UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Welcome UCLA Anderson EMBA Class of 2015

The Executive MBA Class of 2015 hit campus this week for their Leadership Foundations course, a five-day two-unit course taken during orientation designed to develop strategic and leadership agility. The 72 new students launch into their core courses with the Fall Quarter.

For more on EMBA, head here.

A New Track on High-Speed Rail

UCLA Anderson’s Jerry Nickelsburg, adjunct full professor of economics, wants to build a railroad. Well, he wants California to build a railroad, a high-speed rail project to carry us—literally and figuratively—into the future. He just worries that the troubled current California High-Speed Rail plan won’t get us there, and we’ll be stuck on a platform waiting.

His paper, “Switching to the Future Track: An Essay on California High-Speed Rail,” outlines his idea to make the plan bolder, thereby ensuring its success. “The problem is not that CHSR is too big and too ambitious. Rather the problems with CHSR as currently constituted are large and the solutions proposed thus far are too small and not ambitious enough,” he writes. “Specifically, we ought to be looking at transportation infrastructure synergies as they apply to the 21st Century and if we do, CHSR can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”

His plan includes links to a proposed world-class international airport in Palmdale and to California’s Mojave Spaceport. These not-at-all small or unambitious ideas, he says, can help generate the capital-friendly climate that will bring private investors into the fold and make up the currently projected approximately $55 billion-budget shortfall. Bringing in that private investment is the key to his plan, which, he says, will also cement California’s place as “gateway to the Pacific Rim” before newer, high-tech airports in places such as Denver can steal passengers away.

Nickelsburg’s paper is especially timely given CHSR’s recent legal woes. In mid-August, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael P. Kenny ruled that the state neglected requirements on funding and environmental review included in 2008’s $9-billion ballot measure.

Check out Professor Nickelsburg’s paper here and more about him here.

Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry on Financial Inclusion in India: Progress, But More Still Needs to be Done

 

UCLA Anderson Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry founded Financial Access at Birth, a social and economic innovation that seeks financial inclusion for the millions of people around the world who lack access to traditional financial institutions. Under FAB, each child born in the world would have 100 dollars deposited into a bank account at birth -- with access to the money coming later in life. The innovation has a number of potential benefits beyond the financial as each account would also serve to document the very existence of every person born allowing for greater access to a variety of potential services, including health care and education.

Professor Chowdhry recently returned from India, where that country is instituting a program similar to FAB, one that would actually complement Chowdhry's plans should they achieve widespread implementation. Blogging in the Huffington Post today, he wrote:

"Three years ago I blogged "Is Financial Inclusion Imminent in India?" I have just returned from India after observing the progress India has made towards financial inclusion. Yes, there has been progress, but much remains to be done," says Chowdhry.  

While in India, Chowdhry took a number of videos. In the video above, he demonstrates the fingerprint and iris scans involved in creating a bank account for an Indian citizen. 

As for the issues Chowdhry identified, he says, "Despite all these signs of progress towards financial inclusion, the prevalence and reach of these new technologies is very limited and sparse. It can take anywhere between 7 to 90 days to receive the unique ID number by mail. I had to drive for an hour to find the store where I could see a couple of customers using Airtel money. Similarly, the Bank of Maharashtra branch where micro-ATM was deployed was also a 45 minute drive. This will certainly change. But even so, people in India seem to be using mobile banking services mainly for money transfer."

RockCorps Trades Beats for Volunteer Feats

RockCorps, the brainchild of UCLA Anderson alumni Stephen Greene ('01) and Grady Lee ('01), continues to make a worldwide difference. Founded in 2003, the production company trades concert tickets for volunteerism. For four hours of work on pro-social projects, musicians as diverse as Jurassic 5, Lady Gaga, Snoop Dogg, Maroon 5 and The Smashing Pumpkins perform for crowds sometimes numbering in five digits. In mid-July, the French chapter of RockCorps made headlines by hosting 1,300 volunteers for a show in Paris featuring Trey Songz, Oxmo Puccino, Kerry James, Tal and DJ Cut Kill er. Another show is planned for Rouen, France, in September.

More than 130,000 music fans have donated 4-hour blocks of time since RockCorps’ founding.

For more on the group, check out our 2005 Assets profile and their homepage.

UCLA Anderson EMBA Class of 2013 Graduates

UCLA Anderson’s Executive MBA Class of 2013 graduated on July 27th. Dean Olian reminded the 72 freshly minted alumni to Think in the Next as they returned to the working world with their new degree. “We hope we’ve prepared you well for a world that is profoundly, constantly and rapidly changing,” she said. “[One] where we don’t know the precise parameters of the future, but where we all need to be curious in asking questions, hungry in seeking information, flexible in adapting our behaviors and models and open to radical differences from what is, to what will be.”

Jeff Berg, chairman of Resolution, a talent and literary agency with offices in Los Angeles and New York, and a member of Anderson’s Board of Visitors, gave the commencement keynote. A dinner and reception for graduates and their families and friends followed at UCLA's Royce Hall Terrace.

NASA, UCLA Anderson Grads Celebrate Mars Exploration Anniversary

On August 5, 2012 NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity touched down—and six UCLA Anderson alumni breathed a sigh of relief. Allen Chen (FEMBA ’07), Keith Comeaux (EMBA ’08), Keith Naviaux (FEMBA ’98), Kelly Clarke (FEMBA ’02), Jeffery Favretto (FEMBA ‘09) and Saina Ghandchi (EMBA ‘13) all participated in some stage of Curiosity’s development, from design to touchdown. In fact, it was Chen’s voice you might have heard announce the mission’s first success, “Touchdown confirmed. We are safe on Mars,” he said.

It took nearly nine months of space travel to reach the Red Planet and begin its mission of scientific exploration. In the year since, Curiosity has driven more than a mile, “beamed back more than 190 gigabits of data, including 70,000 images (36,700 full images and 35,000 thumbnails), and its laser has fired more than 75,000 times at 2,000 targets,” according to NASA. It has also accomplished its “primary goal by determining that Mars has evidence of ancient environments suitable for life.”

The rover is currently on its way to Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high mountain scientists hope can help shed more light on Martian history.

Look for expanded coverage of the Curiosity rover mission and the Anderson grads involved in Assets Digital in early September.

Check out NASA’s video overview of Curiosity’s first year.

SIEML Engages Possible B-School Students

Fifty top-performing students from historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions were at UCLA Anderson last month for the University of California Summer Institute for Emerging Managers and Leaders. Rotating across six UC business schools, the institute teaches principles of business development, entrepreneurship and other key management skills. Students attend classes for two consecutive summers, learn from world-class educators, participate in hands-on workshops and make valuable connections with peers and industry leaders.

According to Linda Baldwin, Anderson assistant dean of diversity and the UC SIEML director for 2013, the program helps the MBA school connect with students and forge a link before graduation. “Take a look of other graduate degree programs. They have a pipeline from their undergraduate departments,” she said. “With the MBA program, there’s typically a break. The students get scattered.”

This engagement strategy works for Anderson, as well as for the program’s corporate sponsors. “They too are looking at how to diversify their workforce and asking the question, ‘Where do we go to find the top-quality students in the country?’” she said. According to Baldwin, companies are looking for the best, strongest and most diverse workforce they can find and see the economics in supporting and promoting a diversity program of SIEML’s quality. “For the employers, it’s a relatively easy way to see students they don’t traditionally find—top performing students with a 3.8 and above,” she said. “In all likelihood, these companies would not have seen them.”

In the end, the program is there for the students, to help them see the possibilities available to them, regardless of undergraduate degree track or current career goals. When asked if this year’s program was a success, Baldwin quotes one of the students, “He said, ‘UC SIEML pushed us to what we thought was the limit. It challenged us, and it made us think outside the box to the point that we realized that there isn't a box.’”

And, as UCLA Today quoted Kayla McCollum, a sophomore business major at Florida A&M University, "'I had always thought about obtaining an MBA, but had not yet considered how it would fit into my future,' McCollum said in her written evaluation of the program. 'Now I have a much clearer understanding of how I can make it happen, and I want it to happen at UCLA!'"

To read more about the program, head to the SIEML website and UCLA Today.

Kermani’s ('09) Crazy Cart Spins Great Press

It took years for Ali Kermani ('09) to perfect Razor’s Crazy Cart and get it to market, but now it’s hitting the scene—in a big way. From David Letterman to tech blog Gizmodo to the Huffington Post, the product is the summer gift.

A near cast-off from Razor’s prototype line, Kermani believed the mechanized cart had the mojo to go places. But first, Kermani had to go someplace—business school. While earning his MBA, Kermani collaborated with the UCLA School of Engineering to tweak the old design. He then went on to win the $15,000 Wolfen Entrepreneurial Fellowship Award and the Tech Coast Angels competition and place second at the Knapp Venture Competition and the Fast Pitch Competition.

Kermani now heads up a new Razor division, Phase Two, which is focused on the core scooter market. Meanwhile, his baby continues to make waves.

Check it out on Letterman, Today, HuffPost and Gizmodo. Get more into Kermani’s story here, and check out Kermani and UCLA’s Bill Cockrum, adjunct professor of entrepreneurial finance, leadership and business ethics and investment management, test riding the Drift Cart, as it was originally named.

UCLA Anderson MFE featured in Bloomberg Businessweek

Bloomberg Businessweek featured the UCLA Anderson Master of Financial Engineering program in its July 23 issue. “A UCLA Program Tailored to the needs of ‘Big Data’” highlighted the school as a great place to get equipped to take advantage of the “big data phenomenon.”

“The big data phenomenon is getting bigger by the minute, and no where is that more apparent than in the Masters in Financial Engineering program at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management,” the article said.

The MFE focuses on preparing grads for careers in risk management, investment banking, money management, derivative pricing, private equity, hedge funds and in technical operational areas of corporate finance.

Check out the article here and the MFE page here.

Fox News Interviews Shlomo Benartzi About CA Retirement Plan

In September 2012, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program. For the 6.3 million Californians without a pension plan or 401(k), the plan mandates automatic payroll contributions into retirement accounts.

This could be good news for the almost 50% of California workers looking at a retirement near or in poverty, according to the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, many folks 50 to 64 years old aren’t looking at golden years filled with beaches and golf. Three quarters of them have annual incomes below $52,201 and an average retirement balance of $26,395. If you look at the median savings, more than half this group basically has no retirement savings at all, according to The New School.

The Fox News report asked experts what the new law could mean for future retirees. "There are pros and cons to the various approaches," UCLA Anderson’s Shlomo Benartzi said. "But I think the critical ingredient is to make it easier for people to save for retirement." Professor Benartzi is co-chair of the Behavioral Decision-Making Group and a leading authority on behavioral finance with a special interest in household finance and participant behavior in retirement savings plans.

"We eat too much. We drink too much. We don't save enough. I think the difference in the case of savings is that I think we can fix it. By making it easier to spend less and save more," he said.

Check out more about Professor Benartzi here and the Fox News piece here.