C O R N E L L
J O H N S O N AT C O R N E L L U N I V E R S I T Y
F a L L 2 0 1 4
Engaging Customers with Captivating ContentMore than ever, companies are adding content marketing to their brand strategy.
A Fresh Set of EyesCorporate clients value the insights they obtain from Johnson Immersion Learning teams.
A Legacy of InnovationFrom its inception in 1946 through today, Johnson continues to live up to a proud legacy of embracing innovation.
Hernan Mendez, MBA ’83, President of ProcafecolFresh, new energy jump-starts a national icon.
1w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
a virtuous cycle of innovationWe are proud to be celebrating Cornell’s 150th anniversary this year.
Cornell’s Charter, signed by the governor of New York State on April 27,
1865, established the new university as non-sectarian and coeducational,
welcoming anyone who was academically qualified, regardless of sex,
color, creed, or national origins. Sage Hall, Johnson’s home since 1998,
was originally built as Sage College for Women to make co-education at
Cornell a reality at a time when creating equal opportunities for women
was a radical idea. Our school, established as the Graduate School of
Business and Public Administration in 1946, took a bold step in 1983
by embracing a new identity as the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate
School of Management. The Sesquicentennial story in this issue, “A
Legacy of Innovation” (p. 21) tells more about this.
Johnson embraced innovation from its very inception. An example
is Immersion Learning — Johnson’s unique, signature semester for
Two-year MBA students that integrates course and field work in a
specific industry or career interest. Students who gain experience
through immersion projects report back that those experiences boost
their internship and job search successes. In addition, many participating
companies keep coming back to Johnson to engage student consulting
teams. Read more about this in “A Fresh Set of Eyes” (p. 30).
A more recent innovation is Johnson’s 360 Leadership Assessment,
a proprietary, behavior-based feedback instrument that students use in
conjunction with the Johnson Leadership Matrix to guide their leadership
development plans. Students in all of our MBA programs can use their
360 report to identify the dimensions on which they want to focus,
and then use the matrix to craft their experience at Johnson to fit their
personal leadership development goals and ambitions.
Johnson is promoting entrepreneurial approaches to innovation
by helping to establish eHub, a new entrepreneurship center in
Collegetown that will house eLab and PopShop as well as office space
for Entrepreneurship at Cornell and other Cornell organizations that
support student entrepreneurship. To make this effort a reality, Johnson
is collaborating with Entrepreneurship at Cornell and several sister
schools within Cornell: the College of Engineering, the Dyson School
of Applied Economics and Management, School of Industrial and Labor
Relations, and School of Hotel Administration.
Our alumni also play a key role in helping drive novel changes at
Johnson by sharing innovations in their industries with the Johnson
community. They come back to campus as career coaches, as marketing
professionals do each fall for the Marketing Executive One-on-One
Mentoring program. Hosted by Warren Ellish ’77, MBA ’78, visiting
senior lecturer of marketing and president and CEO of Ellish Marketing
Group, this year’s program brought together 98 marketing students who
were mentored by 36 leading executives in the marketing world. Scores of
alumni speak at symposia on campus and at Johnson events around the
world; several serve on advisory councils; and many share their experience
and expertise to show just how new technologies are transforming the
way they work, as alumni in marketing did for “Engaging Customers
with Captivating Content” (p. 24).
Of course, alumni also come back to campus to reconnect with
faculty and one another, as many of you did for our very special
Sesquicentennial Homecoming celebration this October. We will also
celebrate Cornell’s 150th anniversary at Johnson Predictions Dinners in
January and February, and I hope you will join Cornell-wide celebrations
and visit the Sesquicentennial website (150.cornell.edu) to learn more
about Cornell and the myriad “firsts” on its timeline.
Innovation travels full circle at Johnson — from our distinguished
faculty, who are eminent scholars as well as gifted teachers, through
our collaboration with sister schools at Cornell, to our students, and
back through our alumni, who achieve success and stay connected with
Johnson. It’s a winning model, and I am grateful to all members of the
Johnson community who are passionate about leading innovation in
today’s fast-paced world, and who work together to keep innovation
a living and ever-evolving endeavor at Johnson. Together, we help
to sustain Cornell’s position as a leading research university that
lives up to the aspirations of its founders, Ezra Cornell and Andrew
Dickson White.
Soumitra Dutta anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean
F R O M
2 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
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FaLL 2014 VOL. 29, NO. 1
Engaging Customers with Captivating ContentMore than ever, companies are adding content marketing to their brand strategy.
By Robert Preer
30
Cornell Enterprise onlinewww2.johnson.cornell.edu/alumni/enterprise
A Legacy of InnovationJohnson’s home, Sage Hall, was originally built as Sage College for Women to make co-education at Cornell a reality at a time when creating equal opportunities for women was a radical idea. From its inception in 1946 through today, Johnson continues to live up to that proud legacy of embracing innovation.
By Janice Endresen
A Fresh Set of EyesCorporate clients value the insights they obtain from Johnson Immersion Learning teams.
By Merrill Douglas
24
21
3w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
DepartmentsFrom the Dean 1A virtuous cycle of innovation
Enterprise Online 4Web exclusive stories and videos
Intellectual Capital 5Johnson welcomes new faculty
Welcome visiting faculty
Faculty Honors
Cynthia Saunders-Cheatham named director, Career Management
Sean Scanlon named associate dean
Tyi McCray named director, ODI
One of Johnson’s Best Steps Down: Associate Dean Bill Huling Jr. ’68, MBA ’74
Newsmakers 9Global technology and innovationA high five for high-frequency tradingTech startup TipRanks generates a buzzReversal of fortune among black men
Thought Leadership@Johnson 10Young-Hoon Park: How popular are your keywords?
Eric Gladstone and Kathleen O’Connor: Feminine features are a drawback at the bargaining table — even for men
Bookshelf 11Extracting Value from Big Data — Ask, Measure, Learn: Using Social Media Analytics to Understand and Influence Customer Behavior by Soumitra Dutta and Lutz Finger
Brazil rising? The Political Economy of an Emerging Power: In Search of the Brazil Dream by Lourdes Casanova and Julian Kassum
Vantage Point 14Robert H. Frank: Shattering Myths to Help the Climate
Jeremy Kuhre, MBA ’16: Business leads carbon neutrality
Startups 17Smith Family Business Initiative welcomes its first director Startup Snapshots Naama Bloom, MBA ’03
HelloFlo David Bloom, MBA ’01
Ordr.in
Job Talk 19Be the architect of your own career
Class Notes 40 Alumni Profiles Richard Saccany, MBA ’73
Spanning the globe in mining Larry Kraft ’87, MBA ’88
Refocusing on climate change Ponsi Trivisvavet, MBA ’99
A GMO approach to sustainable crops Abbi Hills, MBA ’09, MHA ’09
Combining consulting with a passion for sports
C over illu str at ion: Daniel Hert zberg
Profile in Leadership —Hernan Mendez, MBA ’83, Fresh, new energy jump-starts a national icon Hernan Mendez, president of Procafecol, parent company to Juan Valdez, led a remarkable turnaround of the 66-year-old brand, starting it down a road of growth and profits.
By Chris Kraul
36
Printed green on recycled stock with 30% post-consumer fiber.
FaLL 2014: Vol. 29, No. 1 Cornell Enterprise is published twice a year by the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.
anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean Soumitra Dutta
associate Dean, Marketing, admissions, Global Strategy Carolyn O’Keefe
Executive Director, Marketing and Communications Sandra R. Paniccia
Editor Janice Endresen, MA ’85
Staff Writer Shannon Dortch
Class Notes Editor Tanis Furst, PhD ’94
Copy Editor Ellen Henrie
Design
Emily Zuwiala, Warkulwiz Design Associates
Photography
Chris Kraul
Cornell University Photography:
Robert Barker
Jason Koski
Lindsay France
We welcome feedback from readers.
Address letters to:
Cornell Enterprise Johnson at Cornell University 130 E. Seneca Street, Suite 400 Ithaca, N.Y. 14850-4353
Phone: 800.847.2082; 607.255.3096
Fax: 607.255.1858
E-mail: [emailprotected]
Letters may be edited for clarity and length.
Cornell Enterprise online www.johnson.cornell.edu/alumni/enterprise
©2014 Johnson at Cornell University ISSN 0741 6989
4 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
enterpriseonlineC O R N E L L
Web Extraswww2.johnson.cornell.edu/alumni/enterprise
Corning CEO Wendell Weeks: Sustaining Institutions in a World of Creative DestructionCorning CEO Wendell Weeks emphasized that all aspects of
business — what, how, and why — must come together to
drive innovation when he visited Johnson to deliver the 27th
annual Lewis B. Durland Memorial Lecture, Nov. 17, 2014.
Entrepreneurship Summit 2014Entrepreneurs from throughout the country, including
keynote speaker Hamdi Ulukaya, CEO of Chobani, joined
with Cornell alumni, students, faculty, and staff Nov. 7
in New York City for a daylong conference, “Beyond the
Horizon,” hosted by Entrepreneurship at Cornell.
Johnson Energy Connection Energy sector alumni shared developments and concerns
about the future of energy at the 2014 Johnson Energy
Connection: Fueling Interest in Renewable and Alternate
Energy, Sept. 26 and 27. Hosted by Johnson’s Center for
Sustainable Global Enterprise and co-organized by Johnson’s
Energy Club and the Sustainable Global Enterprise Club, the event was sponsored by Chevron
and Emerson.
Johnson Women in Business and Women’s Leadership ConferenceJohnson Women in Business, an annual education and
networking event sponsored by Johnson’s Office of Diversity
and Inclusion, gives woman students and alumnae from varied
backgrounds an opportunity to come together and share their
experiences and offers prospective women MBA candidates a chance to learn about what an
MBA has to offer. Held Oct. 16–17, the event was immediately followed by the Women’s
Leadership Conference, which featured guest speakers Janet Carr, MBA ’90, president of the
handbag division at Nine West Group; Michele Williams, assistant professor of organizational
behavior at Cornell; and Judy Rowe, global security project manager for Corning.
Expanding Diversity in the WorkplaceKeynote speaker Fred Keeton, chief diversity officer and vice
president of external affairs for Caesars Entertainment, urged
a group of Johnson students, prospective students, and faculty
to broaden their definition of diversity at Johnson’s 2014
Diversity Symposium at Sage Hall on Oct. 24.
5w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
Robert Bloomfield, Nicholas H. Noyes Professor of Management and professor of accounting, was appointed faculty director of eLearning.
Lourdes Casanova, senior lecturer of management, was appointed academic director of the Emerging Markets Institute.
Cornell-Queen’s Executive MBA students honored Professor Jim Detert with the STAR Award for Outstanding Teaching (marking the fourth time he has received the STAR Award).
Vishal Gaur, professor of operations management, was appointed associate dean for MBA programs.
Faculty Honors
Johnson Welcomes New FacultySoo Yeon Kim, assistant Professor of Marketing
Soo Yeon Kim’s research interests include
consumers’ symbolic versus adaptive use
of products, consumer well-being, and the
influence of self-views and emotions on
consumer behavior. Her research has been
published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Kim received her BA in psychology from
Ewha Woman’s University, South Korea; MS in Communication
from Cornell University; and PhD in marketing from the Kellogg
School of Management, Northwestern University.
Clarence Lee, assistant Professor of MarketingClarence Lee’s research examines the
drivers behind consumer adoption, usage,
and purchase dynamics of digital goods,
where he models consumer behavior using
Bayesian statistics and structural econometric
techniques. Digital products and platforms,
such as the ones provided by many Silicon
Valley and New York City tech startups, are increasingly present in
almost all consumer interactions. In such settings, understanding
consumer choice and the dynamics of engagement and usage
become critically important in order to acquire, serve, and retain
consumers. Lee received his doctorate from Harvard Business
School and holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical
engineering and computer science from MIT. He has conducted
nanotechnology research at IBM and space system design at MIT
Lincoln Laboratory.
Kristina Rennekamp, assistant Professor of accountingKristina Rennekamp’s research examines
financial accounting from a behavioral
perspective; particularly, how biases affect
managers’ disclosure decisions and users’
judgments with respect to those disclosures.
She teaches financial accounting in both the
One-year MBA program in Ithaca and the
Cornell-Queen’s Executive MBA. She is the recipient of numerous
awards, including the Deloitte Foundation Doctoral Fellowship
and the AAA Financial Accounting and Reporting Section’s award
for the best dissertation completed in 2012. Her research has been
published in leading journals, including Contemporary Accounting
Research, Foundations and Trends in Accounting Research, and the
Journal of Accounting Research. Formerly a faculty member at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she received her MS
and PhD from Johnson at Cornell University.
armin Rick, assistant Professor of EconomicsArmin Rick specializes in applied
microeconomic theory with a focus
on the economics of information and
communication. His recent research
centers on the role of communication error
and transparency of economic actions in
situations with asymmetric information.
His work shows that appropriately limiting transparency can often
improve the economic efficiency of communication mechanisms,
in particular with respect to the equilibrium tradeoff between
information transmission and communication costs. He is similarly
interested in labor market inequality and the economics of crime
and human capital accumulation. Rick holds a PhD in economics
Sachin Gupta, PhD ’93, Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and professor of marketing, was appointed director of Graduate Studies. In addition, Gupta’s paper, “Simulated Maximum Likelihood Estimator for the Random Coefficient Logit Model Using Aggregate Data,” was one of four finalists for the O’Dell Award, the top honor bestowed by the Journal of Marketing Research.
The MBA Class of 2009 honored Professor and Associate Dean Vrinda Kadiyali with the Stephen Russell Distinguished Teaching Award. This award is voted on by the five-year reunion class for the professor whose teaching most influenced their post-MBA careers.
Continued on page 6
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I N T E L L E C T U a L
capitalfrom the University of Chicago as well as master’s degrees in
economics from the University of Chicago and the University of
Mannheim (Germany).
Isaac Smith, assistant Professor of Management and Organizations
Isaac Smith’s research focuses on the morality
and ethics of organizations and the people
within them. Specifically, his research
examines the psychology of inspiration,
the causes and consequences of unethical
behavior, and the potential role of business
in battling the world’s social ills, such
as poverty. His work has been published in academic journals,
including Psychological Science, Academy of Management Learning
and Education, Journal of Business Ethics, and Entrepreneurship
Theory & Practice. His research has also been covered in multiple
media outlets, including BBC World Service Radio, Businessweek,
Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, Time, The
Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He received his PhD
in business administration (organizational behavior) from the
University of Utah, and he holds an MBA and BA from Brigham
Young University. He has worked with and consulted for a number
of Fortune 100 companies in the financial services and high-
tech industries. He has also worked with nonprofit organizations
dedicated to reducing poverty and promoting economic self-reliance
in Mongolia and Thailand.
Welcome visiting Faculty Christopher Marquis, Visiting Professor of Management and Organizations
Christopher Marquis’ research focuses on
how business can have a positive impact on
society and, in particular, how historical
processes and community relations have
shaped firms’ and entrepreneurs’ social
strategies and activities. Marquis’ research has
won a number of national awards, including
the Academy of Management’s 2006 William H. Newman Award
for best paper based on a dissertation. He has published in the
Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review,
Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review,
Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal as well as a
number of edited collections. He is a member of the editorial boards
of Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly,
Organization Science, and Strategic Organization. Marquis received
a BA in history from Notre Dame, MA in history and MBA in
finance from the University of Pittsburgh, and MA and PhD in
sociology from the University of Michigan. Prior to his academic
career, he worked for six years in the financial services industry,
most recently as vice president and technology manager for a
business unit of Bank One Corporation (now J.P. Morgan Chase).
Christopher Meredith, Visiting Lecturer of FinanceChris Meredith is a senior portfolio manager and the director
of research and portfolio management at O’Shaughnessy Asset
Management (OSAM). Meredith reports to the CEO/CIO,
and is responsible for managing the portfolio management
team, investment strategy research, and overseeing the firm’s
Hyunseob Kim’s paper, “The Asset Redeployability Channel: How Uncertainty Affects Corporate Investment,” was selected as the “best paper in corporate finance” at Finance Cavalcade, the Society for Financial Studies’ conference in Washington, D.C., on May 19, 2014.
Cornell Executive MBA students honored Risa Mish ’85, JD ’88, senior lecturer of management, with the Globe Award for Teaching Excellence.
Maureen O’Hara was appointed to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s chief advisory body to represent viewpoints of Cornell University and academia.
Stijn van Osselaer received the 2014 Faculty Research Award.
Second-year MBA students in the Ithaca program honored Drew Pascarella, MBA ‘01, lecturer of finance, with the Apple Award for Teaching Excellence.
William Schmidt, assistant professor of operations management, was honored with the Doctoral Dissertation Award for significant originality and technical competence by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals for his doctoral dissertation, “Supply Chain Disruptions and the Role of Information Asymmetry.”
Douglas Stayman, associate professor of marketing, concluded his appointment as associate dean for MBA programs and was appointed associate dean at Cornell Tech.
Faculty Honors continued
7w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
trading efforts. He leads a team of analysts
conducting research on new and existing
strategies and evaluating the efficacy of
new factors. Prior to joining the firm,
Meredith was a senior research analyst on
the systematic equity team at Bear Stearns
Asset Management. He was a director at
Oracle Corporation and spent eight years as
a technology professional. Meredith holds a BA in English from
Colgate University, an MBA from Johnson at Cornell University,
and an MA in financial mathematics from Columbia University.
He is a chartered financial analyst.
Scott Yonker, Visiting assistant Professor of FinanceScott Yonker’s primary interests are in
corporate finance, behavioral finance, and
investments. Using tools from psychology,
sociology, and economics, Yonker investigates
how identifiable differences in “key” market
players impact the important decisions that
they make. His work has been accepted
for publication in The Journal of Finance, The Review of Financial
Studies, and The Journal of Financial Economics; cited by The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek;
and featured on the Fox Business Channel. On leave from the Kelley
School of Business at Indiana University, Yonker, a chartered
financial analyst, holds a master’s degree in economics from Duke
University and a PhD in finance from the Ohio State University.
Prior to entering academia, Yonker was a portfolio manager for a
registered investment advisory firm in Chapel Hill, N.C. He is the
president and founder of Frontier Asset Management.
Cynthia Saunders-Cheatham named director, Career Management
Cynthia Saunders-Cheatham was named
executive director of Johnson’s Career
Management Center (CMC), responsible
for career management efforts across all
Johnson’s MBA programs. Saunders-
Cheatham has been at Johnson for six years,
initially filling a dual role as brand advisor in
the marketing and communications group and as CMC marketing
advisor. Most recently, as director of career development for the
Two-year MBA in Ithaca, she advised students pursuing careers in
marketing, high-tech industries, and sustainability. Before Johnson,
Saunders-Cheatham held various corporate marketing roles in
consumer packaged goods and business-to-business marketing.
She earned her BS and MBA degrees from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Saunders-Cheatham succeeded Fred
Staudmyer ’77, MBA ’79, who left Johnson in November to accept a
senior leadership position with a regional bank in Connecticut.
Sean Scanlon named associate dean Sean Scanlon joined Johnson as associate
dean for Alumni Affairs and Development
in October 2014. Formerly senior director of
development and philanthropy at Cornell’s
Lab of Ornithology, Scanlon is respected
nationally for his work in helping further the
lab’s global conservation and research agenda,
with special recognition for his efforts in developing its digital
outreach efforts. An advancement professional since 2000, Scanlon
has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and a
master’s degree from the University of Illinois. “Scanlon’s intimate
knowledge of Cornell and comprehensive knowledge of current best
practices in academic fundraising make him the ideal candidate to
help further the growth that Johnson’s advancement program has
enjoyed under Bill Huling’s leadership as associate dean,” said Dean
Soumitra Dutta.
Tyi McCray named director, ODITyi McCray became the fifth director of
Johnson’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion
(ODI) in October 2014. Formerly associate
director of Diversity Programs in Cornell’s
College of Engineering, McCray holds a BS
from the University of Maryland, Baltimore
County, and a PhD in biology from Cornell
University. She has worked with the Cornell International Institute
for Food, Agriculture, and Development in South Africa and in
Ithaca, with Cornell’s Prison Education Program, at the White
House Office of Public Engagement, and as a researcher at the Max
Planck Institute in Germany. McCray succeeded Nsombi Ricketts,
who left Cornell to become an assistant dean at Northwestern
University.
Christopher Meredith
“ Building a high-performing alumni affairs and Development team and achieving new levels of excellence in Johnson fundraising during his time as associate dean has been the capstone to Bill’s 26-year career at Cornell.” — dean soumitra dutta
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capitalOne of Johnson’s Best Steps Downassociate Dean of alumni affairs and Development William W. “Bill” Huling Jr. ’68, MBa ’74, will retire from Cornell in January 2015.by Janice Endresen
A double-degree Cornellian, Huling embarked on his second career
at Cornell in 1988, after retiring as a lieutenant colonel in the
United States Army. Although stationed in sunny Hawaii for his
last tour, he says: “I knew exactly where I wanted to retire, where I
wanted to go, what I wanted to do.”
Why so certain? Huling thoroughly enjoyed his first alumni
and development effort at Cornell, which came about when he
worked as an assistant professor of military science in Cornell’s
ROTC detachment in Barton Hall, where he taught military
history, military science, and leadership from 1974 to 1977 (after
earning his MBA and while still a captain in the U. S. Army).
“I came in contact with a famous alum, F.R. Newman [Class
of 1912] of Newman Arboretum and Newman Hall,” Huling
recalls. He learned that Newman, who had been a lieutenant in
WWI, had never received certain military awards because many
of his files had burned in a fire in St. Louis. So Huling obtained
some documentation from Newman; then, working through the
Department of the Army Awards branch, “managed to get him three
medals that he deserved,” he said. “We had a wonderful ceremony,
we pinned the medals on him, and he was so happy.” Afterwards,
“Newman helped us build the WWI exhibit over in the Wortham
Military Museum in Barton Hall — he donated all of that to
Cornell ROTC.”
Fueled by this experience, Huling returned to Cornell in 1988
to become director of regional programs in Cornell’s Office of
Alumni Affairs. In 1991, he joined Johnson’s alumni affairs team,
serving first as director of development, then as director of corporate
relations, and later as major
gifts officer. In 2009, he
became associate dean.
Throughout his tenure at
Cornell, Huling set the
bar high for strengthening
relationships with
corporations and alumni.
“Building a high-performing Alumni Affairs and Development
team and achieving new levels of excellence in Johnson fundraising
during his time as associate dean has been the capstone to Bill’s 26-
year career at Cornell,” said Dean Soumitra Dutta.
But the achievement that means the most to Huling is his role in
creating Cornell’s Korean/Vietnam War Memorial. “In 1990, I got a
letter from Joe Ryan, an alum and Vietnam veteran,” recalls Huling,
himself a Vietnam veteran. “He said, ‘Bill, the university has done
nothing to recognize our veterans in the Vietnam War.’” So Huling
brought alumni veterans together during Reunion, where a Korean
War veteran asked, “What about the Korean War?” As Huling tells
it: “Joe Ryan said, ‘Come on in, we’ll do a Korean/Vietnam War
Memorial.’” Huling subsequently became Cornell’s coordinator for
the project and Ryan the alumni leader.
“In 1990, when we started, we didn’t know a single loss of the
Korean or the Vietnam War,” says Huling. “And remember this
was pre-Internet. So it was the old-fashioned way of doing research.
… University archives pulled names of deceased alumni; we took
that and matched them against the losses on the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial Wall, line by line.” The memorial was built, and in
June 1993 Cornell President Frank H. T. Rhodes presided over a
dedication ceremony in Anabel Taylor Hall, which Huling describes
as a “beautiful and very momentous event.”
At Johnson, Huling says, “We were the very first to recognize
that veterans would make outstanding students. They’re very
mature, they’re very calm, they’ve had a lot of responsibility
under a lot of stress.” Johnson began reaching out to veterans in the
1990s, with Huling participating in their admissions interviews. “It
was gratifying to me to be able stay close to what was happening
to these young people, and stay close to the service,” he says. “This
year, we’re very proud that we have 19 first-year MBAs who are
U.S. veterans.”
Huling is affectionately and familiarly known to myriad alumni
under a variety of monikers, including “coach” (a star athlete in
high school, Huling coached Cornell freshman football 1972–77);
“captain” or “lieutenant colonel”; and “Rakkasan” — an eclectic
tribute given him by Korean alumni who enjoy knowing he first
visited their country via parachute.
Johnson staff and faculty will miss his smile, his candor, and his
uncanny ability to instantly recall names of alumni with specific expertise.
9w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
Global technology and innovationDean Soumitra Dutta netted
a great deal of attention in the
U.S. and global press with
the release of his two annual
research projects. In April
2014, the Global Information
Technology Report 2014,
co-edited by Dutta, gained
coverage for Johnson in top
media outlets, including
Newsweek, The Wall Street
Journal, and Voice of
America Radio. The dean
also captured global coverage with on-air appearances on
BBC News and ChannelNewsAsia, both in Singapore. In summer
2014, following the release of the Global Innovation Index 2014,
co-authored by Dutta, he was interviewed on CCTV America,
regarding China as a global innovator; Business Standard, India;
and India Abroad.
The Global Information Technology Report, published with the
World Economic Forum, ranks countries’ networked readiness, or
how prepared an economy is to apply the benefits of information
and communications technologies (ICTs) to promote economic
growth and well-being. The Global Innovation Index, produced in
partnership with the World Intellectual Property Organization
and INSEAD, ranks 143 economies around the world, using
81 indicators, to gauge both their innovation capabilities and
measurable results.
a high five for high-frequency tradingMaureen O’Hara, the Robert W. Purcell
Professor of Management and professor
of finance, had a lot to say in April 2014,
following the publication of a new book
by finance journalist Michael Lewis. His
book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, asserts
that high-frequency traders use algorithms,
supercomputers, and the Internet to gain
microsecond advantages on other traders.
While the book suggests that flash trading could be a form of
cheating, O’Hara takes the opposite view.
“Virtually all academic research looking at transaction costs and
volatility finds that U.S. markets are better now than in the pre –
high-frequency era,” she told Time magazine. That’s because most
brokers have “best execution” requirements, wrote Time, meaning
that civilians get the same price as the pros. In this view, the
HFTs are adding information to the market and thus aiding
price discovery. O’Hara, who co-authored the book High-
Frequency Trading: New Realities for Traders, Markets,
and Regulators, conducts research on computerized trading,
and its effect on markets. O’Hara’s comments on high-frequency
trading, and Lewis’ book also appeared in CBSNews.com
and Forbes.
Tech startup TipRanks generates a buzz
Roni Michaely, the Rudd Family
Professor of Management and
professor of finance, made news
in August 2014 with the launch of
a tech startup for which he is an
investor and advisor. TipRanks, a
financial accountability website,
uses machine learning and natural
language processing algorithms
(NLP) to search the Internet and measure the performance of
anyone giving investment advice on leading financial blogs and
websites. The startup’s launch and its high-profile investors —
including former New York State Governor Elliott Spitzer — led to
media buzz and coverage in numerous outlets, including the New
York Post, New York Daily News, Yahoo! Finance, The New York
Times, CNBC, and The Wall Street Journal’s Marketwatch.
Reversal of fortune among black menResearch from Armin Rick, assistant
professor of economics, and his co-author
Derek Neal of the University of Chicago,
finds that the considerable economic
progress black men achieved between 1940
and 1980 has halted, and in many cases,
reversed. Numerous media outlets reported
on their working paper, “The Prison Boom
and the Lack of Black Progress after Smith
and Welch,” including The Washington Post, Time, and blog sites 538
and Vox.
Newsmakers
ThoughtLeadership
10 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
How popular are your keywords? Less popular keywords better suited for paid search advertising
Consumers are more likely to click a
sponsored link when their searched
keywords are less popular, according
to new research by Johnson Professor
Young-Hoon Park and his co-authors.
Searching the Internet for a
product, service, or idea will yield a
list of results, based on the keywords
used. The results usually include
a list of “organic” results — those
that are returned based on the search
engine’s algorithm — and also a list
of “sponsored” results, which are paid for by businesses as a form of
advertising. Quite naturally, advertisers want to increase the likelihood
that the person searching will click on their sponsored link.
New research from Young-Hoon Park, the Sung-Whan Suh
Professor of Management and professor of marketing at Johnson, and
his co-authors provides marketers with insights to what happens once
a consumer arrives at the search results page. Their paper, “Consumer
Click Behavior at a Search Engine: The Role of Keyword Popularity,”
was published in the August 2014 Journal of Marketing Research.
The research finds that the popularity of a keyword — how often it
is searched relative to other keywords — is an important indicator of
consumers’ clicking tendencies: The less popular a keyword is, the more
a consumer clicks after searching it, and the more likely those clicks are
on sponsored links.
“Consumers who search using less popular search terms are more
invested in their search for information and are closer to a purchase than
those who are using more popular keywords,” Park said.
“They are, quite simply, closer to making a purchase and purposeful
in determining what to buy.”
Knowing that consumers using less popular search terms are more
likely to click on sponsored links has implications both for advertisers and
Internet search engines. Advertisers can make more targeted sponsored-
link buys, and search engines can incorporate this click behavior to better
optimize search results to consumer queries, Park said.
The research, by Park, Kinshuk Jerath of Columbia University, and
Liye Ma of University of Maryland-College Park, was based on data
from a Korean search engine that provided data on search-and-click
activity for several hundred keywords over a one-month period.
Summaries of the research were posted to dozens of media websites
and numerous science and marketing blog sites, including ScienceBlog.
Young -Hoon Park
Feminine features are a drawback at the bargaining table — even for men
New research suggests that people
with feminine facial features are
offered less in negotiations than those
with more masculine ones, and are
perceived as more cooperative.
People with feminine features —
even men — are at a disadvantage at
the bargaining table, according to new
research by Eric Gladstone, a PhD
candidate at Johnson, and Kathleen
O’Connor, associate professor of
management and operations. The
study was published online in
July in the journal Organizational
Behavior and Human Decisions
Processes, and caught the attention
of The Washington Post, Bloomberg
Businessweek, and the Wall Street
Journal Digital Network.
“Research shows that women,
compa r ed to men , do wor s e
in negotiation situations,” said
Gladstone. “We asked whether, on
top of gender/sex effect, there is an element of femininity involved. In
particular, are those with feminine faces judged to be more cooperative?
If so, how does this play out?”
Gladstone and O’Connor addressed this question in two studies.
“In the first study, we show that when choosing someone to negotiate
against, participants chose a more, versus less, feminine-featured other,”
said Gladstone. “When asked to choose someone to represent them
in a negotiation, however, participants chose the less feminine-faced
individual. In an actual negotiation simulation, participants demanded
more from, and acted more aggressively toward more feminine-faced
counterparts.”
Gladstone is earning his PhD in management and organizations at
Johnson and will complete his degree in May 2015. His research articles
have been published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes, Psychological Science, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Social
Networks, Sociological Science, and Best Paper Proceedings of the 2014
Academy of Management.
k at Hl een o ’Connor
er iC gl ads tone
11w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
“ For academics and policy makers, the book provides a political and economic framework that can be studied and applied in Brazil and in other emerging markets.”
— lourdes casanova
B O O K
Brazil rising? The Political Economy of an Emerging Power: In Search of the Brazil DreamBy Lourdes Casanova and Julian KassumBy Pallavi Rao
Twelve years of s ignificant
growth in social and economic
development have made Brazil
the seventh largest economy in
the world, but now the country
seeks a second wind. A new book
by Johnson’s Lourdes Casanova,
senior lecturer and academic
director of the Emerging Markets
Institute at Johnson, encapsulates
Brazil’s role in the new order of
emerging economies and the steps
the country needs to propel its
economic growth forward. The
Political Economy of an Emerging Power: In Search of the Brazil Dream,
co-authored by Casanova and Julian Kassum, an independent consultant
and author of The G20: A Business Guide, analyzes Brazil’s achievements
and its soft and hard power.
While Brazil’s international stature has risen thanks to its ambitious
and friendly foreign policies, it has reached an economic standstill. “To
correct this situation and kick-start growth again, Brazil needs political
consensus and social inclusion,” Casanova says. “Social development
programs need to be maintained and scaled up.”
The book asks whether Brazil’s rise on the global stage is barely
beginning or has already hit a plateau, held back by numerous domestic
challenges and the external constraints of the global governance system.
The authors show that Brazil’s hard power capability is greater than is
often believed, and that this power largely rests on its energy, food, and
financial reserves.
But Brazil’s biggest strength lies in soft power, because Brazil is
able to “seduce” other states with its culture, values, and policies. The
book describes how Brazil is developing its own model of growth and
development with some features of state capitalism and innovative forms
of welfare. The authors examine the role the state plays in Brazilian
business and industry and ask whether the “Brasília model” can be an
alternative to the old “Washington consensus.”
Finally, the authors assess Brazil’s numerous domestic challenges
and how these may prevent it from becoming an effective global power.
These include economic, social, and educational challenges.
“For academicians and policy makers, the book provides a political
and economic framework that can be studied and applied in Brazil and
in other emerging nations,” says Casanova. For students, she hopes,
her book will provide insights into Brazil’s economy and into emerging
markets in general. “Brazil’s problems are similar to those of other
emerging countries,” she says. “People who moved from poverty to
middle class now demand better services: affordable and efficient public
transportation, education, and health care. But the government has not
kept up with it.”
Brazil enjoys the presence of large, local companies that provide
economic stability, but only a few at the top wield a lot of power.
Generally, the economic model known as the Brasilia Consensus, which
has worked up to this point, now needs updating.
Casanova and Kassum also address Brazil’s role on the global stage.
A survey of Brazilian opinion leaders, experts, and practitioners revealed
that the outlook for its international policies needs to be more focused.
“Brazil has to establish a clear international policy, including how to
balance its relations with the U.S., Europe, and the BRICS,” she says.
“The country now needs to be vocal as one of the leaders in South
America.”
Lourdes Casanova specializes in international business with a focus on latin america and multinationals from emerging markets. at Johnson, she is senior lecturer and academic director of the emerging Markets institute.
B O O K
shelf
12 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
In their new book, Ask, Measure,
Learn: Using Social Media Analytics
to Understand and Influence
Customer Behavior (O’Reilly
Media , 2014) , co-author s
Soumitra Dutta , Johnson’s
dean, and Lutz Finger, LinkedIn
director of data analytics, neatly
encapsulate both the opportunity
and the hype associated with big
data:
Data has always had strategic value, but with the
magnitude of data available today and our capability to
process it has become a new form of asset class. In a
very real sense, data is now the new equivalent of oil
or gold. And today we are seeing a data boom rivaling
the Texas oil boom of the 20th century or the San
Francisco gold rush of the 1800s.
If today’s world of big data is like a modern-day oil boom or gold
rush, then just about anyone can get out there and extract the raw material
without special equipment or deep pockets. However, the authors argue,
it can still take sophisticated algorithms and a whole lot of know-how to
realize its ultimate value — just as it does to refine crude into gasoline,
or to make a sophisticated gold watch, for example.
Ashish Gambhir, MBA ’09, co-founder of newBrandAnalytics,
has built a profitable business by extracting value from big data, as the
book notes. His firm started by aggregating all customer feedback in
the hospitality industry — a virtual fire hose of data — from social
media, travel site reviews, and guest surveys. To reap value from that
data, Gambhir and his team developed automated scoring and customer
satisfaction metrics by “training the machine” through proprietary
algorithms. That process enables newBrandAnalytics’ hotel and restaurant
customers to gain actionable insights into their food presentation, quality,
and service.
Sentiment algorithms like the one developed by newBrandAnalytics,
as well as recommendation systems like Amazon’s, get a lot of airtime
in the book, and the authors report keen interest in their work from
data analysts and social media specialists. But Ask, Measure, Learn is
expressly written to help managers learn to uncover the value in both
structured and unstructured data sets. Dutta and Finger call that value
the fourth “v,” which, along with volume, velocity, and variety, typically
characterize big data.
“Big data is all around us,” Dutta says. “It’s not a question of whether
to use it or not, but how to best use it — how to make it small data and
to get it to answer your question.”
As co-founders of Fisheye Analytics, a Singapore-based social media
analytics firm that was sold to WPP Group in late 2013, Dutta and Finger
have spent years grappling with the very questions they write about.
Finger now heads up a data science team at LinkedIn. And as Johnson’s
dean, Dutta is meeting increased demand for data-intensive courses
with additional coursework and a new, big data-focused immersion
that could launch as early as spring 2015.
Ask, Measure, Learn is divided into two main sections, the first of
which describes how collecting and crunching the right data can drive
value across various business functions. Marketing, Sales, PR, Customer
Care, and Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management)/Market
Research each get a dedicated chapter. The second section is designed to
get individual managers focused on building their own “Ask-Measure-
Learn” system. Key in that process is seeking the right data sets and
asking measurable questions with actionable outcomes.
Wondering if big data is a panacea? Think the right social media
analytics software will magically build your customer base? The authors
remind us that selling your product still depends on building knowledge
and trust with consumers through the virtues of big data. On the other
hand, we as consumers hold more power than ever thanks to social
media.
Used strategically, big data enables companies to build some of that
trust while dialing down the human touch. Take Netflix, for example.
The company famously offered a $1 million award to whoever could
develop an algorithm to improve the accuracy of its predicted movie
ratings by 10 percent. Over 60 percent of users rely on its suggestion
engine for recommendations on what to watch. “For companies the
size of Netflix, which generated $3.2 billion in fiscal year 2011, better
recommendations can have a tangible financial impact,” notes the book.
Still, suggestion engines and other machine-learning mechanisms can
get it wrong sometimes. “The more we have machines making decisions
for us, the higher the risk that they get it wrong and we don’t know,”
Extracting Value from Big DataAsk, Measure, Learn: Using Social Media Analytics to Understand and Influence Customer BehaviorBy Soumitra Dutta and Lutz Finger by Jeffrey Gangemi, MBA ’09
13w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
“ Big data is all around us. It’s not a question of whether to use it or not, but how to best use it — how to make it small data and to get it to answer your question.” — dean soumitra dutta
Finger warns. An example in the book illustrates this: “New York Times
bestselling business author Carol Roth once complained in a blog that
Google infers that she is a male over age 65, when in fact she is a woman
decades younger.”
The authors also address how social media increases transparency
and disperses power, allowing customers to influence the behavior of
companies. For example, customer service organizations used to cut costs
by reducing average call times, even if service quality suffered. Now, any
disgruntled customer can take to Facebook or Twitter and voice their
displeasure at lackluster service, causing brand damage and negative
online sentiment. “Suddenly, the hidden discussions between a call center
somewhere in the offshored world and you — the customer — became
public and open,” write Finger and Dutta.
There are a number of ways to address this power shift without
taking a big hit to the bottom line, argue the authors, and they all
involve embracing transparency to build trust with the consumer. On
the one hand, companies can use social media to grow their own internal
customer service. Best Buy, for example, enables more of their workforce
to go online and offer support to thousands of requests they get via
social media and community forums. The company reports saving $5
million that would otherwise be spent on call center operations. Another
alternative: By engaging social-media power users to stock knowledge
bases with solutions to common issues, Apple engages their most valuable
customers, often turning them into vocal (and loyal) brand advocates.
In a quintessentially big-data approach to customer care, strategic
and brand consultancy Prophet asked the question for a banking client:
Which customer behaviors were predictive of switching to another bank?
As detailed in the book, Prophet then built a predictive model that
demonstrated a particularly devastating impact to customer retention
when customers had to call the customer hotline over the weekend.
That kind of actionable data helped to prioritize the improvement of
internal processes to improve customer retention — a clear connection
to the company bottom line.
In today’s data boom, even firms with the drilling and refining
capability of Exxon Mobil can go astray. Asking the right question from
the start is crucial for arriving at actionable, measurable outcomes. When
Google launched its now-legendary algorithm and quickly overtook Alta
Vista in Internet search, they were asking the right question to guide
their efforts: What’s the one website that will best satisfy a user’s search
query?
Ask, Measure, Learn offers tools, cases, and new perspectives to help
managers, data analysts, and social media specialists to ask their own
versions of that “right question.”
Lutz Finger, co-author of Ask, Measure, Learn, heads up a data science team at linkedin, where he is director of data analytics.
Dean Soumitra Dutta, co-author of Ask, Measure, Learn, is a noted authority on the impact of new technology on the business world, especially social media and social networking, and on strategies for driving growth and innovation by embracing the digital economy.
14 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
Shattering Myths to Help the ClimateBy Robert H. Frank
Each new climate-change study seems more pessimistic than the last.
This May and June, for example, were the hottest ones on record for the
planet. Storms and droughts occur with increasing frequency. Glaciers are
rapidly retreating, portending rising seas that could eventually displace
hundreds of millions of people.
Effective countermeasures now could actually ward off many of
these threats at relatively modest cost. Yet despite a robust scientific
consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are at the root of the problem,
legislation to curb them has gone nowhere in Congress. In response,
President Obama has proposed stricter regulations on electric utilities,
which some scientists warn may be too little, too late.
Why aren’t we demanding more forceful action? One reason may
be the frequent incantation of a motley collection of myths, each one
rooted in bad economics:
The enormous uncertainty of climate science argues for
a wait-and-see strategy.
The claim here is that reducing greenhouse gases would be a wasted
expense if climate change ends up causing only minor problems. But
uncertainty cuts two ways. Things might not be as bad as expected, but
they could also be much worse.
In other domains, uncertainty doesn’t counsel inaction. Few people,
for example, recommend disbanding the military simply because
adversaries might not invade. In any event, many scientists now believe
that storms and droughts caused by climate change are already causing
enormous damage, so all that remains uncertain is how much worse
things will get. And as Robert Shiller has written in this space, when the
risk is as high as it now seems, economics tells us that insuring against
worst-case calamities is prudent.
Slowing the pace of climate change would be
prohibitively difficult.
Reducing CO2 emissions would actually be surprisingly easy. The most
effective remedy would be a carbon tax, which would raise the after-tax
price of goods in rough proportion to the size of their carbon footprint.
Gasoline would become more expensive, piano lessons would not.
The functional equivalent of that — a cap-and-trade system —
worked spectacularly well when Congress required marketable permits
for discharging sulfur dioxide (SO2) in 1995. Acid rain caused by SO
2
emissions quickly plummeted, at about one-sixth the cost predicted.
Once people have to pay for their emissions, they find ingenious ways
of reducing them.
Myth 1:
Myth 2:
Myth 3:
“In other domains, uncertainty doesn’t counsel inaction. Few people, for example, recommend disbanding the military simply because adversaries might not invade.”
—robert H. frank
a carbon tax would destroy jobs.
If a carbon tax were scheduled to be gradually phased in once the
economy recovered, its mere announcement would create jobs right
away. As with any policy change, there would be winners and losers.
But because an impending carbon tax would render many existing
energy-using processes obsolete, it would create strong incentives for
corporations to put their mountains of idle cash to work. Spending on
development of more efficient processes, with attendant hiring, would
be expected to begin immediately.
V a N T a G E©
theispot.com
/Jing Jing tsong
15w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
Myth 4:
Myth 5:
Myth 6:
The cost of reducing CO2 emissions would be
prohibitively high.
Because a steep tax on emissions would generate hundreds of billions
of dollars in annual revenue, you might assume the policy would entail
big costs for ordinary people. But every dollar raised by a carbon tax is a
dollar by which other taxes can be reduced. The actual cost of reducing
CO2 emissions would be only those costs associated with the cleaner
processes we’re led to adopt, and they promise to be low. Experience
in other countries, for example, suggests that a carbon tax that doubled
the price of gasoline would result in cars that are more than twice as
efficient as today’s.
The cost objection is further undermined by evidence that we’re
already bearing high costs because of our failure to limit carbon emissions,
as the White House declared in a report in July. The net cost of reducing
emissions would properly include an adjustment for the corresponding
reduction in weather damage.
It’s pointless for americans to reduce CO2 emissions,
since unilateral action won’t solve global warming.
Although an effective solution will take global coordination, America’s
inaction has been a major barrier to progress. If the United States and
Europe each adopted a steep carbon tax, they could elicit broader
cooperation through heavy tariffs on goods produced in countries that
failed to do likewise. India and China need access to our markets, giving
us enormous leverage.
Penalizing greenhouse gas emissions would violate
people’s freedom.
As John Stuart Mill, the British political economist, argued, people
should be free to do as they please, provided they don’t cause undue
harm to others. But greenhouse gases have already caused great harm
and threaten much worse. Mill’s cost-benefit framework provides no
reason for thinking that someone’s freedom to escape the small burden
of CO2 taxation should trump other, vastly more important freedoms.
To the contrary, he said, restrictions on individual liberty are needed
when the health and safety of the great mass of people and the purity
of the natural environment are at stake.
In 2009, the respected M.I.T. global climate simulation model
estimated that if we do nothing to curb greenhouse emissions, there’s a
10 percent chance that temperatures will rise by more than 12 degrees
Fahrenheit by century’s end, causing wholesale destruction of life as we
know it.
There’s still time to eliminate this catastrophic risk at surprisingly
modest cost. If we fail to act, future historians may wonder from behind
high sea walls why we allowed the more effective responses we could
have pursued to be blocked by an easily debunked collection of myths.
Robert H. Frank is Henrietta Johnson louis Professor of Management and pro-fessor of economics at Johnson, where he has taught since 1990. He is also professor of economics in Cornell university’s department of economics, where he first began his career as a professor in 1972, and a monthly contributor to the “economic scene” column in The New York Times. He has served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural nepal, chief economist for the Civil aeronautics Board, fellow at the Center for advanced study in the Behavioral sciences, and was Professor of american Civilization at l’ecole des Hautes etudes en sciences so-ciales in Paris. Frank’s books include Choosing the Right Pond, Passions within Reason, Microeconomics and Behavior, Luxury Fever, What Price the Moral High Ground?, The Economic Naturalist, The Economic Naturalist’s Field Guide, and The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.
From The New York Times, economic scene, august 2, 2014. reprinted with permission.
“ Experience in other countries suggests that a carbon tax that doubled the price of gasoline would result in cars that are more than twice as efficient as today’s.” —robert H. frank
V a N T a G E
point
16 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
Business leads carbon neutrality By Jeremy Kuhre, MBA ’16
On Sunday, Sept. 21, I had the privilege of participating in the largest
climate march in history. More than 400,000 individuals, including about
150 Cornell students, took to the streets of New York City in what is
being called the People’s Climate March. The march united more than
1,400 businesses, schools, faith-based groups, and environmentalists in
an unprecedented show of solidarity, carrying the message that something
must be done about climate change.
The march was scheduled to coincide with the Sept. 23 U.N.
Summit on Climate Change in New York City, where 125 heads of state,
including President Obama, convened to lay a framework for a binding
agreement to reduce greenhouse gasses and cap global warming to an
increase of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius. There are many opinions on how to
best achieve this, including carbon taxes, investment in renewable energy,
changes in dietary and agricultural practices, and divestment from fossil
fuel companies.
That diversity of opinion was the most hopeful message I took away
from the People’s Climate March. The constituencies lining up against
climate change are increasingly representative of the broader melting pot
of political ideologies across America. Take the bus that I organized as
an example: It was captained by a business student; funded in part by
the Center for Transformative Action, a local nonprofit that seeks to
sponsor innovative social change agents in New York State; underwritten
by local environmental activists; and filled with families, Democrats,
Republicans, and Cornell students from a diverse set of disciplines. The
issue of climate change is no longer just part of an environmentalist
or liberal agenda, but something everyone can get behind, including
religious, moderate conservatives like me.
(From left) Jeremy Kuhre, Zachary Perlstein, Mauricio Medaets, and Ace Stryker, all MBA ’16, participate in the People’s Climate March in new York City on sept. 21, which was planned to coincide with the sept. 23 u.n. summit on Climate Change.
Personally, I was marching as a representative of the Samuel Curtis
Johnson Graduate School of Management and, more broadly, business.
During the march, we met many individuals who were appreciative of
(and in some cases, surprised by) the fact that MBAs also cared about
climate change. It’s true that addressing climate change will require
extraordinary coordination between governments, businesses, and the
social sector. However, we at Johnson believe that business is the largest
catalyst for change when it comes to transitioning to a carbon-neutral
economy.
Business is leading the way. How? One example is a recent power
purchase agreement brokered in Austin, Texas, just hours away from
Houston, a major oil and gas center. Austin Energy, the local utility,
secured a solar power purchase agreement with Recurrent Energy for less
than 5 cents per kilowatt hour — considerably cheaper than the price at
which fossil fuel-generated electricity could be had in that market. This
game-changing deal was only possible because of dedicated companies
designing, manufacturing, and developing renewable energy.
Why is business leading the way in the fight against climate change?
One reason is that businesses are starting to see climate change initiatives
transition from cost centers to profit centers. A new report released in
September by CDP, an international nonprofit providing a global system
for companies and cities to measure, disclose, manage and share vital
environmental information, presented evidence that S&P 500 industry
leaders that are actively managing and planning for climate change
generate superior profitability (18 percent higher ROE than peers). Just
this October, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported that 66 percent
of surveyed managers believe there is a link between sustainability and
long-term financial performance. The takeaway is clear: In business
as in politics, the issue of climate change is becoming more and more
difficult to ignore for organizations that want to succeed.
These are exciting times, and, despite the perilous journey ahead of
us, I’m optimistic that human ingenuity and spirit will prevail.
Jeremy Kuhre is a first-year mBa student who plans to focus his studies on sustainaBle gloBal enterprise, especially in the area of renewaBle energy. prior to attending Johnson, he was a proJect manager for sustainaBle solutions corp., a consulting-engineering firm Based outside philadelphia.
“Business is the largest catalyst for change when it comes to transitioning to a carbon-neutral economy.”
— Jeremy Kuhre, MBa ’16
17w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
Smith Family Business Initiative welcomes its first directorDaniel Garrett Van Der Vliet joined Johnson in September as the
first director of the new Smith Family Business Initiative, generously
endowed this year by John Smith, MBA ’74, and his wife, Dyan
Smith. Van Der Vliet brings with him fourteen years of experience
at the University of Vermont, where he built a highly regarded family
business program from the ground up.
Developing a combination of family business-focused courses
and case competitions for MBA and undergraduate students from
across Cornell, as well as executive education non-degree courses and
workshops for key people and owners involved in running family
enterprises, are among the goals Van Der Vliet outlined for the Smith
Family Business Initiative. Scholarship, including generating research
and conducting surveys, will also be an important focus. In addition,
Van Der Vliet plans to develop a robust, interactive network of people
involved in family-owned businesses around the world, including
Johnson and Cornell students and alumni and family business owners
and key people who enroll in non-degree certificate programs. Finally,
Van Der Vliet is putting together an advisory council for the initiative.
For Van Der Vliet, coming to Johnson is exciting because of the
school’s global reach and reputation and its base of accomplished
alumni, so many of whom remain actively involved with the school.
“Most other centers that offer family business programs tend to be
regional; Johnson can be a bigger player,” he says. “With the help of
students, alumni, and faculty, we can establish programs in China,
the Middle East, and Latin America.”
Widely recognized as key drivers of economic growth worldwide,
family businesses are “the most common type of business on the earth,
particularly in developing countries,” says Professor Wesley Sine,
faculty director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute.
The Family Firm Institute (FFI), a nonprofit, reports that family firms
create an estimated 70 to 90 percent of global GDP annually as well
as 50 to 80 percent of jobs in the majority of countries worldwide.
Moreover, as Van Der Vliet points out, most entrepreneurs start out
with financial and emotional support from family; in fact, the FFI
reports that 85 percent of startups are established with family money.
Van Der Vliet and Sine plan to offer the initiative’s first new
“ Most other centers that offer family business programs tend to be regional; Johnson can be a bigger player.”
— daniel Garrett Van der Vliet
Daniel Garrett Van Der Vliet, director of Johnson’s smith Family Business initiative
courses in fall 2015. The Smith Distinguished Family Business Lecture
Series will feature executives from the world’s most successful family
businesses. A second course will focus on the benefits and challenges
specific to family businesses, including succession planning and developing
leaders with sound management, financial, and leadership skills, all within
the context of inter-family dynamics. Van Der Vliet is also developing
a Family Business Week focused on leadership skills unique to family
enterprises and featuring guest speakers.
“Without family business education, there was a big gap in the
offerings to students,” says Rhett Weiss, senior lecturer of management
and executive director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute,
which houses the Smith Family Business Initiative. “I see an overlap
between the institute and the family business initiative when it comes
to starting and scaling a new business.”
Students launch a Family Business ClubJohnson’s newly established Family Business Club held its inaugural meeting Sept. 29 at Sage Hall, with Van Der Vliet and club officers Christopher R. Pletcher, Farouk Appiedu, and George Read, all MBA ’16, presenting. The club will provide a forum for students to explore issues unique to family businesses, including family dynamics and estate planning, as well as entrepreneurship, strategy, and management. Club members plan to connect with Johnson and Cornell alumni involved in running privately held corporations and to reach out to similar organizations in other business schools. Planned events will include guest speakers, social outings, and field trips to local family businesses. So far, 40 students have signed up as members of the Family Business Club, including 35 Johnson students and five undergraduate students enrolled in Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
S T a R T
S T a R T
ups
18 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
Going with the flow The curse. The crimson
tide. Lingonberry week.
It’s the five-day event
that happens to women
of childbearing age
each month, sending
embarrassed husbands
and fathers running to the
“feminine care” aisle.
Helloflo.com is happy
to meet women’s periods
head on.
“It dawned on me
that I really hate buying
tampons,” explains
HelloFlo founder Naama Bloom. Her spouse, entrepreneur David
Bloom, MBA ’01, encouraged her to make her vision into reality: a
subscription service delivering supplies to customers a few days before
each period. And so HelloFlo was born.
Naama Bloom, MBA ’03, founder of HelloFlo [helloflo.com]
New Order Unless you’re a restaurateur
or app developer, you’ve
probably never heard
of Ordr.in. This open
platform for restaurant
e-commerce is used by
restaurants, developers,
and websites to power their
food-ordering capabilities.
Co-founder David
Bloom describes Ordr.in
as “DNA for restaurant
e-commerce” — an
infrastructure for building
takeout-ordering services that allow college students to find the
closest pizzeria or guests staying in hotels without restaurants to get
room service. It is invisible to consumers. “It’s a purely business-to-
business infrastructure, like the multiple listing service for real-estate
properties,” he says. “Most people don’t even understand what we
do.”
David Bloom, MBA ’01, founder of ordr.in
And that’s fine with Bloom. When you serve such a fundamental
need that people rely on without knowing it, you have a great
business.
Bloom hatched the idea while leading restaurant-industry strategy
at American Express. “Every technology was designed to connect an
individual person with an individual restaurant,” says Bloom, who
wanted something to connect restaurants nationally while performing
transactions locally.
It didn’t exist, so Bloom decided to create it himself. He
mentioned the idea to software developer Felix Sheng, a friend of
spouse Naama Bloom, MBA ’03. Sheng’s reaction: “I can’t believe
something like that hasn’t already been made. Can I do it with you?”
First launched in 2010, Ordr.in received valuable support from
New York City incubator TechStars and behemoth Google Ventures
in 2011. The company has been growing steadily, with more than
20,000 clients to date, including Best Western, Wyndham, and Yelp.
Even so, Bloom will never forget an early boost from Johnson
alumnus and entrepreneur Justin Smithline, MBA ’04. “I was still
working out of my kitchen when he came to talk about my idea,” says
Bloom. “When you have nothing and someone writes you a personal
check, there is nothing more important than that that first check, and
that advice.”
The website-based company offers monthly subscriptions and
care packages for students, new moms, and girls experiencing their
first period — including educational materials to help parents and
daughters have “the” conversation. The site also features “Ask Dr.
Flo,” written by two doctors, and a blog.
The brand is all about poking fun at the mystique around
menstruation, to do away with the shame. As an important part of
the marketing approach, two videos take an insouciant look at the
age-old cycle: To commemorate HelloFlo’s launch, “Camp Gyno”
debuted in March 2013, and “First Moon Party” was released in
June 2014, with five million views in the first week. Vital product
and marketing support comes from personal-care giant Procter &
Gamble.
Bloom reached out to Johnson classmates for help, including
an alumna who had worked at Johnson & Johnson on Carefree
products, entrepreneurs in e-commerce, and an alumna with a
successful mom blog.
Bloom, who worked in customer acquisition, brand strategy,
and customer development at American Express for nine years, says
that it can be hard to adjust to the small scale required by a startup.
“When you’re starting from nothing, it can be incredibly hard on
your morale,” she says. “You have to celebrate every single win.”
— Irene Kim
Startup Snapshots
J O B
19w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
After 27 years of sales and marketing roles
of successively increasing responsibility
with IBM Corp., Dan Wellers, MBA ’81,
was laid off. But he stayed positive and saw
it as a moment of freedom: a chance to
think about what he really wanted to do.
“The problem was that I had lots of
possible directions, but no clue how to
choose,” says Wellers. He reached out to
Lynne Allen, associate director, Alumni Career Development, in Johnson’s
Career Management Center. With her help, Wellers considered his
options and explored different paths — including founding a nonprofit,
consulting to technology startups, and teaching. About a year later, he
joined multinational software giant SAP in a senior marketing role —
but this time in a newly created position that fulfilled his professional
as well as personal goals.
Whether faced with a layoff or just ready to try something new,
figuring out what you offer is a good place to start when pursuing a
new career direction. “You are marketing a product — yourself — to a
customer, and you have to determine your strengths and skills and how
you could add value to a future employer,” explains Allen.
Also important: What motivates you? What do you like to do? “These
things can help you keep an open mind,” says Allen. “Say you’ve been
working in the banking industry for years
but realize, ‘Helping clients is what I care
about, not just making money.’ You stop
thinking of yourself as a banker and see
other ways those skills, values, and interests
could be used.”
Think outside your usual role, industry,
even geographic region. Cesar Martin del
Campo, MBA ’11, looking to relocate
from the Dominican Republic, found he
had unnecessarily limited his options by
focusing on Miami. “There was a weak
labor market there for my skill set,” says
Martin del Campo, who has a strong
background in supply-chain management.
To find good job prospects, don’t
rely on job ads. Becky Metler, MBA
’10, who was out of work while she and
her husband were in Germany for a year,
says her first instinct was to apply for jobs
online and reach out to friends upon returning stateside. But Allen, with
whom she’d been in contact since going to Germany, put a stop to this
counterproductive strategy.
“Only 15 percent of applicants find a job solely by applying online,
and Lynne helped me navigate the construction and use of my network
so I didn’t tax it with a desperate plea for employment, which will not
take you far,” says Metler, now manager of diversity and inclusion at
Sony Pictures.
Networking infrastructure
Allen defines networking as building relationships. “You want to set up
one-on-one meetings with people in industries and companies that interest
you. You’re initially after advice, information, ideas, and referrals — not
just a job,” she says. “They need to know about your value and what you
are looking for before they can help you. Once they know more about
you, they can share leads. And you must stay in touch.”
When Wellers saw a notice on the Johnson job board for an opening
at SAP in New York City, he forwarded it to a former IBM colleague
at SAP. The position had just been filled. “But when an even better
position became available, he submitted my resume to HR with a
personal endorsement based not only on my IBM career, but on what
I’d done and learned since. Three months later, I was hired.”
Martin del Campo, who interviewed for many promising positions
Be the architect of your own careerIf you’re considering a career change, or are unemployed for the
first time, now is a great time to think about what you want in your
career and what you offer prospective employers — and find your
perfect situation.
By Irene Kim
Dan Wellers, MBA ’81, senior marketer, saP
Lynne Allen, associate director, alumni Career development, in Johnson’s Career Management Center
Cesar Martin del Campo, MBA ’11, associate, Booz allen Hamilton
© theispot .com/leon Mussche
J O B
talk
20 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
but received no offers, took Allen’s
advice to cast a wider net. He contacted
former employer Booz Allen Hamilton.
“I decided to reach out to someone for
whom I’d done a good job and whose
culture I knew,” he says. He was soon
hired as an associate in the firm’s energy
practice.
Show them you have what they want
Martin del Campo advises showing the interviewer that your skill set
matches his or her wish list. “You don’t know what they’re going to
ask you, but you know what they need to know about you,” says Allen,
who worked for decades as an executive recruiter and HR interviewer.
“If the job description lists duties and responsibilities A through H, go
in ready to talk about your experience doing those things. If they only
ask about A, C, and F, look for opportunities to bring up the pieces
they haven’t asked about.
“If you’re missing anything, address it by saying, ‘I’ve never worked
in exactly that capacity, but I have the transferable skills from my
background,’ and provide examples,” adds Allen. “Go in prepared to
show you understand their needs and have the background to get the
job done.”
Compensation savvy
Allen’s rule for negotiating offers: Never talk about compensation, if
possible, until they make it clear they want to hire you. “If they have
three candidates and you say, ‘I’m looking to work at home one day
a week,’ you might have cut yourself out,” she says. “Once they’ve
made it clear they want you, they’ll make their best effort to give you
want you want.”
Remember: Compensation isn’t just salary. “You’re looking at a
whole compensation package that includes salary, bonus, stock options,
insurance, 401(k) match, paid vacation, holidays, plus a car, cell phone,
flex time, or telecommuting,” says Allen.
Nirupama Prakash Kumar, MBA ’13, who conducted an
independent job search after graduating, had interviewed for a
quantitative data analyst role with NextEra/WindLogics, who liked
her so much that they offered to create another, more senior position.
But she wasn’t satisfied with the company’s lowball offer. With Allen’s
coaching, Prakash Kumar went in ready to discuss different components
of the compensation package. “As a result, I got the largest signing
bonus that we had discussed and one week’s extra vacation,” she says.
Whether you’re considering a change, looking for networking
strategies, or negotiating an offer, you can take charge of your career.
Allen, who has advised Johnson alumni for nearly a decade, is happy
to help at any point in your job search.
Tips for taking charge of your careerIf you’re ready for the next step in your career development,
here are a few pointers:
Create a “skills, values, and interests” inventory to
assess what you’re good at, what motivates you, and what
you like, advises Lynne Allen, associate director of alumni
career development at Johnson. She also suggests writing
down each job you’ve had and listing what you loved and
hated about each. “The ‘loved’ column now becomes your
‘gotta-have’ list,” she says.
Read through a variety of different job postings that
include some of your keywords when looking for possible
new roles for yourself. “Say you use the keyword ‘analysis’;
although you’ve always been in corporate finance, you may
find non-corporate finance jobs that are attractive to you
and that use many of your skills,” says Allen.
Highlight non-work experiences that helped you to
develop personal strengths to impress interviewers.
While in Germany with her husband, Becky Metler,
MBA ’10, was unable to work for a year. “In one of my
first interviews, I realized that not working had forced
me to develop myself outside of an association with an
institution, whether a school or respected company,” she
says. “I had had to establish myself on an individual level
in a foreign country and navigate that culture. Coupled
with my education and work and global experience, my
story made me highly marketable.”
Offer to meet in person, rather than be screened over
the phone, for interviews with HR personnel. “You need
that personal contact, to see if you click,” says Allen. At
the interview, be confident, with a warm smile and a
good handshake. “You’ve got to act like you’re happy
to be there, as if to say, ‘I’m a business person, you’re
a business person, and I’m looking forward to having a
conversation with you.”
Becky Metler, MBA ’10, manager of diversity and inclusion at sony Pictures
Nirupama Prakash Kumar, MBA ’13, senior operations engineer at Windlogics
21w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
age Hall, Johnson’s
home since 1998, was
originally built as Sage
College for Women to make
co-education at Cornell a reality
at a time when creating equal
opportunities for women was a
radical idea. From its inception
in 1946 as Cornell’s Graduate
School of Business and Public
Administration through today,
Johnson has endeavored to live up
to that proud legacy of embracing
innovation.
A unique hybrid
In 1914, Cornell President Jacob
Schurman convened a faculty
“Committee on a Commercial
College”i that was chaired by
Economics Professor Allyn
Young, a graduate of Harvard
who had been influenced by
the new business school there.
That committee recommended
the un ive r s i t y p roceed to
organize a “two-year graduate
course leading to the master’s
degree” in both business and
public administration. This
“new program would provide
graduate instruction only, be
selective in admission, and …
have a professional emphasis like
A LegAcy of InnovAtIonPart I : the early years
that of medicine or law.”ii
World War I temporarily
dashed this and many other
ventures at Cornell; but after
the war, in 1918, Schurman
renewed his call for establishing
a business school at Cornell in
his presidential address to the
university’s trustees. While
adequate funding was not
available then, the dream did not
die. In 1936, Cornell welcomed
a new president, Edmund Ezra
Day, who was formerly the first
dean of business at the University
of Michigan. Day had begun his
academic career at Harvard and
watched the development of the
new graduate business school
there. At Cornell, he advocated for
a two-year professional program
based on the model planned by
Young’s committee in 1914.iii
In 1940, Day appointed a
committee of professors and
deans from various colleges to
make recommendations, and
they proposed establishing a
school of business and public
administration. The broader
pressures and concerns of World
War II put the idea on hold;
in fact, some Cornell faculty,
including Economics Professor
Paul O’Leary, who had served
on Day’s committee, left to serve
their country for the duration of
the war. In 1945, Day moved
ahead to establish Cornell’s
Graduate School of Business and
Public Administration (B&PA)
and asked O’Leary — who had
served as price executive for
textiles, leather, and apparel in
the Office of Price Administration
during the war — to be its first
dean. “Given the public-sector
experience of O’Leary and his
colleagues, the unique idea of
teaching business and public
administration together was
adopted as B&PA’s particular
intellectual niche,” wrote Johnson
historian James Schmotter,
formerly an associate dean at
Johnson.iv An innovative and
untested approach based on
the belief that “universals of
administration” in economics,
marketing, and accounting would
educate leaders for all sectors of
the economy, its inherent duality
would divide the school’s focus
through much of its early history
and eventually lead to a serious
rift.
D e m a n d f o r b u s i n e s s
education from returning veterans
was big in the post-war world, and
all but two of the new business
school’s inaugural class — the
class of 1948 — were veterans.
However, true to Ezra Cornell’s
“any person … any study” vision,
the new program’s brochure
welcomed women as well as
men: “The principal purpose of
the school is to give professional
training to men and women who
want to enter private business
or who desire employment with
public agencies, federal, state or
local.” One woman, Jane Stevens,
did enroll in the Class of 1948.
“ given the publ ic-sector experience of o'Leary and his col leagues, t h e u n i q u e i d e a o f t e a c h i n g b u s i n e s s a n d p u b l i c a d m i n i s t r a t i o n t o g e t h e r w a s a d o p t e d a s B & P A ' s p a r t i c u l a r i n t e l l e c t u a l n i c h e . ” — J A m e s s c h m o t t e r , A u t h o r , N o t J u s t A N o t h e r s c h o o l o f
BusiNess AdmiNistrAtioN
In celebration of the 150th anniversary of cornell University's founding, we take a look back at our school's history, from the graduate School of Business and Public Administration to the Samuel curtis Johnson graduate School of Management. by JAnice endresen
Look for A legAcy of iNNovAtioN PArt ii: 1984 to the PreseNt in the spring 2015 issue of corneLL enterprise.
22 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
As she put it herself years later,
in 2001: “Let’s face it: Back then
the business world was male
dominated. Men had the power.
The few women who made it
had to have guts. And luck.”
Nevertheless, she said her class-
mates were “perfect gentlemen”
— and that she was “no shrinking
violet … because I knew I could
match them intellectually.”v
Focused on advancing the
school’s thought leadership,
B&PA’s second dean, Edward
H. Litchfield (1954–56), initiated
the school’s PhD and executive
education programs as well as the
Sloan Program in Hospital and
Health Services Administration
and launched Administrative
Science Quarterly, which has long
since achieved recognition as the
preeminent scholarly journal
in the field of organizational
behavior.
The school having outgrown
its first home in the basement of
McGraw Hall, Dean C. Stewart
Sheppard (1956–61), raised $1.6
million to fund a new building,
Malott Hall. His successor,
Dean William D. Carmichael
(1963–69), a Rhodes scholar and
economist, focused his attention
on strengthening the B&PA
faculty. He hired Thomas R.
Dyckman, David Ahlers, Jerome
Hass, and L. Joseph Thomas —
eminent researchers and scholars
who, along with Sheppard’s
hires Harold Bierman Jr. and
Seymour Smidt, formed the heart
of the school’s teaching faculty
and thought leaders for several
decades.
schism + trAnsformAtion
W h i l e t h e s c h o o l g r e w ,
prospered, and gained standing
as a leading business school
throughout the 1970s under
Dean H. Jus t in Dav idson
(1969–79), the schism among
business, public-administration,
and heal th-adminis trat ion
faculty, clearly evident since the
school’s founding, became more
pronounced. Increasingly, the
functional areas of management
in business education were
developing into full-fledged
academic disciplines, making
the integration of business
administrat ion and publ ic
administration that O’Leary,
Litchfield, and Sheppard had
championed difficult to attain.vi
It was Dean David A. Thomas
(1979–85) who finally confronted
this head on in 1982, when he
established an external, strategic
task force made up of prominent
business and educational leaders,
faculty, and alumni — including
Samuel C. Johnson ’50, Nelson
Schaenen Jr. ’50, MBA ’51,
Sanford Weill ’55. That task
force recommended the school
focus exclusively on business,
eliminating public and health
administration.
Dropping the “PA” from
“B&PA” generated a “fire storm
of protest” from the faculty,
students, and alumni of those
two programs.vii Nevertheless,
after passionate debate, the
faculty voted on March 1, 1983,
to implement the task force’s
recommendation. Thomas bore
the brunt of the ensuing criticism
and anger, but he “firmly believed
that for an institution of its
modest size to continue spreading
its energies and resources across
three broad academic fields would
prevent it from reaching the level
of excellence that would otherwise
be possible.”viii
There were also many who
applauded the school’s change in
focus and curricular reform, and
among those was Sam Johnson,
chair of S.C. Johnson and a
close friend of Thomas. Johnson
subsequently made the $20
million gift that transformed the
school and renamed it in honor of
his great-grandfather (the founder
of S. C. Johnson) as the Samuel
Curtis Johnson Graduate School
of Management.
Johnson is proud of its alumni
who earned master’s of public
administration and master’s of
health administration before those
programs migrated to other parts
of Cornell. The Sloan Program in
Health Administration, housed
in Cornell’s College of Human
Ecology, offers the MHA and
also a dual degree MHA/MBA
together with Johnson. This
November, Johnson’s Black
Graduate Business Association
and Office for Diversity and
Inclusion recognized Percy Allen
II, MPA ’75, as recipient of the
Wilbur Parker Distinguished
Alumni Award. The Cornell
Institute for Public Affairs offers
the MHA, and several Johnson
professors , including Glen
Dowell, Robert Frank, Robert
Jarrow, and Vithala Rao, serve as
field faculty members in CIPA’s program.
“ D e a n D a v i d A . t h o m a s f i r m l y b e l i e v e d t h a t f o r a n i n s t i t u t i o n o f i t s m o d e s t s i z e t o c o n t i n u e s p r e a d i n g i t s e n e r g i e s a n d r e s o u r c e s a c r o s s t h r e e b r o a d a c a d e m i c f i e l d s w o u l d p r e v e n t i t f r o m r e a c h i n g t h e l e v e l o f e x c e l l e n c e t h a t w o u l d o t h e r w i s e b e p o s s i b l e . ”
— JAmes schmotter
i Not Just Another School of Business Administrat ion: A Histor y of Graduate Management Educat ion at Cornel l Univers i ty , James W. schmotter, 1992, p. 9.
i i schmotter, p . 9.i i i schmotter, p . 10.iv “seven Who shaped us,” by James W.
schmotter, Cornel l Enterpr ise , spr ing/summer 1989, p. 24.
v “We Were Pioneers,” as to ld to Jessica Por tner by Jane stevens, Mba ’48, Cornel l Enterpr ise , spr ing 2001, pp. 26–29.
vi “seven Who shaped us,” by James W. schmotter, Cornel l Enterpr ise , spr ing/summer 1989, pp. 26–27.
vi i ib id, p . 28.vi i i ib id, p . 29.
Many applauded the school's change in focus and curricular reform, among them Samuel c. Johnson '50, chair of S.c. Johnson.
Malott Hall housed Cornell’s business school, 1964–1998.
the Class of 1948, the inaugural graduating class, included one woman, Jane stevens.
A L
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23w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
n the fal l , looking
out at the broad vista
of Cayuga Lake and the hills
above its Western shore from
the third-floor windows of Sage
Hall, you can still see the view
that M. Carey Thomas, class of
1877, described when she was
one of the first residents there
in 1875: “The autumn foliage
is glorious. The trees scattered
But the practical barriers
proved too onerous for Cornell’s
first woman student, Jennie
Spencer of Cortland, N.Y., who
struggled up the steep, muddy
or icy hills from her downtown
boarding house for one winter,
then withdrew. Struck by
Spencer’s experience, wealthy
businessman and lumber mill
owner Henry Sage stepped
forward and donated $250,000
to build the residence hall that
became Sage College for Women.
When the cornerstone for Sage
College was laid on May 16,
1873, Sage proclaimed: “The
doors of opportunity must be
opened wide. All women should
have the liberty to learn what
they can, and to do what they
have the power to do.”
Designed to be an elegant,
Victorian Gothic-style structure,
Sage College was also a modern,
t echnolog ica l l y advanced
building, described in glowing
detail in an early brochure:
“Heated by steam, lighted by
gas, provided with water and
all the modern conveniences,
with baths on every floor, with a
gymnasium, a sheltered corridor
for walking in bad weather, and
infirmary for the sick.”
A l t h o u g h b u i l t t o
accommodate 120, when it
opened in 1875 only 29 women
students lived at Sage College.
Thomas’ experience gives us a
window into the social barriers
that may have prevented more
women from enrolling in those
early days. While her teacher at
Howland Academy, a Quaker
boarding school, advocated
for Thomas to attend Cornell
— “the highest place open to
ladies”ii — Thomas’s own father
strongly opposed her attending
a coed university. It took a year
of campaigning — “Many and
dreadful are the talks we have
had upon this subject,” she wrote
in her journal — but finally, her
father did relent and give his
consent.iii
If her contemporaries had to
struggle to achieve the support
of their families to attend a
coed university as Thomas did,
perhaps it is no wonder that Sage
College for Women was not fully
occupied until 1895 — a full 20
years later. By then the idea of
coeducation had become more
accepted, and in 1896, a new
addition to Sage Hall was built
to accommodate another 50
students.
Thomas went on to earn her
“ the doors of opportunity must be opened wide. All women should have the liberty to learn what they can, and to do what they have the power to do.”
— henry sAge, benefActor of sAge hALL
PhD in Zurich and, in 1884, she
became a professor of English
and dean of the faculty at the
newly established Bryn Mawr
College, an institution she helped
to shape and found. Ten years
later, she became Bryn Mawr’s
second president, serving in that
capacity through 1922.
In an interesting twist,
Thomas bridges yet another tie
among Cornell, Sage Hall, and
Johnson. From 1897 to 1901, she
served as the first woman alumni
trustee at Cornell University, and
in that capacity, she supported
C o r n e l l P r e s i d e n t J a c o b
Schurman in his 1899 request
to New York Governor Roswell
P. Flower to establish a College
of Commerce at Cornell. She
also spoke in support of this to
her fellow Cornell University
trustees in 1900, and again in
1906, through her colleague,
Jeremiah Jenks.
M. Carey thomas (right foreground) with fellow residents of sage College for Women, april 1876
i First -Person Cornel l , Carol Kammen, p. 31.ii The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, Helen lefkowitz Horowitz , p . 49.ii i The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, Helen lefkowitz Horowitz , p . 52.
M. Carey tHoMas PHoto CreDit: bryn MaWr College arCHives
sage College for Women opened its doors in 1875.
oPenIng DoorS to oPPortUnIty
over the hills opposite and along
the shores of the lake look like so
many little bonfires.”i
When Thomas l ived in
Sage Col lege for Women,
the idea of co-education was
radical and controversial, and
Cornell was the first university
on the East coast to offer it.
Both Cornell’s founder, Ezra
Cornell, and the university’s
first president, Andrew Dickson
White, were firm believers in
equal opportunities for women,
and determined to offer women
the same education as men even
before women’s rights leaders
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton urged them to
do so.
186
5–
20
15A
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25w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
he says. “If you want to create passion for your brand and be in the
lives of your customers, you have to create content that people care
about.”
Although few companies have adopted an approach as far-reaching
as Red Bull’s, more and more businesses are adopting the strategy
of content marketing. Marriott International, the world’s largest
hotel company, recently announced it would establish a content
studio that will produce television shows, Web series, concerts, and
movies. This year, IKEA took its marketing efforts well beyond its
bulky catalogue by publishing a global “life at home” report. The
interactive online document analyzes the results of a survey conducted
by the company’s research arm into the daily home lives of 8,000
respondents in Berlin, London, Moscow, Mumbai, New York, Paris,
Shanghai, and Stockholm.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, which supports
and promotes the industry, 90 percent of business-to-business
marketers surveyed in 2013 reported using some form of content
marketing.
“Content marketing today has become one of the important ways
for businesses to communicate about the company to customers,”
says Vithala R. Rao, professor of marketing and management at
Johnson.
Content marketing can take many forms — from white papers
to online video, blogs, podcasts, webinars, and social media posts.
Some businesses have gone so far as to establish their own newsrooms
and research departments.
“Smart brands share their stories, and they create content
people love,” says Farland Chang ’84, MS ’85, CEO and executive
producer of WorldBizWatch, a video production and media
strategy firm. “Companies
are leveraging their expertise
to produce content that gives
audiences ‘news we can use.’
Useful content creates loyalty.
It cultivates communities.”
Letting them come to youThere is no widely accepted
d e f i n i t i o n o f c o n t e n t
marketing, and most attempts
to define it start by saying
what it is not — traditional
marketing.
“Traditional marketing
and advertising is telling
the world you’re a rock star.
more than ever, companies are adding content marketing to their brand strategy.By RoBeRt PReeR
Engaging Customers with Captivating Content
he basic approach to marketing a beverage used to be
straightforward: Craft an appealing logo and a catchy
jingle, sign up a celebrity endorser, produce a series of
television commercials and magazine ads, and perhaps put
up billboards and insert coupons in Sunday newspapers.
The maker of Red Bull, the world’s largest selling energy drink,
adopted a different formula. To promote the beverage, which was
launched in Austria in 1987 and introduced to the United States
a decade later, the Red Bull company established its own media
organization. Red Bull Media House produces a print magazine,
video games, feature films, records, mobile apps, and programming
for television, radio, and online media. Red Bull also owns several auto
racing teams, as well as professional soccer franchises in the United
States, Europe, and Africa.
Joseph Guzik, MBA ’11, is senior vice president of promotion and
integrated marketing at Red Bull Records, which since its launch in
2007 has become an important force in indie music. Based in West
Hollywood, with studios in major cities around the world, Red Bull
Records signs and promotes up-and-coming artists, sells CDs and
mp3s, produces music videos, and operates a YouTube channel.
“What we do is create content,” Guzik says. “We make videos,
which can be seen as content marketing for the music so that people
stream it and radio stations play it.”
According to Guzik, Red Bull is a lifestyle brand. Music has long
been a way to engage youth culture. “We are really the only brand that
has a major record company that delivers — quote-unquote — hits,”
t
smart brands share their stories,and they create content peopLe Love.”— Farland Chang ’84,
MS ’85, CEO and executive producer of WorldBizWatch
illustr at ion: Daniel Hert zberg
26 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
Content marketing is showing the world
that you are one,” reads one of a series
of definitions offered by the Content
Marketing Institute.
A more expansive definition used by
the Institute calls content marketing “the
technique of creating and distributing
relevant and valuable content to attract,
acquire and engage a clearly defined target audience in order to drive
profitable customer action.”
“Different people use the term in different ways,” says Jonah Berger,
visiting professor of marketing at Cornell Tech. “When I think about
content marketing, I think about rather than trying to sell someone
directly or push a product, you share useful content that makes the
recipients’ lives better. In doing so, you also show that you have expertise
or knowledge in the domain.”
Johnson Marketing Professor Stijn M. J. van Osselaer suggests using
the concept of inbound versus outbound communication to understand
how content marketing and traditional marketing differ. From the
perspective of the company doing the selling, content marketing is
inbound, while traditional marketing is outbound.
“Instead of going out and interrupting people through cold calling
or advertising, what you are doing with content marketing is letting
customers come to you by providing them with information that is
attractive to them,” van Osselaer says.
The inbound nature of content marketing is a big reason why it
works, according to Melinda Byerley, MBA ’02, CEO of Vendorsi, and
an expert in marketing technology.
“The purpose of content marketing is to draw you in and make you
feel so engaged and enamored of the company that you continue to the
salesperson,” Byerley says. “It’s inbound because the customer picks up
the phone to call the salesperson. That then becomes
a much easier conversation.”
a time-honored strategyAlthough the term content marketing first
came into usage in the 1990s, the
practice has existed for
m o r e t h a n a
century.
In 1895, John Deere launched a farming magazine called The Furrow,
which is still published today. In 1900, the Michelin tire company began
publishing its popular guides, which remain a trusted information source
for travelers around the globe.
Other early examples of content marketing are Jell-O’s recipe
book, first published in 1904; Sears’ World’s Largest Store radio show,
launched in 1922; and Paramount Records, the pioneering label that
recorded African-American blues and jazz artists of the 1920s and ’30s,
started by the Wisconsin Chair Company to boost sales of its wooden
phonograph cabinets.
For many years, one of the most widely used forms of content
marketing was the white paper, typically a learned treatise on matters
of interest to an audience that included potential customers. Some
businesses issued white papers to generate sales leads; others used them
to demonstrate thought leadership in their field.
“In the early days of content marketing, it was all about writing
great blocks of enriching content in white papers,” Byerley says. “Then
the Internet changed everything.”
With the Internet came email newsletters, search engine optimization,
blogs, podcasts, e-books, online video, and webinars. The Internet even
gave the white paper a boost.
“Content became much easier to find,” says van Osselaer. “In pre-
Internet times, it would be difficult to find a white paper, and even if
I knew there was a white paper somewhere in the library, it would be
hard to get. Now, you can use Internet search to find a white paper and
then just download it.”
Before the Internet, content production was largely the province
of major publishers — mainly newspapers, magazines, and radio and
television stations, according to Berger. “The Web democratized the
content creation process. For a brand, it’s much easier to create content,”
he says.
advertising evoLvesAt the same time that new technologies were boosting content marketing,
they were inflicting damage on traditional approaches.
“You can’t really depend on advertising
anymore,” says Karolina Kocalevski, MBA
’08, a marketing executive in the U.S.
if you want to create passion for your brand and be in the Lives of your customers, you have to create content that peopLe care about.”— Joseph Guzik, MBA ’11, senior vice president of promotion
and integrated marketing at Red Bull Records
E N G a G I N G C U S T O M E R S W I T H
Captivating Content
27w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
office of the professional services firm
PricewaterhouseCoopers. “People
circumvent it. They record their
TV shows. They’ve learned how to
avoid ads on the Internet. You have
to engage them in different ways,
and social media is now a big part
of that agenda for many industries.”
Guzik of Red Bull Records says
that while traditional marketing
strategies still have their place, a
generational shift is underway. “My
son just turned 8, and he has never
watched a commercial in his life.
He also doesn’t understand that
some show comes on at 8 o’clock.
Everything is on the DVR, and he
can fast forward through the ads.”
With the Internet also came
search engines, and with search
eng ines came sea rch eng ine
optimization or the crafting of
website content to get higher
rankings in search results. Byerley
sees a close connection between the
ith newspapers and magazines folding and broadcast media cutting back, jobs in the news business have become scarce. Does the rise of content marketing offer hope of gainful employment for an army of out-of-work and underemployed journalists?
No broad movement of reporters, editors, and producers to the emerging field has been verified yet, but some journalists have discovered that their skill sets do transfer quite nicely.
“I’ve found the skills of a journalist to be hugely valuable in everything I do — interviewing, tracking down information, sorting through data, boiling it down, making a story make sense,” says Jeff Gangemi, MBA ’09, a former Businessweek staff writer who is now director of marketing and communications for TELUS International, a global customer service outsourcing provider.
Although he continues to pursue his passion for journalism on a freelance basis, Gangemi made the shift to content marketing shortly after getting his MBA. He discovered the field while doing marketing and communications for a New Hampshire-based local foods startup and a Vermont-based sustainability consulting firm.
“By creating quality content for these companies, I was driving lots of traffic to our websites that was generating sales leads,” Gangemi says. “That was really where the light went on, and I realized this was really valuable from a business perspective.”
Former colleagues at Businessweek have made similar crossovers, according to Gangemi. One is at IBM now, while another started his own media consulting business.
“People who are making a good living in journalism, more power to them; but I’m definitely seeing more and more former journalists going into brand communications and marketing roles,” he says.
Some high-profile journalists have jumped to brands recently. Michelle Kessler, a former editor and reporter at USA Today, is director of content for strategy at Qualcomm. Dan Lyons, a former senior editor at Forbes and a writer at Newsweek, went to work for HubSpot, an Internet marketing firm. Wired Senior Editor Michael Copeland left his job last year to lead content strategy for Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm started by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and businessman Ben Horowitz.
In 2001, Farland Chang ’84, MS ’85, who had been a network correspondent for NBC News and business news anchor at CNN, left broadcast news to start his own video production and strategy company, WorldBizWatch.
“My goal back then was to create a platform that connects journalists with brands and agencies,” Chang says. “We wanted to provide news publishers with content for their audiences, and we wanted to help smart brands share and amplify their stories.”
With bases in Orange County and Hong Kong, WorldBizWatch produces content for mainstream media such as National Geographic, Bloomberg, and PBS. It also produces content for leading brands, such as IBM, Starbucks, Flextronics, Microsoft, and Accenture. “We have our feet in both worlds,” Chang says.
WorldBizWatch employs many people who, like Chang, came out of traditional broadcast journalism. “I love working with producers who know how to take a lot of content, boil it down into a compelling story and make the message stick” he says. “Whether we’re producing for mainstream broadcasters or social media publishers or directly for brand clients, we have a common goal: getting the audience to say “Wow!” and share useful content.
“One common thread between journalists and smart brands is storytelling,” notes Chang. “That’s why some people say ‘brand journalism’ is the new PR. Regardless of how much the news business changes, and whether you are a brand, old media, or new media, one thing is constant: The key to getting attention is telling great stories. It’s our oldest form of communication. It’s how we remember. The craft of storytelling will always be in demand.”
From reporter to content producer:news vets find that teLLing good stories has vaLue for companies
W
the skiLLs of a journaList are hugeLy vaLuabLe in everything i do — interviewing, tracking down information, sorting through data, boiLing it down, making a story make sense.” — Jeff Gangemi, MBA ’09,
director of marketing and communications for TELUS International
28 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
rise of content marketing and search engine optimization.
“If you had specific content that people liked to read, that content
would arrive on the page of the search engine,” Byerley says. “You have
more people coming to your site, and you didn’t have to buy an ad. You
might have to pay a copywriter or a visual designer, but you weren’t
paying for the advertising per se.”
Search engine optimization has the added advantage of generating
inbound communication, since people come to sites of their own volition,
Byerley notes.
The next stage in the evolution of content marketing in the Internet
era was the spread of broadband, which made feasible the use of video.
With video, marketers could create appealing, attention-grabbing content,
which viewers would share on social media and on mobile devices.
Kocalevski, who oversees marketing for her company’s mergers and
acquisitions group, says she produces content using video, audio, and
text.
“These are different formats with the same idea behind them:
storytelling,” she says. “They replace the old idea of having a brochure
with features and benefits about your product or service. In professional
services, we have almost done away with the brochure. Our partners
and sales people lead their discussions with a point of view on a pressing
business issue or leave behind a white paper after a discussion, not a
brochure. It’s how they effectively ‘demo’ their expertise. And behind
the scenes, the marketing team takes that point of view and we generate
carefully crafted content for white papers, podcasts, webcasts, and video
clips. They all demonstrate our thought leadership on the topic, and we
also distribute that content more broadly to our target market through
various channels.”
“We’re at another tipping point due to the rise of mobile devices
and social networking, which give content a new distribution channel,”
Byerley says. “Because mobile devices now outsell PCs, and more than
40 percent of social media is consumed on a mobile device, content is
a major marketing channel for most brands, especially in the business-
to-business space.”
crafting a content strategyAn organization attempting a content marketing
strategy of course has to have content,
and for many, this is a
challenge.
“Probably the biggest thing people struggle with is just creating
enough content,” says Steve Peck, MBA ’09, co-founder of Docalytics,
a firm that produces tools that help marketers determine how customers
interact with downloadable content. “I talk to a half dozen marketers
every day. I hear it again and again. It’s tough to continually create
compelling content that’s going to keep people engaged with your
brand.”
Rao says that firms must be willing to commit substantial resources
to content marketing if they want it to succeed. “To develop a website
and to maintain it well is a very expensive proposition,” he says.
Whether a company’s content is video, audio, or text, it has to be
useful to prospective customers, and it also should demonstrate that the
company is a leader in its field, according to Chang. “People don’t want
the hard sell any more,” he says. “Companies have to use their expertise
to be a trusted source of content.”
Sometimes companies make the mistake of launching content
marketing without first developing a strategy, notes Berger. “If all we
do is post a lot of content on the Web and nobody shares it or reads
it, it’s not going to be very effective,” he says. “Understanding how to
design content is very important.”
Berger has spent the last ten years studying how social influences
promote the spread of ideas, behaviors, and products. He explains the
process in his best-selling book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
Berger identifies six principles that explain why people share things
and why contagions happen. He captures these principles with the
acronym STEPPS:
Social currency: People are more likely to share things that make them look good.
Triggers: Things that are top of mind are more likely to be at the tip of our tongue.
Emotion: The more we care, the more we share.
Public: The easier it is for people to see what others are doing, the more likely they are to imitate them.
Practical value: People share things that help others.
Stories: Information often travels under the guise of idle chatter.
Companies that incorporate these principles into their content marketing
are in a position to succeed, according to Berger. “When something
goes viral, it’s not random, and it’s not luck,” Berger says. “There is a
science behind it.”
suited to academiaContent marketing is a natural fit for universities. Research is part
of their core mission and most have well-established news
offices and publishing operations.
For eCornell, Cornell
University’s online education
it’s tough to continuaLLy create compeLLing content that’s going to keep peopLe engaged with your brand.”— Steve Peck, MBA ’09, co-founder of Docalytics
E N G a G I N G C U S T O M E R S W I T H
Captivating Content
29w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
division, content marketing is
a way to attract new clients and
engage current students and
alumni. The program offers
online certificate programs and
courses taught by faculty from
Johnson as well as the School
of Hotel Administration,
School of Industrial and Labor
Relations, and several other
schools.
“At least 75 percent of
my content marketing efforts
are focused on webinars,” says
Chris Wofford, digital media
business development manager for eCornell. “They work on a few
levels. We get a lot of prospects and leads from them, and the material
we produce dovetails nicely with our courses.”
Webinars on eCornell are typically faculty-led hour-long discussions,
with time set aside for questions and answers. Recent webinar topics
include “Marketing Strategies: Driving Demand and Connecting with
Today’s Buyer,” “HR Technology in the Era of Drones, Robots, and
Infinite Data,” and “The Influence of Reputation Analytics on Hotel
Revenue and Financial Performance.”
The marketing department at eCornell uses marketing automation
software to track the effectiveness of its initiatives. When visitors come to
the website, click on an email, or visit eCornell’s blog, their engagement
is tracked.
“Content marketing operates like a hub. All of the elements and
assets need to be talking to each other, ultimately to best serve the
customer. In short, we don’t try to sell anything to anybody until they
are educated about the product and ready to buy,” Wofford says.
Producing webinars and other content for eCornell is satisfying work,
Wofford says. “I like content marketing because it’s honest, educational,
and really valuable to people. It prepares and empowers them to make
informed decisions.”
buLL marketTo be effective, content marketing needs be tailored to the particular
business using it. The approach to marketing an indie rock band will be
different from the approach to marketing a team of financial professionals.
“In professional services, you really can’t demonstrate the product,”
Kocalevski says. “What you have to do is build the brand through really
strong content.”
One of the main ways that Kocalevski promotes the professionals
in PricewaterhouseCooper’s U.S. mergers and acquisitions group is by
producing one-hour webcasts. “We take a business topic, and we talk
about it for an hour,” she says. “It’s not just random content — we
choose a topic that’s important to our audience. We identify a business
trend, challenge, or opportunity. Next, we discuss the implications,
including pitfalls and possible actions that could be taken. We end by
talking about winning practices and the potential impact of taking a
recommended course of action.”
The webcasts are produced professionally and partially scripted,
Kocalevski says.
“There’s a lot of effort that goes into how we deliver the message. It’s
a way of storytelling — capturing the audience’s attention and making
sure we don’t lose them along the way.”
Red Bull Records uses a multipronged approach to marketing
its artists. Social media play a big role — all of the label’s bands
have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and the other major
platforms. Another key component is video, played on
the company’s YouTube channel, which Guzik
likens to a music video jukebox.
One of Red Bull
Records’ up-and-coming
artists is Twin Atlantic, a Glasgow-
based band whose “Heart and Soul” video
became a YouTube sensation.
“There is a tremendous amount of earned media —
media you don’t have to pay for — you can get with music,”
Guzik says. “That video had more than a million views on YouTube.
It became a really big hit in the U.K., and it’s starting to get on radio
in the U.S. It is generating millions of earned media impressions every
week.”
Guzik says music is well suited to content marketing. “It would
be hard to do the same thing with a company that makes couches,” he
says. A song that becomes a hit in Britain can quickly become popular
in the United States, Australia, and Japan, as fans send music files and
links around the globe, according to Guzik.
“The beauty of music is that it is the one piece of content that that
truly can go viral and can travel the world.”
we’re at another tipping point due to the rise of mobiLe devices and sociaL networking, which give content a new distribution channeL.”— Melinda Byerley, MBA ’02,
CEO of Vendorsi
Robert Preer writes regularly about trends in business
and finance for Cornell enterprise.
Corporate Clients value the insights they obtain from Johnson immersion learning teams.by merrill Douglas
A Fresh setof EyEs
To gain muscle, you need to get moving. As Johnson students work to build management strength, they get a
significant portion of their exercise through Immersion Learning.
Johnson’s Immersion Learning program lets a student in the
Two-year MBA program devote the entire second semester to a single
business discipline. Each immersion mixes rigorous study with hands-on
application.
31w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
The Sustainable Global Enterprise (SGE) and Strategic Marketing
immersions provide an additional workout component. In both of these
programs, each student takes on a consulting engagement, teaming with
classmates to explore a real business issue on behalf of a client.
Why consulting? In the SGE immersion, it’s important to understand
the full breadth and depth of issues that shape the ever-evolving field
of sustainability, says Mark Milstein, clinical professor of management,
director of Johnson’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise, and
faculty leader for the SGE immersion.
“The only way to do that is to get students working on projects
with organizations that are struggling with those problems,” Milstein
says. The students confront business challenges that lack clear answers,
deciding which tools to apply and how to apply them.
A consulting engagement also enables students to practice for their
upcoming summer internships, increasing the odds that an intern will
do a good job and receive an offer of full-time employment, says Manoj
Thomas, S.C. Johnson professor of marketing and faculty leader for the
Strategic Marketing immersion. Students gain skills they can’t learn
in the classroom, giving them a competitive edge against interns from
other top business schools.
For example, says Thomas, how do you translate an employer’s
stated business objective into an effective project? “How do you scope
it out into a series of activities that can be accomplished in two months,
develop milestones, and then knock on doors in the organization to
recruit other people’s support?” An immersion project helps hone those
skills.
“It forced me to think strategically in a way that no other MBA
experience had forced me to do,” says Pratima Arapakota, MBA ’13,
a market intelligence analyst with Autodesk in San Francisco, who
did an SGE immersion project with the Korean beauty products firm
AmorePacific.
“My project helped me understand how to work with a varied group
of stakeholders who might have competing priorities,” says Teyren
Brown, MBA ’14, an associate brand manager at Johnson & Johnson,
who was a member of the SGE immersion consulting team for Novo
Nordisk in spring 2013. Her engagement also sharpened her leadership
and collaboration skills and taught her to make presentations that lead
to action, she says.
Students aren’t the only winners: clients gain real benefits from
immersion projects, too. For
some sponsors, an engagement
with a Johnson team is a way to
gain valuable business insights for
one-tenth what it would cost to
hire professional consultants, says
Thomas. For others, it’s a chance
to forge bonds with Johnson students before recruiting starts.
Some companies that work with immersion teams act directly on the
students’ recommendations. For many sponsors, however, the impact
of an immersion project is more subtle.
A student team doesn’t have the time or resources to produce
broad recommendations, such as whether to launch a new product,
Thomas says. Instead, a team conducts research to shed fresh light on a
business issue. “Rather than having us recommend strategic positions,
our engagement offers new and critical insights that help managers take
strategic positions.”
The students dig deep, and their objective analyses sometimes lead
them to redefine issues or spot new opportunities.
“We’re not there just to nod ‘Yes’ and do what the sponsor says,”
Milstein observes, “but to think critically and analytically, bringing all
of our program’s vast experience to bear on the issue.”
blooming flowerOne case in point is the SGE immersion team that worked with beauty
products company AmorePacific in spring 2012. The Korea-based firm,
headed by Suh Kyung-Bae, MBA ’87, CEO of the multibillion-dollar
global company, had asked for help in establishing its Mamonde line
of makeup and skin-care products in China.
Sustainability is a central tenet for AmorePacific. Knowing that
Chinese consumers value social responsibility, company officials wanted
to make sure that Chinese women linked the Mamonde brand in their
minds with sustainability.
AmorePacific turned to an SGE team because the students offered
expertise in both the business and social realms — a combination hard
to find among internal resources or traditional consultants, says Jeong
Hwa Oh, senior manager of AmorePacific’s sustainability management
team in Seoul. “It was also important to find people who could develop
solutions that were both creative and logical, and who could take a global
perspective,” she says.
Three members of the four-student team, plus a teaching assistant,
traveled to China to explore the thinking of local AmorePacific
customers. Working with MBA students from Tsinghua University,
they visited the cities of Wuhan and Xi’an to talk with retail employees
who sell AmorePacific products,
and with their customers. The
To unDerSTanD The FuLL BreaDTh anD DepThoF iSSueS ThaT Shape The ever-evoLving FieLD of sustainability, stuDents work on proJeCts with organizations that are struggling with those problems.”— professor mark milstein, director, Center for sustainable global enterprise
and faculty leader for the sustainable global enterprise immersion
of EyEs©
theispot.com
/Keith n
egley
32 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
Tsinghua students also ran some
focus groups on behalf of their
colleagues from Cornell.
Back in Ithaca, reviewing
the results of their primary
research, the students uncovered
something surprising. “We had
to shift our understanding of
sustainability,” says Arapakota.
More than envi ronmenta l
stewardship or the use of natural
ingredients, the big concern for
the Chinese customers was how
to empower women.
So the team proposed an initiative to address widespread
unemployment among women in China by training women to become
beauty experts, who, of course, would use Mamonde products in their
businesses.
“We saw a market opportunity for day spas, where the beauticians
would be independent entrepreneurs,” says Ufei Chan, MBA ’13, a
member of the AmorePacific team who went on to do a fellowship with
Citigroup’s Corporate Sustainability unit and now serves on the board
of the nonprofit organization Alegria: Hope Through Art.
AmorePacific named the students’ idea Blooming Flower, linking it
to the notion of personal growth. “It’s a brilliant concept that meets the
needs of both sustainability and brand image,” says Oh. The company
embraced the spirit of Blooming Flower as it made plans for new
marketing initiatives in China.
Oh credits the immersion team for highlighting the close
connection between social concerns and profitability. “The
recommendation showed that sustainability issues are not far
from business issues and can actually solve some of them.”
what makes CarD users tiCk Since Nate Rothstein, MBA ’11, did a marketing immersion
project in 2010, he knows very well what a Johnson team can
achieve. That’s why Rothstein, senior manager, partner and
product management at American Express in New York, decided
to tap the class of 2015 for help with a project of his own.
He asked four Johnson marketing immersion students to
find out why some consumers who buy reloadable, prepaid cards
become heavy users, and others don’t.
American Express’s prepaid card, Serve, has been well-received
in the market, Rothstein says. “The next step is to drive more
use of this product.”
Focusing not just on Serve, but on all cards of this type, the
team set out to learn what distinguishes heavy from occasional users.
After some secondary research, they started talking to consumers. “We
held a focus group with users of prepaid cards to understand what makes
them tick when it comes to what they choose for payment methods
and why,” says team member Alexander Allister, MBA ’15. They also
interviewed some heavy users one-on-one.
Based on that work, the team developed a survey and engaged a
market research provider to administer it to users — mainly heavy
ones — of prepaid cards. Responses showed that the heaviest users fall
into two groups with distinct motivations.
“One group was what we called Cash Lovers,” says Zachary Roberts,
MBA ’15, another member of the team. Such people rarely borrow
money, they tend not to make budgets, and when they’re not using
cards for purchases, they pay in cash.
“We called the other group Card-carrying Budgeters,” Roberts
says. Those consumers like using plastic. “They might have a credit
card, a debit card, and a prepaid card.” They use the prepaid cards for
budgeting, perhaps loading enough money to buy a week’s groceries
and then adding more when the fridge is bare.
American Express had already conducted similar research focused
on its Serve product. The immersion team’s work was in line with some
of those findings, Rothstein said.
The students also brought a fresh point of view to the research.
As outsiders to the payment industry, they were better able to put
themselves into customers’ minds when devising questions for their
survey, Rothstein says. “It’s really good to get a different perspective,
especially when you’re still in the early days of a new market.”
sustainable global enterprise immersion students Pratima Arapakota, MBA ’13, and Emily Busch, MBA/MILR ’13, interview an amorePacific retail sales representative at a mall in Xi’an with the help of a translator.
my proJeCt helpeD me unDerstanD how To worK wiTh a varieD group oF STaKehoLDerS who might have Competing priorities.” — teyren brown, mba ’14, an associate
brand manager at Johnson & Johnson
who participated on an sge immersion
consulting team for novo nordisk
a F R E S H S E T
of Eyes
33w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
extreme makeoverA leader in the market for equipment that controls hydroelectric turbines,
American Governor has grown by about 25 percent a year for the past
ten years, says president Scott Ginesin ’90 (Engineering).
But as the company blossomed from a startup into a major player, its
public image failed to keep pace. Although an outdated website wasn’t
hurting sales, American Governor had to make a better first impression
to attract top talent onto its team, Ginesin says. “We needed people to
look at our company and say, ‘I want to work there.’”
In 2012, Ginesin invited an SGE immersion team to give the
company a brand makeover. “The project was open to anything to do
with our image,” he says.
After studying American Governor’s industry and market, the students
spent a day brainstorming with Ginesin on the Cornell campus. Then
they visited its headquarters in Ivyland, Pa., to interview employees.
“We were trying to understand what they perceived to be the brand
of the company and what they wanted to improve,” says team member
Uday Tumuluri, MBA ’13, now a senior consultant at Deloitte Consulting
in Boston.
“We also got a lot of insight from Mark Milstein about how to
structure the problem and get to its root,” Tumuluri says. “We needed
to keep asking ourselves, ‘What is the problem we’re trying to solve? Is
it just branding, or something larger?’”
Based on its findings, the team developed new designs for the
company’s logo, business cards, on-premise signage, and website. Ginesin
says he has adopted most of those suggestions and will eventually install
the new signage.
The team also suggested some changes to make American Governor a
more appealing workplace. Some of those ideas focused on performance
management. “We also spoke a lot about rewards and recognition
programs they could bring into the organization,” Tumuluri says.
Many of those recommendations confirmed ideas that American
Governor had identified on its own and that it has since put into action,
Ginesin says.
Ginesin first learned about the immersion program from Milstein at
a green energy event. Since then, he and his classmate and co-founder,
Daniel Berrien ’90 (Engineering), have engaged five Johnson immersion
teams, hired one team member, and taken one as a summer intern.
Ginesin periodically rereads reports from past teams. “I get new insights
into things as time passes,” he says. “The recommendations from some
of the teams were ahead of their time and could only be implemented
much later down the line.”
new moDel for Diabetes managementIn 2012, the global health-care company Novo Nordisk started to
develop a model for delivering diabetes care in rural India. Focusing on
a village called Sampatchak in the state of Bihar, Novo Nordisk gave
training in diabetes management to doctors, pharmacists, and local
female health-care workers known as Accredited Social
Health Activists (ASHAs).
The ultimate goal was to sell insulin to India’s rural
poor, a vast and underserved “bottom of the pyramid”
(BoP) market. “These people do not have any access to
health care,” says Dr. Bharathi Bhatt, senior medical
advisor, market access and public affairs at Novo Nordisk
in Bangalore. They are largely illiterate and know very little
about diabetes, she adds.
Novo Nordisk engaged an SGE immersion team to
evaluate whether the company could turn the pilot into
a sustainable, scalable, and profitable business venture.
In the spring of 2013, the four-student team, along
with business analyst Anirvan Dutt Chaudhuri from Novo
Nordisk, began by interviewing Novo Nordisk employees via
phone and email. Then two team members, Michael Ditter
and Mallory Martino, both MBA ’14, went to Bihar for
an intensive week of interviews with doctors, pharmacists,
ASHAs, and patients.
iT ForCeD me To ThinK STraTegiCaLLy in a way ThaT no oTher mBa experienCe haD.” — pratima arapakota, mba ’13, a market intelligence analyst with autodesk in san francisco who participated in an sge immersion project for amorepacific
student participants in the american governor sge immersion project with american governor President Scott Ginesin ’90. Pictured (left to right): Uday Tumuluri, MBA ’13, Jennifer Le, MBA ’13, Scott Ginesin ’90, Christopher Smith, MPA ’12, and Willy Wang, MBA ’13.
34 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
a F R E S H S E T
of Eyes The students also used business
and financial tools, such as break-
even analysis and cost estimation,
to analyze the prospects for this
social and health initiative, says
Ditter, now a consultant with
Accenture in New York City.
The team determined that
Novo Nordisk should indeed scale
up, says Hira Hafeez-Ur-Rehman, CIPA ’13, now a reporting and
information specialist with USAID in Pakistan. (Hafeez-Ur-Rehman
was one of eight students from other Cornell schools who took part in
the SGE immersion program in 2013.)
“We proposed an alternative business model with five-year financial
projections and recommendations to scale the BoP model in other
villages in Bihar,” she says. The plan included details such as how many
patients Novo Nordisk would need to serve and how many ASHAs and
pharmacists it should involve.
The students also suggested looking for synergies with other Novo
Nordisk initiatives already in progress in India. For example, the ASHAs
should join the teams of health-care workers who administer blood
glucose tests and provide education about diabetes in company-sponsored
mobile health centers, says Ditter.
“The Novo Nordisk brand is really strong in that area,” he explains.
Patients who see rural care providers cooperating with a trusted health-
care company are more apt to accept care from ASHAs at home.
Novo Nordisk has since moved to expand the pilot project. “We
signed a memorandum of understanding with the state government of
Bihar for using 300 ASHA workers in the next phase and taking it to
ten districts,” says Bhatt.
The recommendation to integrate the activities of different Novo
Nordisk entities in India was extremely valuable, says Bhatt. So was the
experience in BoP that the team brought to the project. “Base of the
Pyramid was a new concept to us,” she says. “Since Cornell University
had expertise in that domain, association with them was certainly of
value.”
a Consulting engagement enables stuDents to praCtiCe for their upComing summer internships, inCreaSing The oDDS that an intern will Do a gooD Job anD reCeive an oFFer oF FuLL-Time empLoymenT.” — manoj thomas, s.C. Johnson professor of marketing and faculty leader for the
strategic marketing immersion
novo nordisk sge immersion team members Michael Ditter and Mallory Martino, both MBA ’14, with members of the Bihar Voluntary Health association in Patna, india
Mallory Martino, MBA ’14, and stalin Chakrabarty, novo nordisk local project manager, interview accredited social Health activitsts, or asHas, in Bihar, india.
iT’S reaLLy gooD To geT a DiFFerenT perSpeCTive, espeCially when you’re still in the early Days of a new market.” — nate rothstein, mba ’11, senior manager at american express,
on why he tapped class of 2015 students for a marketing
immersion project
35w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
travel innovationTerry Dale was so impressed with the work of two marketing immersion
teams in spring 2014, he invited some of their members to make a
presentation to his board of directors in August.
Dale is president and CEO of the United States Tour Operators
Association (USTOA), a New York-based membership organization
that represents packaged tour operators. USTOA recently established
an Innovation Lab to help members better understand their customers.
Dale considered seeking help with the Innovation Lab from Harvard
Business School faculty and professional consultants. In the end, though,
he decided to engage two Johnson teams. “It seemed like an absolutely
great fit,” he says. “To tap these bright, intellectual minds on a host of
different fronts felt right, fresh, and forward-leaning.”
He asked one team to create a consumer confidence index, a tool
to gauge the near-future demand for packaged tours.
The students created a survey to gather data and a methodology for
calculating the index. “We also went beyond the project a bit, developing
sample dashboards that USTOA can use to slice and dice the data,”
says team member Jeremy Budge, MBA ’15. A company that offers
luxury tours, for example, could use the tool to study the motivations
of high-income travelers.
USTOA now plans to conduct the index survey twice a year, Dale
says.
The second team set out to study the travel preferences of millennials.
But while interviewing people across a broad spectrum of ages, members
discovered something completely unexpected: travel behavior has little
to do with age.
“We found that there were certain characteristics across different age
groups that made people more apt to use travel agencies or tour operators,”
says Derek Mayer, MBA ’15. For example, there’s Experimental Evan:
He’ll go anywhere, improvising all the way. Vigilant Vanessa, on the
other hand, shuns exotic destinations; she values safety and peace of
mind above everything else.
A survey of consumers aged 24 to 80 confirmed that travelers fall into
four distinct personality types. “We saw a similar percentage of each type
in each age bucket,” Mayer says. Tour operators should start segmenting
their markets by travel behavior, not by age, the team suggested.
Class of 2015 student participants in the united states tour operators association (ustoa) immersion project with ustoa President and Ceo terry dale, center. Pictured (left to right): Steve Ryu, Bernice Chan, Dan Murphy, Derek Mayer, Terry Dale, Grace Schiodtz, Jeremy Budge, Janice Claudio Morales, and Sam Griffiths.
to tap these bright, intelleCtual minDs on a host of Different fronts felt righT, FreSh, anD ForwarD-Leaning.” — terry Dale, president and Ceo of the united states tour
operators association
“It was reassuring that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel for future
customers,” Dale says. But USTOA members — who today market
mainly to baby boomers — should start paying attention to young
travelers now.
The engagement with both teams far exceeded Dale’s expectations,
he says, and he looks forward to sponsoring more immersion projects.
“I’ve already signed up for next year.”
Along with USTOA, several other companies that
participated in spring 2015 — including Johnson &
Johnson and General Electric — have signed up to sponsor
Strategic Marketing immersion projects again in 2015,
says Thomas.
Milstein says he looks forward to engaging with
more Johnson alumni about immersion projects. “As
our alumni network grows, the strength of the SGE
immersion program will continue to benefit from the
involvement of our alumni who help identify sponsored
project opportunities and actively support current
Johnson students.”
Merrill Douglas writes about a wide range of business and government-related topics for trade magazines, university publications, nonprofits, and corporate clients from her home on a country road in upstate New York.
37w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
hen Hernan Mendez took over as head of Colombia’s Juan Valdez
coffee business in 2010, the retailer was in sad straits. Parent company
Procafecol was on the verge of bankruptcy and its misguided expansion
plans for its chain of coffee shops had been deep-sixed. The executive
corps was dispirited and the brand’s mustachioed namesake, a national icon,
was in serious jeopardy of losing his aura.
Mendez has since led a remarkable turnaround at the company and started it down
a road of growth and profits, a success story that speaks volumes about his education,
experience, and talent. Mendez’s career trajectory provides a model for many young
executives, particularly those whose ambitions point to international business.
The numbers tell the story. In less than four years at the helm, Mendez has nearly
doubled Juan Valdez revenue and turned losses into healthy profits. Insiders say a once
restive corps of executives is now united behind common objectives. The thousands of
coffee growers who are the company’s owners are seeing millions of dollars in annual
royalties.
Juan Valdez, which has been around as a Colombian coffee trademark since 1958 but
as a retail coffee chain only since 2002, will end this year with about 312 coffee shops
— 207 in Colombia and 105 in 13 foreign countries (including 11 in the United States).
That’s almost three times the 112 total outlets open when Mendez signed on. A key to the
company’s newfound health has been its embrace of franchising, a business model pushed
by Mendez that the company previously had resisted.
“I feel that I’m making a real difference in the lives of thousands of mostly small,
humble, coffee-growing families. That’s an important part of what motivates me to come
here every day,” said Mendez, who was interviewed in the Procafecol office in north
Bogotá.
Procafecol headquarters is in the same office tower as the Colombian Coffee Growers
Federation, which represents the nation’s 564,000 coffee farmers and which owns 84
percent of Procafecol’s Juan Valdez brand. Another 12 percent of the company’s equity
is owned by the World Bank’s IFC investment arm and 4 percent by a smaller group of
18,000 coffee growers.
Fresh, new energy jump-starts a national iconHernan Mendez, MBA ’83, President of Procafecol, a parent company to Juan ValdezBy Chris Kraul
PHoto by: CHris Kraul
38 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
On his arrival at Juan Valdez, Mendez was a seasoned executive
with experience gleaned at several multinationals, including Dow
Chemical, Exxon, and Alpina, another iconic Colombian brand
of dairy products whose international expansion he guided. The
once-regional Alpina now sells in South and Central America, the
Caribbean, and the United States in addition to Colombia.
Mendez brought some time-tested business practices to the
table. One was his insistence on “participatory” decision making.
He constantly reaches out to Juan Valdez employees, from cashiers
to vice presidents, to solicit suggestions as well as get feedback on his
ideas for improving the company.
“He loves hearing what those who work alongside him have
to say,” said Eduardo Lehmann, Procafecol’s vice president of
manufacturing and supply chain, who has been with the Juan
Valdez chain since the coffee federation opened it in 2002. “It
shows his respect for people, but also that his decisions have been
thoroughly evaluated from all sides.”
But the turnaround took some wrenching adjustments. He put
in place strict cost controls and benchmarks and reset corporate
culture from a “silo” communication mode to a more transparent,
consensus-seeking style. He had to raise morale that had been
hammered by the closure prior to his arrival of many Juan Valdez
outlets, including flagship stores in New York and Madrid.
“As a firm proponent of ‘managing by walking around,’ I started
integrating people and getting everyone to focus on teamwork
and a common purpose by defining goals and letting people know
what they could do to help,” said Mendez, who added that his
management philosophy is founded on respect, preparation, and
openness.
Pretty words, to be sure, but people who know Mendez say he
lives by them. “There has been a total change in organizational
climate. Before he got here, each department was looking out after
its own objectives, and now we have formed a real team,” said
Adriana Ochoa, Procafecol’s VP of commercial operations.
Mauricio Rodriguez, Mendez’s former boss at Dow Chemical’s
Colombia unit and later ambassador to Great Britain (2009
to 2013), says Mendez’s communication skills, international
experience, and old-world values, added to his track record at Alpina
and Juan Valdez, make him “one of Colombia’s best executives.”
“Hernan’s way of treating people is friendly, respectful, and
organized, in his personal as well as his professional life,” said
Rodriguez. “He is also extremely logical and systematic, and so
he was a perfect complement to someone like me who is creative,
visionary, and chaotic.”
Mendez, who got his undergraduate degree in industrial
engineering at Bogotá’s Javeriana Pontifical University, said a
key factor in his career success was getting his MBA at Johnson,
which he chose over other graduate schools, including Penn’s
Wharton School, because of its reputation and also for Ithaca’s rural
ambience.
“I personally feel close to nature and wanted to be in a small
town instead of a big city. I feel I got a better balance of life and
study,” said Mendez, whose hobbies are trekking and tennis.
But his appreciation of most things American began long before
he enrolled at Johnson. His father, also named Hernan, was a high-
level executive at Burroughs Corp. who moved his family around
the hemisphere, including to Detroit for three years. There, Mendez
attended elementary school, joined the Boy Scouts, and played Little
League baseball.
“I liked and identified with the American way of doing
things,” Mendez said. “The U.S. was a clear choice for my higher
studies. That’s why I didn’t apply to schools in any other country.
As a family member, I had lived the life of a U.S. multinational
employee. I had seen my father grow and develop, and I knew that
was the path to follow.”
It was no accident that his first job after getting his BS degree
from Javeriana was at Exxon Colombia, where he worked in the
economics and planning department. Influenced by his boss there,
P R O F I L E I N
leadership
i feel that i’m making a real difference in the lives of thousands of mostly
small, humble, coffee-growing families. that’s an important part of what
motivates me to come here every day. Hernan Mendez , MBa ’83
39w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
Mendez decided that he liked finance and that it should be his focus
at Cornell.
At the same time, Mendez had deep roots in Colombia and
knew at the outset it was where he wanted to live and work. So,
after earning his MBA at Cornell, he returned home and landed
a job with Dow Chemical as a credit analyst in the company’s
pharmaceuticals and agricultural products division.
For a variety of reasons, working for Dow in Colombia was
an auspicious start for Mendez’s career. Responsible for the
creditworthiness of customers that included big city hospitals as
well as coffee and rice farmers in the countryside, he got to know
Colombia inside and out. Later, after being promoted to treasurer
of Dow, which made him the company’s principle cash manager, he
forged close relations with the country’s largest banks.
Next it was on to Mexico City, where Dow made him CFO for
its Mexican operations. There, Mendez learned the ins and outs of
currency trading, perhaps the job’s biggest responsibility. That was
because Dow’s Mexico unit was largely a commercial and financial
business, since its manufacturing for the Mexican market was
virtually all done in the United States.
Learning about currency trading helped Mendez enormously
in his subsequent positions because it is essential in managing a
multinational business, Mendez said.
“Perhaps more important, my Dow experience taught me the
value of teamwork,” Mendez added. “Dow Colombia General
Manager Rafael Pavia liked to hire smart people and get everybody’s
opinion because it led to decisions that we all felt part of. We felt we
had had a chance to express our views and that our ideas had been
taken into account.”
In 1992, Mendez was hired as vice president of corporate
development at Alpina, a respected, well-known dairy concern based
near Bogotá that had ambitions of growing beyond Colombia’s
borders. Over the next decade, he helped manage the consumer
goods company’s entry into new product lines as well as expansion
into Venezuela and Ecuador.
Ivan Lopez, Alpina’s VP for business development who worked
with Mendez from 1998 to 2001, said Mendez’s leadership style
could be summed up by charisma, communication, and “emotional
intelligence.”
“By that I mean comporting himself in such a way that made
the business function well not by organizational charts but with his
listening and participatory leadership style that pulled people along
because they wanted him to succeed,” Lopez said.
Mendez needed his communication skills to persuade the
family-controlled business to invest the millions of dollars required
to modernize and expand internationally. Convincing the board
to invest in a multimillion dollar Oracle IT system was especially
difficult, not only for the high cost but because adopting it would
require “changing the working habits of the entire company.”
“Alpina wanted to make a big corporate leap. But balancing
corporate needs with those of a family business is very challenging.
Especially when you are talking about investment in an IT system
from which shareholders wouldn’t see a return for two or three
years,” Mendez said. Eventually, the Oracle system paid big
dividends and Mendez was promoted to Alpina CEO.
In 2002, Mendez left Alpina to head one of its suppliers,
Phoenix Packaging, a company with operations and stakeholders in
Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico that made plastic containers and
also had big expansion plans. His international experience plus his
familiarity with petrochemicals as a former Dow executive made
him the ideal candidate.
Over the next seven years, Mendez put his multicultural
background to work in balancing the interests of owners from three
different countries. “You have to gain the confidence of your board,
your customers, and suppliers and one good way of doing that in
a country like Mexico, for example, is sit down, have a meal, a few
tacos and shots of tequila, together. I became keen about adapting to
cultural differences, and now I believe it’s a strength of mine.”
But the fates of Mendez and Juan Valdez seemed destined
to intersect, so well-suited are CEO and company to each other.
Mendez’s predecessor as CEO, Catalina Crane, had done a lot of
the “dirty work” in restructuring the debt and closing money-losing
stores prior to leaving for a job in Colombian President Juan Manuel
Santos’ administration. But the company cried out for someone
with Mendez’s experience in managing international expansion and
applying best business practices.
As for Mendez, taking over at Juan Valdez was appealing
because it was “a brand close to Colombians’ hearts and because it
was a diamond in the rough.” Nearly four years later, the company’s
“recovery from the abyss” is nearly complete. More franchise-led
expansion is planned.
“There is a big appetite for the Juan Valdez brand, and we have
hundreds of requests for franchises coming in from all over the
world. So why not do it?” Mendez said.
“This is now a growing and profitable business that is benefitting
Colombian coffee farmers. We now know that they are our real
bosses — and that we are contributing to their welfare. That moves
me and motivates all of us to work hard and keep this company
moving forward.”
A former foreign correspondent with the los angeles times, Chris Kraul is a freelance writer based in Bogotá, Colombia.
40 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
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C L A S S O F 1 9 6 8Bill Boerum was elected to a full
three-year term on the board of
directors of the Association of
California Healthcare Districts
(ACHD) and was also elected
board secretary. Having served
one year on the board’s gover-
nance committee, he now joins
the executive committee. ACHD
is based in Sacramento and
represents health-care districts
across the state of California.
C L A S S O F 1 9 6 9Ivan Blum ’67, MEng ’68, took
early retirement after a 25-year
C L a S SC L a S S
C L A S S O F 1 9 6 4James Byrnes ’63 retired in May
as chairman of Tompkins Finan-
cial in Ithaca and teaches a class
in bank management in Cornell’s
Charles H. Dyson School of Ap-
plied Economics and Manage-
ment. He writes that his son,
Andrew, was inducted into the
Canadian Olympic Hall of
Fame. James and his wife, Terry,
live in Cayuga Heights.
Robert Strahota ’62 worked for
many years and in more than
40 countries as a securities and
corporate governance consultant
with the SEC. Now retired from
that position, he continues his
emerging markets work and has
served as a consultant for Iraq,
Kuwait, Serbia, Ukraine, and
Vietnam. Teaching is also on
his agenda; his topic of choice
is investor protection issues af-
fecting investments in emerging
markets.
C L A S S O F 1 9 6 0Robert Camp ’59 was honored
in June with the American Soci-
ety for Quality’s Distinguished
Service Medal. The American
Society for Quality is the leading
authority on quality in all fields,
organizations, and industries
worldwide and honors the excep-
tionally distinguished lifetime
contributions of any person rec-
ognized as a long-term enabler,
catalyst, or prime mover in the
quality movement. Camp is also
is author of Benchmarking: The
Search for Industry Best Practices
that Lead to Superior Performance
(Productivity Press, 2006).
global management consulting
career as a partner at Deloitte
& Touche, AT Kearney, and
Grant Thornton, followed by
ten years as a services and re-
search executive at IBM. He is
now an adjunct professor at the
University of Connecticut, teach-
ing organizational leadership
courses, and at Albertus Magnus
College, teaching in the MBA
program. He spends time “with
my four granddaughters and on
my golf handicap, which refuses
to improve.”
Thomas Russo, JD ’69, ex-
ecutive vice president of legal,
compliance, regulatory affairs
and government affairs, and
general counsel of American
International Group (AIG), was
interviewed May 5 for a Law 360
Top In-House Counsel Q&A,
“5 Insights From AIG General
Counsel Tom Russo.” Law 360
[www.law360.com] features
expert analysis from Fortune
100 general counsels and leading
attorneys.
C L A S S O F 1 9 7 3James R. Marlow was appoint-
ed president of Core Services,
where he is also a member of the
company’s senior management
team. James is an executive and
management consultant with
T H E
1960s
41w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
as a teenager growing up in a suburb of Cleveland, richard saccany recalls reading in the newspaper about an underground salt mine operating near the center of the city. With all the drilling and blasting, the operation fascinated him, and when it came time to choose a college, he selected a school where he could major in mining engineering. “i had a fairly basic motive,” he says. “i like digging in the dirt.” that dream became a reality when saccany, with his Mba in hand, landed his first job as a production analyst in the uranium industry in 1973 and progressed through the organization to become a superintendent of a uranium mine in new Mexico in 1978. over the next 35 years, saccany would manage mining opera-tions, engineering, and construction projects for companies in the united states, Canada, Panama, turkey, south africa, Peru, and Mongolia. “My career has been one giant adventure,” says saccany, who has overseen the mining of gold in alaska, copper and zinc in turkey, and potash in Canada. His travels across the globe and his frequent visits to museums led saccany to pursue a master’s degree in world history, which he received from the university of Denver in 1991. For the past decade, saccany has been stationed in Canada, most recently as the project manager for construction of a $900 million mining facility 100 miles southeast of saskatoon, saskatchewan. the province has 40 percent of the world’s proven and probable reserves of potash, which is converted into fertilizer after being cut from underground mines in a form similar to rock salt. the project saccany is supervising — the Jansen Mine — is expected to take six years to construct. When complete, the mine will produce 33 million tons of potash ore annually, says Saccany, a senior consultant for Stantec, the engineering, consulting, and design firm that is developing the hoist plants’ structural steel towers and loading systems, which will transport the mining crews 3,000 feet below ground to extract the ore. Despite his long-term assignment in Canada, saccany continues to make Denver his home, because, he says, the climate there allows him to ski and golf in the same weekend. although his monthly commute is more than 1,000 miles, saccany wouldn’t think of trading in his job. “i’ve never been bored,” he says. “i can honestly say i’ve never gotten out of bed in the morning and dreaded going to work.”
— Sherrie Negrea
Richard Saccany, MBa ’73
30+ years of corporate experi-
ence, including CEO, COO, and
CFO positions with manufactur-
ing, high tech, and investment
companies, notes the ITBriefing.
net article about his promotion.
Henry Ritter ’71 writes that he
was appointed to the board of
directors and chairman of the au-
dit committee for Custom Pool,
“an OTC pink sheet company”
in Florida. Henry, who lives in
Scottsdale, Ariz., also writes that
his turnaround consulting firm
has opened an office in Miami.
C L A S S O F 1 9 7 6James Bierman was appointed
president and CEO of Owens &
Minor, a Fortune 500 health-
care logistics company.
C L A S S O F 1 9 7 7Michael Durham, MBA ’77,
was appointed a member of
Travelport’s board of direc-
tors. Michael, who was formerly
president and CEO of Sabre
Group Holdings, also serves as a
member of the board of directors
of Hertz Global Holdings.
C L A S S O F 1 9 7 8Mark Zweibel, MPS ’78, is
fiscal director (CFO) for the
public mental health network for
Northwest Connecticut, with
clinical locations in Danbury,
Waterbury, and Torrington.
C L A S S O F 1 9 7 9Diane (Dee) Berger, MPA ’79,
received her doctorate in educa-
tion, with a concentration in
educational administration, from
LIU Post in December 2013. She
writes: “Not sure why I took on
that challenge other than it was
on my bucket list! The process
took four years, while working
full time, and was as academi-
cally rigorous as my MPA from
Cornell … both degrees were
worth the sweat.” Dee is princi-
Central AsiaS P a N N I N G T H E G L O B E I N
mining
Richard Saccany, MBA ’73, at the Jansen Mine project site in Saskatchewan
T H E
1970s
42 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
pal of the Children’s Learning
Center, a private, special educa-
tion school for children with
disabilities, ages 1 to 21, at the
United Cerebral Palsy Associa-
tion of Nassau County, where
she has worked for 32 years.
Nancy Schlichting, CEO of
Henry Ford Health System, was
a recipient of the National Cen-
ter for Healthcare Leadership’s
2014 Gail L. Warden Leader-
ship Excellence Award. She was
honored for her “innovative ap-
proaches to bringing high-value
and accessible healthcare to the
NCHL’s communities, perma-
nently transforming and improv-
ing the field.”
C L A S S O F 1 9 8 0David Culbertson is VP, cus-
tomer success, at OpenExchange
in Boston. He sent sad news:
“(Malcolm) Craig Kelley, passed
away this summer. Those who
knew Craig remember his sense
of humor, intellect, passion for
everything from skiing and bik-
ing to political discussions over
a cold one, love for his family,
and his huge collection of friends
around the country. We will all
miss him deeply.”
C L A S S O F 1 9 8 3Ron Scharman ’77 was named
COO of Chatterbox Wine Mar-
keting in Napa, Calif. He is an
instructor in wine e-commerce
and consumer direct market-
ing at Sonoma State University’s
Wine Business Institute.
C L A S S O F 1 9 8 4Cathy Dove was named the 10th
president of Paul Smith’s Col-
lege in the Adirondacks. Cathy
was formerly a vice president
of Cornell Tech, a position she
was named to in 2012. She was
responsible for all administrative,
operational, outreach, capital
planning, and construction func-
tions for the campus currently
under construction on Roosevelt
Island and at its temporary loca-
tion in Manhattan. “In Cathy,
Paul Smith’s College has found
an exceptional leader,” Cor-
nell President David J. Skorton
said in an article in the Cornell
Chronicle (July 28, 2014). “Her
talents are a perfect fit for Paul
Smith’s, whose mission combines
experiential and traditional
learning with a vibrant entre-
preneurial spirit. I wish her and
her new campus community
continued success.” Cathy had
served as an administrator at
Cornell since 1989, including
several years as associate dean for
MBA Programs and Admissions
at Johnson.
C L A S S O F 1 9 8 6Gordon Haff, a cloud evange-
list at Red Hat, was a panelist
at the DevOps Summit Power
Panel June 9 in New York City.
He discussed how DevOps is
changing the way IT works, how
businesses interact with custom-
ers, and how organizations are
buying, building, and delivering
software.
C L A S S O F 1 9 8 7Tim Matson ’81 was named
chief investment officer at Re-
insurance Group of America,
where he manages all aspects of
RGA’s $35 billion global assets
portfolio. Tim was most recently
chief investment officer of a joint
venture between Cathay Life In-
surance Co. and Conning Asset
Management in Hong Kong.
C L A S S O F 1 9 8 9Brian Jung ’83 was appointed
VP of finance and CFO for
Nanomix, a nanotechnology
company.
Robert S. White was appointed
a member of Novadaq’s board
of directors. White is a medical
technology industry veteran with
over 25 years of high-level experi-
ence, Novadaq’s announcement
notes, and was formerly president
and CEO of TYRX, a privately
held company commercializing
innovative, implantable com-
bination drug/device products
designed to reduce surgical site
infections, until it was acquired
by Medtronic earlier this year.
C L A S S O F 1 9 9 0John S. Roscoe ’85, portfolio
manager with the Roosevelt
Investment Group in New York
City, visited campus in April. He
enjoyed speaking to and interact-
ing with Johnson students in
the Parker Center about how the
investment industry has changed
since the 2008 financial crisis.
C L A S S O F 1 9 9 3Joseph Cherian, MS ’92, PhD
’93, is professor of finance and
director of the Center for As-
set Management, Research &
Investments at the National
University of Singapore. He
describes a “hybrid career” in
asset management, with “a few
professional twists and turns —
first as an engineer … then as an
academic, followed by a stint on
Wall Street, and … now back as
a clinical academic.”
C L A S S O F 1 9 9 5Andrew Neuman was inter-
viewed in June, in Japanese, by
BizGate Nikkei, Japan’s equiva-
lent to the Wall Street Journal.
The interview was about the
differences in Japanese and U.S.
project management styles, espe-
cially with regard to communica-
tion. Andrew is VP of business
development and project man-
agement with MSOL, a startup
providing project management
office services to clients across all
industries. MSOL’s parent com-
pany is Management Solutions.
C L A S S O F 1 9 9 6Paul Antinori writes that he
recently departed Cisco Systems
after a 14-year run. “Looking
forward to the next step in my
career in technology.”
Mike Renna was promoted to
president and COO of South
Jersey Industries, an energy
company headquartered just
outside Hammonton, N.J. He
is also president of South Jersey
Energy Solutions and South
Jersey Energy, the region’s largest
energy marketer, and serves on
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43w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
the board of directors of the New
Jersey Chamber of Commerce.
Tony Riley is associate director
of IT at the Dow Chemical Co.
He gives back to Johnson via the
Ruth and Morris Abner Scholar-
ship, the very fund that helped
him pursue his MBA. He says, “I
had a wonderful two years that
have helped me in life, as well as
professionally and financially.”
Johnson also gave Tony early ex-
posure to international business,
which has helped him in his role
with Dow.
C L A S S O F 1 9 9 8Rick Cleary founded a compa-
ny, CYS Investments, a few years
after graduating from Johnson,
and took it public. In July “we
celebrated our fifth anniversary
on the NYSE (and over $1 bil-
lion in dividends paid to share-
holders) by ringing the opening
bell. It was a pretty good day.”
Brian Sapp has joined Hercules
Technology Growth Capital as
a managing director responsible
for the origination and execu-
tion of loans to venture capital-
backed companies in the energy
technology sector.
C L A S S O F 2 0 0 0Jonathan Alford was named
CFO of WISErg Corp. in
Redmond, Wash., a bio-clean
technology company that con-
verts food scraps into organic
fertilizer for sale to farmers and
consumers.
C L A S S O F 2 0 0 1Anne Cramer writes: “I’m
thrilled to announce the launch
a year and a half ago, larry Kraft was senior vice president of sales and marketing at Digi international, a technology company in Minneapolis. but after circling the globe on an environmental quest with his wife and two children, Kraft decided to leave the corporate world and now leads an organization that empowers youth to fight climate change. the new direction in his career evolved from the questions Kraft began asking when he and his wife, lauri, became parents. “Having kids, you start to think, ‘What are my kids going to do when they grow up?’ and you start planning their education,” he says. “but when you do, you have to take a step back and say, ‘What kind of world will they live in?’” over the next few years, his growing concern about the climate crisis led Kraft to reach a tipping point in his career and decide to dedicate his energy to fighting global warming. First, though, Kraft and his wife decided to do something they had always wanted to do: travel around the world with their children — who were then 6 and 8 — and show them firsthand the environmental challenges threatening the global ecosystem. During their yearlong journey, they also shared weekly blogs (see krafttrip.blogspot.com) with the Wilderness Classroom, an environmental education nonprofit followed by an estimated 85,000 young people. Their first stop was Costa Rica, where they saw how funds raised by kids around the world had created the country’s largest rainforest preserve. in vietnam, they met educators from an organization trying to reduce demand for endangered animals that are illegally poached. and in norway, they saw glaciers that are retreating because of rising global temperatures. after completing their trek across 17 countries in august, Kraft became executive director of iMatter: Kids vs. global Warming, an organiza-tion based outside santa barbara, Calif. Working remotely from his home in st. louis Park, Minn., Kraft is now planning activities for kids and strategies for them to demand political action on climate change. “i think everyone has a love of kids or is connected with kids,” he says, “and i think that’s the way to connect with people on climate change, regardless of their politics.”
— Sherrie Negrea
Larry Kraft ’87, MBa ’88
Central AsiaR E F O C U S I N G O N
climate change
Larry Kraft with his family at the Madikwe Game Reserve on the South Africa/Botswana border
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44 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
of my new company Suitecx, a
multidimensional suite of tools
designed to enable marketing
and sales professionals to visual-
ize impact, cost, and ROI based
on customer, employee, and
institutional viewpoints. Suitecx
[www.suitecx.com] allows users
to make fact-based decisions
and process improvements that
are grounded in the customer
experience. Customer-centric
diagnostics, touch inventories,
experience maps, data-driven
personae and customer storytell-
ing, and precision marketing are
all components of this ground-
breaking software.”
Yair Holtzman, CPA, became
partner at Anchin Block & An-
chin, LLP, based in New York
City, Oct. 1, 2014. A member
of the firm’s tax credits and
incentives group and practice
leader of the R&D tax credits
group, Yair has more than 20
years of experience with national
public accounting and manage-
ment consulting firms focusing
on federal tax consulting issues
and assisting senior executives
with strategy development and
implementation. Anchin Block
& Anchin is a full-service tax,
accounting, and advisory services
firm that specializes in serving
the tri-state area.
Ben Lewis was appointed senior
VP of strategy and business
development at ProQuest, a
cloud-based technology company
offering solutions to librarians,
students, and researchers.
Ponsi trivisvavet has spent the past six years thinking about how to help farmers feed the world. in india and africa, how can growers increase their corn yields, which are far below worldwide averages? and in southeast asia, how can farmers boost their production of rice to meet the population’s demand? After working for McKinsey & Company as a consultant for five years, in 2008 trivisvavet plunged into the world of agribusiness when she joined syngenta, a global swiss agribusiness that markets seeds and agrochemicals. since her undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, trivisvavet concedes there was much to learn when she was hired as syngenta’s head of strategy for seeds. “i won’t pretend that it was easy at all,” she says, “but i have to admit that agriculture and its technologies are fascinating.” Her focus on corn began in 2011, when she became syngenta’s global head of corn, responsible for developing solutions to improve crop yields in develop-ing countries and help farmers in other parts of the world. in india, for example, corn production averages 40 bushels per acre, less than a quarter of the average 170-bushels-per-acre yield in the united states. to boost the low yields, trivisvavet says, growers in developing countries must change their agronomic practices and adopt more sustain-able products, including genetically modified and hybrid corn seeds, which are commonly used in the United States and are among Syngenta’s main products. When she became regional director of Syngenta North America in July, working out of the Minnetonka, Minn., office, Trivisvavet expanded her focus to improving the productivity of several crops, including corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and vegetables. syngenta, a company that is involved in biotechnology and genomic research, is the sole developer of a genetically modified corn grown specifically for ethanol, which increases throughput while reducing the use of water and energy in the production process, trivisvavet says. While the approval of genetically modified corn in the United States and other countries has drawn protests, Trivisvavet says such technol-ogy is needed to ensure sustainable growth of crops. “there’s no way we can feed the world’s hungry without technology, without investment, without having the private sector work with the public sector to lift up the lives of the farmers and the population,” she says. “Feeding the world is what keeps me going.”
— Sherrie Negrea
Ponsi Trivisvavet, MBa ’99
Central Asiaa G M O a P P R O a C H T O
sustainable crops
Ponsi Trivisvavet hosts an employee breakfast at Syngenta’s Greensboro, N.C., office
C L a S S
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C L A S S O F 2 0 0 5Michael Albrecht was appointed
managing director at Ridgewood
Private Equity Partners (RPEP),
an investment firm focused on
energy-centric real asset private
equity strategies.
Greg Hernandez was selected
by Diversity MBA Magazine as
a “Top 100 Emerging Leader
Under 50” for 2014. These lead-
ers, chosen across all industries,
represent Fortune 500 compa-
nies, entrepreneurs, health-care
organizations, educational insti-
tutions, and nonprofit agencies
and are honored annually for
excellence in the workplace as
well as the community. Greg is
a commercial business director
for AstraZeneca pharmaceuti-
cals and lives in Keller, Texas,
with his wife, Sharon, and two
children.
C L A S S O F 2 0 0 6Kentaro Muto was appointed
managing director of Business
Development Asia, LLC, in the
firm’s Tokyo office.
Olga Narvskaia, head of online
revenue operations at Drop-
box, was featured in an Aug. 11
TechRepublic article in which
she spoke about her life in Rus-
sia, working for a company
that is changing the world, and
the power of focus. “It’s very
important to do whatever you’re
doing with as much excellence
as you can muster,” she said. “I
always try to take whatever it is
I’m doing to the next level and
really apply myself fully to that
problem or issue at hand.”
Henry Patz Jr. published his
first novel, The Naïve Guys: A
Memoir of Friendship, Love and
Tech in the Early 1990s, a his-
torical coming-of-age story set
in New York City in the 1990s.
Henry also posts to a blog on the
book’s website, www.thenaiveg-
uys.com, including recent entries
about what he’s learned on his
“initial journey into self-publish-
ing” — parts I and II of “The
Alchemy of Self-Publishing.”
C L A S S O F 2 0 0 7Saurabh Nayyar was appointed
CFO for Macadamia Natural
Oil.
Halis Santana works for PULSE
Network, a part of Discover
Financial Services. He lives in
Houston, Texas.
C L A S S O F 2 0 0 8William DeRosa was appointed
to the board of directors of Da-
kota Plains Holdings.
Tushar Virmani completed his
first Ironman race at Louisville
in August and wrote a series of
humorous, informative, and fun
blog posts about it for his train-
ing center’s website at ehstri.com.
“Just to be clear, at this point in
my athletic career (if you want
to call that), I had never done
a triathlon, didn’t own a road
bike, and I could do the doggie
stroke in the pool,” his first entry
begins. He concludes: “I leave
with a quote from David Bowie
who said, “Just for one day, we can
be heroes.” Tushar is a director at
UBS Investment Bank in New
York City.
Brent Pycz, applied insights and
innovation manager at General
Motors, writes: “Moved around a
bit since Johnson, having worked
at 3M (Minnesota) and Nike
(Oregon) in various roles. Being
near extended family brought us
back to Michigan, where I am
currently with General Motors
to develop the future of the con-
nected car. Along the way, the
family grew with all three of my
kids having been born in differ-
ent states!”
Rhoda Yap spoke about the fash-
ion house she leads, BritishIndia,
in an interview with New Straits
Times of Malaysia in Septem-
ber, when the brand celebrated
its 20th anniversary. Rhoda
returned to Malaysia a few years
ago to take the reins as CEO
from Pat Liew, founder of the
company and Rhoda’s aunt. Prior
to this, Yap worked with McK-
insey & Company in the U.S.,
focusing on large-scale transfor-
mational efforts for Fortune 100
clients, including retailers and
financial institutions.
C L A S S O F 2 0 1 0Tyler Baier ’05 says, “Roshelle
and I just celebrated four years
of marriage, and it’s been the
best four years of our lives —
well, mine at least.” In Febru-
ary, Tyler was promoted to chief
strategy officer at the public
charter school management
organization where he’s worked
since leaving Ithaca. He also
has become a board member for
Beat the Streets Los Angeles, and
they have started over 20 youth
wrestling programs in the inner
city, “four of which served the
kids at my charter schools (not a
coincidence).”
Harris Baltch and Sarah Sher-
Baltch ’04 welcomed a son,
Hunter Nate, March 28.
Oz Barhama and his wife, Abby,
“got married in Israel in a tradi-
tional Yemenite Jewish wedding
and a more modern wedding
last August,” and in June they
welcomed a baby girl, Noa. They
live in Chicago, where Oz works
at Aon in strategy consulting for
insurance companies.
Will Brassel ’02 has a new role
within Johnson & Johnson. The
job is global, “which has brought
a great deal of travel to Europe,
with plans that I visit the Asian
Pacific.” Will and his wife, Jill,
moved to Jacksonville, Fla.,
where “we bought a place at the
beach, which has definitely had a
soothing, positive impact on life
balance.”
Sarah Brown ’04, MPS ’10, is
director, HR business partner
supporting the institutional
business, for TIAA-CREF. She
lives in Charlotte, N.C., with her
husband and two children.
Anna Bruno ’79 launched Im-
blim, a social jewelry company,
“founded on the premise that
jewelry connects people” [www.
imblim.com]. She says, “A few
awesome Johnson folks, includ-
ing Ann Cole, Jenn Li, and
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46 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
Christine Sneva, already own
Imblims!” Anna has learned
firsthand that “everything takes
between two and ten times lon-
ger than you want it to — espe-
cially when you’re running on a
shoestring budget and people are
doing you favors.”
Vicki Chen lives in Singapore
and works as a new product
business development man-
ager at 3M Asia Pacific. She has
taken on a consumer health-care
project focusing on air quality
and respiratory health, especially
in heavily polluted markets like
China. Vicki and her husband,
Alex, also “have news of a baby
… of the restaurant/bar variety!”
They have opened a Mexican bar
and casual eatery called Hombre
Cantina.
Ryan Cole and Ann Tracy-
Cole had a daughter, Bailey
Elizabeth, in February. In March
they relocated to Maine, where
Ryan started a new job as senior
manager at IDEXX Laboratories
managing M&A and strategy for
the company. Ann is with Ener-
NOC, as senior marketing man-
ager, splitting time between her
home office and the company’s
Boston headquarters.
Ludo Denza spent two weeks
in Nepal with Clint Sidle ’74,
MBA ’77, on a leadership pro-
gram with a few other alumni,
including Steve Maddox. “Lots
of trekking.”
Katie Baines Drossos wel-
comed a daughter, Elizabeth
Baines, Dec. 30. Elizabeth joins
big sister, Madeline. In other
news, Katie joined Discovery
Communications as director of
educational engagement to “lead
collaboration with distribution
partners at the national, regional,
and local levels to build aware-
ness for Discovery Education and
its value as a community-based
partner that optimizes the power
of broadband to transform teach-
ing and learning.”
Sandra Chang Frank and her
husband, Brian, were married in
2013 at their favorite destination,
Sonoma wine country. Sandra
lives and works in San Francisco
and has started her own retail
business, Mason Grace Co.,
“providing elegant gift solutions
for the busy professional.”
Sakina Walsh-Groth works for
Mozilla (maker of the Firefox
browser) as a marketing strate-
gist. She says, “Not many know
this, but we are actually a non-
profit fighting to keep the Web
open, neutral, and in the hands
of people.” Sakina’s proudest ac-
complishment over the past year
has been becoming a vegetarian
“… a dramatic but rewarding
change.” She and her husband
live in Florida.
Ethan Hawkes ’07 lives in York
Beach, Maine. He “continues to
rack up frequent flyer miles and
hotel nights” as an associate prin-
cipal at McKinsey & Company,
working extensively with the
hospitality sector.
Melissa Kim ’09 created a new
role at ExxonMobil, “responsible
for building a team focused on
local content and sustainable
supply-chain development …
developing the company’s first
global supplier program for hu-
man rights and environmental
risk management … also creating
the company’s global strategy for
local supply-chain development
… back in my area of passion for
sustainability and business …
awesome!”
Ben McLaughlin ’03 and Whit-
ney Church were married in
August 2013 on Spectacle Island
in the Boston harbor. A Johnson
contingent representing the
classes of 2010, 2012, and 2013
celebrated with them.
Brian McMeekin ’02 and Katy
McMeekin ’02 live in Minneapo-
lis and spend a lot of time with
Cornell alumni. Last spring,
Brian came back to Cornell for
Destination Johnson weekend,
and “in May we brought three
current students to Minneapolis
to present their SGE project find-
ings around technical education
in the process industry.” Brian
is director of marketing, flow
lifecycle services, at Emerson
Process Management.
Katy Moyer, MEng ’08, moved
from the Boston area to San Di-
ego to begin working in program
management for General Dy-
namics NASSCO. The company
builds huge cargo transport ships
for the Navy, right on the harbor.
“Been loving it so far and loving
San Diego.”
Chrysoula Nigl and her hus-
band, Franz, welcomed a baby
boy on June 2. Chrysoula works
at S.C. Johnson, and Franz works
in downtown Chicago.
Kristin O’Planick and her hus-
band welcomed a son, Alexander
Penn Mershon, June 8. On the
job front, Kristin was promoted
to private enterprise division
chief with USAID. She says, “I
managed to get in one last work
trip while five months pregnant
to design a youth employment
program in Ethiopia. I liked that
Alexander made a trip to the vil-
lage while still on the inside.”
Uvika Sharma and her husband
had a baby boy, Jayvir, in 2013,
who is “quite a handful and
keeps us very busy.”
Connie Sintuvat and her hus-
band, Hsiang, welcomed a son,
Parker Pahnom-Ding Wong,
Oct. 3. Connie works for Big
Heart Pet Brands (formerly Del
Monte), “making dogs every-
where happy with Milo’s Kitchen
treats … also just recently
launched a food truck for dogs
that is touring the country.”
Hsiang works for a mobile game
company, DeNA. They live in
Alameda, Calif.
Tammy Tran ’05 is at Colgate-
Palmolive. She recently trans-
ferred from New York City to
Basel, Switzerland, to work in the
European division. She says, “In
this new role, I am in category
marketing, covering Colgate’s
whitening and multi-benefit
toothpaste brands across all the
European countries … tak-
ing the opportunity to travel as
much as I can.”
Anthony Van Nice joined
Soléna Estate, a private winery in
Oregon, to lead business opera-
tions, including company sales,
marketing, and strategic plans.
Jen Walvoord and her husband
welcomed a son, Theodore Mi-
chael, Nov. 14, 2013. Jen says, “I
can already sense a great interest
in business … he knows his way
around a Blackberry and devours
the Economist.”
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47w w w.johnson.cor nell .edu
abbi Hills arrived at Cornell in 2004, not for graduate school but for her first job: assistant coach of the women’s lacrosse team. A vet-eran lacrosse player who had played in high school and college, Hills helped lead the team to earn its first Ivy League title. “It was such a great opportunity because i had always played lacrosse on the West Coast, and it’s such a historically east Coast sport,” she says. Having earned a degree in human biology from stanford, Hills knew that she wanted to become a health-care consultant. so in 2006, she started both an Mba and a master’s of health adminis-tration at Cornell. after graduating, she joined Deloitte Consulting LLP and was promoted to a manager in the Denver office this past summer. While Hills has been able to work with a variety of health-care clients — from an academic medical center to a nonprofit hospital group — she has also found a way to stay involved with sports through Deloitte. since all employees are expected to be involved in internal initiatives, Hills chose to work with the u.s. Paralympics, an organization Deloitte has been advising. along with a group of col-leagues, Hills has helped 25 of its sports clubs across the country with strategic planning and grants management. “if i had known when i started at Deloitte that i was going to work with Paralympics, i would have thought someone was fooling me,” says Hills, who spends about five hours a week on the project. “It’s just an amazing opportunity to work with these athletes and the organizations they are training under.” as a member of Deloitte’s senior Consultant board program, which exposes younger employees to nonprofit governance, Hills has also volunteered with the national sports Center for the Disabled in Denver and last year created a future leaders group to attract new volunteers to the organization.
abbi Hills, MBa ’09, MHa ’09
C O M B I N I N G C O N S U L T I N G W I T H a
passion for sports
in between her consulting and volunteer work, Hills remains active in sports and completed the ironman triathlon 2013 in Wisconsin in 13 hours and 11 minutes. “it was essential from a san-ity perspective to have something i was working toward for myself,” Hills says. “It helped me find some balance in my life.”
— Sherrie Negrea
Beth Xie reports that in 2012
she “co-founded TaggPic Inc.,
a high-tech startup in com-
puter vision … and served as the
company’s CEO until TaggPic’s
acquisition by a leading global
technology company earlier this
year. I moved to Silicon Valley
post-acquisition to be closer to
the heart of high tech.”
Marques Zak has worked for
Frito-Lay for four years. In Sep-
tember 2013 he was promoted
to a new role supporting the
company’s Georgia and Florida
retail business and moved from
Dallas back to his “home away
from home,” Atlanta.
Anador Zuazua and Megan
Willems-Zuazua welcomed a
son, Benjamin, Oct. 18, 2013.
On the career front, Megan
works at Goldman Sachs, and
Amador is with J.P. Morgan.
Peter Zullo has a new sales job
with SMA, a solar company in
Sacramento, Calif.
C L A S S O F 2 0 1 1Amit Dingare is a senior analyt-
ics advisor with 360i, a digital
marketing agency. Amit leads a
team of scientists working in big
data technology.
Abbi Hills skiing at Vail, Colo., with the Paralympic skiers she met through Deloitte’s sponsorship of the U.S. Paralympics
Early days in the digital ageThanks to Carol Fisher, Dave Duma, and Bruce Gordon, all MBA ’85, for writing to identify the
students pictured in this photo. All of them named Carol Fisher, who referred to herself as “the gal
in the striped shirt in the middle.” They also named the fellow on the right with the dark hair and
white shirt as John Preli, MBA ’85. Carol commented: “How interesting to reflect on how far and
fast technology has advanced in 30 years! The next 30 are sure to be as exciting!”
F R O M T H E
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48 cor nell enter pr ise • fa ll 201 4
Gregory Howard Schmidt ’08
married Megan O’Hara Easley
Sept. 27 in Aurora, N.Y. Greg
is an assistant vice president for
energy financial services in an
investment branch of General
Electric in Stamford, Conn.
Megan is a daughter of Maureen
O’Hara, Robert W. Purcell Pro-
fessor of Finance at Johnson, and
David A. Easley, Henry Scarbor-
ough Professor of Social Science
at Cornell.
Chao Wang and Elaine Qin
sent this fun photo of their new-
born daughter, Zijun, sporting
a Cornell T-shirt and a Johnson
bib they received as gifts. “We
made her wear our proud all
day long,” Chao writes. Chao is
business development opera-
tions manager at Google Fiber,
and Elaine is a financial analyst
at IBM.
C L A S S O F 2 0 1 3Bobby Frisch and Kyle Rear-
don ’06, MPS ’14, along with
Bobby’s wife, Emma, and Dyson
School junior, Charlie Farioli,
had the grand opening celebra-
tion for their “glamping” camps,
“Ithaca by Firelight,” at La
Tourelle in Ithaca, Sept. 4 and 5,
2014. [www.firelightcamps.com]
Henry Jameson, MBA ’49
Malcolm Craig Kelley,
MBA ’80
Luisa Velasquez, MBA ’12
Jeff D’Onofrio joined Zagat
Survey as their CFO while still
pursuing his Executive MBA in
2010. Zagat was purchased by
Google, and Jeff was asked to
stay on as head of Zagat finance
and operations. In December
2013 he became the CFO of
Tumblr, and in October 2014 he
was promoted to president and
COO. In his new role, Jeff man-
ages all day-to-day operations of
Tumblr, including engineering,
sales, marketing, legal, HR, busi-
ness development, and finance.
Jeff will be assisting CEO David
Karp with strategic planning,
including user growth and mon-
etization strategies.
C L A S S O F 2 0 1 2Selina Ang and classmates initi-
ated a fundraising campaign to
commemorate Luisa Velasquez,
MBA ’12, who passed away in
2013. They are joined in this ef-
fort by Luisa’s co-workers at Gen-
eral Electric, where she worked
as a diversity recruiting leader for
GE’s Experienced Commercial
Leadership Program. The effort
seeks to endow the Luisa M.
Velasquez Memorial Scholarship,
which will honor Luisa’s memory
and recognize future Johnson
students who exemplify her dis-
tinguished qualities. This year,
organizers hosted two fundrais-
ing events: a GE-sponsored golf
tournament in Danbury, Conn.,
on July 15, and an alumni event
in New York City on Nov. 8.
To learn more about the effort,
please visit www.rememberluisa.
com.
Daniel Chavez, a partner at
McDermott Will & Emery, LLP,
in Houston, was interviewed
for a Q&A about private equity
investing in Latin America in
The Deal Pipeline in September.
“The regulatory environment for
private equity funds and inves-
tors in the major Latin American
markets continues to improve,
and population growth and in-
creasing urbanization driving de-
mand for oil and gas, power and
infrastructure, creates ‘significant
investment opportunities for
private equity investors,’” he says
in the article, which continues:
“He expects a pickup in activity
particularly in Mexico, which is
opening up its oil and gas sector
to private investment.”
C L a S S
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