UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate Braces for the Senior Tsunami

Drawing by Isabella Farrell

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By Carolyn Gray Anderson

By 2029, every member of the Baby Boom cohort — those born between 1946 and 1964 — will have turned 65. Boomers make up 35 percent of the U.S. population, and 45 percent of them are already past 50.

UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate presented “Preparing for the Senior Tsunami: The Future of Affordable Housing and Long-Term Care” in partnership with Mercy Housing to address the fact that the majority of California’s housing stock was not designed with aging in place in mind. The day’s panelists agreed unanimously that today’s aging population is decidedly not interested in assisted living or skilled nursing homes.

The good news is that Americans are living longer and remaining relatively healthy. The not-so-good news? Americans are living longer and remaining relatively healthy. This means they insist on independence and a variety of choices well past the age their parents and grandparents might have done, minus the necessary savings or income. Although recent changes in health care law and regulations may move in the direction of community-based care models that focus on wellness, prevention and cost reduction, the regulatory bias in health care funding is still weighted toward institutional care.

UCLA Anderson’s Hal Hershfield Recommends Forgetting the Present to Find Purpose

By Bijan White

How do we derive meaning from the mundane world in which we live? Hal Hershfield, assistant professor of marketing at Anderson, attempts to decipher the complex mechanism of the mind. In research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Hershfield and his colleagues tested whether simulation in general corresponds to and, more important, predicts meaning in life.

In his recent article in Slate, Step Outside Yourself, Hershfield writes about the formal studies and reports, “We found that having people project themselves forward or backward in time or into other geographic locations — compared with having people think about the present — boosted their subsequent reports of meaning in life.”

He reminds us that the mind possesses remarkable abilities of time travel, projection and imagination. We are constantly traveling through time and space in our minds, reliving memories, envisioning faraway places, and entering peoples’ heads. Hershfield asserts that mental stimulation is correlated with a stronger sense of meaning in one’s life.

When feeling a little lost, try to get lost in thought and discover a place deep inside yourself to bring some meaning to the present.

Read more about Hershfield’s research on decision-making in Harvard Business Review.

UCLA Anderson C4C Casino Night Raised a Record $20K for Charity

Under the festive theme of Venice Carnival, the student-run Challenge for Charity’s annual C4C Casino Night raised more than $20,000 for its selected charities, Special Olympics, Junior Achievement and Project ECHO. It’s a record for C4C’s biggest social event of the year, which raised $9,000 last year and clearly exceeded this year’s goal of $15,000.

Held at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles, the fundraiser featured real casino games dealt by favorite Anderson professors and staff, a date auction, a silent auction (with a signed shirt from David Hasselhoff!), live DJs, open bar, dancing and photo booth.

“Even though the chips had no monetary value,” blogged C4C member Zafeer Khan, “students enjoyed playing to win big and get more tickets for the raffle.”

Visit C4C’s blog, Flickr album and Facebook page to check out photos from the event.

UCLA Anderson Distinguished Professor Christopher Tang Named Fellow by MSOM

Dean Judy Olian, on behalf of UCLA Anderson, shared the news that Professor Christopher S. Tang has been selected as a Distinguished Fellow of the Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM) for his outstanding research and scholarship in operations management.

Tang is world-renowned for his deeply influential research on supply-chain management, flexible manufacturing systems, product variety, and social business operations. He has published more than 100 journal articles as well as a book on managing risk in supply chains. In 2011, he was named Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and Fellow of the Production and Operations Management Society(POMS).

Tang is one of an elite group of management science and operations management scholars who are fellows of each of the three premier professional societies in the field. He serves Anderson as Distinguished Professor and Edward W. Carter Chair in Business Administration and is the recipient of numerous awards for his teaching, leadership and research.

HBA’s Conference Modernizing Health Care for the New Age Detailed Major Changes in a Burgeoning Industry

By Cheechee Lin

On February 13, the UCLA Anderson Healthcare Business Association gathered together prominent leaders from health care to discuss industry challenges looking forward. Allison Faris (’15), an Anderson student with a background in civil engineering and sustainability, attended the conference and said, “I thought it was excellent and sets a high bar for next year.”

The inaugural topic was Modernizing Health Care for the New Age. And technology — its great advantages as well as unknowns — was at the center of almost every discussion. Consolidation of services along the lines of ur-consortium Kaiser Permanente, as well as the massive size of the industry, also drove conversations.

"I have yet to arrive in a major international city without having a classmate to call on"

Dwight Holcomb (’11), a graduate of our top-ranked GEMBA for Asia Pacific program reflects on life since Anderson.

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With more than 20 years of global business development and executive management experience, Dwight Holcomb (GEMBA ’11) has co-founded several startup companies: iBuyBaby.com, an e-commerce retail business, along with Millennium Entertainment Inc. (renamed Alchemy in January), an independent film and television distributor and content owner. More recently, Holcomb is founding CEO of LifePet Organic Inc., a company committed to providing natural, “eco-friendly” pet products that keep home environments free of toxins. Holcomb also serves as vice president of the UCLA Anderson Alumni Network Board.

Q: What would you say was the career game-changer that the program provided?

The UCLA-NUS Global Executive MBA program directly influenced my decision to launch a new startup that manufactures organic companion pet products. The relevant education I gained throughout the entire program, the ongoing support and dedication of the faculty, and the vast knowledge and experience available through our global network of classmates and alumni gave me this arsenal of valuable resources to draw from to ensure success. I felt more confident than ever to take the step forward to launch my company.

Q: What did you learn while pursuing your degree that you’ve incorporated into your business?

Each area of focus provided a new and unique opportunity to improve my company. For instance, by reviewing a 2/10 net 30 discounting program we’d had in place for many years, classmates and professors helped me deem it obsolete for our purposes. After removing the unneeded discounting program, our company realized approximately $160,000 in retained revenue, which will occur in perpetuity. The benefit from this single decision came through in-class consulting and will far exceed the cost of the entire program.

 

 

AOL Inc. CEO Tim Armstrong Visits Campus, Discusses Shared Success with Students

AOL Inc. CEO Tim Armstrong spoke with UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian.

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By Bijan White

Tim Armstrong, chairman and CEO of AOL Inc., was invited to UCLA Anderson as a part of the Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series and sat down with Dean Judy Olian to talk about the revolution in video content and more. Armstrong joined AOL in 2009 and brought with him sweeping changes to the company, rendering it a NYSE-listed public company and a model for corporate success. AOL represents some of the largest and most influential brands and digital platforms on the Internet, including AOL.com, AOL Mail, TechCrunch, and Huffington Post.

Prior to joining AOL, Armstrong served as president of Google’s Americas Operations When he joined AOL in such a crucial leadership position, he was effectively an outsider seeking to reinvent the company. “It is sometimes good to come from the outside,” he remarked. “The model of reinventing from the inside out is difficult if you have always been on the inside.” Armstrong argued that his perspective allowed him a clearer view of the company’s situation and enabled him to make better decisions regarding changes in the firm. “Change,” he insists, “is a competitive advantage in the industry, and a great leader must have the fortitude necessary to undergo massive amounts of it.” He pointed to AOL’s recent 11 percent drop in stocks and noted that he believes the company has only become “more valuable; however, Wall Street might not agree. It is a question of how much value you are going to capture today versus what you want to capture tomorrow.”

HBA Conference Takeaway: How Can We Put the Humanity Back into Health Care?

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

With the health care industry growing faster than any other job sector (representing 13 percent of U.S. jobs added since 2010, and 15 percent in California), the timing was perfect for UCLA Anderson’s inaugural health care conference. UCLA Anderson’s Healthcare Business Association organized it with premium sponsorship from Blue Shield of California, Amgen and others, along with the collaboration of many other Anderson groups and UCLA affiliates.

The conference featured keynotes by Dr. Neil Solomon, vice president for Quality and Care System Transformation at Blue Shield of California; Thomas Priselac, president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Health System; and Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO of XPRIZE Foundation, with which UCLA Health System is advancing an organ preservation program.

The program opened with Dean Judy Olian’s introduction of Dr. David Feinberg, whose range of responsibilities encompass president of UCLA Health System, CEO of UCLA Hospital System and associate vice chancellor of UCLA Health Sciences. Feinberg was complimentary in his comments about the students’ adept organization of a conference that highlighted business opportunities in the health sector and covered bases from emerging markets in technology and biopharma to providers’ critical decisions to policy. “But you got the conference all wrong,” he teased. “There’s nothing about patients!”

Alfred E. Osborne, Jr.: The Accidental Professor

Enjoy the full gallery of images.

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By Carolyn Gray Anderson

On Tuesday, February 13, the African-American Students in Management and the Entrepreneur Association co-sponsored a public but informal talk between Dean Judy Olian and Dr. Alfred E. Osborne, Jr., the senior associate dean and professor of global economics and management whom most regard as an Anderson legend.

Now celebrating some 42 years at UCLA, Osborne — wearing his signature ball cap and fashionable “statement” socks — told the dean that he actually never expected to spend his career here. He had earned tenure at Anderson in the late 1970s, when he decided to join the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C., as a Brookings Institution Economic Policy Fellow, conducting studies on venture capital and early investments based on SEC Rule 144 (public sales of restricted and control securities exempt from registration). “I developed Potomac fever,” he confessed; but, luckily for Anderson, Osborne didn’t land the White House job he went after and he returned to California for good.

Olian wanted to hear from Osborne during Black History Month in part because his origin story and the events of his life defy predictable categories. Born to a naturalized U.S. citizen father, an educator from Antigua, and a Panamanian mother, Osborne grew up in Panama City. He earned four degrees at Stanford, a B.S. in electrical engineering, an M.A. in economics, an MBA in finance and a doctorate in business economics. His experiences are typical neither of other Panamanians nor other African-Americans; as Olian observed, the singularity of his choices and experiences thwart any notion that underrepresented groups always have “monolithic” similarities.

Anderson Student Association Puts Diversity in the Spotlight

Top row, left to right: Fark Tari, Saki Takasu, Lindsay Shaffer.

Enjoy our full gallery of photos from the event.

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By Bijan White

On February 5, the student-led weekly Fireside talk focused on the diversity of the student body by providing a forum for students of various backgrounds to share their captivating stories.

Fark Tari (’15), a second-year in entrepreneurial studies, spoke of his experience growing up in an underprivileged environment within a fiercely supportive and dedicated family. Tari worked throughout high school, following the example of his hard-working and educated parents who emigrated from Nigeria. He described his first failure: As a freshman at Vanderbilt, he lost his scholarships because of low grades. However, he proceeded to work his way through college and continued on to graduate school to pursue a master’s in mathematics and accounting. He eventually enrolled in Anderson with a passion for entrepreneurship and education.