Author: Haas News

When executives at Visa wanted to deepen their understanding of how consumers are using social networks, the Haas@Work program caught their eye. They were intrigued by the opportunity to tap the brainpower of some 40 MBA students.

"We wanted fresh thinkers who were free to think about a space from a consumer mindset as opposed to a corporate mindset," says Scott Sanchez, Visa's vice president for Global Innovation Strategy. "We wanted to find people who had intimate experience with social networking — but it wasn't just about their youth. We were looking for smart thinking."

Haas@Work dispatches hand-picked teams of students to brainstorm innovative solutions to competitive challenges, followed by 100 days on the ground putting the approved recommendations into action. In addition to Visa, this year's clients included Panasonic, Wells Fargo, and Clorox – following last year's partners: Cisco Systems, The Walt Disney Company, Lam Research, and SunPower.

“The students forced us to completely rethink our social networking strategy," says Visa’s Sanchez. "We had been hoping for two or three good ideas from this, and we ended up getting nine."

Feng Xu, MBA 10; Oliver Strutynshi, MBA 09; and Chrstine Rhinehart, MBA 10, collaborate on ideas for Visa, a Haas@Work client.

Pejman Pour-Moezzi, MBA 10, applied to the Visa project because of his interest in social networking. "We brought in social psychology, influence, and sharing of information. Social networking companies are not really driven toward transactions — you need to take a softer approach," says Pour-Moezzi, who later used what he had learned from the Visa experience during his summer internship at Mozilla.

When a company partners with the program, a team of 40 students begins several weeks of intensive research on the firm and market conditions, guided by faculty members and external partners with industry and subject expertise. With Visa, for example, students worked with Associate Professor Terry Hendershott, the faculty director of the Center for Innovative Financial Technology.

Students are selected for Haas@Work projects through a competitive process that usually has three applicants vying for every spot, according to Adam Berman, executive director of the Institute for Business Innovation. A student's skills, experience, perspective, and creativity are all taken into account in building the teams.

"What is interesting is that with Panasonic, the challenge was to provide insights into the youth market, and with Wells, it was expanding market share in the retirement space, while the focus with Clorox was the supply chain for a line of green cleaning products," Berman adds. "We can take any high-level challenge and marshal 40 students with the right backgrounds in a cross-functional team to attack it."

The research period culminates in a full-day workshop at company headquarters, where the 40 part-time and full-time MBA students — broken into five teams that zero in on specific areas of the challenge — make their pitches directly to the company's top executives. The execs deliberate on the spot and cherry-pick their favorites, which are then pursued by smaller teams.

One presentation, in particular, electrified the Visa executives. "It was a very complicated idea, told to us in one of the most amazing presentations I've ever seen," Sanchez recalls. "The storytelling, the pictures they showed, the voice over, the solution – it absolutely blew us away. We are not only looking at implementing it, but we are planning to use their storytelling approach to push other ideas forward at Visa."

Visa found the experience with Haas@Work so valuable that Sanchez is already scoping out a new challenge to re-engage the program in the fall. "The students were all very down-to-earth, with a seek-to-understand mindset," Sanchez says. "For them, it was very much about listening and getting the right outcome rather than being wedded to something in particular. The intellectual firepower was also impressive."

Jeff Street, senior vice president of retail retirement for Wells Fargo, says he was initially attracted to the program as a cost-effective way to bring in new resources with a fresh perspective. He chose an opportunity that was both important to his group and easy for the students to grasp: How could the bank better help its customers save for retirement, whether they are just starting out or well on their way?

"The student teams delivered three new ideas we hadn’t thought of — and this was something we had been thinking about for a while," Street says. "These were completely different ways to tackle the challenge. That kind of creativity was the most impressive part."

For Clorox, students used an open-innovation approach to solve supply chain challenges with its Green Works natural product lines: Picking up the phone and calling supply chain experts at non-competitors for tips.

"Almost every student team reached out to other companies in this space and gathered intelligence about how they are solving similar problems," says Frank Tataseo, executive vice president for strategy and growth for plastic bags, wraps, and the Away from Home line. "I was so impressed by this approach I recommended it to our head of international. Often, our inclination has been to try to solve it all ourselves.”

Clorox and Haas are currently working together to implement two of the students' ideas: a supply-chain solution and a web-based marketing strategy. "This is exactly the kind of idea that we, as a consumer package goods company, could benefit from by involving students and how they use social networking," Tataseo says of the web-based marketing strategy. "Their views on how to create better one-to-one marketing were enlightening."

Tataseo says he'd highly recommend the program to other companies. “I guess one thing that never ceases to amaze me — and the Haas folks amazed me –is the distance they came in terms of understanding the business problems," he says. "This was impressive in and of itself, but also the number of ideas and finally, the way they presented their recommendations — they just wow you.”

All nine of the Haas School's PhD graduates this year have landed positions at top universities in the US and Europe.

Among the graduates, three studied business and public policy, three studied marketing, two were in organizational behavior, and one was in finance.

Eight of the nine graduates will work as assistant professors, while one graduate has accepted a post-doctoral position at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center.

Three graduates will cross the Atlantic to share their ideas and expertise in Europe at the London School of Economics, the University of Navarra in Spain, and INSEAD in France.

"The Haas PhD program continues to train some of the most sought-after new professors at the top business schools," says Miguel Villas-Boas, director of the Haas PhD Program and the J. Gary Shansby Professor of Marketing Strategy. "The fact that all of our graduating PhD students landed positions at such well-respected research universities is a major accomplishment. Top schools are interested in tapping the pioneering new ideas generated at Haas."

Three graduates will take their knowledge to the East Coast, where they will teach at Yale, Rutgers, and New York University. One graduate is moving to the South to teach at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., while another graduate is staying in the Bay Area to teach at Santa Clara University.

Seventy-six new students — the most ever for the Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA Program — began their coursework as the program's eighth class on May 19.

The new class is five students larger than the previous one. Thirty percent of the class lives outside the Bay Area, including as far away as Brazil. One student works all over the world on oil rigs for Schlumberger.

The students come from a wide range of companies and industries, including Chevron, Google, Lockheed Martin, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Wells Fargo Bank, and even Cal's rival, Stanford University. A small number of students work in government, including the San Francisco Department of Public Health and the US Navy.

The class also includes a husband-and-wife team. The couple, the parents of four children, have roots in both medicine and viticulture.

The husband is a pain doctor in Napa, while the wife is a retired dentist. They own vineyards and a winery. The wife manages their wine brand and also owns and manages a grocery store in Point Reyes Station.

The class averages 11 years of work experience, and its average age is 36.

A video produced by this year’s Lifelong Connections Campaign (LLC) Committee urged fellow students "Don’t forget where you came from." They didn’t: Every member of the full-time MBA class of 2009 made a pledge to the campaign, achieving a 100 percent participation rate for the first time in the campaign's 21-year history.

Technically, the class even exceeded 100 percent participation because an exchange student from London contributed to the campaign.

Despite tough economic times, the full-time Berkeley MBA class of 2009 pledged a total $59,285. The first $25,000 in pledges was matched by Dean Rich Lyons, bringing the campaign’s total pledges to $84,285. Money raised through the Lifelong Connections Campaign directly benefits the Haas School through the Haas Annual Fund.

Nora Tucker and Mahta Eghbali, both MBA 09, co-chaired this year’s LLC committee, which invigorated the campaign with the viral video to promote the idea of "You. Us. Haas. Stronger." They also used competition as a motivator, bestowing the cohort that completed pledging first with extra funds for year-end celebrations. The Oski cohort won.

At a May 15 Consumption Function to celebrate the end of the year, the LLC committee presented the class of 2009’s check to Dean Lyons, who thanks the committee for the hard work and dedication that led to such a successful campaign. "I am inspired by your commitment," Lyons told them.

Lyons thanked all of the graduating students for "being an integral component of the Haas Community." "Your participation as active alumni will continue to be important as we make Haas even stronger," he added.

Mahta Eghbali (left) and Nora Tucker (right), both MBA 09, helped achieve 100 percent participation for the first time in the history of Lifelong Connections Campaign. Here they present the campaign check to Dean Rich Lyons.

A team of 28 Haas undergraduate seniors reached out to their classmates through one-on-one solicitations and raised a record-breaking $10,545 for the Haas Senior Gift Campaign.

As a result of the Senior Gift Campaign Committee’s high-touch efforts, 60 percent of the graduating class of 2009 contributed to the 14th annual campaign. That's up from 48 percent participation by the class of 2008, which raised $8,700.

Adam Melero, BS 09, gift committee chair, presented the class's check to Dean Rich Lyons at the school's end-of-the-year celebration on May 15. Melero said the goal of the committee’s efforts was to educate classmates on the importance of staying connected and supporting the Haas School.

Dean Lyons commended the 28-member committee for its efforts and noted that many students made donations that qualified them to join the Haas Leadership Society, which he said, "represents our school’s most invested annual supporters."

Adam Melero, BS 09, gift committee chair, helped the Senior Gift Campaign raise a record $10,545 this year. Here Melero presents the class's check to Dean Rich Lyons.

"Call the shots if you see a friend drinking" was the thrust of the campaign created by a Haas team of undergraduates who placed third in the national American Advertising Federation competition in Washington, DC, from June 4 to June 6.

Imagical, a Haas-sponsored chapter of the American Advertising Federation, was among 16 teams who made presentations at the final competition, which took place at the federation's national conference. Imagical lost to Syracuse University and the University of Alabama by the narrowest margins in the history of the competition — 0.2 percent and 0.1 percent respectively.

"This is also the best that Berkeley has done in over a decade in this competition," says Esther Hwang, BS 09, Imagical’s creative coordinator and one of 20 Berkeley students who traveled to Washington, DC, to compete. She noted that the Century Council, a national nonprofit funded by distillers dedicated to fighting drunk driving and underage drinking, "loved our campaign."

The teams were challenged to come up with a campaign to decrease binge drinking on college campuses. While many campaigns addressed drinkers directly, Imagical targeted its message to drinkers' friends, Hwang says.

Imagical's "Call the Shots" campaign previously took first place in the Northwest Regional competition in May.

Imagical spent a year developing its multimedia campaign, which incorporated everything from bus shelter hologram ads to email newsletters to viral videos. To prepare, the team studied the effectiveness of three binge-drinking campaigns, surveyed 1,200 college students at 84 campuses, and conducted 150 in-depth interviews.

"Next year the team plans to recruit new talent and aims to take first place in the nationals," says Hwang. Students interested in joining the group can contact Imagical at [email protected].