UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

How to Keep Up

Dean Judy Olian spoke with PwC's Robert Moritz, who shared his thoughts on the rapidly changing expectations of both the workplace and the workforce

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By Devon Dickau (’15) 

During my first graduate program, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I studied the potential of leveraging media and technology to spark social change. Along with my exploration of television and film as tools for activating people around important social issues, I studied the Twitter revolution in Egypt and the uncanny popularity of YouTube, integrating philosophy, sociology, education theory, and technical knowledge to develop my new understanding of how the world works — and evolves — in a new digital age.

My most poignant takeaway from my time at Harvard: The key to creating change is the ability to keep up with change.

Constant waves in new technologies do the best job of illustrating this phenomenon. For example, any successful marketer today must understand the new technological tools that customers use to communicate. In this way, studying technology from the outside is nearly impossible; as soon as we have a grasp of a technology’s presence and impact, technology has evolved once again.

Authenticity Is the Key to Women’s Career Momentum

By Katrina Kurnit (’17)

Anderson’s Women’s Business Connection recently hosted the WBC Career Afternoon and Mixer, presented by global science and technology innovator Danaher. The event brought together more than 150 women across the greater Anderson community, including alumni, current full-time MBA and FEMBA students, as well as recruiters and business leaders from some of the nation’s top companies.

WBC President Britney Sussman (’16) said, “The various professional clubs at Anderson all offer opportunities to meet recruiters, but the Career Afternoon and Mixer was a special occasion for women to connect on a different, deeper level. The workshops provided an environment to explore careers in the context of personal brand and leading with one’s strengths.”

Sasha Strauss, founder and managing partner at Innovation Protocol and executive-in-residence at UCLA Anderson, opened the event by leading a personal branding workshop. He kicked it off with a discussion of authenticity, addressing the importance of understanding and celebrating what makes each person unique in the job market as much as in our personal lives. As a brand advisor for startups and Fortune 100 companies alike, Strauss has applied his 20 years of marketing and communications expertise to the process of individual brand development. He encouraged audience members to develop their own rubric for measuring success, citing examples from his own professional journey and imploring us to cease trying to be all things to all people and instead to identify our true value and best fit.

Big Ideas at UCLA Anderson’s 2015 Big Data Conference

Big Data: Big Impact FULL PROGRAM

On Friday, November 20, UCLA Anderson’s Center for Management in Media, Entertainment & Sports (MEMES) and the Easton Technology Management Center present Big Data: Big Impact. The one-day interactive conference brings together a cross section of industry experts and academic thought leaders who are shaping and defining the big data conversation.

Bob Lord, CEO of AOL Networks, will deliver the keynote address. Several panels will explore topics ranging from data-driven marketing trends to the role of data analytics in the entertainment value chain. Representatives from chief sponsors Teradata and MarketShare will contribute to these conversations, as will executives from Adobe, IBM, Hulu, Cancer Treatment Centers of America and many other organizations.

The conference aims to teach how data-driven capabilities and technology solutions give companies insights about their customers, help identify the right technology solution to maximize business impact, and ways to integrate data insights into strategy and decision-making.

Big Data: Big Impact is for executives who are either providing technology solutions for their organization or using data analytics to make business decisions across all functional areas.

Register now!

The Basics of Venture Capitalism

By Nathan Moorman

UCLA Anderson’s Entrepreneur Association kicked off their Venture Capital Speaker Series with a talk by UCLA Anderson Lecturer Jon Funk, founder of Ocean Road.

Funk, a professional venture capitalist who’s worked in Southern California since the 1980s, has invested in dozens of companies and openly admits to being a “paid member of the Dark Side,” as he puts it.

While students snacked on pizza, Funk dove into the origins of venture capital and its growth on the back of innovation in electronics, along with a broad overview of what venture capital is. He went into the effects of the dot-com boom and its huge, negative effect on venture capitalism — from which it’s only just now recovering.

Recognition for UCLA Anderson Faculty

Clockwise from top left: Bhagwan Chowdhry, Mark Grinblatt, Andrea Eisfeldt, Romain Wacziarg, Margaret Shih, Kumar Rajaram, Danny Oppenheimer, Mark Garmaise

Dean Judy Olian recently made the following announcements about UCLA Anderson’s Faculty:

Professor Bhagwan Chowdhry will become the inaugural faculty director of Impact@Anderson, a collaboration across UCLA among students, staff and faculty to seed and advance the school’s social impact agenda. In this role, Bhagwan will direct the school’s activities related to social impact — health care, environment, impact investing, education, policy and technology dimensions. Bhagwan has been teaching at UCLA Anderson since 1988. He earned a Ph.D. in 1989 from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He also has an MBA in finance from the University of Iowa

Professor Mark Grinblatt, the Japan Alumni Chair in International Finance, has advanced to Professor, Above Scale, the highest academic distinction at the University of California. Mark received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1982 and joined the finance area at UCLA Anderson in 1981. Mark is a trailblazing researcher in asset pricing, investor behavior and fund management.

Professor Andrea Eisfeldt, an outstanding researcher in macrofinance with a focus on the connections between financial frictions and the real economy, has been appointed to the Laurence D. and Lori W. Fink Endowed Chair in Finance. Her recent work includes research in corporate finance, and regulatory and design issues in derivatives markets. Andrea earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1998 and she joined Anderson from Northwestern’s Kellogg School in 2010.

Aviva Altmann: The Social Impact of an MBA

By Aviva Altmann (’13)

Reflecting back on my time at UCLA Anderson, I am grateful for the many people and opportunities that helped build my career into what it is today.

I came to Anderson in 2011 after working to improve public education in Los Angeles with Green Dot Public Schools — where I was so positively influenced by other Anderson alumni that I knew that this school would be the right place for me. While I loved working in education reform, I wanted a chance to really hone and improve my management skills to become a better leader. Working for a quickly growing nonprofit organization meant there was little time or opportunity for training or professional development, and there was still so much that I had to learn.

Instantly at Anderson I was motivated by the energy of my classmates and the countless opportunities to get involved in things that I was passionate about, with people whom I today count on as lifelong friends. I threw myself into Net Impact, participated in the Haas Education Case Competition and did an internship with FINCA microfinance. Best of all, I was able to turn that internship into an AMR project that culminated in a trip to Uganda to conduct local market research to evaluate whether to launch a social enterprise. In doing this research, I learned more from my friends and our AMR advisor Gayle Northrop than from anything else I did in business school. This experience forced us to ask a question: “How could a microfinance organization work to solve the health challenges of the most vulnerable populations on a global scale?” And, in trying to solve what seemed like the most impossible problem, we were able to come together to develop and recommend real solutions.

The Importance of Funding Fellowships

By Nathan Moorman

There’s more work to be done, according to Dean Judy Olian, who spoke at this year’s Fellowship Reception while dozens of fellowship donors and recipients enjoyed hors d’oeuvres, sipped on wine and chatted with one another in the Fowler Museum courtyard.

Olian announced that 78 donor fellowships — some worth up to $25,000 — were awarded to 111 recipients and totaled $1 million. She also stressed how important fellowships are in the face of the egregious debt that student loans can cause. In the U.S., 40 million people are currently in debt from student loans, adding up to a staggering $1.2 trillion. At Anderson, the average student debt load upon graduation was nearly $90,000 in 2015. Olian also expressed her desire to do more, mentioning Into the Next: The Campaign for UCLA Anderson, whose goal is to raise a minimum of $300 million, with $80 million set aside for student aid and fellowships to help lessen the burden on students. Thus far, the school has raised $188.3 million.

Los Angeles Is a Hub of Clean Tech Innovation

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Photo: @porttechla

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By Makibi A. Takagi (’17)

Last week, several of my fellow Energy Management Group members and I attended the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator’s third annual Cleantech Global Showcase. The conference highlighted startups tackling the energy, transportation, food and water sustainability issues facing modern society. The showcase kicked off with keynote speaker Mayor Eric Garcetti, who highlighted how the Los Angeles leads in the advancement of policy supporting the development of clean technology.

Mayor Garcetti described the work L.A. is doing to overcome sustainability challenges, such as hosting the recent Climate Leaders Summit, where L.A. welcomed mayors from major cities in the U.S. and China to discuss sustainability initiatives. He also cited L.A.’s success in deploying sustainable technology to improve the life of Angelenos through the massive expansion of the light rail system and the widespread adoption of solar.

Earn a Million Dollars in Seed Money by Making the World a Better Place

By Nathan Moorman

This year marks the seventh annual Hult Prize competition, organized by the Hult Prize Foundation. Offered in partnership with former U.S. President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative, the competition aims to create and launch the most compelling social business ideas — namely, startup enterprises that tackle grave issues faced by billions of people.

Each year, teams are tasked with confronting a different global social challenge with this year’s being “Crowded Urban Spaces.” Participants must look for ways to leverage connectivity to improve life for congested urban dwellers with a focus on increasing residents’ income by better connecting them to products, people and services.

Psychology of Belief Expert Jennifer Whitson Is Interviewed for New Documentary Film

Assistant Professor of Management and Operations Jennifer Whitson joined the faculty of UCLA Anderson last summer from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and her B.A. from UC Irvine. Whitson was recently interviewed for a forthcoming documentary that explores the psychology of belief.

Whitson’s research delves into what persuades people to imagine patterns where there aren’t any, such as stock market predictions. She focuses on illusory and accurate pattern perception as well as how the experience of power changes the way we come to understand the world around us. By demonstrating a link between emotional experiences and the desire for structure, her studies have both psychological and management implications.

Whitson co-athored an article published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology titled “The Emotional Roots of Conspiratorial Perceptions, System Justification, and Belief in the Paranormal.” It reports the results of experiments the authors conducted after predicting that experiencing emotions reflective of uncertainty about the world (e.g., worry, surprise, fear, hope), compared to “certain” emotions like anger, happiness and disgust, would activate the need to imbue the world with order and structure across a wide range of compensatory measures. They found that self-affirmation eliminated the effects of uncertain emotions on compensatory control.

The film being produced by Fama Media Productions asks, why do we believe the things that we do, whether religious leanings or even conspiracy theories? The filmmakers interview leading psychologists and philosophers to investigate why we continue to believe in things even when there is clear evidence that contradicts that belief. “We chose Jennifer Whitson as our last interviewee because of her research into how uncertainty and control or lack thereof can lead us to see patterns where there are none,” said general manager Mesa Fama. “She is an integral part of our film, as what she brings to it really rounds out and ties together everything we’ve explored.”