UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

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.

UCLA Anderson School of Management Announces 2017 Gerald Loeb Award Winners

Enjoy a full album of photos from the 60th anniversary Loeb Awards.

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Journalists from across the nation gathered at Capitale in New York for the 60th anniversary Gerald Loeb Awards banquet, where the 2017 winners were revealed. Winners of 12 competition categories were named at the ceremony.

Judy D. Olian, dean of UCLA Anderson School of Management and chairman of the G. and R. Loeb Foundation, welcomed guests and honorees, who included Walt Mossberg, executive editor of The Verge and editor-at-large for Recode, recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award; and Fortune’s assistant managing editor, Nicholas Varchaver, who received the Lawrence Minard Editor Award.

Nicholas Varchaver and Walt Mossberg

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The Gerald Loeb Awards are among the highest honors in journalism, recognizing the work of journalists whose contributions illuminate subjects in business, finance and the economy for readers and viewers around the world. Among the guests was veteran business writer Werner Renberg, the first Loeb Award recipient in 1958. Tyler Mathisen, co-anchor of CNBC’s Power Lunch, served as master of ceremonies. Gerald Loeb’s legacy was celebrated with historical footage of the Wall Street icon himself.

The Loeb Awards at 60, Honoring Walt Mossberg and Nicholas Varchaver

The Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism are celebrating their 60th anniversary. Dean Judy Olian, chairman of the G. and R. Loeb Foundation Inc., revealed the 2017 finalists and announced the recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lawrence Minard Editor Award.

The 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient is Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor-at-large for Recode. This annual award recognizes an individual whose career exemplifies the consistent, superior insight and professional skills necessary to further the understanding of topics in business, finance and economics.

Nicholas Varchaver, assistant managing editor at Fortune, will receive the 2017 Lawrence Minard Editor Award, named in memory of Laury Minard, founding editor of Forbes Global and a former final judge for the Loeb Awards. This award honors excellence in business, financial and economic journalism editing, and recognizes an editor whose work does not receive a byline or whose face does not appear on air for the work covered.

News Fit to Print — in Modern-Day Myanmar

By Elise Anderson

In today’s digital age, with mobile devices and online streaming services ascendant, print is considered a dinosaur.

But when Sylvia Saw McKaige (’11) surveyed the Southeast Asian media landscape, she decided to take an alternative, back-to-the-future tack with a country that only recently came online. The longtime media professional and UCLA Anderson graduate recently launched Frontier Myanmar, an English-language print magazine published weekly in Myanmar.

“I felt that good solid journalism was missing in the market,” she says. “You know, that feeling when you watch a news program or read an article and you think, ‘Wow, that’s good reporting.’”

McKaige’s background, both personal and professional, prepared her to make this leap of faith in a country not known for press freedom. She was born and raised in Singapore. Her father is Burmese and her mother is Chinese. She gained journalism experience working as a business reporter at the Bangkok Post newspaper in Thailand and as a television producer at CNBC Asia, and later headed the guest assignment desk as part of the senior editorial team involved with the development of strategy for programming.

Nopical: Not Your Typical News Source

Alex Gostomelsky pitches Nopical at Plug & Play Selection Day, a startup accelerator program in Los Angeles

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By Isha Patel

The entrepreneurial spirit is nothing new to UCLA Anderson. Among the many opportunities available to MBA students with innovative ideas is a chance to start or plan their own company through the Business Creation Option of the Applied Management Research field study project. However, Alex Gostomelsky’s (’17) entrepreneurial journey started long before he arrived at Anderson.

It was May 2, 2011, and Gostomelsky was scrolling through Twitter to find out why major news sources were halting their regular evening newscasts to announce a special message from the White House. After a long search, Gostomelsky finally happened upon a tweet from a mid-tier news source that claimed Osama bin Laden had been shot in a raid led by the United States. After hearing of the breaking news, Gostomelsky had another thought: Why did it take so long for him to find a tweet that had high engagement rates and should have been one of the first tweets he saw on his feed?

It was this question that led him to create Nopical, a news aggregation website that allows users to build custom news feeds based on their interests. Gostomelsky wanted to provide a platform for users that took all the legwork out; people could now follow top stories in different subjects without having to follow all news sources or scroll through thousands of tweets to get the most relevant information.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Michael Hiltzik to Steer Conversation at 2016 John Wooden Global Leadership Award Dinner

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

On November 2, the John Wooden Global Leadership Award, presented annually by UCLA Anderson, will be given to W. James McNerney, Jr., retired chairman, CEO and president of The Boeing Company. The award recognizes exemplary corporate leadership and service to the community by a professional whose career embodies the leadership ideals of Coach Wooden, with proceeds from the dinner funding four $25,000 John Wooden Global Leadership Fellowships.

This year’s ceremony will be held at the California Science Center and features an on-stage conversation between McNerney and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Michael Hiltzik. During Hiltzik’s three decades with the Los Angeles Times, he has served as a financial and political writer, an investigative reporter, a technology writer and editor, and a foreign correspondent in Africa and Russia. He currently serves as the Times’s business columnist and hosts its business blog, The Economy Hub.

Hiltzik earned the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry. His other awards for excellence in reporting include the 2004 Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding business commentary and the Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association for outstanding legal reporting. His books include New York Times best-seller Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century (2010), The New Deal: A Modern History (2011), The Plot Against Social Security (2005), Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (1999) and A Death in Kenya: The Murder of Julie Ward (1991).

His latest book, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex, details the untold story of how science went “big,” built the bombs that helped win World War II and became dependent on government and industry — and the figure behind the movement, UC Berkeley scientist Ernest O. Lawrence.

Follow Michael Hiltzik @hiltzikm

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The 2016 John Wooden Global Leadership Award honors W. James McNerney, Jr., retired chairman, CEO and president of The Boeing Company. The event will be held on Wednesday, November 2, at the California Science Center, starting at 6:00 p.m. Business attire is required. For event and ticket information, contact [email protected]. Proceeds from the event fund fellowships for four UCLA Anderson students who are being awarded John Wooden Global Leadership Fellowships. This year’s recipients are Doug Larratt (EMBA ’17), Corey McMillen (’17), Datra Oliver (FEMBA ’18) and Eric Potocek (FEMBA ’18).

#JohnWooden #WoodenAwards

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UCLA Anderson School of Management Announces 2016 Gerald Loeb Award Winners

Paul Ingrassia (left), Lifetime Achievement Award; Amy Stevens, Lawrence Minard Editor Award (photos: Business Wire)

Journalists from across the nation gathered at Capitale in New York for the 2016 Gerald Loeb Awards banquet. The Gerald Loeb Awards are among the highest honors in journalism, recognizing the work of journalists whose contributions illuminate the world of business, finance and the economy for readers and viewers around the world.

UCLA Anderson Dean Judy D. Olian, chairman of the G. and R. Loeb Foundation, welcomed Loeb Awards honorees and their guests. Tyler Mathisen, co-anchor of CNBC’s Power Lunch, served as master of ceremonies.

The Gerald Loeb Awards were established in 1957 by the late Gerald Loeb, a founding partner of E.F. Hutton. His intention was to encourage reporting on business and finance that would inform and protect the private investor and the general public. Distinguished journalists and outlets nationwide submit entries to compete for the most prestigious honor in business journalism.

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

UC President Janet Napolitano Headlines Robertson Lecture Series Event

 

UCLA Anderson’s Robertson Lecture Series on Global Business Leadership is a collaboration between the school's Center for Global Management and the Los Angeles World Affairs Council (LAWAC). The series serves to provide opportunities for UCLA Anderson students to acquire global leadership perspectives through discussions around the critical issues impacting global business and the global political economy. It is made possible by Anderson alumnus Chip Robertson (FEMBA’06) and his family. The family has dedicated the series to Chip’s great-grandfather, Leo M. Harvey, a pioneer industrialist, inventor and founder of Harvey Aluminum.

On February 3, 2016, University of California President Janet Napolitano participated in the third Robertson Lecture. The event included an introduction by UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian, followed by a discussion with President Napolitano moderated by renowned journalist Terry McCarthy, president and CEO of the LAWAC. Mr. McCarthy was kind enough to recap the event.

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by Terry McCarthy

Janet Napolitano, President of the University of California, said the university is "in a state of excitement" after closing a multiyear budget deal with Governor Jerry Brown last spring and that she now wants to "ratchet down" student fees amid the rise of student debt. Speaking to a LAWAC dinner on February 3, Napolitano said that to convince Governor Brown to allocate more funds, she told him that "California would not be California without the UC system." As former Secretary of Homeland Security, Napolitano also talked about her thoughts on the current state of national security, saying she believes we are better off than we were pre-9/11, but that there is deep concern for the increase in cyber threats and an ongoing concern about aviation security.

When Napolitano left her job as Governor of Arizona in 2009, the entire state budget was $9.8 billion. The University of California currently has a budget of $27 billion a year — almost three times as big. Napolitano compared the extensive 10-campus university system to a "moderately large state with a large population of 18-year-olds." Faced with rising student debt, students protesting for first amendment rights, and the need to change the system's revenue model, Napolitano said of her job, "It gets crazy sometimes."

UCLA Anderson Alumni Company Local Construct Works to Meet Environmental and Housing Affordability Challenges in Echo Park and Beyond

Casey Lynch ('09) founded real estate development company Local Construct in 2008, along with classmate Mike Brown ('09). The company describes itself as "a private real estate investment and development company focused on improving development patterns throughout the western United States." Lynch and Local Construct made headlines recently for their 18-unit Blackbirds housing project in Echo Park, designed by architect Barbara Bestor. The Los Angeles Times described it as "the latest urban infill development built under the city's Small Lot Subdivision Ordinance, which was designed to allow developers to build several detached homes on a single parcel of land. In this case, 18 homes have replaced five dilapidated single-family homes. Residents will own their house and the land and will have no homeowners association fees. Trash disposal, mailboxes and gardens will be communal."

With the September 2015 UCLA Anderson Forecast conference focused on real estate, under the title Housing Is Back, the UCLA Anderson Blog took the opportunity to interview Lynch and get his thoughts on some key issues facing housing in the city of Los Angeles.

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Q: One of the problems your company is interested in solving is housing affordability. What types of projects may be built to address this important issue?

The answer is any type of housing. The areas of the country with the most acute affordability issues are cities, including Los Angeles, that are severely supply constrained. The combination of regulatory hurdles, public policy constraints, restrictive parking requirements and limited land make it very difficult to add housing in dense infill markets. We rarely experience affordability issues in places where supply is free to keep up with (or exceed) demand. For example, they are adding nearly as much housing annually in aggregate in Denver as we are in Los Angeles. As a result, Denver has experienced a major urban renaissance while maintaining greater affordability.

There is clearly a place for government to have a more direct role in creating affordable housing, but we are so far out of balance in L.A. that without significantly reducing barriers to the creation of market rate housing we won’t be able to make a dent in pent-up need.