UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Meet Anderson’s New Chief Information Officer, Ron Chandler, Techie and Diversity Advocate

Q. How did you first become interested in tech?

Growing up I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I went to Brooklyn Technical High School in New York, and my dad owned a radio and TV repair shop. So you can say I’ve been a techie since way back.

Q. As chief information officer, what is your role here at Anderson?

My job is to foreshadow technology needs of students, faculty and staff here at Anderson and then to articulate these needs as appropriate investments. This is of course all done to help enable continued innovation at Anderson.

Q. You received your MBA from Michigan Ross and returned to UC Berkeley Haas for a certificate from the CIO Institute. How does it feel to be back in the higher education space?

I’m really excited to be at Anderson and to see the opportunities that lie ahead for leveraging technology here. My wife is an Anderson alumna (Antoinette Reynolds Chandler ’95, chief deputy treasurer of San Diego County), so she’s happy and will probably be my most engaged critic.

Q. What are your thoughts on exposing students to technology at an earlier age?

I think it’s important to teach and expose kids to technology at an early age. There is a certain language and culture around technology that many kids are getting left out of. It’s a different world than the one that I grew up in. It’s a digital world where one’s ability to navigate therein determines, in too many cases, life outcomes for students and adults. Early exposure also helps to demystify technology. This is important because it is at this point that you start to learn how to extract optimum value out of technology.

Gary Fraser on the Importance of Black History Month, MBAs and Things Uniquely UCLA Anderson

UCLA Anderson’s assistant dean of student affairs for the full-time MBA program can be credited with numerous successes along the journey that has led him to us. Dr. Gary Fraser, originally from New York City, earned his B.S. from Syracuse University, his MBA from NYU Stern and his Ed.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as dean of the full-time MBA program at USC Marshall School of Business and as dean of students at NYU Stern. Prior to his entry to academia, Fraser enjoyed an eight-year career in brand management with prestigious companies such as Kraft Foods, Cadbury Beverages and Sara Lee.

Q. What are the responsibilities of the assistant dean of student affairs?

My focus is on student leadership and the development of the students. I fulfill this focus by providing the support students need to succeed academically and by opening up opportunities for their MBA experience to be transformational.

Q. How did you go from managing large, household brands to managing student affairs?

When I was in marketing, I would occasionally talk to peers about what the future holds for brand managers. One day, an associate brand manager suggested I talk to the dean of NYU Stern because she thought I would be a great fit there. I ended up doing that (I was a NYU Stern alumnus and came back to campus for an event) and, a few months later, I was able to interview for the assistant dean of NYU Stern’s Office of Career Development, which led to the start of my career in higher education.

Q. In your work, you communicate with people from a variety of diverse backgrounds, languages and cultures. What is your secret to doing this successfully?

Understanding where someone is coming from is key to building any good relationship. I also find I can relate better to that person who then becomes more comfortable sharing information about his or her background or cultural difference. I truly believe that there is something valuable to learn from almost anyone, and I go into any conversation expecting that.

Reclaiming the Tech Dream: Freada Kapor Klein on Closing Gaps

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

UCLA Anderson’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports and the Anderson chapter of Net Impact hosted activist, entrepreneur and thought leader Freada Kapor Klein, founding partner at the Kapor Center for Social Impact in Oakland. Kapor Klein is author of Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay. She co-leads the Kapor Center and Kapor Capital with husband Mitch Kapor, who, among his many tech and business accomplishments, founded the Lotus Development Corporation and designed Lotus 1-2-3. They champion impact technology companies that make real improvements in real communities.

Last August Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein pledged $40 million over the next three years to fix the leaky pipeline to opportunities and careers in technology. Their pledge funds a set of initiatives designed to give women and underrepresented ethnic minorities a better shot at becoming tech entrepreneurs.

Interviewed by Christal M. Jackson, founder of Head and Heart Philanthropy, Kapor Klein shared her wisdom, experience and advice on a number of salient points, chief among them these five:

1) A pipeline problem exists, but it’s become the excuse for exclusion.

Biases and barriers within the pipeline to tech careers prevent people from advancing through it and often cause them to exit the path if they've embarked on it. If we don’t fix the leaks, Kapor Klein said, “We will see our entire national standard of living steadily decline relative to the rest of the world.” We all lose, she said, when people in underrepresented groups are encouraged not to aim high — being persuaded, for instance, that the accident of birth that landed them in a certain ZIP code precludes them from certain educational and professional trajectories. “One low expectation along the way deprives us all of talent.”

Susan Wojcicki: From AdWords to Youtube

By Cheechee Lin 

Visionary. Entrepreneur. Women in tech advocate. Google employee no.16. One of America’s most powerful women. Mother of five. UCLA Anderson alumna.

Add it all up and you’ve got Susan Wojcicki (’98), CEO of YouTube. Wojcicki joined Dean Judy Olian for the most recent installment of the Dean’s Distinguished Speakers Series.

Wojcicki had just graduated from Anderson when she relocated back to the Bay Area. “I was thinking, okay, so I have student loans, houses are expensive, so I should be a good entrepreneur and rent out part of my house,” Wojcicki said. “Initially, I rented out my garage to (then Stanford Ph.D. students) Sergey Brin and Larry Page purely for the additional income. Little did I know that renting to these two entrepreneurs would turn out to be quite savvy.” This decision was the turning point in Wojcicki’s career, as the humble beginnings of a search giant emerged from Wojcicki’s garage and she later joined the company as its sixteenth employee.

“Join a company where you believe in the product,” Wojcicki said. At the time of Google’s start, it was one of many search engines on the market. However, when the service was down for one day, Wojcicki quickly realized how Google had transformed her life. “I couldn’t get my work done without it.” A strong product will have a differentiator. For Google, that was the company’s focus on a really relevant search product.

Jane Wurwand Champions Women Entrepreneurs

Enjoy photos from the Velocity conference

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By Golie Alemi

Jane Wurwand’s history begins with a modest upbringing. After her father passed away when she was just two, her mother, a trained nurse, returned to work to support Wurwand and her three sisters. “It was my mother who taught me work ethic, independence and resilience,” Wurwand says.

A simple message of five words shared by her mother would ultimately define Wurwand’s life: “Learn how to do something.” She echoed these same words during her keynote address delivered to a full house at UCLA Anderson’s Women’s Leadership Summit, Velocity.

For Wurwand, it all began when the fiercely independent entrepreneur, with her then boyfriend Raymond (now husband), saw an opportunity in what the U.S. skin care education industry lacked. The pair founded the International Dermal Institute in a small classroom in Marina Del Rey, Calif., in 1983. Not long afterward, Wurwand realized no other product line embraced her approach to skin health, so in 1986 she developed her own.

How the Film Industry Reeled in Anderson Alumna Monique Jones

Monique Jones (’93) is vice president of finance and controller for Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, a leading independent finance and production company dedicated to developing high-quality motion pictures and television programming. Jones provides financial analysis and decision-making support to the executive management team. She has also held senior finance positions with Sony Pictures Television International, Icon Entertainment International, Myriad Pictures and PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. She moderated a panel at Anderson's 2016 Pulse Conference in January.Twenty years into her career in the entertainment industry, she looks back at how she aspired professionally.  

Q. You began your entertainment career in Los Angeles in 1996, but you’re originally from Omaha. Did you know growing up in the Midwest that you wanted to land in Hollywood?

When I was growing up in Nebraska, my dream was to move to New York City. I didn’t know what I would do there, I just knew it was the city for me. I made a pit stop in Washington, D.C., to attend college at Georgetown University. Although I majored in finance, it was during my college years that I developed my interest in the entertainment industry. Specifically, I wanted to work in the music industry. But before heading west, I moved to New York after graduating from college and worked as an internal auditor in the financial services industry.

Q. What led you to UCLA for your MBA?

After working in financial services for four years, I knew I would never be passionate about a career in that field. That said, I was not prepared to quit my job and take an entry-level position in the music industry. I decided my best strategy would be to earn my MBA at a school in Los Angeles. This would give me the opportunity to pursue a variety of internships during my two years in a full-time MBA program and determine if a career in entertainment was the right fit for me. If it wasn’t, then I would still have earned my MBA and would be able to pursue other career options.

Top 10 Ways a UCLA Anderson MBA Helps You at an Early-Stage Tech Startup

Textpert founder Neama Dadkhahnikoo (far left) and his team at work

By Neama Dadkhahnikoo (’14)

As the chief operating officer of Textpert (www.textpertapp.co), a smartphone app that provides quick, crowd-sourced advice for how to respond to texts that have you stumped, I wear many hats every day. Whether it’s fundraising, product development, growth marketing or startup strategy, I have to be ready for any new challenges the startup world throws in our direction. Thankfully, my MBA from UCLA Anderson has proven itself handy time and again. Here are the top 10 aspects of an MBA from UCLA Anderson that have helped me, and Textpert, get to where we are today:

1. Learning how to build a 17-tab financial model with dynamic growth assumptions to impress number-crunching investors.
2. Entrepreneurial classes that taught me how to evaluate an opportunity, size a market and write a bullet-proof pitch deck.
3. Dozens of chances to practice and perfect my pitching and public speaking skills — so that I can shine whether speaking to a crowd or to an individual angel investor
4. Having world-class VCs, industry leaders and startup veterans who were my professors and fellow alumni just a phone call away
5. A student ID with no expiration date that allows me to return to campus to speak with college students every week, providing invaluable first-hand feedback from our target audience (don’t leak this to the dean)
6. Technology classes that help me understand rapid iteration, product-market fit, and the fact that analytics and customer insights are the lifeblood of an early-stage startup
7. An active and robust alumni network through both UCLA and UCLA Anderson, giving me access to amazing connections with a wide array of experience and expertise
8. Soft skill classes that taught me how to build and manage a team, persuade VCs to invest and influence customer behavior
9. Using the many collaborative spaces at Anderson as my own rent-free incubator after graduation (seriously, don’t tell the dean)
10. Lifelong friendships with brilliant classmates who open doors, make introductions and invest in my startup

As we say in the startup world, UCLA Anderson helped me pivot my life from ordinary to extraordinary.

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Neama Dadkhahnikoo is chief operating officer at Textpert. Download his app at www.textpertapp.co and give him some customer feedback at neama@textsavvyapp.com.

Anderson Team Wins First Place at Challenges in Energy Case Competition

View photos from the case competition

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By Daniel Komula (’17)

On Friday, January 29, UCLA Anderson’s Energy Management Group hosted the fifth annual Challenges in Energy Case Competition, which drew teams from some of the top business schools from around the country.

This competition had the largest turnout to date, with 12 teams from 10 schools participating, including Rice, Duke, Purdue, UC Berkeley, USC, UCLA, SMU, UC Irvine, Northwestern and Cornell. UCLA Anderson demonstrated its knowledge of the energy industry by winning the competition and taking home the $2,500 prize. The Anderson team, Age of Voltron, consisted of Dan Komula (’17), Arnab Pal (’17) and Ean Mulligan (’17), all active members of the Energy Management Group. This victory continues a tradition of success for UCLA’s Energy Management Group. In late 2015, UCLA won the Ross Renewable Energy Case Competition and a team from UCLA won the fourth annual Challenges in Energy Competition last year.

Women’s Opportunity Lies in the Unscripted Spaces

Left to right: Karla Ballard Williams, Lisa Erspamer, Mali Kinberg, Susanna Fogel

Enjoy photos from the Velocity conference

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By Carolyn Gray Anderson

One of the leitmotifs at last week’s Velocity conference was the obligation women have to help other women — help people in general, as keynote speaker Jane Wurwand pointed out — as far as keeping workplaces diverse. “Pull a woman in behind you when you move up so that there is no void,” she said. Hollywood is notoriously white and male, and the annual Women’s Business Leadership Summit included a special panel for industry veterans to talk about what’s changed for the better since they embarked on their careers and where they feel like they still face roadblocks.

Karla Ballard Williams, founder of YING Bank (whose motto is Currency for Humankind), moderated the panel, which included: Lisa Erspamer, an Emmy-nominated media executive who co-founded Happy Street Entertainment; EVP and head of international at Media Rights Capital Mali Kinberg, whose knowledge of several languages led her, following a Ph.D. in literature, to a career in foreign film sales and distribution; and Susanna Fogel, a comedy writer, producer and director whose first feature, Life Partners, will soon be followed by a second.

Williams is co-chair of the 41st Annual Gracies, an awards show supported by the Alliance for Women in Media, where Williams serves on the board. She was previously SVP of Participant Media’s TAG division, a social-action agency leveraging the power of storytelling to drive impact, and she served as the global account lead for Sony Pictures Entertainment on rebranding and strategy engagements for Latin America. She is an appointee to the United States Federal Communication Committee on Diversity in a Digital Age.

She opened with, “We’re sitting here with women who have killed it in entertainment.” So, why the dearth of women still?

Ron Herndon: The Head Start Activist

By Paul Feinberg

Ron Herndon has lived a life of service to others.

Since 1975, he has served as director of the Albina Head Start Program in Portland, Oregon. While working for the welfare of hundreds of families in the Rose City, he also found the time to spend two decades (1993–2013) as chairman of the board of the National Head Start Association. His community activism was not limited to his work with Head Start; he also organized the Portland chapter of the Black United Front, a civil rights organization that fought for better educational opportunities for black children in Oregon.

Herndon’s accomplishments over the years are myriad. For example, he created a program that both addressed his need for more substitute teachers for his Head Start classrooms and provided much-needed jobs for parents of Head Start children.

“We’re very proud of the program that we created for parents interested in becoming Head Start teacher assistants,” says Herndon. ”We have a volunteer training program for these parents. It’s over a hundred hours, in which we go through everything teachers need to know in the classroom: curriculum, first aid, child behavior and expectations. You name it, we go through it.”

Herndon and his Head Start colleagues in Portland make it a practice to hire substitute teachers from this pool of volunteers. “Once you become a teacher assistant, we will pay for you to go to college, get your A.A., and were going to do the same thing for the B.A.,” he says.