Prof. John Morgan: From Research Chops To Photo Opps

In June, Prof. John Morgan and alumnus Richard Wang, PhD 10, won the Accenture Award from the Haas School's journal, California Management Review, for their article "Tournaments for Ideas." The article showed firms how to organize tournaments to
generate innovative ideas. Outside of Haas, Morgan nurtures his own creativity through photography. Morgan captured this vortex heading into Sedona in Arizona. View other Morgan photos at flickr.com/aidanmorgan. Read Morgan and Wang's article at cmr.berkeley.edu/accenture_award.html.

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Haas Thought Leaders Share Innovation Insights in Shanghai

Shanghai, the most populous city in China, provided a vibrant backdrop as some of the Haas Schools top thinkers from North America, Europe, and Asia shared insights about innovation March 22 at the Berkeley Asia Business Conference.

Organized by Haas Professor Teck Ho, the conference featured keynote speeches from the Haas School's Nobel Laureate Oliver Williamson; alumnus Joe Jimenez, MBA 84, CEO of Novartis; Professor Michael Katz; and Dean Rich Lyons.

Jimenez set the stage for his talk with a video about deaths from diarrhea, obesity, malaria, and other easily treatable or preventable diseases. He talked about how
reducing these deaths requires Novartis to innovate in ways that go beyond developing pharmaceuticals.

In remote places like rural Africa, Novartis taps widely used cellphone technology
to ensure patients can get medicine when they journey to the clinic. Using SMS technology, Novartis was able to reduce out-of-stock incidents from 25 percent to 1 percent in a few months. Novartis also distributes anti-malaria drugs for free in Africa–one example of the company's social responsibility effort.

Meanwhile, Dean Lyons cited growing health care costs as one of many "unsustainabilities" that require the skills of a new type of leader. Lyons said schools and organizations need to develop leaders who can bend the unsustainable paths facing our and our children's generations in areas such as health care, education, energy, and clean water.

Lyons pointed to culture as key to developing path-bending leaders. He closed the conference with a question for the 300 alumni and friends in the audience: "What culture would you create if you wanted to produce pathbending leaders?"

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The Social (Entrepreneur) Network

 

The 12th annual Global Social Venture Competition, founded by Berkeley MBA students, expanded again this year to draw a record number of teams. Here's a look at the vast network of socially minded entrepreneurs that the student-run competition has helped foster.

• 845 entrants from 296 universities in 31 countries
• 463 entrants from China
  
• 21 Berkeley MBA student organizers
  
• 112 student organizers at 10 university partners worldwide
• 377 mentors worldwide
• 3,000+ teams participating since inception
• $500,000+ in prize money awarded since inception
• 15 finalists competed for $45,000 in prize money
• 388 Semifinal and final judges
• 1 Winner: NextDrop, a mobile platform to help residents in India avoid wasting hours waiting for water to arrive by truck or communal tap. The team includes
  UC Berkeley graduate students and a Stanford MBA student.

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Teams Excel in Real Estate, Health Care

MBA students ended the spring semester on a high note, besting other top business schools in health care and real estate competitions.

A team of Haas students in the joint business-public health degree program won the inaugural Health Services Case Competition at Kellogg April 30 after standing out for considering client culture. Students were charged with creating a growth strategy for DaVita Rx, a full-service pharmacy for kidney patients.

Tapping the Haas network, the team learned about DaVita culture from a student who worked for the firm to determine which strategies would work best for the company.

In real estate, another Haas team buried Stanford in the annual NAIOP Real Estate Challenge May 4, taking both first place and the audience-choice award. It was the fourth victory in a row for Berkeley-Haas. The challenge: Present a multi-use development plan for three sites in Livermore, Calif. The Haas team talked with more than 100 experts, from the city's mayor to hoteliers to attorneys, to develop its 200+ page proposal.

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Seinfeld Meets Supply Chain

Associate Professor Terry Taylor has a secret weapon in his quest to interest students in supply chain management: Jerry Seinfeld.

Taylor, who teaches Operations and studies supply chain management, was recently named among the world's 40 best business school professors under 40 by the MBA website Poets & Quants. Before he came to Haas in 2007, MBA students called Operations their least relevant course. With Taylor, it shot up to most relevant.

"Professor Taylor doesn't just teach Operational Leadership, he personifies it," Bernie Murphy, MBA 11, told Poets & Quants. Taylor gives students countless examples of what he means by mitigating the "pain of variability," from color-coded handouts to predesigned white-board diagrams. He has a fun side, too, using a mix of teaching techniques, including case discussions, in-class simulations, and yes, a few Seinfeld clips.

Take Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi" episode. It's an extreme example of a service organization (a soup-stand vendor) addressing variability by forcing customers to act a certain
way, Taylor says. He teaches students a more moderate approach: Identify the sources of variability you face; eliminate the variability you can; and find intelligent ways to accommodate the rest.

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Undergrads Spread Little Sunshine

Undergraduates put democracy into action this spring when they gave local nonprofits $12,000 as part of their Strategic Philanthropy course.

For the second year, students in the course were charged with selecting a local nonprofit to receive a $10,000 donation from Doris Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett's sister and founder of The Sunshine Lady Foundation, which invests in programs that help the working poor and families in crisis.

Dividing into teams, students identified and evaluated six nonprofits that they thought would be most deserving of the $10,000. The teams then gave presentations on each nonprofit to their classmates—and Buffett via videoconference—before the class chose a winner.

This year, though, all six nonprofits were winners, thanks in part to alumnus Ted Kuh, BS 82. After sitting in on a class, Kuh was so impressed with the students and the course that he donated an additional $2,000. That extra gift prompted the students to give all six nonprofits a piece of the pie. The two favorites split $10,000: First Graduate, which supports students who will be their family's first college graduates, and Operation Access, which provides free surgery to low-income people. And the students split Kuh's $2,000 among the four other finalists.

Nora Silver, director of the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership, taught the course, which was designed by students in 2009 and won a UC Berkeley award for curriculum innovation.

To contribute to the class, contact Silver or Kuh at silver@haas.berkeley.edu.

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Students Raise Funds for Japan

About one week before their spring break trek to Japan, Berkeley MBA students canceled their trip and sprang into action to begin fundraising for the earthquake- and tsunami-ravaged country. First, students created a Web portal to facilitate donations to aid groups. Then they helped organize several fundraising events, including a bake sale, sake tasting, and silent auction with the University Village Japan Club, altogether raising more than $4,000 for the Japanese Red Cross Society. Meanwhile, after sending an email to alumni in Japan, Dean Rich Lyons received notes detailing some harrowing experiences but no reports of casualties in the Haas community. Fortunately, the Haas students from Japan also reported their family members overseas were safe.

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