EMBA@UCLA blog

As His Company Takes Flight, UCLA Anderson Alumnus Derek Herrera Aligns His Incentives

By Carolyn Gray Anderson

When he accepted the John Wooden Global Leadership Fellowship in 2014, Derek Herrera(EMBA ’15) quoted the inspirational UCLA coach’s aphorism “adversity is your asset.” And Herrera knows about adversity: In 2012, the former U.S. Marine Special Operations Officer was shot by sniper fire while fighting in Afghanistan and became paralyzed from the chest down.

Last June Herrera blogged, “Exactly three years ago I was confronted with a situation that altered my life in many ways. Physically, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally. In most respects, I would say that getting shot and paralyzed is a wholly negative event. Conversely, the path I have traveled in the past three years has been absolutely incredible.”

Turning adversities into assets, Herrera has propelled his ideas forward, pursuing more than one project inspired by his military expertise and experiences — both positive and negative. Herrera was the first person in the U.S. to buy and get FDA approval for in-home use of the ReWalk exoskeleton, a robotic device that enables him to walk upright. He has trained as a para-triathlete, entered marathons and served on multiple foundation boards. When he was still enrolled at Anderson, he spent a week as a teaching assistant in the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans, helping to teach veterans basic skills to start and run their own businesses.

But, Herrera recently wrote, “I have gradually subtracted more and more activities from my life so that I can try to magnify and grow the one project I am willing to commit to indefinitely.”

Herrera presented the Connected Catheter at the 2015 Knapp Venture Competition, where his company Spinal Singularity won first prize

That project is Herrera’s pre-seed company Spinal Singularity, which is devoted to improving the quality of life for people with spinal cord injury and disease (SCI/D) with high-tech connected medical devices. It especially helps those diagnosed with neurogenic bladder, a condition that leaves a person unable to sense the fullness of his or her bladder or control the voiding process.

The company’s pilot product is the Connected Catheter, the world’s first semi-permanent, minimally invasive, fully internal “smart” catheter system that measures bladder pressure and wirelessly transmits data to a smart phone or watch. The data is synched wirelessly to secure cloud storage for remote patient monitoring. “It provides value not just for the users,” says Herrera, but also clinicians and providers.”

The Connected Catheter is designed to allow the user control of a valve to empty urine from the bladder and eliminate the need for intermittent catheters and drainage bags. It also enables more normal sexual function, which, along with bladder control, ranks among the top functions paraplegics and quadriplegics would choose to regain if they had the option. But these are difficult topics to discuss publicly, especially for fiercely independent people in positions of authority or leadership. If Herrera wanted to see the product take off — and in the process dramatically improve his own life — he had to become very candid about his condition.

Herrera says it doesn’t even occur to many people how debilitating the conditions associated with paralysis can be. “It is common for people to see a wheelchair and think, ‘Oh man, that must be really tough because he/she can't walk.’ I thought the same thing before my injury; but what I learned was that … a variety of secondary conditions result that are often more troubling than the mobility issue.” Peer-reviewed research concludes that trunk stability, for instance, ranks above mobility as one of the most desirable functions to have back.

Herrera kicked his company and premiere product into high gear with remarkable speed. He confesses that before he took George Abe’s class he really didn’t have a concrete plan for launching a medical device business. Clear ideas and strategy came into focus less than a year ago, while he was still enrolled at Anderson. “In academia,” he says, “medical breakthroughs are made but they’re not consumer-focused. Advancing science is very important but it happens at a pace that may or may not ever bring a product to market.” Wanting to take an active role in his own recovery, Herrera listened to experienced clinicians and doctors and followed their research, but he strove to understand the business landscape for a useful product and found there was a market impatient for it.

“We asked, ‘What’s the best route to a solution? How can we work within the existing environment to make it happen?’ Because every day that I don’t have a product at market, it’s costing me money.

“The Connected Catheter will revolutionize the way more than one million Americans deal with neurogenic bladder,” says Herrera. Standard catheter technology hasn’t changed significantly in a century, and Herrera calls current methods of catheterization “archaic and medieval.” Contamination is all too common; urinary tract infections are the leading cause of rehospitalization for people with SCI/D. And the daily waste from packaging and single-use components becomes voluminous. Meanwhile, one Connected Catheter replaces approximately 200 disposable catheters and lasts about a month — compared to those that have to be changed with each use.

Herrera’s product earned him first place in both the annual Knapp Venture Competitionand the UCLA Institute for Technology Advancement (ITA) Student Engineering Venture Competition — within mere months of conceiving of his product. And Herrera ranks among Poets & Quants’ Best Executive MBAs in the Class of 2015. The Spinal Singularity team recently waged a $50,000 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for the Connected Catheter and have surpassed their mid point ahead of schedule. With this kind of momentum, Spinal Singularity hopes to start clinical testing of the Connected Catheter before the end of 2015.

At Anderson, he says, he's enjoyed crucial support from professors like Abe and Bill Cockrum and the staff at the Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. Associate Dean of Executive Education Programs Kelly Bean “was and is an incredible mentor and friend,” says Herrera.

Herrera spent part of his Global Access Program in China, where he visited the Great Wall

“It feels great to have that sense of purpose and clarity in my life and has caused me to get up every day excited to go to work,” Herrera says of his new focus. “My goal is to help people and help myself. Through this line of work and this industry, my incentives can be aligned as a successful business person whose products help people’s lives and make a difference in their daily routines.

“The more successful I am financially, the more successful I am socially,” says the Marine-turned-CEO. “My whole life has been dedicated to serving. Even if I don’t solve this problem, I can generate awareness. I’m not going to fail either way.”

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The team at Spinal Singularity invites testimonials from people who believe the Connected Catheter has the potential to change their lives. Their website gives instructions for recording a short video to talk about the company, the product, personal experiences with catheters or anything else the team should know.

Tribute link: https://www.tribute.co/spinalsingularity

Career SEAL and John Wooden Global Leadership Fellow Christian Dunbar Thinks Fearlessly about His Next Layer of Service By Carolyn Cray Anderson

Christian Dunbar (EMBA ’16) has been active on Navy SEAL teams for 22 years. He is a U.S. Navy Captain and Deputy Commander in the Naval Special Warfare Center, responsible for all West Coast SEAL teams. He’s embarked on nearly a dozen deployments, many in combat, most under his leadership and lasting six months. One of those deployments interrupted his MBA studies, requiring him to take a year’s leave of absence to run Special Operations in Afghanistan.

In 2015 — the year he would have graduated were he not called into service overseas — Dunbar is one of four recipients of a John Wooden Global Leadership Fellowship. He’s a third-generation Eagle Scout whose Midwestern parents set strong examples of citizenship and personal responsibility. With two grandfathers who served in World War II, grandmothers who inspired his wise choice of spouse, and four children (ages 2 to 12) at home in San Diego, he regards his family as his most influential collaborators. “It takes their resilience, the shared love in the family,” he says, “to be able to succeed.”

At Dunbar’s level of Special Operations, leaders toggle back and forth between tactical assignments or deployments and corporate executive roles running a piece of the organization in, say, HR or finance. “You traverse from being in charge of 16 people in the middle of the night on the ocean, trying to get them to do dangerous things, to growing up to be in charge of 70 people, to then being in charge of 350 people. Your leadership style changes. When it’s a smaller unit, it’s definitely more visceral: it’s about ‘you and me’ and survival. You find a good way to create a bond with your people. Whereas when you continue to grow up it’s a little bit more about ‘Do I know how to be a technical expert?’ ‘Can I run larger management pieces and run divisions instead of small teams?’” Special Operations, he says, teaches you always to ask whether you’re doing the right thing for the people on the ground (or in the water, as the case may be), as you would in combat. “As you get withdrawn from personal risk, you still have that bond with other guys on the ground.”

Humbled by his award, Dunbar says he wants to live a life of leadership that Wooden would be proud of. For his part, he can be proud of his track record so far; but he acknowledges the possibility of resting on one’s laurels.

Dunbar grew up in the Midwest and went to college at Notre Dame, where UCLA basketball wasn’t exactly on his youthful radar. But he wrote in the essay required for his Wooden fellowship application that Coach Wooden actually had a role in shaping his leadership development and his ability to motivate people effectively after years of managing them. He says in 2005 he had just changed jobs, going from a corporate and policy role in Special Operations Command to jump back into a SEAL team as director and deputy commander of operations. His team, a Special Operations task force, was preparing to deploy to Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2006. A senior enlisted advisor shadowing him helped him become aware that, although he was master of all the tactical and technical components of his work, he might have lost sight of the most effective and intuitive (vs. mechanical) ways to manage, lead and inspire other people.

An avid reader of classic manuals on leadership, Dunbar read Wooden on Leadership on the recommendation of his wife, a former Marine. Remembering the valuable lessons in that book, Dunbar paraphrases Coach Wooden by observing, “When you think you have all the answers, you’ve stopped asking the right questions.” And he took to heart that friendship and cooperation are both foundations of the Wooden Pyramid of Success. “I directly attribute to Coach Wooden my ability to pivot at a pretty critical time, 12 years into the SEAL teams, when I thought I was very successful but was losing touch.”

With master’s degrees in space systems operations and unconventional warfare (which describes as the “science of counter-terrorism”), Dunbar is pursuing an Executive MBA because he’s developing a “sports performance” business in which he’s applying psychology and behavioral techniques that have worked in military contexts to mitigate negative behavior — specifically, sexual assault and domestic violence.

Through what he describes as a circuitous path, Dunbar says, “I really feel as though I’ve found that next layer of service.” His consultancy teaches better habits and decision-making to help athletes become better educated as well as better selected and assessed, and imparts better ways to cope with the stress and the power struggle they deal with on the field. He’s led this kind of training across an organization thousands wide, and he imagines clients among the NFL or other major athletics organizations and large university systems.

Thus, a for-profit business applying the methods he knows effectively intercept and change negative behavior will branch into the Ethos Project, inspired by alarming statistics that one in four college women will get sexually assaulted on campus. When family friend and UC Regents President Janet Napolitano launched the Task Force on Preventing and Responding to Sexual Violence and Sexual Assault, Dunbar, with three daughters of his own, reflected that, having helped to stop the invasion of entire countries, he ought to be able to contribute somehow to curbing this kind of violence.

He’s now training to be a victim advocate. He says UCLA offered him chances for collaboration outside Anderson. He’s networked among people on Napolitano’s UC task force, medical care providers, and UCLA Title IX Coordinator Kathleen Salvaty, a fellow Notre Dame graduate.

“The Anderson experience has been amazing for me,” says Dunbar. “I chose to comehere.” He says he interviewed at other b-schools where the process felt more “cut-throat,” but the Anderson culture reinforces for him “a sense of purpose, a sense of service.” He feels strongly that the Anderson community is interested in the quality of life, within the b-school cohort and outside of it. “It’s a lot about the students, but it’s also about the staff, the faculty…. And some of them are not just plain old ‘good professors.’ I look at what they do extra; they’re studying or they’re proving or discussing happiness.

“When you get to be my age and you’ve been in the SEAL teams for twenty-something years…it’s about resourcefulness, it’s about working hard, it’s about a commitment to each other — there are other things in life besides business success.”

 

 

Dunbar, along with three other Anderson students, will be awarded his $25,000 fellowship on October 6, when Anderson also honors Xerox chairman and CEO Ursula Burns with the 2015 John Wooden Global Leadership Award.

"So Far So Good: Leadership Foundations" by Adrian Colesberry '17

When you're trying to make a name for yourself in business, first impressions are important, so on my first day of class, I arrived late and, having forgotten my name tent, wrote “ADRIAN” on a torn out piece of spiral notebook paper in large block capital letters with the handwriting of a child. So far so good.

The executive educator who puts together the Leadership Foundations week, Dean Kelly Bean had been in the middle of her opening salvo as I squeezed into my seat. Once I got settled with my ad libbed tent, she generously made eye contact with me several times to help me calm down from my tardy arrival. I ungenerously got marginally happier every time someone arrived after I had sat down.

Then we broke for a snack. If you like to eat constantly, don’t like the idea of going on a cruise, and have a generous food budget, consider signing up for the UCLA EMBA program.

As I waited at the rear of the classroom, deciding whether to unnecessarily feed myself, I wrote an email to Allison apologizing for having forgotten my tent and inquiring as to whether I could get a new one. Five seconds after pressing send, an undergrad assistant walked up to me with a new tent they’d just laminated. That level of attention and care was quite reassuring, I must say.

Ian Larken led us through our first case study about beer, know your audience, and Gonzalo Freixes threw a few ethics problems at us. The level of student comment was encouraging. There are a lot of bright people in the room. 

On the second morning, I walked to Anderson from the Palomar hotel. (St. Jerome said that there’s no problem that can’t be solved by a walk. Oh, St. Jerome, you do tickle me with your bone-dry aphorisms.) I cut through the Mildred E. Mathias botanical garden, by the biomedical library, through the engineering college, where you enter the older campus with a back view of the Powell library, which looks like an old church.

 I found my way to the Young Research Library, resisted a temptation to wander through the sculpture garden, worried that I’d make myself late again, and found myself in the turnaround for the university elementary school with seemingly nowhere to go. I thought I was lost until I asked an elementary teacher where Anderson was and he pointed to the building right on the other side of the parking garage. I counted that as my first business lesson of the day: Never doubt yourself. 

Aside from the Zen-like mental state you achieve, the convenience of walking is that you arrive at class with an even skein of perspiration all over your body. (Is convenient the right word in that situation? I’m not sure. Words are so tricky.) 

 

The rest of the week was chock full of terrific professors and learning experiences. The improv exercise was certainly a highlight, but Kelly herself, to borrow one of her favorite analogies, was the red thread that pulled through the experience. She demanded that we take this opportunity not just to learn the skills of business, but to develop ourselves as leaders using the tools she was giving us. Partly as a way of illustrating how to use these tools, she recounted many personal examples of her own leadership journey challenges. In doing so, she set a heroic example of how we can be vulnerable in front of one another during this experience and gain by the risks we choose to take.
I know I’m not alone in having found the week to be an inspiring beginning and I look forward to sharing the next two years with you, my classmates.

 

Yours, Adrian

First Day of EMBA Class of 2017 Leadership Foundations by EMBA Staff

This is such a great day - and the Class of 2017 has been attentive, engaging, asking thoughtful questions on this first day of school. Today has been revealing as professionals were surrounded in the EMBA classrooom by classmates, clearly getting the idea that they will learn so much from each other. I promised them it would be "one of the most interesting and diverse group of people you’ve ever been with" and that's how I see my job as Director of Admission:  Providing an stunning class / learning group where they would learn numerous new ways to problem-solve.

 

 

"A Computer Science Professor wants an MBA" by Jens Palsberg '17

Why do it?

I love to learn. MBA is an area about which I know little so taking an MBA promises to be enriching. Additionally, many people have told me about their positive experiences with taking an MBA. I am particularly inspired by Mads Tofte and Jeffrey Vitter who are outstanding computer scientists, leaders of their universities, and both PhDs and MBAs.

Back to School

Sat Aug 8 was Back to School day, with a packed program from 7:30am to 6:00pm. The education appears to have two main threads: leadership foundations and technical knowledge. I enjoyed the conversations and found that I have amazing class mates, for a total of 71 students, including 24 percent women. The average age is 37 years, the average management experience is 10 years, and the average annual salary is $165,000.

Leadership Foundations

Aug 15-31 I spent 22 hours to prepare for the Leadership Foundations week which will be in September. I read ten articles (known as cases) and wrote my answer to an assignment about strategic challenges. Those ten articles are mainly about strategy, ethics, creativity, marketing, and mergers and acquisitions. I took detailed notes and found that my experience with reviewing computer science papers has been good preparation. Later, when I worked on the assignment about strategic challenges, I found that I had already learned a lot.

 

More about Jens Palsberg and his blog "CS2MBA: A Computer Science Professor wants an MBA":

"I am a professor of computer science at UCLA. After five years as department chair (2010-2015), I joined the UCLA Executive MBA program as a student (2015-2017). In this blog I chronicle my experience in the EMBA program and shed light on two questions: how much time does it take? is it worth the time and money?"