Haas News recently talked to Chang, who also holds a bachelor’s degree in political economy from UC Berkeley, about his love of public service, his experiences at Haas, and his desire to serve Berkeley in a district where students make up the majority of the voting population.
You came to Haas planning to return to the private sector. Why did you change your mind and run for office instead?
I wanted to leave politics. But coming here renewed my passion for public service. I was a delegate in the Graduate Assembly, representing all three Haas MBA programs, and president of the EWMBAA (student) association. That is what made me realize that I want to really double down on public service.
As you approach graduation, what are some highlights from your time spent in the MBA program?
Taking core classes with my cohort and the deep friendships that you build. Also, placing second at the HUD Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design and Planning Competition. Being able to work with different people from the Real Estate development program, Berkeley Law, and the architecture program at Berkeley… If there’s anything I could recommend that Haasies do, it is case competitions with people from outside of your program. Meeting people from different majors and different walks of life is a beautiful thing.
What made you decide to run for a seat on the City Council?
I’m running because I have a deep passion for public service and because I have a deep love for Berkeley. Berkeley is a place where I found the love of my life, Richard. But it goes a little deeper than that. I get to be authentically “me” here, whether that’s showing up at work at City Hall, or showing up authentically at Haas—being a leader on campus representing Haas, I have the opportunity to be who I am: fearless, not just in my identity, but also in my values and being able to speak up, even if it’s sometimes unpopular.
What are the core issues driving your campaign?
Fighting for affordable housing. I am concerned about housing affordability and availability and safety, which I know is a big concern for many of our students. Students deserve a nice place to live and an economically vibrant Telegraph Avenue business district. These are all things that I’m running on. The person who represents you—the job is to really serve you and bring back resources to the community, to make the community better, and I think I’ve shown I’ve been able to do that.
Do you support the UC Berkeley campus decision to build housing at People’s Park?
Yes. I think this is one of the reasons why Haasies should care about this election. The building project at People’s Park, to be clear, includes two-thirds green space. There’ll be housing for 1,100 students, and there will be over 100 housing units for the unhoused. We can either have that as an option, or an open-air drug market as the alternative. I know students overwhelmingly want housing. I think a lot of students are too afraid to speak up because, anytime we do anything to solve a problem that requires some form of public safety measure, it’s often vilified as a right-wing tactic or supporting right-wing policies. And I just really reject those notions.
We can either have that as an option, or an open-air drug market as the alternative. I know students overwhelmingly want housing.
How do you think your classes and community at Haas have helped you to be a better leader?
I think that all of my classes are founded on our Haas Defining Leadership Principles. Whether that’s going beyond ourselves, questioning the status quo, confidence without attitude, or students always, every single one of my classes has really grounded me. I have become a better leader, am open to different perspectives, ask the tough questions, and also just always want to learn and soak up different knowledge. I always say Haas is one of the most supportive communities that I’ve ever belonged in.
What do you love about your current job?
What I do best is I know how to deliver for constituents who are in need, as long as they’re patient with me and give me time. Most of the time, I am able to give them what they want within reason, whether that’s cleaning up a street, making sure that our unhoused people are compassionately served, or getting a traffic circle at the edge of our district, or making sure that their events get fully funded. Also, getting $9 million for the African American Holistic Research Center, and making MLK Way much safer. It’s still messy, but safe. That took seven years, and I am so proud of it.
How would you make this area of Berkeley safer?
I think we need better lighting on and off campus. The campus “Warn Me” system needs to be a lot better. The city could do more to make sure that simple things like cracked shop windows are fixed, simple things like cleaner streets—this goes a long way. We are also working with merchants to install private cameras that work with the city. I am open to public cameras but I am always concerned with civil liberties, so I’m not ready to say yes or no to that. We should be working with business first. One of my biggest goals is economic growth on Telegraph. We know the No. 1 crime deterrent is more eyes on the streets, so that’s what I’m really hoping for.
The special election will be held April 16 until 8 p.m. (mail-in ballots have been sent). Registration has ended, but eligible District 7 voters can register at the voting location, the YWCA Berkeley, 2600 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, before and on election day.
Shortly before Layshia Clarendon, BA 13 (American studies), was drafted into the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), the Cal senior attended a pre-draft orientation. Clarendon raised a hand and inquired about matching 401(k)s. The people fielding questions were floored. They weren’t used to college students knowing what a 401(k) was, let alone being savvy enough to ask about matching contributions.
“I remember going to that meeting and thinking, ‘Oh, wow, I already know some of this,’” Clarendon recalls. When it came to financial literacy, Clarendon was miles ahead of most of their peers—all thanks to an independent study course they’d taken with Haas professional faculty member Stephen Etter, BS 83, MBA 89, called Financial & Business Literacy for the Professional Athlete.
For more than 20 years, Etter has helped scores of UC Berkeley athletes prepare for the financial realities of turning pro. Everyone from football great Marshawn Lynch and quarterback Jared Goff to Olympic swimmer Missy Franklin and golf phenom Collin Morikawa, BS 19, have learned about navigating contracts, choosing advisors, budgeting, investing, and more for their lives post-graduation.
Now, all of these issues are relevant for students too. In 2019, legislation was passed—first in California, then later throughout the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)—allowing college athletes to earn compensation for the use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) via sponsorships. No longer are questions about agents, contracts, and taxes part of a hypothetical future; student-athletes are facing them today, intensifying the need for Etter’s class.
“I’m working with students who are putting a half to three-quarters of a million dollars in their pocket today,” Etter says. The trouble was that his independent study only reached a small number of students. This coming fall, with the help of a grant from Robinhood Money Drills, Etter is expanding his course and bringing it to many more UC Berkeley student-athletes.
Mary Elizabeth Taylor, vice president of international government and external affairs for Robinhood Markets, Inc., says one of the company’s top priorities is providing the next generation with access to financial education. “Through the Robinhood Money Drills program, we are proud to give college students and student-athletes a strong foundation to responsibly manage their finances for the future,” she says. UC Berkeley is one of eight schools nationwide benefitting from the initiative.
It’s how much you keep
The idea for an independent study for athletes first occurred to Etter when one of his students, Nnamdi Asomugha, BA 06 (interdisciplinary studies), approached him for some advice. Asomugha was preparing for the draft (ultimately a first-round draft pick by the Oakland Raiders) and was suddenly facing major decisions that would affect his economic future. Etter, one of the founding partners of Greyrock Capital Group, had been teaching corporate finance at Haas for nearly a decade by then. He favored experiential learning with real-world application, and helping athletes navigate the complex waters of a professional career more than fit the bill.
Athletes turning pro find themselves in an unusual position, entering highly lucrative careers while having no financial training. The eye-popping mega-salaries that generate headlines are not the norm in pro sports, but starting salaries for many athletes are nevertheless substantial. Still, as former National Football League (NFL) player Justin Forsett, BA 14 (interdisciplinary studies), put it, “It’s not how much you make, it’s how much you keep.”
Forsett, who played pro football for nine years and is now an entrepreneur and motivational speaker, says taking Etter’s course gave him a real advantage. “There weren’t a lot of courses on financial literacy when I was a kid, in high school, or even in college,” he says. After gaining a solid foundation with Etter, he entered the NFL with what he calls “a conservative approach.” He explains, “I wasn’t going out getting fancy new cars. I knew it was about how much I could actually keep and save and invest in the right things.”
Keeping your future self in mind
Each year, Etter begins the class by sharing a series of sobering statistics: 78% of retired NFL players suffer financial hardship. Nearly 16% of NFL players have filed for bankruptcy. And 60% of former National Basketball Association (NBA) players are broke. These brief, cautionary tales drive home a crucial point that’s easily overlooked by young student-athletes: While the pros earn big salaries during their careers, those careers are often short and can be wildly unpredictable.
“Steve tells us the reality,” says Cam Bynum, BA 20 (American studies), who studied with Etter and just finished his third season as a safety with the Minnesota Vikings. “The average lifespan in the NFL is three years,” he says. “If you’re blessed, you’ll make it to 10 years, maybe 12. So that means you’re retiring at 32 years old, maybe 35. That’s just half your life. So then, what are you going to do?” Without Etter to prompt them, many student-athletes might never give that question much thought.
Elijah Hicks, BA 20 (American studies), a safety for the Chicago Bears, says that one of the most valuable aspects of the course was that it forced him to think ahead. “I got to put myself in my future self’s shoes,” he says. “The class puts you in scenarios before you’re actually there, so now, I’m more prepared and I’m not surprised by anything that pops up, like taxes.” High-earning athletes, for instance, not only have to pay taxes in their home state but in nearly every state they play in, a fact that shocked many of Hicks’ first-year teammates—but not him. Etter also helped Hicks start a nonprofit, Intercept Poverty Foundation, to provide emergency grants to low-income UC Berkeley students during the pandemic.
Learning to ask the right questions
Since the course’s inception, athletes from a range of sports have studied with Etter, players heading to the NFL, NBA, WNBA, and Major League Baseball (MLB), along with swimmers, golfers, and water polo players. News of the class has tended to spread by word of mouth among teammates and friends, but Etter says coaches, too, have been instrumental in steering students to his door. “The Cal coaches have had the insight and caring attitude to make sure they prepared their athletes for the financial aspects of their careers,” he says.
Not all professional careers are the same, however. Swimmer and six-time Olympic medalist Ryan Murphy, BS 17, knew he wanted to swim professionally after his success at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, but he didn’t know what that entailed. In Etter’s class, Murphy’s fellow students that semester were heading for the NFL, but as a swimmer, Murphy’s professional path was less straightforward. “Our earning power is completely based on marketing,” he says. So Etter tailored the learning, helping him focus on finding a marketing agent.
“He connected me with people on campus and had me sit down for meetings with them,” Murphy recalls. Etter also encouraged him to talk to older swimmers who’d turned professional. “He was kind of a master connector for me.”
Getting out and talking to people is a big part of what Etter teaches. Whether it’s picking an agent, a financial advisor, or an insurance broker, knowing the kinds of questions to ask to make decisions that are in their own best interest is a fundamental skill he wants these athletes to learn. Sometimes, those questions come back to Etter himself. He continues to serve as a mentor to his student-athletes—they all have his number and aren’t shy about texting or calling for advice.
Changing the playing field for college athletes
Similar to professionals, NIL allows college athletes to engage in sponsorships and receive cash payments and gifts. For example, student-athletes may enter contracts to appear for autograph signings, endorse products via social media, conduct camps and clinics, post personalized video greetings, and more. However, the policy precludes students from entering pay-for-play contracts with colleges and universities.
Some Cal athletes secure deals on their own or through agents, while others are paid through the California Legends Collective, a newly formed organization (not affiliated with UC Berkeley) funded by donors who, together, create income opportunities like those mentioned above for Cal student-athletes. Advisory Board members include Lynch, Clarendon, and Murphy.
Christian Trigg, MBA 23, director of brand development for the Cal women’s basketball program, says the new NIL rules benefit players and the team as a whole. “This is a huge opportunity for students to start building wealth at an earlier age,” he says. “Especially athletes who might be first-generation college students.” In his newly created position, Trigg will help members of the team build their brands and secure NIL sponsorships, which in turn will help attract talented recruits to Cal. As women’s basketball coach Charmin Smith notes, “Having a strong NIL presence is critical in today’s college athletics environment.”
Cal football player Jaydn Ott is one of the students who’s benefited from Etter’s class while still at Cal. Ott, a running back with a likely future in the NFL, has begun earning money through NIL contracts, and he’s clear-eyed about the importance of financial literacy. “I want to understand what’s going on with my money when I speak to my financial advisors, so I’m not just giving somebody my money and saying, ‘Here, do whatever,’” he says. “I’m able to sit down and talk with them and understand what’s actually going on.”
“I want to understand what’s going on with my money when I speak to my financial advisors, so I’m not just giving somebody my money and saying, ‘Here, do whatever.’ ” – Jaydn Ott, Cal running back.
Just like pros, college athletes need to understand the taxes they owe, and Etter makes sure his students do. “A lot of NCAA athletes don’t understand the difference in income and taxes between being a W-2 employee and a 1099 contractor,” he says. NIL compensation is entirely 1099, which means there is no tax withholding; players must pay estimated taxes. Etter suspects that more than a few student-athletes across the country will inadvertently fail to pay sufficient taxes. But Ott won’t be one of them. “After Jaydn got his first paycheck,” Etter says, “he put half away for taxes. And then he was worried, so he put half of the other half away for taxes, too.”
Spreading the wealth
Etter, who has three times won the school’s prestigious Earl F. Cheit Award for Teaching Excellence from his undergraduate students (once as a graduate student instructor), has long wanted to empower more students with the skills he teaches. Now, thanks to the grant from Robinhood, he’s going to. Starting this fall, the course will be reclassified as a full-fledged class rather than an independent study, which will allow more student-athletes to take it. The structure of the course is being retrofitted to accommodate up to 250 students while maintaining the active learning style that’s a hallmark of the class. Etter will be assisted by MBA graduate student instructors who are reflective of the diverse student-athlete population.
The money is helping Etter fulfill a long-held goal. “My dream,” he says, “was to get this grant and to educate all 1,000 student-athletes at Cal.” From there, he says he’d like to bring the class to all NCAA athletes and ultimately to all 55,000 students on the Berkeley campus.
When TOMS Shoes first hit the market in 2006, company founder Blake Mycoskie’s plan forever changed how people think about the for-profit business landscape. TOMS’ One for One business model was simple: Every time you sell an item to a customer, you give one away to someone in need.
Mycoskie said his idea came to him during a trip to Argentina.
Taking note of both the country’s popular alpargata shoes and, more importantly, the youth who could not afford to buy a pair, he was inspired to create a business that could help solve the problem.
“The idea was really simple,” Mycoskie shared at the Feb. 7 Dean’s Speaker Series, co-sponsored by the Center for Social Sector Leadership. “It was just: ‘What if I took these shoes that I see all these people wearing that I’ve never seen before, and sell them back in Venice, California, where I live, and every time I sell a pair, we give a pair to these kids that desperately need them for their school uniforms. The idea is, that if you buy a pair today, we give a pair tomorrow.”
That’s when “Tomorrow’s Shoes” became TOMS. As the brand grew in popularity, the company did not invest much money in traditional marketing strategies. (Watch the video below)
While a lack of marketing may seem antithetical to a for-profit business, it was exactly this alignment between values and practice that brought the company’s early success. “It’s this idea that our giving and our commitment to our impact had a greater influence on the customer than any type of marketing we could ever do,” Mycoskie said. “We were not necessarily going to be focused on the things that a traditional business was, but we really focused on giving and telling our story, and that’s why our model worked so well.”
From shoes, the company expanded its One for One model to include eyewear and safe drinking water. Mycoskie would donate a book for every purchase of his 2011 autobiography, “Start Something that Matters.”
Though he is no longer an owner of TOMS, Mycoskie’s leadership efforts have not stopped. He is currently a co-founder of the wellness program Madefor and is also investing in research into the use of psychedelics for therapeutic purposes.
“I really have this belief that, to found a successful company, it has to come from a passion, from a need, from something that you’ve seen in the world that you’re frustrated with or you don’t agree with or there’s a product you wish you had but you can’t buy,” Mycoskie said. “I believe that that’s where the great businesses come from.”
Read the transcript below:
– [Ann] OK, why don’t you all take your seats. Come and take your seats. Good afternoon, everybody. My name’s Ann Harrison. I’m the dean of the Haas School of Business. Welcome to today’s Dean’s Speaker Series. It is co-sponsored with the Center for Social Sector Leadership, otherwise known as CSSL. Nora here who runs it is sitting right here. I am absolutely thrilled to introduce our guest today, Blake Mycoskie. Blake’s story is a really powerful one.
He was on a trip in Argentina in 2006, and while he was there, he saw many children who had no shoes, and he was deeply affected by how difficult their lives were. And so, he decided to create TOMS Shoes. And in doing so, he created the One for One business model. And that’s a model where a customer, by buying a product, helps someone else in need every time they buy. And that was a complete revolution in the way to do for-profit business. Amazingly, over its lifetime, TOMS has provided over 96 million pairs of shoes for children around the world. Since then, TOMS expanded into other areas of vital needs, for example, eyewear and safe water.
Now, Blake didn’t stop there. He published a book, “Start Something That Matters.” And every time that book sells one copy, he donates a child’s book to a child. So that’s really amazing. His current ventures include co-founding a wellness program Madefor, and his philanthropic endeavors include working in the area of legalizing psychedelics—hopefully we’ll hear a little bit about that today, too. We’re incredibly fortunate today to have such a trailblazer here working in the area of socially responsible business, an area that Haas excels in and that we’re passionate about.
Blake, our students have so much to learn from you, I just want to thank you once again for coming to speak today to give your insights to our community. So just some quick housekeeping. When you sat down, you might have noticed a note card on your seat. If a question occurs to you, write down the question while you’re listening to the Q&A, and then you can hand it to our assistants here, my colleagues, they’ll be collecting them, and then there’ll be time starting about 1:10 for some Q&A. So now, I’m going to turn over the session today to two students who will be doing the Q&A, Eli Bresler and Yvonne Mondragón, and they will moderate today’s discussion. Take it away!
– [Yvonne] Thank you, hello, can you hear me? So Blake, thank you for being here. As we’ve mentioned before here at Haas, we care a lot about social impact and entrepreneurship, so everybody here is very excited to hear from you. To start us off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your journey starting TOMS, kind of from your perspective, what influenced the One for One model and how that helped drive the success of TOMS?
– [Blake] OK, great, well TOMS started in Argentina, and there’s kind of a funny backstory of how I got there. How many people have seen the reality TV show, “The Amazing Race?” Oh, a lot of people. OK, did anyone see it 20 years ago when I was on it? Two people, yes! So my sister and I were on this TV show, “The Amazing Race,” and for those who haven’t seen it, you’re racing around the world for 30 days, and there’s a $1 million prize at the end. And interestingly enough, the last leg of the race was here in San Francisco. And unfortunately, at a very critical moment, my sister said, “We’re almost there to win the $1 million. Let’s stop and ask for directions to make sure we know where we’re going.” And as it’s such a cliche, as a man, I said, “No, I know exactly where I’m going. We don’t need to stop and ask.” And next thing I know, we were lost, and we lost the $1 million by four minutes. And after we lost $1 million by four minutes, about a month later, I got a text message from my sister, and it was this random string of numbers. And I thought, “That’s weird.” And I thought, “Well, maybe she kind of butt-dialed me or something, and that’s what came through on the text.” So I didn’t respond or anything. And then the next month, I got another text message, and it’s a different random string of numbers. And so I called her, and I said, “Paige, what’s with these text messages?” And she goes, “That’s the interest you owe me on my half million dollars.” And so, that was a great experience, but what, “The Amazing Race,” did was, it really took me to all these countries I had never been to. And Argentina was one of them. And so, I decided I wanted to go back to a lot of the countries. And so, in January of 2006, I took a trip to Argentina. I was there for about a month, and I experienced a bunch of different things. And one of the things that I experienced was, and it was the first time that I’d really seen this, was just really intense poverty. Just outside of Bueno Aires, I saw many kids in the street, and not wearing shoes and sniffing glue and just some really horrible things with these children. And at the same time, I noticed that a lot of the young people were wearing these slip-on shoes called alpargatas. And I grew up wearing Converse and Vans and kind of these thick, bulkier, slip-ons, but these were really different. And so, I asked my friend at the time about the shoes, and he said, “Yeah, the farmers wear them, the polo players wear them.” And I thought they were really interesting. In a very serendipitous way, I met a woman that was running a nonprofit, and they were specifically helping kids get shoes for school. The shoes was part of the uniform, and so many of these kids that I saw in the streets, the reason they were in the streets and not in school was ’cause their families couldn’t afford the uniform, which included a pair of shoes. And so, I had this kind of morning ritual where I drink my coffee and write in my journal about the day and have some of the things I’m thinking about and goals for the day. And when I was sitting on this farm that I was staying at in Argentina, I was writing in my journal, and this idea came to me and the idea was really simple. It was just: “What if I took these shoes that I see all these people wearing that I’ve never seen before and sell them back in Venice, California, where I live? And every time I sell a pair, we give a pair to these kids that desperately need them for their school uniform, and we’ll call it ‘Shoes for Tomorrow.’ The idea is, that if you buy a pair today, we give a pair tomorrow.” And most people think my name is Tom—it’s not. But that’s where the name TOMS came from, was “Tomorrow’s Shoes.” And we wanted to put the whole word, “Tomorrow’s,” on the tag, but it wouldn’t fit, so we shortened it to TOMS, and that’s how we got the name, yeah.
– [Eli] That’s really incredible, and as someone with two sisters in the crowd right now, I can only imagine that costing us all $1 million for four minutes, you’re probably catching grief about that today, so I empathize with that. We are on an MBA campus, and so, I think one of the things that we’re really curious about is the business of TOMS, and the One for One model signals a lot how you can have a profitable, successful enterprise and also have it do good, do well for the world. So I think one of the things we’re curious about is how you layer in social responsibility and what complexity that adds. What challenges have you faced in maintaining TOMS’ commitment to social impact while ensuring the company’s financial responsibility? What sacrifices do you have to make on both sides of that coin to make sure that both can succeed, financially and your social goals?
– [Blake] OK, well, I think maybe start in answering the question, just thinking about the financial aspects of the TOMS business model, there’s really kind of a magic formula that TOMS kind of created and that other businesses have followed. And it’s not necessarily just the One for One model. It’s this idea that our giving and our commitment to our impact had a greater influence on the customer than any type of marketing we could ever do. And so, while many companies might spend 10%, 15%, 20% of their margin on marketing, we spent basically zero. And instead, we took that money and we used it to pay for another pair of shoes, which was oftentimes less expensive than the marketing. And so, that’s why when we became extremely profitable, which was a kind of a surprise to me because when I started the, we didn’t even call it a business, we called it a project, we started the TOMS project, we priced the shoes based on how much it cost for us to make them in a guy’s garage in Argentina. So you can imagine when the business took off and all of a sudden we were working at big factories, the cost went down so much that our profit went up a lot. And so, we really had to focus on, to be successful as a business, we actually need to focus on our giving as much as anything else and telling that story of the giving. And I really learned that lesson in a really kind of funny way. I was in the JFK airport, we had just started TOMS and I was probably two, three months in and the only people we really sold TOMS to was my parents, their friends, my neighbors and I was living in Venice, California. And so, I was in New York trying to get new stores and I decided to go for a run right before I had to get to my flight and so I went to the JFK Airport not wearing TOMS, which was unique for me—at that point, I always wore TOMS. And so, I had my running shoes on, and I go to the American Airlines check-in counter, I’ll never forget this, it was kind of one of the most meaningful things the early days of TOMS for me, and I went to do the electronic check-in. And next to me, there was this woman wearing a red pair of TOMS, and I had never seen a stranger wearing our shoes. I mean, it was so cool! It was such a cool moment, and so, I’m kind of looking at her and I’m thinking, “Gosh, should I say something?” And so, I decide to say, “Hey, I really love these shoes you’re wearing, what are they?” And she says, “TOMS, TOMS Shoes.” And so, I’m doing the check-in. I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And she literally physically put her hand on me and said, “No, you don’t understand! This is the most amazing company in the world!” She goes, “When I bought this pair of shoes, they gave a pair to a child in Argentina and there’s this guy who started, I heard he lives on a boat…” And she just went on and on. So I was feeling bad, and so I was like, I had to stop her. And I’m like, “Excuse me, actually, I’m that guy. I am Blake, I live on a boat, and I started TOMS.” And she goes to me, she looks at me like deer in headlights, she’s so, like, “What?” And she goes, “Why’d you cut your hair?” And I was like, “How did she know I cut my hair?” And I realized that she wasn’t just a customer, she was just totally invested in this, and she’d watched all these videos on YouTube of us giving the shoes away. And so, that’s how she knew I had cut my hair. But then, as I said thanks to her and went to my flight and started thinking about that conversation, I realized that this woman took the time out of her day at an airport to tell a stranger about TOMS. So how many people has she already told about TOMS? I mean, definitely all her friends and family and people on FaceBook, and so, I realized that the effect of just one customer connecting to our giving was going to have such a magnitude effect on how many shoes we would sell and ultimately give away. And so, that’s when we really decided that, as a business model, we were not necessarily going to be focused on the things that a traditional business was, but really focused on giving and telling our story, and that’s why our model works so well.
– [Yvonne] Yeah, that’s awesome to hear, to see that something you believe in, others also believe in, and it grew into what TOMS is today. Going off of that, large-scale innovation is something that is very hard to do. There are some products out there that we see that we think this large scale is inevitable. What are some of the challenges that you experienced with scaling up TOMS, and how did you face those challenges?
– [Blake] Well, the biggest challenge was making the dang shoes. I mean, I had never made shoes before. My Argentine polo playing partner, Alejo, had never made shoes before, and we met this guy who said he could make them in his garage, which he could do somewhat sufficiently. So really scaling the production once the business took off was really, really hard. What I found was, the key to that was finding people who did know how to make shoes and had done it for companies that really scaled. And so, we very early on were able to attract a really senior executive from one of the big shoe companies to come and start working in my apartment with us. I think he was employee number two or three, and the first two were interns off Craigslist. But Sean came to us, and I remember it was really cool. I went on a factory tour with him in Asia, and we were drinking beers one night, and I said to him, I said, “Sean, why did you come to TOMS?” Because, I mean, we’re paying you probably half as much as you as you made at this, I think it was Nike or Converse, I forget where he was at before, and he’s very senior in his role, he’d worked in the industry for I think 30 years. And I said, “‘Cause we’re paying you probably half or two-thirds what you’re paying, and you’re having to do the job of basically five people.” And it was so cool, he’s told me, he said, and this goes back to the giving being our key differentiator is, he said, “Because now my kids think I’m so cool, and my daughter thinks it’s so amazing that I’m helping kids get shoes. And so, that’s a big part of why I’m here.” And that’s also, I realized, just focusing on our giving and staying authentic to that was so important, because without Sean, we never would’ve been able to scale the business.
– [Eli] That’s really interesting. It feels like people are attracted to it because it’s solving two problems. It’s putting stylish shoes on people’s feet—that’s actually a fun problem to solve—it’s also putting shoes on the feet of people in need, and that’s an even more fun problem to solve. I think when we think about the most successful businesses, the most successful products, that’s what they fundamentally do. They solve problems that people can’t solve themselves. Velcro allows me to fasten my shoes, Advil allows me to reduce pain, inflammation, all that kind of stuff. How do you go about figuring out what problems people need to solve and how you can solve that problem? And even one step further, if you know how to solve the problem, how do you turn that into a business that can solve it for a lot of people? What does problem-solving and filling need look like for you?
– [Blake] OK, so I’m going to tell a story from a different company. So I’ve started, I think five or six companies, and most of them were before TOMS, and one of them was an online driver’s education company. Now, how I got into that business is really by listening to someone’s problem. I was at a barbecue for a television network that I’d also helped start, and my head of programming’s son was there, and he was 15 years old. And I asked him, “What are you doing this summer?” And he kind of said, “Uh, I’m learning to drive.” And I was like, huh, I mean, I would think that if you’re learning to drive, that’d be exciting for a 15-year-old. And I said, “Well, why is learning to drive not that exciting?” And he said, “Oh, I’m in this classroom, and it’s stinky, and it’s dark, and it’s in this mall, and I got this old lady teacher, and I can barely understand what she’s saying, and the cars are just crap.” And I mean, he was just super negative. And I was thinking, “Well, this is not good for our safety on our California highways. If this is how engaged or disengaged this kid is, like, we are in a lot of trouble.” And so, I went home that night, and this is right when MySpace was out and there was no Facebook yet, and some of you probably don’t even know what MySpace is, I’m realizing, and it was also when they were just starting to do things online that traditionally had been done in brick and mortar. And so, I thought, “Well, one way to solve this problem of these classrooms that are really not that inspiring, they’re usually in Sears malls or something, is to see if we could take this class online. And so, that could be more engaging, more entertaining, they could do it at their own pace.” And so, that was one idea. And I worked really hard with some legislature to get that changed in California so that we could do that. And so, that was Step One. And Step Two was, we got to get better cars, these cars have got to be more interesting. Now, this was right when Toyota came out with a Prius, and so, they had this huge desire to get people to know what an electric car even was. And starting with young people who might be more environmentally inclined was a big part of their thing. And so, I cold-called Toyota down in Torrance and got a meeting, and they decided to give us four cars at basically, at the cost. But the third thing was the teacher, and that was something that was going to be a little bit harder to do, because people who were kind of driver’s ed teachers were pretty—a very specific type. They’re usually retired, they were usually … I mean, I think everyone can remember the driver’s ed teacher. Unless you went to our school, ’cause I’ll tell you why ours was special, and you’d really remember because what we decided was these teenagers were not paying attention to their teachers at all. And so, we thought about, OK, how can we get them to pay attention? Now, we were lucky, ’cause we lived in Los Angeles, so we had a lot of actors and models. And so, we went and basically and hired a bunch of Abercrombie & Fitch models and actors that had all this free time, and we knew that teenagers pay attention to them. And it worked. And so, we had them as our driver teachers, and they would post pictures on MySpace of them and their teacher. And, so we solved all three problems at once!
– [Eli] That’s beautiful. I distinctly remember my driver’s ed teacher self-branded himself as Tupac Dave, and he was far too old to be trying to educate 15-year-olds about Tupac and not teaching them about driving. So I understand not learning anything and also trying to make sure kids actually learn how to drive so it’s safe. Pivoting a little bit, you’re mentioning a lot of partnerships, you’re talking about Toyota, you’re talking about these Abercrombie & Fitch models, you’ve been talking about this person that you met who was working at Nike came to work for you, and I think partnerships are key, and I know you often talk about collaboration as being key to success. I’m curious, what are the green flags that you look for in individuals, entities, partners of what you think would make them a trustworthy partner, a good faith partner, someone who you want to do business with, whether it’s an individual or an entity, kind of what’s your criteria? What are the green flags?
– [Blake] I mean, I think the most important thing in a partnership is: Is the partnership going to be seen as something that’s authentic, that makes sense? The best partnership we ever had was with AT&T. It was truly one of the biggest turning points in our business, and I would even say in my life. Because what happened was, I was on CNN doing an interview, and I did an interview, and they were asking about how many people worked at our company at this point, there were like 40 of us, and we were selling all over the world. And they were like, “How in the world do you run your business, when you’re in places like Ethiopia giving shoes or Cambodia or Guatemala and there’s only 40 of you and you’re competing against these big shoe companies?” And I pulled out my, it was funny, I had a BlackBerry back then. Do you guys remember BlackBerry? OK, good! I’m not as old as I think! And so I pulled out my BlackBerry on the CNN interview and I said, “This is how I do it.” And basically, I can run the business and do everything from my phone while I’m in Ethiopia. And so, this ad exec was in the back of a taxi in New York, and they saw this interview on CNN, and they thought, “Oh my gosh, if he uses AT&T, this is perfect.” And so, they called me, and luckily they asked me if I used AT&T, and I said, “Yes.” And that was one of the great, lucky moments of my life because they said, “We want to do a commercial about you and TOMS and your story, and we don’t want to create something slick, and we want to actually go with you on a giving trip to Argentina and just film you and then make a commercial.” And so, they made this commercial, and it was like lightning in a bottle. They loved it, they tested it, it tested well, they premiered it on the Masters Golf Tournament, which if you know that tournament, they only allow three different commercials for the entire term. And then they played it at the NBA Final Playoff games, everything. They ended up spending $30 million on a commercial to basically tell the TOMS story. But it was completely authentic because I use AT&T. And so, it worked really well for them. Our business grew 500% that year because of that commercial. And so, literally, I mean it was crazy how much it grew. And that was really the beginning of our mass growth. But that partnership was so important, and the reason it worked, to your question, is because it was completely authentic.
– [Eli] Thank you.
– [Yvonne] Yeah, that’s a great partnership story. Moving a little bit away from the business side and transitioning into leadership, I strongly believe every great venture has a strong leader behind it. You often talk about being a servant leader, one that aims to serve others. You talk openly about your failures and vulnerabilities. How do you think sharing some of those experiences have shaped you into the leader you are today?
– [Blake] Hmm, thank you. Well, I think when you hear the term, “servant leader,” I think it’s a really important term. And it goes back to the fact of, in most businesses, your employees that are on the front line are serving customers, you hear that phrase. And in order for them to really serve your customers, they need to be served from their managers, and I think that’s really the job of a manager or an executive, is not just to lead the vision of the business, but to really serve those that are working for them so that they feel empowered to really serve the customer. I think, also, leaders really set the culture, and I think talking about failures and vulnerabilities, you really, I believe, need to set a culture where it’s OK to fail. I always say “If I’m going to fail, I want to fail fast.” So I don’t waste a lot of time and money failing, but I learn from it, and I move on. And so, I think it’s really important that as a leader, that you show that failures are not going to be reprimanded. If anything, they’re going to be celebrated because what did we learn from that failure? And I think that’s a really important part of leadership.
– [Eli] I love hearing that. And I think one other thing we hear a lot of successful entrepreneurs talk about is luck. So learn quick from your failures, but also, you have to have some luck sometimes. Some say they create their own luck and that they earned it and they built that luck, and if they didn’t work as hard and put themselves in those situations, that luck wouldn’t have happened. Others say, “A beautiful opportunity fell in my lap and I got lucky that my idea worked.” So I’m curious what you think about luck and how much luck has played into your success.
– [Blake] I mean I’m a lucky guy for sure. So I think there is some truth to this idea that the harder you work, the luckier you get. But I also think that, sometimes just an idea, I mean, how do we have an idea? Start there: I’m sitting on a farm in Argentina, and this idea is somewhat downloaded or transmitted to my brain that then goes to my journal that then goes to starting a business that then goes to kind of changing the face of business across the world—I can’t take responsibility for that. I mean, from a spiritual perspective, I don’t really understand how that came about, but I feel really lucky that I was the one that got to do it. And so, I do think that you can make your own luck, and you have to work hard, but I also think that in certain businesses or certain ideas that come and really have a huge effect on culture, that idea was just, its time was to come. And the person that got to bring it to the world is pretty lucky, so I feel lucky.
– [Yvonne] Yeah, that’s great. I think we’re all hoping for some, a little bit of luck, out here to go on to our next endeavor. So your ventures have given us shoes, provided safe drinking water, and restored vision of countless individuals at a global scale. Going forward, where do you think the greatest need will be and what new business models outside of the One for One model have you been excited about or you’ve seen actually work?
– [Blake] Well, I think if I was an entrepreneur starting out today, I would be spending a lot of time looking at green energy. I think that one of the biggest problems facing our species right now is the climate. And I think there’s going to be so many opportunities—there already have been so many opportunities, so many fortunes built—focusing on how we can live in a more sustainable way. But it’s something that I don’t have a lot of experience or expertise in. But I think that’s where I would really be focused ’cause I think that there’s just going to be, I mean, technology and innovation is our only way out. And so, when there’s a necessity, there’s usually great opportunities for entrepreneurship.
– [Eli] I think half of my classmates here who are going into green energy and climate tech just got really excited, so thank you for that. The future is bright, my friends. I do also want to ask about another interest that you have in something that you’ve pledged time and resources towards, which is the legalization of psychedelics. And I just want to know, what inspired you to get involved with that and where do you think the opportunity is for that to succeed? Or just any general thoughts about that space, which is kind of new and upcoming?
– [Blake] Sure, I mean, I’m really excited about this. I feel like this is really at the beginning of a new frontier in how we help address so many mental health challenges. I’ve struggled myself with depression, I know many people that have, and I know many people that have taken the traditional route of pharmaceuticals and talk therapy and have not had success. I had the opportunity, gosh, it was six, seven years ago, a friend of mine, famous podcaster, Tim Ferriss, many of you probably know, called me and had known that I had worked with psychedelics myself and had found them very beneficial, and we had shared that with each other and in private, and he said the John Hopkins is thinking about creating the first-ever center for psychedelic research in the country, and they’re looking for a few philanthropists to kind of step up and help in Dallas. And at that point, most of my giving had been through TOMS, and then also a supporter of some of these nonprofits like Charity: water that I’m a big fan of, and so this was, kind of, giving to a university and helping endow a department for psychedelic research, this was really kind of outside of my scope, but I realized, and Tim really helped me understand and see that there was going to be very few opportunities as a philanthropist to have their dollars be so leveraged because if this worked and John Hopkins could show the effects of psilocybin or MDMA or LSD on different mental health challenges, that this could be the beginning of legalization and really our society accepting that these are not necessarily drugs, but they’re actually medicines. And so, I made that donation, and it was the largest donation that I had made, to date at that time, and then about two years later, there’s an organization called MAPS that’s been working really hard to put MDMA through the FDA, mainly for helping with PTSD. And they were at a critical place in their FDA, kind of path, and they needed to raise, I think, $10 million. And so, interestingly enough, Tim Ferriss called me again. And Tim and a guy named Joe Green were putting together this round and trying to raise this for the nonprofit, and they explained the benefit, especially to many of our veterans. The statistic that haunts me every day when we think about our veteran community is that 17 veterans a day commit suicide. I mean, that’s more people are dying of suicide than dying combat now, and that to me is just inexcusable. And so, seeing how MDMA can have an effect on that, in helping with the PTSD and depression that many of them experience was really an amazing opportunity for me. And so, I made that investment, and then I just kind of sat back and watched these two for about four or five years. And then, a couple years ago, I decided to get more engaged and more involved. I made an investment here in the Berkeley Center for Psychedelic Science. I continued to help John’s Hopkins. I’ve worked with the VA now on some projects there. And what I’m finding is, I like things to happen fast. I think as an entrepreneur, that’s kind of one of our characteristics. This is going to be a long process. I mean, this is something that I probably commit the rest of my life to because that’s how long it’s going to take for things to really become legal, to have regulated access. We’re working on a bill through the legislature in California right now to create regulated access for PTSD, for MDMA and psilocybin, that’ll go to the governor’s desk next year around September. So there’s a chance that it gets passed, which will then really change the landscape across the country. But this, to me, is the most exciting kind of science advancement that we could have that could have the biggest impact on what really is a health epidemic in our country with mental health issues. So I feel really, really lucky. It’s kind of like when TOMS idea came to me and I got to be part of a change in the way that business is done, I feel really lucky that now I get to be a part of a way that hopefully we help millions if not billions of people around the world with mental health issues.
– [Eli] Thank you so much. I do want to thank you for all that. I’m very passionate about this space personally. Do I wish I had my own Tim Ferriss? Absolutely. But otherwise just interfacing with those.
– [Blake] Oh, be careful. Tim Ferriss has been very expensive for me.
– [Eli] OK! That’s true, that’s true, that’s true. But no, it’s a huge need. And I think I could ask about 200 follow-up questions about that, but I want to be conscious of time. We have a lot of questions here from the audience. So the last question we want to ask you is, you’re sitting in front of a room of aspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, people who are going through their MBA or teaching at this program so that they can make a real difference. And so, just for the aspiring leaders in the room, whatever capacity that is, do you have any last words of advice, parting pieces of wisdom just for us aspiring leaders?
– [Blake] Oh man, that’s always the hardest question because, do I really sit here and give you advice? I mean, I’m not that much older than most of you guys in the room. I mean, I think, we were talking about this back there, and so I would say, if you have entrepreneurial desires, then this is advice that I think is particularly for you. And that is, that I really had this belief that, to found a successful company, it really has to come from a passion, from a need, from something that you’ve seen in the world that you’re frustrated with or you don’t agree with or there’s a product you wish you had but you can’t buy. I really believe that that’s where the great businesses come from. I think it’s very dangerous to come get your MBA, learn about entrepreneurship and be like, OK, I want to be an entrepreneur, I’m just going to go start a business, without the passion behind it, just ’cause you think you’re going to make money. I’ve seen most of those businesses fail, to be honest. And so, if you make making money the reason you’re getting into entrepreneurship, I think it’s dangerous. I think if you make the change you want to make or the product you want to create or the service you want to provide because you deeply care about it, the reason you’re becoming entrepreneurship, then the money will follow. And so, that is what I would say is kind of one of the main pieces of advice I have for entrepreneurs. The second piece of advice, I’m going to give two now, I just realized there’s another one, and this is going to be super contrarian to this group, I can tell already. ‘Cause you’re spending so much money to get your MBA here. And so, as soon as you graduate, you’re going to have a ton of pressure, yourself, your student loans, your parents perhaps, to go out and get a job that will pay the most amount of money for a job that you can get. And that makes sense, initially, but the truth is, no matter how much money you make working at a bank or a consulting firm or whatever, it’s not going to actually have that big of impact on how much money you make in your life. And I’m not saying making money is the only reason that we work, but it is one of the reasons. And so, what I tell people is, “Instead of going out and just chasing the biggest paycheck right away, think about what you’re most passionate about and invest your time, at least for a few years, in that without the pressure to pay those loans back right away or to make as much money as possible.” Because what usually happens is, if you follow your passion and you do something that you’re really deeply interested in versus just trying to make money, you become really good at it. And when you become really good at anything, usually you make money at it. And so, that I know is probably falling on some deaf ears, but that’s fine. And you think I’m naive and idealistic, and it’s easy for me to say ‘cause I’ve already made money, but I really have seen, I’ve given that advice to undergrads and MBAs over, probably, 15 years of speaking now, and I’ve had people come up to me or write me emails or letters years later and say, “That really made an impact,” because they ended up getting into something that they deeply cared about, and they got really great at it. And then they made the money, so there you go.
– [Eli] That’s brilliant, thank you so much Blake. Turn it over to Nora!
– [Nora] So first, I want to thank Blake for starting off with a loss, we don’t do that very much in business school, and I want to really acknowledge Eli and Yvonne who came up with the questions and posed them so well, don’t you think?
– [Blake] Yes, absolutely.
– [Nora] So my name’s Nora Silver, I’m a faculty director for the Center for Social Sector Leadership, we call CSSL. And I’m an adjunct professor here, and Ann was kind enough to share this Dean’s Speaker Series with us. Before we open it up for your questions, which I do have here, thank you very much. I have a few for you. How many of you are Berkeley or Haas students? OK, how many of you came here in order to make a difference or create social impact at Berkeley or Haas? How many came here for that? OK, about half. Do we have any alumni here? Welcome back. Do we have any friends and family of Blake or of CSSL? Yay, Ella! OK, so I want to take a minute with the students in particular, whatever you came here for. If you are curious about the kind of innovation that Blake made or the kind of career path that he took, I want you to know, do you know that you can explore it through CSSL? And I want to point out a couple things. Gloria, would you stand up? Gloria is right now teaching a course called Reinventing Capitalism for a Sustainable, Humane and Equitable World. It’s offered this spring, it will be offered next spring as well, stay there. In the fall, Gloria taught and will teach again Business Models for Social Impact. She teaches that with Kristin Groos Richmond. Both of them are serial social entrepreneurs who can introduce you to different models, such as that Blake described and describes in his book. Thank you, Gloria. For those of you who want to found something with social impact, we do have an impact startup disco. It’s an intensive weeklong with Jorge Calderon that will walk you through those initial kind of scary steps. And lastly, I’m going to be teaching in the fall a course on social movements. I’m exploring teaching that if that’s what you’re interested in. We have a lot of experiential programs, and one I want to point out to you, ’cause it’s coming up. If any of you are interested in trying exploring a Social Impact Summer Internship, we have a program that will supplement your salaries if that’s what you’re worried about. So look for the HIIA with net impact, and we’ll let you know about that. And we have career advising, so I and CSSL’s executive director are serial social entrepreneurs. We have faculty—20 plus, would you raise your hands here? I see you, come on!—that teach on things and know about things in the world because they’re professional faculty, so they’re out there working on these issues at the same time that they’re teaching you, things like climate tech and global health and food and education and economic development. So whatever is stirred up in you from hearing about Blake doesn’t need to stop here. There are many more resources at Berkeley and at Haas available to you, depending on your interests, and I just want to make sure you know where you can come to start the journey. So there are people here to help you with your curiosity, with your thinking, with your next adventure, no matter what that will be. But now, we still have some more questions for Blake. So Blake, back to you, ready?
– [Blake] Sure.
– [Nora] Alright, you may not be ready for this one, but we’ll try.
– [Blake] Oh no.
– [Nora] “Have you paid your sister 500,000-plus interest?”
– [Blake] So how many people know this clothing brand called Aviator Nation? Raise your hand. Enough, OK, so my sister started this company, and I think Forbes last said that she’s a billionaire now, so I think she’s doing fine.
– [Nora] Maybe she should pay you back? No, I’m kidding. Alright, alright, so here’s the next question: “TOMS was a pioneering business model, and I think received disproportionate scrutiny and criticism. How did you navigate it, and what would you have done differently in hindsight?”
– [Blake] Hmm, yeah, I mean that was a really hard thing for me because, hey, you hear this adage that the media loves to build you up so then they can kind of tear you down. And we got a lot of flak for what impact were we having on communities by just going out and offering a handout? And that was really hard, because all we were trying to do is do good. I mean, I was in Argentina, saw kids that didn’t have shoes, wanted to give them shoes. I didn’t come with a public health background, and so, we really at first were angry and frustrated and scared by this, and then we decided we had to lean into it. And so, ultimately what we did was, we hired some people who did have that background, who really understood the impact of giving free goods in these communities, how it impacted the local community, and that really led us to doing some local manufacturing. So we did a manufacturing plant in Haiti after the earthquake, which was really successful. We moved manufacturing also to Ethiopia, which created a lot of jobs in Ethiopia. And then the other thing we did is we realized that just giving shoes was not enough, that we had to be part of health programs as well. And so ,there’s a lot of health programs for worms that kids get in Central and South America, and so they want them to come in and take the medicine that would keep them from getting worms. But the incentive, a lot of kids wouldn’t come do it, they started saying, “If you come, you get a free pair of shoes.” And so, that was a big incentive, we worked with the Gates Foundation on that. And so, yeah, so we just had to get smarter and better and more sophisticated in how we did our giving.
– [Nora] Great, thanks. So, “How have your previous ventures, you mentioned four or five before TOMS, allowed you to be successful as an entrepreneur? What did you bring forward from those?”
– I mean, just lots of learning. A couple of them were moderately successful, and a couple of them were huge disasters. One disaster was after what I was on, it was not a disaster, but it was a failed business I guess, is after I was on “The Amazing Race,” I recognized that there was this tremendous amount of interest in reality stars and their 15 minutes of fame, but there wasn’t really a market for really kind of capitalizing on that. And so, I decided to start at, I think at the age of 25, I was very naive, I decided to start a television network, and it was an all-reality cable channel, in which I went around and bought the rerun rights of reality shows because once you kind of knew who won, they really had no interest at the networks. But what I realized is, people cared so much about the reality stars that you could pair the stars with the shows, and they could kind of almost do these shows where they gave commentary about what they were thinking when they did that move on, “Survivor,” or how they got that person outed on, “Big Brother,” or something like that. And so we were able to get the content for basically next to nothing, but we knew that advertisers really wanted to reach this audience, it was mainly an 18-to-34 audience, which was the key audience that advertisers wanted to reach. All these components showed that we were going to have incredible success in this business. The one thing we did not think about, which was the most important and the reason it failed, was there were only about 10 cable operators in our country at that time, and including DirecTV, satellite provider. And so, the cable operators, and then DirecTV, basically had a monopoly as to what content we see. It’s not like today where you can see it on Hulu or you can see it on a number of different streaming networks, obviously YouTube being one of the dominant players. So we basically had an amazing product, people wanted it, and we had advertisers willing to pay for it, but our only way we were going to get anyone to ever see it was through these cable operators. And they had no need for another network. I mean, they had 400 channels already. Getting one more was not going to have anyone all of a sudden decide to pay for cable television. They were paying for cable television for many other reasons already. And so, they basically said, “No, we’re not interested.” And so, we ended up going out of business. It was incredibly painful, I had to lay off like 40 people, it was a really challenging, challenging situation. And what I learned from that was, I never wanted to be in a business again where so few people had the power to make it work or not work. And so when I started TOMS, the great thing was, there’s thousands of stores in America that sell shoes, and so, I didn’t have to go out and get this one big fish customer, I could go and focus on one after another, after another, after another. And so, that was one of the real lessons that I learned from an earlier business that failed, that really helped me as I thought about TOMS.
– [Nora] Great, thank you. So, “The buy-one-give-one model used by TOMS has long-standing been a point of celebration, however, there have been shortcomings and challenges and all of that. Here’s the big question, Is it truly possible to be a business for good? And how should incoming business leaders incorporate,” I’ll read it as it says, “Corporate philanthropy into their company brands?”
– Absolutely, my mic, hello? I can just talk loud, too.
– [Nora] We’re trying to broadcast, though, hold on.
– [Blake] I could juggle.
– Hello, great, I don’t know how to juggle. I would love to learn though. So yeah, I mean I think that there’s a lot of examples of businesses for good out there now, TOMS being one of them. I think the key is to really focus on kind of three things, and you hear this a lot of time in conscious capitalism, the three Ps: people, planet, and the profit. By doing that, you can really build a business where all those stakeholders are equally benefiting. I think, I will say the bad news in all this is, is that, and because of the success of TOMS and other companies like TOMS, it’s not as novel to be a business for good as it was when we started. When we started, there was nothing like this. I mean, there was Ben and Jerry’s that had been giving, there was the Body Shop that had been giving, Anita Roddick, but neither of them built their whole business on it like we did with TOMS. And so, we really kind of pioneered this and several other businesses as well. But now, today, if you were starting a business, I was talking to an entrepreneur the other day and they were saying, “OK, well we’re going to incorporate this giving model, helping people get clean water, et cetera.” And they’re going to invest a lot of money in that. And I said to them, and they thought it was weird coming from me, I said, “I don’t think you should do that.” I was like, “I don’t think there’s going to be enough return on your social investment to make it work,” I talked about from a marketing perspective, “because so many other companies are already doing it.” So I think now what I would say for entrepreneurs that really want to do good in business is: “It’s really important to incorporate it into the business model itself.” So to do it as an add-on, or if you do this, we give this, I think can be more difficult, but if the actual business itself, and that’s why I use the example of green energy, if the business itself is making the planet a more sustainable place, then it is a business that’s doing good. But it’s also not necessarily having to carve out a percentage of its margin to do so.
– [Nora] OK, and the final question from the group is, “You talk a lot about conscious capitalism and for-profit business; and in your book, you also herald or celebrate nonprofits and philanthropists, and many people draw divisions between those, but you don’t. Can you talk a little bit about why you don’t or how you see that?”
– [Blake] Well, what I tried to do when I wrote this book, which is a long time ago now, as I’m thinking about it, and I’m trying to remember some of the things that I said, but I tried to really highlight two different organizations, businesses that were innovative and they’re giving and doing good like TOMS, but then also some of these new nonprofits that were being created that were operating more like businesses. And so, I’ll use Charity: water as a great example. How many people know Charity: water? Raise your hand. Oh wow, OK, you should definitely check out Charity: water. Not a lot of people here know, but they’ve been incredibly innovative. My friend Scott Harrison started it the same year I started TOMS, and his idea was to bring water to as many people in the world that need it as possible. And if you look at the marketing of Charity: water, it’s as innovative and as slick as any new Silicon Valley-backed tech startup. I mean, the branding is unbelievable. The storytelling is unbelievable. It competes with any business in terms of marketing, but it’s a nonprofit. They also do really, really innovative marketing campaigns asking people, especially young people, people who are 15, 16, 17 years old to give up their birthday in order to raise money for wells. And they found this to be incredibly successful, especially with social media, ’cause they can message out to all their friends, “This year instead of having a party or bringing a present, I’m asking you to donate $10 for every year I’ve been born or whatever.” And they’ve raised, I mean literally they’ve raised I think $300 million in the last couple years through these campaigns. So I also try to talk about something like that in the book as well ‘cause I think, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of big problems in the world that we want to solve, and sometimes the right vehicle is a nonprofit, like in the psychedelic space, for instance, and then sometimes it is a for-profit like TOMS. And so, I don’t really see a distinction between either, as long as the organization is being used to address a major problem in the world.
– [Nora] Great, thank you, Blake. We’re hitting our time, and I’m going to take a little editorial freedom and go off script here. Alan Ross, would you come up here? Alan does not know I was calling him up here, so bear with us. Alan is doing something I think is very innovative as a philanthropist, and he sent out an email just yesterday asking us to vote. So Alan, I want to relinquish the final two minutes to you to make a pitch to the group.
– [Allan] Well, thank you so much, that’s very sweet. It’s very surprising. I started something a couple years ago called the Chris Kindness Award, and everyone calls me Chris. I’m Alan. I named it after my kids’ preschool teacher who died, just the sweetest guy I ever met, and I give $1,000 every month to someone in Berkeley who does a kind act, random acts of kindness. We’ve had a gas station attendant, someone who volunteers, Children’s Hospital, a teacher, this month was a 16-year-old at Berkeley High who’s from Afghanistan, just arrived in America a year ago, who helps newcoming kids from all over the world acclimate to Berkeley High, sweet, sweet stories, and we just announced our three finalists for this month on Monday, one of whom is a Haas person, former student of mine of 20 years ago, Olive Davis. Anyone know Olive? Wonderful woman who was with YA for a while, Young Entrepreneurs at Haas, and now she started BBAY [Berkeley Business Academy for Youth] several years ago, giving back to the community, bringing in youngsters from middle school to Haas to educate them about business, to get them interested, so they’ll go on to college and all. Wonderful person, anyone can vote. ChrisKindnessAward.org, voting goes through Friday. If you want to vote for Olive, that would be wonderful. And we need nominations—we’re seeking nominations all the time. Go on our website, nominate anyone who lives, works, or goes to school in Berkeley, and we’re raising money now. We now give second- and third-prize cash prizes, also, and we’re trying to grow throughout the community, and beyond Berkeley as well. So ChrisKindnessAward.org, thank you so much, Nora. Thank you, dean, appreciate it, thank you.
– [Nora] So we know that many of you are doing meaningful and interesting things for your local communities, for your friends, for your family. We want to thank you for all of that, for Blake, Yvonne, Eli, Ann, thank you for coming, thank you for listening. We hope you are inspired to go out and try something really meaningful to you that you’re passionate about in the world, and Haas is here to help you, thank you very much.
When Lizzie Hoerauf, MBA 24, joined Berkeley Haas, she had a vision of what she wanted to do post-graduation.
“My goal was to bring the finance and operations business acumen I gained from an MBA program back to organizations with missions I care deeply about,” said Hoerauf, who has a background in nonprofit management, including working for Yosemite National Park.
At Haas, Hoerauf found her calling in the Impact CFO program, an innovative initiative designed to create a new generation of CFOs equipped to lead foundations, nonprofits, and other social enterprises.
She’s not alone in this journey; Hoerauf is part of the inaugural cohort of 14 MBA students united by a goal to develop strong finance and analytical skills while having an impact on society.
(Hear about Impact CFO from a few students in video below.)
Workshops, speaker series, and networking events complement hands-on projects and industry mentorship, ensuring a comprehensive learning experience. Another key program feature is an internship that bridges impact and finance, helping students gain insights into the evolving role of a CFO in the social sector.
Raising the financial leadership bar
Silver emphasized the program’s unique approach: “Today’s social sector organizations need more than just accountants who can close the books; they need strategic thinkers with an MBA-level understanding.” This sentiment echoes throughout the program, raising the bar for financial leadership in the social impact realm, she said.
“Today’s social sector organizations need more than just accountants who can close the books; they need strategic thinkers with an MBA-level understanding.” — Nora Silver.
Even-Tov highlighted the diverse backgrounds of the program’s candidates: from seasoned finance professionals seeking meaningful impact to experienced nonprofit professionals aiming to amplify their fiscal expertise. “The program challenges its participants to balance the mission of the organization with financial stability,” he said. “Without wise business decisions, these organizations will not be able to achieve their social missions.”
CFOs in demand
Demand for such specialized financial talent is high, especially in California, a hub for the social impact sector, Silver said. “Of the 86,203 U.S.-based foundations, 22,347, or 26%, are located in California and hold assets of more than $722 billion,” she said. The base salary range for a senior finance manager or director in the sector is $120,000-$140,000.
Mentorship is a cornerstone of the Impact CFO program—and mentors in the Impact CFO program hail from industries including education, health care, impact investing, government, humanitarian aid, housing, art & culture, and philanthropy.
Hoerauf’s mentor, David Samuels, MBA 86 and CFO of REDF, exemplifies this. Interning at REDF, Hoerauf uses her MBA skills in a real-world setting, applying her learnings from courses like Strategic Management of Nonprofit Organizations and Social Sector Solutions.
Victor Ringeard, MBA 24, who is transitioning from a healthcare consulting background, anticipates a transformative experience at LifeLong Medical Care under CFO Brent Copen. Ringeard aims to grasp the nuances of nonprofit finance in healthcare and learn how to influence stakeholders who may not have a financial background, all the while making healthcare more accessible in the Bay Area.
A deeper understanding of the role
Yvonne Mondragón, BS 16, MBA 25, is blending her investment banking career with her nonprofit commitments. “Understanding the CFO role deeper will enrich my contributions to both sectors,” Mondragón, who serves on the board of the East LA Community Corporation, said.
Delphine Sherman, CFO of BRIDGE Housing, is mentoring Alex Weinberg MBA 24, who is interested in low-income housing, a field where BRIDGE Housing is a major player.
Sherman, the former CFO of Haas, said she believes that the Impact CFO program is not only shaping future leaders, but “molding a new financial paradigm in the social sector.”
“Impact CFO will fill a huge need for strategic, forward thinking, systematic, efficiency-driven, change agent CFOs in the social sector,” she said.
Looking ahead, Even-Tov and Silver envision building one of the largest networks of finance professionals in the social sector within a decade.
“We want the Impact CFO program to stand as a beacon, illuminating the path for future CFOs committed to making a difference,” Even-Tov said..
It’s lunchtime on a recent Saturday and Melissa Little and a group of fellow Berkeley Haas Evening & Weekend MBA students are scooping gluten-free noodles, free-range chicken, and organic salad into large pans after lunch.
“We only have a few minutes to load the last of the bowls before class starts,” said Little, EWMBA 24, an energy consultant who most recently worked as a strategic energy partnerships manager at Google. She and her classmates rush carts of food down the Chou Hall elevators and load up a hatchback whose driver is waiting at the curb.
The group has completed this mad dash since October 2022, when Little kicked off a program to donate hundreds of pounds of the cohort’s uneaten lunch food to the Dorothy Day House in downtown Berkeley, which shelters and services homeless and low-income people in the area.
For Little, the program is a long-awaited feat.
During her first few Saturdays in the EWMBA program, she discovered that most of the leftover lunch food for her Saturday cohort was thrown out— from boxed lunches to trays of turkey meatballs to chocolate chip cookies.
“It drove me crazy for the rest of the school year,” Little said. “I live in Berkeley and ride my bike here past unhoused people who could be eating this.”
Little worked with Kelly McCartney, a coordinator with campus’s Bancroft Catering, to figure out how she could donate the extra food. While McCartney was eager to help, Little didn’t yet have a partner to pick up the food and make her plan work—until she started a class called Design Thinking, taught by Lecturer Dave Rochlin.
In the class, her breakout group focused on the social sector and chose to address the needs of the unhoused. Little, a member of the Haas Sustainability Task Force, was on a mission to figure out how to donate the cohort’s food to a nonprofit in Berkeley.
Rochlin’s class recommends starting with user-centered research, including on-site visits, which led Little to Dorothy Day, where she met with Executive Director Robbi Montoya.
They talked for an hour straight, discussing the complex needs of the unhoused community and, eventually, how to make a food rescue plan work. Montoya agreed to transport the extra lunches to Dorothy Day every week if Little could meet a driver to get the food to the curb, and help load it.
Andrea Carroll, a cook at Dorothy Day, now transports the food from Haas and helps figure out how to best use it to build between 100-200 dinners that night. “The fact that we don’t have to dip into our storeroom to put out delicious meals is a huge boon to our residents and the folks we provide meals to out of our back door,” she said. “It’s such a good variety of lovely, fresh food that’s really healthy.”
Little recruited classmates, including Kevin Cheng, also EWMBA 24, to help her collect and load the food each week. To stay organized, she designed a logistics system to log communication with the Dorothy Day House volunteers and map out routes from Chou Hall to downtown, even on Cal football days.
A year later, Little and Cheng continue to volunteer together every Saturday. Cheng, who had volunteered with the Berkeley Food and Housing Project as a Cal undergraduate, said he enjoys serving hot meals to the community. So when he learned about Little’s project, he wanted to help give back, as well as use what he’s learned about problem-solving at Haas. “It’s a way to create opportunities for reducing waste and redirect food for good,” he said.
Rochlin said he was thrilled to learn about the successful outcome of an enterprise that had launched in his class. “This is what we hope to see,” he said. “Haas is at its best when the students take what they learn in the classroom and apply it outside in the world —and it’s even better when they create impact for populations in need. It’s a perfect example of Beyond Yourself.”
Haas is at its best when the students take what they learn in the classroom and apply it outside in the world. —Lecturer Dave Rochlin
Little is now working with Danner Doud-Martin, director of Haas Campus Sustainability, to make food rescuing a permanent student role within the Haas Sustainability Task Force. Their goal is to ensure that Little’s work with Dorothy Day will continue after she graduates.
Doud-Martin and Little are also looking to grow the program so that food in other Haas programs won’t go to waste. “The work that Melissa has done this past year on behalf of Haas and the EWMBA program with the Dorothy Day House is nothing less than extraordinary,” Doud-Martin said.
“This is a fantastic partnership,” Carroll said. “We’re saving this food by providing it to people.”
An MBA student team won first-prize funding for a startup that’s helping to make supply chains more efficient for small Brazilian farmers at last Friday’s Invest for Impact Pitch Competition.
The winning team, pitching on behalf of startup Clicampo-Arado, included Arsal Khanani, EWMBA 24, Byungwoo Han, MBA 23, Gui Klingelfus, MBA 23, Mateus Loesch, MBA 23, and Vivian Hare, EWMBA 23.
Clicampo, now rebranded as Arado, secured a $75,000 investment, awarded by a panel of industry judges, including Michelle Kiang, managing partner and co-founder at Impact Science Ventures; Matt Caspari, managing partner at Alumni Ventures, and Joshua Posamentier, managing partner at Congruent Ventures.
The students who pitched are enrolled in the Haas Impact Fund course and program, part of the Sustainable and Impact Finance Initiative at Haas, which gives MBA students hands-on impact investing experience. The fund’s MBA student partners invest in early-stage impact startups throughout the spring semester, leading sourcing and conducting due diligence.
Klingelfus said he was thrilled by the team’s first-place win. “What set our team’s pitch apart was the fact that we highlighted both Arado’s social impact and its financial success, demonstrating that they are ready to scale.”
Loesch said pitching during the competition helped prepare him if he chooses to pursue a career in venture capital or entrepreneurship, as he learned about how industry pros analyze a startup’s potential.
“I don’t believe that I would have had the same experience in other classes in the MBA program,” he said.
Reducing food waste
Five MBA student teams pitched during the competition addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges, including food waste, financial access, health, and renewable energy. The teams included Team Health & Wellbeing representing startup Shezlong; Team Sustainable Supply Chain representing startup Diferente; Team International Development representing Farm to Feed, and Team Climate Tech representing Oceans-Sway.
Arado’s prize comes on the heels of two other funding rounds over the past year for the startup: a $7.5 million seed round and $12 million series A funding round. Founded in 2021, Arado connects small to midsize farmers in Latin America directly with restaurants and food retailers.
“Food waste is one of the main problems in the world now, and Arado came up with an innovative solution that increases the system’s efficiency and that contributed to the success of our pitch,” Loesch said.
The day also included a report from the Sustainable Investment Fund course, the first and largest student-led SRI fund within a leading business school. It offers MBA students real-world experience in delivering both strong financial returns and positive social impact in public markets. Since 2008, the student principals have more than tripled the initial investment to over $4 million.
Freada Kapor Klein, the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, who gave a keynote at the event, noted the importance of investing in impact startups that help close opportunity gaps for communities of color and low-income communities.
In investing, “we look at one’s lived experience,” she said. “What hurdles do they encounter along the way, and how did those hurdles give them an idea for a startup that might solve the problems?”
Takedra Mawakana, co-CEO of autonomous driving technology company Waymo, urged Dean’s Speaker’s Series attendees to embrace the ambiguity required to bring true innovation to the mobility industry.
“One of the reasons this industry is so exciting to me is nothing is set,” said Mawakana, who joined Mountain View-based Waymo in 2017, and was named co-CEO in 2021. “Everything is up in the air. The regulatory environment isn’t set, the customer adoption plan isn’t set, and the technology isn’t done. I thought my relationship with ambiguity was quite advanced … but ambiguity at every level means never walking on solid ground.“
Some things are going to go wrong, she added, and that’s OK. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Waymo operates in San Francisco and metropolitan Phoenix, with plans to expand to Los Angeles. Its taxi service, called Waymo One, does not require a human driver.
Watch the DSS talk here. Prior to joining Waymo, Mawakana led global teams at eBay, Yahoo, AOL and Startec. She said she joined Waymo because the company reflects her values, with its mission is to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going. Research has shown that Waymo technology can prevent 75 percent of vehicle collisions, while reducing serious injury risk by 93 percent.
Mawakana said that two of her uncles were killed in “completely avoidable” traffic accidents, which has committed her to making driving safer. “I’m just deeply tied to the mission,” she said. “What I can’t say is that the journey is always going to be easy, but I can say it feels worth it when it’s deeply tied to what you believe in, which is very different than chasing the next software release.” Mawakana’s talk was sponsored by the Black Business Student Association and the Haas Transportation & Mobility Club.
UC Berkeley student Egbert Villegas was driving his girlfriend, Nelly Elahmadie, to a doctor’s appointment last November when the pair spied an SUV flipped over on the freeway in Oakland.
They were on their way from Walnut Creek to Berkeley; the accident came into view right before the Caldecott Tunnel.
Other drivers were whizzing past the unsettling scene, but Villegas “sprang into action,” said Elahmadie, pulling over to a safe spot and then running to the overturned vehicle to help the driver, who was still strapped to his seat.
Last week Thursday, Villegas, a molecular and cell biology major, was honored on campus for his effort with a $1,000 award, a framed certificate and a performance by the Straw Hat Band. It all was a complete surprise, he said, since “I never expected anything out of this … I was always taught to do things out of the kindness of your heart.”
That’s exactly why Alan Ross, a lecturer and distinguished teaching fellow at the Haas School of Business, founded the Chris Kindness Award, which Ross gives monthly for a random act of kindness to a person who lives, works or goes to school in the city of Berkeley.
Ross, who has taught business ethics at Berkeley Haas for 33 years, named the award for Chris Walton, who was a preschool teacher for his daughter Haley, 21, and son Danny, 18. Walton, who died in 2012, “imbued in his young pupils a strong sense of community, charity and care,” said Ross.
The kindness award also aligns with what Ross teaches in his ethics course, The Social, Political, and Ethical Environment of Business. “When I teach corporate social responsibility, I call it ‘citizens’ social responsibility,’ for the responsibility we have as citizens,” he said. “What responsibility do we have? What more can I do?
The award definitely ties into what we teach, and the students see me doing this and not just talking about it.”
Brett Fallentine, BS 03 (business), and BA 03 (film studies), is releasing his documentary Fire on the Hill: The Cowboys of South Central LA on several streaming platforms this month, including Amazon Prime Video. The film centers on a group of urban cowboys and the last public horse stable in South Central, Los Angeles—and the aftermath of a mysterious fire that destroyed it. PBS will broadcast Fire on The Hill in June to celebrate the federal Juneteenth Holiday.
An award-winning documentary and commercial director, Fallentine started his film career as an apprentice editor to George Lucas on the film Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith. He now runs his own film company, Preamble Pictures. He is currently working on a new film about a family that defied all odds to survive the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Sonoma.
Haas News: So how did you find the story that became Fire on the Hill?
Brett Fallentine: I had heard about this riding community when I moved to LA, and I became really fascinated with it—the juxtaposition of this rural equestrian lifestyle in this neighborhood with rival gang culture located at the juncture of two major freeways in Los Angeles. It’s a place that you would never expect to see something like this happen but it’s this culture that’s been there since the1940s. A lot of famous riders have come out of this stable who’ve gone on to become world champions in rodeo, but no one really knew that at the time. Ultimately, that was one reason why I became so interested in the story.
So how did you find the Hill?
I went to places where people said they’d seen the riders before and no one showed up. Through several trips, I found manure and followed a trail that led to the Hill horse stable. I started interviewing and one interview led to another and another and they invited me on a ride. I wasn’t sure of the story at first, but after the Hill stable fire, I started learning about the history of the stable, the impact it had on the youth in the community, and why having this culture was important for them. I ended up meeting their families and watching them grow up over subsequent years of filming.
Did making this film shatter a lot of stereotypes for you?
One of the big themes that started to emerge was that positive stories like this one don’t really emerge from South Central because popular media tends to focus on the area’s violence and crime. I grew up in the 1990s when movies like Menace II Society and Boyz n the Hood popularized that area. So I believed that part of LA was dangerous and I avoided it. When I learned that this riding culture existed it sparked my curiosity enough to go down there and see for myself. I became interested in the story behind the Hill and the community of riders I met really changed my mind and my feelings about this area in a way that never would have happened otherwise.
Watch the trailer for Fire on the Hill.
You track multiple stories in the film, all different and compelling.
We follow Ghuan Featherstone, who worked with the youth in the community at the Hill. Among the rival gangs, the stable has always been a neutral zone that provides a way for kids to not only work with animals but to work with kids from other neighborhoods who they would not normally interact with. Since the fire, Ghuan has started a non-profit inspired by the Hill Stable called Urban Saddles. We follow Chris Byrd, a rising bull rider from Compton, who enters his rookie year of professional rodeo. There’s also Calvin Gray, who having found freedom on the back of a horse, must choose between the cowboy lifestyle and his family. Their stories shine a fresh light on what it means to be a modern “cowboy” in an urban world.
Their stories shine a fresh light on what it means to be a modern “cowboy” in an urban world.
How did Ghuan work with local youths? Were there challenges?
The kids in the neighborhood would wander into this stable, just mesmerized. They would first learn to care for the animals and eventually get to ride. But one of the quick lessons learned is that these animals are big and you can’t force them to do anything so you’re going to have to work with them. Ghuan told me about kids who learned to solve differences based on how tough they were. Soon they found out that you can’t really do that on a horse. You have to be willing to work with a horse and those insights started to carry over into how they were settling their differences back in their neighborhoods. That became an important message throughout the community.
How long did you work on this film?
I began filming in 2011 and the stable fire happened a few months into the process. The film took about five to six years after that to make because the subject’s stories were constantly evolving, even while we were in editorial. So I’d grab my camera and follow up on their stories. We completed the film in 2019, and showed it at festivals. Amazon Prime picked it up and released it in 2020, a time when the world was focused on Covid. So we’re thrilled to have it re-released on streaming channels like Amazon and have it nationally broadcast later this year through PBS.
We’re thrilled to have it re-released on streaming channels like Amazon and have it nationally broadcast later this year through PBS.
You said that you rode horses during the making of Fire on the Hill. Where did you learn to ride?
I did have some experience riding as a kid and riding was something that was always around me, but I had never really learned to ride until making this film. The cowboys provided a lot of opportunities to ride in South LA after the cameras had wrapped for the day. The men and women there were very open and willing to teach me and it’s become more of a part of my life now.
You entered UC Berkeley as a molecular and cellular biology major. How did you land in film?
I switched majors my sophomore year, which is pretty late in the game, especially going from science into the arts and business. I had always been behind a camera as a kid, making little movies and commercials growing up, but my family was science-focused, so that was the assumed route. I was in class in a lab one day and there was kind of an epiphany where I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ and at that moment I switched from being an MCB student to double majoring in Film Studies and business at Haas.
How do the two degrees work together in your career?
They work hand in hand. I started working on Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith during my last semester at Berkeley, and I was using a lot more of what I’d learned at Haas than I was with the film studies.Over the years, I’ve found myself going back to what I learned in marketing, accounting and organizational behavior. Film is a business and having that knowledge has been super important to me.
In a recent Dean’s Speaker Series talk, RockCreek founder and CEO Afsaneh Beschloss weighed in on the long-term goals of ESG and impact investing and how her firm allocates capital to diverse asset managers and underrepresented founders.
Global investment firm RockCreek holds $15 billion in assets to invest in a diverse portfolio that integrates sustainability and inclusivity. “I like to call (our investment strategy) air, land, and water, because a lot of what we have all worked on traditionally is energy on land and food and agriculture,” she said during a fireside chat with Dean Ann Harrison. “But there’s also a lot going on with aviation fuels and, as we speak, we’re doing some early investments on alternatives to aviation fuels.”
Before starting RockCreek in 2003, Beschloss worked in economic development at the World Bank, where she rose to become treasurer and Chief Investment Officer. (Along the way, she met Michele de Nevers, the executive director of Sustainability Programs at Haas. Dean Harrison also worked as an economist at the World Bank.)
During her early career, Beschloss shifted focus from health to the energy sector, leveraging private sector investment as her group worked on projects to move countries away from coal to natural gas. As solar and wind technology started to develop, the World Bank began pioneering investing in these areas. “We got special grants from the Nordic countries to work on this in a number of countries that were well-suited for doing solar and wind,” she said. “And it was really quite spectacular to be investing in Latin America, in Africa, and in Asia in these cleaner forms of energy in the early days and doing environmental studies.”
Pearly Khare, MBA 23, was in a difficult spot. His ‘boss’ was confronting him about takingoff early for vacation, leaving his colleagues “in the dust.” “I definitely understand how that impacted the team,” he said, adding that he gave her and his team advance notice. Then he apologized.
Afterwards, MBA students who had watched the interaction discussed Khare’s apology to Bree Jenkins, MBA 19, who played the role of his boss.
“If we apologize, and we’re not even sure of what we did or we are not genuinely sorry for what we did, it can be another form of conflict avoidance,” says Jenkins, co-instructor of the new Berkeley Haas MBA pilot course Difficult Conversations: Conflict Lab, where students roleplay tricky situations that are dreaded at work. “We should ask ourselves if it’s just because we want to move past the discomfort.”
From delivering a poor performance review to providing a critical work project assessment to firing an employee, things often got “spicy” during the 10-week session, says co-instructor Francesca LeBaron, MBA 19. But the class isn’t about right or wrong or about debating morality. “It’s about maintaining connection, even when we disagree with the person,” LeBaron said. “What is your objective? Is it to make this person feel heard, to problem solve, or to share your own needs? And how effective were you at achieving that objective?”
The new Conflict Lab extends learnings from longstanding Haas School MBA offerings including Teams@Haas, which delivers a common framework for teamwork across MBA programs, and the core Leading People course. It also compliments experiential learning on conflict management included in the class Leading High Impact Teams and the new core course Communicating in Diverse Environments.
Do you want to be promoted?
Jenkins and LeBaron kicked off their new class with a speed conflict session (similar to speed dating) where students role-played a back-to-back series of conflicts to get a sense of the discomfort they would experience in the class. The exercise helped students to assess if this style of experiential learning was right for them.
Ten undergraduate UC Berkeley students and a group of Berkeley Haas alumni—ranging from PWC partners to a Google exec to an NYU professor—also joined the class to play roles that would put students in the hot seat.
In one session, alumna Kelly Deutermann, MBA 17, confronted Mridul Agarwal, MBA 23, about why he wanted to get off a project. Deutermann aggressively questioned Agarwal. “Do you want to be promoted? Do you want to be taken seriously? This is your chance.” When Agarwal explained that “it might not be the best project for me at this time,” Deutermann responded with, “This project needs to happen. Do you just not want to work hard to do it?” In this role play, Agarwal had to balance his own bandwidth and need for support with Deutermann’s demands for project management.
After the difficult talk, Agarwal took a deep breath, and the two of them laughed and shook their heads.
Friends coming up with solutions
Jenkins and LeBaron met in their first year at Haas. They were in the same cohort and found they shared a lot in common: They were both Consortium Fellows, student instructors for the Leadership Communications course, and board members for the Haas Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership (EGAL). After graduation, LeBaron went to work as an executive coach and mediator for startups at UC Berkeley’s accelerator SkyDeck; Jenkins runs leadership training courses as a senior leadership development associate at Pixar Animation Studios.
“I noticed themes and trends with what we were doing at work,” Jenkins said. “There was conflict avoidance and harm from conflict that’s not dealt with effectively. We talked to friends in other organizations and we realized quickly that everyone is dealing with workplace conflict.”
For example, LeBaron had recently coached startup founder and former Haas classmate Fahed Essa on how to fire someone. “Fahed is brilliant—has three masters degrees and has started three companies,” she said. “If he is still struggling with this, I bet many people are. I want Haasies to have this skill set that balances being compassionate with being honest and clear.”
After discussing the problem, Jenkins and LeBaron did what they were known for doing at Haas: they came up with a solution. With sponsorship from the Center for Social Sector Leadership at Haas (CSSL), they designed a syllabus for a pilot course completely devoted to managing difficult conversations. The class enrolled 32 MBA students, with a waitlist.
To track their progress throughout the class, students provide one another with feedback, write papers addressing their own conflict styles, and identify conflicts in the media and how they can be improved using lessons from the course framework. “It’s really important that the students find ways to continue to practice this work after the class is complete,” Jenkins said. “They should have a clear understanding of where they are in their conflict journey and what they want to do to continue to grow.”
During their final class, Jenkins and LeBaron took on a role-play with each other. Jenkins played a manager criticizing an employee for botching a critical client presentation. “I expected more of you,” Jenkins said. “I’m hearing that my actions didn’t meet your expectations. Can you tell me more about what that looked like for you?” LeBaron said. After more back and forth, they drilled down to the core issue: Jenkins was frustrated and disappointed because she wanted to appear competent in front of the client. The two decided to review all future presentations together before going to a client.
LeBaron asked the class to consider what Jenkins felt. “I don’t know if I made typos, but in her mind I made those mistakes,” she said. Her objective, she said, was to better understand her boss’ experience and unmet needs. “I can still hold my experience as true for me, while being curious about understanding her experience,” LeBaron said.
Working past fear through practice
After the 10-week class ended, students who identified themselves as conflict-avoidant at the start of Conflict Lab said they were starting to work past it.
Daryl Pugh, MBA 23, an executive recruiter before he came to Haas, said he’s learning to be “comfortable with discomfort” and was already using what he learned in class to help a friend through the difficulty of laying off employees. “I tried to talk to her through having that conversation and processing other people’s feelings, understanding what was happening and her interpretation of what was happening. We had a couple of sessions.”
What Pugh said he found most surprising over the weeks was understanding how inaccurately he can interpret the actions of others. “We need to focus on not ascribing emotion to people that could be just wrong,” he said. “That’s how we are trained our whole lives, even in social settings, is to interpret other people’s feelings. The only way to know how a person is feeling is to ask. This class taught me how to get others to express their feelings, then I can move past my observations and interpretations to a new level of understanding.”
Mariam Al-Rayes, MBA 23, said the course provided a set of tools that she plans to use at work and beyond. “I wish we’d learned this earlier in life,” she said. “The role playing was so useful—like when alumni talked to us as our managers. It was realistic and we applied what we learned in class first-hand.”
On the journey to create a new class of conflict-embracing leaders, LeBaron and Jenkins are well on their way—and plan to offer the class again in Fall 2023.
Karan Singh, BS 05, said his career purpose didn’t become clear until a life-changing event 13 years ago.
“I was on the other end of a phone call after a loved one had tried to take their own life,” said Singh, COO of Headspace Health, during a recent Dean’s Speaker Series talk. “I’ve always thought of myself as a good read on people and a good judge of character, and I had no idea at all. I realized in a lot of communities of color—my family’s originally from India—that mental health is just the no-go zone. It’s the topic that no one talks about.”
That realization set Singh on the path to founding Ginger, a digital therapy platform that takes a preventative approach to mental health, in 2011. The company merged with Headspace, a meditation and mindfulness app, to form Headspace Health in 2021, a time of global need for mental health care services as the COVID-19 pandemic intensified behavioral health challenges.
During the DSS talk, Singh discussed the increasing level of investment in mental health care, and his excitement that more young entrepreneurs are joining him in mental health innovation.
“I want to say that mental health has made it into the forefront…I think we’re on that journey now. We’re having these conversations in rooms in government, in boardrooms, and in other settings that historically would never have been in the dialogue. So, we’ve come a long way, and still, there’s just a whole lot more we’ve got to do.”
The DSS talk was held with Google, part of a collaboration for The Haas Healthcare Association John E. Martin Mental Healthcare Challenge. The event marked the start of this year’s Challenge, which invites graduate student teams from around the world to develop creative solutions for improving the quality of and access to mental healthcare.
Kanyinsola Aibana and Danielle Dhillon, both MBA 22, will travel to Germany and Poland this summer to participate in Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), an intensive 12-day program for students studying business, journalism, law, medicine, or religion.
Fellows learn about the roles played by people in their professions in Nazi Germany, and explore the ethical issues facing those professions today. Daily seminars are led by specialized faculty who engage fellows in discussions and critical thinking about both the historical and the contemporary.
We interviewed both students about the fellowship.
What led you to apply to the FASPE Fellowship?
Kanyinsola: I applied to the FASPE Fellowship because it would allow me to go beyond my core Ethics course and explore practical ways to address ethical issues as a business leader. I was intrigued by the structure and setting of FASPE, which provides a unique opportunity to delve into topics in business ethics, both historical and contemporary, and a forum to engage and learn from fellows from different graduate programs to create a genuinely enriching and impactful experience. FASPE will serve as a great capstone to my MBA.
Danielle: I applied to the FASPE fellowship because I truly see it as a culmination of my educational journey. I’ve always enjoyed my ethics and philosophy classes in undergrad and here at Haas. In college I minored in German and had the chance to study parts of the German economy via my finance and international business major. Being part of the FASPE Business Fellows community will give me a community to share with and learn from as we examine the role of business and capitalism in making the world a better place through a lens of the harm that it once contributed to.
What do you hope to take away from the trip?
Kanyinsola: I hope to take away tools to help me resolve, avoid, or prepare for the nuanced ethical issues I will face as a business leader. In addition, I hope to leverage the multidisciplinary discussions and different perspectives of other fellows to examine and better understand the actions and complicity of business executives during Nazi Germany and other contexts to reinforce my professional responsibility to promote ethical and moral decision-making.
Danielle: I hope to take away a renewed sense of what business ethics can and should look like, particularly given the ambiguity created by context and time. I hope to walk away with a better understanding of how systemic evil can make it impossible to make the right choices, especially for businesses. But I also am eager to hear stories of businesses that did the right thing—because we don’t tend to focus on those or have good, accessible examples of what ethical business leadership looks like.
How does the fellowship align with your career goals?
Kanyinsola: I aspire to be a business leader in the sustainable food and agricultural space. I am driven by a desire to promote individual well-being by facilitating access to nutritious food products while minimizing the detrimental impact of large-scale food production on the climate and environment. While I hope to be an innovator in this arena, I anticipate tension will sometimes arise in balancing my ultimate mission with the fiscal responsibilities of running a business. I want to be a business leader who continuously reflects upon and confronts ethical issues in all aspects of my business operations. FASPE will provide a great foundation to accomplish this goal.
Danielle: I came to Haas to pivot to a career in impact investing, where I will be responsible for advising and structuring investments that have a double or triple bottom line. In July I’ll be joining the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation where I’ll source, evaluate, and select early stage, high impact social entrepreneurs to support via the model of venture philanthropy. This fellowship will give me an additional lens to truly become a prudent impact investor because business isn’t inherently ethical or unethical: business will always have the ability to perpetuate good or harm. An ethical capital allocator needs to be able to dissect and understand the potential harms as well as see the bigger picture if they choose to go forward.
Helen Hatch, EWMBA 22, and Adjunct Professor Paul Jansen believe that every nonprofit organization could benefit from hiring a chief governance officer. So what’s holding them back?
We asked Hatch about why a chief governance officer is essential and how she’s helping with a plan to train the first class of chief governance officers through a pilot program sponsoredby the Center for Social Sector Leadership at Haas.
Berkeley Haas News: How did you get interested in the topic of improving nonprofit governance?
Helen Hatch: Good governance is integral to thesuccess or failure of nonprofit organizations. My interest in investigating nonprofit governance wastwofold. First, I work in development at a large nonprofit arts organization and wanted to understand the nuances of governance while exploring a solution to thechallenges that frequently face nonprofit boards, and second, I was excited by theopportunity to impact the entire nonprofit sector by providing an actionable way for boards toaddress common governance obstacles before they become major issues.
How did you and Paul Jansen decide to work together on this?
Nora Silver, adjunct professor and founder and faculty director for the Center for Social SectorLeadership, introduced me to Paul in August 2020 when he was developing a hypothesiscalled “Board Chair as Chief Governance Officer” and seeking a research partner. I sawa tremendous opportunity to learn from Paul, who has deep expertise in the nonprofit sectorand nonprofit boards, and was excited to immerse myself in a subject that was so relevant tomy professional field. Paul and I met virtually in September 2020 and have been workingtogether ever since.
Good governance is integral to thesuccess or failure of nonprofit organizations.
What’s at stake when a nonprofit has poor governance, and can you provide a fewexamples of how it hurts an organization?
High-profile governance failures make headlines and come with real costs to nonprofits. For example, the Wounded Warrior Project was hit by allegations of “waste and unbridled spending” by leadership in 2016. The CEO and COO were fired, and total revenues fell from a peak in 2015 of $483M to $280M in 2017 and still have not returned to pre-crisis levels. In higher education, How USC Became the Most Scandal-Plagued Campus in Americadetails how the University of Southern California suffered from a “contagion of shaky oversight and money grabbing” with the cost of lawsuits expected to exceed $1 billion. Damage to reputation and the finances of nonprofits likewise transpired from oversight scandals at the United Way USA, Boy Scouts of America, and numerous private high schools and colleges around the country.
Governance failures, however, are not always so public or so headline grabbing. Still, the costs in terms of weaker strategies, underperformance against mission, donor hesitancy, ineffective advocacy, discouraged employees, and time spent managing potentially damaging revelations are just as real and go a long way to explain why some nonprofits successfully grow and increase their impact while others quietly fail.
Do any nonprofits have a CGO? Why should nonprofits appoint one?
No such position currently exists, but the experienced directors we spoke with agreed that an “independent, objective, organization-first mindset and willingness to ask hard, sometimes uncomfortable questions” constituted the essential skill set for this role.
And while the idea of “Board Chair as CGO” was the initial hypothesis of our research, we quickly realized that it would be more impactful for the board chair to have a trusted, governance-focused thought partner who was empowered to credibly raise and address issues when they happen. The CGO is proposed as a board leadership role that seeks to improve board effectiveness by sharpening compliance oversight and helping the board dedicate time to high-value organization leadership activities and mission fulfillment.
What’s next for the research?
We are now looking to test and refine the CGO concept through a pilot program sponsoredby the Center for Social Sector Leadership. We plan to train a class of CGOs, measure theimpact on board performance over time, and use the learnings to refine the CGO concept.We invite interested organizations to contact us at [email protected]and[email protected].
Kashish Juneja, BS 22, is learning about running a business in real-time as she prepares to open startup Aura Tea’s first shop in downtown San Francisco on March 27. In between juggling a mid-term and going to class she’s taking calls from her contractor and interviewing for counter help at the shop that will serve boba tea with a twist: It’s sugar free, made with plant-based milks, and under 100 calories.
“It’s insane from the operational side,” said Juneja, whose first shop is strategically located on Spear Street across from Google and Databricks offices, where employees are starting to trickle back. “We need to make sure there’s a demand and that we’re making sure the product is good enough so that people will continue showing up.”
In many ways, Aura Tea has been a team effort from the start. Juneja recruited 22 interns from the UC Berkeley community who help with marketing, TikTok, and Instagram, where she’s drawn support from NFL players to local musicians. Students and Cal athlete ambassadors helped her host on-campus events that offer “boba for de-stressing”—and she recently held a pop-up on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, giving away Cal-themed boba tea drinks.
Kaitlin Dang, BS 24, an intern who serves as business growth lead at Aura Tea, said her favorite Aura flavor is mango pineapple.
“Before I started working here I was an avid milk tea connoisseur, trying new places,” said Dang, who is in her second year of the Berkeley Haas Global Management Program. “My taste has changed from sweeter teas and now I drink a lot of fruit teas. Most fruit teas are very sweet and not refreshing. Aura tea has a refreshing taste.”
Solving her own problem
Juneja, who grew up in Cupertino, has always loved boba. “Our high school was boba central, with a boba shop across the street that was open during lunch every day,” she said. “I played tennis every day so it balanced out.”
Her boba addiction continued at Berkeley, but drinking those 500 extra boba calories without her usual tennis playing led to an unwanted 30-pound weight gain. Aura Tea, she said, was founded in part to solve her own problem.
The idea to start making healthier boba tea emerged during a Plant Futures course that she took with Will Rosenzweig, the faculty chair of the Center for Responsible Business at Haas who co-founded the Republic of Tea.
She’d already taken an entrepreneurship bootcamp and was interested in starting a company. Plant Futures, a collaboration between Berkeley Haas, Public Health, Engineering, Public Policy, and the Berkeley Food Institute, pushed her idea forward.
Throughout the pandemic, Juneja could be found crafting tea in her apartment, testing different oat, almond, and pea milks, which make her tea drinks vegan, and sweeteners, using fresh loose leaf green and black teas from the grocery store. (Boba pearls are naturally vegan, as they’re made of tapioca starch, which comes from cassava root.)
Juneja tested her teas on friends and classmates. In the early recipe days, she conducted a blind taste test: her milk tea against the Boba Guys’ tea and others. (Boba Guys was co-founded by Andrew Chau, MBA 11.) “We didn’t win but it was a good start,” she said. “Our taste was nowhere that it is now.”
It took time to get Berkeley-based impact investor David Jiang to take a chance on her venture, she said. Jiang’s wife’s father was a tea farmer in China, and they all shared an interest in tea. “There was a lot of making it and taking it back to them,” Juneja said. “I was taking what I learned in class and bringing them my tea and my pitch deck.”
I was taking what I learned in class and bringing them my tea and my pitch deck.
Valuable startup experience
The shop, which will take to-go orders online, will offer a combination of grab-and-go and fresh-brewed drinks with boba tea in flavors including strawberry, matcha, pineapple, and mango. Aura will offer coffee drinks, too, and a masala chai with infused with spices and CBD for relaxation. (Aura’s boba pearls are made by US Boba Company in nearby Hayward, Calif. Her tea is sweetened with Purecane, which she says she chose for its lack of an aftertaste.)
Dang said she’s getting valuable experience working for Aura. “There’s a lot of creativity involved,” she said. “I have the space to try the things I want to try. We’re appealing to a certain wide demographic: corporate employees, health influencers, healthcare professionals, and foodies. I like to try things I’ve seen work in other industries, casting a wide net.”
Juneja, who will work in the shop part-time until graduation, said she’s grateful to her entire community of classmates, professors, and advisors for all of their help with Aura’s creation.
“When I wrote my essay to get into Haas I said I wanted to solve a problem,” she said. “My dream came true.”
“Classified” is an occasional series spotlighting some of the powerful lessons being taught in classrooms around Haas.
Julie Kang, MBA 22, used to be concerned about the direction of the tech industry and its negative implications for society.
Then an exciting summer project led her to sign up for a new Berkeley Haas course called Designing Tech for Good, which made Kang see the industry through a different lens. The class called on student teams to work on projects that promoted social good at big tech companies, including Electronic Arts, Dell, Autodesk, and UI Path.
“Tech firms want to demonstrate that their platforms can do good,” said continuing lecturer Dave Rochlin, who co-created and taught the elective for the first time last semester with instructor Adam Rosenzweig, EMBA 19. “We wanted to look at what companies can do to minimize harm but also focus on how they can create positive change. Tech for good initiatives can help firms promote a values-based culture and better connect the firms’ core business with the sustainable development goals and other ESG metrics.”
Creating business value and social value
Rosenzweig, senior manager of product impact at online identity management company Okta, also leads Okta’s “tech for good” strategy, which drove his interest in launching the course. Rosenzweig brings real-world experiences to the course, which enrolls 30 Berkeley Haas students and six students from the Goldman School of Public Policy.
“We want students to learn how to design programs that are good for the world within whatever companies they go to work for,” he said. “If we don’t go out of our way to solve social problems, they won’t solve themselves. It’s critical for leaders to know how to create business value and social value at the same time.”
The students’ projects varied in scope. For Dell, teams worked with the CTO’s external research group on how technology such as virtual reality headsets might be used to increase civic engagement. For UiPath and Autodesk, students focused on how their platforms could best help NGOs to become more effective and identify which NGOs might benefit most.
“It’s critical for leaders to know how to create business value and social value at the same time.” – Adam Rosenzweig.
Joy of connection
The Electronic Arts project aligned perfectly with the course theme. While online games provide joy and community for many, they’re also fertile ground for bad behavior, Rochlin said.
For the project, two student teams split up to work on ideas for both the shooter game franchises (such as Apex) and sports games (such as FIFA) with a goal of supporting the Electronic Arts Positive Play Initiative. “I was thrilled that EA wanted the teams to focus on insights and initiatives relating to the joy of connection rather than just community policing,” Rochlin said.
Kang, who worked on the shooter games project, said when she tried gaming at a younger age, she felt overwhelmed. “I tried to learn but found it difficult to get good fast,” she said. “As a kid, I had negative experiences online with people saying mean things.”
The EA project included three phases: discovery, where team members read up on gaming in forums on online publications before interviewing gamers from different backgrounds. They then developed and presented EA with a framework which focused on both the root causes of bad experiences. Phase three involved coming up with solutions to pitch to the company.
The students recommended several ideas they felt would have impact and were achievable, said Sania Salman, MBA 22. Those ideas included bringing players from online together offline to create micro-communities of people from different schools or affinity groups who engage in tournaments. “This takes the vastness of the digital world community and makes it more accessible,” Salman said.
A second idea involved creating incentives and awards for advanced players to mentor newer players. Kang said she particularly liked the mentoring idea. “That would have been super helpful for me to get better at gaming and solving the isolation that happens with new gamers,” she said.
A second idea involved creating incentives and awards for advanced players to mentor newer players.
“Exceptional” teams
Chris Norris, director of Positive Play at EA, noted that for Electronic Arts and the Positive Play team, “It’s incredibly important that we ensure our experiences are minimally disruptive, while also focusing efforts on amplifying the meaningful connections and moments of joy that games provide.”
Working with the two Haas project teams was exceptional, he added. “The students brought an intellectual rigor and sharp perspective, focused entirely on improving the player experience,” he said.
Rochlin, who recently wrote a Berkeley Haas case on tech for good and human-centered product design, said he’s looking forward to teaching the course again. “This course was a dream for Adam and I,” he said. “Many Haas students have an interest in pursuing careers in tech firms and a desire to find meaningful career work that reflects their values. It doesn’t need to be ‘either/or.'”
A plan to weave sustainability across the Berkeley Haas curriculum is underway, with faculty adding fresh cases, new class materials, and lectures with industry leaders to their courses.
“We are doubling down on our investment in sustainability and preparing the next generation of sustainability leaders,” said Berkeley Haas Dean Ann Harrison.
Making Haas the number one business school for sustainability is a goal shared by Harrison and Michele de Nevers, executive director of Sustainability Programs at Haas. “Our goal is that all graduates should have an understanding and awareness of the sustainability challenges, issues, and a framework for thinking about these challenges as they go forth into their careers,” she said.
By the end of 2023, the school plans to retool all 14 core courses at Haas to incorporate concepts that address climate change and other sustainability challenges throughout various business disciplines. (Haas already offers many elective courses focused on sustainability, everything from Energy & Environmental Markets to Business and Sustainable Supply Chains.)
“Accountants need to plan for the effects of climate change on valuation and outcomes; real estate developers and financiers will need to consider climate changes in forecasting risk; so will consultants and investment bankers,” Harrison said.
Becoming a leader
There are many signs that Haas is moving toward its goal as a sustainability leader. More than two-thirds of the full-time MBA Class of 2021 took a course focused on sustainability while they were at Haas. And a total of 109 part- and full-time MBA students are signed up for the new Michaels Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business, a 9-credit certificate program. The first 10 students earned the certificate last year in one of three tracks: corporate sustainability, sustainable finance, and impact venture capital.
The school is also developing a dual masters program with Berkeley’s top-ranked Rausser College of Natural Resources that will combine an MBA with a masters in climate solutions.
The school is also developing a dual masters program with Berkeley’s top-ranked Rausser College of Natural Resources that will combine an MBA with a masters in climate solutions.
In addition, Haas is also moving its campus further toward carbon neutrality. The Financial Times this week named Haas among the more ambitious schools today in this area, citing its efforts with UC Berkeley to be carbon neutral by 2025, for both direct emissions and indirect emissions arising from electricity consumed. (Chou Hall is already certified as zero-waste — defined as diverting more than 90 per cent of refuse from landfill.)
For the past year, de Nevers has been assessing how sustainability is incorporated within the curriculum. She is working with the faculty to update courses during the 2021/2022 school year to address sustainability, tapping funds from the Holmstrom Sustainability Curriculum Grant.
Faculty members participating include Assistant Professor Omri Even-Tov, who is teaching a carbon emissions case he co-wrote with Professor Xiao-Jun Zhang, in his Financial Accounting course. Taught to first-year MBA students, the case addresses how companies can provide detailed disclosures about their carbon emissions in financial statements and estimates the direct and indirect costs of disclosure. The case also asks why companies might act to mitigate pollution—and evaluates the costs and benefits of those actions.
At the undergraduate level, Professor David Levine includes sustainability issues during most weeks teaching his macroeconomics course, integrating it into topics such as measuring GDP, international trade, recessions, and the analysis of current policies such as the environmental elements of Biden’s “Build Back Better Plan.”
During discussion on global climate change toward semester’s end, students will engage in a simulation, with teams taking on the roles of different nations. “Their job is to see if they can find a climate agreement that they all find acceptable,” Levine said.
Five key areas
Across campus, what makes Haas stand out is the extensive work the school has done is five key areas of sustainability: energy, the food chain, the built environment, sustainable and impact finance, and corporate social responsibility.
In 2020, CRB led a survey of MBA employers across industries, asking them about their sustainability roles and the necessary skills required for success. They then mapped those in-demand skills to content taught in more than 40 Haas courses—that teach everything from impact measurement and management to systems thinking to coalition building.
Separately, CRB curated a database of top corporate sustainability cases and articles for the faculty to use in their courses. “The case compendium is one example where CRB and our wonderful Haas students have curated a suite of sustainability-minded business cases and articles that are primed to be readily integrated into the core MBA curriculum,” said CRB’s executive director Robert Strand.
Professional Faculty member Brandi Pearce is teaching a case tapped from the database about Burt’s Bees in her course Leading for Sustainability. The case examines the challenges the company faced in remaining committed to its mission after its acquisition by Clorox. Pearce said the case “encourages students to explore the challenges of becoming part of a public company—with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders—while remaining a leader in driving social responsibility and sustainability business practices.”
Student demand for new course material in sustainability in the core and beyond is strong, said Olivia Wasteneys, MBA 22, who worked with de Nevers to assess how the faculty is integrating sustainability and on the distribution of grant funds. “It’s not just ESG reporting or climate change but the bigger question of ‘What is responsible business?’ ” she said. “It’s about how we cultivate a stronger sense of ethics and awareness of systemic issues, what we as a society face, and how business plays a role in perpetuating this and how we disassemble it.”
Every semester, Berkeley Haas Lecturer Alex Budak kicks off his class on Becoming a Changemaker with examples of changemakers who inspire him. For the past two years, he’s led with childhood trauma expert Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, California’s first Surgeon General.
On Nov. 9, his students got to hear directly from Burke Harris, who answered their questions virtually as a guest during class.
“She charts her own path in everything she does,” Budak said. “From being the first-ever Surgeon General for the State of California to championing a crucial-but-overlooked aspect of childhood health, she doesn’t have a playbook to follow. She invents it herself, every day—and she does so in a way which is empathetic, humble and tenacious.”
Burke Harris, who has established early childhood, health equity, and toxic stress as her key priorities, is the author of The Deepest Well, which addresses how deeply bodies can be imprinted by or Adverse Childhood Experiences—or ACEs—like abuse and neglect. The ACEs Aware initiative is a first-in-the-nation effort to screen patients for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) to help improve and save lives.
The pandemic has worsened mental health for many, and Burke Harris pointed to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which just announced a national mental health emergency for children.
“We recognize that (the pandemic is) also this massive, massive stressor and there’s never been a more important time for us to implement trauma-informed systems and trauma-informed care at scale,” Burke Harris said. “A lot of my focus, in addition to helping with vaccines and thinking about our rollout, is our strategy for equity, which is another huge thing right now because when you have a public health emergency, it doesn’t effect everyone equally.”
Being a changemaker is about more than working hard and being intense, she said. “I work hard, that’s no joke,” she said. “But it’s really that ability to replenish ourselves, that ability to nourish ourselves and take breaks and be joyful and really integrate the work we do and our purpose, also with our lives, I think allows us to sustain the work we’re doing and it also cultivates creativity and innovation and all of things that help us be more successful and change-making.”
Asked about a changemaker she admires, Burke Harris described a Google-organized dinner she attended, where she met lawyerBryan Stevenson, the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson worked on Supreme Court decisions to prohibit sentencing children under 18 to death or to life imprisonment without parole. “That was a total changemaker moment,” she said. “It was so joyful to talk to someone who was similarly passionate about caring for our vulnerable community members.”
This video is also listed as a Dean’s Speaker Series talk.
Software that can help electricity operators monitor and maintain microgrids located in remote rural communities netted a first place win and $50,000 in funding at the second annual Invest for Impact Competition. The event was held virtually April 23.
The winning student team–Jack Kerby-Miller, Simon Greenberg, both MBA 21, Rachel Stinebaugh, and Michael Calderón, both MBA 22–secured equity investment for early-stage startup 60Hertz.
“I am absolutely thrilled we were able to fund a women-founded startup that is working to support remote communities, many of which are indigenous communities in Alaska,” Calderón said. “I also feel deeply honored to have worked with my teammates who all brought their expertise and experience to deliver a winning pitch.”
Rachel Stinebaugh, MBA 22, who previously worked with microgrid startups in Burundi before coming to Haas, said 60Hertz was a great fit for the Haas Impact Fund and “well-positioned to address rural electrification in Alaska and other remote locations.”
Five student teams consisting of a total of 20 first-and-second-year MBA students pitched ideas ranging from an online childcare marketplace to a fintech app that would help unbanked communities gain access to credit to a bluetooth-enabled sensor to better track packages.
The competition is the culmination of a course called the Haas Impact Fund in which Haas student venture partners find existing social impact startups and help pitch their innovations to secure equity investment. Many of the startups that are selected for the Haas Impact Fund are in housing development, health, renewable energy, sustainable services and supply chain, and financial access industries.
“I’m incredibly proud of all the students who presented,” said Julia Sze who co-led the course with Bulbul Gupta, both of whom are professional faculty members at Haas. “This course provides a real and exciting opportunity for our students to learn how to invest in early-stage companies that are ready to have a big impact on the world.”
Competition attendees also heard from keynote speaker and UC Berkeley alum Kesha Cash, general partner of Impact America Fund, who gave a talk about the importance of investing in social impact companies to create positive, long-lasting change.
As CEO of Poshmark, Manish Chandra, EWMBA 95, constantly questions how and why people shop, and the journey clothing takes from the supply chain to closets to resale.
A decade after he graduated from the evening & weekend MBA program, he started the pioneering social shopping platform Kaboodle, which he sold to Hearst two years later in 2007. Poshmark, a social marketplace for new and used clothing and accessories that he founded in 2011, focuses largely on extending the life cycle of clothing.
In a Dean’s Speaker Series event on April 9, MBA students and Robert Strand, executive director of the Center for Responsible Business at Haas, interviewed Chandra about how he embeds sustainability into the core of his business, his journey as a leader, and his vision for the future of capitalism.
Here are a few highlights from the interview.
On the meaning of clothing: “Clothing really binds people together. It brings a sense of community, it empowers people, it makes people feel good, proud. It can uplift people.”
On Poshmark’s rise in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic: “Covid 19 was a seismic shock and a very sad shock for all of us. We’re still reeling from it. We’re isolated and we’re not physically connected. The circular economy and the resale really was in many ways a connector. When you bought and sold things from each other it connected you to another human being. It gave you something that was very powerful, that took energy to do. We saw the rise of second hand.”
On capitalism in the post-pandemic world: “We’re at a very powerful moment in our history…As we come out of hiding places and the world reintegrates over the next few months, I feel like everyone is looking at their life and looking at their values in a very different way. And as we go out and truly experience both the wonder of human connection and the misery that people have had, it’s a really important time to transform how we feel about consumption, how we feel about capitalism, and how we feel about sustainability. I think all three things can exist in a meaningful way.”
On getting an MBA: “Haas is, for me, one of the most transformational experiences, particularly because it happened after I’d worked for a few years and I was looking at finding that next level of growth for me.”