UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Pete Marino Brought His Entrepreneurial Muscle Memory to MillerCoors

By Margaret Bliss

How does one remain entrepreneurial while working in a large company? For UCLA Anderson alumnus Pete Marino (’02), CCO of MillerCoors and president of Tenth and Blake, MillerCoors’ craft and import division, the transition wasn’t all that difficult.

In a discussion with Senior Associate Dean Al Osborne at an event hosted by the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Marino admitted he has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. After a two-year stint with a consulting firm where he honed his business skills, Marino started his own communication firm, Dig Communications. It was his first client, MillerCoors, that helped his company grow to 60 people. Six years later, he sold Dig to Olson PR and stayed on as president before joining MillerCoors as vice president of communications.

Viewing Leadership as Service: John Wooden Global Leadership Fellow Evan Barnes

By Carly Milne

Evan Barnes (EMBA ’18) has weathered many storms, but he didn’t do it alone — and the support that got him through his toughest times informs not only his studies, but his future as a UCLA Anderson Executive MBA graduate.

“In the military, we view leadership as service,” Barnes says. “It boils down to showing care and compassion to the members of your team. It comes from building a relationship with the team, and that’s building leadership. Leadership has to be derived from your courage, care, compassion and trust to build that unbreakable bond with your team.”

It’s this values-driven leadership that led to Barnes’ selection as a 2017 John Wooden Global Leadership Fellow.

Marion Anderson Hall: A Link to the Past, a Bridge to the Future

Left to right: Senior Associate Dean Al Osborne, Jr., Sam Tang (’87), Donald Morrison, Sherie Morrison, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, Dean Judy Olian, Bob Wilson (B.S. ’53), Lindsey Serrano, Luis Serrano (’02), Heather Hasso

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View a full album of photographs from the Marion Anderson Hall groundbreaking ceremony

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UCLA Anderson’s vision for Marion Anderson Hall, named for the school’s beloved benefactor, embodies the institution’s blueprint for the future. On October 19, Dean Judy Olian and Senior Associate Dean Al Osborne, Jr., along with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block and Marion Anderson Hall donors Sam Tang (’87), Donald and Sherie Morrison, Bob Wilson (B.S. ’53), Luis (’02) and Lindsey Serrano, and Heather Hasso, drew shovels to break ground on the building site.

Chancellor Block remarked, “The Anderson legacy is everywhere when you look around the university.” In May 2015, Marion donated an unprecedented gift of $100 million to fund research and fellowships, with $40 million earmarked for the state-of-the-art building that bears her name.

Inclusion Is No Sacrifice: John Wooden Global Leadership Fellow Sana Rahim

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

Sana Rahim (FEMBA ’19) is the recipient of a 2017 John Wooden Global Leadership Fellowship, which rewards students who embody Coach Wooden’s leadership ideals and commitment to improving the lives of others. And if, as Wooden believed, adversity is an asset, Rahim has risen to the challenge — primarily in the interest of helping other people.

Rahim is an observant Muslim American whose parents hail from Pakistan. She is a brown-skinned woman pursuing an MBA. She grew up a distinct minority in the Wyoming town of Laramie, and later moved with her family to Naperville, Illinois, where she proudly became her high school’s first homecoming queen in hijab. In adulthood, amid worldwide trends toward divisiveness along political, religious, gender and cultural lines, she has traveled widely and faced her share of prejudice and setbacks.

But the former sales manager for industrial supply company McMaster-Carr says, “Although my ‘roots’ presented me with a number of challenges, they motivated me.” Her immigrant parents instilled in her a great sense of achievement, worthiness and responsibility. These influences protected her from insecurity.

The Future of Health Care? Numbers Tell the Story

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National Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15 through October 15. UCLA Anderson, in conjunction with the Anderson Latino Management Association and the UCLA campus, recognizes the significant contributions to society among our Latino and Hispanic students, alumni, staff and faculty. Visit Latino@Anderson to enjoy their stories.

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By Paul Feinberg

Integrated Behavioral Health self-describes as a company that specializes in behavioral health plan administration, employee assistance programs, psychological disability management and work-life services. The company works with Fortune 1000 employers, business coalitions, insurance companies, union health plans, HMOs and PPOs.

As corporate controller, Juan Salcedo (’83) is the top finance professional at the company. “I handle monthly reporting, banking and analyzing acquisitions,” he said via phone from the company’s headquarters in Costa Mesa. He also oversees all of the accounting and finance departments.

Salcedo, who did his undergraduate work at Stanford, didn’t enroll at what was then UCLA’s Graduate School of Management with a goal of becoming a corporate controller. His primary objective was to educate himself as to how businesses are run, with a vague notion that someday he’d like to head his own company. While at UCLA, he recognized that his strengths ran more toward finance and analytics as opposed to marketing. He focused on accounting during his last year at Anderson and ended up taking a position with a Big Eight accounting firm.

Strategy Expertise and Insights into Multi-Ethnic Communities Drove California’s Highest Health Care Enrollment

National Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15 through October 15. UCLA Anderson, in conjunction with the Anderson Latino Management Association and the UCLA campus, recognizes the significant contributions to society among our Latino and Hispanic students, alumni, staff and faculty. Visit Latino@Anderson to enjoy their stories.

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By Paul Feinberg

Elvia Delgado (’99) has spent the last 10 years with AltaMed Health Services, the largest, federally qualified community clinic in the country. “Its mission,” Delgado says, “is to provide health services to the underserved and uninsured community.” The organization has served Los Angeles and Orange County for nearly 50 years.

A Pro-Social Imperative

“AltaMed is mission-centric,” Delgado says. “It’s served over 200,000 patients and provided over a million encounters to a population that in many ways has not had access to health care. We provide health care regardless of ability to pay.”

The AltaMed system has 58 locations in Los Angeles and Orange County and provides health care services from birth to end of life, including prenatal, adult medicine, pediatrics, dentistry and behavioral health. It’s physician-based, not an insurance company.

Seen and Heard (and Felt) at LeVRage

UCLA Anderson’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports (MEMES) recently convened LeVRage, an event exploring the most practical ways to monetize new virtual reality and augmented reality experiences that depart from the strictly visual. A lineup of experts in emerging technology, film, gaming, social innovation, marketing and storytelling shared their predictions for the next big trend in VR and AR. #UCLAleVRage

"Do you want to take flight?"
- @gopositron, location-based, narrative-driven #VR #UCLAleVRage #VirtualReality pic.twitter.com/rIxNETLDeO

— UCLA Anderson (@uclaanderson) October 6, 2017

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• Mariana Acuña, Co-Founder, Opaque Studios
How we consume will change dramatically as every industry is touched by AR and VR. Kids will learn to tell stories differently. If you’re an artist, you’re always going to have to be yearning to get ahead of the curve.

• John Canning, VP of Interactive Experiences, NBCUniversal
Building experiences complete with haptic and olfactory sensations is where investors are active.

• Emily Cooper, 360 Video and VR Producer
Tell stories that are a conduit to quieter voices, the unheard Americans. VR can’t literally transport us but it can extend an olive branch to understanding.

Tech Storytellers Explore the Business of VR and AR

Enjoy a full album of photos from UCLA Anderson's LeVRage conference

#UCLAleVRage

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By Carolyn Gray Anderson

We live in a future-oriented culture. But sometimes innovation is already right in front of you.

That was the message at LeVRage, which explored monetizing virtual reality and augmented reality from every angle — whether in a blockbuster movie or a scrappy marketing startup. Organized by UCLA Anderson’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports (MEMES), the conference and expo convened panels of veterans and newcomers to make pronouncements on the most practical ways to scale new VR and AR experiences.

MEMES executive director Jay Tucker (’09) opened the day-long event by asking the question, “What if VR and AR tech grew the entertainment industry by $100 billion?” While experts were cautious about tying the profits from storytelling and technology innovations to a hard number within a specific industry, animated discussions ensued as they both agreed and disagreed about what’s going to make the next big difference in a vast number of consumers’ lives. Some observed that it makes more sense to market add-ons to existing products than to require consumers to buy a new gadget for every upgrade — though members of the audience gleefully waved their latest Apple mobile products in response.

Retail: Survival of the Fittest

By DJ Busch

Retail as we know it is going through a dramatic shift, and the negative narrative is loud as ever. Consumer behavior is changing, retailers are trying desperately to compete and owners of retail real estate are working to ensure their properties are positioned for the future. But not all the news is bad. Some landlords should be positioned not just to survive, but to do quite well.

In the public market, mall REITs have been trading at large discounts to the underlying value of their assets for quite some time. This investor skepticism has spilled over to open-air shopping centers (strip centers), which are now also trading at discounts. While mall REITs own 80 percent of mall value in the U.S., these signals from the public market can have important, and often overlooked, implications for private market players. It’s no secret that the U.S. is over-retailed, and we have a substantial amount more square feet per capita than any other country.

The Iceman Comments

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National Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15 through October 15. UCLA Anderson, in conjunction with the Anderson Latino Management Association and the UCLA campus, recognizes the significant contributions to society among our Latino and Hispanic students, alumni, staff and faculty. Visit Latino@Anderson to enjoy their stories.

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By Paul Feinberg

Roberto Sequeira (’07) is pretty used to it by now. While so many of his classmates spend their days dealing with the intricacies of high finance or consulting, he’s selling ice. Assured by a reporter that a forthcoming interview wouldn’t go into anything too deep, he just laughed: “Right,” Sequeira said. “It’s not too complicated.”

Did we say “ice”? Yes, we did.

Sequeira is founder and chief executive officer of Gläce Luxury Ice. The company bills itself as the world’s leading premium-drink ice brand; the product features a zero-taste ice cube that allows consumers to “maximize the beverage experience.” You probably didn’t know that traditional machine ice, typically made with local tap water, may contain impurities and carcinogens that result in lousy tasting ice. Gläce Ice, by contrast, is cleaner and better tasting. Still not sure? Let Sequeira explain:

Q: If I were to ask you for the elevator pitch for your business, what would you say?

Basically, we’re carving out the niche, the top spot in a $4 billion commoditized industry, and the value proposition is simple: While consumers have developed a sense of brand loyalty in just about every other consumer packaged good, ice remained, up until our arrival, an overlooked opportunity. People have preferences in bottled water, vodkas and scotches, but “on the rocks” remained a generic proposition until we came along.