UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

Military Precision Led to a Dynamic Career in Business

By Jill Hisey (’95)

Both of Jarred Herman’s (’14) grandfathers served in the military, which influenced him to set his sights on joining the U.S. Navy. But one of his grandfathers convinced him to get his college degree first, and then, if he was still interested, he could enter the Navy as an officer.

Heeding this advice, Herman, who grew up in Nevada City, California, attended University of Nevada, Reno, majoring in math. After graduating he knew he wanted to join the submarine corps and determined that becoming a nuclear engineer would offer a perfect mix of science and military service. But first he would attend Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Florida, followed by six months at the Nuclear Power School in Charleston, South Carolina — which he says entailed an intense academic program — and six months at the Ballston Spa NPTU Prototype in Saratoga Springs, New York. Finally, Herman spent six months in submarine school in Connecticut. All told, he spent 1½ years in training before reporting for duty.

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.

Same Entrepreneurial Spirit, New Business Savvy for Videographer and Veteran Tyler Hill

See a full gallery of photos from UCLA Anderson’s 2017 Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans

---

By Paul Feinberg

Tyler Hill grew up in a ski town, skating and snowboarding with his friends. Influenced by reality TV daredevil Johnny Knoxville and his band of merry men, Hill and his crew messed around with cameras, capturing their own stunts.

Hill’s hobby took a more serious turn when he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.

“I was a combat photographer and videographer in the Marines. I did two tours in Iraq,” says Hill, who served in the military from 2005 through 2010 and was deployed in ’06 and ’08.

When Hill separated from active duty he transitioned into a career in outdoor television, specializing in filming shows in remote areas ranging from Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan to Iceland and Greenland. He later earned a degree in filmmaking and became a freelance video producer in Dallas. While there, he saw his clientele shift from big companies with big budgets to YouTubers and Instagrammers making big bucks for posting branded content.

EBV Graduate Ben Wynkoop Demystifies the Digital Ecosystem of Marketing Niches

See a full gallery of photos from UCLA Anderson's 2017 Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans

---

By Matt Duyst

Ben Wynkoop, who completed UCLA Anderson’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV) program in 2010, returned to campus in July to share his expertise in digital marketing through search engine optimization with the EBV class of 2017. The crux of Wynkoop’s talk advocated the importance of SEO to achieve the broad goals of digital marketing — how to bring more traffic to one’s website vis-à-vis consulting, strategies for reaching out to online vendors, the necessity of pay-per-click Google AdWords. His visit fell on the occasion of Anderson’s 10th anniversary hosting EBV, which gave it special relevance. Wynkoop, a former U.S. Marine, emblematizes as well as emulates the purpose of UCLA Anderson’s EBV program, serving as a symbol of its continuation within the veteran community and as a tangible representation of the program’s success.

Underscoring Wynkoop’s presentation was his personal progression, which he illustrated by streaming a timeline of his entrepreneurial metamorphosis — a play-by-play recap of his life before and after the bootcamp. He told his audience that EBV served as a vehicle for him to develop as an entrepreneur, though his introduction to the formalities of management came a couple of years before his enrollment in the program.

Job Sharing in Military Support? U.S. Air Force Veteran Kristina Iskander Wants to Make It Fly

See a full gallery of photos from UCLA Anderson's 2017 Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans

---

By Carly Milne

As a captain in the U.S. Air Force for nearly eight years, Kristina Iskander became acutely aware of two things: one, many baby boomers were retiring from the work force, which meant there was a need for highly skilled and well-trained military support personnel to take their place; and two, if non-active-duty military employees with families were allowed a more flexible schedule, they could fill those open positions — and excel in the workforce in a whole new way.

“Although the military is making great strides — the U.S. Air Force has the highest percentage of females — it’s still a male-dominated profession,” Iskander says. “I want to provide more support to the military, and to the women who want to enter and remain part of this important work. Many women feel they have to choose between having children and working, and even if they choose work after children, they feel pressured to be on maternity leave for the shortest amount of time possible. I want to change that.”

At UCLA Anderson, Teaching Leadership Communication and the Value of Military Experience on Corporate Teams

 

Robert McCann's Leadership Communication class for Executive MBAs includes veterans, active duty military personnel and civilians who work side by side in study groups. Top row, left to right: Randy Trosper, Victor Joseph, Carmen Moch, Kyle Anderson. Bottom row, left to right: Abe Sipe, Jeffrey Kausek, Brian von Kraus.

---

Visit UCLA Anderson's Veterans@Anderson online portal and our special Veterans Day photo wall saluting our school's military community.

---

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

Dr. Robert McCann teaches executive communications within UCLA Anderson’s management and organizations area. His courses include Leadership Communication for Executive MBAs, a component of which entails practicing persuasion techniques in team settings.

Students rehearse team presenting techniques by making five-minute pitches to their classmates, imagining the audience to be HR staff at major corporations. The exercise trains students to structure a memorable message, frame data effectively and navigate representative bias. Classmates evaluate each other’s delivery and content to cultivate greater persuasiveness — for instance, in presenting their credentials for employment. McCann incorporates a specific exercise in which students make a case for why a company should consider military veterans as top candidates for leadership roles.

McCann says, “It has been my pleasure and honor to work with so many veterans during my six years at Anderson. From what I have observed, veterans are trained to be flexible, adaptive leaders, possessing skills that get tested and enhanced among those who have served in combat capacities.” He adds, “I am the son of a World War II U.S. Navy veteran, who, incidentally, is still actively working in a printing company at age 90. Some employers may also be motivated to hire veterans, in part, for reasons of pride in one’s country and a desire among employers to reward service.”

“Under the Harshest of Circumstances” Two Veteran Entrepreneurs Launch a Private Security Service

Brian Boggess (left) and Killian Hemmy (center), who teamed up to launch a private security company, mix with other graduates of the intensive Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans at UCLA Anderson

---

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

“Information without action is irrelevant, and action without information is ineffective.”

This is how retired U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Brian Boggess sums up the experiences in Logar Province, Afghanistan, that inspired Whitebeam Global, the private security service that Boggess and former U.S. Marine Corps Infantry Officer Killian Hemmy are launching. They recently accelerated their startup in the nine-day intensive Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans. It was the first time UCLA Anderson admitted veterans who came in as a team.

Hemmy had been discharged from service in 2005 and he was working in Afghanistan for the FBI — a client he never imagined he’d have. “Afghanistan was such an uncharted and uncontrolled environment,” he says. “Being able to collect crucial information is one thing, but if you can’t find somebody who can commit decisive action to that information, you’re missing out.”

Boggess and Hemmy feel fortunate that their paths crossed in 2008 when Boggess’ Special Forces unit and Hemmy’s FBI team collaborated on a series of efforts to shut down an extensive IED network around Kabul.

“The relationship that was established was phenomenal because Brian’s team was able to commit to performing action based on what we communicated to them. Because of that, we were able to disrupt the various networks of threats out there — not just threats to U.S. interests but to innocent people across the board,” says Hemmy.

“Afghanistan is an extreme example of having extraordinary capacity for action in a combat environment that is also constrained by local law enforcement,” Boggess says. “Our work together in Afghanistan was a model of interagency cooperation. After 9/11 there was a recognition that the various U.S. agencies and departments needed to have much better communication and interoperability in order to be most effective. We put that concept to work at the most fundamental level — the guys on the ground.”

UCLA Anderson Receives $50K Grant from Newman’s Own Foundation in Support of Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans

UCLA Anderson has been awarded a $50,000 grant from Newman’s Own Foundation, the independent foundation created by the late actor and philanthropist, Paul Newman, a U.S Navy veteran.

Newman’s Own Foundation made the award to UCLA Anderson as part of a broader commitment to support veteran entrepreneurship and higher education. The grant will benefit Anderson’s summer Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV), which is entering its 10th year. EBV is headquartered at Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families.

“UCLA Anderson and the Price Center are honored to receive this commitment from Newman’s Own Foundation,” said Senior Associate Dean and EBV Faculty Director Al Osborne, Jr. “This generous support will allow us to enhance our efforts in assisting veteran service men and women as they launch their businesses.”

UCLA Anderson Alumnus Lars Hoffman Takes Flight at SpaceX

Colonel Lars Hoffman as a U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School commandant, standing in front of the F-16 VISTA test aircraft, June 2014

---

U.S. Air Force Colonel Lars Hoffman (EMBA ’15) entered UCLA Anderson with the intention of transitioning from the military to private-sector business. Hoffman, who spent a total of 26 years on active duty, envisioned his dream job at SpaceX. He talks about how his UCLA Anderson Executive MBA and the skills he acquired throughout his career — from Air Force Academy through deployment overseas as an officer — contributed to his readiness to join SpaceX, where he has worked as senior director of government sales since 2014.

---

Hoffman with a model of SpaceX Falcon 9 at Air Force Space Command, April 2016

Q: Why don’t you tell us about your career in the Air Force and why you decided to attend UCLA Anderson?

I was a pilot my whole career, both reconnaissance pilot and a test pilot, and had two tours in the Pentagon, and a couple tours living overseas.

Coming up on my last few years, I realized that as I transitioned from the Air Force to civilian life, I needed to prepare myself. During my last two years in the Air Force I was assigned to Edwards Air Force Base out in the Antelope Valley, where I was the commandant of the test pilot school. I started looking in the Southern California area for a good MBA program, and quickly found the Executive MBA program at Anderson, which seemed like a great fit. I was able to attend the first year of the two-year program during my last year in the Air Force, and it helped me find my job here at SpaceX, where I finished the second year of the program. So the EMBA program was actually the bridge from my military career to my new corporate career at SpaceX.

Q: Please tell us about your transition from military life to a civilian career.

During the last five to 10 years of my Air Force career, I was in higher levels of responsibility and authority, in command positions with staff and direct reports that were supporting me and working with me in a very formal arrangement, as the military is fairly hierarchical. That was the environment I came from.

In transitioning to civilian life, I was told (by the Air Force at least) that there’s going to be a bit of a culture shock. They said, “You won’t be a colonel with a staff supporting you and it’s likely you’re going to transition into a position where you’ll have to do things yourself, you’ll have to work with peers in a different way.”

It wasn’t so different as some people will make it out to be; but during my interview process at SpaceX, they were asking me a lot of questions about whether I was going to be comfortable working in a very flat and collaborative organization without a lot of formal organizational structure to it. They especially wanted to know if I would be comfortable working with people half my age. I said, “Yes, of course.” I had some experience with that, but my MBA experience helped prepare me for that a bit because I was in a classroom of colleagues and contemporaries who were from different industries.

Committed to the Mission: John Wooden Global Leadership Fellow Doug Larratt

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

A former Naval flight officer, test pilot and veteran of multiple carrier deployments over 21 years of service, Doug Larratt (EMBA ’17) learned the brotherhood of service as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, creating life-long bonds with friends who, like him, “bleed Navy blue and gold” (coincidentally Bruin colors as well). “There’s something about committing yourself to a higher cause and serving that cause with like-minded teammates,” he says. “The bond created is unique.”

Both of his own daughters are now UCLA Bruins, and Larratt feels he still serves by delivering high-quality systems to the young servicemen and women who defend our nation. He is one of four UCLA Anderson students receiving a 2016 John Wooden Global Leadership Fellowship on November 2.

Larratt is a program director at Orbital ATK, where he manages design, development and production of major air-launched missile systems. His current project, the Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile – Extended Range (AARGM ER) is the next generation missile for FA-18 and F-35 JSF aircraft.

Following his Naval Academy studies, Larratt served in the Navy operationally, flying the A-6E Intruder and EA-6B Prowler aircraft. He attended the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, earned master’s degrees in aerospace engineering and strategic studies, and served in many flying and leadership positions while logging 2,260 total flight hours in 26 different aircraft and 501 carrier landings.

Larratt was sent on long deployments for many months at a time, while his wife, Bernadette, took care of their young daughters. “I am forever grateful. We moved eight times in 15 years of service.” He recalls flying through post-Gulf War oil fires in Kuwait, helping evacuate refugees from a volcano eruption in the Philippines, and celebrating Y2K on a carrier in the middle of the North Arabian Gulf. In 2007, he retired from the military and began working for Orbital ATK.