by the school, "the revised core curriculum, as well as elective courses, were designed with one goal in mind -- to better prepare MBA students for their chosen career tracks."

Based on market information, expert opinion, and insights from recruiters, students and faculty, the new curriculum is built around four key components:  

• A customizable core course sequence;
• Tracks that enable students to deepen their knowledge in marketing, finance or consulting, while adding certificate programs in areas of interest;
• Development of leadership and communication skills through specialized  courses at the start of the first year;
• Team-based Applied Management Research (AMR) projects conducted over 6 months, in organizations in the US and globally. 

The end goal, summarized in the video below is to give Anderson students more of what they need for their summer internships right out of the gate as First Years, allowing them to take essential and applicable courses in advance of their internship interviews. 

This video, featuring Senior Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Marketing Andrew Ainslie details the changes:

 

Anderson Dean Judy Olian said of the new curriculum:

"Employers expect MBA graduates to be ready, from day one, to add value to their organizations. They want to avoid investing time and resources to retrain new MBA hires.  With the new curriculum customized around their career needs, UCLA Anderson graduates will be ready to enter the market with deep expertise in their chosen fields when they finish their MBA.

"One size does not fit all. The program is designed to give our students the flexibility they want, and the critical preparation they need."

UPDATE:

The national media is covering the curriculum reform at UCLA Anderson.

BusinessWeek quoted Dean Olian:

"We're in an ever-changing world. If the schools don't change, we're going to be out of touch with how the market is changing globally and around the particular challenges that exist in business."

Finacial Times also spoke to Dean Olian:

“Employers expect MBA graduates to be ready, from day one, to add value to their organisations."