Georgetown
BUSINESS SPRING 2011
Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business
A fond farewell to Dean
George Daly
Finding a Fit
Work and home pieces come together for employees
IN
APPRECIATION Successful networking events and expanded alumni relations activities at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business rely on enthusiastic volunteers who are committed to supporting their alma mater. On behalf of your Alumni Network—
thank you!
Class Representatives for 2011 Alumni Reunion Weekend, June 2–5, 2011*:
Class Representatives for 2012 Alumni Reunion Weekend, May 31–June 3, 2012*:
MBA 1991
MBA 1987
Jean-Michel Beghin Mary Jean Duran Katie Leon Craig Walker MBA 1996
John M. MacKethan MBA 2001
Brian Cooley Eric Daniel Katherine Anne Doe Tiffany Karp John Sikking Sandra Szahun Qing Xian MBA 2006
Shahed Amanullah Matthew Blake Sara Brenner Christina Griffin Julie Kang Michael Kelker Millie (Byun) Schild Angela Sulentic EMBA 2001
Brian David Knapp EMBA 1996
Pietro Gerosa Terri Gerosa Michelle Honey Felecia Wilson EML 2006
Melissa A. Kanaya Kimberly Kirkpatrick Jacqueline Scott Brian Snow Archana Vemulapalli
Anthony O. Onyewuchi MBA 1992
Sharon Del Valle MBA 1997
Todd Corley Tara Michelle ScaliaQuilty MBA 2002
John Casey Martin Doyle Christian Fenner Jennifer Craddock Folsom Daniel Karches Caroline Kibler Radhika Gupta Murari Stephen Murray MBA 2007
Natalia Barantseva Stephanie Paige Kennedy Barry Levy John Ryan ( JR) Milone Isabelle Robinson Moses Al Ribeiro Mona Rowghani Andrew Yang Chris Zheng EMBA 1997
Dan Campbell EMBA 2002
Edwin Lucio EMBA 2007
Shine O. Kang Rachna Sethi Christopher Voss EML 2007
Greta Kendrick
Georgetown NYC Business Network kick-off events at New York’s Arctica Bar & Grill on Nov. 18, 2010, and at Pranna on March 10, 2011; and the New York Alumni Networking Event at the Princeton Club, Jan. 26, 2011:
MBA 2007
Stephanie Paige Kennedy Barry Levy Al Ribeiro For photos and video clips from alumni activities and a calendar of upcoming events, visit msb.georgetown.edu/ alumni *Alumni volunteers as of February 2011
spring 2011
Georgetown
Business Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business
Learn Locally, Interact Globally
Contents
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by Bob Woods Through consulting projects on real-world problems, companies across the world benefit from the experience and expertise of students in the Global Residency program.
Innovation in Global Education
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by Melanie D.G. Kaplan Students in the GEMBA program do much more than study abroad; they dive headfirst into the cultures of emerging markets.
Why Workers Stay by Chris Blose According to Brooks Holtom’s pioneering research on job embeddedness, employee turnover has as much to do with life outside the office as it does with money or job satisfaction.
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Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
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24 30 COVER: Illustration by Peter and Maria Hoey
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Georgetown
Business Dean
George Daly Associate Dean Marketing and Communications
Chris M. Kormis Editor and Director of Editorial Services
Jill Lindstrom staff writer
Teresa Mannix director of alumni relations
Eric D. Zack
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From the Dean Dean George Daly discusses the global progress of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business.
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News Keep up to date on life at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business with a fond farewell to Dean George Daly, plus stories about the innovative new First Year Seminar, student victories in prestigious competitions, high rankings for our programs, and much more.
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Faculty Spotlight 16 How Bad Behavior Affects the Bottom Line Assistant Professor Christine Porath’s research shows that workplace incivility hurts profits as much as it hurts feelings.
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Managing Editor
Chris Blose Art Director
Jeffrey Kibler Photo Editor
Sara Elder
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Alumni News and Class Notes Catch up with classmates and find out about the latest alumni news, events, and programs.
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35 Momentum Eric D. Zack, newly appointed director of alumni relations, has big plans for alumni engagement.
Copy Editor
Tara Kawar Project Manager
Connie Otto
37 Beyond Your Father’s Bank Father and son Kevin (BSBA ’73) and Peter Couhig (BSBA ’94) use their business acumen to help protect wetlands in their home state of Louisiana.
Production Artist
Brenda Waugh Contributors
Melanie D.G. Kaplan Andrea Orr Laura Putre Chloe Thompson Bob Woods
39 Tweets in Space Self-declared “space geek” Stephanie Schierholz (EMBA ’10) has a dream job as spokesperson and social media manager for NASA.
Georgetown Business welcomes inquiries, opinions, and comments from its readers. Please send an e-mail to GeorgetownBusiness@msb.edu. Alumni should send address changes to addup@georgetown.edu or contact alumni records at (202) 687-1994.
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Business Sense 44 New Questions, New Answers for Globalization Associate Professor J. Bradford Jensen paints a detailed picture of U.S. service jobs in the national and global economies.
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41 Helping Patients Take (Remote) Control Michael O’Neil (JD ’02, MBA ’02) founded GetWellNetwork to offer interactive options to help patients take part in their own care.
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From the Dean Globe-trotting for Georgetown Business
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n my six years as dean of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, one of my top priorities has been to enhance our global curriculum and expand our worldwide influence. As I prepare to leave this post in June, our school is well positioned for the demands of international business education. This issue of Georgetown Business reflects that standing. “Innovation in Global Education” focuses on our Georgetown-ESADE Global Executive MBA (GEMBA) program, which is run through an extraordinary partnership with the Walsh School of Foreign Service and Barcelona’s ESADE Business School. Through international teaching modules and cultural experiences, GEMBA faculty and program administrators teach students how to work successfully in emerging markets. Companies abroad reap the benefits of our global education, too. During our Global Residency program, featured in “Learn Locally, Interact Globally,” teams of experienced MBA students offer realworld consulting to businesses in Vietnam, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and elsewhere around the world. These projects are more than hypothetical; companies take the students’ recommendations to heart and put them into practice. For some U.S. pundits, globalization has a negative connotation, particularly when it comes to loss of manufacturing jobs. However, in our “Business Sense” column, Associate Professor J. Bradford Jensen counteracts that negativity with compelling new data. Jensen’s research focuses on an often-overlooked area where the United States has a comparative advantage: the services sector. I share his optimism, particularly when I look at the strides our own school has made in educating global citizens. Even as we look abroad, we must continue to innovate at home. You will read examples of such innovation in these pages: Brooks Holtom’s field-changing research on job embeddedness and employee retention, our successful pilot program for a new First Year Seminar, and our new alumni director’s plans for alumni engagement — including a wealth of events, an improved alumni database, and increased involvement with our alumni across the globe. I am proud of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business — its faculty, alumni, students, and staff — and I thank you all. You are truly worthy of the national and international spotlight. Sincerely,
George Daly Dean Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
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Thank You, Dean Daly!
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n November 2010, George Daly, dean of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, announced his plans to leave the dean’s office at the end of June 2011. After taking a year’s leave, he expects to return to Georgetown as a part-time faculty member. During his six years of leadership, Daly has made a remarkable impact on the business school, its students, and the Georgetown McDonough School of Business community. His many achievements will help the school continue to improve its international stature, and students will benefit for many years to come. Daly’s accomplishments include: • Negotiating a new financial model for the school that has encouraged greater independence and, with it, growth in revenues and quality; • Implementing the MBA Evening Program, the Georgetown-ESADE Global Executive MBA and Global Advanced Management programs, as well as the fast-growing custom programs area; • Increasing the school’s visibility among business leaders worldwide and in Washington, D.C.; • Recruiting more than 30 new faculty who have significantly raised the school’s research profile; and • Opening the Rafik B. Hariri Building, an $82.5 million state-of-the-art facility that houses the business school.
Daly came to Georgetown from the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he was dean for 10 years and also was the Albert Fingerhut Professor of Business Administration, teaching courses in economics, managing in the performing arts, and leadership. We had the opportunity to talk with Daly about his years at Georgetown. What made coming to Georgetown appealing? I felt, and still feel, that the McDonough School of Business has great potential and that I could help it realize that potential. It is part of a premier university that has strengths in closely related areas, has a solid reputation, and is located in an attractive and important world city.
What does it take to build a world-class business school? Many things. You need great faculty, students, staff, educational programs, and facilities, of course. You need to have a strategy that will lead you to focus on the activities that you can credibly excel at, and not get distracted by others. You also need a culture and incentive structure that can promote and sustain excellence. Perhaps most important, you need the personal and institutional courage and determination to reach for those goals, even when doing so is neither popular nor easy. What accomplishments as dean are you most proud of? I think we have made considerable progress in each of the areas noted above, but I am proudest of the kind of people who have joined this enterprise in some capacity during my time as dean. They are the people who will make the difference in the years to come, and they are a very capable and strong group, individually as well as collectively. Tell us about the more than 30 new faculty hired during your tenure. Many are focused on research as well as teaching and come from prestigious institutions. As you note, there are a large number of them, and it is not easy to describe them col-
Dean Daly and his wife, Barbara Daly, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at a gala event marking the opening of the new Rafik B. Hariri Building on Oct. 29, 2009.
Commencement 2006
lectively. But I do believe that, together, they have brought a new sense of possibility and energy to the school. In the end, that is what you buy when you hire people — not a guaranteed outcome, but a new sense of possibility and energy. It will be interesting to see where this new energy takes the school in the future. As for me, I am quite hopeful. 5
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Dean Daly and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke at the U.S.-China Commercial Forum in December 2010
How has the new building at Georgetown advanced the school’s mission and your goals? It is a wonderful facility, and it has justifiably received a great deal of attention both within the university and beyond it. In addition to the great facilities, it has given us a sense of place and purpose and potential that we have not always known. It is proving very attractive to a number of groups critical to our future, ranging from prospective students to the national business community. Perhaps most important, it serves as a symbol of what can happen when a 6
Former Visiting Professor Phill Swagel; Hank Paulson, former secretary of the U.S. Treasury and former CEO of Goldman Sachs; Dean Daly; and Adjunct Professor Steve Shafran, May 2010
group of dedicated alumni and friends pursue a common goal. What will you miss the most? The people, the routine, the students, and the other largely human elements that animate Georgetown and make it such a special place.
With then–Prime Minister of Lebanon Saad Hariri, center, outside the school’s Rafik B. Hariri Building
On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange
What opportunities and challenges do business schools currently face? There are many, but the most fundamental are those that face every living enterprise: demonstrating the relevance and value of the services you provide in a competitive world. The costs
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Dean Daly, Robert H. Steers, Robert E. McDonough, President John J. DeGioia, and Tim McBride break ground for the school’s new Rafik B. Hariri Building on March 31, 2006.
PHIL HUMNICKY
PHIL HUMNICKY
PHIL HUMNICKY
Students and faculty rang the New York Stock Exchange closing bell remotely from campus on Sept. 28, 2010.
of higher education have risen dramatically, and the technology that underlies information transfer — our fundamental activity — has changed dramatically. These are the logical antecedents of significant, even seismic, change. Meeting this challenge will drive higher education in the next decade and beyond. The schools that understand and effectively adapt to these changes will succeed; those that do not, or cannot, will fail. A great deal of reinvention will need to take place, and I have tried to make sure that the McDonough School of Business will be prepared to be successful in such an environment. msb.georgetown.edu
News Dean Daly talks with alumni in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.
New Executive Programs for Abengoa, CNIA, and NII Holdings
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What will you do next? In addition to teaching a course or two at Georgetown, I do not have a fixed plan, but I do have some interests around which I expect to build a plan. They include working to encourage the huge innovations I expect to see in the future of education in the United States and elsewhere. I also hope to become more involved in some personal projects that have attracted my interest, such as autism and early childhood literacy. And I am really looking forward to some travel, especially to places I have not been to before.
eorgetown’s McDonough School of Business has partnered with the Critical National Infrastructure Authority (CNIA) of the United Arab Emirates, sustainable technology company Abengoa, and NII Holdings, formerly Nextel International, to create custom executive education programs in leadership and project management. CNIA’s first two executive education program sessions were held in Abu Dhabi this past fall and culminated on Georgetown’s campus in January. Fifteen CNIA executives attended classes centered on national security and made site visits to the Port of Baltimore and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The participants also heard from officials who oversaw port and other security challenges, including James Loy, former deputy secretary of homeland security (2003–05) and commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard during the Sept. 11 attacks. “As the protector of Abu Dhabi’s critical infrastructure,
CNIA requires both technical and tactical competence and confidence,” says H.E. Staff Brigadier Pilot Faris Khalaf Al Mazrouei, chairman of CNIA. “Training and education based on the world’s best practices is a key priority for us, and we are very pleased to be building bridges with such a distinguished school and its partners.” To welcome CNIA to Washington, D.C., and to mark the significance of the partnership, UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba hosted a dinner at his embassy for the program participants, members of the commercial sector, and other dignitaries. Similarily, Abengoa has joined with the school for a program in project management, offered exclusively to Abengoa’s employees. The 10-month curriculum emphasizes management skills and company knowledge, enabling participants to learn how to apply best market practices to realistic challenges. “This partnership with Georgetown’s McDonough
School of Business aims to help participants update their expertise and develop skills in project management, enhancing their managerial competency as well as people management skills and team leading,” says Manuel Sanchez Ortega, CEO of Abengoa. A third new partner is mobile communications services company NII Holdings, which is conducting a two-year custom executive education program in global leadership development with the school. Offered to the CEO and approximately 100 other top NII Holdings leaders, the program began with a two-day event in January titled “Leadership Is Change: Strategies for Global Success in the Rapidly Changing Telecom Industry.” Classes included sessions in change management taught by Associate Professor Brooks Holtom, a strategy class overseen by Associate Professor Paul Almeida, and a keynote lecture from Deputy Dean Ricardo Ernst titled “Globalization, Competitiveness, and Governability: What Do They Mean for Latin America?”
CNIA students joined UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba (middle) for dinner at the UAE Embassy in January.
News Innovative First Year Seminar Empowers Students
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n the new First Year Seminar (FYS) titled “International Business, Public Policy, and Society” at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, faculty introduced undergraduates to the business world through small, focused classes this past fall semester. To create the FYS program, faculty and administrators, including Pietra Rivoli, professor of finance, and Undergraduate Dean Norean R. Sharpe, first examined similar programs across the country. Sharpe and her colleagues wanted the program to offer global and interdisciplinary perspectives, emphasize communication skills, and expose students to the social and public policy needs of nonprofit organizations. “Rather than replicate what other schools are doing and require all the seminars to be identical, we decided to allow faculty the flexibility to develop their own seminars according to their
specialties, their interests, and their strengths,” Sharpe says. Participating students chose from five seminars, including Grand Strategy: Conceptual Foundations in Strategic Thought; Great Books in Finance; Economic Foundations in Commerce; Markets, Businesses, and Governments in a Global Economy; and Entrepreneurship: A Habit of Mind and Community. With classes of no more than 20 students, the seminars offered first-year students greater contact with senior faculty and encouraged the faculty to focus on in-depth discussions. In addition, the seminars emphasized writing skills with support from Writing Fellows from Georgetown’s English department. To complement in-class discussions, the school partnered with a local nonprofit to bring in speakers and added a case competition. This is one of the first freshmen programs
to pair a course for credit with a real case competition judged by executives from the organization. This social outreach component differentiates Georgetown’s program from similar ones around the country. Each year, a local nonprofit partner works with the FYS faculty to challenge teams of students who must develop real-life business plans, conduct basic market research, and present their recommendations to faculty and executives. This year’s nonprofit partner was D.C. Central Kitchen (DCCK), an organization that fights poverty, hunger, and homelessness through job training, meal distribution, and support of local food systems. The competition challenge was to develop recommendations on how to grow its revenue with new food products. To prepare the students for
their task, CEO Michael Curtin delivered the inaugural lecture that described the mission and objectives of DCCK. Curtin, along with Alan Andreasen, professor of marketing, and Sharpe, was a judge during the final competition. He was impressed by the maturity of the first-year students, and especially by the winning team, which proposed selling affordable organic food prepared at DCCK to consumers at metroarea grocery stores. “These projects aren’t theoretical; they’re not in a book,” Curtin says. “This is absolutely real, and to make these projects work, they had to get out in the community.” Sharpe says the FYS program provides students with real business exposure, and the case competition emphasizes the importance of the common good. “The fact that you can do both — you can have a sustainable corporation, and you can still care about the society we live in and give back to it — directly relates to reinforcing the
Undergraduates Alexandra Piedrahita, Eunice Chin, and Alex Kondziolka with D.C. Central Kitchen CEO Michael Curtin
Professor Elaine Romanelli (right) and Professor Arthur Dong (left) with students in the First Year Seminar program
Jesuit mission of Georgetown,” Sharpe says. Elaine Romanelli, associate professor of strategy, who supervised the winning team and taught the entrepreneurship seminar, says the case competition was vital as an introduction to the many facets of “real-world business.” She also found that during class discussions, her students often made connections with material from other classes, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of the program. And the small class size made these discussions richer. “I was able to interact with [the students] in the classroom in a more personal, 360-degree way than I would be able to in a larger class,” Romanelli says. “We literally turned the classroom into conference tables, where I sat at one end.” Student enthusiasm was palpable: “About half of them would have their hands up at any one time.” Eunice Chin, who took Romanelli’s seminar, says she would recommend the FYS to any incoming student. “I was one of the only students in my class who hadn’t taken a business class before, so for me, it was a great transition into business.” In general, the faculty teaching in the FYS program view it as a success. Ricardo Ernst, deputy dean and professor of operations and information management, says the point of the seminar is to spark interest and introduce core business
concepts early in the student’s education in an interesting, dynamic way. “Now that the pilot year has ended, we are excited about the positive response from students and faculty,” he says. In the future, Ernst envisions increasing the number of sections. Both program co-directors, Robin Dillon-Merrill, associate professor of operations and information management, and Patricia Louison, senior assistant dean, expect demand for the FYS courses to increase. Admitted students will receive information on the FYS over the summer, and registration will be on a first-come, firstserved basis. “Both the faculty and students involved in the seminars this fall spoke very highly of the experience,” says Dillon-Merrill. “Having the opportunity to interact with our esteemed faculty in a small environment was a wonderful introduction for the students to the McDonough School of Business.” Chin, who originally was on a waiting list, says the experience was worth being patient. “It’s made me more confident,” she says. “It makes me think, ‘OK, I can really do this. I can keep up and even excel in the business school.’ ”
Learn more about the First Year Seminar at msb.georgetown.edu.
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
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News Entrepreneurship: Undergraduate A Habit of Program Climbs Mind and to 10th in Community Businessweek Taught by Elaine Romanelli, Associate Professor of Strategy This FYS class examines the origins and outcomes of entrepreneurship in society. Why do some people, some regions, and even some nations routinely generate sparks of entrepreneurial energy that sustain the fires of economic growth and technological development over time, while others do not? Does the answer matter? Students explore these questions through the insights of economists, sociologists, architects, and journalists who have considered the transformative power of people, cultures, and resources toward the creation of new organizations and new industries. Although the seminar does not teach how to start a new business, it will enrich students’ thinking about how, when, and where new businesses form. The topic is important both to aspiring entrepreneurs and to rising business and civic leaders.
Ranking
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he Undergraduate Program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business has climbed to 10th in Businessweek’s 2011 “Best Undergraduate B-Schools” ranking. The program had the greatest advances in student satisfaction and recruiter evaluations. The school also ranked in the top 10 in the areas of academic quality, median starting salary of seniors, and schools that send the most undergraduates to top MBA programs. According to Norean R. Sharpe, undergraduate dean of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, during the past two years the undergraduate business program has added several new offerings for students, including a First Year Seminar, an Entrepreneurship Fellows Program, a business minor, new international partnerships, and increased opportunities for service to the community. She credits the combination of “innovative curricular initiatives, outstanding faculty, and talented students” with Georgetown’s current recognition and reputation. To calculate the ranking, Businessweek surveys seniors and college recruiters, and collects data points from each school. The results are then averaged with statistics from the two previous years, producing the ranking for 2011. 9
News Georgetown and ESADE Form Alliance to Educate Global Leaders
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uilding upon the success of the GeorgetownESADE Global Executive MBA, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and the ESADE Business School in Spain have entered an alliance that reaches across programs and initiatives at both schools. “With this alliance, we will further research in the field of global management and continue to create new educational programs,” says George Daly, dean of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. Part of the agreement is a new ESADE-Georgetown Global Management Research Initiative, with centers located in Washington, D.C., and Barcelona. The initiative will establish a collaborative
research agenda and focus on knowledge creation and dissemination, as well as the practical application of managerial practices in the global context. Governed jointly by faculty at both schools, the initiative will include opportunities for student research and will educate global managers through seminars and other programs at each location. “We have achieved a complementary strategic alliance, allowing us to combine Georgetown’s global, interdisciplinary training with ESADE’s entrepreneurial spirit and expertise in social innovation, meeting the needs of international managers of today and tomorrow,” says ESADE Director General Eugenia Bieto. The schools also seek to expand their collaboration
in executive education programs. One such new program, the Global Advanced Management Program (GAMP), offers three six-day sessions over the course of two months starting this fall in Madrid, São Paulo, Dubai, and Washington, D.C. Additional partnerships in the alliance include the creation of an exchange program for undergraduate students at both institutions; early admission of Georgetown McDonough School of Business students into the ESADE M.Sc. in Innovation and Entrepreneurship program; the organization of international weeks abroad for graduate students enrolled at both schools; and the sharing of visiting professors between the institutions.
Wal-Mart Winner
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ecca Brown (MBA ’12) won the Wal-Mart Better Living Business Plan Quick Pitch Challenge held at the Net Impact Conference at the University of Michigan in October 2010. After being selected through an online process, she competed against 15 other presenters who gave 90-second business pitches and answered questions from top Wal-Mart executives. Brown proposed to launch a fleet of mobile abattoirs (slaughterhouses) that would service small-scale, local farmers raising livestock and provide product distribution by using online and social media to connect with retail and wholesale customers.
Second Place in Battle of the Beltway
A Dean Daly; Eugenia Bieto, ESADE’s director general; and Alfons Sauquet, dean of ESADE Business School, sign the alliance agreement between the two schools.
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Georgetown team of undergraduate students placed second in the Battle of the Beltway Federal Case Competition sponsored by Deloitte Consulting in November 2010. The team developed solutions to two cases centered on port and cargo screening and beat Wake Forest University, Howard University, The College of William & Mary, Princeton University, The George Washington University, and the University of Richmond. msb.georgetown.edu
News Hoya Challenge for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
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Undergraduates Gabriel Sim, Jamie Cooke, Camilla Han-He, Joseph Friedrich, and Anna Pomerantseva with American Eagle Outfitters CEO Jim O’Donnell.
Undergraduates Reach Finals in American Eagle Challenge
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team of five undergraduate students competed in the final round of a marketing competition sponsored by American Eagle Outfitters (AE), during which they presented their marketing plan for a new offshoot store to AE senior management in Pittsburgh in January. Juniors Jamie Cooke and Anna Pomerantseva and sophomores Joseph Friedrich, Camilla Han-He, and Gabriel Sim made up Georgetown’s finalist team. They were selected as one of three finalists, along with teams from the University of Wisconsin
and the University of Southern California, from a field of 57 teams from 11 universities. Each team was challenged to develop a marketing plan for a new offshoot store called “Aerie.” Students enrolled in marketing classes taught by Professor of Marketing Alan Andreasen and Assistant Professor of Marketing Debora Thompson received background information and were briefed by AE executives who came to campus in September 2010. The AE executives returned in early December to hear the students’ presentations.
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
esigned to bring entreevent featuring Carl Schramm, preneurial students president and CEO of the together and foster the Kauffman Foundation, hailed creation of valuable by The Economist as “the evanbusinesses, the Hoya Challenge gelist of entrepreneurship.” helps students hone their ideas, The winning team took home develop their business plans, $300 for its business idea, and create a pitch to judges. American Car Socks (www. A joint project of the americancarsocks.com). Georgetown Entrepreneurs “The early interest level for Organization and the the Hoya Challenge has far McDonough School of Busiexceeded our expectations,” ness Entrepreneurship Initiative, says Jeff Reid, director of the the Hoya Challenge consists of Entrepreneurship and Real three separate events: a Twitter Estate Initiatives. Pitch Competition, Rocket Pitch The Business Pitch ComCompetition, and Business Pitch petition has two tracks. The Competition. At each successive Commercial Venture Track, stage, participants will compete which features for-profit for greater amounts of prize money. In total, more than $10,000 will be awarded to the best teams. The kickoff event was held Nov. 17, 2010. More than 60 students attended, representing a crosssection of campus degree programs. The Rocket Pitch Competition Twitter Pitch Challenge in December received 21 businesses, is judged on the entries. The challenge was to likelihood of financial success; tweet a business idea with the the Social Venture Track features goal of securing a meeting with socially focused businesses an investor. The winning tweet and nonprofits judged on their was submitted by Aaron Snitzer likelihood of sustainability and (MBA ’11): “Rosetta Stone for social impact. math. Empowering lessons. The Hoya Challenge is open Polished production. Inspirto all Georgetown students, ing marketing: math=dreams faculty, and staff. achieved.” Judge Maria Thomas, former CEO of Etsy, says it has a “clear, concise first line that lets me immediately understand the big idea.” To learn more, visit eship. The Rocket Pitch Competigeorgetown.edu/hoya tion was held in January at an challenge 11
News Bank of America Awards $1 Million to Social Enterprise Initiative
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he Bank of America Charitable Foundation has awarded Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business $1 million to sponsor the school’s new Global Social Enterprise Initiative (GSEI). Spearheaded by Bill Novelli, a pioneer of social marketing and professor of the practice at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, the GSEI is designed as an innovative cross-sector initiative to prepare global leaders to create economic and social value. Among its goals, the GSEI will advance research, teaching, outreach,
and creative problem solving, as well as convene corporations, nonprofits, government, and other stakeholders to advance the understanding of social enterprise. “Big social problems require partnerships; no single sector or organization can solve them alone,” says Novelli. “Georgetown and Bank of America will work together and bring in others from around the country and the world to tackle job creation and promote a stronger economy.” “Bank of America recognizes that we have a tre-
mendous opportunity and responsibility to advance the discussion around economic development and job creation, both critical issues facing our communities,” says Kerry Sullivan, president, Bank of America Charitable Foundation. “Partnerships with leading academic institutions like Georgetown University make this possible.” “This partnership with Bank of America is a great example of applying business techniques to address social problems,” says George Daly, dean of Georgetown’s
McDonough School of Business. “We are very pleased to be engaging our students and faculty in this important endeavor.” As part of the partnership with Bank of America, the GSEI will offer an annual symposium to generate ideas for public policy and business practices to yield increased public-private partnerships, employment, and global economic stability. In addition, faculty at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business will conduct research to further thought leadership. The first symposium is being planned for fall 2011.
Visiting the Oracle of Omaha
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group of 20 Georgetown MBA students (below) traveled to Omaha, Neb., to visit the legendary Warren Buffett, CEO of
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Berkshire Hathaway, on Feb. 18, 2011. The students toured two of Berkshire’s businesses, Nebraska Furniture Mart and
Borsheims jewelers, and had a Q&A session at Berkshire’s main office and lunch with Buffett at Piccolo Pete’s, an
Omaha steakhouse. The group was impressed by Buffett’s insight, as well as his ability to respond to every question with a humorous anecdote.
News MBA Consulting Corps Has Successful First Year
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year since its launch, the MBA Consulting Corps is already showing impressive results. In fall 2010, student participants completed five consulting projects for a fraction of the cost of a large consulting firm, and five more projects are taking place during the spring semester. A student-driven, 10-week program, the MBA Consulting Corps allows MBA students to gain real-world experience by helping organizations solve business challenges, mainly in the Washington metropolitan area. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. “Working with the MBA Consulting Corps group gave us a fresh perspective as we evaluate next steps for our brand and company,” says Beth Nonte Russell, founder of GoodTrueBeautiful Inc. “The students helped us focus on a core issue and understand our customers in ways we had not been able to achieve prior.”
In mid-January, 25 selected MBA students from a pool of 85 applicants attended presentations by sponsoring organizations, including the Army Navy Country Club, Cregle Inc., DC BID, the Impact Center, and the Nature Conservancy. The challenges laid out ranged from developing a social media and grassroots marketing campaign to assessing how streetcars would affect property values along H Street. According to Joe Daly (MBA ’11) and Grace Hwang (MBA ’11), managing directors of the MBA Consulting Corps, the program benefits organizations and students. “Companies receive MBA-level consulting advice at an outstanding value,” he says. “And it’s a great opportunity for students to gain knowl-
edge in various industries.” Interest from outside organizations has exceeded expectations. Daly and Hwang say the next step is to attract and create projects that are even more meaningful to the students. Projects should involve tools and concepts that relate to the MBA curriculum. They should also be important enough to the sponsoring organization to justify involvement by its senior executives, and be achievable within the 10-week timeframe. In the fall, the MBA Consulting Corps received 10 project requests from organizations, out of which five were approved. Moving forward, Daly and Hwang will focus on further increasing the selectivity and the quality of the projects.
If your organization is interested in receiving first-rate, low-cost consulting services from Georgetown MBA students, contact MBAconsultingcorps@msb.edu or visit msb.georgetown.edu/ ConsultingCorps
Sponsoring organizations and students meet to discuss consulting opportunities.
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
MBA Programs Earn Strong Rankings eorgetown’s
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McDonough School of Business earned high marks from top publications and organizations for its various MBA programs: The Executive MBA Program was ranked No. 3 for corporate strategy and No. 10 for general management in the world in the Financial Times 2010 EMBA ranking. The program was also ranked No. 2 for aims achieved and No. 4 for career progress in the United States. The Financial Times 2011 survey of full-time MBA programs places Georgetown at No. 17 among U.S. business schools, up two spots from last year. The program remains 38th among the world’s top MBA programs. The school was ranked No. 3 in the world in international business. The MBA FullTime Program was ranked No. 33 in the Businessweek Best B-Schools (FullTime MBA) 2010 ranking. The program received an A+ for teaching and an A for career services. In its inaugural ranking of full-time MBA programs, Poets & Quants named the school 23rd in the country. Poets & Quants uses a weighted composite of rankings from Businessweek, The Economist, the Financial Times, Forbes, and U.S. News & World Report.
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News Oxford Summer Program Celebrates 35 Years
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rom meeting Prince Charles to learning about global business, students of the Georgetown McDonough School of Business have benefited from Georgetown’s Oxford Summer Program. Since 1976, Georgetown sophomores and juniors have studied at the legendary Oxford University, the oldest English-speaking university in
the world, with a teaching history dating back to 1096. During the six-week program, students live on the campus of the historic Trinity College and participate in the Comparative Strategic Management Program, which compares business functions in Great Britain, Western Europe, and the United States. A main part of the curriculum involves
Students at the Trinity College gates (2010)
site visits to leading British firms, including Goldman Sachs, the Bank of England, and the MINI Cooper automobile plant, to experience global business and intercultural exchange firsthand. “Our students are living and learning in another country and experiencing the culture from within their educational system as well as outside it through everyday experiences,” says Jackie Hoell, director of the program. “They become more independent and are better able to manage their lives.” “I enjoyed experiencing English culture and becoming close with other Georgetown students who were, like me, passionate about finance and international business,” says senior Bonjean Koo (BSBA ’12). Students also interact with London’s Georgetown alumni. “Half of the site visits are sponsored by alumni working in London,” says Hoell. “In 2010, we had our first visit to Bain & Company’s office in London, which alumnus Michael Garstka (SFS ’84) hosted.”
Punting on the Churwell River (2009)
Alumni consistently report that the program was one of their college highlights. Gerald Chiariello (BSBA ’89), a New York attorney who spent the summer of 1988 in the Oxford Summer Program, fondly recalls, “There were interesting courses, excellent trips to various businesses, and a great sense of camaraderie among the group. We even got to meet Prince Charles one evening when he came to present an award at the famous Radcliffe Camera building in Oxford, and a few of us happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
Punting on the Churwell River (1988)
MINI Cooper automobile plant (2010)
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PHIL HUMNICKY
Business Leaders Visit Georgetown
LESLIE KOSSOFF-NORDBY
Naina Lal Kidwai, group general manager and country head of HSBC India, on Oct. 6, 2010
J. Alexander “Sandy” Douglas Jr., president, Coca-Cola North America, on Feb. 9
“Unleashing New Ideas” on Nov. 15, 2010, kicked off D.C. Entrepreneurship Week with a keynote lecture by Ken Langone, co-founder of The Home Depot and former director of the New York Stock Exchange.
The Georgetown McDonough School of Business and PwC US co-hosted a U.S. and Global Financial Reform Conference on Oct. 25–26, 2010. Government leaders, business executives, policymakers, regulators, and academics discussed the challenges and opportunities of domestic and global financial reform in the regulatory landscape. Keynote speakers included Donald Kohn (left to right), former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve; Jill Sommers, commissioner of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission; and Neil Wolin, deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
LESLIE KOSSOFF-NORDBY
Suzanne Clark, president and CEO, Potomac Research Group, on Jan. 24
RAFAEL SUANES
Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, and Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of “All Things Digital,” at The Wall Street Journal, on Oct. 4, 2010
Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business Real Estate Finance Initiative and NAREIT hosted a panel discussion featuring five real estate experts, as well as a conversation with real estate entrepreneur Sam Zell, chairman of Equity Group Investments, on Sept. 29, 2010.
PORTER WATKINS
Upcoming Events
T. Boone Pickens, founder and chairman of BP Capital Management, on Oct. 6, 2010
Seth Goldman, “TeaEO” of Honest Tea, on Sept. 27, 2010
Monday, April 11, 4:30 p.m., Lohrfink Auditorium: The Business of Sports Panel with Woody Johnson, owner of the NFL’s New York Jets; Ted Leonsis, owner of the NHL’s Washington Capitals and NBA’s Washington Wizards, as well as CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment; Sheila Johnson, managing partner of the WNBA’s Washington Mystics and CEO of Salamander Hospitality; and Edward Cohen,
one of the principal owners of the MLB’s Washington Nationals. Moderated by George Daly, dean of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. Thursday, May 5: The Flash Crash: A Year Later Thursday–Sunday, June 2–5: Alumni Reunion Weekend Thursday–Friday, Sept. 22–23: Georgetown/PwC Global Finance Conference
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FA C U LT Y
SPOTLight
How Bad Behavior Affects the Bottom Line
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hen Christine Porath graduated from Holy Cross University 16 years ago, she took a marketing job in the sports management industry, where she discovered a corporate culture in which rude and disrespectful behavior was tacitly accepted. Although many colleagues found the workplace unpleasant, Porath understood it was also bad business. Much of her career since then has been focused on studying how bad behavior in the workplace affects corporate profits. “I felt that I was on a mission to show that disrespect was costly,” says Porath, who in 2010 joined Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business faculty as an assistant professor. Porath published studies and research papers on workplace incivility, all of which culminated in her 2009 book, The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It. The book, cowritten by Christine Pearson, professor of management at Thunderbird School of Global Management, shows that incivility is far more prevalent in the workplace than most managers and executives think. What constitutes incivility? Porath offers a long list of passive behaviors, including taking credit for others’ efforts, talking down to others, and withholding information. She also lists more aggressive acts such as spreading rumors about colleagues and throwing temper tantrums. The increased use of technology in the workplace also has added 16
potentially offending behaviors, such as texting during meetings, although Porath acknowledges that policies vary about acceptable use of smartphones at work. In her research, Porath has identified companies such as DaVita Dialysis (previously known as Total Renal Care) that achieved dramatic financial turnarounds by fostering a positive community and mutual respect among employees. In 1999, a new CEO addressed high turnover and low morale by installing a new management team charged with building a positive values-based organization. Between 1999 and 2005, the company’s market capitalization grew from less than a quarter-million to more than $5 billion. Its clinical outcomes became the best in the industry, and turnover dropped by 50 percent. Perhaps more surprising than such dramatic turnarounds, Porath also shows how mild offenders can pay a price without even knowing it. One chapter in The Cost of Bad Behavior focuses on Cisco
Systems. The company values interpersonal skills and mutual respect in its hiring, but when Porath helped Cisco calculate the impact of even occasional acts of incivility, it amounted to a hefty sum. If just 1 percent of employees experienced workplace incivility, she says, the cost of lost work time and employee departures would add up to almost $12 million a year. In surveys, Porath has found that a staggering 96 percent of people in the United States have experienced incivility at work, but only 9 percent reported it to human resources, a disparity that may explain why managers underestimate the cost of incivility. Rude and disrespectful behavior, she says, can be found across all industries in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Porath also has found that 12 percent of employees have left their jobs because they were treated uncivilly. It costs employers 1.5 times to 2.5 times an employee’s annual salary to find a replacement when a worker leaves. The quickest way to persuade managers to focus on workplace civility, she says, is to share this statistic to illustrate the high cost of doing nothing. However, Porath says wise employers address
poor workplace behavior before it escalates to the point where employees are leaving. “When morale is bad, people can spend an enormous amount of time slacking off at work,” she says, citing anecdotes of groups of employees spending their working hours comparing resumes and otherwise being unproductive. Likewise, companies should not justify uncivil work environments as being part of a tough or competitive corporate culture. “Civility isn’t about being nice,” she says. “It’s about working with mutual respect.” — Andrea Orr
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The Dean’s Leadership Fund
Invest in the Future Giving to the McDonough School of Business Dean’s Leadership Fund has an immediate impact on our mission and success. This fund provides flexible resources that enable us to innovatively invest in our curriculum, programs, initiatives, faculty, and students. Throughout the year, the Dean’s Leadership Fund has supported student scholarships, faculty research, design and implementation of new curricular and co-curricular programs, and the bringing of world-class leaders to speak
to our students. Invest in the future of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. A gift of any kind is greatly appreciated.
To make a gift to the Dean’s Leadership Fund, visit msb.georgetown.edu/alumni/giving or call 202-687-6674.
Learn Locally, Interact Glob Through consulting projects on real-world problems, companies across the world benefit from the experience and expertise of students in the Global Residency Program.
When executives at 3M’s Vietnam subsidiary wanted to validate their strategy for marketing Scotch-Brite household cleaning products in that emerging marketplace, they turned to a consulting team of five students from the MBA FullTime Program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Over the next several months, the team gathered mounds of research, interviewed industry experts, designed and analyzed an original survey, and ultimately produced a comprehensive report containing specific recommendations. 18
Le-Dung Ly/Getty Images
By Bob Woods
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Ho Chi Minh City, shown here, has become an emerging market for Scotch-Brite and other 3M Vietman Ltd. products.
If it were purely a classroom exercise, the project would have had definite merit, but what took it several steps — and thousands of miles — further is the distinctive nature of the Georgetown McDonough School of Business’ Global Residency program. With the report in tow, the team traveled to Ho Chi Minh City in spring 2010 to meet with 3M’s senior managers and present their analysis in person. Team member Rina Hurst (MBA ’10) calls it the best experience of her academic life, but the companies benefit as much as the students. 3M’s Anthony Tan lauds the consulting students for “developing product positioning that was very relevant and gave credibility to our Scotch-Brite marketing strategy.” The 3M project was just one of more than 100 consulting projects conducted last year by separate Global Residency consulting teams representing each of the Georgetown McDonough School of Business’ four MBA programs, as well as the Executive Master’s in Leadership program. These students are required to participate in the Global Residency course to earn their degrees. Stanley Nollen, professor of economics and international business, oversees the Global Residency course, regarded as the most distinctive feature of the Georgetown MBA program. Each year, Nollen and several other faculty members collaborate with contacts at foreign organizations and Fortune 500 companies with overseas operations to develop projects for each academic program
that address real issues, questions, or problems. In recent years, teams have traveled to Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, India, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Turkey, and Vietnam, working for clients ranging from Philips Electronics to the World Bank. Students review synopses of their programs’ projects and rank them in order of preference. Nollen’s faculty group then forms a small, program-specific consulting team, usually five students, for each project. “The teams work remotely with company representatives for several months,” Nollen. They gather research, data, and other information necessary to address their project’s objectives. “They then travel to the company’s facilities and make their presentation.” “The magic of the program,” Nollen states, “is that the projects are not made up. They are real. The students apply what they learn in the classroom to solve real problems and make recommendations that have to satisfy the companies and deliver value.” For the companies themselves, Nollen adds, “There is the strong likelihood that they will get an original, creative, and useful answer to a real situation, at a modest cost in managerial effort and time.” Finding the Right Audience in Vietnam
3M Vietnam Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of St. Paul–based 3M Company, was established in 1994 in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2008, the company introduced its Scotch-Brite line
of cleaning products to the market there. A year later, progress was slow, reports Tan, 3M’s senior manager for Asia-Pacific business development, from his office in Singapore. “When Georgetown’s Professor Nollen approached us about developing a Global Residency project, we wanted the students to validate our Scotch-Brite marketing strategy and to formulate an actionable strategic game plan with recommendations that would help us take the business to the next level.” Tan was the primary contact for Hurst and four other MBA Full-Time students assigned to the 3M project. He provided the team with company information and research, including a Nielsen consumer usage-and-attitude study commissioned prior to the ScotchBrite launch, and assisted in developing two integral benchmarking initiatives. “We spoke with marketing managers at 3M Indonesia about their experience in launching ScotchBrite in that emerging market several years earlier,” says Hurst, currently a buyer for Target in Minneapolis. “We also talked to executives at Unilever’s Vietnam subsidiary about its successful launch of an ice cream brand.” To gain more current insights into Vietnamese consumers’ attitudes and behaviors, the Georgetown team developed a household survey. “We wanted to position ScotchBrite among consumers who understood the products, so we designed a comprehensive survey aimed at a cross-section of socioeconomic statuses,” Hurst explains.
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Courtesy of 3m
Left to right, Ben Pagel, Jonathan Buser, Melissa Golub, Rina Hurst, and Bill Salesky advised 3M Vietnam Ltd. on how to market its Scotch-Brite cleaning products, right.
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Courtesy of aBrIL
3M administered the door-to-door survey among 500 households in Ho Chi Minh City, then relayed the raw data to the Georgetown team. “The students did a high-level statistical analysis of the quantitative data,” says Nollen, who served as the team’s faculty adviser. “Using about 200 good survey returns, they produced a market positioning and value proposition that was innovative for 3M.” Based on their analysis of the survey data, the team defined six distinct clusters of consumers, from which they targeted one group that best matched the Scotch-Brite brand. “They were women 18 and older, from higher socioeconomic classes,” says Hurst, referring to them as future brand ambas-
Left to right: Nikul Pandya, Kerby Houff, Greg Flowers, Megan Galloway, Rob Whiteside, and Peter Hahn worked with Brazil’s Abril Group to create revenue from digital versions of the company’s top publications (above).
sadors. “They entertain at home, are trendconscious and brand-loyal, and are willing to pay more for foreign brands.” Combining that analysis with benchmarking from the 3M Indonesia and Unilever interviews and information from the Nielsen report, the team established a traditional marketing plan — including product, pricing, placement, and promotion strategies — aimed at the target consumers. They presented the plan, along with recommendations on implementing it, to Tan and his marketing group in Ho Chi Minh City last March. “They recommended premium pricing and distribution into modern grocery stores, which validated our previous strategy,” Tan says. “The richness of the project was in giving us a sense of which consumers to target. Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
If they had not done the research in a collaborative way with us, it would have been very challenging. All in all, their recommendations were in line with what we wanted to do, and they are being executed.” “Working with the highly energized and very professional Georgetown team was a good experience for my local team, and everyone felt they learned a lot,” Tan adds. “It was time well invested.” Exploring Online Revenue in Brazil
Abril Group is a far-reaching media conglomerate based in São Paulo, Brazil. Latin America’s equivalent to Time Warner, Abril includes publishing, Internet, broadcasting, printing, distribution, advertising, and education operations. Like other diverse media companies, it is constantly searching for new and creative ways to generate revenue from its rapidly evolving online businesses, especially dozens of print magazines that also feature digital platforms. “One of the revenue streams we want to explore is from online users, instead of just from advertisers,” says Marcia Netto, an Abril manager who last year worked with a Global Residency team of six students in the MBA Evening Program. [Netto has since left the company.] “Advertising doesn’t pay all the bills.” With the blessing of senior manage-
ment, Netto coordinated with Susan Dugan, professor of the practice in strategy, who specializes in strategic management at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, to design a project to suggest different business models in which consumers are willing to pay for certain online content. Such quests have become a sort of holy grail within the media world, with publishers large and small experimenting with various ways to make money from their Web properties. “We were floored by the daunting task before us,” says team member Greg Flowers (MBA ’10), who chose to pursue the Abril project because it was markedly different from his job as an engineering consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. He quickly discovered that his objective would be satisfied. “After we initially learned that Abril is looking to derive 20 percent of its profits from online users, we understood the magnitude of the project.” Flowers and his teammates developed a three-pronged attack and divided into groups of two to tackle a range of duties. One group investigated the state of the media industry itself, with special emphasis on publishing. Another twosome analyzed numerous examples of recent online publishing ventures to assess what worked and what did not with regard to generating user revenues. The third group examined Abril’s stable of 54 print publications to gauge which might best fit online business models, careful to factor in Brazil’s unique consumer culture, everything from purchasing behaviors to use of various digital technology platforms. 21
Chilling Out in Dubai
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has been the regional hub for FedEx Express in the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, and Africa markets since 1998. The Memphis-based company operates flights from Dubai that connect regional customers with the worldwide FedEx network. To address growing opportunities among companies in nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar — last year, FedEx collaborated with a four-student team from the McDonough School of Business’ Executive MBA program on a consulting project. The project was led by Hamdi Osman, senior vice president of operations for FedEx Express Middle East, Indian subcontinent, and Africa. Osman has championed the program for many years, providing his insight and knowledge of the market and ensuring the continuity of the relationship between FedEx and Georgetown. Specifically, the project examined the highly specialized “cold chain” logistics market, which transports and stores lowtemperature-controlled foods, pharmaceutical and healthcare products, flowers, and other goods. “We wanted to gain a deeper 22
Courtesy of FedEx
Ultimately, the team concluded that it was indeed feasible for Abril to generate revenue from select online users. “We focused on several niche properties that are sold to specific demographics who are likely to spend extra money,” Flowers says, “and identified certain characteristics among those consumers, such as utility of the niche publications’ contents, brand equity, and added value from online content.” In their presentation to executives at Abril’s São Paulo headquarters last March, the students recommended four print titles that might generate revenue from online readers: Exame, a widely read business publication; Quatro Rodas, a top-selling automotive monthly; Veja São Paulo, a popular city magazine; and Placar, a favorite among soccer enthusiasts. “We presented a sensitivity analysis of varying consumer reactions to show the likelihood of achieving the overall goal,” Flowers says. “The team planted a seed in the minds of the company,” Netto says, “which has been concentrating on online advertising revenue. Abril is considering implementing some of the recommendations,” with Exame perhaps leading the way.
project meetings, and our personal lives was challenging.” It all came together successfully, however, and the team flew to Dubai last March, accompanied by their faculty adviser, Sezer Ülkü, assistant professor of operations and information management. “This was a very comprehensive project, and very different from a typical student exercise,” Ülkü says. The team made its presentation in Dubai to a group of regional department heads representing planning and engineering, sales, marketing, customer service, finance, and human resources. “The team provided an excellent overview of the region’s cold-chain market,” says Hasbini, “and gave us a solid understanding of what the opportunities are in the different vertical markets.” The team ultimately assessed that pharmaceutical and other health care markets offer the greatest potential in the GCC’s cold-chain market. Attracting Software Developers to South Africa
Student consultants helped FedEx plan for “cold-chain” market logistics in Dubai, a hub of international shipping.
understanding of what a typical cold-chain customer looks like in the region,” says Maher Hasbini, FedEx managing director of operations in the region, who was involved on the project. “We also wanted to identify their requirements for cold-chain services and what types of related goods and commodities they need to be shipped.” To meet those objectives, the team had to research FedEx’s existing cold-chain operations in the United States and other regions. “We interviewed FedEx executives to learn about their strategies,” says team member Geetanjali Tandon (EMBA ’10), a finance manager for Capital One in Maryland. “We asked about topics such as packaging solutions to maintain temperatures, warehousing, distribution, regulations, and insurance.” The Georgetown team members’ expertise and skills proved instrumental in gathering, analyzing, and assembling the disparate components of the project. “Each of us has a different background — finance, IT, operations and strategy, and product development — so we all had different roles,” Tandon says. “We were working full-time jobs, too, so coordinating that with classes,
Cape Town, South Africa, has built up a strong IT community, populated by a number of small, successful firms, as well as several universities with broad IT expertise. What the city lacks, though, is the ability to attract major software developers, which has stymied Cape Town’s desire to become South Africa’s Silicon Valley and entrepreneurial hub for technology innovation. Last year, the Cape Information Technology Initiative (CITI), a nonprofit economic development group dedicated to growing Cape Town’s IT infrastructure, joined forces with a team of students in Georgetown’s Executive Master’s in Leadership (EML) program to address this vexing issue. “Our ultimate goal was to attract a major ICT [Information and Communications Technology] development center,” says Jenny McKinnell, CITI’s executive director. Such a center would, she explains, raise Cape Town’s stature as an incubator for software developers that could serve emerging economies in Africa and elsewhere. Russell Pike entered Georgetown’s EML program last year looking not only to grow his leadership skills, but also to work on an interesting project — dual goals that he accomplished through the Cape Town assignment. A 20-year IT veteran with Oracle Corp., first in his native New Zealand and then in the United States for the past 17 years, Pike was part of a five-member consulting team. “Our goal was to put together msb.georgetown.edu
Bob Woods is a freelance writer based in Madison, Conn. He has covered business, sports, health, travel, and other topics for publications including Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek International. Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
Courtesy of turKIsH aIrLInes
Preparing for Takeoff in Turkey
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urkish Airlines has been Europe’s fastest-growing airline for the past three years, adding new aircraft and routes at a tremendous rate. Until now, its rapid growth has been organic, but to keep expanding in a hypercompetitive industry, Turkish Airlines is considering other strategies. To assist in that effort, a consulting team of Executive MBA students from Georgetown has spent this spring developing a project aimed at providing the airline with a strategic framework for its future expansion. This marks the Global Residency program’s first interaction with Turkish Airlines. Sezer Ülkü, assistant professor of operations and information management, contacted the company last year and worked out the details of the project with Sükrü Nenem, the airline’s strategic planning and investments manager. “My department is providing the students with as much data as possible, and we’ve had several conference calls and exchange e-mail regularly,” Nenem reported in January. Further insight was gained when the Turkish minister of foreign affairs, Ahmet Davutoglu, visited with a group of Georgetown students in November, and in January, when students dined with Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, Namik Tan, at his residence in Washington. The airline, of which 49 percent is owned by the government and 51 percent privately, has been approached by competitors and other companies about partnerships, and internally management has considered possible mergers and acquisitions. “First we need to develop our growth strategy, then decide which investments to pursue,” Nenem explains. In addition to Turkish Airlines’ financials and internal policies, the team also is considering the region’s market dynamics and political constraints, oil prices, and case studies of competitors’ growth strategies. Its presentation in Istanbul was planned for the end of March.
Turkish ambassador Namik Tan, left, meets with Matt Sebastian, Sandra Johnson, Neil Hamlet, and Mohamed Ly.
rafaeL suanes
a marketing plan to help CITI attract software developers to Cape Town,” he says. Under the direction of Lamar Reinsch, Ph.D., professor of management and codirector of the EML program, the team set up a phone conference with McKinnell to get an overview of the project. Then they surveyed CIOs in the United States to elicit comments on Cape Town’s potential as a place to invest, Pike says. Other team members had backgrounds in finance and procurement, and they divided up subsequent research duties by their individual strengths. “We’re all leaders in our day jobs, but we understood that to get this project done smoothly and effectively for the client, we had to check our egos at the door,” Pike observes. “We had to be leaders at some points and followers at others.” With that mutual understanding, team members worked individually on their own time and together during class sessions, then collectively to assemble their presentation. They traveled to Cape Town in August and met with a group of more than 30 IT stakeholders, including McKinnell and other CITI representatives, local government and industry leaders, and members of the city’s academic community. “The team recommended that instead of one large ICT center, we should try to attract smaller, high-level, niche research centers,” McKinnell says. “Their ideas generated a very good discussion, and we’re continuing to work on their recommendations.” CITI has, for example, prepared a “pitch book” promoting the region’s attractiveness and has made at least one offer to a developer of mobile applications. “A benefit of the project was that it created a better working relationship between ourselves and the local universities’ IT departments, so that we can work together to attract software developers,” McKinnell states. “And it definitely helped to get an outside perspective from the Georgetown team,” she concludes, “because one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know about oneself.” ◗
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By Melanie D.G. Kaplan
Innovation in
Gl bal Education
Ted Morrison
Students in the GEMBA program do much more than study abroad; they dive headfirst into the cultures of emerging markets.
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
International business lacks perfect structure and uniformity. If it has one predictable aspect, it is unpredictability. So when a bus filled with students in the Georgetown-ESADE Global Executive MBA (GEMBA) program found itself lost in Brazil a couple of years ago, co-director Paul Almeida chalked it up to good practice for conducting business in a global environment. 25
“Globalization is inherently uncertain,” experiment, and it was successful.’ That says Almeida, senior associate dean for experimentation is most inspiring to me — executive education at Georgetown Univer- that we can advance education and learning sity’s McDonough School of Business and in new and wonderful ways, if we dare.” associate professor of strategy and international business. “We put the students in Finding the Rhythm of a Country tough environments. We could easily make Of all the GEMBA program’s features, stuit perfect, but learning to conduct business dents most value the opportunity to use comfortably even when you’re uncom- their business tools and techniques in real fortable is part of being successful settings in emerging economies. globally.” Yet that also is the one feature The GEMBA marries the that drew the most skeptiresult of interdisciplinary teaching cism from traditional educathis new thinking was strengths of Georgetown’s tors when Almeida and his not only McDonough School of Busico-director, Pedro Parada, a global program, ness and Walsh School of associate professor in the but also a Foreign Service with the Department of Business Poltruly global entrepreneurship and social icy at ESADE, were developexperience. innovation strengths of Barceing the program from scratch lona’s ESADE Business School. This seven years ago. program emphasizes the geopolitical and The professors knew that both Georgemacro environment that affects business. town and ESADE have solid undergraduate The program is so distinctive that it and MBA programs, but both were seeking has turned the traditional concept of the to expand global offerings. “We decided if executive MBA on its head: Instead of a we were partnering on the global scale, with program built essentially on classroom all its complexities, we should apply a new education, with a quick visit to another approach,” says Parada, associate professor at country, GEMBA immerses students fully ESADE Business School and visiting professor in dynamic and challenging environ- at Georgetown. “Schools that were already ments — with logis tical challenges, lost offering a ‘global executive MBA’ were just reshaping their traditional MBA, taking their buses, and all. “We’ve learned that we can be innova- students to another country for a week, and tive and adventurous in terms of program calling it ‘global.’” The result of this new thinking was not design,” Almeida says. “At the end of the first GEMBA in 2009 I said, ‘This was a grand only a global program, but also a truly 26
Moscow Metro
Simon Watson/Getty Images
Cassio Vasconcellos/Getty Images
São Paulo from the sky
global experience. Broken into six 12-day modules spread out during a 13-month period, GEMBA students hopscotch the globe and return after each module to their jobs. The program moves from Washington, D.C., to Barcelona to Buenos Aires and São Paulo, to Bangalore to Madrid and Moscow, and back to New York and Washington. GEMBA is designed for older, more experienced students from all over the world — future and even present captains of industry — who seek different learning environments than their younger peers. Admission requires eight years of work experience, but the current class has an average of 13 years’ experience, and onethird have other graduate degrees. These students seek a learning experience rather than simply another certification. Immersing students in emerging markets allows them to discover which tools and concepts do and do not work in a particular country, while they simultaneously learn in the classroom. Alumni say they also gain a more global perspective and increase their understanding of the role of governments and multinational institutions. The idea is that if they experience globalization, and it becomes part of their decisionmakingprocess, they can then act on it. Teri Gendron (GEMBA ’09), a CPA who worked in public accounting for seven years before she joined NII Holdings, Inc., the international division of Nextel Communications Inc., as vice president and msb.georgetown.edu
controller, says GEMBA is about much more than visiting other countries. “You learn to appreciate the difference within a country,” she says. In Moscow, for instance, the cohort visited the Moscow Oil Refinery, which she says was very traditional and hierarchical, almost militarylike, in its operations. But they also visited a young entrepreneur’s toy company, which she says was relatively liberal and open-minded, more like American companies. “If we’d just seen one of them,” she says, “we would have a skewed vision of how things operate in Russia.” GEMBA covers all the basics of an MBA program through classroom discussions and lectures, case studies, and a master’s project. In every location, there is a faculty leader, and faculty from all three schools team up with local professors to teach. Every module offers courses that cover industry structure, corporate strategy, and corporate finance. Local managers, executives, or lobbyists are invited to speak to the class, and students roleplay with them, integrating all the topics covered in that specific module. The program also immerses students in the rhythm and culture of each location. The group stays in local hotels, eats local food, and dines when the locals dine — even if, as in Spain, that means sitting down to eat at 10 p.m. In Bangalore, students take “cultural walks” and try to understand the challenges and opportunities in the market. Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
In São Paulo, they learn the frustrations of a city so congested that, Parada says, it has denser helicopter traffic than New York City. In Moscow, they take Metro, which exposes them to some Soviet heritage. “It’s 300 feet below ground, because it was used to protect people from bombings in World War II,” Parada says. They visit a private Russian gallery and have experts explain the history
MarCo CrIsToForI/GETTy IMaGEs
a walk in Bangalore
of the country through its art. Through all these academic and cultural experiences, the program builds students’ confidence, Almeida says. “We unleash the possibilities in themselves,” he says. “People realize they are capable of a lot more than they realized, and a lot of them, after the program, change jobs. An ER doctor decided to leave and start his own business. One person stayed at Microsoft, but he got two promotions in a year.” Other students go even further in their immersion. Heather Petry (GEMBA ’10) added her own trips to every GEMBA module in an effort to learn more, extend her network, and do some good in the places she visited. She spent time on the water with Sailing Training for Youth: Ruhunu Sailing Association, an NGO in Sri Lanka that teaches children how to sail, so down the road they are less reliant on fuel for fishing. She also volunteered at a school and orphanage in the Philippines and climbed mountains in Patagonia. Petry formed her own consulting group, Intersection International, four years ago, focusing on strategy, innovation, and diplomacy. She recently completed training in international conflict management and peace building. Being someone who seeks such cultural and business expe-
GEMBA students bond as a cohort.
27
PhIl huMnICKy
GEMBA students learn in traditional classrooms, bottom, and by exploring business in Bangalore and other markets, above.
riences, she says classroom-based executive programs offered by other institutions do not compete with GEMBA. “The program,” she says, “inspires you way beyond what’s in your grasp.”
gram,” he says, “I learned that emerging economies are quite big and powerful, and there is more than one center of gravity in our world now.” Montes Güell directly benefited from GEMBA when the chairman of Banco Sabadell asked him to represent the bank as a major stakeholder in an American bank in Florida. But there were many other, more subtle benefits as well. “You apply different management skills, you change your style, you change the way you are communicating,” he says. “Everything you learned, all your experience, it all has a different framework in this program. You understand better the things you already know.” Likewise, Gendron says she implemented new skills in her job at NII Holdings, Inc., immediately. She remembers one particular class that covered structuring a global organization, something her own company has struggled with, having formed through the acquisition of a number of companies throughout Latin America and operating as a very decentralized organization. “We were asking ourselves, ‘What is the right role of the headquarters, and where should decisions be made?’ Right as we’re going through all this, I had this class. It couldn’t have been more relevant.” For Hanna Dust (GEMBA ’11), Johnson & Johnson’s North American Pharmaceuticals MBA talent development director, lessons from a recently completed GEMBA consulting project proved valuable in her job, too. At Johnson & Johnson, she serves on a com-
Industry globalization in Barcelona
A common refrain among GEMBA students and alumni is the benefit of returning to their jobs after each module with new knowledge. “What they discover after these intense experiences is they go back and say, ‘OK, what does that mean to me?’” Parada says. “What we see is they apply it immediately. They return to their jobs and have fresh ideas.” For Miguel Montes Güell (GEMBA ’09), the GEMBA experience is helping his company expand globally. Montes Güell is COO and chief information officer of Banco Sabadell Group in Barcelona. “In the pro28
sCoTT E. BarBour/GETTy IMaGEs
Back to Work With Fresh Ideas
msb.georgetown.edu
Strategy in Buenos Aires
The uniqueness of the GEMBA experience comes from the travel and immersion,
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
Michael S. Yamashita/Getty Images
A Class of Global Citizens
but also, considerably, from the students national issues you struggle with every themselves. The 29 students in the class of day, it makes sense to depend on a class 2011 come from 12 countries and speak in which there is a significant representa14 languages, including English, which is tion from other countries. I’ve learned so much from my classmates.” After gradurequired for admission. “We had a student from Brazil working ation, they all joined a Google group, for a Canadian company in South Africa,” within which people introduce topics for Parada says. “While he was traveling from debate or seek information — from advice home to work, he’d pop in for GEMBA.” on changing jobs to finding business conParada — a Bolivian living in Spain and tacts in a different country. Every fall, all GEMBA alumni are invited teaching in Washington — says most of the participants are already world travel- to one of the program’s cities for a couple ers and global citizens. “GEMBA is just of days to gather with current students and informally talk about new another part of that.” business ventures and trends, Alumni of the program “This issues at work, and updates agree that one of the is the type of within the program. GEMBA gems is the cohort true-life business Parada says it’s a priviitself. The students come scenario that is lege to work with indifrom financial services, directly related to the viduals as accomplished government, technology, work as the GEMBA students. energy, health care, and I’m doing.” “They are businesspeople nonprofit sectors and work — Hanna Dust (GEMBA ’11) who are so good, they can for companies including build teams that survive withMicrosoft, Procter & Gamble, out them for two weeks,” he says. Boeing, Dubai International Capi“Getting this eclectic, well-trained, and tal, Royal Bank of Canada, and Booz Allen intelligent class that can play off each Hamilton. Almeida says it is easy to recruit 30 other is invaluable. One of the things I people; the challenge is building a great promise people when I recruit them is mixture of nationalities, personalities, and that the class will be part of their globalprofessional backgrounds. “We teach and ization experience forever.” w give feedback, but they bring the subWashington, D.C., freelance writer stance to the program,” he says. Gendron says anyone working in inter- Melanie D.G. Kaplan has written for The national business would covet the network Washington Post, USA Weekend,The Christian Science a GEMBA class creates. “If you have inter- Monitor, and Georgetown Law Magazine.
Keren Su/Getty Images
mittee that focuses on the global pharmaceutical career framework. In preparation for the module in Bangalore — a vibrant IT market — she consulted for 3M India, which is growing at a rate of 40 percent per year. The challenge for 3M India, Dust says, is providing the tools to support their human capital structure and the talented leaders to meet the robust work demands. “This is the type of true-life business scenario that is directly related to the work I’m doing,” she says. While she was having conversations with 3M India’s vice president of human resources, she was sharing feedback in similar conversations with her leadership at Johnson & Johnson. “I shared the recommendations we’re making for 3M India on how to maintain the strong culture that’s well known at the company. It’s such a fast pace in India at the moment that there’s barely time to look up from your desk.” Dust would like to work abroad one day. This year, she says, Johnson & Johnson’s support has been imperative for her to succeed in the GEMBA program. Because students attend classes for 14 days every two months, employer support is a big part of the equation. For the class of 2011, 28 percent of employers offered a full financial scholarship for the program and 31 percent provided a partial scholarship.
Finance in New York 29
Why Workers
Stay Peter and Maria Hoey
By Chris Blose
According to Brooks Holtom’s pioneering research on job embeddedness, employee turnover has as much to do with life outside the office as it does with money or job satisfaction.
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
When Brooks Holtom was in graduate school, his father received an offer for a promotion. The offer came with more money and an advanced role within his company, but it also came with a price: He would have to relocate with his family, including Holtom’s younger brother, a star high school baseball player and eventual class valedictorian. 31
Holtom’s father faced a tough choice. After much deliberation, he declined the offer for the sake of keeping his family rooted. To Holtom, now associate professor of management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, this story has become much more than a family anecdote; it has informed and enlightened his own pioneering research on employee turnover and the development of the new construct of “job embeddedness.” At the time, Holtom was a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, working with faculty members Terence Mitchell and Thomas Lee, two leading figures in turnover research. In addition to Holtom’s father’s story, both Mitchell and Lee presented personal anecdotes of their own; each man had spent his entire career at the university, despite offers to teach and perform research elsewhere. Together, the three researchers began to question the existing methodology of job satisfaction models — models that focused on why dissatisfied workers leave a job. Building on existing research while simultaneously flipping the field on its head, the men used job embeddedness to ask a simple question: Why do people stay?
Even with that value, though, Holtom estimated they left roughly 75 percent of statistical variance in turnover unexplained. In simple terms, something was missing. “Reading all of those theories, I felt like the picture was incomplete,” Holtom says. “They were exclusively focused on work and the job itself. But a lot of times, the question is not just, ‘Am I willing to leave this job?’ but ‘Am I willing to leave this community?’” Holtom seized his chance to explore what was missing by going to work with Mitchell and Lee in 1996. At the time, Lee explains, the two longtime colleagues were looking to do something other than put “old wine in a new jug.” They were looking for new wine and a new jug. They found it throughout the early 1990s as they developed what became known as the unfolding model of turnover, first published in 1996. “One of the major precipitating reasons of why people leave is called a shock to the system,” says Lee, explaining an important aspect of the unfolding model. “That is a jarring event that prompts thoughts of leaving. Our focus on shocks has resonated really well. The empirical evidence to date, across many nations, is very supportive of it.” Shocks include pregnancy, getting passed over for promotion, a death in the family, a
ing people? What are the factors that keep people embedded? Lee says Holtom was crucial in turning those early questions into the job embeddedness construct, something that interests people in industry as much as people in the academy. “One of Brooks’ greatest strengths is that he’s very aware of what is usable,” Lee says. “He’s very insightful about what will work for practitioners. He kept us grounded.” For his doctoral dissertation, Holtom performed longitudinal research, meaning he gathered survey data on employees over time to follow their evolution within a company. He asked a range of questions that covered off-the-job and on-the-job factors. In total, he surveyed 700 employees at a chain of grocery stores, an industry with notoriously small profit margins, and 500 hospital employees, including nurses, a profession with a high rate of turnover. Throughout the process, familiar responses started to emerge: My family is in the area. My mom does daycare. My friends from nursing school and I decided to work together. “Those things buffer the day-to-day trials at work, when you have family, friends, colleagues, and other outlets,” Holtom says. The resulting paper, “Why People Stay:
“Any organization that values who they are and what they are is obviously they can do to reduce turnover and make their people Research With Roots
Do you own a home? Do you have schoolaged children? Are you happy with your network of friends? With your church? Do you like your doctors and dentists? Have your season tickets to the local football stadium finally moved from the nosebleed seats to the lower level on the 50-yard line? Do you feel at home near the mountains or the ocean? These questions, and others like them, have as much to do with a person’s overall contentment and well-being as how they feel about their work. But management researchers largely ignored them for decades. The previous field-leading theories, including job satisfaction and organizational commitment, were and are valuable — so valuable, in fact, that people had been perfecting them since the late 1950s. 32
change in marital status, or anything else that might cause an otherwise satisfied employee to rethink everything. Holtom elaborates further: “Most days we operate in status quo mode. Get up, get dressed, go to work, work on tasks. We’re not thinking about our job and whether or not we want to stay. People don’t always leave because of job satisfaction or dissatisfaction or a lack of organizational commitment. Instead, there are shocks, both personal and professional, that cause them to stop and think, ‘Wow, maybe I won’t be here for the rest of my life.’” Holtom became a crucial part of the next academic leap forward for the research. The unfolding model showed that employee turnover extends beyond workplace factors alone. With that model gaining steam in the management field, he turned his attention to the next questions: What can we do to prevent these shocks from dislodg-
Using Job Embeddedness to Predict Voluntary Turnover,” was published in 2001 in the prestigious Academy of Management Journal and co-written with Mitchell, Lee, and other researchers. The paper related the brand-new job embeddedness construct to existing theories, such as job satisfaction. The results showed a positive and significant correlation between job embeddedness and job satisfaction, plus a negative correlation with searches for new jobs. In other words, the more embedded an employee was, the happier they were on the job, and the less likely they were to be looking for a job elsewhere. Despite initial resistance caused by the sheer newness of the idea, the work received a breakthrough when Holtom’s paper was nominated as a finalist for Best Paper of the Year. Then a companion piece aimed squarely at business and industry practitiomsb.georgetown.edu
ners, “How to keep your best employees: Developing an effective retention policy,” earned the same accolade after publication in the Academy of Management Executive. Job embeddedness was resonating with readers. In part, it earned Holtom the offer to join the faculty of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business in 2002. Perhaps telling for research that deals with community connections, Holtom’s hospital data came from a friend he met through church, Paul Tucker. Tucker, now retired, was CEO of Highline Community Hospital for nearly 30 years. When Holtom approached him about the project, Tucker saw the value instantly. “This made a lot of sense to me,” he says. “Any organization that values who they are and what they are is obviously interested in anything they can do to reduce turnover and make their people happier.”
this city or region? Are there cultural or sporting opportunities that fit his or her interests? Do the area’s values and politics match the employee’s? • Links: Does the employee have a spouse? Children? A church group or other social network? Family in the area? • Sacrifice: If the employee feels a proper fit in this community, would it seem like a sacrifice to leave it? All of the variables above may come into play.
firmed their common sense with systematic thoroughness. Tucker, for example, says he always valued the employer-employee link and made it a point to know the faces and day-to-day work of Highline Community Hospital’s thousands of employees. And he wanted his employees to share that value. “Brooks’ research was really a confirmation of what we thought we knew — but you don’t really know until you verify
Holtom’s first Academy of Management Journal paper showed that each of these six variables displayed a statistically significant relation to turnover in at least one of the two employee samples. But it is important to note that his research also paired job embeddedness with job satisfaction and several other traditional measures. The result was a holistic analysis of employee turnover. To many human resources managers and top-level administrators, the results con-
it,” Tucker says. However, the benefit went well beyond confirmation. Based in part on Holtom’s research, Tucker says, Highline developed an employee prescreening questionnaire with both community and organizational factors in mind. Tucker’s goal was to reduce the cost of the hiring process, as well as weed out potential employees who would not be a good fit, thereby reducing the even more expensive turnover process.
The Big Picture and the Bottom Line
What makes employees happier? Holtom’s work suggests the answer truly is a combination of community and organizational factors. His first two job embeddedness papers laid those factors out clearly and established the groundwork for future research.
interested in anything happier.” —Paul Tucker Holtom describes a matrix, with three variables under both community and organizational headings: fit, links, and sacrifice. Under the organizational heading, the three variables include the following: • Fit: How comfortable is an employee in this job? How comfortable is that employee with the organization’s values and culture? Does the employee’s skill set match the job’s duties? • Links: Does the employee have a good relationship with co-workers? What about superiors or reporting employees? • Sacrifice: Does the employee enjoy perks or benefits? Does the employee find the work interesting and stimulating enough that leaving it would be a sacrifice? The community variables are similar: • Fit: How comfortable is an employee in Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
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About the Researcher
B
rooks Holtom, associate professor of management, joined the faculty at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business in 2002. Holtom earned a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and human resources from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business in 1999; and a M.Acc. and a B.S. in accounting from Brigham Young University in 1992. As a recognized expert in the field of employee turnover and retention, Holtom has consulted for companies and organizations including Booz Allen Hamilton, Citibank, the International Monetary Fund, Rolls Royce, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the World Bank, among many others. Holtom’s research, which bridges the gap between academia and practitioners, has earned accolades, including: • 2007, Outstanding PractitionerOriented Publication, Academy of Management • 2005, Ascendant Scholar of the Year, Western Academy of Management • 2001, Best Paper Award Finalist, Academy of Management Journal • 2001, Best Paper Award Finalist, Academy of Management Executive
Brooks Holtom
34
Holtom feels good about providing such real-world value. In fact, his Academy of Management Executive paper offered tips for managers on how to improve embeddedness in employees. “Retention cannot be accomplished purely through money,” it reads. “A host of on-the-job and offthe-job factors must be considered when developing a retention plan.” For example, the paper recommends organizations provide mentors for new hires, as well as ways to recognize accomplishments for employees who go above and beyond their job descriptions. It also offers tips such as recruiting from local markets, where people already are more likely to feel a proper fit and have extensive community links. In addition, companies wishing to increase retention may offer financial incentives, such as help with a down payment on a house. In other words, Holtom’s research process is a two-way street; he gets a wealth of data, and his partners get actionable advice for reducing turnover. The latter also is what connects his management work with that of his finance faculty colleagues. “The cost of turnover is material,” Holtom points out. “Labor is the number one expense in a lot of industries. This is real, and it is millions of dollars on the bottom line.” An Idea That Resonates
On its own, offering better prediction models for turnover would be an impressive accomplishment. But it turns out that job embeddedness goes even further. “We have found that job embeddedness not only predicts who will stay and who will leave, but it also predicts the best performers,” Holtom says, referring to 2004’s “The Effects of Job Embeddedness on Organizational Citizenship, Job Performance, Volitional Absences, and Voluntary Turnover,” also published in the Academy of Management Journal and co-written by Lee, Mitchell, and colleagues. Using data from 1,650 employees of Citibank, Holtom and fellow researchers fine-tuned the construct and used it to measure even more variables. The results showed that employees with higher levels of community embeddedness were more likely to stay and less likely to be absent from work. Likewise, those with high onthe-job embeddedness were more involved in organizational “citizenship” behaviors
and typically were rated better by their supervisors. “They do things that are above and beyond the call of duty,” Holtom says, “like volunteering, bringing cards and gifts for co-workers’ birthdays, welcoming new people, and other things that create a better work environment.” Publishing with other groups and individually, Holtom has taken job embeddedness research in other directions, too. Research in 2006 examined best job embeddedness practices among Fortune 100 companies. A 2008 paper showed that the principles carry over to multiple European nations. A 2009 paper applied the construct to larger groups of employees — collective embeddedness — instead of individuals. Then in 2010, in the Journal of Vocational Behavior’s “When two theories are better than one: The buffering effects of job embeddedness on negative shocks,” the academic cycle came full circle with a paper that combined the unfolding model with job embeddedness. Perhaps more important, other management researchers, independent of Holtom and his colleagues, have validated their results and begun to use the construct on their own. It has shown up in India, Japan, and China, and it has crossed over into other fields such as applied psychology, too. A recent draft of a meta-analysis paper also identifies 40 studies from the published research on job embeddedness. The results are standing the test of time and proving to be sustainable. Holtom continues to move forward with it, too, of course. Current projects examine what he calls the “dark side” of embeddedness; he is examining whether there is a point when employees become too complacent and stop performing at a high level — essentially the opposite of the Citibank findings. In addition, in another project in partnership with Navy Federal Credit Union, he is refining his datagatheringmethods. Using Web surveys, he now checks in with employees on a monthly basis rather than yearly. His goal in all cases is to improve the construct and its applications as well as improve its usability for the industry practitioners who apply it to their businesses. “I am interested in doing things that make a difference in the business world,” he says. “Theory without application is useless to me.” w msb.georgetown.edu
MOMENTUM
Dear McDonough Alumni and Friends
A
Eric D. Zack Director of Alumni Relations
s the newly appointed could do more to support our director of alumni extended family. relations, I am excited But where do we start? We to join the Georgewill continue to seek feedtown University back from those on campus, McDonough School of Business but it is essential to get more family and the Georgetown input from our alumni. We community. It has been a welwill be sending you surveys in coming start as I have attended which we will ask your help events and met many proud and solicit your opinions and graduates. Capitalizing on the feedback. By listening, learnenthusiasm I have witnessed, ing, and focusing our energy and in order to communicate and resources, we will become with students, alumni, and a service-driven resource, business leaders across the with activities and programglobe, we have created a new ming befitting Georgetown’s column in Georgetown Business McDonough School of Business magazine titled “Momentum.” and our alumni. We considered many names While we compile and anafor this column — “Conneclyze the data we receive from tions,” “Networks,” “From the you, we also must plant the Director” — all the standard pillars for a solid foundation. words associated You are a In part, this means with alumni offices vital part of having up-to-date around the world. information this process, contact But none captured on all our alumni. and you can We recently implethe spirit and energy help shape mented an alumni for which we are your alumni relationship manstriving, both as a office. school and as an agement system, alumni office. “Momentum” and with this, we can create signifies our drive and passion a robust, accurate database to for creating lifelong relationmanage alumni information ships with alumni. and support our communicaUpon arriving on campus tions with you. last December, I excitedly began You are a vital part of this developing a strategic plan for process, and you can help shape the alumni office. Although it your alumni office. I urge you would be easy to draw upon to support your alma mater past experiences at other instiby responding to surveys, tutions, it was paramount that attending events, updating I first learn about Georgetown, your contact information, and its history, and its tradition. This volunteering to help when and meant connecting with faculty, where you can. With nearly administrators, local business 6,000 graduate and more than leaders, students, and alumni. 14,000 undergraduate alumni, It became clear that everyone is meaningful connections expopassionate about the school and nentially expand our network university. It also was apparent and your access to professional that as an alumni office, we and personal resources.
“
”
Read more about Zack at msb.georgetown.edu /ericzack/.
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
We are moving quickly and gaining momentum each day. I look forward to informing you of our progress and, most important, hearing your thoughts, concerns, questions, and suggestions. E-mail me anytime and, if you are on campus, visit me in the Hariri Building. It would be great to meet you. See you on the Hilltop.
Eric D. Zack Director of Alumni Relations
Alumni Volunteers Welcome
D
o you want to be part of the growing cadre of alumni volunteering on behalf of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business Alumni Network? Join the volunteers already on board for Alumni Reunion 2011 and 2012, or be part of the planning teams being organized for reunions in 2013 and 2014. To volunteer, contact Eric D. Zack, director of alumni relations, at edz4@georgetown.edu. Stay connected. Join us on LinkedIn, “like” us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and visit us on YouTube for the latest videos. Send updated contact information to alumni@msb.edu.
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ALUMNINotes BSBA Class of 1969
Louis Sanz de Santamaria II, a U.S. Foreign Commercial Service officer (and past president of the GU Alumni Association in Belgium), was awarded the American National Standards Institute’s 2010 Meritorious Service Award for his contributions to the U.S. voluntary standardization system and to national and international standardization activities, as well as his ongoing commitment to the enhancement of the global voluntary consensus standards system. Santamaria and his wife, Elodie, retired to Mexico City in October 2010. BSBA Class of 1977
Monica Dodi lives in Los Angeles and is launching a venture capital fund with two partners to invest in genderdiverse, early-stage companies. After four successful startups, including MTV Europe and AOL’s Entertainment Asylum, Dodi is focusing on building companies led by women. Dru Drake is director of mergers and acquisitions at 3M Company. He competes in Olympic-distance triathlons and conducts admission interviews in the GU Alumni Admission Program. He resides in Minnesota.
Timothy Stepgnes has been retired in Minneapolis since 1999. He enjoys volunteerism, woodcarving, gardening, and weekly poker. He has recovered from being hit by a car in 1988. He previously worked in financial management and consulting. Thomas S. Vaughn was named on a list of lawyers ranked by their peers as leaders in their fields in the Best Lawyers in America guide published by Woodward/ White, Inc. Vaughn’s practice focuses on general corporate and securities matters with an emphasis on mergers and acquisitions. BSBA Class of 1979
Smiti Kumar was named strategic marketing executive at U.S. Trust, Bank of America Private Bank. She also was named to the board of directors of the North American Foundation for the University of Durham. BSBA Class of 1981
Roberto Herencia, former chief executive of Midwest Banc Holdings, Inc., has been nominated by the Obama administration to serve on the board of directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corp.
Share your news! Send an e-mail to alumniclassnotes@georgetown.edu
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Ron Sinclair and Phil Geyer
Jeff Klein was named CEO of The Global FoodBanking Network in Chicago in February. Geof Rochester has started a new job as chief marketing officer at the Nature Conservancy, where he steers the organization’s marketing, membership, and visibility strategies. His career has spanned the entertainment, Internet, consumer products, and hospitality industries. Most recently, Rochester was executive vice president for marketing at World Wrestling Entertainment. Prior to that, he served as senior vice president for marketing at Showtime Networks and held senior marketing positions at Comcast Communications, Radisson Hotels International, and Procter & Gamble. He also consults for several nonprofit organizations.
Ron Sinclair and Phil Geyer cycled 75 miles in the Bike MS: City to Shore Ride from the Philadelphia suburbs to Ocean City, N.J. They chose this venue to support fellow Hoya Valli (Baldassano) Bellapigna (C ’82), who has been battling multiple sclerosis for more than 20 years, and is on the board of trustees for the National MS Society chapter that sponsored the event. Riding under the team name “Valli Boyz,” Sinclair and Geyer collected more than $2,000 in donations to support the search for a cure for MS. BSBA Class of 1982
Pamela Hufnagel is planning a trip with her husband to South Africa to celebrate her 50th birthday. She lives in New Jersey and also has a house in Chatham, Cape Cod, where msb.georgetown.edu
ALUMNINotes
MIN I P R O F I L E
K
evin Couhig (BSBA ’73) and his son, Peter Couhig (BSBA ’94), both Louisiana natives and graduates of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, have found a way to combine their interests in business and environmental conservation. They both hold management positions at Resource Environmental Solutions, a Baton Rouge– based “mitigation bank” that helps land developers in South Louisiana restore environmentally sensitive wetlands as an offset to development. One of the pleasures of the work is that they can measure their success in trees. “In the last three to four years, we have planted 1 to 1.5 million trees each year,” says Peter, chief analytical officer of Resource Environmental Solutions. “It is very fulfilling. We are running a green business that makes money.” Mitigation banking is a highly complex business in which the “bankers” earn credits by creating, preserving, restoring, or otherwise enhancing environmentally fragile regions such as wetlands. They sell these credits to businesses that are required to compensate for lands that they have affected. For example, if a construction project destroys five acres of wetlands, the developer would be required to restore at least five acres of wetlands — often more — to their natural state. There are multiple challenges in this line of work. For one, there are several different wetlands classifications in southern Louisiana, and myriad different regulations covering them. In addition, the bankers who sell these credits must also manage the land restoration, a long-term process covering everything from planting trees to the more challenging matter of creating an environment that will support native plants and wildlife over time. Resource Environmental Solutions employs a field biologist and other scientists to oversee the land restoration, but the Couhigs focus mainly on the banking part of the business, working to generate financial returns for investors. Kevin, the company’s chief operating officer, describes the process as “restore and monetize.” The elder Couhig draws on more than 25 years of experience in investment banking and private equity, including founding the regional Louisiana bank Source Capital LLC. Because of that background, Kevin says he is able “to bring significant capital to what has traditionally been a mom-and-pop industry.” That capital has made a real difference on the ground. For years, the majority of businesses working in environmental mitigation in
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
Louisiana had limited budgets and could restore only a handful of acres at a time. That left limited hope for building healthy and expansive swaths of wetlands. But when restoration projects cover more land, it is easier for wildlife to establish a base and thrive. “You see the benefits almost immediately,” says Kevin, who says the theory of wetlands restoration is similar to the land developer’s mantra, “If you build it, they will come,” but for plants and wildlife rather than people. Although mitigation banking is based on a “no net loss” policy for a region devastated by careless development and natural disasters, Kevin says the final result is usually a net gain of wetlands. Developers are typically required to restore a larger area of wetlands than they negatively affect. To date, Resource Environmental Solutions has restored or is in the process of restoring more than 20,000 acres of land that encompasses terrain from swamp to forest. The company’s long-term goal is to restore 100,000 acres. As it works toward that goal, it is also demonstrating how one can, as the saying goes, do well by doing good: The business was profitable after its first year and is now generating eightfigure revenues, says Peter. — Andrea Orr
Keith Wood/Glow Images
Beyond Your Father’s Bank
Peter and Kevin Couhig have combined their business interests with wetlands conservation in their home state of Louisiana.
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ALUMNINotes she and her husband like to relax and enjoy the ocean. She continues to work in the wireless space for AT&T, and her husband recently retired.
Boolyai University in ClujNapoca, Romania, which has a German language program.
Paul Krumins lives in Fairfield, Conn., and is a real estate agent and managing partner for The Higgins Group, a growing real estate brokerage serving Fairfield County. His oldest son attends the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his younger son is a senior in high school, about to begin a new basketball season.
Lee Flint has relocated to Northern Virginia with his wife, Shelly, and son, John, to join the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.
BSBA Class of 1984
Shelley Martinez and her sister, Donna Nuttall Joe (L ’90), have started several eco companies. Cyan Holdings, Inc., is the corporate head with three subsidiaries: Eco Home Store, Eco Trade Source, and Eco Construction and Development. They plan to launch a trade store, Eco Trade Source, which will sell green building supplies and materials to contractors, architects, designers, and tradespeople for residential and commercial projects that seek LEED certification.
BSBA Class of 1988
BSBA Class of 1991
Alex Frutos is a partner at Jackson Walker, LLP, where he practices corporate, private equity/hedge funds, securities, and mergers and acquisitions. After graduating from Georgetown, he became a certified public accountant and worked in public accounting for four years and then received his law degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He lives in Dallas with his wife, Darla, and two boys, Chase, 7, and Cole, 5. BSBA Class of 1992
Lilian Moy has founded a marketing and communications company. Previously, she was in federal- and private-sector marketing companies.
BSBA Class of 1986
Alexander Hunger celebrated his 10th year as part of the Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft Investor Relations team. He is now based in Wolfsburg, Germany. In 2010, he married Silke Eickhorst, a teacher, in the State of Lower Saxony. In 2008, he volunteered to teach financial analysis at the Babes38
Luba Sharapan and Erik Haagensen (BSBA ’93) operate a fine-art ceramics and studio pottery gallery called MudFire in Atlanta. The gallery is affiliated with MudFire Clayworks, a pottery school and studio. Sarbjit Singh has joined the School of Business at Farming-
dale State College (N.Y.) as an assistant professor with an emphasis on sports management. BSBA Class of 1996
Natalie Barth was honored at the 2010 UJA-Federation of New York’s Family Fun Day for her continued leadership and dedication to the Families Division. Lloyd F. Hussey and his wife, Joelle, are happy to annouce the birth of their daughter, Faith Marie, on July 26, 2010. The couple was married by Georgetown’s former president Rev. Leo O’Donovan, S.J., in December 2005. Hussey recently earned an MBA and a Master of Real Estate Development degree from the University of Southern California and is working for Ernst & Young in the firm’s real estate transaction advisory practice in Los Angeles. Mark Vlasic was named a D.C. “40 under 40” International Development Leader by Devex, the world’s largest community of aid and development professionals, and Chevron Corporation. Vlasic is a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for Law, Science, and Global Security; an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center; and a partner at Ward & Ward PLLC, where he
heads the firm’s international practice. All honorees were recognized at a reception held at the Washington offices of McKinsey & Company in September 2010. MBA Class of 1996
Richard Vinci joined Mutual of Omaha in December 2010 as vice president of the investment management division at the corporate headquarters in Omaha, Neb. He is responsible for sourcing new investment opportunities on a national basis. He also serves as an officer for the administration and management of Mutual of Omaha and United of Omaha’s mortgage, real estate, and real estate focused private equity investment portfolio. Vinci and his wife, Jackie, have a son named Andrew. BSBA Class of 1997
Christy Pugh Keswick and her husband, Matthew Keswick, welcomed their son Anderson Ellsworth Keswick into the world on April 21, 2010. Brian Stolz lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Veronica. After starting his career in investment banking, he earned an MBA from Harvard University. He then worked at McKinsey & Company, where he and his wife met. He now msb.georgetown.edu
ALUMNINotes
MIN I P R O F I L E
Tweets in Space
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tephanie Schierholz (EMBA ’10) is a self-declared “space geek,” so her role as spokesperson and social media manager for NASA is about as close to her dream job as she can get. “I wanted to be an astronaut,” she explains, but poor eyesight deterred her from pursuing that career path. Schierholz credits her father, who has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, for planting the flying bug when she was younger. He earned his private pilot’s license and would take her for rides over her hometown of Colorado Springs, Colo. “The interest in flying was always there, and I think that sort of led me to the interest in space,” Schierholz says. “The Air Force Academy was close by, and the academy has an incredible number of graduates who are astronauts.” Her passion for aeronautics stayed strong, but throughout college, she focused on soccer and her business classes instead. An internship at The Space Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to space exploration, revived her first love, though, and in 2007, Schierholz found herself at NASA after four years as the foundation’s director of communications. Schierholz laughs when asked to describe a typical day. She writes and distributes press releases and handles media requests. She gives frequent presentations on NASA’s digital media scene and continually comes up with creative ways to get NASA out in (cyber)space. Along with a few others at NASA, she manages the @nasa Twitter account and NASA’s “Tweetup” account, @nasatweetup. NASA’s Tweetups, the first of which was held in 2009, are meetings at a NASA-related site for people who follow NASA on Twitter. Schierholz has held launch Tweetups for the STS 129, 132, and 133 space shuttle missions and has invited astronauts and scientists to hold panels or lead space center tours throughout the country during the sessions. “The last Tweetup, we received 2,700 registrations for 150 spots in a 24-hour window for registration,” she says. Currently, the Tweetup account has more than 10,000 followers, and @nasa has a whopping 750,000 followers. Digital think tank L2 named NASA a social media “genius” in a recent study assessing the digital IQs of various industries. In addition to Twitter and Facebook, NASA has a large following on the geotagging sites Foursquare and Gowalla, where followers can collect virtual moon rocks and NASA badges by visiting NASA-approved sites. “It’s not all about Twitter,” Schierholz says. “It’s about what Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
Among other social media efforts, Stephanie Schierholz has organized NASA Tweetups around space shuttle missions.
is the next way to communicate. We’re constantly on the lookout for that.” Schierholz says she is proud to be a fountain of NASA information. She even admits her friends sometimes have to tell her to keep quiet about her newfound knowledge. Grinning, she adds, “I think if you were to ask some of my classmates from Georgetown, they would say I was the ‘space girl,’ which I’m perfectly happy with. I’m glad they knew I was the person to go to for all their space news.” — Chloe Thompson
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ALUMNINotes works for ghSMART, a leadership consulting company that helps boards, CEOs, and investors deal with their most pressing people issues. The couple is planning to move to Chevy Chase, Md., to make space for some family additions. IEMBA Class of 1997
Lucy Reilly Fitch is president of Tallgrass LLC in Potomac, Md., a strategic advisory firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions, corporate communications, and strategy in the global aerospace and defense industry. Fitch previously was the senior vice president of corporate communications for BAE Systems, as well as BAE Systems’ senior vice president for corporate development. She recently was appointed to the board of advisers for Kansas State University’s A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Dennis Morris is the new president and CEO of Allen Vanguard Corporation, a company that provides products and services to defeat and protect against IEDs and other terrorist threats. The bomb suits in the movie The Hurt
Mike Doonan and Emily Enstice
Locker were made by Allen Vanguard. On Jan. 1, Morris and his family relocated to Ottawa, Canada, from Houston. BSBA Class of 1998
Garrett Hartzog has joined Bank of America’s mortgage insurance workout strategies group as a vice president. He and his wife, Alicia, reside in Newbury Park, Calif.
of the firm’s trial department and focuses her practice on complex litigation with an emphasis on antitrust, competition, and class action matters.
Conn., after living in Tokyo for nine years. He and his wife, Chitomi, have a son named Nathan. BSBA Class of 2002
Carl Mazzanti’s firm, eMazzanti Technologies, was named in Inc. magazine’s 2010 list of the 5,000 fastestgrowing companies. BSBA Class of 1999
Adam Boyd has been appointed to serve as a linguist/translator in Papua New Guinea with Wycliffe Bible Translators. He and his wife, Martha, will promote literacy and Bible translation among peoples in Papua New Guinea that have no written language. To read more, visit gutnius.blogspot. com.
Mike Doonan and Emily Enstice (C ’01) were married on Feb. 26, 2010, in Sayulita, Mexico, surrounded by many Hoyas. The couple met during the first week of their freshman year at Georgetown in August 1997. They reside in San Francisco.
BSBA Class of 2003
BSBA Class of 2000
Bridgette Walker began her latest assignment with the Department of State’s Foreign Service in Alexandria, Egypt, in June 2010. She assumed the position of director of the American Center.
Timothy Riker moved to Sacramento, Calif., in 2007. He started as a financial adviser working with deaf clients who use American Sign Language and has now started a new career as an adjunct professor of Sign Language Studies at Sacramento City College. He is enrolled in the California State University, Northridge, online master’s in public policy program. He volunteers as the president of the California Association of the Deaf Sacramento Chapter.
Kristen Marie (O’Gara) Koluch and Nicholas A. Koluch had their first child, Nicholas Thomas Koluch, on Nov. 1, 2010. The Hoya parents reside in Rockland County, N.Y.
BSBA Class of 2001
Marc Rene Lohser and Kristen Elizabeth Colello (N ’05) were married in Dahlgren Chapel on Oct. 9, 2010. Father Otto Hentz performed the ceremony in the presence of family, friends, and many Hoyas. The couple resides in New York City. MBA Class of 2003
MBA Class of 2001
Dennis Morris and family
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Amy J. (Bouchard) Carletti was elected to partnership at the law firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP. She is a member
David Rudolph will go to law school at the University of Connecticut in West Hartford,
Shannon Delany Stroud and Lindsay Stroud had their first child/Hoya, Finley Elizabeth Stroud. msb.georgetown.edu
MIN I P R O F I L E
ALUMNINotes
M
ichael O’Neil (JD ’02/MBA ’02) was newly engaged and finishing up his third year in Georgetown University’s joint JD/MBA program when life threw him a curveball: He had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a blood cancer that required chemotherapy. Between surgery to remove a stomach tumor and chemo treatments, O’Neil spent weeks confined to a hospital bed while a television served up daytime talk shows and soap operas. These programs offered nothing in the way of the content O’Neil was starving for: information about his condition. “The whole world was moving at warp speed around me,” says O’Neil, founder and CEO of GetWellNetwork, based in Bethesda, Md. “I never felt so out of control in my entire life. I was on the outside looking in on my own care, and I wanted the situation to be reversed.” Out of that desperation came the idea for GetWellNetwork, a digital technology company that distributes customized educational content for patients during their hospital stays — including videos, text-based information, and interactive resources that connect patients with their doctors and nurses. GetWellNetwork developed an application that tailors the information to patients’ diagnoses and where they are in their clinical care, using content licensed from an array of providers. It also provides hospitals with regular in-person software support. O’Neil offers an example of how GetWellNetwork works: “Brad,” a post-op heart attack patient who has just been prescribed Robaxin, is watching CNN from his hospital bed. During the program, a message pops up: “Hey, Brad, you’ve just been prescribed Robaxin by your physician. Click here to learn about why you’re taking the medication, and what you can expect while you’re on it.” Using a universal remote specially designed for the hospital environment, he clicks the link, gets the rundown on the drug, and is then asked whether he’d like to fill his prescription at the hospital. The system also provides on-demand entertainment programming. During his stay, Brad also can access a digital library of information related to his condition, give feedback on his hospital experience, and alert a clinician to stop by and address unanswered questions. “We have found that just putting up another website with patient videos is not the answer,” Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
says O’Neil, who developed his business plan with the help of classmates and professors after his health improved and he returned to Georgetown for his final year. The goal is to build a personalized workflow that proactively involves patients in their critical care and links into the same clinical record their clinicians are looking at every day. In 10 years, GetWellNetwork has grown from six employees to 115 and now has contracts with 90 hospitals. The company has seen a more-thantenfold increase in service in the past three years, and O’Neil sees further opportunities for growth with the enactment of health care reform measures that reward hospitals for improving patient outcomes and involving patients in their care. “To be honest, in the first five years of the company, we were pushing a rock up the hill, trying to convince people that patient engagement was important, not just nice,” he says. With a growing market in pediatric hospitals and the 2011 launch of GetWell@Home, an application that continues the virtual experience after the patient leaves the hospital, O’Neil predicts the best is yet to come. He has another reason to celebrate, too: He has been cancer-free for 10 years now. — Laura Putre
Michael O’Neil’s business provides customized interactive information for patients to take part in their own care.
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PeteR VoN FelBeRt/GloW imaGes
Helping Patients Take (Remote) Control
ALUMNINotes IEMBA Class of 2003
Ronaldo Ferreira will move with his family from Houston to Budapest, Hungary, in April 2011 to work as Europe chemical financial reporting manager for ExxonMobil. Robin Moore recently married Michael D. Lasky. Moore was widowed in 2006. She works as a social media consultant and spoke on “cyber grieving” at Camp Widow in 2010. Moore is working with the event’s host, the Soaring Spirits Loss Foundation, to build an original online community, Widowed Village. A short essay by Moore, “It’s NOT Going to Be Okay,” has been published in Thin Threads of Grief and Renewal and also in the anthology Open to Hope.
MBA Class of 2007
Vijay A. Rajendran and Sona Desai were married on Sept. 18, 2010, in Baltimore. They reside in Washington, D.C., where Rajendran is a management consultant. MBA Class of 2008
Richard Sharpe Jr. is a diagnostic radiology resident physician at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. In June 2010, he received the Thomas Erika Hoops and Alex Gorodetsky
Jefferson University Department of Radiology Excellence in Medical Student Teaching Award, and in July 2010, he was appointed to the Radiological Society of North America Residents and Fellows Committee. BSBA Class of 2009
Erika Hoops and Alex Gorodetsky were married on Oct. 2, 2010, at St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church in New York City. The couple resides in
New York City, where Gorodetsky works at the New York Stock Exchange and Hoops is a senior assistant buyer at Bloomingdale’s. BSBA Class of 2010
John D’Angola received a Fulbright award in June 2010. He is studying “green technology” in Taiwan as it relates to the growing auto industry in China. IN MEMORIAM
Chia-Jung (CJ) Fan (MBA ’03) lost his courageous twomonth battle with leukemia and passed away on Oct. 1, 2010. Fan was a career officer in the Taiwanese Army. He returned to Taiwan after graduation, but later returned to Washington, D.C., for several years as a military attaché for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office. While at Georgetown, he and his wife, Denise, had their only son at Georgetown Hospital. Fan is survived by his wife; his son, Eric; and a brother. He will be truly missed by his friends.
BSBA Class of 2005
Sara Spiro Abramson and Brett Abramson (C ’04) are proud to announce the birth of their daughter, Ilana Claire Abramson, on June 20, 2010.
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msb.georgetown.edu
From left to right: David Jefferson and Naima Jefferson (MBA ’05) with their children; Sarah Williams and Shawn Williams (MBA ’05)
Help Us Celebrate During 2011 Alumni Reunion Weekend Picture the Rafik B. Hariri Building at its best, bustling with classmates, friends, and family, celebrating a milestone graduation. Excitement is building and registration is in full swing for the 2011 Alumni Reunion, June 2–5 at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. “The anticipation is growing as we put the finishing touches on our plans for the 2011 celebration,” says Eric D. Zack, director of alumni relations at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. “I want to extend my appreciation to the more than two dozen class representatives who worked hard to plan fun and meaningful events for their classmates, families, and friends.” The 2011 reunion honors business school alumni from the classes of 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, and 2006. All alumni are invited to attend any of the events. Activities kick off Friday, June 3, with a reception from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Rafik B. Hariri Building. Dean George Daly will salute the reunion classes and join professors and staff on hand to welcome alumni. Last year, more than 600 alumni, family, friends, and guests attended the reception. (View photos at msb.georgetown.edu/alumni.) “The events and activities we have planned were inspired by the feedback we received from the volunteers and members of the reunion classes who responded to our surveys,” says Zack. The hope is that the addition of individual class parties and opportunities to meet with professors will boost attendance and set new school records. Once the June 2011 reunion concludes, planning will ramp up for the 2012 Alumni Reunion, to be held May 31–June 2, 2012. More than two dozen alumni volunteers are already at work on the celebration honoring business alumni from the classes of 2007, 2002, 1997, 1992, and 1987. Reunion-class alumni who want to volunteer are invited to contact alumni@msb.edu.
If you are celebrating your 25th, 20th, 15th, 10th, or 5th reunion this year and have not signed up to attend, take a moment to read about the events and register to attend. Visit the Reunion Web page at msb.georgetown.edu/alumni/mba/ reunions
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
ALUMNIEvents Blizzard-proof New York Alumni Attend Networking Event Despite a dire forecast for a gathering snowstorm, nearly 150 business alumni braved the elements Jan. 26 to meet George Daly, dean of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, for a networking reception at The Princeton Club. Sponsored by the school’s Alumni Relations office, the event was hosted by Al Ribeiro (MBA ’07), who collaborated with classmates Stephanie Kennedy (MBA ’07) and Barry Levy (MBA ’07). Daly’s remarks focused on the school’s successes and progress in expanding the numbers of new
(Left to right) Lorraine O’Neil (BSBA ’98), Polis Papadopoulos (MBA ’07), Aktug Baloglu (MBA ’07), Al Ribeiro (MBA ’07), Monica Mattimore (BSBA ’96), and Marc Rinaldi (MBA ’07)
faculty. Eric D. Zack, director of alumni relations, updated attendees on new initiatives under way at the school to enhance alumni engagement.
Metro D.C. Area Alumni Networking Breakfasts Breakfast was served early Jan. 20 for 65 alumni from the greater Washington area who gathered at the Hyatt Regency in Bethesda, Md., to network and listen to an update from Paul Almeida, professor of strategy and international business and senior associate dean for executive programs. Almeida discussed the growing market for executive education programs and how Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business is leading the way in that endeavor. The event opened with remarks from Eric D. Zack,
For upcoming alumni events, visit msb.georgetown.edu/ alumni
Matthew Blake (MBA ’06), Ian Simpson (MBA ’07), and Eric Young, associate director at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business MBA Career Center
director of alumni relations. This was Zack’s first Georgetown McDonough School of Business event since his appointment in December. The Bethesda breakfast kicked off a series of networking events that continued in New York on Jan. 26, in Tysons Corner on Feb. 23, and March 15 in the school’s Rafik B. Hariri Building. 43
BUSINESSSense
New Questions, Answers for Globalization
By J. Bradford Jensen, associate Professor
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For example, the world is about to undertake an infrastructure boom of historic proportions. Some estimates suggest that $40 trillion will be spent over the next 25 years — with more than 80 percent of it outside the U.S. The engineering services required to plan, design, and manage construction of large infrastructure projects provide a perfect example of tradable services. The industry employed almost 1 million workers in 2007 and paid average wages of about $74,000. This industry alone is roughly one-tenth the size of the manufacturing sector. It employs more people than the automobile industry and twice as many people as the aerospace industry, and it pays higher average wages than both. U.S. firms should be able to compete for these burgeoning infrastructure projects globally. Pushing for liberalization through the World Trade Organization would be a starting point; encouraging the world’s largest and fastestgrowing countries to sign the Government Procurement Agreement would help, too. We also must remember a crucial point: Education matters. Observers say that education does not prevent your job from being outsourced, but this is not true. It is true that education does not prevent your job from being tradable, however. Indeed, tradability and education are positively correlated; workers in tradable jobs have higher skills and higher education. But because a job is tradable does not mean that it will be lost. As long as we have a high-skill workforce, high-skill, highwage jobs are likely to stay inside the United States. Education remains a good investment for individuals and for the country. daVe lesh
S
hould the United States fear increased trade in services? Several years ago, the answer might have been a simple “No, services are nontradable,” or a dismissive “Why worry about the services sector? Manufacturing is what matters.” More recently, however, one is more likely to hear a more alarmist answer: “Yes, of course. The United States will lose its service jobs to India, just like it lost manufacturing jobs to China.” Much of this concern is driven by the unknown. Which services are tradable? How many jobs are in tradable services? Which service jobs are likely to face competition from low-wage, labor-abundant countries such as India? Answers to these and other questions about services are hard to come by. I am finishing a book for the Peterson Institute for International Economics with the purpose of drawing a detailed picture of U.S. services in the national and global economies. The book provides the most comprehensive services fact base to date, a framework for interpreting those facts, and a set of factual answers to the many questions the growing service sector raises. As a natural by-product, I hope the book will dispel some common misconceptions about trade in services and the risk of losing high-skill service jobs to low-wage countries. Tradable service activities are high-wage, high-skill activities: software development, computer services, and engineering, for example. My analysis yields the following conclusion: The United States should not fear increased trade in services. Instead, we should aggressively seek to liberalize the policy impediments that hold us back. The U.S. is relatively open to service trade, while a number of large and fast-growing economies are less so. These fast-growing economies benefit from access to the U.S. market for goods and services, so the U.S. needs to encourage liberalization of services trade as it would allow U.S. firms with a strong comparative advantage in services to increase their exports to these countries. In short, the United States should push aggressively to open these markets to services trade.
J. Bradford Jensen is an associate professor of international business and economics at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a senior policy scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Learn more at www.iie.com msb.georgetown.edu
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business
Board of Advisors Zubaid Ahmad
William H. Diamond Jr. Daniel S. Jaffee
Ellen M. Morrell
Charles F. Sarkis
Vice Chairman Institutional Clients Group Citigroup Inc.
President Comet North America
President Back Bay Restaurant Group Inc.
Joseph V. Amato
Vice President and Associate Broker Washington Fine Properties LLC
General Partner Keltic Financial
President Neuberger Berman Group LLC
William Anderson Managing Director Goldman Sachs & Co.
Paul Donlin
John J. “Hap� Fauth IV
Michael R. Fisher
Dewey John Awad II Managing Director Brookside Capital LLC
Marc Flamino
Joseph Baratta
Managing Director H/2 Capital Partners
Senior Managing Director Blackstone Group International LP
Robert J. Flanagan
President and COO W. R. Berkley Corporation
Arlen H. Kantarian CEO Kantarian Sports Group
Founder, President, and CEO Kenneth J. Kencel Churchill Companies CEO Churchill Financial President/CEO Fisher Dynamics Corp.
William Robert Berkley Jr.
President and CEO Oil-Dri Corporation of America
Paul Murphy
Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff
Partner Sentinel Capital Partners
COO BBC Worldwide America
Robert Bernard Nolan Robert H. Steers Co-Chairman and Jr.
Gerard M. Kenny
Managing Partner Halyard Capital Fund
Co-CEO Cohen & Steers Inc.
President/COO and Partner Palladian Development
Geoffrey A. Oliver
Jonathan R. Lynch
CEO and Managing Partner Hilltop Advisors LLC
Timothy P. Tassopoulos
Christopher P. Franco Booz Allen Hamilton
Senior Vice President, Operations Warren Joseph Olsen Chick-fil-A Inc. Co-Founder, Vice Chairman, and CIO Gil Ashley Tenzer First Western Trust Bank Partner Contrarian Capital Management LLC Patricia Mulvaney
President Rock Point Investment Partners
Attorney PwC LLP
Executive Vice President Clark Enterprises Inc.
Managing Director CCMP Capital Advisors
Herbert Stuart MacArthur Vice President
John B. Maier II
Pignataro
John Vitalo
Lawrence R. Botel
The Honorable Richard Fredericks
Senior Managing Director Group Head, Mergers and Acquisitions FBR Capital Markets & Co.
Managing Partner JOSS Realty Partners LLC
Managing Director Main Management LLC
David McBride
Managing Director GAMCO Investors Inc.
Robert Bowlin
Paul J. Hill
CEO McBride Enterprises Inc.
Stanley Eugene Wood
Elaine N. Pochtar
Mark J. Casella
Chairman, President, and CEO Harvard Developments Inc.
Timothy B. McBride
Principal Morgan Stanley
President IBIS
Chairman and CFO McBride Enterprises Inc.
Peter Pritchard
Daniel M. McNamara
President and CEO Pritchard Industries Inc.
Alison Lohrfink Blood
Partner PwC LLP
Peter N. Crnkovich
William Henry Hoefling
Managing Director, CEO Investment Banking Division Financial Resources, Elite Morgan Stanley Agents
Alberto E. de la Cruz President Coca-Cola Company
Head of Financial Institutions Group and Head of Real Estate Nomura
Wayne Clarke Plewniak
Michael G. Psaros Managing Partner KPS Capital Partners LP
CEO, Middle East and North Africa Division Barclays Capital
Ming Yang CEO BJB Career Education Company Ltd.
Carlos A. Zalles CEO Latin World Securities Ltd.
Georgetown
Business Georgetown University McDonough School of Business Office of Marketing and Communications 37th and O Streets, NW 211 Rafik B. Hariri Building Washington, DC 20057
2011 Reunion
Weekend June 2–5 If you graduated in 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, or 2006, we have something special for you. Your classmates have planned 2011 Alumni Reunion activities based on your survey feedback. Class parties, a grand reception, and special presentations will make the weekend meaningful and memorable. To make sure we have your current contact information, please send any updates to alumni@msb.edu. See who’s coming. Join your classmates. Visit www.msb.edu/alumni and register to attend.