UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

UCLA Anderson School of Management Adds Social Innovation Specialization

By Paul Feinberg

As part of our continuing efforts to enable our students to meet the evolving needs of today’s business world, UCLA Anderson has added a specialization in social impact to the curriculum. UCLA Anderson currently offers a variety of specializations, including those in accounting, brand management, corporate finance, entertainment and entrepreneurship, among others.

The specialization in social impact enables students to build in-depth expertise in mission-driven businesses, while customizing their academic preparation toward leadership in endeavors aimed at transformational social change.

“Today’s world calls for a more holistic approach to business, as customers demand more transparency and social responsibility from the companies they engage with,” said Professor of Finance Bhagwan Chowdhry, who led the creation of the new specialization. “As young professionals strive to make a positive impact through their careers, they’ll need to navigate the blurred lines between traditional for-profit business and the social sector and the rise of benefit and flexible-purpose corporations.”

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Social Innovation Week returns to UCLA Anderson April 18–21 under the theme Ignite Impact

Applying to UCLA Anderson? Admissions Officer Satiya Witzer on the Ideal Candidate

Satiya Witzer (’13) grew up with Anderson.

Selected as a Riordan Scholar at the age of 14, Witzer has been closely tied to UCLA Anderson since her high school days. The Riordan Scholars program is a UCLA Anderson initiative invested in pairing first-generation college students with MBA student mentors to provide guidance in their pursuit of higher education. This jump start to Witzer’s career planted the seed for her future at Anderson. Now Witzer has returned to UCLA once more, this time as associate director of MBA Admissions.

Q: You went from an accounting degree at USC to PricewaterhouseCoopers. What prompted you to pursue your MBA degree at Anderson?

When I was 14, I happened upon the Riordan Scholars Program at UCLA Anderson. I had gone to a public high school, and there was a significant dearth of college counseling available, so this was an incredible opportunity for me. I was paired with an Anderson mentor, Clare Davidson Flynn (’00), who ended up having a significant impact on my life. She helped me with my first draft of my resume, invited me to my first women’s business conference here at the school — and from then on, I knew I wanted to be at Anderson. The skills I learned in this program built the foundation for my future.

I wanted to study abroad so I went to the National University of Singapore as an undergraduate, but two years in, I realized that if I wanted to build a career in the U.S., I needed to pursue an education in the States. I transferred to USC and earned a B.S. in accounting. As soon as I graduated, I joined PwC as an audit manager, and after five years of experience, I decided to go to Anderson in pursuit of other opportunities. It was either Harvard, Stanford or Anderson, but I knew my life was here, and my CPA experience helped build my quantitative skills that enabled me to succeed at UCLA Anderson. 

Q: Why did you switch careers to human resources? 

During the Anderson orientation, there were WAMO (“What Are My Options”) panels. You were allowed to attend three panels, and my first two were in banking and consulting. I realized I could go into these fields, but they weren’t the reason why I returned to school. I wanted to leverage skill sets into a career I was really interested in, and that turned out to be human resources (HR), the third panel I attended.

With the help of my Parker Center career advisor, I successfully landed an internship at Hewlett Packard over the summer in HR Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures, and thus began my career in HR. As a career switcher with an MBA, I brought an understanding of the business to my role to help effectively drive our deal and people strategies.

Q: What are your responsibilities as associate director of MBA admissions? 

This role is really exciting for me since it involves a variety of tasks. For the majority of the year, I read applications. Everyone has a story to share, and I take the responsibility of evaluating candidates very seriously. The rest of the year is spent on the road recruiting, and this is a chance to help people realize more of their goals and what can be achieved with an Anderson MBA.

Los Angeles Business Journal Honors Peter Guber as Business Person of the Year

“Congratulations to our friend and collaborator Peter Guber, who, for years, has generously provided his vision to our media, entertainment and sports education. His perspectives on leadership and the trailblazers he brings to his class are legendary, driving our students to Think in the Next.”
— Dean Judy Olian

UCLA Anderson congratulates Peter Guber, distinguished lecturer at Anderson, for being recognized as the Los Angeles Business Journal’s Business Person of the Year. Guber’s leadership class is beloved by MBA students, and undoubtedly is one of the most popular courses available. Guber has spent decades in both entertainment and sports, and boasts a long list of accolades. An awards ceremony took place to celebrate this distinction on March 23. Below is an excerpt from his LABJ feature:

The lecture hall at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management was packed with some 80 MBA students, listening in rapt attention to the man at the podium whose trim build and sheer energy belied his 74 years. Indeed, Peter Guber would fit in among most professors at the Westwood university. But his speech about leadership skills on a recent evening drew from hard-won experience, not book learning.

“You have to really emotionalize the offering,” Guber said in a husky voice that retains more than a hint of the brogue of his Boston youth. “Just look at that dumbbell running for president! When you’re running a business, you have to shape that emotion inside a proper narrative. Otherwise, you’ll never hold the emotion of your audience.”

Guber has commanded the attention of audiences for more than four decades, from producing Hollywood blockbusters in the 1970s and ’80s to his latest passion, professional sports. In addition to minor league baseball and professional soccer teams, Guber has taken stakes in the Los Angeles Dodgers and reigning NBA champs, the Golden State Warriors.

“He’s the first in the room to remind everyone that we’re competing against every other form of entertainment in the market-place, and we should never forget that,” said Adam Silver, commissioner of the National Basketball Association.

As different as film and sports might be, they still rely on putting audiences in the seats and drawing viewers to the screens. And in that, Guber has excelled.

Read more at LABJ

What It Means to Be an Ally

See the full schedule of Awareness Week activities in the [email protected] portal

By Kelsey Gorman (’16)

[email protected] co-president Derek Bailey ('16) with the author

I knew before coming to UCLA Anderson that I wanted to be involved with the LGBTQ club on campus as an active ally. I grew up up in Los Angeles, where the LGBTQ community was very familiar to me. My mom was an active ally, often volunteering at the LGBTQ resource center. I considered myself an ally, and a supporter of the LGBTQ community, but it wasn’t until later that I made the shift from “sure, of course I support gay rights” to truly educating myself to become an active ally for the entire community.

Right before I entered high school, one of my best friends confided in me that they were gay. I didn’t think much of it as it was one of my closest friends and their sexuality had no bearing on our relationship. I listened and tried to be as supportive as possible throughout the conversation. What I learned later was just how nervous that friend had been to tell me, and it was a few years afterward that they got the courage to tell other friends and family. It was a big lesson for me to see a friend I loved so much be so scared to tell me something about who they were. I knew I wanted to take action toward making my school, my community and the world a place where no one should be scared to tell a friend who it is they choose to love.

In high school, I worked with faculty and other friends to help start the first Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) club. Although ours was an open-minded liberal school, we were faced with surprising resistance from parents — even parents I knew well — and the surrounding conservative community. We fought to get approval; by the time I reached my senior year the GSA was one of the larger clubs on campus and we participated annually in the National Day of Silence.

LGBTQ Awareness, Equity and Inclusion at UCLA Anderson

See the full schedule of Awareness Week activities in the [email protected] portal

Enjoy an album of photos from Awareness Week 2015

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LGBTQ Awareness Week returns to UCLA Anderson starting April 11 — with a rainbow of events and activities for the whole campus community.

Central to Awareness Week activities is the Ally Pledge of solidarity with LGBTQ+ people, available for signatures during the daily lunchtime Ally Rally, Monday–Thursday, 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. In 2015, Dean Judy Olian and some 200 other members of the Anderson community pledged to support student-led [email protected] and work to create an inclusive environment for people of all gender identities and sexual orientations.

On Monday at 11:30 a.m., Ask A Gay* provides a welcoming forum for anonymous questions about the LGBTQ+ community that people may have felt embarrassed to ask. Even if you don’t have a pressing question, you’re bound to learn something new and interesting from this panel.

The annual GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network) National Day of Silence is a student-led event that brings attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools. The Day of Silence is observed nationwide on Friday. In anticipation, on Tuesday the Anderson community is invited to join hands at noon for a moment of silence in the courtyard to reflect on how society silences LGBTQ+ individuals.

Brazil: The Country of the Future?

By Britney Sussman

I have heard so many different, contrasting things about Brazil throughout my life. Growing up on Kauai, I mainly heard about the great waves, beautiful beaches, and cheap bikinis from the Brazilian surfers who visited the islands. When I lived in Peru for a year and a half, most of the business leaders I met had deliberately avoided talking about Brazil, focusing instead on Chile and Argentina, where they spoke the same language and doing business was just “easier.” I also ran into more than a few backpackers who all reported some version of the same story - “When I was in Brazil, these guys robbed me on the street and they took my wallet, passport, and camera, but man, I still had the best time ever!”

I continued to read countless opposing headlines about Brazil. One moment, it’s the “Country of the Future”, the next, there’s an increase in violent crime. Hyperinflation is finally under control, but at various points during the 90s, inflation was over 3,000%. In 2002, President Lula adopted a moderate platform and made significant strides to grow the middle class, but just last month, he was detained and is being investigated on suspicion of corruption. An article in the Economist says, “Since 2003, some 20m Brazilians have emerged from poverty and joined the market economy. These new consumers buy everything from cars to cookers and fridges to flights.” Simultaneously, Brazil ranks as one of the most difficult countries in the world to do business.

I’ve always been curious about the real story. Does Brazil deserve its place among the other BRIC countries (Russia, India, China), or is the “Brazil Cost” still too large? Is it the “Country of the Future” or is that just a pipe dream? What’s really going on in Brazil?

How UCLA Anderson Resources Led Charlotte Baxter Maines to a Rapidly Rising Career at Amazon

Our new blog series “Rising Stars” pairs current students with alumni who share similar interests and who are making great strides in their careers. Samantha Skarin (’17), who will be a summer 2016 intern at Amazon, interviews Charlotte Baxter Maines (’13), principal product manager at Amazon. Here, Maines shares insights into how she leveraged Anderson resources to transition from real estate to tech, quickly rose through the ranks at Amazon, and landed the unique opportunity to present to CEO Jeff Bezos during her summer internship.

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Q: What was your background prior to attending UCLA Anderson?

Before Anderson I was a real estate developer, and one of the reasons that I went to business school is I knew that I wanted to get into tech. As a real estate developer you’re very much a project manager, quarterbacking these big (in my case) hotel development projects. You spend two years, 20 million dollars, really going all the way from finding the empty land to having fully stamped and approved architectural plans, approved by the city council and engineers. That whole process involved managing something from A to Z, which I really enjoyed, but the real estate industry itself and being in that space wasn’t my passion — whereas I was really interested in tech. I decided to go to business school in order to facilitate that transition.

I went to Anderson because it is a great school, it’s on the West Coast, there are lots of good things about it. When I got there I just really dove in immediately trying to make that transition to tech, which was a little bit tricky. There are a lot of things on your resume when you’ve been a real estate developer for seven years that don’t really jump out to tech companies when they’re trying to decide who to interview and who to talk to for a summer internship. That’s why it’s great at Anderson to be able to leverage the career nights, the things that the clubs are doing and the tech treks. Anderson is a top school that tech companies come to for recruiting. You get the chance to make connections with employees who are currently working there and that helps facilitate getting interviews.

Q: How did you land at Amazon? What is your role there?

I accepted an offer with Amazon for a summer internship as a product manager and spent the summer working in the Kindle group. The project that I worked on entailed building an upgrade strategy for e-readers and tablets - looking into who Amazon’s customers are who buy multiple devices and finding out why they’re buying multiple devices. Are they buying e-readers for additional family members? Are they breaking old ones and getting new ones? What’s happening there? So that’s what I worked on, but what actually ended up happening is, it was close to the launch of our generation five e-readers and tablets and the whole team was really swamped with launch activity. At the last minute, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos made a request for something he wanted it to be able to announce as part of launch, so of course it had to get spun up very quickly. The team looked around and said, “Well, we’re all completely buried trying to launch these products but we have this intern, and we think it would be a better use of her time to work on the Jeff ask rather than work on upgrade strategies, so we’ll put her on it.” I actually ended up presenting to Jeff during my summer internship…which was pretty crazy, but exciting.

Autonomous Cars the Driving Force in California’s Technology Future

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

According to Henry Bzeih, chief technology strategist for Irvine-based Kia Motors America, quite literally driving the California economy is what’s to come in autonomous vehicle technology.

Bzeih spoke at April’s UCLA Anderson Economic Forecast, predicting that a major disruption akin to the leap from invention of the wheel to development of the combustion engine — which took millennia — will occur within the decade. In terms of both software and hardware content, the technology quotient for existing automobiles exceeds that of vehicles used for space travel, which means, Bzeih said, “The recipe for a fully autonomous vehicle is already in the car today.”

Bzeih believes that California — and not only Silicon Valley but just as likely Orange County and other parts of the state — will lead the country in vehicle technology innovation. But the hurdles before launch, he said, include psychological and cultural barriers and the fact that California, Nevada, Michigan and Florida are to date the only states in the union that have passed any laws pertaining to autonomous vehicles.

“The answer is convergence,” Bzeih said, and referenced cyberpunk author William Gibson’s observation that the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. With the proper vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and the crucial component of good vehicle-to-human interface, companies like Kia can take driver assistance features (like smart cruise control) to partial automation by 2020 and full automation by 2030 — to which Forecast senior economist Professor Jerry Nickelsburg responded that it would still beat the L.A. Metro’s purple line extension into Westwood.

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Read the UCLA Anderson Economic Forecast press release

Deloitte’s Jim Moffatt on Millennials, Innovation and the Future of Consulting

By Yu Chen (’17)

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series event featuring Jim Moffatt (’87), CEO of global consulting at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited. Jim joined Deloitte in 1987 after graduating from UCLA Anderson, became a partner in 1994, and has been a leader in Deloitte’s global scaling initiatives, while focusing on the energy and life sciences and health care practices. My classmate and outgoing president of Anderson’s Strategy & Operations Management Association (SOMA), Amirali Ghasemipour, had the honor of introducing Jim to a packed Korn Hall audience. The talk left several deep impressions on me, and challenged many of my assumptions.

Go Where the Innovation Goes

We all have preset notions of management consultants’ time-tested routines: walking in with sharp suits, collecting data and then implementing a framework analysis and delivering an impressive set of slide decks for their clients. Yet Jim's description of the practice could not be more radically different. A key point he made, for instance, was that management consulting is inherently about adapting as quickly as possible to shifts in technology, industry trends and client preferences. Deloitte intends to go where the innovation goes (as its recent history of technology and digital agency firms clearly demonstrates); no matter what function or industry you are in, you have to learn to speak the language and understand the underlying concepts of the 21st-century technological revolution. Jim made an important point about being cognizant not to surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear — that's a recipe for stagnant complacency and lost value, and a surefire way to get left behind.

Meet the New ASA Cabinet

UCLA Anderson congratulates the school’s new ASA cabinet (pictured above, starting top right with President Nicole Fencel). The officers for the Class of 2017 officially began their terms at the beginning of the new quarter. We asked them all to reveal a bit about themselves and imagine what their lives will be like in the future. Here are the questions we asked; you might be surprised by some of their responses.

1. What was your dream job at age 10?
2. What was your first job?
3. Where would you like to be in your career five years from now?

President: Nicole Fencel

1. At 10 years old, my dream job was an astronaut. I was pretty obsessed with Space Camp.
2. My first job ever was working as a cashier at the Finishline. First job out of college was investment banking.
3. In five years I would like to be managing a team responsible for the international operations of a company. I would also like to be integrally involved in the mentor program at my company.

Executive Vice President: Jen Ockelmann

1. At 10 years old, I would have said I wanted to be an author.
2. My very first job was scooping ice cream at the mall in my hometown.
3. In five years, I’d like to be managing an entertainment brand.

VP of Academics: Jan Jajalla

1. My 10-year-old self wanted to become a pilot.
2. My first paid job was storing and stacking backup data tapes.
3. Five years from now, I hope to undertake management responsibilities presiding over technology strategies.

VP of Student Affairs: Daniel Kiczek

1. I wanted to be an actor or comedian. (My parents let me watch Seinfeld but I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone.)
2. In high school, I was a lifeguard.
3. I secured a summer internship in consulting, specifically in M&A implementation. I hope to move up through the ranks there and advise on deals with major content producers and tech firms.

VP of Alumni Relations: Sugam Arora

1. Be like Mike (pro NBA player).
2. My first job was at Fry’s Electronics, so, pretty much the polar opposite of a pro basketball player.
3. Retired; but if not, helping to bring amazing products to life.

VP of Ethics: Neil Parikh

1. The second guitarist in Blink 182.
2. In my first job I was a tennis coach.
3. Senior manager or director in the strategy/business development group of a music company.