UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

UCLA Anderson Alumnae Advise: Think Fearlessly about Building and Tapping the Network that Supports Your Next Transformation

Professor Sanjay Sood engaged Paramount Television and Digital Entertainment President Amy Powell in conversation and audience Q&A

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By Carolyn Gray Anderson

UCLA Anderson alumni from 44 class years ― ranging from 1962 to 2017― convened for the May 4–5 Alumni Weekend, starting with the annual conference and Dean Judy Olian’s final State of the School report. Addressing the crowd in Korn Convocation Hall, she acknowledged an extra element of emotion this year: “In another couple of months I’ll become an ‘alum’ in a sense, myself.”

Olian departs at the end of the academic year to become president of Quinnipiac University. “We all try to leave a mark at Anderson,” she said, “something that lifts this extraordinary school higher and leaves it better than when we arrived. Each class aims to do that.”

With the help of faculty, staff, students, donors, and alumni, Olian said she, too, has tried to raise the bar at Anderson since she arrived in 2006. The accomplishments she listed included the school’s increasingly global outlook and education, the growing strength of its academic centers and progress on diversity and inclusion.

UCLA Anderson Launches New Online Journal Spotlighting Current Research

Across disciplines, UCLA Anderson’s faculty enhance the school’s relevance through cutting-edge research that is highly applicable to the economy, business and the wider world. The weekly UCLA Anderson Review chronicles for a broader audience the research our faculty publish in leading academic journals.

UCLA Anderson Review launched with articles examining retirement savings, including Americans’ aversion to annuities and the hot topic of decumulation — illustrating how, under a single roof at Anderson, faculty members are individually and collectively expanding understanding of how to solve one of the country’s biggest financial and societal problems.

The Review joins other leading graduate business school publications in making available to a global audience of business leaders, fellow academic researchers, policymakers and others the substantial intellectual capital UCLA Anderson possesses and adds to each day.

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.

No Guesswork, No Guilt: Goodbye Hangry, Hello officebites

UCLA Anderson MBA students conduct Applied Management Research field study projects in lieu of a thesis. Anderson gives full-time students the Business Creation Option in which entrepreneurs launch companies while still in school. We’re highlighting stories of Class of 2017 mission-driven BCO projects that fulfill unmet needs in sectors from e-commerce to cleantech.

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By Anna Highberger (’17), Brian Leong (’17), Evan Milnor (’17) and Jesse Shapiro (’17)

Officebites takes the guesswork out of healthy snacking in the workplace.

Our subscription snack box contains nutritionally ideal snacks to help consumers become more mindful about what they eat at work. After consulting with nutritionists and dietitians, we’ve developed a menu of snacks with two times the protein and half the sugar of the vast majority of snacks on the market. They are portion-controlled at 135 calories each and are time-stamped for consumption two times a day.

We're proud to announce that officebites has been awarded the UCLA Anderson/Union Bank Most Outstanding Business Creation Award and a fellowship from YPO West Los Angeles, and we tied for second place in UCLA Anderson’s 2017 Knapp Venture Competition.

Officebites tied for second place and won $5,000 in the annual Knapp Venture Competition. Left to right: Jesse Shapiro, Brian Leong, Evan Milnor

Raising Storytelling Standards Is the Key to Social Impact

Entrepreneur Anna Bulbrook (center) took first place in the Impactathon pitch competition with her social impact project, GIRLSCHOOL, an annual music festival in Los Angeles

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Enjoy Photos from UCLA Anderson’s 2017 Impact Week, Purpose + Profit

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By Margaret Bliss

What makes a great social impact project? Now that I have an idea I think solves a problem, how do I present it to the world? How do I get others involved with my pro-social business?

Those were a few of the questions entrepreneurs were asking during UCLA Anderson’s annual Impact Week, particularly at the all-day Impactathon workshop held in collaboration with Innov8Social marketing consultancy. For answers, attendees looked to invited speakers who included Somya Munjal, founder of Youthful Savings; Andrew McDowell, founder of With Love Market and Café; Kaitlin Mogentale, founder of Pulp Pantry; and Innov8Social founder Neetal Parekh. In a nutshell, they seemed to agree, social impact is a niche that improves a community and actually makes a difference in the lives of those it touches.

Among Impactathon attendees’ primary goals was learning how best to tell their story. GOOD strategist Andy Morris introduced approaches and techniques from the South Africa-based Red Bull Amaphiko Storytelling Lab as an exemplar that “assists entrepreneurs in achieving their goals of effecting positive social change in their communities.”

These Quants Create Algorithms to Your Taste

UCLA Anderson MBA students conduct Applied Management Research field study projects in lieu of a thesis. Anderson gives full-time students the Business Creation Option in which entrepreneurs launch companies while still in school. Team Connoisseur researched the restaurant landscape in L.A. to devise a delicious formula for picking local dining options that improves on standard rating sites.

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By Zodin Del Rosario (’17), Richard Fernandez (’17), Kimberly Kalb (’17), Christina Rath (’17) and Sean Ginley (’17)

The restaurant search process is broken. With so many restaurants in L.A., people feel overwhelmed, and current websites like Yelp prove untrustworthy and cumbersome for people to sort through.

Connoisseur is a mobile app designed to offer personalized restaurant recommendations based on your dining history.

To gather seed data for our algorithm, the Connoisseur team surveyed 82 respondents to rate all the restaurants they had visited in Santa Monica. We explored multiple methodologies for predicting restaurant scores, including a k-nearest neighbors algorithm (k-NN), in which users are plotted in vector space and the actual physical distance between users is measured. In a k-NN, users with similar restaurant ratings will be closer to each other. We looked to find the five nearest neighbors to any user. Taking the average ratings of these five nearest neighbors, we found the other restaurants that these similar users loved.

We were able to test the viability of this approach by removing some of the data and using the algorithm to predict the deleted scores. This method was most effective when users had rated at least 25 restaurants, meaning once we moved outside of Santa Monica we would need users to rate even more in order to give accurate predictions.

Center for MEMES’ Jay Tucker: Relentless Problem Solver, Unrepentant Optimist

 

Jay Tucker (’09) is the new executive director of UCLA Anderson’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports. He graduated from Anderson in 2009 and embarked on a career with a certain local competitor school, where, as CMO of the Institute for Communication Technology Management at USC and founder of the Silicon Beach initiative there, he led an interdisciplinary team to launch a $50,000 venture competition combined with a conference focused on innovation, emerging technologies, tech startups and digital entertainment. It’s early days, but Tucker has had his finger firmly on the MEMES pulse (presiding, in fact, over the 2017 Pulse Entertainment, Sports & Technology Conference). He is busy preparing for NextFest, the collaborative cross-disciplinary event with FuturizeX UCLA on March 2.

 

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Q: What in your educational or personal background led you to your current professional interests?

I’ve always had a passion for entertainment and its impact on popular culture, and even taught courses on media literacy before attending business school. My interest in the business of entertainment grew over time as I saw a rapid increase in franchises jumping from publishing to feature films, video games, TV series and other platforms. One of the essential questions I had at the time was whether quality alone was enough to ensure business success for content — in other words, is content really king? Another was the converse: Could exceptional business operations be a substitute for amazing content?

These days, it’s clear that my questions were far less important than the question of how Hollywood would harness innovation and disruptive technologies to delight audiences and finance the next wave of storytelling. But the drive to understand the industry, and the business of storytelling, were a big part of what compelled me to come to UCLA Anderson.

Q: Before starting your MBA, you worked in a range of marketing, tech and educational roles. How did earning your degree enhance or influence the direction of your career in the years to follow?

At Anderson I had the opportunity to connect with industry leaders in film, video games and more. One advantage I brought to the table was deep experience as a technology leader and as a Web developer in the early days of the commercial internet. My time at Anderson coincided with the rise of a number of digital and social media platforms, and some of the business leaders in Hollywood were interested in my perspectives on how technology would impact the industry.

The Time Is Liao: Alumna Committed to Social Responsibility Finds Like-Minded Colleagues at High Impact Tea

By Carolyn Gray Andeson

Vicki Liao graduated from UCLA Anderson in 2011. “I came here wanting to earn my MBA as quickly as possible and get a good job in entertainment,” she says. The degree, combined with a field study project at an entertainment tech startup, certainly helped her accomplish this goal: After graduating, Liao went first to Disney and ESPN Media Networks as an account manager and she is now director of pay TV at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Liao returned to Anderson recently for a talk in the High Impact Tea series organized by Impact@Anderson and students in Anderson’s Net Impact chapter. She’s glad she reengaged with the school: The self-described prodigal is becoming increasingly committed to corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability and stewardship.

The guest that night was Aspen Institute fellow Max Schorr, co-founder of GOOD, the Los Angeles-based media platform and publication known as the force behind numerous progressive initiatives, including Earth to Paris, PepsiCo’s Refresh campaign, the Sports Matter campaign with DICK’S Sporting Goods that broke employee engagement records and won GOOD a Clio, and the Starbucks community outreach project that enabled customers to direct $4 million from the Starbucks Foundation to fund 124 local and national nonprofit organizations.

Paramount Television President Amy Powell Rewards “Strong, Tenacious Women” Like Those Who Influenced Her

View the full gallery of photos from Velocity

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By Paul Feinberg

Amy Powell (’05) president of Paramount Television and Digital Entertainment, was the morning keynote at UCLA Anderson’s second annual Velocity Women’s Leadership Summit, whose 2017 theme was Empower Together. Powell used the specifics of her own life and career to illustrate universal lessons for those gathered.

Powell grew up in “a household of very strong influences, parents who encouraged her to go out and get what she wanted,” and she was inspired by a close relationship with a grandmother who was “the epitome of a strong woman.” Those influences infused Powell with a confidence that enabled a recurring theme in her life: moves that took Powell outside her comfort zones.

Big Names at Big Data Conference Confront Analytics Challenges, Unlock Opportunities

By Cheechee Lin

The Big Data Conference returns to UCLA Anderson for the second time on Friday, November 18.

Who should attend? This conference is for technologists, managers, directors, executives and entrepreneurs who are either providing technology solutions for their organization or using data analytics to make business decisions across all functional areas. Executives and director-level representatives from IBM, Google, Netflix, Uber, Microsoft and many other companies will participate as panelists or keynote speakers.

With the immense growth of the volumes of data collected, and the decrease in costs of acquiring and storing data, corporations and startups of every scale are equipped with a huge competitive advantage to extract valuable insights when they extract data to answer key business questions.

This one-day interactive conference, organized by the Easton Technology Management Center and the Center for MEMES at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, aims to explore big data challenges and opportunities by bringing together a cross section of industry experts and academic thought leaders who are shaping and defining the conversation around the business aspects of big data.

“Big data has been, and continues to be, an important area for UCLA Anderson,” says Dr. Vandana Mangal, Easton’s executive director. “Big data and analytics have been taught in our classes at Anderson since as early as 2012.”