THE MAGAZINE OF THE McCOMBS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
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PHIL CANFIELD, BBA ’89, INVESTS IN THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS HONORS
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PASSION FOR TEXAS LANDS
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INCENTIVES + INCUBATION = CREATIVITY
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TEACHING SPORTS ANALYTICS
and UT took advantage of our hometown advantage at the massive tech, film, and music conference SXSW in March this year: the PitchTexas graduate startup competition awarded a total of $50,000 in prize money, including winner James Chance of yourself.online. com (top) and runner-up Alex Eng of Slate Tattoo (middle left), followed by a celebratory parade down 6th Street to a UT party. THE McCOMBS SCHOOL
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2. LETTER FROM THE DEAN 3. NEWS
Short Takes: Hall of Fame honorees announced, entrepreneurship minor launches, and more. 6. System Shake-Up: Kevin Eltife, BBA ’81, named UT System regent chair. 7. Investing in Philanthropy: A new MBA course teaches students how to help nonprofits be effective. 8. You Can’t Thank Others Enough: McCombs research shows thank you letters have a strong impact. 10. Business Forecast: Statewide growth expected to slow, while disruptive technologies will continue to proliferate.
11. RESEARCH
Smart Music: Researchers create a “personalized DJ” music playlist program that chooses and sequences songs based on a listener's mood.
12. Accounting for Creativity: Researchers find creative workers need both incentives and downtime. 14. Clinical Optimization: Supply-chain principles improve clinic scheduling.
SPRING 2019 McCombs is published in the fall and spring for alumni and friends of the McCombs School of Business at The University
37. COMMUNITY
of Texas at Austin.
Investing in Private Equity Education: How the Hicks, Muse, Tate, Furst Center ushered in a new era at McCombs. 40. Up Close: Vanderbilt vice chancellor, marketing VP for la Madeleine, first female adjutant general of Texas, and more. 42. Herb Kelleher in Memoriam: Remembering the McCombs benefactor and Southwest Airlines leader. 43. Gatherings: Alumni events and celebrations.
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER
Emily Reagan MANAGER, CONTENT STRATEGY
Todd Savage EDITOR
Molly Dannenmaier ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Jeremy M. Simon
44. ALUMNI NOTES
ART DIRECTION/DESIGN
48. BOTTOM LINE
Tucker Creative Co.
Head in the Cloud: Emil Sayegh, MSTC '96, shares cloud computing insights.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Steve Brooks, London Gibson, Judie Kinonen, Mary Ann Roser
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INSPIRING LEADERSHIP
The impact of Phil Canfield’s donation to the Business Honors Program and the program’s history. BY CAT E N YA M c H E N RY A N D LO N D O N G I B S O N
WILD JOURNEY
Conservationist Jay Kleberg, MBA ’13, looks out for the land in his job, a new start-up, and a new documentary film on the Rio Grande. BY TO D D SAVAG E
CHARTING A COURSE ON THE COURTS
Former NBA analyst Kirk Goldsberry show students how sports and analytics go hand-in-hand. BY J E R E M Y M . S I M O N
BACK IN CLASS
The Tower Fellows Program offers accomplished professionals a school year to study anything. BY M A RY A N N R O S E R
C O V E R P H OTO G R A P H E D B Y S A S H A H A A G E N S E N ; I N S I D E A N D BAC K C OV E R S P H OTO G R A P H E D B Y L AU R E N G E R S O N , B R I A N B I R Z E R , M A R S H A M I L L E R
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CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Brian Birzer, Dennis Burnett, Lauren Gerson, Sasha Haagensen, Jerry Hayes, Marsha Miller, Jeff Wilson CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS
Spur Design, Emily Haasch, Nata Metlukh ONLINE
http://issuu.com/mccombs schoolofbusiness CHANGE OF ADDRESS
512-232-2441 alumni@mccombs.utexas.edu FOLLOW US
facebook.com/utmccombsschool twitter.com/utexasmccombs Linkedin: http://bit.ly/UTexasMcCombs
McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU 1
McCOMBS: FROM THE DEAN
Harnessing a Sense of Purpose are as crucial to business success as are the mastery of business subjects like finance and accounting. Leaders who put these virtues into action are able to accomplish great things while at the same time inspiring their colleagues, clients, and even their competitors. Many of the stories featured in this issue of McCombs illustrate how harnessing a sense of purpose toward the greater good can have ripple effects that spread far beyond the initial people and institutions involved. Phil Canfield, BBA ’89, our cover subject, exemplifies both extraordinary success and extraordinary generosity. He and his wife, Mary Beth, recently donated $20 million to the McCombs Business Honors Program, of which he is a graduate, because, he says, “Education is the single most important investment that society makes in its members.” Their gift will enable us to make O M PASS I O N , K I N D N ESS, A N D H O N EST Y
bold improvements in a program that is already one of the finest in the nation. We are especially proud that the gift includes a matching challenge to provide scholarships to a dramatically larger number of students enrolled in the newly renamed Canfield Business Honors Program. Dual passions inspired one of our new faculty members, Kirk Goldsberry, to create a whole new approach to sports analytics. Goldsberry, a staff writer and NBA analyst for ESPN and the former vice president of strategic research for the San Antonio Spurs, has parlayed two of his lifelong interests — basketball and cartography — into a one-of-a-kind career that harnesses the analytical power of visual mapping to reveal groundbreaking new insights into the game. He’s now teaching Performance and Sports Analytics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels here at McCombs. We are thrilled to have him on our team. And finally, in our community section, we remember Herb Kelleher, who was known worldwide for creating one of the most welcoming, inclusive, non-hierarchical corporate cultures in the world as the CEO and co-founder of Southwest Airlines Co. He was a great friend of McCombs, founding the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship, Growth, and Renewal in 2001. Kelleher figured out early on that when companies take care of their employees, the employees will take care of the customers. That commitment to kindness permeated everything that Kelleher did — and his compassionate example continues to inspire us. We hope that his story, and all the others in this issue, will inspire you as well. The power of purpose is an unparalleled thing. We are proud that so many of those within our community have stories where this virtue takes center stage.
JAY HARTZELL Dean and Centennial Chair in Business Education Leadership
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P H OTO G R A P H BY D E N N I S B U R N E T T
NEWS
SEAT AT THE TABLE MBA STUDENTS SPEARHEAD WORKPLACE DIVERSITY CONFERENCE
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SHLEY FOX (LEFT) AND
DeAndrea Staes (right), both MBA ’19, took aim at “diversity that works” in a studentorganized conference at Texas McCombs. The Elevate: Diversity and Inclusion Conference on Feb. 8 brought together business leaders and members of The University of Texas at Austin community. A series of panels and discussions in Robert B. Rowling Hall focused on how organizations can strategically establish a culture that enjoys the rewards of an inclusive workforce. Fox and Staes were interested in trying to illuminate the connections between corporate diversity and benefits to productivity and the bottom line. Their solution was the inaugural conference. The students curated an impressive lineup of speakers, including keynote speaker BET Senior Vice President Michele Thornton Ghee. “She talked about making sure you have a seat at the table. As a person of color, you have to be proactive,” says Staes. “It’s important that as business leaders, we give people opportunities.” All the conference proceeds will be used to establish a scholarship for underrepresented minorities. Meanwhile, the event co-founders are also at work on a blueprint so that future second-year MBAs can host the event next year.
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N E W S : S H O R T TA K E S HALL OF FAMERS The 2018-2019 Hall of Fame honorees have been announced: Phil Canfield, BBA ’89, GTCR managing director; the Hon. Antonio O. Garza, BBA ’80; Kay Bailey Hutchison, U.S. ambassador to NATO; Niloufar Molavi, MMA/ MPA ’91, PwC Global and U.S. Energy Leader; J. Marc Myers, MBA ’88, Myers and Crow Co. president. They will be inducted at a ceremony on Nov. 7.
GO-TO GUY ON THE AMAZON HQ2 SAGA If you have followed the Amazon HQ2 story, you’ve probably heard from Business, Government, and Society Professor Nathan Jensen. He has been widely quoted on the subject, appearing everywhere from CNN to the Washington Post.“Cities across the country offered billions of dollars to the richest man in the world but probably didn’t change his investment decision,” Jensen wrote of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a Huffington Post op-ed.“This crazy process seems shocking but is actually more common than unique in economic development.” Jensen’s new book, Incentives to Pander: How Politicians Use Corporate Welfare for Political Gain, connects the dots, linking politicians’ efforts with growing economic inequality.
Phone-less Fear Gets a Name
Concerned you’re missing something important? Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year “nomophobia” — defined as “fear or worry at the idea of being without your mobile phone or unable to use it” — gives a name to the obsession with our mobile phones. The word, chosen in a global people’s choice poll, was highlighted in a widely syndicated News.com.au article that also pointed to a McCombs study: In his research, Assistant Professor of Marketing Adrian Ward found that keeping a phone nearby makes us dumber. Hope you read about that finding on a desktop.
An impressive list of marketing alums returned to campus this fall. The occasion: The school’s Marketing Conference and Challenge in October, featuring CEOs, chief marketing officers, and senior vice presidents from leading companies, including CSDC Systems Inc., Sam’s Club, Wendy’s, Dell, IBM Watson Health, Disney Channels Worldwide, RetailMeNot, Prophet, and AT&T Inc. These days, artificial intelligence and digital technology may get the headlines, but speakers stressed that marketing success still requires human insight and empathy. “And we haven’t yet figured out how to mechanize that,” said Rob Malcolm, executive in residence at McCombs’ Center for Customer Insight and Marketing Solutions. “The most successful marketers of today are indeed ‘wholebrained’ — using the data and intuitive sides in equal balance.”
UNDERGRADS LEARN TO LAUNCH
PitchTexas Winner Improves Online Presence
You’re overexposed online. That universal problem helped yourself.online founder James Chance win UT’s 2019 SXSW Graduate Startup PitchTexas Competition. Chance — an exchange student from London Business School at McCombs for the fall 2018 semester — claimed the first-place award of $35,000 in a nationwide graduate student competition during SXSW Interactive. His startup service analyzes online information to help users manage their data and privacy. Other competitions have also recognized his company’s merits: Yourself.online previously won the fall 2018 Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition.
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FALL FOR MARKETING
Entrepreneurs often begin early. McCombs’ new 15-credit-hour entrepreneurship minor offers UT students from any major the perspective, knowledge, and skills to launch a business or grow and renew existing enterprises. Along with business and engineering, this year’s admitted students came from the schools of liberal arts, natural sciences, communications, undergraduate studies, social work, fine arts, nursing, architecture, and education.
S P R I N G 201 9
McCOMBS BY THE NUMBERS
ACADEMIC ALL-STARS Who’s got the awards? We do. Assistant Professor of Marketing Kathy Li won the American Marketing Association’s John A. Howard/AMA Doctoral Dissertation Award. Associate Professor of IROM Ashish Agarwal claimed the Information Systems Society Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award. And doctoral candidate Ryan Hess, MS ’18, was among 10 U.S. Ph.D. students who earned a $25,000 grant, thanks to his Deloitte Foundation 2019 Doctoral Fellowship in Accounting.
STUDYING SMALL-TOWN STARTUPS Ariel Benson, BBA ’20 (below), is taking a close look at rural entrepreneurship. As an undergraduate researcher at the university’s IC2 Institute, she visited Fargo, North Dakota, where she says there are more coffee shops than tech companies. “The traditional frameworks you would use for entrepreneurial ecosystems do not match up with rural entrepreneurial ecosystems because they don’t have the same funding opportunities,” Benson says. “But these ecosystems are succeeding by definition. They’re growing.” Through her research and interviews, she’s discovering a template for rural entrepreneurship that can be copied in other small towns, including in Texas.
No. 1
Best campus environment, Princeton Review Best Business School Rankings, 2019.
760
Weekend MBAs Get New Dallas Home DFW-area MBAs have a new place to call home. Targeting the fall 2019 semester, the Texas McCombs Weekend MBA Program Dallas will move into a 17,000-squarefoot space in The Centrum building near downtown. The new space will offer interactive classrooms, offices, meeting and study rooms, and collaboration spaces. The Uptown location means easy access from multiple freeways and the downtown DART station, while also offering interaction with existing Centrum occupants Capitol Factory, SalesForce, Brit Systems, and the University of Texas System.
STUDENTS TRACK IN-STORE IMMUNIZATIONS
Millions of Texans rely on their pharmacies for annual vaccines like the flu shot. But vaccination gaps are still a major public health concern. Sean Oslin and Lauren Hadjimarcou, 2018 graduates of the school’s Health Informatics and Health IT program, recently led an immunization data-collection project at Walmart’s Texas pharmacies for public health informatics company Scientific Technologies Corp. The students created a performance dashboard template, giving individual pharmacies an idea of how they compare with others in the same state, region, and market. “You cannot just tell pharmacists to better protect their customers by providing more immunizations,” says Michael L. Popovich, CEO of STC.“You have to give them a score card.”
Hours of graduate student consulting provided to local business, nonprofit, and government social enterprises through the Social Impact Case program.
No. 12
McCombs' rank for faculty research, according to the 2019 UT Dallas Top 100 Worldwide Business School Rankings.
No. 9
UT Austin’s rank for producing startup founders who receive venture capital, according to Inc. magazine.
No. 10
UT Austin’s ranking for number of Fortune 500 CEOs produced, with five Longhorn chief executives, according to CEO World.
716
Number of followers for @redmccombs, the Twitter account managed by Red McCombs' grandson Joe Shields, BBA ’13.
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NEWS: L E AD E RSHIP
McCOMBS ALUM LEADS UT SYSTEM SHAKE-UP NEW UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS SYSTEM BOARD OF REGENTS CHAIR, KEVIN ELTIFE, BBA '81, PRIORITIZES WORKING WITH THE LEGISLATURE
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chair of the UT System Board of Regents, thinks he will be able to improve the way the system communicates with legislators — because he was once one. A former Texas state senator and mayor from Tyler, Eltife was elected board chair in December. In his new role, Eltife says his primary focus is working more closely with state legislators on the system’s budget. The UT System oversees eight universities and six academic medical centers, including The University of Texas at Austin and its Dell Medical School. In 2019, 11.7 percent of the UT System budget will come from state appropriations. The number varies from year to year depending on resources and need. Eltife says because the legislature provides significant support for the system, it is important that regents communicate openly with legislators. EVIN ELTIFE, NEWLY ELECTED
“We have to earn their trust, and we have to show that we’re spending the dollars they give us efficiently and effectively,” Eltife says. “Having been on the other side, having sat on the finance committee in the senate, I know what they want, and I know what they deserve from us. And I’m going to make sure we do that at the UT System.” When Eltife was first appointed to the board in 2017, it was in the midst of tension between the legislature and the system over a $215 million purchase of land in Houston, where then-Chancellor Bill McRaven had hopes of expanding UT’s presence. Many lawmakers were upset that they weren’t consulted before the plan was announced, and Eltife says this point marked a low in the relationship with the legislature. He says it should have been handled differently. “We should have certainly gone to the legislature and gotten our statewide elected officials
Newly elected UT System Board of Regents Chair Kevin Eltife, BBA '81, an outspoken critic of UT System spending, is now overseeing system-wide budget cuts.
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and our legislators on board and explained why it was important to the UT System to have that piece of land,” Eltife says. “I don’t think we did our homework on it.” Eltife has been one of the most outspoken critics of system spending. He co-chaired a task force looking for cuts within the system, which released a report in October recommending the reduction of up to 110 jobs within the UT System administration. The system had about 700 full-time employees on its payroll before the layoffs began. As of this January, more than 60 positions had been cut. Eltife says it’s important to make cuts at the system level because the majority of the money saved can be passed to its universities and academic medical centers. He says he hopes that the cuts will free up more resources to students and prevent tuition increases. “Our No. 1 goal, mission, and job is to do everything we can to put resources in the hands of our institutions to improve our students’ experience and our patients’ experience,” Eltife says. “That is the ultimate goal and mission of the system.” Regent James C. “Rad” Weaver, BBA ’98, and former Regent Sara Martinez Tucker, MBA ’79, are also McCombs graduates. Martinez Tucker resigned in January. As Eltife moves forward as board chair, he says working with legislators and mending some of those relationships is of primary importance. He plans on having all 14 institutions present their financial pictures to the board before the next session in 2021. “We don’t want to wait until session to show up asking for money; we need to be over there in the interim as well,” Eltife says. “It needs to be a partnership, every year, ongoing.” Eltife says he has received positive feedback from the senate finance and house appropriations committees regarding the reorganizational task force, and some senators have even cited it as a model for other statewide educational systems. However, he says there’s still more work to do. “You’re not going to fix this overnight,” Eltife says. “We’re going to work tirelessly to earn the trust of the legislature and show them that every dollar they give us we appreciate, and we spend wisely.” — London Gibson
LEFT: Students from the Investing in Philanthropy course gather in the 256-square foot tiny house of Associate Dean Gaylen Paulson at the Community First! Village. RIGHT: Donor Jeff Swope, BBA '72, MBA '73, speaks to students about how to make philanthropic investing decisions.
INVESTING IN PHILANTHROPY NEW MBA COURSE TEACHES STUDENTS TO EVALUATE NONPROFIT SUCCESS
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E A R LY T W O D O Z E N G R A D U AT E
students crammed into an 8-by-32foot tiny house on a cold, wet February day. Texas McCombs Associate Dean Gaylen Paulson and his wife, Kristin, were sharing stories about their family’s 18-month experience in their home. During that time, the Paulsons lived as neighbors to more than 200 Austinites struggling with chronic homelessness in an innovative 51-acre community called Community First! Village. The on-site visit is a good example of the unique learning opportunities students enrolled in the new Investing in Philanthropy course get to experience. Introduced this spring, the course is taught by Finance Professor Laura Starks and Business, Government, and Society Associate Professor Minette Drumwright. “It involves a lot of thinking about being a good steward of one’s resources and how to help nonprofits be effective,” Drumwright says. “Many of our students will be board members of nonprofits, probably sooner than they expect.” In addition to classroom lectures, discussions, guest speakers, readings on subjects from finan-
cial economics to philosophy, and on-site visits, students practice actual philanthropy. They are divided into five teams, each focused on a specific area of philanthropic investment: education, environment, health, arts, and human services. Individual teams conduct research and create their own framework for selecting the nonprofit most effective at solving a societal problem, which they pitch to the rest of their classmates. “The experience helps students to think more broadly,” Starks says. “Not just about philanthropy, but about measuring impact.” The class spent the semester researching and vetting nonprofits to receive $89,000 in grant money. Those funds came from Jeff Swope, BBA ’72, MBA ’73, and the nonprofit Philanthropy Lab, which partners with donors and schools to teach giving through the allocation of real money. While the organization supports many classes at the undergraduate level, the Texas McCombs MBA class is one of only two participating graduate business classes nationwide. Swope, founder, CEO, and managing partner at Champion Partners in Dallas, visited the
class as a guest speaker during the semester. “In my early 40s, when the financial rewards had come, I did a brief retake on my life,” Swope explained to the class. “Somebody asked me, ‘What’s your legacy going to be?’ I realized there needed to be more than just being a big-time real estate guy.” He said he considered his passions, and identified family, work, nonprofits, and UT. “This place had such a huge impact on my life,” Swope said. “You can combine your passions, and that’s why I’m here — where the passion is.” Swope made a strong case for giving back: “With success comes responsibility. That’s something the class aims to teach MBAs.” At the end of the semester, the students divided the donated funds among three different organizations: $47,800 to Code2College, $23,400 to the Austin Child Guidance Center, and $17,800 to the Coral Restoration Foundation. The course allowed them to think about big, important questions, says Drumwright. “What makes life meaningful, what are their values, and how can they live those out?” — Jeremy Simon
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N E W S : G R AT I T U D E
Kumar and Epley’s research focused on expressions of gratitude toward people who had impacted the sender in some important way, rather than simple thank you letters for gifts or interviews.
YO U C A N ’ T THANK OTHERS ENOUGH
New Message To: Katherine Subject: Thank you Dear Katherine,
I hope you are doing well. I want to express Thank you for your advice, your time, and y
McCOMBS RESEARCH FINDS THANK YOU LETTERS MEAN MORE THAN THEIR WRITERS EXPECT
revisit the idea of writing old-school thank you letters. Research by McCombs Assistant Marketing Professor Amit Kumar and the University of Chicago’s Nicholas Epley found that writers of thank you letters overestimate the awkwardness and underestimate the positive reaction recipients feel. Kumar and Epley asked hundreds of participants in a series of studies to write brief thank you letters and guess how they thought recipients would react to them. The letter recipients were also asked to rate their responses to the letters. Results showed that recipients almost always reacted more positively to the letters than the writers had imagined they would.
I understand that as an executive you are q day during your lunches and coffee breaks Your expertise has been essential to me as
I felt very welcome as I gained my footing in organization who were looking out for me a values and supports its employees so muc
I T M AY B E T I M E TO
Thank you again for everything. Best, Jane Kumar and Epley asked that the participants’ letters be brief, but specific.
Send
The study’s findings could have implications for other kinds of interactions as well, including spending money on others, acting extroverted, and doing random acts of kindness.
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The research found letter writers were most anxious about expressing their gratitude “just right,� but receivers prioritized warmth and positive intent more than wording.
S P R I N G 201 9
The research found participants were more likely to write a letter to someone they thought would receive it well. If they thought the recipient would feel awkward about the letter, they were less likely to want to write it.
s my gratitude for your mentorship over the past year. your attention as I worked my way through this new position at the company.
quite busy, and I appreciate that you regularly took time out of your s to give me feedback. Your advice was very helpful s I tackled new projects, and I know that my success has been in part because of you.
n this position last year, knowing there were members of the and helping me succeed. I feel grateful to be a part of a company that ch.
On average, it took participants less than five minutes to write the thank you letters.
Kumar and Epley found that letter writers anticipated that the recipients of their letters would be negatively surprised to receive them. However, most receivers were surprised more positively than the writers expected.
The research found that participants reported feeling significantly happier after writing the thank you letter, and that they felt writing the letter was an overall positive experience.
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NEWS: BUSIN ESS OU TLO O K
PARTLY CLOUDY FOR BUSINESS IN 2019 DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES WILL CONTINUE TO PROLIFERATE, WHILE STATE ECONOMIC GROWTH IS EXPECTED TO SLOW
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LO BA L U N C E RTA I N T Y A N D A T I G H T
labor market threaten to dampen economic growth in Texas this year — but only somewhat, according to panelists at the 2019 University of Texas McCombs Business Outlook events. Some of the state’s top economists and business executives shared a cautiously optimistic outlook in January and February with audiences in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. The state’s economy will grow more slowly this year than last, according to panelists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Mine Yücel, Keith Phillips, and Robert Steven Kaplan. They predict only 1 to 2 percent growth, citing uncertainty as a main headwind. “A lot of businesses in our surveys report that due to trade uncertainty, they’re hesitant to expand,” said Phillips. Labor is another constraint, as companies face an aging workforce and an erosion in the quality of education, said Kaplan. Highlighting one effort to improve education in Texas was Kate Rogers, president of the Holdsworth Center, an initiative funded by HEB to train and support superintendents and principals on public school campuses. Rogers said the organization is working with seven districts now and selecting six more for its next cohort. Another essential element of growth in Texas is expansion of the Houston Ship Channel, which accounts for about 20 percent of the state’s GDP, said Janiece Longoria, chair of the Houston Port Authority. She has proposed widening the Houston Ship Channel from 530 feet to 700, and deepening it to stave off problems after flooding. CHALLENGES IN INNOVATION
Advances in genomics have ushered in a new era for the health care industry, said Dr. Mark Shen, MBA ’16, president of St. Louis Children’s
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Hospital. But the obstacle now, for the U.S., is to slow the growth of spending in the world’s most expensive health care system. In the oil and gas industry, innovations may not always have the expected outcome, said James Hackett, chair and CEO of Alta Mesa Resources Inc. Hackett explained how the industry’s long investment cycle makes the risk of new methods and devices more challenging. CONNECTION AND DISRUPTION
The internet celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, connecting 55 percent of the world’s population — 4.19 billion people, said Robert Metcalfe, professor of Information, Risk, and Operations Management at McCombs. This connectivity catalyzes an “upstart ecosystem,” he said. “Mov-
ing forward, we need to look at building more connectivity and leveraging it.” Connectivity is also the buzzword for city governments, many of which are embracing the internet of things, according to Erin Nelson, BBA ʼ91, CEO and director of CSDC Systems. She said state and local government spending on smart city technology is growing each year by 17 percent. Technologies like the smart grid are dramatically changing how utility companies interact with customers, said Cris Eugster, CEO of CPS Energy of San Antonio. Innovations such as smart meters, predictive analytics in customer care, and new leak detection technologies all point to a cultural shift in the utilities industry, said Scott Prochazka, president and CEO of CenterPoint Energy. “We’re smack in the middle of the Age of Disruption,” he said. — Judie Kinonen
Speakers at the 2019 Austin Business Outlook event, left to right: Dr. Mark Shen, MBA ’16, Mine Yücell, Erin Nelson, BBA ’91, McCombs Senior Associate Dean Eric Hirst.
RESEARCH
SPRING 2019
SMART MUSIC RESEARCHERS CREATE ‘PERSONALIZED DJ’ MUSIC PLAYLIST PROGRAM MAGINE HAVING A DISC JOCKEY
inside your computer who matches music to your current frame of mind. That’s what Maytal Saar-Tsechansky, associate professor of Information, Risk, and Operations Management, has created with a pair of UT computer scientists. Their goal: outdo streaming music services by making their playlists more individual. The project started as the brainchild of Elad Liebman, a UT Ph.D. student in computer science who also has a degree in music composition. The program that he, Saar-Tsechansky, and UT Computer Science Professor Peter Stone designed runs a series of feedback loops. It tries out a song, the listener rates it, and the program heeds that rating in choosing the next song. The program adapts to the listener's mood, considering not only which songs he or she will enjoy, but also in what order. Songs are organized intelligently, leading to an expressive, "DJ-like" sequence, instead of a random, arbitrary-sounding one. Like a chess player, the program plans moves 10 songs ahead. While one song is playing, it generates tens of thousands of possible sequences and predicts which one will please the listener the most. It serves up the next song — and as it’s playing, creates and tests new sequences. In machine learning, that’s known as a Monte Carlo search. Which inspired the name of the program: DJ-MC. The program could be adapted to other kinds of media, from news stories to videos. “It can work in any case where you’re recommending things experienced in a sequence,” Saar-Tsechansky says. “It could even be food.”
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RESEARCH: BIG IDEAS
CREATIVE WORKERS NEED BOTH INCENTIVES AND BREAKS FOR BEST RESULTS, CHURN OUT IDEAS, REST, REPEAT by Jeremy M. Simon ENCOURAGE GOOD IDEAS FROM
employees, companies can’t simply demand creativity on the spot. Instead, they need to spur workers’ creative activity — and then wait. “You need to have the incentives to get a lot of creative ideas. The kicker is that it doesn’t happen right away,” says Steve Kachelmeier, the Randal B. McDonald Chair in Accounting at Texas McCombs. Incentivizing creativity has been one of the accounting professor’s research interests for more than a decade. An initial study showed that paying for the production of more ideas resulted in more ideas, but did not actually improve creativity, while another study found workers who chose to be paid for their creativity failed to come up with better ideas. What does seem to work, according to the latest research, is unfettered idea generation combined with “incubation.” When, after making an effort to crank out as many ideas as possible, a person has time to relax, their most creative insights often arise. It’s the phenomenon of struggling with a problem while at your desk, only to have inspiration strike when you’re taking a shower, driving to work, or otherwise not focused on the project. “Even when you’re doing something else, your subconscious mind works in the background. Then, all of a sudden, you may get this epiphany,” Kachelmeier says. “It happens to all of us.” PRIME THE PUMP, THEN WAIT
In a pair of recent studies, Kachelmeier and researchers from the University of Illinois at Urba-
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na-Champaign, Assistant Professor Laura Wang, BBA/MPA ’05, Ph.D. ’14, and Professor Michael Williamson, gave participants a creative task. Students were asked to create rebus puzzles, the sort of riddles where words, phrases, or sayings are represented using a combination of images and letters. For the study’s first phase, the researchers paid participants for a variety of outcomes: the number of ideas they generated, regardless of creative quality; high-creativity ideas; ideas that were above a minimum threshold of creativity; or a fixed-wage of $25, regardless of what they came up with. The results? No group was more creative than the fixed-wage students. For example, the minimum creativity threshold group generated significantly fewer high creativity ideas. And while the pay-for-quantity group produced more rebus puzzles, their ideas were no better, according to the independent team of graders who later reviewed their rebus puzzles for creative quality. Ten days later, all the participants returned to collect their money. When they arrived, the researchers had a proposition: Jot down any additional rebus puzzles that came to mind and earn an extra $10. “As you might imagine, a lot of students just said, ‘Okay, thanks for the $10, buddy. Here’s a stupid idea, I’m out of here,’” says Kachelmeier. “But some of them actually sat down and wrote some really good stuff.” Students who were originally paid for quantity “definitely had a distinct creativity advantage,” says Kachelmeier, producing both more and better ideas.
After the study’s initial phase, it’s unlikely coming up with more rebus puzzles was on their to-do lists. Or so it seems. “Maybe in their subconscious, they’re coming up with the ideas they wished they had 10 days earlier,” says Kachelmeier. So why did they do so well? It seems related to their earlier efforts to try different approaches. “Priming the pump leads to more creative ideas,” says Kachelmeier. GIVE THEM A BREAK
For the next stage of their study, the researchers paid half the participants a fixed amount and half for the number of ideas they produced. While the pay-for-quantity participants produced a lot more puzzles, they once again didn’t generate better ideas than the fixed-pay group. Next, researchers changed their environment entirely. Participants were led outside on a quiet 20-minute walk through the University of Illinois campus. When the students returned to the lab, they were asked to create additional puzzles. Just like in the 10-day study, those originally paid for quantity once again produced much better puzzles following their break. “You need to rest, take a break, and detach yourself — even if that detachment is 20 minutes,” says Kachelmeier. NOT FORCING, BUT SETTING THE STAGE
Some companies are already recognizing the benefits of formalizing employee downtime. The Harvard Business Review describes global aviation strategy firm SimpliFlying, which required members of its approximately 10-person staff to
For more stories based on faculty research and insights from Texas McCombs, visit Big Ideas at https://medium.com/texas-mccombs
S P R I N G 201 9
McCombs Professor of Accounting Steve Kachelmeier and his research colleagues found that highly creative productivity comes about when workers are rewarded for producing lots of ideas — even mediocre ones — and are then given a break to allow their ideas to "incubate."
each take a scheduled week’s vacation every seven weeks. When asked to rate employees before and after their mandatory time off, managers noted a 33 percent increase in creativity (alongside smaller gains in happiness and productivity). According to the researchers, employers can’t demand creativity from workers through pay or pressure. But neither can companies simply let workers do whatever they choose all day, such as playing ping-pong or relaxing in beanbag chairs, and expect good ideas.
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y D AV I D P L U N K E R T
The researchers outline a different proposition: Get employees to work hard at generating ideas, uncritically reward them for producing a large number of ideas, provide downtime, and then have them try again. “The recipe for creativity is try — and get frustrated because it’s not going to happen,” says Kachelmeier. “Relax, sit back, and then it happens.” With increasing automation and outsourcing eliminating many jobs, Kachelmeier says what’s
left is companies’ need for workers who bring judgment, creativity, and innovation to their roles. “We’re paying people to think,” he says. “We’ve got to figure out how to do that effectively and what role incentives play. That’s where we’re playing our own small part.” “Incentivizing the Creative Process: From Initial Quantity to Eventual Creativity” was published in the March 2019 issue of The Accounting Review.
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RESEARCH: BIG IDEAS
CLINICAL OPTIMIZATION RESEARCHERS FROM McCOMBS, COCKRELL, AND DELL MED WORK TOGETHER TO HELP PATIENTS SEE MULTIPLE CLINICIANS ON ONE VISIT by Steve Brooks
W
H E N A F I R S T-T I M E PAT I E N T
walks into the Musculoskeletal Institute at Dell Medical School’s new UT Health Austin clinical practice, they might be surprised by one feature: an empty lobby. If they’ve filled out their electronic paperwork ahead of time, they should be whisked straight into an exam room. That’s by design, says the institute’s medical director Dr. Karl Koenig. When he was setting up the clinic, which opened in October 2017, one of his mantras was, “A doctor’s office should keep the appointment time you set.” Koenig is fulfilling that pledge, thanks to a collaboration with Texas McCombs and UT Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering. Professors in all three schools are applying concepts from supply chains — like how to get oilfield equipment to a drilling site at the right time — to help patients see health care providers. “Our challenge is how to coordinate a network of providers around a patient,” says Douglas Morrice, Bobbie and Coulter R. Sublett Centennial Professor of Business at McCombs. “We’ve designed it so that someone can see several different clinicians on one visit.” It’s the kind of interdisciplinary problem the Value Institute for Health and Care was created to solve, as a joint project of the medical school and Texas McCombs, says Managing Director Scott Wallace. “Health care is decades behind the rest of the economy in how it applies business concepts,” Wallace says. “We need the operations expertise of people like Doug to show us how to allocate resources. We want providers to deliver as much care as is feasible, but we can’t have six people sitting around waiting for one patient.” NAVIGATING PATIENT FLOW
Re-engineering health care delivery has interested Morrice for a long time. In 2012, the
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University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio asked him and Cockrell Professor Jonathan Bard to analyze its anesthesiology clinic. Patients faced long waits to prepare for outpatient surgery, while doctors were delayed by missing information. Morrice and Bard, working with the medical center’s Dr. Susan Noorily, came up with the idea of a new position: a nurse navigator, who helps patients gather all their information before their appointment. With that change, the clinic was able to see 19 percent more patients the following year. Next, the medical center asked the researchers to tackle a tougher challenge: a unified scheduling system for two clinics. When patients saw an anesthesiologist, they often turned out to have other conditions needing treatment. How could they get into an internal medicine clinic the same day, instead of waiting weeks? “We wanted a system that could accommodate unscheduled patients,” says Dr. Luci Leykum, chief of the division of general and hospital medicine for the medical center. “And we wanted to make it work without everybody staying late and paying overtime.” UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLES
To handle the math, Morrice called on Kumar Muthuraman, McCombs professor of Information, Risk, and Operations Management. His specialty is decision-making under uncertainty in areas like financial markets and energy trading. At a medical clinic, Muthuraman says, uncertainties abound, from which patients will miss appointments to which ones will need a second doctor. Make it two clinics, and risks for havoc grow exponentially. “If one person gets delayed seeing a doctor, it cascades through the system,” he says. He devised algorithms to juggle three goals: keep patients from waiting, keep doctors from sitting idle, and avoid overtime. Each time someone requests an appointment, a computer tries fitting
them into several open slots. Then it calculates which slot will produce the optimal outcome, a single number that balances the three objectives. DELIVERING VALUE
When Koenig, the director of Dell Med’s Musculoskeletal Institute, met Morrice at a McCombs Health Care Symposium, he says, “It was a serendipitous connection.” Koenig was busy setting up a new kind of clinic. Instead of bouncing a patient from one health care practitioner to another, it would bring different types of providers to the patient. They would work as a team, called an integrated practice unit. If a patient needed to see multiple team members, they would each sequentially come to the patient, all in a single appointment, with the patient staying in the same examination room the whole time. But to make that vision work, the clinic would have to minimize waiting time, for both patients and providers. Morrice might provide the missing link. At Koenig’s request, Morrice and Bard modeled the clinic-to-be, complete with numbers of rooms and mixes of cases. Provider time slots were scheduled at five- and 15-minute intervals. “You spread patients more efficiently, so that they don’t overwhelm the clinic at the end of the day,” Morrice says. The system updates provider availability as the day goes along. NEW HORIZONS FOR RESEARCH AND CARE
When his clinic for hip and leg pain opened in October 2017, Koenig expected it to accommodate 28 patients a day. Today, thanks to the system’s efficiency, it is handling 37. Even though more patients are being served, Koenig never has to rush, because the schedule adjusts, depending on which providers on the team each patient ends up needing to see. “I have the amount of time I need to spend with each person,” Koenig says. “I don’t have to cut it short to see four people who turn out not to need surgery.” He’s now using Morrice and Bard’s system at the Musculoskeletal Institute’s three other clinics: for arm pain, back and neck pain, and sports injuries. A variation is being tried in operating rooms at the school’s teaching hospital, Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of
S P R I N G 201 9
An innovative new scheduling methodology is allowing Dell Medical School's health providers to serve patients as collaborative teams, with several practitioners attending to the patient's individual needs at each visit.
Texas. While patients benefit, so does Texas McCombs, says Wallace. “Innovations happen at the intersection of disciplines. This fusion of different disciplines creates tremendous opportunities for faculty to explore whole new areas of research.” Morrice is already taking his model a step further. He’s working on adding telemedicine to the mix. “We can fill in white space in schedules by interlacing telemedicine appointments,” he says. “They’re generally follow-up patients. They might only need to check symptoms or make sure they’re using the right medicine.” For Koenig, though, the system’s biggest reward is that he can watch human beings instead of clocks. “Patients can feel the difference,” he says. “I’ve had people weep because they felt that for the first time, providers were really paying attention to them.” “Designing and Scheduling a Multi-disciplinary Integrated Practice Unit for Patient-Centered Care” by Douglas J. Morrice, Jonathan F. Bard, and Karl M. Koenig, is forthcoming in Health Systems.
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y N ATA M E T L U K H
NEW CLINICAL MODEL SERVES PATIENT NEEDS INSTEAD OF DOCTORS' FOUR YEARS AGO, an Austin resident had to wait an average of 400 days to see an orthopedic surgeon at the city’s public hospital. Now, at UT Health Austin’s Musculoskeletal Institute, the wait is one week. Medical Director Dr. Karl Koenig gives credit to a pioneering care model called an integrated practice unit. It fits the school’s core principle of value-based care: making patients healthier at lower cost, by organizing services around their needs rather than doctors’. An IPU assembles a diverse team under one roof, able to address all a patient’s issues in the same visit. For hip and knee pain, Koenig’s team includes a surgeon, an associate provider (nurse practitioner, physician’s assistant, or chiropractor), a medical assistant, and a physical therapist. It shares a social worker and a registered dietician with other IPUs at the institute. After a patient enters the clinic and is roomed, the appropriate providers sequentially address the patient’s conditions. Most often, patients are first seen by an associate provider who determines what additional treatment is required. Then, other members of the team are called in, depending on what best serves the patient at that point in their condition. “A patient comes in with joint pain,” explains Scott Wallace, managing director of the school’s Value Institute for Health and Care. “Surgery may be one solution, but they may have a condition better treated with physical or behavioral therapy. We’re trying to look at what’s really wrong and what’s going to help them the most.” Because clients get comprehensive care in one stop, there are fewer follow-ups and more slots for new patients. They enjoy better outcomes, too. Dell Medical’s early hip and knee surgery patients went home a day earlier than those not treated by an IPU, and 65 percent reported improvement by their next visits.
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PATH TO PHILANTHROPY PHIL CANFIELD, BBA ’89, AND HIS WIFE, MARY BETH, INVEST IN THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS HONORS WITH A $20 MILLION GIFT TO BHP
by Catenya McHenry photograph by Sasha Haagensen
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M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 17
hil Canfield, BBA ’89, whose undergraduate UT business honors education opened the door to a successful 30-year career as a private equity investor, recently described two life experiences that hold great significance for him. The occasion for sharing these memories was an exceptionally momentous event: He and his wife, Mary Beth, were guests of honor in November at a ceremony with an audience of hundreds. It was a celebration of their $20 million gift to Texas McCombs. ¶ Canfield recalled a moment in 1984 when he was a junior at Houston’s Memorial High School. It was the “college conversation” with his father. ¶ “My dad says, ‘Well, you want to study business, right?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ He says, ‘Well, Texas is one of the best business schools in the country, and you’re in state, so it’s pretty affordable. I really don’t see why you’d go anywhere else.’”
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million contribution to the school. The students wore T-shirts sporting the new name for the elite undergraduate program: Canfield Business Honors Program. The couple’s goal to get the word out to the world about the best undergraduate business program in the country was becoming a reality. T he C a n f ield g i f t i nc lude s f u nd s for full-tuition scholarships, increased nationwide recruitment, and enhanced national reputation building for the program. $7 million has been earmarked as a matching scholarship challenge to other alumni and friends of the school. The journey toward philanthropy at this level has been an organic process for the couple. They met 27 years ago in Chicago where they had both moved after college. Mary Beth worked for the Chicago Foundation for Education, a small nonprofit organization that gives grants to Chicago public school teachers to try and enhance the curriculum there. “That was the beginning of our education about education,” she says. Phil began his career in the corporate finance department of Kidder, Peabody & Co. He joined GTCR, a private equity firm, in 1992, and rose through the ranks to his position now as a managing director. He attended the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for his MBA, and has played a leadership role in funding such companies as AppNet, CellNet, DigitalNet, Rural Broadband Investments, Solera, Sorenson Communications, Transaction Network Services, and Zayo. Once the Canfields had children, they volunteered in the classroom, chaired fundraising efforts, became board members, and endowed scholarships. They got involved with an orga-
nization in Chicago that works with middle school children in underserved communities to enhance their growth and help them get into competitive high schools. “Do you see a theme here?” Mary Beth says. Both of the Canfields attended public schools and public universities. That experience informed their decision to focus on education — and specifically scholarships — as an area where they believed they could make an impact when they started making their first philanthropic
CREDIT TK
Fast-forward to 2016: Phil and Mary Beth Canfield are now parents themselves. They visit the 40 Acres with their oldest son, Clay, who has been admitted to the McCombs Business Honors Program, and Phil sees how much the program has evolved since he was a BHP student himself. “As great as I thought BHP was back then when I was a student, it was 100 percent greater now.” Canfield says. “The cohort of admitted students were sharp, but they also had the UT way about them. They were friendly but also competitive, and I just love that.” During that college visit, Canfield met with McCombs Dean Jay Hartzell. “Jay said something that was really, really pivotal to me,” Canfield says. “He said that the McCombs BHP program was the best undergraduate business program in the country.” The dean’s assessment was based on a variety of factors: student quality, curricular rigor, collaborative approach, access to Austin’s thriving business ecosystem, and nationwide career placement and success. BHP students are in the top 1.75 percent of their high school class, and their average SAT score is 1479. “I was blown away,” says Canfield. “But I told Jay, ‘There are probably just a lot of people — high school students and employers across the nation — who might not know us — or might not appreciate how good BHP is.’” As Canfield shared these memories on a crisp November afternoon, he and Mary Beth stood side by side. The hundreds of alumni, faculty, staff, and current BHP students gathered in the McCombs Hall of Honors danced and cheered as the couple announced their $20
P H OTO G R A P H S B Y J E R R Y H AY E S
gifts. They began supporting scholarships at her alma mater, Miami University of Ohio, as well as the Chicago Booth School and the Rush University Medical School. “Education is the single most important investment that society makes in its members,” Phil says, “and whether it’s funded through taxes and public education, whether it’s funded privately or by philanthropy, it’s probably the best thing our country has going for it. Everybody in the world wants to come here to go to a university for a reason. It’s our most valuable resource because it just enables people to do productive things over their life. “Our approach to being philanthropic is to have a strategy,” he continued, “and to focus and concentrate our investments where they can have a pretty significant impact. We both believe if you’re helping education and helping people get access to education, then that is the single highest leverage and best ROI investment you can make philanthropically.” After the visit to UT with their son, Phil and Mary Beth kept returning to the McCombs Business Honors Program in their conversations.
The contribution from the Canfields was celebrated in a ceremony (left) at McCombs on November 30, including a contingent of the Longhorn Band. At right: Mary Beth and Phil Canfield in the Hall of Honors on the day of the celebration.
AS GREAT AS I THOUGHT BHP WAS BACK THEN WHEN I WAS A STUDENT, IT WAS 100 PERCENT GREATER NOW. “I really started thinking a lot about what an amazing opportunity I had to attend that program,” Phil says. “The BHP gave me really all the fundamentals that I needed to have a successful career in business, and for that, I am truly and eternally grateful. In many ways, you can think about this gift as just a dividend back to The University of Texas for the investment made in me 30 years ago.”
When Phil arrived at UT as a freshman in 1985, he learned about the Business Honors Program, and it really appealed to him. Back then, BHP students were admitted internally and only after their freshman year in the business school. “The idea of being in a very small cohort with the very best professors, in a small classroom setting, and the ability to work with the smartest kids and learn from them made me think, ‘Wow, I’ve got
M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 19
to do really well my freshman year so I can get into that program.’ “Some places are just so competitive that it’s every person for themselves. BHP did a very good job when I was there of forcing situations where people have to engage with their peers, work in collaborative groups, and learn how to see what other people bring to the table. That drives compassion and that drives understanding, and you would not believe how important that is in the investing business,” says Canfield. Understanding the importance of compassion — something often missing in business — ended up being a highly valuable insight that has served Canfield well throughout his career. “People say to me, ‘What? Really? Compassion?’ My response is, ‘Absolutely,’” he says. “The reality is we’re buying private businesses, and they’re negotiated, and they’re complex. A big part of getting to a deal that makes sense is understanding the person on the other side of the table, understanding what their objectives are, and understanding that they have careers, they have families, they have children, they have golden aspirations.” More than anything else, Canfield says it was meeting students like McCombs senior Phoebe Lin that sold him on the idea of making the gift. “I just fell in love with the program all
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over again. Meeting them conjured up a lot of awesome old memories.” Lin has a full scholarship, is triple majoring in BHP, finance, and math, and already has a highly competitive private equity job in New York lined up after graduation. She says that learning how to collaborate, negotiate with respect and kindness, and hold yourself to the highest ethical standards are all key principles that her BHP education has instilled in her. Without her scholarship, Lin says she would not have been able to take part in any of this rich learning. “Every BHP class does have a chunk of students who are coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and the Canfield gift program’s commitment to full scholarships really moves the needle for their ability to come to UT and BHP,” she says. After more than a year of reflecting on the program both past and present, Canfield says, “one night, I spoke to Mary Beth, and I said, I’d like to do something big with BHP. I want to do something that can really, really change the game.” But, Canfield says, to make this kind of a gift, you have to have unwavering confidence in an institution’s leadership. “My conversations with Dean Hartzell give me faith and trust in his vision for the program and his ability to execute that within all the constraints that exist in running an organization. My confidence is very high,” Canfield says.
Left: Senior Phoebe Lin, who spoke about her experience in the BHP program, is greeted by Faculty Director Andres Almazan. Right: Students in the newly renamed Canfield Business Honors Program surround Phil and Mary Beth Canfield (center, second row), along with Dean Jay Hartzell (second row, far right) and Almazan (front row, far right).
The Canfield name was a natural fit for the program. Shelley Nix, the program’s staff director, sees Phil Canfield as a role model for current students. “Right now the world needs leaders who are very much like Phil — leaders who are compassionate and interested in changing the world around them on the business side, but more important, changing the world in a way that’s going to affect the future for generations to come,” says Nix. Although the gift was a natural extension of the couple’s commitment to education, it was a whole new level of giving for them. Anxiety set in when they thought about how it would change their family dynamic and their relationship with their son and two daughters. But any hesitation disappeared when they discussed the example they wanted to offer to their children. Their goal is not only to leave a lasting legacy, but for their name to uphold and exemplify their values. “What your kids know about your wealth is a question you never know the answer to,”
P H OTO G R A P H S B Y J E R R Y H AY E S
BUSINESS HONORS BACKGROUND The newly rechristened Canfield Business Honors
everybody to have everybody’s back. And I
Program attracts the most ambitious of
focused on creating an ethical culture — being
McCombs undergraduates. The selective program
as honest as possible — one where employers
provides a wealth of academic and programmatic
would say, ‘We want to hire BHP kids because
opportunities for its students — but it took de-
we know they’ll do things the right way.’”
cades of development to get to where it is today. Collaboration is another of the distinctive charBHP now boasts 500 students, a faculty direc-
acteristics of BHP, says another former director,
tor, seven full-time staff, and 10 student peer ad-
Eli Cox, who led the program from 1995 to 2010.
visors, but it began with just 37 students when
Group projects are an important part of the pro-
it was launched in 1960. At the beginning, BHP
gram, requiring students to be constantly working
represented a way for the business school to
together. “Again, people in business don’t work in
keep some of the best and brightest undergrad-
isolation. They work in teams,” Cox says.
uates in the state with the promise of a rigorous learning experience to rival the Ivy League.
HOLISTIC AND DIVERSE ADMISSIONS
But BHP also carved out a place for more than
Today’s BHP student has an average SAT score
just challenging coursework. The curriculum was
of 1479 and an average GPA of 3.79, but admis-
designed to produce business graduates with a
sions go beyond academic performance.
sense of community and ethical leadership, and this dedication persists in the program still.
Phil Canfield, BBA ’89, says he admires the program’s holistic approach to admissions.
Phil explains. “They have some idea, but having an idea about it is very different than sitting in an audience and watching your parents get celebrated for giving millions away. That’s a whole different feeling. Having their friends find out made us concerned, but it has stimulated conversations with our kids about our wealth and about our priorities and how those two things go together. It gives you an opportunity to tell them why you did it, what you value, and how important giving back is.” Phil and Mary Beth are proud of the ambition of the program, and they are excited about getting the word about the culture of BHP — that its students are not only the best and the brightest, but that they’re kind, collaborative, and honest, with deep aspirations to do good in the world while making their own mark on it. “We’re at the beginning of something that we hope can become very big and very impactful,” says Phil. “We want the Canfield Business Honors Program to be the No. 1 business program in the country, and we want it to have that reputation nationwide. Just imagine that for a moment, the best business program in the country with 100 percent scholarship coverage. What starts here really does change the world.” As he concludes his remarks on the day of the gift announcement ceremony to warm and enthusiastic applause from the crowd, Mary Beth turns to him, barely audible, and says, “Nice job.” Indeed, well done, Canfields.
Shelley Nix, BHP staff director, says in more
“They’re looking for kids who’ve had really
recent years, the program has expanded its
high-quality leadership experiences. It’s not
goals to include broader recruitment strategies,
just how smart they are but also how good they
cohort programming that develops collabora-
are as leaders.”
tive leaders, and experiential learning opportunities for students. “The aim has been to create
The program’s new faculty director, Finance
a more diverse learning environment,” Nix says.
Professor Andres Almazan, says his plan is not to make great changes but to reinforce
The program also has a sterling track record in
the program’s strengths. That effort includes
launching students into their careers. Over the
introducing new four-year dual honors degree
last eight years, job placement is 100 percent
programs, such as the recently established
for students seeking industry positions. Other
Texas Honors Computer Science and Business
BHP graduates go to top law schools, medical
program. It complements the current dual
schools, or other non-business graduate pro-
degree program Business Honors/Plan II, and
grams immediately after graduation. According
opens the door to future dual honors offerings
to self-reported alumni data, 30 percent of BHP
in fields such as engineering.
alumni were admitted to a top 20 MBA program within five years after graduation.
His ambitions also includes maintaining the competitive yet supportive environment that
CULTIVATING THE CULTURE
gives the program its special character.
Former program director Robert Prentice, who
“I honestly believe that a unique combination
led the program from 2010 to 2018 and is now
of factors has led to a quite remarkable social
chair of the Business, Government and Society
enterprise,” Almazan says. “Superb students
Department at McCombs, says he worked to
interacting with dedicated staff and faculty
incorporate moral principles into the program.
have produced a top-notch academic environment that enjoys the strongest support from
“One of the best ways to succeed in the
our passionate alumni and the highest recruit-
business world is to be the kind of person who
ing interest of the best companies in the world.
is always there for everybody else,” Prentice
Our future builds on these great accomplish-
says. “I wanted students to compete with each
ments, and I firmly believe that the sky is the
other — and not against each other. I wanted
limit.” — London Gibson
M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 21
Growing up on the King Ranch instilled in Jay Kleberg a lifelong appreciation for the land — plus horse-handling skills (pictured here at Big Bend National Park).
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JOURNEY
SIXTH-GENERATION TEXAN JAY KLEBERG, MBA ’13, SON OF A STORIED TEXAS RANCH FAMILY, TURNS HIS LOVE OF THE LAND INTO A GRAND ADVENTURE by Todd Savage | photographs courtesy of The River and the Wall M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 15
MBA ’13, recalls a time in his early 30s when he was working as a business development director for a real estate investment trust. The El Paso-based company developed industrial parks along the U.S.-Mexico border, and Kleberg was in Chicago touring a 3-millionsquare-foot industrial park. “It was the last place on earth I wanted to be,” he recalls. But one of his colleagues had a different attitude. “He was just ecstatic looking at the bay doors and the quality of the buildings, looking at all the aspects of this park like a piece of art. I thought to myself, ‘I need to figure out another career path,’ because obviously this guy really loves this stuff.” Kleberg knew he needed to find something that sparked his passion in the same way. “Hitting a reset button” was what Kleberg decided he needed to do, so he applied and enrolled in the Texas McCombs MBA program. Soon after arriving at UT, he was sitting in a class with the popular Senior Management Lecturer John Doggett, who asked everyone to think about how they wanted to be remembered. “If the slate is clean, then I want to be remembered for making a difference,” Kleberg says. “It got me thinking.” What it got him thinking about was his upbringing and the issues he cared about. Kleberg, now the director for conservation initiatives at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation, grew up around open lands and wildlife. Once he left his family’s ranch, he spent time exploring the wider world — getting his B.A. in English literature at Williams College in Massachusetts, spending three years in Brazil, getting his pilot’s license, and later pursuing real estate work — but when Doggett asked the JAY KLEBERG ,
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question, Kleberg knew in an instant that he needed to go back to his roots. “I have a passion for conservation and stewardship that has been passed on to me,” Kleberg says, meeting for an interview at Austin’s South Congress Hotel. As he talks, he often gestures toward large photographs on the wall of the canyons of the Rio Grande. Compared to families with parents who came home from work every evening at 5:30, Kleberg’s childhood was distinctly different. A sixth-generation Texan, he grew up on the King Ranch, the storied and sprawling South Texas property founded by his ancestors in 1853 that today is spread over 825,000 acres and is home to 35,000 cattle. When Kleberg was growing up, his father was responsible for managing global farming and cattle operations for the ranch. Geneticists, biologists, and cowboys passed through their home. Dinner conversation topics touched on cattle and quail, grasses and land management. His parents took him out of school to work cattle roundups and travel to stock shows with the quarter horses they showed, and he was taken out with cowboys branding, castrating, and herding cattle. “It was all-encompassing,” says Kleberg, dressed in Texan business attire of crisp button-down shirt, Wrangler jeans, and cowboy boots. “I was surrounded by cowboys and cowboys’ children. There were biologists working on improving native habitats. It was just part of growing up.” The ranch has had a long relationship with Texas McCombs. In 1983, the King Ranch Family Trust endowed the creation of a professorship. In 2015, it was expanded and renamed the King Ranch Chair for Business Leadership, a position now held by Senior Associate Dean Eric Hirst. After getting his MBA, Kleberg learned how valuable his business education was for a nonprofit organization like the Texas Parks
Kleberg came to McCombs determined to "reset" his career path. He applied his MBA education to a new role as director for conservation initiatives at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation.
and Wildlife Foundation. “There definitely is a real need for analytical, strategic thinking, and an ability to think about public access and funding. It’s about taking all of the things that we’re learning in business school but applying those skills to the natural world.” Indeed, his first task at the foundation was writing a business plan as part of a campaign to raise $100 million. In the role, he works to manage philanthropic donations to acquire new land for public access. Then he oversees a team to perform habitat improvement, such as restoring coastal prairie near Port O’Connor along the Gulf of Mexico at the 17,000-acre Powderhorn Ranch. “I’m trying to enhance public access and conserve native habitat in Texas and do that by any means possible,” he says. “Many of the national and state parks exist due to generous donations of individuals. Big Bend National Park, Padre Island National Seashore, Big Boggy — all of them started with private citizens.” He’s learned that even donors in the area of land conservation are thinking of their contributions as investments. He explains: “They want metrics about how much habitat you’re restoring, what’s your baseline, and how many ducks or quail or deer are being conserved, or how much water is flowing now that wasn’t flowing before? If we’re going to put money to work, then how do we maximize our impact and how do we measure all of that? Again, we’re taking what everyone is learning at business school and just applying it to a different industry.” His work has taken him to far-flung corners of the state. He knows the Texas landscape well, but in the winter of 2017, he got a more intimate
KLEBERG KNEW HE NEEDED TO GO BACK TO HIS ROOTS. “I HAVE A PASSION FOR CONSERVATION AND STEWARDSHIP THAT HAS BEEN PASSED ON TO ME.”
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Kleberg's commitment to conservation led to a role as a character and associate producer of the documentary The River and the Wall, which had its world premiere at SXSW in March. He and four others traveled the 1,200-mile length of the Rio Grande by canoe, horse, and mountain bike over 72 days to explore the impact of the proposed border wall to be built by the federal government.
look at one of the state’s most fabled natural features: the Rio Grande. The river defines the state’s 1,200-mile border with Mexico, as its leaves El Paso on the state’s far northwestern corner on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Kleberg and four others — a filmmaker, an ornithologist, a wildlife videographer, and a whitewater rafting guide — embarked on a 72-day journey traveling the entire length of the river to make a documentary exploring the border. Kleberg brought his knowledge as a conservationist to the team — not to mention his experience on bike, horseback, and canoe. The group traveled along the river pedaling mountain bikes on muddy paths, trekking up and around rocky canyons astride beautiful mustang horses, and finally paddling canoes through walled canyons rising to 1,500 feet and rock-filled rapids until they reached the confluence with the Gulf. Kleberg teamed up with the film’s director, Ben Masters, after the two found they both had completed ambitious transcontinental treks: Kleberg had ridden a mountain bike from Mexico to Canada while Masters had made a similar journey on horseback with a pack of mustangs for an earlier documentary. Their goal was to document the landscape along the Rio Grande before the potential construction of a border wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. Kleberg was both a character and associate producer of the documentary capturing the adventure called The River and the Wall. The film had its world premiere in mid-March at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin. It rolled out nationally in early May, with screenings in more than 200 locations and streaming on iTunes. Kleberg says he hopes the adventure angle of the film will draw in a diverse audience. “We’re hoping to interest people who may not otherwise watch a film about the Texas-Mexico border,” he says. “I don’t think the people in Texas or anywhere else in the United States know how beautiful and diverse this area is and that it changes every mile of border between Texas and Mexico. If they knew that they would be separated from it, that wildlife depend on it, how much all of that would be permanently altered, I think Texans would fight tooth and nail to figure out other solutions. It was a way for us to capture this super amazing landscape
“I DON’T THINK THE PEOPLE IN TEXAS OR ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE UNITED STATES KNOW HOW BEAUTIFUL AND DIVERSE THIS AREA IS AND THAT IT CHANGES EVERY MILE OF BORDER BETWEEN TEXAS AND MEXICO.” that is underappreciated and hopefully capture its beauty in high-definition before it’s potentially altered.” The documentary participants traveled about 20 miles each day, often camping along the river. Along the way, they interviewed people who could speak to the impact that a wall would have on issues of wildlife conservation, water access, cross-border culture, and property rights, including border patrol agents, farmers whose land would be split up, Mexican business owners, and politicians such as Republican U.S. Rep. Will Hurd and then-Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke. “Texans love this river even though we may have forgotten about it, but it’s in our lore,” Kleberg says. “Every river has a story — the Brazos, the Colorado, the Guadalupe. I think the Rio Grande itself and the landscapes through which we go are characters that most Texans can identify with.” “Hopefully our film provides a lens through which we as Texans and Americans can have this conversation,” he says. “Some things aren’t easy to understand in a soundbite, and the only way that we could think of to articulate the complexity of this multifaceted subject was to sit somebody down for 90 minutes and have them both see and hear from the border.” Kleberg and his family live in the Travis Heights neighborhood of Austin. They can get into nature with a nearby walk along the creek, the lake, or at a park. “I try to connect to it as often as I can,” he says. “Our kids, are bombarded with stimulus all the time and all day. Creating some space for them to free their mind, be kids, and be creative is so important. I can see it when I get them out even in these little parks. They immediately start creating and playing other things.” He also makes every opportunity to take them to his family’s ranch and expose them
to the kinds of experiences he had as a child. “I’m not necessarily spending the whole day telling them what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it. I just want them to be there.” “For a long time, I ran away from it,” Kleberg says. “Not the responsibility necessarily. I just didn’t want it to define me. There’s a tremendous amount of history and legacy there. It’s something that I’m certainly proud of. Now, the way I live my life is in some way trying to honor that rather than feel a burden. I think most people perform better when they feel motivated to do so, not a responsibility to do so.” One way that Kleberg is honoring his legacy is his new venture, Explore Ranches, which offers travelers access to a network of private, historic ranches. “What we’re doing is elevating the ranch, not just the accommodations, but the whole ranch experience with the guide, meals, and all of that,” he says of the company, which he co-founded in December 2018. “In some cases, bringing in a scientist to talk about it, archeologists, or with programming.” The venture offers an option for landowners who have difficulty earning money on their properties. “It’s a revenue stream that we hope will allow them to hold on to it for multiple generations,” he explains. At the same time, it keeps the land open and preserves wildlife habitat. “As you start chopping up land among different owners, it’s not very healthy for the air, water, and land quality,” Kleberg says. Kleberg says he appreciates the legacy of the generations that came before him on his family’s ranch. It’s clearly offered him a unique perspective that guides his work today. “It gave me an appreciation for the responsibility that anyone who owns land, whether it’s the home and your yard or it’s a wildlife habitat. I view all of us as stakeholders, even folks who are living in Austin. You really do have to care about it for these places to continue to remain wild.” M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 27
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KIRK GOLDSBERRY, NBA ANALYST AND SPURS RESEARCHER, JOINS McCOMBS TO SHOW STUDENTS HOW ANALYTICS IS CHANGING THE GAME
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by Jeremy M. Simon | photographs by Jeff Wilson M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 29
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growing up in Pennsylvania, Kirk Goldsberry loved to spend time playing basketball at the neighborhood park. His favorite shot: from the left side of the court, where he would fake a spin move and then turn the opposite direction, hitting a fade away off the backboard. ¶ Goldsberry tried to get the shot down from the right side of court — but he never could make it as reliably. Then, watching the pros on TV, he noticed star players also had their favorite side of the court — often the left. “I'm a terrible basketball player, but it didn't stop me from playing for years,” he says. “As a kid, I knew that I was better on one side of the basketball court, and that even NBA players had asymmetries in their abilities.” ¶ It’s an insight Goldsberry kept filed away for years. ¶ Today he can back up his youthful insight with hard data, having staked out a one-of-a-kind career in sports analytics. An early love of maps and cartography led him to overlay visualizations onto a basketball court, and his pioneering hexagonal shot chart led to jobs as vice president of strategic research at the San Antonio Spurs and NBA analyst at ESPN. ¶ This April, he published a new book, SprawlBall: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA. Analytics guru Nate Silver wrote of the book: “If you want to understand how the modern NBA came to be, you’ll need to read this book.” Wired magazine said: “This guy’s quest to track every shot in the NBA changed basketball forever.” ¶ This spring Goldsberry joined the McCombs faculty. We sat down with him to learn about how he’s made a career mapping data on the basketball court, along with the business lessons he believes sports analytics can impart. Q: You’ve been drawn to mapmaking since your undergraduate studies at Penn State and first job as a cartographer at FEMA. How did you figure out that maps could be applied to sports? A: Often the best way to communicate spatial information is a map. I’ve borrowed a lot of the best mapping techniques and ideas from my background in geography. That’s really propelled my work. I spent my entire 20s learning how to make maps and communicate spatial data in ways that had nothing to do with sports. Academically, I'm most happy and comfortable at the intersection between computer mapmaking and leveraging this century’s emerging technologies. In 2011, as a visiting professor at Harvard, I started to blend my other love, which is basketball, with mapmaking and visualization. I visualized individual players’ shooting tendencies on the basketball court as a new kind of sports analytics. It all started with applying a fundamental lesson from one domain to another. That was
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a breakthrough for the field. People ask, “How does a geographer become a sports analytics person?” Location, location, location. It's all about space. Basketball is a spatial sport; space influences everything that happens in every game. Until very recently, that was entirely overlooked in basketball stats. Basketball shot charts ask, “Where does this player shoot from? And how well does he shoot from there?” The best answer is a graphic. Constantly balancing that spatial and visual framework in sports has been my calling card. Q: Why did it take other people so long to catch on? A: As obsessed as we are with sports, nobody was talking about space, with the exception of things like three-point range. I knew we could get a lot more precise. But it wasn't until this decade that you could put the data into a computer. When I first presented this at the MIT Sports Analytics Conference in 2012, nobody had given it
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this treatment. That says the real bottleneck in sports analytics is not often technology but intellectual in nature: trying and applying things from different fields. Q: After presenting your research at that conference, you landed a coveted role working for sports writing guru Bill Simmons. How did that happen? A: That paper went viral. Then I provided an NBA finals preview for The New York Times, which was seen by millions of people. A few weeks later, Bill Simmons asked me to work at Grantland. I was a big fan of that website. I remember seeing his email and feeling, “Wow, this is awesome.” When your favorite writer says, “Will you come write with me?” that’s pretty cool. So I leapt at the chance. I did that part-time while I was teaching at Harvard. After the first year, more people were enjoying my work, and I got a full-time offer to go work at ESPN in 2013. Q: And you kept going: After working at ESPN, you became the vice president of strategic research for the San Antonio Spurs. A: When I was at ESPN and Harvard, the Spurs took a great interest in my research. I developed a friendship with R.C. Buford, their general manager. At some point in 2015, he asked me to come work there. I never wanted to work for a team, but the Spurs are the one team I really was drawn to. I lived in Austin and the Spurs are the best organization in sports. When they ask you to join them, you do it. I had the chance to bask in that culture and learn from Coach Gregg Popovich, R.C., and the great players — like Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili, who were still there — and be a part of that championship culture. Q: During your three years at the Spurs, how did you use analytics to improve the team? A: We applied analytics heavily to the draft: How can we use statistical modeling to understand which amateur players are most — or least — likely to succeed? And how can that influence our choice on draft night? For free agency evaluation, we were looking at which players were a good fit for our team and why, and how much we should pay them. We used analytics for our team’s on-court strategy or understanding our opponents’ weaknesses and strengths. And looking at all of the performance data on player health, wellness, and athletic performance. There are increasingly giant haystacks of data about athletes, and we were trying to find the needles in those haystacks.
Q: Can you name any specific players selected using your approach? A: Bryn Forbes was undrafted in college, but my shooting analytics identified him as a very good NBA shooter. We did an advanced dive into his shooting statistics at Michigan State University and saw some things that we really liked. When we had him in our workout environment, our shooting coach also noticed. Most undrafted players don’t even make the NBA. He’s playing tons of minutes for the Spurs now and is one of the league leaders in three-point percentage. It was a really cool example of analytics highlighting something that a coach may have seen but may not have thought about twice. Now, he’s making millions of dollars playing basketball. Q: You’re bringing what you’ve learned into the classroom with your MBA class, Performance and Sports Analytics. What are students learning? A: The first is obviously sports analytics, the quantitative revolution, and how we're characterizing performance in the games we love to watch. On a secondary level, sports is obsessed with ways to quantify and understand performance in ways that almost anybody can apply to whatever field they work in. Sports capture the hearts and passions of young learners in ways that very few other domains can. That said, I don't think it's an academic subject unto itself. Sports analyst and McCombs faculty member Kirk Goldsberry brought his cartography background to the court: His new book SprawlBall uses visual data to show how the three-point shot has changed basketball from a game focused on physical interior play to precise long-range shooting.
Q: Besides analytics, what can your students expect to learn? A: We’re emphasizing storytelling. One of the most underrated aspects of analytics is communicating your findings — not just dumping numbers on somebody, but telling a story. That’s really the hardest part. How do I tell Coach Popovich something? That’s different from how I would tell a business school audience or a television audience the same thing. The greatest writers and filmmakers have shown us what works: What can we learn from them? Every MBA student today needs to be able to handle data and tell a story. I don’t think that’s being taught well enough in universities. Q: As a storyteller yourself, your book SprawlBall came out in April. What’s it about? A: The NBA has changed in the analytics era. The book talks about some of the driving forces of those changes and some players who both embody and have been affected by those changes. We have chapters on Stephen Curry, LeBron James, and James Harden. Q: And you believe analytics can improve the game. A: We can actually leverage analytics — not at the team level, but at the league level —to tweak aesthetics: What rules would optimize aspects we love while minimizing those we think are less interesting? As opposed to how it's been framed since Moneyball came out, with teams using analytics to beat other teams or rate players, there's an opportunity to regulate and legislate a game, optimizing its beauty. Q: If you could change the NBA, what’s first on your list?
A: The most prominent one is where the threepoint line should be, and we should use data to inform that. In 1961, Abe Saperstein, who’s most famous for founding the Harlem Globetrotters, drew a three-point line on a basketball court. That's still where the three-point line is today. When he first drew the line, nobody could shoot out there. It took two or three generations of players and coaches to take this from a circus shot to the core strategy of the NBA half-court offense. Now, the shot is too easy for most NBA players. We can look at moving the line back, adjusting the line, or enabling goal tending on three-point shots. Q: If we look beyond the court, how can we apply analytics in other areas? A: People around the world know about batting average or points per game. We use those numbers to evaluate performance. This is not new or unique to sports, but the passion people bring to sports analytics is unique. You take the ability to quantify a performance and you ask how can we spread that to work at a stock brokerage — how are you evaluating your stock performance and your employees’ performance? These concepts are important every day in every industry. By studying what has changed in sports, we can start to understand some concepts that are affecting all industries in the early 21st century. Q: What about here at UT Austin? A: When it comes to sports, there's no university in the world where I'd rather be thinking about this. UT is uniquely positioned with its size and passion to blossom into this hub for sports academic work. If there’s such a thing as a perfect university setting for sports analytics, it would be hard to argue that this isn't the No. 1 place.
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Sandy Seaman, the former director of the Office of Estates and Trusts for UT System, is one of 13 participants in the first cohort of the new UT Tower Fellows program, created and managed by McCombs Executive Education.
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BACK IN C L A SS NEW TOWER FELLOWS PROGRAM OFFERS SEASONED PROFESSIONALS A SCHOOL YEAR TO STUDY ANYTHING
by Mary Ann Roser photographs by Dennis Burnett and Lauren Gerson
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NE W H OR I Z O NS ON T HE FOR T Y A C R E S Monica Samuels has practiced law, staffed a presidential campaign, and co-authored Comeback Moms, a book about how to successfully re-enter the workforce after taking a break to raise children. Last year, while planning her own comeback, she realized she needed a boost before writing her own next chapter. Paul Kinscherff, dual MBA and M. Public Affairs ’85, retired in August 2017 after a long career in senior management and financial leadership jobs at the Boeing Co. He knew he wanted his next act to include guest lecturing at UT and mentoring students, but, at 60, he also was hungry to feed his own brain. Samuels, Kinscherff, and 11 others have found a home for their inquisitive minds and a place to launch a journey of self-discovery: the UT Tower Fellows Program. In its inaugural year, the UT program is one of only a handful in the country that offer adult professionals the opportunity to spend a school year on campus as full-time students exploring any combination of subjects they want. Demand is growing for educational experiences that give accomplished adults a place to regroup and learn, says Tower Fellows Admissions Director Sally Brinker. Harvard, Stanford, Minnesota, and Notre Dame are among the other universities that offer similar programs. The Tower Fellows “are all pivoting for some reason,” Brinker says. They range in age and background, from a foundation co-director and mother of three in her 40s to prominent
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lawyer Sam Perry, an 84-year-old retiree whose late wife, Shirley Bird Perry, was a beloved UT executive for decades. UT gives the fellows wide latitude for exploring, Brinker says. “We’re from Texas. We let you go on your own journey here. The campus is your oyster.” A big, diverse school like UT is an ideal venue, says Gaylen Paulson, associate dean and director of McCombs Executive Education, which oversees the Tower Fellows Program. UT offers a vast smorgasbord of courses and resources open to the fellows. It’s about lifelong learning, Paulson says. “This is taking it to a whole new demographic.”
The fellows, who may or may not have a prior connection to UT, can audit up to four classes of their choice each semester. They find themselves making new friends and sitting beside millennials in courses that use technologies that didn’t exist when they were in school. Each Wednesday, the fellows meet for luncheons that feature speakers, many of them nationally known industry leaders. On Thursdays, the fellows gather in the evening for an intimate session at which each participant shares his or her personal story. This part of the program creates deep bonds among the participants, says Chantal Delys, McCombs assistant dean and Tower Fellows director of programming. “It’s a powerful experience when you meet with such a small group several times a week and really open up with each other about your lives.” The fellows also take group “field trips” to campus landmarks like the Blanton Museum and even UT’s football field where they meet and interact with high-level school officials. “I love the ‘behind the scenes’ element, where the fellows gain access to experiences and people that are very hard to come by,” Paulson says. An added perk is the offer of a wellness evaluation, in conjunction with UT’s Dell Medical School, along with help devising a plan to reach personal health goals. Program staff work with each fellow to make sure their course selection is tailored to fit their interests and abilities. “This is a very immersive, high-touch program,” Brinker says, noting the $60,000 tuition is similar to a year’s cost in a professional degree program at UT. “We can get you connected with some of the best and brightest minds on campus. You
are, without a doubt, going to go on a personal journey," says Isabella Cunningham, Tower Fellows faculty director.
THE COMEBACK MOMS a 1987 graduate of UT’s School of Law, the program has been the spark she needed. Samuels was practicing immigration and environmental law when she was elected national chair of the Young Republican National Federation in the late 1990s. In 2000, she worked in Austin on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, and after he won, was offered a job in his administration. At the time, Samuels was pregnant with her second child, and knew she’d rarely be home. She turned it down. “People were shocked,” she recalled. “They said, ‘Are you crazy?’” Then she co-wrote Comeback Moms, which Random House published in 2006, leading to numerous media appearances. Next, Samuels started working on another book idea, then switched gears to work on a podcast with her Comeback Moms co-author for women in transition — women like her. The podcast is about to launch, but she realized her book idea was languishing. The Tower Fellows Program offered a path forward, she says. This semester she’s doing independent study with UT’s Michener Center for Writers, while taking a class on U.S. presidents taught by author H.W. Brands and a crisis management course taught by Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. “I feel I’ll get the most out of it this semester, especially working with the Michener Center,” she says. “That’s what I’d like to be doing — writing full-time.” Another fellow, Sandy Seaman, was a lawyer with the UT System’s asset management office, overseeing endowments and estates for all 14 UT campuses, when she decided to stay home with her young twin daughters, now grown. Seaman began thinking about next steps when Brinker emailed, telling her about the Tower Fellows. Seaman was intrigued. She signed up and is studying entrepreneurship, which she called FOR SAMUELS,
Left: Retired Boeing executive Paul Kinscherff, dual MBA and M. Public Affairs '85, is taking courses ranging from astronomy to the Business of Hollywood as part of his personalized Tower Fellows curriculum. Above: Monica Samuels, J.D. '87, the author of Comeback Moms, is doing independent study with UT's Michener Center for Writers.
“invigorating and highly challenging.” Maybe she will end the program with clarity on a new career, but maybe not, she says. She’s not worried because she loves the immersion in a field of study that’s new to her. “I can’t even tell you how great the classes are,” Seaman says. “It’s probably the best investment in me that I’ve ever made. This program has been absolutely worth every minute and every dollar of it.”
MENTORS AND ADVISERS together quickly, says Tower Fellows mentor Chris Harte, MBA ’75. “It was incredible,” says Harte, who has been a publisher at four newspapers, a director at various companies, a private equity investor, and an adviser to several other UT programs, in addition to working on land conservation in Spicewood and a third-party political effort, the Serve America Movement. THE PROGRAM CAME
Harte and Amon Burton, an attorney and adjunct professor in the Plan II Honors program, were in on the early discussions with UT about creating Tower Fellows two years ago. They had studied in Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute, a model for UT’s program, and wanted to help UT get started. Both are mentors in the program. Burton was winding down his law practice when he went to Stanford as a way to transition to his next phase. While there, he became fascinated by climate change and “realized it was one of the major issues of our time,” as well as deeply complicated and intellectually stimulating. Burton took six climate-related courses at Stanford, and as a Tower Fellow, he is studying oceanography this semester. He’s also begun teaching a Plan II seminar on the law and ethics of climate change — exactly what he wanted to be doing when he left Stanford. To get the most out of a program like this, participants need to clear the decks and immerse themselves in it, says Harte, 71. He attends most of the lunches, including a recent one featuring M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 35
Bill Cunningham, UT’s James L. Bayless Chair for Free Enterprise, former chancellor of the UT System, former president of UT Austin, and former dean of the business school. Cunningham is the faculty adviser to Tower Fellow Glenn Lowenstein, who has been “really impressed at the really high level UT plays at.” Lowenstein was attracted to the program as a way to expand his horizons after his real estate investment firm was sold a year-and-ahalf ago. At 59, he knows “there’s definitely another chapter.” “Last semester, I took a new media class and a venture capital class,” he says. “Both were like candy. It was learning about the world, and it was stretching my mind.” Being a fellow has connected him to what he finds exciting and what he loves, he says. “It’s an experiment. I knew I wanted to do this but I didn’t know how cool it would be.” And it doesn’t hurt to have Cunningham as an adviser, he adds, someone who is “friends with everyone” and knows the university so well.
‘AN EPIPHANY’ AFTER HE RETIRED from Boeing, Paul Kinscherff
moved to Austin and got heavily involved with the McCombs School of Business and the LBJ School of Public Affairs as an executive-in-residence. When the Tower Fellows Program launched, he leapt at the chance to learn new things. In the first semester, he took an astronomy course and the Business of Hollywood, a popular choice among the fellows. “The whole thing is an epiphany,” he says, including an awareness of what it’s like to be different than everyone else. “You’re the only one in the class who looks like you,” he says. Having his wife, Ada, in the program is fun, especially making new friends together, often with the other fellows, says Kinscherff, who is taking corporate governance and venture capital courses this semester. He did not sign up for courses with a career goal in mind, but “I think the opportunity for continuous learning is a personal and social good,” he says. He sees it as a chance to become a more informed citizen and a better person. Austin Ligon, BA ’73, MA ’78, an angel investor who co-founded CarMax Inc. and was CEO until he left in 2006, retired at 55. He traveled extensively with his three children and serves on other corporate boards.
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The Tower Fellows meet weekly for Wednesday luncheons at which industry leaders join them as featured speakers. Top: Bill Cunningham, former UT president and chancellor, joins them at one of their January gatherings. Clockwise from left, under top photo: Amy Vail Baer, co-director of the Baer Family Foundation; Austin Ligon, investor and retired co-founder and CEO of Car Max Inc.; Chris Harte, MBA '75, retired newspaper publisher; and Glen Lowenstein, institutional real estate investor and co-founder of Lionstone Investments.
As a fellow, he is delighting in courses unrelated to his career, including art history, Spanish, the history of mariachi music, and creative writing. He’s also enjoying being around younger students. “I think millennials are an improved version of young people in the ’60s era,” says Ligon, 68. “They’re interested in what I’ve done, and I’m interested in what choices they are making.” He looked into the Stanford program but is glad he chose UT. “A big state university covers
the waterfront like no one else,” he says. Kinscherff, who expects to continue taking classes after the program ends, says it has had an immediate impact on him. “Just coming into the program changes you … and it’s a heck of a lot of fun,” he says. Lowenstein agrees: “It made me 25 years old again!” For full information about the Tower Fellows program, including how to apply, go to https:// towerfellows.utexas.edu.
P H OTO G R A P H S BY L AU R E N G E R S O N
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INVESTING IN PRIVATE EQUITY
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HOW THE HICKS, MUSE, TATE, AND FURST CENTER FOR PRIVATE EQUITY FINANCE USHERED IN A NEW ERA AT McCOMBS
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when the partners of the Dallas-based leveraged buyout firm of Hicks, Muse, Tate, and Furst (HMTF) decided to endow a Center for Private Equity Finance at McCombs, they had a strong sense that the emerging alternative investment class of private equity was poised for significant growth. They wanted to prime the pump for growth in this market in the state of Texas, as well as more broadly. Since then, the rate of growth in the private equity markets has surprised even them. In the five years leading up to the establishment of the HMTF Center for Private Equity Finance in 2000, worldwide private equity fundraising totaled about $375 billion, says McCombs HMTF Center Director Bob Parrino. That number was roughly $2.5 trillion for the five years ending in 2018. The level of private equity investment activity in Texas has also grown very rapidly. Jack Furst, MBA ’84, recalls the partners’ thought process when they established the center in 2000. “When we started the HMTF Private Equity Center, private equity as an asset class was in its early stages of development. >
SHARON KIM
Panel discussion on identifying, attracting, motivating, and retaining talent at the 2018 Texas Private Equity Conference. Panelists left to right: Ross Gatlin, CEO of Prophet Equity; Tiffany Kosch, managing director, CenterGate Capital; Eric Leventhal, consultant, SpencerStuart; and Kevin Murphy, the Kenneth L. Trefftzs Chair in Finance at the University of Southern California.
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C O M M U N I T Y: PA R T N E R S H I P “We wanted business students and future investors to become acquainted with and exposed to the evolution of the private equity space,” says Furst. Education in private equity was in its infancy in 2000. “By founding the center, we wanted to be a part of introducing this whole new vocabulary,” says partner Charles Tate, BBA ’68. Indeed, the impact of the HMTF Center on the education of McCombs students and outside interest in the center have steadily increased over the last 20 years. The center has enabled the development of private equity courses and provided academic oversight and financial support for the McCombs Venture Fellows Program. The center also awards scholarships, brings in high-profile speakers, and hosts private equity conferences and forums. The external activities of the HMTF Center reflect a key objective of the HMTF partners when they endowed the center — to help strengthen and raise the profile of private equity in the state of Texas. Boosting this market in his home state was, in addition to offering educational opportunities for students, top-of-mind for HMTF’s founding partner, Tom Hicks, BBA ’69, when he presented his partners with the idea of starting a center at McCombs. “Texas has always been a state with investors willing to take a risk to do deals, because of our oil and gas industry,” Hicks says. “But back when we started making deals, private equity just wasn’t very institutional here.” Partner John Muse agrees. “We saw that this was an emerging category of commerce and finance, and it was an underrepresented dimension in the state.” In fact, Charles Tate worked out of a large satellite office in New York City, because “that’s where the deal flow was,” he says, noting that Texas was not well known or respected for private equity back then. The trends in private equity over the last 20 years are likely to continue as both the private and public equity markets continue to evolve. There is an ongoing dramatic shift in where growing firms are raising new equity capital. Even very large firms are now able to fund their capital needs in the private markets. “A lot of companies are choosing not to go public,” Parrino says. “Uber is just now talking
38 McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU
Associate Dean for Graduate Programs Steve Limberg presents the Jack D. Furst Scholarship award to Travis Cunningham, MBA '19.
about it. A company that size would never have gotten to the stage it’s at now 10 or 15 years ago, using only private money.” In 2018 there were approximately 300 private companies with a market value of $1 billion or more, up from approximately 40 such companies five years earlier. In contrast, the number of companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges declined from more than 7,000 in 1997 to about 3,600 in 2017. Even more exciting is the growth of private equity in Texas, says Tate. “One of the big changes is when I graduated from The University of Texas, I felt I had to go to someplace else to find
an opportunity that I thought would lead to something interesting,” he says. “That’s all changed. Now, people all over the world recognize that Texas, and in particular Austin, is where they want to start their careers.” That means more job opportunities close to home, says Parrino. He says graduates historically entered the field by first taking a job in investment banking — “to learn the finance of these transactions” — then shifting into a private equity firm after a few years. “Today, there are a lot of opportunities for students to get jobs and there are more career
SPRING 2019 HICKS, MUSE, TATE, AND FURST CENTER FOR PRIVATE EQUITY FINANCE KEY ACTIVITIES Private Equity Courses: McCombs now offers MBA courses in private equity and new venture finance and BBA courses in entrepreneurial finance and mergers and acquisitions. Student interest is booming: More than 40 percent of the second-year McCombs MBA students took the private equity elective course this past fall semester. In contrast, the number of MBA students concentrating in finance is only about 35 percent. “So, we're getting some non-finance students who understand how important this market is today,” says Parrino. Venture Fellows Program: The center also provides academic oversight and financial support to the McCombs Venture Fellows program, through which 16 to 17 MBA students from each class participate in internships with private equity (including both venture capital and buyout) firms during the spring of their first year and fall of their second year. High-Profile Speakers: In addition to for-credit courses, the HMTF Center supports activities that bring high-profile visiting speakers to campus to meet with students, such as Robert F. Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, and General David Petraeus, chairman of the KKR Global Institute. “The idea is to plant seeds across our programs, both at the MBA and the undergraduate levels, to get more students interested in studying private equity, and to increase our success in placing them in the job market,” Parrino says. Scholarships: The HMTF Center annually awards scholarships to support top students who are interested in pursuing careers in private equity. Thirteen such scholarships were awarded in each of the last two years, a number that Parrino hopes to increase in the future.
Speakers from the 2018 Texas Private Equity Conference, clockwise from upper left: James Zelter, co-president of Apollo Global Management; Tim Pawlenty, former CEO of Financial Services Roundtable; Robert Parrino, McCombs HMTF Center director; Tiffany Kosch, managing director, CenterGate Capital.
paths available to our students in private equity,” Parrino says. “The vision of the center hasn't changed, but the opportunities available to students have changed quite a bit over the last 20 years.” There has never been a better time to enter this market — especially in Texas, says Tom Hicks. “There are lots of pri-
vate equity firms here now, and I think that growth will continue.” “The center is continually adding resources and using their own entrepreneurial vision about how to evolve,” Hicks says. “I feel like we were the ones that planted the seeds and fertilized them, and got it going. Now it’s time to let it just grow in its own organic way.”
Conferences and Forums: In addition to its academic programs, the center also has an active program aimed at promoting interactions between members of the private equity community and McCombs and helping to raise the profile of the Texas private equity community. This program includes sponsoring the annual Texas Private Equity Conference, which attracted 300 registrants this year, most of whom were industry professionals such as investors, fund managers, and agents, and advisors. It also includes sponsoring the Forum on Corporate Finance, which brings together senior financial executives and academic researchers from top business schools for two days of discussions on current issues in corporate finance.
Mc COMBS.UTEXAS.EDU 39
C O M M U N I T Y: U P C L O S E
DIVERSITY CHAMPION y JAMES PAGE JR., MBA ’07, VICE CHANCELLOR FOR EQUITY, DIVERSIT Y,
AND INCLUSION, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY
common for many diversity officers, but James Page believes his experience in business and engineering gives him a fresh angle on his role. In August, Page began a new position as vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at Vanderbilt University. He says his role is to ensure that the institution provides a safe, respectful, and dignified environment for its students, faculty, and staff. It’s important to make sure they have the resources to be aware of the challenging sides of diversity issues and be able to address them, Page says. He also says that Vanderbilt, as both an elite university and academic medical center, holds a unique role in its community as an anchor institution. “There’s a real responsibility for us to understand our community so that we maintain the benefits that we receive from them, whether that’s trust, tax breaks, or connections with an engaged employee base,” Page says. Page’s work at Dell Inc. as an engineer early in his career landed him on a career path he hadn’t planned for. By the end of his 10 years there, he was managing the company’s global diversity program while also completing his Executive MBA at Texas McCombs. Since then, he has held executive diversity positions at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and managed care provider DaVita. Page says his background in engineering and business allows him to measure success, work with data, and communicate with executives on multiple levels. “That understanding gives me a really important place at the table,” he says. “What’s been really important for me in my roles at all these institutions has been to facilitate the understanding of the importance we have in creating resilient citizens — citizens who are not going to crumble when they see an email or a communication or get talked to in a certain way,” Page says. “We want to help grow individuals who are going to see that communication as a challenge to help fundamentally shift the behaviors that are happening within our society and culture.” — London Gibson A B A C KG R O U N D I N H . R . M AY B E
40 McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU
HOOK ’EM MAKES IT BIG y JACQUELINE O’REILLY, BBA ’05, VICE
PRESIDENT OF MARKETING, LA MADELEINE a college job as UT’s iconic Longhorn mascot Hook ’Em, Jacqueline O’Reilly was named vice president of marketing for the Fort Worth-headquartered national restaurant chain la Madeleine in October. In her new position, O’Reilly says she plans to expand la Madeleine’s presence by focusing on customer experience and service. “I wanted to be part of a la Madeleine generation that really connects with guests," O'Reilly says. "Our brand holds a unique position in the market, and is poised for significant growth. I’m committed to improving brand relevancy and convenience, creating connections with larger audiences and younger generations.” O’Reilly is the first to say her career got off to a quirky start: After her stint as the UT mascot, her first job out of college was as a spokesperson, or “hotdogger,” driving the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. “It was a natural progression from the Hook ’Em gig,” she says, with a laugh. After that, she worked for 12 years as an account supervisor for TracyLocke Advertising, focusing on national brands such as Pizza Hut and Sonic. O’Reilly says her business honors education at McCombs gave her a foundation of financial knowledge that has been indispensable in her advertising career. “It's important as a marketer that I constantly think beyond the next great campaign, and consider all sides and implications to the business: ’How does this impact operations? How does it impact margins, the bottom line?’” O’Reilly says. “I channel all of that in my day-to-day work, how I lead my team, and how we develop our marketing strategies.” O’Reilly says it may seem unusual for a marketer to take this big-picture kind of approach. “But it just comes naturally after the kind of education I got at McCombs. Plus, I think I’m just a little unorthodox in general.” — London Gibson I N A C A R E E R T H AT B E G A N W I T H
SPRING 2019
LEADING THE CHARGE y TRACY NORRIS, MBA ’15, ADJUTANT GENERAL OF TEXAS on an ROTC scholarship, Maj. Gen. Tracy Norris entered the National Guard. She says her plan was to serve for six years and then get out. Along the way, her plans changed. Thirty-three years later, this January, the Iraq war veteran was named the first female adjutant general of Texas. As adjutant general, she commands the personnel of the Texas Military Department and reports to the governor on the Texas Army National Guard, Texas Air National Guard, and Texas State Guard. “When I look back at all the hard jobs I did that led to this,” Norris says, “I appreciate that the governor saw that and selected me for the position.” Norris has served at the company, battalion, and brigade levels. She was chief of staff of the 36th infantry division when she was deployed to Iraq. “It’s been a hard job, but very rewarding, and it was a very good experience for me that not everybody gets,” Norris says. After returning from Iraq, Norris enrolled in the Texas McCombs MBA program. She says business and the military have two important goals in common: risk assessment and strategic planning. “The MBA education opened up my view from being so focused on military missions,” Norris says. “I was exposed to different experiences that people had, and I learned how to just listen and apply it to some of the things that I was doing with the Texas Military Department.” Military service is great preparation for leadership in the civilian world, she says. “Those are not always skills you can get anywhere else,” Norris says. “You see people come out of the military having been called on to do some really hard things — and accomplish them.” — London Gibson A F T E R C O M P L E T I N G H E R U N D E R G R A D U AT E D E G R E E
REPURPOSING CO-WORKING y SIRI CHAKK A, MBA ’17, SILVA GENTCHEV, MBA ’17,
CO-FOUNDERS, RESET
getting frustrated. Both women were working remotely, and they were tired of the isolation of their home offices. So over dinner one day, they decided to make some changes to help others in the same predicament. Together, they founded Reset, a company that turns restaurants closed during the day into workspaces for freelancers, startup founders, and remote workers. Reset opened its doors last August, and now has three working locations in Austin. More than 250 clients have tried out the workspaces, and many of them have stayed as paying members. The company operates on a revenue-sharing model with the restaurant spaces they use and offers three pricing models to customers — a day pass, a 10-day pass, and a flat monthly fee that offers unlimited daytime use of the space. "We’ve tried to make it a place where people who work from home or work from coffee shops can get a more consistent work experience, but they also have a place to go when they’re feeling socially isolated,” Gentchev says. “That’s something Siri and I both struggled with when we were working from home.” Outside of Reset, Gentchev works as a project manager for Dell and Chakka is a private equity consultant. They met at McCombs when they were placed in the same MBA study team. They sat next to each other for months, became friends, and kept in touch after graduating. Both women say networking and support from McCombs have been instrumental to Reset’s success. “Our classmates have been our strongest support system from the beginning,” Chakka says. “They spread the word. They come to our events. They help us with referrals and let us bounce ideas off of them. So, that’s been huge.” Reset is now operating only in Austin, but Gentchev says she and Chakka are considering expanding to other cities, including Nashville and Denver. — London Gibson S I R I C H A K K A ( L E F T ) A N D S I LVA G E N T E V ( R I G H T ) W E R E E A C H
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C O M M U N I T Y: I N M E M O R I A M
REMEMBERING HERB KELLEHER HIS MISSION OF EXCELLENCE AND HUMANITY CONTINUES AT THE SCHOOL’S HERB KELLEHER CENTER FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP, GROWTH, AND RENEWAL larger-than-life co-founder and former CEO Herb Kelleher died Jan. 3 at age 87, his friends and colleagues at Texas McCombs mourned him deeply. Known for his determination, wit, and love for his employees, the man who democratized air travel also left an indelible imprint on the business school, funding McCombs’ Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship, Growth, and Renewal in 2001. “Herb’s leadership played a key role in propelling our business school to the top echelon,” says Marketing Professor and former McCombs dean Bill Cunningham, who also served as UT Austin president and UT System chancellor. As a close friend and lead director of the board for Southwest Airlines Co., Cunningham spoke during the celebration of Kelleher’s life on Jan. 22 at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas to a standing-room-only crowd of more than 5,000. The celebration honored the man who led an unorthodox airline upstart to 46 years of profitability, making it the most successful airline in the history of commercial aviation. Fortune once called Kelleher “perhaps the best CEO in America.” Today, Southwest carries the most domestic passengers of any U.S. airline, and it will continue to thrive, said Cunningham, noting that McCombs alumni hold all of Southwest’s chief positions. “Herb taught us to recognize that the employees of Southwest Airlines are the people who make it happen,” Cunningham said. “He WHEN SOUTHWEST AIRLINES'
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Southwest Airlines’ beloved co-founder and longtime friend of McCombs, Herb Kelleher, died Jan. 3 at age 87. figured out early on that if the company took care of its employees, the employees would take care of the customers.” Kelleher regularly taught a McCombs graduate course in corporate governance, starting the class with a video of the legendary “Malice in Dallas” event of 1992. When the CEO of Stevens Aviation argued with Kelleher over the rights to the slogan “Plane Smart,” Kelleher challenged him to an arm-wrestling match. Kelleher lost the match but earned $6 million in publicity benefits for Southwest and eventually was allowed to use the tagline anyway. The episode illustrates Kelleher’s personality and the light-hearted corporate culture he engendered at Southwest: “One of Herb’s commandments was that everyone at Southwest Airlines must have fun,” Cunningham said.
When Kelleher funded the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship, Growth, and
Renewal at McCombs, his goal was to create “the finest academic research and teaching center focused on entrepreneurship in the United States.” To that end, the Kelleher Center has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships, startup competition prizes, travel grants, and research grants in entrepreneurship. The center serves as a hub for workshops, conferences, and programming aimed at nurturing in others the entrepreneurial spirit that Kelleher was famous for. Luis Martins, director of the Kelleher Center and chairman of the Department of Management, said the center strives to live up to its founder’s larger-than-life example. “We’ve drawn inspiration from Herb, constantly seeking to improve and innovate, to help our constituents achieve their dreams, to push forward in the face of challenges — and to have fun in the process,” he said. — Judie Kinonen
C O M M U N I T Y: G AT H E R I N G S
A REVIEW OF McCOMBS CELEBRATIONS, HONORS, AND ALUMNI EVENTS 1
ALUMNI BARBECUE SEPTEMBER 15, 2018 All McCombs alumni were invited to a pregame barbecue before the Texas Longhorns versus USC game. Alumni celebrated Longhorn pride, reconnected with fellow alumni and their families, and enjoyed delicious barbecue. Pictured (from left): Steven Robillard, past co-chair, McCombs Parents Council; Chuck Turet, BBA ’68, JD ’71, attorney/partner, Frank, Elmore, Lievens, Chesney and Turet LLP, member, BBA Advisory Board; Anne Robillard, BBA ’77, business development director, M. Gale and Associates, past co-chair, McCombs Parents Council; John Briscoe, BBA ’81, senior vice president and retired CFO of Energy Consulting, chair, BBA Advisory Board (2018-2019). 2
HALL OF FAME INDUCTION CEREMONY NOVEMBER 1, 2018 Dean Jay Hartzell welcomed Richard Folger, Rex Tillerson, and Ted Wang into the McCombs School of Business Hall of Fame. Pictured (from left): Hartzell; Ted Wang, MBA ’96, founding managing partner of Puissance Capital Management; George Ackert, senior managing director of Evercore, chair of the McCombs Advisory Council (2018-2019); Rex Tillerson, BS ’75, 69th United States secretary of state and former chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil Corp.; Richard Folger, BBA ’81, BS ’84, managing general partner of Colbridge Partners Ltd. and past chair, McCombs Advisory Council; UT Austin President Gregory Fenves.
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AUSTIN STARTUP WEEK OCTOBER 16, 2018 Austin Startup Week attendees celebrated the university track at Capital Factory. Hosted by the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship and the MSTC Program, Austin Startup Week brought together students, alumni, and startup teams for a week of interactive workshops and speaker series.
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MBA REUNION OCTOBER 12-13, 2018 At the annual MBA alumni reunion, the classes of 2013, 2008, 2003, and 1998 celebrated their 10-, 15-, and 20-year reunions. Pictured: Alumni from the Texas MBA Class of 1998. 2 5
HALL OF FAME RISING STARS NOVEMBER 1, 2018 The 2018 Alumni Rising Star recipients were (from left): Jeffrey M. Duchin, BBA ’98, senior vice president, UMB Bank; Lisa Seacat DeLuca, MSTC ’10, distinguished engineer, IBM Watson IoT; David R. Druley, BBA ’98, MBA ’03, CEO, Cambridge Associates and member, BBA Advisory Board. 3
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C O M M U N I T Y: A LU M N I N O T E S Please send your updates to alumni@mccombs.utexas.edu for publication in the fall issue of McCombs magazine and online in the alumni news section of the McCombs website. Feel free to share news on behalf of a fellow graduate.
at Richmond College and guest lectured at McCombs.
1990s
Stephen Myers, BBA ’79, was
Kyle Kennedy, BBA ’90, was
named CEO of the College of American Pathologists. Myers joined the CAP, an organization for board-certified pathologists, in 2003 as vice president of finance, and has also served as the company’s CFO and COO, as well as its chief administration officer. He has also worked at Bell & Howell Co.
named president and COO of COPC Inc., a global consulting company. Previously, Kennedy was executive vice president of the company’s global certification practice. He also has worked at Ruffalo Noel Levitz and Harte-Hanks.
1970s
1980s
Allan Goldfarb, BBA ’73, JD ’76, and his son, Aaron Goldfarb, BA ’08, JD ’12, formed the
Ben Moreland, BBA ’84, was
of finance and operations at Triangle Tire USA. He joined the company from Resource Label Group, where he was vice president of supply chain management. He also has worked for Bridgestone Americas in multiple financial management roles.
Goldfarb Law Firm PLLC in El Paso. Allan has also worked as a partner and chairman of Kemp Smith LLP’s business department. Three generations of the family attended McCombs or another school at UT, including Allan's two daughters and parents.
named lead independent director on the board of directors for Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, a subsidiary of iHeartMedia. Moreland is a private investor who previously was CEO of Crown Castle, a wireless infrastructure company. He remains on the board of directors for Crown Castle as well.
John T. Rippel, BBA ’76, joined
Stacy J. Smith, BBA ’85, MBA ’88, was named executive chair-
the board of directors for American Campus Communities, one of the largest student housing developers in the country. Rippel also helped found Alliance Residential Co., one of the largest private multi-family companies in the U.S. and has served as its chief investment officer since 2001.
man of Toshiba Memory Corp. He has lived in and led organizations in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. He previously worked at Intel as president of manufacturing, operations, and sales, as well as serving as CFO for the company.
W. Barefoot Bankhead, BBA ’76, has affiliated with Echelon
Roger Edelen, MBA ’88, was
Analytics to provide witness and support services. A licensed CPA for 40 years, Bankhead will be based out of the company’s Dallas office. Previously, he worked at Deloitte Financial Advisory Services, and has also taught accounting
44 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U
appointed as an associate professor in the finance, insurance, and business law department at Virginia Tech. Edelen’s research is in institutional investing, and he has experience teaching courses on equity valuation, statistics, investments, and derivative securities.
Campbell Metcalfe, BBA ’90, became vice president
27 years in various roles, including vice president of marketing for the Asia-Pacific area, regional president for Canada, and senior vice president at FedEx Services, among others. Subramaniam is credited with creating the company’s first global brand campaign and expanding its global product portfolio. Susan Jenevein, BBA ’92, was
named as director of philanthropy at Tolleson Wealth Management. She will oversee the company’s private foundation clients and support charitable organizations. She previously worked as director of development at Cristo Rey Dallas College Prep, as executive director of Genesis Women’s Shelter, and as a principal at the Wells Firm. Marshall Dodson, BBA ’93,
Scott Mitchell, BBA ’90, was
appointed vice president of sales for T5 Data Centers, a company that operates data centers for companies including those in the finance and technology sectors. Mitchell’s new responsibilities include expanding sales in the U.S., Ireland, and Singapore. Laura Russell, BBA ’90, was
appointed treasurer of the board of directors for the Wilderness Youth Project, a nature-based mentorship program. Russell has 25 years of experience in accounting, primarily corporate, including work at KPMG in public accounting. She is currently the director of finance and tax at the Walking Company Holdings Inc.
was appointed interim CEO of Key Energy Services. Dodson is currently the company’s senior vice president, CFO, and treasurer. Before working at Key Energy, Dodson worked at Dynegy in multiple divisions. Linsly Donnelly, MBA ’95, be-
came a member at large for the board of directors of the Parents Television Council. She is also current CEO and co-founder of SmartFeed, a family media database to help parents find healthy media for their children. She was previously chief marketing officer at Wine.com and co-founder and COO for Joann. com and IdeaForest.
Raj Subramaniam, MBA ’91,
Christopher Bartlett, BBA ’96, was named senior vice
was appointed president and CEO of FedEx Express. He has worked at FedEx for more than
president for corporate development at Verizon Ventures. Bartlett will be in charge of joint
S P R I N G 201 9 is backed by fiat currencies or bitcoin and makes it easier for users to transfer funds. Willard also founded Brazos River Ventures, a real estate investment firm. Chris Eckerman, BBA ’98, MBA ’07, was named a top 30
private equity and venture capital investor for 2018 by Trusted Insight. It is the second year in a row he has been recognized. Eckerman works at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board and was previously a director at Covera Ventures. Marissa Tarleton, MBA, ’02, was named CEO of the online coupon promoter RetailMeNot in January, but she was mentoring students at McCombs long before that. “Especially as a woman executive in the tech space, I am very cognizant of the fact that young women need role models,” Tarleton says. She says her own learning experience at McCombs was shaped by the people who took the time to offer her guidance and support. She wants to offer that same opportunity to current students. Her plans at RetailMeNot include continuing to foster a culture of diversity and refining the company’s growth strategy. “It’s often better to work with diverse teams to solve a problem than act alone, and that’s something McCombs pushed,” Tarleton says.
ventures, acquisitions, divestitures, and strategic investment. Previously, he worked at Bear Stearns Cos., and at Arthur Andersen LLP. Keith Jacobs, BBA ’96, joined
the advisory board for Gateway Architects. Currently president of Luscinia Health, Jacobs will work with the Gateway team to develop a product that helps businesses use SAP data capabilities. Jacobs has also worked as CEO and board member at projekt202.
Adam Spice, MBA ’96, became
CFO for Rocket Lab, an aerospace company that develops advanced U.S. launch systems to provide frequent and reliable access to orbit for small satellites. Spice previously worked at communications hardware company MaxLinear and brings with him more than 20 years of financial experience.
Craig Wideman, MBA ’98,
became vice president of investments at Tailwind Advisors. Wideman joined Tailwind after almost 15 years with the office of Berry R. Cox in Dallas as a managing director and chief investment officer. He has also worked at Merrill Lynch and SunTX Capital Partners. Richard Fusco, BBA ’99, MBA ’08, was named vice president
of operations at recruitAbility, a recruiting company. Previously, he was director of business development at the company. He has also worked at Building Bridges Worldwide, Apogy, and VenueNext.
Halliburton Co. after four years at the company as vice president of corporate development and vice president of investor relations. He has also worked as a director at Deutsche Bank Securities and UBS Investment Bank.
2000s Jaime Easley, MPA ’01, became
vice president and CFO of SPX Flow, a global manufacturing and equipment supplier. Previously, Easley served as the company’s corporate controller and chief accounting officer. Andreas Frank, MBA ’01, was
named president and vice president of Hill-Rom’s front line care business. Previously, Frank was senior vice president of corporate development and strategy and chief transformation officer for the medical technologies company. He joined the company in 2011. Ben Kusin, BBA ’01, and Eric Kusin, MBA ’08, expanded
their Dallas restaurant Malibu Poke to two new locations, one in Austin’s Seaholm District and another near Klyde Warren Park in Dallas. Jason McMinn, BBA ’01,
Stu Bell, MBA ’99, was chosen
Jason K. Willard, BBA ’96, MPA ’96, co-founded GetLoci,
to lead a new branch of CrowdOut Capital, a private lender for middle market companies in Dallas. With more than 20 years of experience in commercial banking, Bell has formerly worked in senior roles at Comerica Bank, Cypress Growth Capital, and Teakwood Capital.
an online platform for digital investments and payments and currently serves as its CEO. GetLoci
Lance Loeffler, BBA ’99, MBA ’04, was named CFO of
committed $1 million to the UT baseball program’s player development facility in August, alongside his brother Justin McMinn and their wives, Heather and Kendall McMinn. Jason was a member of the UT baseball team and founded the McMinn law firm after earning his law degree. James Walbom, MBA ’01, was
named chief financial officer of the year for his work at software
M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 45
C O M M U N I T Y: A LU M N I N O T E S has worked for Mentoring Minds as CFO since 2013. He has also worked at Sabre and Boeing Co. and served in the U.S. Army. David Muse, MBA ’04, was
named CEO of Dharma.ai, a data management company. Muse has worked as a senior advisor to TPG, president and CEO of Enviance, and COO of P2 Energy Solutions. Michael Stewart, MBA ’04,
was named CEO of Saline Health System. Stewart takes this new role after serving as CEO of Navarro Regional Hospital in Corsicana, Texas, for 12 years. He also served for four years in the U.S. Air Force, where he became a captain. Joseph Cahoon, MBA ’05,
Richard Szelc, MBA ’90, was named No. 54 on Barron’s list of top 100 financial advisors for 2018. Szelc was also ranked the No. 1 financial advisor in Texas for the third year in a row. A managing director at Neuberger Berman, Szelc advises clients with collective assets of $1.8 billion and serves high net-worth individuals.
company Tiempo Development. The award, given by the Arizona chapter of Financial Executives International, was given in recognition of Walbom’s effort to improve the company’s financial health. Xianjun Geng, Ph.D. ’03, has
joined Tulane University as a professor of management science and executive director of the business analytics master’s program. Geng is also an associate editor for MIS Quarterly and
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Information and Management. Greg Davis, BBA ’04, became a partner at EIV Capital, a Houston private equity firm. Davis was previously a managing director and investment committee member at Kanye Anderson Energy Funds. At EIV Capital, he will be responsible for originating and overseeing investments. Shad Madsen, MBA ’04, was
named CEO of Mentoring Minds, a publisher of critical thinking resources for students. Madsen
joined private investment firm McNally Capital as a strategic advisor. Cahoon has more than 20 years of experience in real estate and development. He is also the current director of the real estate program at Southern Methodist University’s business school. Fred Han, BBA ’05, was named
a principal of Campbell Lutyens, a global private capital advisers group. Han joined Campbell from Park Hill Group, where he worked as a principal. He has also worked at UBS and Greenhill Cogent. Nilesh Rajadhyax, MBA ’05,
was named vice president of service management at Heartland Dental, the largest dental support organization in the country. Rajadhyax has more than 12 years of experience in health care product development and has previously worked as vice president of health care product analytics and corporate development at TransUnion LLC.
Jeremy Goebel, MBA ’07, be-
came senior group vice president, commercial, at Plains All American Pipeline. Goebel will now oversee Plains’ commercial activities. Previously, he worked as senior vice president of strategic planning and acquisitions. Anup Parikh, BBA ’08, is
pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors in multiple fields while also working full-time at ChargePoint, an electric vehicle charging network. Parikh’s newest projects include Chefwalla, a service that connects chefs with families who need help in the kitchen, and a YouTube channel on electric vehicle education. Parikh previously worked for Google and IBM. Ben Rodgers, MBA ’08, was
named vice president of treasury of Apache Corp. Previously a senior vice president at EIG Global Energy Partners, Rodgers has also worked in investment banking at J.P. Morgan Securities. Jeffrey Knupp, MBA ’09, joined
Perella Weinberg Partners as an advisory partner working out of Denver. Knupp has been working in investment banking for more than 10 years and has worked as a petroleum engineering consultant for Netherland, Sewell & Associates and as an engineer at Merit Energy Co. and ExxonMobil Development. Robert Norris, MBA ’09, was
named CFO of energy company Legacy Reserves Inc. Norris has worked in the energy industry for more than 15 years, including roles at Oil States Interna-
S P R I N G 201 9 has worked for the company for just under three years. Previously, he was a manager and senior vendor manager at Amazon. Charlie Biedenharn, MBA ’15,
owns Bakery Lorraine, a San Antonio eatery that recently opened its first Austin location — in the Domain Northside. It has been named one of the best bakeries in the U.S. by Food & Wine, and was named a destination bakery in Conde Nast Traveler. Hyungmin Kim, MPA ’16, was
Suja Chacko, BBA ’06, was hired as chief diversity officer for the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. As the first person of South Asian descent to hold this position, Chacko will recruit, hire, and train people from underrepresented groups who work or volunteer for the city. She previously worked in the city’s human resources department focusing on the city’s diversity initiatives.
tional and the Catalyst Group, a private equity fund. Samy Sakthivel, MBA ’09, was
named general manager of Novotel Chennai Chamiers Road, a hotel in India. Sakthivel will oversee operations on the property, owned by AG Hospitality. He has also worked at Le Royal Meridian as director of sales and marketing.
one of 58 winners of the 2017 Elijah Watt Sells Award for a high-scoring grade in the Uniform CPA Examination. Kim
works for Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Michigan. Mark Shen, MBA ’16, was
named president of St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Previously, he was CEO of Ascension’s Texas Accountable Care Network, and also served as president of Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin. Blake Harlan, MBA ’17, was
named executive vice president of finance and operations for Emergent Technologies Inc. He will be responsible for overseeing financial objectives and funds for the company and its portfolio companies. He will also spearhead some commercialization efforts.
itat, an international company focused on eco-friendly development. In her role, she works with archeologists and biologists to ensure the preservation of the environment and support for indigenous cultures. She is a sustainability activist and an international speaker. Jerry Wilmink, MBA ’14, was
2010s
named chief business officer of CarePredict, a software company focused on enabling assisted living facilities to track residents via wearable devices.
Tania Arrayales Rodriguez, MBA ’11, was named a woman
Peter Whitcomb, MBA ’14, was
to watch by Austin Woman magazine for founding Green Hab-
named director of new business development at REI. Whitcomb
Tyler Dial, BBA ’18, was recently selected as a partner for Fender Play, a digital learning app by Fender guitars. He is also a brand ambassador for BBVA Compass and is touring this spring through Texas as part of a BBVA Compass/Business Journals tour. In the last year, he released an EP, was featured in Rolling Stone, and performed on a summer tour.
M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 47
M c C O M B S: B O T T O M L I N E
HEAD IN THE CLOUD EMIL SAYEGH, MSTC ’96, DISCUSSES THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF CLOUD COMPUTING by London Gibson
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M I L S A Y E G H G O T I N T O C L O U D C O M P U T I N G V E R Y E A R LY .
He was working for Rackspace in 2006 when the cloud computing industry was just getting started, and he quickly got in the game, eventually building the company’s cloud business to a value of more than $100 million in yearly revenues. Sayegh also spearheaded cloud businesses for HP Inc. and Codero, and co-founded OpenStack, a free platform for cloud computing available to developers around the world. The current president and CEO of the cloud company Hostway in Austin, Sayegh recently led the merger of Hostway and Hosting in one of the largest mergers in the cloud industry. He talked about his career and the past, present, and future of cloud computing with McCombs.
co-location facilities. Others run completely on something like Amazon Web Services or Azure or the Google Cloud — completely in the public cloud. And then a third way is to use somebody else’s data centers, like Hostway’s data centers. What we’re seeing right now is the pendulum swinging to something that’s called the hybrid- or multi-cloud. This is where you have customers that are actually using all three ways. They’re putting some stuff with us, they’re putting some stuff in the public cloud, they’re keeping some stuff on their site, but then needing someone like us to manage it all together seamlessly. They’re able to move data from one environment to the next. Companies are starting to take this hybrid approach because of cost, performance, and compliance with security and privacy laws all around the world. H O W D O YO U E N V I S I O N T H E I N D U S T RY ' S F U T U R E ?
In the next few years, artificial intelligence capabilities are going to explode. You put your data in the cloud, and all of a sudden, you’re going to be able to visualize that data in ways you didn’t even dream possible. Artificial intelligence is going to give us the ability to sort and look at the data to make faster and more precise decisions.
H AV E YO U H A D T O TA K E R I S K S T O G E T W H E R E YO U A R E T O DAY ?
H O W D O YO U H A N D L E D I F F I C U LT S I T U AT I O N S ?
I was in the first wave of people to get into the cloud. It was the road less traveled, for sure, but you’ve got to cut your own path. When you do that, there are benefits. There are also risks. But when you experience a program like the McCombs Master of Science in Technology Commercialization, you learn how to deal with those risks. Your self-assurance in terms of how to tackle business problems grows exponentially. You’re able to make decisions a lot faster. You’re learning from other people’s experiences in the classroom. They’ve been through the same kinds of challenges you have been. So, you’re learning from the professors, you’re learning from the career counselors, and you’re learning from your peers.
There are going to be challenges. Nothing worthwhile comes without them. The thing that you need to keep in mind is to know and believe that you will overcome them and get to where you want to be. You overcome challenges by, frankly, learning from others and having good judgment, and these things get developed through education and life experience.
W H AT ’ S T H E C U R R E N T S TAT E O F B U S I N E S S C O M P U T I N G?
In the last five years, businesses have rushed to move their applications to the public cloud. But I think it’s important for them to be careful and look at the type of data and the type of applications they are moving. Certain applications belong in the cloud, and other applications belong in traditional computing. One example of what shouldn’t be on the cloud is personal health care information, for security and compliance reasons. For databases, it’s for performance reasons. Databases run better on what we call bare metal, on a traditional server, versus running in a virtualized environment that sits in the cloud. They run much better, more efficiently, and less expensively. When you put an application that is not suited for the cloud in the cloud, two things are going to happen. You’re going to pay a lot more than putting it on traditional infrastructure. Or you’re going to have security and privacy risks. W H AT ’ S N E W I N C L O U D C O M P U T I N G?
Currently a lot of people run servers themselves — in their offices or in
48 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y E M I LY H A A S C H
associate professor of Information, Risk, and Operations Management, was one of many Texas McCombs faculty and alumni speaking this year at SXSW Interactive in March. Scott, a data scientist and author, drew a large, interested audience for his talk on “Big Ideas in AI: Solving Problems … Since 1696.” JA M E S S C O T T,
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McCombs School of Business 1 University Station B6000 Austin, Texas 78712
at this year’s SXSW acted as Longhorn ambassadors in T-shirts sponsored by UT Austin.
T H O U S A N D S O F VO L U N T E E R S
