UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

DailyBruin Covers First Day of TED Week: "“Business school covers an overarching view of the global markets, and the similarity is in trying to think on multiple levels and make connections between sectors.”

(Photo by Scott Fletcher)

“The themes of business school (and the conference) are similar,” said management student Fabien Heitz, sitting in the lounge watching the conference stream Tuesday morning. “Business school covers an overarching view of the global markets, and the similarity is in trying to think on multiple levels and make connections between sectors.”

In that one quote, Anderson student Fabien Heitz summed up much of the relationship between UCLA Anderson and the TED conference, which opened yesterday in and around the Anderson complex. The quote comes from this morning's Daily Bruin, in an article by Alexia Boyarsky. Boyarsky also spoke to student Russ Altenburg about the relationship between TED and UCLA Anderson.

Jim Stengel, an Anderson professor who is one of the speakers at TED, helped to begin the collaboration between the conference and Anderson after he suggested to a TED organizer that the conference should be featured as a case study in his class.

From this suggestion, a wide variety of connections between Anderson and TED were implemented, including panel discussions with students, faculty and alumni about the talks, and student group projects designed around converting ideas from TED into more practical applications, said Allison Holmes, assistant dean of Marketing and Communications at Anderson.

UCLA Anderson TED Week Schedule; Hashtag is #UCLAAndersonTED

UCLA Anderson TED Week Schedule

Below is the schedule of events for UCLA Anderson Ted Week. The hashtag is #UCLAAndersonTED. Please use #UCLAAndersonTED in all your tweets this week, we'll have Twitter feeds tracking this hashtag on display all week long.

UCLA Anderson TED Week

TED talks will be live-streaming in Il Tramezzino all day Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012 through Thursday, March 1, 2012. For a full schedule of TED conference talks, see the TED website.

>> WEDNESDAY, FEB. 29, 2012

11:30 am	TED Speaker: Andrew Stanton Anderson Panel: Faculty: David Ginsburg, Executive Director, Entertainment and Media Law and Policy Program Student: James Kanatas Alum: Cristina Patwa ('07), President, FactoryMade Ventures Co-Host: Entertainment Management Association (EMA) Location: Student Lounge
6:00 pm	TED Speaker: Reid Hoffman Anderson Panel: Faculty: George Geis, Faculty, Executive M&A Program Student: Danny Greene Alumni: Jonathan Lehmann ('11), Founder and CEO, KarmaGoat; Matt Richter-Sand, VP of Strategy, Originate Co-Host: Entrepreneurs Association (EA) Location: Student Lounge
7:00 pm	Dinner Party with TEDActive Location: il Tramezzino

Francis Longstaff Has His Own Observatory; Helps Discover Dwarf Galaxy

(The galaxy NGC 4449 and its companion dwarf galaxy, NGC 4449B, in a false color image created by Francis Longstaff.  Image by Francis Longstaff, via UCLA Newsroom.)

Francis Longstaff is UCLA Anderson's Allstate Professor of Insurance and Finance. HIs publications cover a vast array of finance topics. He's both a certified public accountant (CPA) and a chartered financial analyst (CFA).

He's also an amateur astronomer -- with his own observatory -- who helped discover a dwarf galaxy.

UCLA Newsroom has the details on the latter discovery. 

A team led by UCLA research astronomer Michael Rich has used a unique telescope to discover a previously unknown companion to the nearby galaxy NGC 4449, which is some 12.5 million light years from Earth. The newly discovered dwarf galaxy had escaped even the prying eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope.

 The research is published Feb. 9 in the journal Nature.

The larger, host galaxy, NGC 4449, may be "something of a living fossil," representing what most galaxies probably looked like shortly after the Big Bang, Rich said. The galaxy is forming stars "so furiously" that it has giant clusters of young stars and even appears bluish — a sign of a young galaxy — to the eye in large amateur telescopes, he said.

<snip>

Rich collaborated with Francis Longstaff, a professor of finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and an amateur astronomer, in acquiring and using a specialized telescope designed to take images of wide fields of the sky. Known as the Centurion 28 (the diameter of the mirror is 28 inches), the telescope, and the observatory the astronomers used, are located at the Polaris Observatory Association near Frazier Park, in Kern County, Calif.

Aislinn Dunne of the Daily Bruin has a story today on Longstaff's lifelong love of astronomy. 

As a college student, Francis Longstaff was faced with a decision – go to business school or pursue a degree in astronomy.

He loved finance and found it important. Astronomy, meanwhile, had been his hobby since he bought his first telescope as a teenager. In the end, Longstaff chose to go to business school.

But after years of working in brightly lit cities like New York and Los Angeles where stargazing is next to impossible, he started looking for a better way to pursue his other interest.

That was when he decided to build his own observatory.

High Tech Business Association Invites You to Participate in the TECH DREAMS Campaign

 

(Jason Wakizaka ('12) with Bill Gates. Photo courtesy Jason Wakizaka.)

Got a cool email today from my colleague Emily Taylor ('08), an associate director in UCLA Anderson's Parker Career Management Center. Taylor passed along the news that Anderson's High Tech Business Management Association is asking alumni and students to "to share their career goals and dreams with each other by joining in the HTBA Tech Dreams campaign!" Here are the details, provided by Courtney Mayeda ('12):

The High Tech Business Association (HTBA) is inviting alumni and students to share their career goals and dreams with each other by joining in the HTBA Tech Dreams campaign!  The HTBA recently completed a refresh of its brand and is eager to reinvigorate our connection with our alumni and the greater tech community. The goal of Tech Dreams is to more tightly knit the Anderson HTBA and tech communities by sharing our common passion and ambitions.

Recently, students, alumni, and other tech industry veterans submitted photos and videos capturing a high point in their tech career. From that first magical trip to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), to an awesome job offer, to sharing news of a milestone life event, there were some wonderful moments shared. Jason Wakizaka‘s ('12) photo (see above) that captures him sealing a professional partnership with the Gates Foundation may just take the cake (or should we say Kindle?).

You are invited to join in the HTBA’s Tech Dreams today by voting on a submitted photo or video that you love. Check out all the entries on Facebook by clicking here. Voting begins on March 1^st and ends on March 15^th when the winner will be announced not only to great fanfare but also to a grand prize of a Kindle Fire!

If you would like to know more, please visit our website www.htbaanderson.com/HTBA-Tech-Dreams or e-mail HTBATechDreams@gmail.com

This is a great opportunity to share your tech dreams and win a Kindle. 



Rakesh Sarin: Happiness equals Reality minus Expectations

 

Rakesh Sarin, UCLA Anderson's Paine Chair in Management, considers himself an engineer. In his latest book, he and co-author Manel Baucels (Ph.D. '99 -- who earned his undergraduate degree in engineering from ETSEIB, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, now a professor at the Barcelona School of Management) set about quantifying happiness and sought to come up with a formula for it as well. Spoiler alert: That formula is Happiness equals Reality minus Expectations.

I had the privelege of interviewing Rakesh for an upcoming podcast about the book, which is titled "Engineering Happiness." It's a great read, aimed at everyone, and a wonderful addition to the literature on happiness and living life; I found some similarities between it and "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. There is a preview clip of our interview above.

My colleague Judy Lin, who writes for UCLA Today and other campus publications did a Q&A with Sarin, that was published last week. It's part of the faculty author series "10 Questions." Here's a highlight:

 

You define happiness mathematically, and you’ve invented "happydons" as a unit of measure. But can the complex state of happiness really be measured this way?

 

Being happy is all about making choices, and describing happiness mathematically helps us see this. We define happiness as the total sum, over time, of momentary emotions, feelings and states of mind. Moment-happiness — pain or pleasure in a particular moment — is very volatile, prone to outside influences and not a good measure. To truly get a sense of overall happiness, we need to measure the intensity and duration of moment-happiness over an extended period of time, similar to the way a seismogram measures ground motion over time.

 

Stated simply, total happiness is the sum total of pleasures minus pains. Happydons, while they’re not really precise, are still a good unit of measure for all those "How are you feeling right now?" moments over time. Let’s say, using a 10-point scale for happydons, I’m having a good conversation: I’ll rate that as nine happydons. Later, I’m having a stressful time dealing with an agitating email — I’ll give that a five. Viewing your happiness like a 24-hour seismogram — the numbers above the midpoint of the graph and the numbers below — the question then becomes, "How can I improve the total sum of happiness? How can I increase the frequency and duration of the positive and reduce the negative?"

Professor Sarin is expected to deliver a "TED Talk" during Ted Week at UCLA Anderson.

You can ready all of Judy's interview with Rakesh Sarin here. 

Please find "Engineering Happiness" on Amazon.com here. 

Finally: I have an extra copy of Professor Sarin's book "Engineering Happiness." First person to watch the video above and leave a comment wins it. Remember to leave your contact info.

#UCLAAndersonTED Connection Making Headlines, Daily Bruin Provides Coverage

The Daily Bruin has a story up regarding the partnership between TED and UCLA Anderson. The piece, written by the DB's Ani Torossian, details the relationship between the two, idea-generating organizations. Here's an excerpt:

In the past, UCLA has hosted one-day events, such as TEDx, for the Los Angeles community. Now TED will return to UCLA to launch what is informally known as the “TED Takeover.” As part of the long-term collaboration, the Anderson community will now get the chance to hear and to discuss various 18-minute lectures conducted by what the TED2012 program lists as statistics whizzes, peace activists, surgeons and economists.

While the partnership will provide a sturdy transitional bridge between higher education and potential future career opportunities for Anderson students, Russell Altenburg, a management graduate student, stressed that the collaboration serves a broader purpose than mere networking.

TED-Anderson allows business students focused on tackling global issues such as poverty and the environmental footprint of human activity to apply what they learn through meaningful discussions that seek to facilitate action, Altenburg said.

“At Anderson, we want to connect ideas with tangible outcomes,” he added.

Check out Torossian's entire piece here.

 

Lonnie Ali ('86) Manages "Corporate Ali"; Devotes Herself to Social Causes

(Muhammad and Lonnie Ali ('86); photo courtesy Celebrity Fight Night)

by David Davis

Editor's Note: With the 2012 London Olympics fast approaching, this is the first in a series of articles about UCLA Anderson alumni with Olympian connections.

As an undergrad at Vanderbilt University, Yolanda "Lonnie" Ali, (nee Williams) set her sights on becoming a clinical psychologist. But needing money for graduate school, she took a job as a sales rep with Kraft Foods.

Three-and-a-half years later, her experience at Kraft persuaded her to switch her career course. She decided to pursue an MBA with an emphasis in marketing, and then climb the corporate ladder as a brand manager. She enrolled at UCLA Anderson because, she says, "I figured an MBA from UCLA would give me an edge. I could go back to Kraft and have a jump on everyone else." Ali graduated from Anderson in 1986.

At UCLA, Lonnie found a vibrant atmosphere, whether she was hanging out with fellow MBA candidates or taking Dr. Richard Stern's standing-room-only statistic courses. "The process of things that we did at UCLA was so useful," she says. "They made us work in groups, and I was like, 'Why are we doing this?' I didn't realize how important working in groups, and managing groups, was until I came to UCLA."

While Williams was earning her MBA, she was re-connecting with a childhood friend, boxing legend Muhammad Ali, who was living in Los Angeles at the time. They first met as neighbors in Louisville, Kentucky, shortly after Cassius Clay, as he was known then, powered his way to the gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics. He was, Lonnie remembers, "this beautiful, very charismatic athlete -- a Greek god almost – in the way he was built and the way he moved."

Four years later, after the "Louisville Lip" captured the heavyweight title with an upset victory over Sonny Liston, he shocked the sports world by embracing Islam and changing his name to Muhammad Ali. When he refused to fight in the Vietnam War on religious grounds, he was ostracized and stripped of the championship belt, only to regain it with an upset victory over George Foreman in 1974.

January Ceridian-Pulse of Commerce Index Down But Don't Worry, We Think February Will Be Much Better

 

The latest Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index^TM is out and the January numbers are not good, showing a drop of 1.7% when compared to December -- and this in the face of some pretty good economic numbers coming from other indicators. Alas, don't worry, Ed Leamer, the chief economist for the Ceridian Index and director of the UCLA Anderson forecast explains why:

"The Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index^TM was down 1.7% from December to January on a month-over-month basis. On a year-over-year basis we're down 2.2%. Both of these number are extremely disappointing, signaling very, very moribund trucking -- and that's in the fact of quite a few other indicators that suggest the economy is turning around, most notably the labor market.

"Everything that we're getting about the labor market is suggesting 2012 is going to be a much better year than 2011. And it's not just the labor market. It's also real retail sales (and) industrial production.

"What's happening with trucking? Why is our measure of trucking so weak? There are several hypothesis.

Jenessa Shapiro's Research Finds Discrimination Against Overweight Shoppers

 

Jenessa  Shapiro is an assistant professor of Management and Organizations at UCLA Anderson School; she joined the faculty of the UCLA Psychology Department after completing her Ph.D. in 2008 and then joined UCLA Anderson in 2011. Her research focuses on modern forms of discrimination that emerge in organizational contexts and how stereotypes can undermine performance. 

Some of Shapiro’s recent work looked at the ways in which overweight or obese shoppers were treated in retail stores. She and her research colleagues set up an elaborate series of tests, sending shoppers in to stores both as themselves and also while wearing obesity prosthetics to gauge how they were treated. This methodology was used to ensure that everything other than size was the same between the "two" shoppers. Also, secret observers were used to watch the interactions and tape recorders were used to document the exchanges. What Shapiro found was that the overweight shoppers were subtly discriminated when shopping:

"In general, our overweight shoppers were treated with more of this “interpersonal hostility.” We did not see evidence of more formal types of discrimination. Nobody was turned away from the store nobody was refused help, but where these differences emerged was when we looked at these interpersonal forms and both the observers and the shoppers and the tape recorders revealed these interpersonal behaviors" were more negative with the overweight shoppers.” 

(the quote above begins at about the 4:10 mark of the video)

The study also used certain "cues" to see if they increased the level of discrimination. In some cases, they did. For example, average weight shoppers who dressed "casually" or "sloppy" did not receive any additional negative treatment. But the overweight shoppers received increased levels of negative treatment when their dress was more casual.

Shapiro's research included '"real" shoppers as well. What she found was that the more overweight a shopper was , the more they reported more rudeness, less friendliness and less eye contact and the were less likely to make a purchase while being more likely to just leave the store without buying anything. 

This last point suggests that a company hurts itself when these negative non-verbal behaviors leak into employee interaction with customers.

Please do check out the whole video as Shapiro details the research and some of the ways companies may work with employees to eliminate these negative behaviors. 

UCLA Anderson Launches TED Takeover (UPDATED)

Jim Stengel, far right, and friends at the announcement of the TED Takeover at UCLA Anderson. Photo credit Carol Zou.

Today in the UCLA Anderson Courtyard, Anderson Adjunct Professor of Marketing Jim Stengel announced a new partnership between TED and UCLA Anderson, a relationship being called the "TED Takeover."

UPDATE: Here is the schedule for the TED Takeover.

Here is the school's press release detailing the event:

UCLA Anderson Launches TED Takeover

TED’s First-ever B-School Partnership Designed to Immerse UCLA Anderson Community in TED Experience

Los Angeles, CA – Feb. 13, 2012 – In its pursuit to cultivate thought leaders and advance ideas, UCLA Anderson School of Management today announced a multi-faceted partnership with globally-renowned nonprofit, TED. This represents TED’s first partnership with a business school.  

The unique association will launch with UCLA Anderson’s “TED Takeover,” a series of collaborative experiences that will enable the UCLA Anderson community to take an active role in the annual TED conference in Long Beach and the simultaneous TEDActive conference in Palm Springs.  The partnership will continue post-conference, with students consulting in class on TED’s brand management and ongoing mission.

“The UCLA Anderson community looks to engage in the big issues of the day as a forum for discussion, and as a source of solutions,” says Judy Olian, Dean of UCLA Anderson School of Management.  “TED does that, attracting the best minds and creative ideas as part of the dialogue.  This partnership represents a tremendous opportunity to add our faculty and students to that discussion.”

The partnership will begin February 27, 2012, with the four-day TED Takeover, designed to immerse the UCLA Anderson community in the TED experience -- inviting faculty and students to hear some of the world’s most innovative thought leaders, encouraging them to engage in dialogue, share and exchange ideas and develop connections that will help advance those efforts.  To facilitate that process, monitors around the school will live-stream the exclusive content from the TED conference in its entirety, and an idea incubation lounge will be set up in the center of the UCLA Anderson complex, featuring signature TED décor and serving as the “thought hub” for the week.  Here, students can watch an uninterrupted simulcast of the TED conference and contribute to the discussion in real time via social media and through other means.