Ronald Goettler

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Ron Goettler's new study looks at how competing firms invest in innovation to increase overall market share.

Goettler Named Senior Associate Dean

Ron Goettler in one of his many meetings with Simon students

Ron Goettler, the James N. Doyle, Sr. Professor of Entrepreneurship, became the senior associate dean for faculty and research, succeeding Rajiv Dewan, starting in July 2014.

Goettler joined the Simon Business School in 2012 and immediately provided important leadership in our Entrepreneurship program. His research and teaching cover quantitative marketing, economics, entrepreneurship, and finance. Goettler received his PhD from Yale University in 1999 and was on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago. Goettler is well known for his methodical approach to problems and his willingness to contribute his time and intellect to help both students and the institution move forward.

Goettler also serves on the Board of Directors for the Simon School Venture Capital Fund and plays an active role in helping the student teams assess investment prospects. Goettler will continue to teach in his new role and to serve on several faculty committees, including the Promotion and Tenure Committee, the Faculty Curriculum Committee, and the Faculty Policy Committee. “In searching for a candidate for this position, I was impressed by the faculty’s universal support for Ron,” says Dean Andrew Ainslie. “I look forward to working with Ron, and I know he will continue to receive strong support as we move forward on a wide variety of initiatives over the next few years.”

Rajiv Dewan

Rajiv Dewan’84S (MS), ’87S (PhD) is rejoining the faculty full time as professor of computers and information systems. Dewan’s first faculty appointment was at Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. For the last eight years, he has provided Simon invaluable service as an administrator, including as the director of our doctoral program, faculty director of master’s programs, and senior associate dean of faculty and research. In addition, he has played key roles in Simon’s relaunching of an undergraduate business program. In making the announcement, Dean Ainslie invited all to thank Rajiv for what he has already done and will continue to do for our School.

Ron Hansen

Dean Ainslie also announced that Ron Hansen will continue to serve as senior associate dean for program development. In that role, Hansen is responsible for Simon’s international graduate partnerships, an increasingly important role in the University’s undergraduate business program, as well as the Technical Entrepreneurship And Management (TEAM) MS program. “Ron Hansen provides an important perspective that is grounded in both his academic achievements and his many years of service with Simon,” Ainslie says. “His counsel will be invaluable as we prepare our School for new challenges and opportunities.” In addition to his role as senior associate dean, Hansen also serves as area coordinator for the concentrations of Business Environment and Public Policy and International Management.

New Faculty Hires

Avery Haviv

Simon welcomes five distinguished scholars and a notable entrepreneur-in-residence.

Avery Haviv, assistant professor, marketing, is completing his PhD in quantitative marketing at the University of Toronto (Rotman School of Management). His research interest is in the development of methodology and the application of dynamic models to solve marketing problems. Haviv earned a bachelor of mathematics (honors statistics) from the University of Waterloo and a master of science (honors statistics) from the University of Toronto. He has also worked as a consultant market research.

Olga Itenberg

Olga Itenberg, assistant professor, finance, received her doctoral degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton). Her research interests lie in macroeconomics, innovation, and corporate finance. In addition to her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, Itenberg holds an MBA with a concentration in economic theory from New York University (Stern School of Business).

Sudarshan Jayaraman

Sudarshan Jayaraman, associate professor, accounting, previously served as assistant professor of accounting at Washington University, St. Louis (Olin Business School). Jayamaran was a senior analyst at HDFC Bank in Mumbai, India. His research interests focus on the interaction between financial reporting and informed trading and tradeoffs between internal and external monitoring mechanisms. He earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler) and an MBA from Bentley University, Waltham, MA.

Dmitry Orlov

Dmitry Orlov, assistant professor, finance, has research interests in several areas of finance and economics, including employee performance evaluations, markets for repurchase agreements, and coherent risk measurement. He also studies market microstructure models and general equilibrium asset pricing. Orlov’s research has been published in the Journal of Finance and The Journal of Mathematical Finance. Prior to earning a PhD from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he received a degree in mathematics from Moscow State University and a degree in data analysis from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Bryce Schonberger

Bryce Schonberger, assistant professor, accounting, received his doctoral degree in accounting from the University of Southern California. His research interests lie in financial accounting, with a focus on asset impairments, option markets, and earnings quality. He holds a CPA license in Colorado following work experience at PricewaterhouseCoopers in its audit support practice.

Simon Enlists Entrepreneurial Expertise

Gregg Steinberg is joining the University of Rochester Center for Entrepreneurship as entrepreneur-in-residence. A longtime Simon supporter, Steinberg will work with faculty, staff, and entrepreneurs to help develop and support the creation of business plans and new companies launched by students. He will also serve as an advisor to the Simon School Venture Capital Fund. Steinberg has been involved in a number of industries from startups to mature companies, both public and private. He has directed and advised a health care services organization, founded a strategy and operations advisory firm, and served as an investor and advisor to early- to mid-stage companies in a variety of industries. A member of the Simon Executive Advisory Committee, he holds an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a BS in business administration from the University of Arizona.

Simon Receives Nearly $5M in Major Gifts

The Simon Business School is receiving seven major gifts totaling nearly $5 million in support of The Meliora Challenge: The Campaign for the University of Rochester. These gifts will support student scholarships, curricular enhancements, and a named professorship. The gifts are the School’s latest contributions to the University’s record-setting campaign and help bring Simon’s total dollars raised to nearly $70 million.

Ronald H. Fielding’73 (MA), ’76S (MBA) has pledged $2.5 million to support student scholarships in addition to his $7 million in prior giving. Fielding is the retired chief strategist and senior vice president of the Rochester division of OppenheimerFunds Inc., one of the nation’s largest asset management companies. He managed its Rochester municipal bond funds and their predecessors for more than 25 years. A strong advocate of scholarships, he established the Ronald H. Fielding Scholarship Fund in 1996 to provide support for Simon students. Fielding is a member of the Simon National Council and Executive Advisory Committee.

Martin S. Lacoff’71S (MBA), chairman and co-founder of Belpointe, and Executive Advisory Committee member, committed $1.3 million to establish an endowed professorship in honor of former Simon Business School professor Michael C. Jensen. This adds to a previous gift from Lacoff, which established the LaClare Professor of Business Administration and Finance, the first faculty endowment at Simon in 1984. The Michael C. Jensen Professorship will support a leading faculty member at the School. Jensen, who was the first LaClare Professor, had a lasting impact on Lacoff, so the professorship will also recognize the long-run effect that instruction and research have on Simon students.

David Reh’67S (MBA), managing partner at Ravenwood Golf Club in Victor, NY, and former president at Gorbel Inc., is adding $250,000 to prior giving in support of the Sue and David Reh Scholarship Fund, awarded to outstanding full-time MBA students who have demonstrated capacity for success in the MBA program. Reh is a member of the Simon National Council and the Executive Advisory Committee.

Gregory S. Hayt’92S (MS), managing director and chief risk officer for Paloma Partners, a hedge fund based in Greenwich, CT, is committing $125,000 in scholarship support through the Annual Fund. Prior to joining Paloma, Hayt served as senior consultant for Rutter Associates. Previously, he was an executive director in CIBC World Markets and vice president, risk management research, at Chase Manhattan Bank.

James N. Doyle Jr. is adding to prior giving with $116,000 to establish the James N. Doyle Jr. Fellowship Fund for Christian Entrepreneurship. The Doyle fellows will be recruited from Christian colleges and universities. Special consideration will be given to students demonstrating an interest in service to others and who exhibit a commitment to their undergraduate institution’s higher ideals and missions.

David Khani’93S (MBA), CFO of CONSOL Energy Inc., the Pittsburgh-based natural gas and coal producer, is pledging $100,000 to enhance the Center for Innovative Teaching and Technology by creating an open, collaborative space with the latest technology to enhance classroom instruction, club activities, research, training sessions, and individual and team study. Khani is a member of the Executive Advisory Committee.

J. Michael Smith, founder and CEO of CABOT Group, is committing $100,000 to establish The CABOT Group Lecture Series in Real Estate. The intention of the endowed fund is to bring prominent executives to Simon and the University to share experiences, professional lessons, and career guidance with students. Funds will also support small-group sessions with students and alumni interested in working in commercial real estate.

“We are deeply grateful to our generous donors for helping us to provide much-needed scholarship and faculty support, as well as curricular enhancements that will benefit our students for years to come,” said Dean Andrew Ainslie. “Their generosity is a testament to their belief in the value of a Simon Business School education.”

Tilson to Head Full-Time MBA Program

David Tilson has been named associate dean of the Full-Time MBA program. Tilson teaches business systems consulting, information systems, and analytics courses. A trusted mentor, he also works with many student teams on consulting projects in the Rochester region.

Ovitz Award

Ovitz CEO Felix Kim

The University of Rochester student-run Ovitz Corp. won the grand prize of $50,000 during the Rochester Regional Business Plan Competition. Ovitz makes a portable hand-held device called an EyeProfiler to determine an accurate prescription for corrective lenses.

Got Mock?

The Simon Career Management Center held a “Got Mock?” interview event on February 21, 2014. It
provided a great opportunity for students to toughen up their interviewing and networking skills with real-time feedback from business professionals in a variety of industries.

Commencement 2014

Robert E. Rich Jr. delivers the 2014 Commencement address and advises graduates to keep learning and retain their curiosity.

The Simon Business School held Commencement ceremonies on Sunday, June 8, 2014, in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. Over 500 students received graduate degrees, bringing the number of Simon Business School alumni to nearly 15,000. University President Joel Seligman presided and former Dean Mark Zupan delivered his last address as dean.

Robert E. Rich Jr. ’69S (MBA) delivered the Commencement address and received the Charles Force Hutchison and Marjorie Smith Hutchison medal. Rich is chairman of Rich Products Corporation and has led the company to more than $3 billion in worldwide sales revenue, earning the distinction as one of the world’s most dynamic business leaders. Rich earned his MBA from Simon Business School and subsequently became Rich’s vice president of sales and marketing. He was named president in 1978 and chairman in 2006. Rich serves on the Simon Executive Advisory Committee and as director of the 100 Club of Buffalo Inc. He told the graduates, “Retain your youthful curiosity. Employers are looking for people who can think and learn.”

Colleen Wegman’00S (MBA), president of Wegmans Food Markets, received the Simon Business School Distinguished Alumnus Award. Wegmans Food Markets Inc., an 83-store supermarket chain headquartered in Rochester, has built an international reputation for its overall excellence in quality, customer service, and variety. For 17 consecutive years, it has been named to Fortune magazine’s list of the “100 Best Companies to Work for in America,” including being ranked the top company on this list in 2005. In that same year, her grandfather, the late Robert B. Wegman, named her president of the company. In 2007, she was named to the Food Marketing Institute Board of Directors. Wegman is also active in the United Way of Greater Rochester and currently serves as chair of its Board of Directors.

Ronald Fielding’73 (MA), ’76S (MBA) received the Dean’s Medal. Fielding is the retired chief strategist and senior vice president of the Rochester division of OppenheimerFunds Inc. An example of brainpower and ambition, Fielding began  his first job—a paper route—at age seven. At age 15, he won a scholarship to the Putney School in Vermont, which he followed with an undergraduate degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland and an MBA from Simon. Fielding is a member of the George Eastman Circle, the University’s leadership annual giving society.

The Simon Class of 2014 included 229 MBA graduates (155 full time and 74 part time); 29 graduates
of the Executive MBA program; 251 graduates who received MS degrees (79 MS in business administration, 104 MS in finance, 32 MS in accountancy, 25 MS Finance in New York City, and 15 MS in Management in New York City); and five graduates were recognized for earning the PhD in business administration. Across all programs, 49 countries were represented. In addition, the Simon Business School’s Executive MBA program in Bern, Switzerland, graduated 22 students.

Mark Ain Business Model Winners Announced

Aspiring student entrepreneurs at the University of Rochester presented their business models to a panel of judges during the eighth annual Mark Ain Business Model Competition on May 13, 2014. Taking first place was the SmartDialysis team, which produced a nanomembrane, technology-based portable hemodialysis unit that could significantly improve quality of life for over 600,000 end-stage renal disease patients in the United States and revolutionize the $8 billion hemodialysis equipment industry.

MS Students Travel to NYC

MS in Finance students recently traveled to New York City to learn more about career developments in their field. The students had the opportunity to meet with over 50 alums and explore the sights and sounds of the world’s financial capital.

Simon Business School Installs Three Named Professors

Simon is recognizing three faculty members for their outstanding scholarly accomplishments through their recent installation in named professorships.

Ron Kaniel

Ron Kaniel became the inaugural Jay S. and Jeanne P. Benet Professor of Finance at an installation ceremony in New York City on May 7, 2014. Kaniel’s research interests are in asset pricing, financial intermediation with a focus on portfolio delegation, and investments. His scholarship has enhanced the understanding of how incentives affect fund investment decisions and security prices, the information contained in trading volume for predicting returns, and how herd behavior in financial markets can be rational. Kaniel is chair of the PhD committee.

Joanna Wu

Joanna S. Wu was installed as the first Susanna and Evans Y. Lam Professor on May 15, 2014. Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Accounting Research, and Accounting Review, among others. She is an editor of the Journal of Accounting and Economics. Wu’s research spans the areas of international financial reporting, the behavior of financial analysts, management compensation, voluntary disclosure, and mutual fund performance. Her work has been published in the

Robert Novy-Marx

Robert Novy-Marx became the inaugural Lori and Alan S. Zekelman Professor of Business Administration on June 6, 2014. Novy-Marx’s research on the government pensions crisis with co-author Joshua Rauh of Stanford University has firmly established him as a leading national voice on the issue, culminating in testimony before Congress. Among his many awards, Novy-Marx earned the 2012 and 2013 Fama-DFA Prize for the best capital markets/asset pricing paper in the Journal of Financial Economics; the 2012 Whitebox Advisors Selected Research Prize for the Best Financial Research of 2011 (second place); the 2012 AQR Insight Award Distinguished Paper Prize; the 2011 Smith-Breeden Prize for the best capital markets paper in the Journal of Finance; and the 2011 Spängler IQAM Prize for the best paper in the Review of Finance.

Eyes On Reducing Pharmacy Waste

Simon professors David and Vera Tilson joined University of Rochester Medical Center pharmacy director Curtis Haas on WHAM 1180’s Eyes on the Future radio show to discuss their research on streamlining pharmacy processes to reduce waste. Their study examining how pharmacies prepare and dispense medication could potentially improve operations for thousands of hospitals nationwide. Simon professor Gregory Dobson coauthored the paper with the other researchers but was unavailable for the program. For more on the study, see the spring 2014 issue of Simon Business.

Simon NYC Conference Examines Disruption, Innovation Impact

In a world where change is constant, disruption, regulation, and innovation continue to have a significant impact on the way business is conducted around the globe. Simon Business School gathered prominent senior executives and industry leaders on May 8, 2014, for its fifth annual Simon NYC Conference, “The Global Marketplace: Rising to the Challenges of Regulation, Disruption, and International Competition.”

More than 250 people turned out to hear from headliners Sallie Krawcheck, owner of 85Broads and former Bank of America senior executive; Robert Wilmers, chairman and CEO of M&T Bank; Rob Sands, president and CEO of Constellation Brands; and John Stossel, host of Fox Business’ Stossel, among several others.

Stossel discussed the failure of “big government” to solve America’s economic problems, while Krawcheck shared her advice for succeeding in business. Krawcheck urged the audience to listen to their instincts when it comes to ethical or moral dilemmas.

Sands received the Executive of the Year Award for his lifelong achievement as an outstanding business leader; for his philanthropic commitment to advancing education, health care, and arts and culture in the Rochester region; and for his strategic vision and innovation at the helm of Constellation.

Schmeling Gives Kalmbach Lecture

Judy Schmeling

Simon Women in Business (SWiB) presented a lecture from HSN COO and CFO Judy Schmeling on April 7, 2014, as part of the Kalmbach Lecture Series. Schmeling oversees HSN’s finance, information technology, customer care, facilities, supply chain and logistics, corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and affiliate relations.

Executive MBA Program Evolving to Meet Professional and Industry Needs

The Simon Business School Executive MBA (EMBA) program, the second oldest in the world among top-tier business schools, is enhancing its academic and program offerings to meet the needs of today’s business leaders. Starting in September 2014, Simon will offer an innovative, hands-on leadership module and an online component to allow busy executives to attend classes on campus just once a month.

The new yearlong leadership module provides a framework for personal leadership and expands professional development offerings, and its modular format allows for a seamless integration of our leadership content with the rest of the academic schedule. The online component engages the right use of technology to maximize students’ time management, with fewer hours away from work.

The module complements an existing yearlong business plan course and offers global management electives that provide immersion and understanding of macroeconomic trends, particularly in Europe and Asia. Students develop a robust network in Rochester and beyond through Simon’s EMBA program in partnership with the University of Bern (Switzerland) and MS in Finance and MS in Management programs in New York City.

“Our Executive MBA program is designed for those ready to lead their organizations, and with these enhancements, we are providing a comprehensive set of skills: analytical, strategic, and interpersonal,” says Carin L. Cole’99S (MBA), assistant dean for executive and professional programs.

“As the business market faces increasing cost pressure, we have restructured the program so that it will provide more flexibility in balancing work and program schedules,” explains Clifford W. Smith Jr., Louise and Henry Epstein Professor of Business Administration and professor of finance and economics. “We believe that the technology has evolved to where we can offer students more flexibility to participate from a remote location.”

Simon Partners with UBS to Offer Wealth Management Master’s in Switzerland

Simon Executive Programs, in partnership with Rochester-Bern, is teaming up with global wealth manager UBS AG to launch a Wealth Management master’s program for experienced UBS client advisors. The two-year program prepares participants to navigate the changing conditions in the industry.

The program is targeted at UBS Wealth Management experienced client advisors worldwide, with the exception of those in the United States. The two-year program combines academic content with practical content from UBS speakers; in addition, there are lectures delivered by select, internationally recognized practitioners and researchers. Between courses, participants apply the material they have learned in projects relevant to their own areas of business.

Participants attend four course blocks, as well as a further series of individual courses covering not only financial markets, investment management, strategy, and leadership, but also ethics, corporate finance, behavioral finance, and risk management. Graduates earn a master of science in wealth management from the Simon Business School, as well as a master of advanced studies in finance from the University of Bern.

A thorough evaluation process led UBS to select Rochester-Bern for both its executive education experience and its requisite network of expertise, stemming from its cooperation with the Simon Business School as well as the University of Bern and the Swiss Finance Institute. “It is both interesting and challenging to support top client advisors at UBS with an education program that will enable them to tackle market challenges in the best interest of clients, employees, and society,” notes Claudio Loderer’80S (MS), ’83S (PhD), professor of finance, head of the Institut für Finanzmanagement at the University of Bern, and academic director of Rochester-Bern Executive Programs.

SimonUnited Celebrates a Taste of India

In May, the SimonUnited club held a special Broaden Your Horizons event to showcase traditional Indian dances, as well as live music and authentic Indian cuisine. SimonUnited’s mission is to encourage Simon students to further their cultural awareness and attain a sense of tolerance and understanding.

When General Motors announced the largest recall in the company’s history, the nation’s media turned to George Cook.

Executive professor and former auto executive George Cook offers insights into GM's massive auto recalls.

Simon travels to Israel to find an ancient land now fueled by entrepreneurs.

By Itay Hod

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Earlier this year, prior to the recent conflict in Gaza, 26 Simon Business School students embarked on the trip of a lifetime, as they boarded a flight from New York to Tel Aviv. This was not your average pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The trip was part of a new groundbreaking course aimed at answering the world’s most intriguing trillion-dollar question: How does a country so small manage to become a global startup superpower?

While courses about Israel are not exactly a new development, this particular offering was not your mother or father’s business class. As part of their workload, students advised an actual up-and-coming Israeli startup company on how to break into the American consumer market. At the end of the quarter, they presented their findings in front of the company’s CEO.

“This experience has been invaluable,” says Israeli-born Abraham (Avi) Seidmann, Xerox Professor of Computers and Information Systems and Operations Management and co-sponsor of the course. “Our students need to be exposed to real, world-class entrepreneurs.”

During their visit, Simon students were also invited to meet some of Israel’s biggest names in the business world. That, Seidmann says, was more useful than anything found in the pages of a textbook. “The students came back with sparkling eyes saying, ‘Professor, we love your country!’”

Meals to Maps: Israel Is Alive with Entrepreneurship

Nakarin Gai prepares a home-cooked meal for EatWith guests visiting Tel Aviv.

On a warm January evening, Yariv Gai, a 42-year-old businessman from Tel Aviv, and his wife, Nakarin, a 33-year-old native of Thailand, are getting ready to host an unusual dinner for six. Nakarin has been preparing for days, going to the market several times, spending hours dicing vegetables, marinating meat, and sautéing four types of exotic mushrooms. Even their two-year-old son, Tom, helped with some of the preparations before going to bed. At T-minus zero, Nakarin scrambles to put the final touches on her elaborate four-course meal. Her husband fastidiously sets the table, making sure everything is just right.

As the guests start to arrive, Yariv hands each a tiny cup of warm lemongrass tea while greeting them with the traditional “Wai,” a slight bow, with his palms pressed together in a prayer-like fashion.

The visitors are then treated to a beautifully prepared meal, peppered with personal anecdotes of the couple’s life in Thailand, as well as intriguing facts about each dish.

While Yariv and Nakarin have had plenty of their friends over for dinner many times, this is no regular get-together. In fact, every person sitting at their dining-room table is a complete stranger and paying guest.

The dinner guests are all customers who booked a dinner reservation through a new startup company called EatWith. Dubbed the “Airbnb of food,” the site allows individuals traveling abroad to try authentic home-cooked meals. All they have to do is go on the site, pick a dinner, and enter their credit card number. For the most part, it’s cheaper than going to a restaurant, but the experience is the selling point.

“We can’t compete with the big restaurants and their huge resources,” says Yariv. “What we can offer is that human touch, and a very full stomach.”

At $37 per person, the couple isn’t expecting to get rich. But they do hope to earn some extra cash, and, perhaps, meet some interesting people in the process. “Nakarin loves to cook and I love to entertain,” says Yariv. “It was a win-win for us.”

EatWith is the brainchild of Israeli entrepreneur Guy Michlin. While vacationing in Crete, Michlin and his wife were looking for a good, hearty meal. They were tired of the fare at restaurants catering to tourists and were craving something a bit more authentic. When he asked a Greek acquaintance where the locals ate, he was told, “What do you mean where? We eat at home!”

Michlin, who was looking for ideas for a new startup company, felt a lightbulb switch on over his head. “I was invited to his house and it ended up being the highlight of my trip,” he recalls. “It was right after the economic crisis in Greece, and everyone was talking about it. I sat there listening to their stories in awe. It was fascinating.”

When Michlin got back home, he decided to do a little research. After asking his friends about their trips abroad, he realized the only meals they could remember were those prepared by ordinary people. “One friend told me, ‘When I went to Vietnam in 1998, the tour guide took us home and cooked us this amazing dinner.’ His eyes sparkled as he recalled every dish, every little detail of that night. But when I asked him what restaurants he went to, he couldn’t think of a single one.”

EatWith founders Guy Michlin (left) and Shemer Schwartz

After spending four months (and most of his savings) putting the site together, Michlin managed to secure a $1.2 million investment from a local venture capital fund. Today, EatWith is available in 30 cities, including Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. The company makes money by adding a 15 percent surcharge to the price of the meal. Hosts are carefully vetted on both their cooking and entertaining skills. EatWith already has thousands of applications from more than 110 countries.

Interestingly, what was supposed to be an alternative for tourists in search of an authentic experience has become a fad among Israelis looking for an out-of-the-ordinary night out. At least 50 percent of the company’s customers are from the surrounding areas.

“It’s something different,” says Daniela Bleishtein, who tried EatWith for the first time with her husband. Bleishtein, an Israeli, heard about the site through friends and thought it would be a new idea for date night. “We loved it,” she says. “There was something adventurous about the whole thing. We’d definitely try it again.”

EatWith is just one of thousands of new startups popping up in the Holy Land in recent years. A small country, with roughly 8.2 million people, Israel has been dubbed the “startup nation.” Although it’s tiny, barely the size of New Jersey, Israel is home to about 6,000 startup companies, more than any other country per capita, and second only to the United States in absolute numbers. Israel also leads the world in venture capital invested per capita, attracting $170 per person, compared to $75 in the United States. Not bad for a country that until 66 years ago wasn’t even on the map.

In February, Fast Company, an award-winning tech magazine known for its annual report on the
world’s most innovative sites, included a list of the top 10 most innovative startups in Israel.

“Israel has more companies on NASDAQ than all of Europe combined,” says Dr. Shlomo Kalish, CEO of Jerusalem Global Ventures, one of the top private equity firms in the country, observing that Israel’s lack of natural resources has been the driving force in its quest for innovation. Dr. Kalish says Israel’s dominance in the world of startups is nothing short of miraculous. “In the last 10 years,” he says, “there were $10 billion in acquisitions of Israeli startups, $2 billion in the last year alone.”

Last June, Google set its sights on the Israeli mapping service Waze, acquiring it for $1.2 billion, until then the most expensive buyout of any Israeli consumer app. Though there have been two other non-consumer Israeli unicorns (companies achieving an exit of more than $1 billion), as part of the deal with Google, each of Waze’s 100 employees received an average of $1.2 million, representing the largest payout to employees in the history of Israeli high tech. That move is what made headlines in both Israel and around the world—so much so that Waze’s CEO, Noam Bardin, famously received a phone call from Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the night the company was sold, to offer what seemed like a well-intended pun and congratulate him for putting “Israeli technology on the global map.”

Tel Aviv is an emerging Israel, with a new and thriving economy situated in an ancient and historical land.

Waze is a GPS-like smartphone app that provides drivers with up-to-the-minute, real-time updates on road conditions. More than 50 million subscribers use it to warn fellow drivers about traffic jams, accidents, and even the presence of nearby police. It’s become so ubiquitous that one out of three drivers in Israel is on Waze at any given time.

“Waze really established Israel as a force to be reckoned with when it comes to mobile application technology,” says Edon Ophir, a former marketing executive at Waze (and no, he wasn’t one of the 100 people who made $1.2 million; we asked). “Israel’s technology has always been amazing, but people were skeptical about the country’s ability to create applications that a mass consumer audience would use. Waze proved that with one of the largest mobile exits of all time. It’s really phenomenal.”

Ophir may have a point. Although Israel has had incredible success with Waze and other apps—such as ICQ, which was acquired by AOL in 1998 for $407 million and was the basis for the AOL instant messenger—it’s been slow to break into the billion-dollar club. Though Israel is second in the world when it comes to total number of startups, it has only three unicorns on its résumé, while the United States has had 39 and Europe has had 30. But now the word is out, experts say, and that’s all about to change.


Lee also points out that the companies reaching unicorn status typically fall within four major business models: consumer e-commerce, consumer audience, software-as-a-service, and enterprise software. More specifically, three consumer-oriented companies, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, have created the majority of the value in the past decade. As for where most of these unicorns roam, San Francisco, not Silicon Valley, is their popular new home, with 27 of the 39 companies located in the Bay area.

Lee also points out that the companies reaching unicorn status typically fall within four major business models: consumer e-commerce, consumer audience, software-as-a-service, and enterprise software. More specifically, three consumer-oriented companies, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, have created the majority of the value in the past decade. As for where most of these unicorns roam, San Francisco, not Silicon Valley, is their popular new home, with 27 of the 39 companies located in the Bay area.

Since Waze, Soluto and Onavo, both Israeli startups, have had great exits in consumer tech, and Wix “unicorned” through its IPO. Experts say there are many more to come.

A Cultural Thing

One reason Israel is so successful in the startup world, says Ophir, is because its citizens are known for speaking their minds. “They don’t see arguing as something negative,” he says. “If anything, they see it as a necessity.” Ophir, who is American by birth, says he experienced a bit of a culture shock when he moved to Israel. “I had to throw out all of my American conditioning toward the workplace. I was told very early on that my chutzpah was an asset. I was encouraged to raise my voice and make my views heard out loud. I realized that I wouldn’t be respected if I raised my hand and waited for my turn to talk.”

Then, of course, there is the whole army issue. Israel has mandatory military service. Instead of heading to college, every 18-year-old must serve in the Israeli Defense Forces first. The law requires three years of service for men and two years of service for women.

“The military has become a good breeding ground for leadership and teamwork,” says Tal Brener, CFO of GetTaxi, the uber-successful Israeli mobile app for ordering cabs. Brener says the military experience fosters a sense of fearlessness that’s essential in the startup world. “They’re not afraid of making tough decisions and they are extremely resourceful,” he notes.

Brener should know. GetTaxi is another one of Israel’s blockbuster stories, with annual revenue of more than $100 million, according to the company.

Earlier this month, GetTaxi’s CEO said on Facebook that the company is growing at an annual rate of more than 400 percent, same as its arch-nemesis, the San Francisco-based Uber. Company executives predict an astounding half-billion dollars in revenue next year.

Interestingly, many of Israel’s startup legends got their big break in the military’s 8200 unit, the commando regiment of coders and computer engineers. Getting into the 8200 is akin to a letter of acceptance from Harvard. In fact, many of the unit’s graduates have been recruited by some of world’s biggest companies, such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, all of which have offices and R&D centers in Israel’s “Silicon Wadi” (Arabic for valley), concentrated around the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.

Studying Startup Success

As part of their trip to Israel, Simon students worked closely with Lexifone.

The Jewish state has become such a technological phenomenon that Simon sent students to Israel last March as part of an innovative new independent study program. “It was a tremendous addition to our profile for summer school,” says Seidmann. During the trip led by faculty advisors Dennis Kessler, Edward J. and Agnes V. Ackley Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, and Rami Katz’03S (MBA), students focused on Israel and its startup dominance in the global market. “The students came back very excited,” says Seidmann. “Many of them told me it was the best trip of their lives.”

The visit was the culmination of an entire quarter studying the region and its culture, as well as advising a new Israeli startup called Lexifone on how to break into the American market. Lexifone, an app straight out of a Star Trek episode, translates languages in real time. Just talk in your native tongue, and Lexifone will transcribe, then translate into the desired language.

Simon students were divided into two groups. Each came up with its own strategies and ideas on how to sell Lexifone to American consumers. After working on their project for an entire quarter, students presented their findings in front of the company leadership. A job offer at the company went to the group with the best strategy.

Hands-on Learning for Global Business

At the end of the quarter, students traveled to Israel for work and a bit of sightseeing. Of the 26 people who went on the trip, only four were Jewish. “I was surprised at how many people signed up,” says Michael Lightman’14S (MBA), the student who organized the journey and designed the independent study course. “Last year, we went to China and only nine people made it.”

Lightman, who works part-time for Excell Partners, the VC firm that invested in Lexifone, says the trip exceeded his greatest expectations. “It was a mix between spring break and a corporate trip,” he says referring to Purim, the Jewish carnival-like holiday. “We got to have fun, go to Jerusalem, and learn about Israel’s culture and history. Most important, we got an inside look at business in a place that is unbelievable at what it does.”

Simon students explore Israel.

The reason it’s so good, Lightman adds, is its people. “There are three things that you look for in a startup company as an investor,” he explains. “The market, meaning do people want to buy what I’m selling; the product, meaning can it do what I say it’s going to do? And finally, the team. Things are going to go bad; that’s a given. The question is, Can my team fix it? Can we work together without falling apart? Israelis have experience working together in high-pressure situations.”

More than just hands-on experience, the course was a good way to introduce students to major players in the startup world. “When you go to Israel you have a chance to meet people from Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins that would not talk to you if you flew to California,” Seidmann says.

The trip was subsidized in part by the Farash Foundation and a Jewish organization called Israel & Co., which also helped with background support, including introductions by Gregg Steinberg, the newly appointed entrepreneur-in-residence at Simon, to key players in the Israeli economy. They even organized a special visit to an Israeli Air Force base where students had an opportunity to meet a fighter pilot finishing his MBA.

“It was unbelievable learning about how his experiences, making life-and-death decisions from a very young age, helped him in the fast-paced, high-tech business world,” Lightman says. “It really helped drive home the point that Israeli citizens have an extraordinary ability to stay calm under pressure. They’re able to create order out of chaos.”

“Israel is doing what every brand has to do to survive and prosper in today’s world,” says Chad Kawalec, marketing expert and founder of The Brand Identity Center. “They’re exposing student leaders in top business schools all over the world to the Israeli experience, basically letting people sample the brand in much the same way you sample a piece of cheese at Costco on the weekend. The hope is that you’ll return and spread the word.”

Kawalec says studying a country for an entire quarter and then working directly with an Israeli startup help create a bond between the students and Israel that otherwise wouldn’t have been formed. “Israel is reframing and expanding its brand from a potent religious and tourist destination to a world-class hub of innovation on every level.”

And it seems to be working. Lightman, who just graduated from Simon, is now googling apartments for rent in Tel Aviv. “This trip was my first trip to Israel,” he says. “I went in with high hopes, especially having spoken with all the companies beforehand. Those hopes weren’t just met; they were exceeded. This is the sort of place I could see myself working and living.”

“I find it to be a fascinating place,” says Dennis Kessler, who co-sponsored the trip and joined the students on their program in Israel. “This was not just a tour to see the Old City or Tel Aviv,” he says. “It was 100 percent experiential learning.”

Professor Seidmann

Kessler says students were able to get their hands dirty rather than just learn theory, a must in today’s competitive market—and that Israel has proven effective at problem solving. “They don’t have oil like their Arab neighbors,” he says. “They don’t have water either, which has led them to become world leaders in water desalination. They created drip irrigation, which waters crops through perforated hoses, and are now exporting goods all over the world.”

Despite having less than optimal conditions, with half of the country’s territory consisting of desert land, Israel manages to produce 95 percent of its own food while exporting more than $2 billion in produce every year.

But perhaps Israel’s biggest asset when it comes to startups is its tolerance for failure—and resilience. “Israelis are not afraid to try and try again,” says Seidmann. As for EatWith, it’s anyone guess whether it “unicorns” anytime soon. But if it does, it will no doubt give global investors a lot more food for thought.

Ainslie Selection Balances Strategy and Tradition

A number of very qualified and highly regarded candidates threw their hats in the ring, but Dean Andrew Ainslie stood apart from the rest. 

By Janice Willett

The search for a new dean at the Simon Business School presented an opportunity to find someone who could take the School to the next level. Simon has a proud tradition of both pioneering research and a rigorous, economics-based approach to management education. Under Dean Mark Zupan’s leadership, the School built a solid foundation of strong alumni engagement, innovative one-year programs, and a sustainable endowment draw—along with job placement rates, student satisfaction scores, and entering-class statistics that are all moving in the right direction. We were looking for someone who would respect our traditions and build on that foundation, but who would also take a hard look at where we could do better—and be a change agent.

University President Joel Seligman understood the strategic importance of Simon’s next leader and opted to chair the selection committee himself, in addition to appointing a special committee of alumni to assist in the process. A number of very qualified candidates from highly regarded schools expressed interest in the position, which is a tribute to the continued strength and reputation of the School. (As Peter Simon, for whose father the School is named, often says, “It’s a gem of a school.”) The search committee whittled the list down to a handful of finalist candidates, at which point the alumni committee was brought in to meet and evaluate them.

My fellow alumni committee members were Mark Ain, Ron Fielding, Evans Lam, Mike Ryan, Peter Simon, and Colleen Wegman—all savvy, hard-core supporters of the School. I can speak for the committee in saying that Andrew Ainslie captured our interest immediately by virtue of the breadth of his strengths. His academic credentials include a degree in electrical engineering and an MBA—as well as a PhD in marketing and statistics, which he earned in four years from the University of Chicago after starting there at the age of 34, no small feat. He brings leadership experience in an unusual mix of areas—the military, the corporate world, and graduate business education. He had a solid reputation as an academic before moving to the administrative side. He shares our respect for the workings of markets and a reliance on hard data analysis as the best basis for sound decisions. He appreciates the distinctiveness of Simon’s approach to business education—and particularly its reliance on economics—in a world where business education has become somewhat conformist.

Speaking with Andrew Ainslie is like speaking with any of our faculty or alums. He immediately identifies and engages in the issues, he doesn’t mince words, and he is quantitative, data-driven, and empirical. He emphasizes long-term strategic success over short-term performance “blips.” He has a great regard for our faculty and its reputation for intellectual rigor, and the value of the research mission. He understands how a strong faculty can boost a school’s ranking—and vice versa—and will work to attract and retain a world-class faculty.

While head of the MBA program at UCLA-Anderson, Ainslie identified career placement as a key differentiator and worked hard to improve both the placement center itself and the marketability of the students—and to link admissions and placement more closely together.

We are fortunate to have found someone with Dean Ainslie’s intellectual training and leadership skills. He’s Simon tough—and we are excited to welcome him to the Simon community.

Guest contributor for the Fall 2014 Dean’s Corner message is Janice M. Willett ’78S (MBA). Willett is the Simon Campaign chair, and a member of the Simon Business School National Council and the University of Rochester Board of Trustees.

Soon after Andrew Ainslie became the seventh dean of the Simon Business School, we spoke with him about the state of business education and his strategy for success.Interview by Jim Ver Steeg

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Q: Before we find out a little bit more about you and your career, perhaps you can tell us why the dean leadership role at Simon felt like the right opportunity for you.

AA: I had been running the MBA program at Anderson, which was really one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in my career. But there comes a point where you feel like it’s time to take that next step. I had been looking at a few opportunities with other business schools, but Rochester really stood out. That’s because the Simon School has a long tradition that is similar to the schools where I have spent most of my career, either as a PhD student or as a faculty member. Simon has many ties and commonalities with the University of Chicago and UCLA. So it felt like I was staying academically in the same milieu that I’ve been in for my entire academic career, and that was really important to me.
 
Rochester also has the same high standards in terms of its research and mission. It has always been a very quantitative school with an economic approach to the study of business problems, which also ties with my own academic background. So this really did feel like an incredible opportunity. I am truly honored that I have been chosen for this position.

Q: Speaking of opportunities, can you speak to some of the top opportunities for US business schools, and perhaps some of the biggest challenges they face?

AA: The opportunities and challenges are essentially the same set of issues! Business is changing fast, and interestingly enough, moving in the direction that academics have been going for many years. That direction is the analysis of huge amounts of data to better understand patterns in consumption and the movements of goods, and what motivates and drives those patterns. This affects many disciplines, including marketing and operations as just two examples. Of course, finance has understood and analyzed data very rigorously for a long time, but even in finance, the sheer quantity of data has increased over the last few years. That creates both an opportunity and a challenge for business schools to impart that knowledge to MBA students. It also happens to be an area where we at the Simon School are particularly well positioned. We have outstanding faculty members in those areas who have been creating both great research and new classroom content to help businesses cope with the data deluge.

The other area that presents both an opportunity and a challenge is in understanding how to better incorporate technology in the classroom, be it virtual or real. There’s been a lot of talk about MOOCs—massive open online courses. Personally, I’m skeptical on just how useful most of the early implementations of MOOCs are to people interested in improving their skillset—and the statistics show that many of the individuals participating in MOOCs get halfway through the first lesson, or maybe the second video, and then just give up.

Q: That seems to go against current opinion. Why is that?

AA: I think it’s important to understand student incentives. It’s naïve to believe that the only reason people go to a university is purely to learn. One of the biggest values that business schools offer is the opportunity to network. Networking provides each student an opportunity to interact with peers who are just as bright, if not brighter, than they are, with experiences both similar and different from their own. This provides a richness that can never be replicated by stand-alone videos or, for that matter, old-fashioned textbooks. It also provides an opportunity to interact directly with faculty, and a structured way to go out and look for job opportunities in the marketplace.

But possibly the most important problem with MOOCs is that a degree from a good business school offers you entrance to a relatively small club. None of these are offered by online or MOOC classes, unless those classes are very carefully structured. Our challenge is to find methods that deliver content in new ways, while not walking away from this other complex set of benefits that people get out of an MBA or a master’s degree in business.



Q: MOOCs may not be the answer, but are there aspects of their technology that offer opportunities within an on-campus setting?

AA: Certainly. One of the faculty members at UCLA, Carla Hayn, developed a very successful hybrid program where students spent 50 percent of their time in the classroom in fairly intense blocks, and 50 percent of their time learning online at home. The hybrid program really does offer the best of both for people whose jobs don’t allow them to be on campus regularly in the evening or over the weekend. A similar model is being implemented at Simon with our Executive MBA program; it also offers the best of both worlds. But I think it’s important to move slowly and to be cautious. Some schools have gone into this a little too fast, and it’s not clear that what they’ve put together offers sufficient value to the students taking courses in programs that veer too far over to a pure online delivery. I think it’s important to get it right, and I think it’s also important to do it in a way that doesn’t use students as guinea pigs, but immediately gives them effective tools for learning and for succeeding in their careers.

Q: We often hear about Simon’s data-driven approach. Can you speak to what that means to the future direction of the School?

AA: That was one of the strongest things that attracted me to Simon. We’re uniquely positioned as a business school. We believe strongly in the value of economics and statistics and the analysis of all business problems. That arguably leaves you with a bit of a hole in terms of what we might be able to offer our students around such areas as behavioral decision theory, which is sort of an interface between economics and psychology. However, one of the first things that every business school teaches in a marketing class is the importance of differentiation, yet there is actually remarkably little differentiation between the offerings of most business schools. There are at least two advantages to being differentiated: First, this allows us to spend more time on giving our students a deeper understanding of those economic and analytic tools, and second, it allows us to offer a product that will attract that set of students who value our analytic bias. In turn, we can then put them in front of the set of recruiters that are most interested in candidates with a great analytic skillset. I think our alumni are appreciative of the type of education they received because of Simon’s differentiation. There’s a place in the marketplace for our well-differentiated product, and I don’t think we should change that.

Q: How does Simon’s quantitative approach compare to UCLA?

AA: UCLA is fairly quantitative in its approach. They have strong finance, marketing, operations, and economics groups, but they also have a very strong behavioral decision theory group. So UCLA is more conventional in their approach.

Q: If we think about the behavioral aspect of business education, and the fact that having more quantitative education is better in the long run, do you think that extends to identifying the right prospective students?

AA: I think that’s a really important point. I also think some of those behavioral aspects are difficult to teach. People often refer to this as emotional intelligence, or EQ. One of the things we did at UCLA was try to move away from picking candidates largely on their quantitative skills and to balance that with looking for candidates with high EQ by focusing on their interviews. At the Simon School, we can balance the quantitative bias of our program by bringing in the right people who already have some of the more intangible skills, such as working well in groups and with others.

Dean Ainslie discusses issues facing women in business with MBA candidate Dianna Marks.

Q: The search committee cited as one of your strengths your attention to the research mission of the School and your farsighted approach to the challenges facing all MBA programs. What makes those a priority for you?

AA: The way that one has to think about this is that it’s a matter of differentiating between long-term goals and short-term goals—and it’s also a matter of balancing between the broader goals of our community and our school’s goals. The balance that we’re trying to achieve is between ensuring that we do well by our students in the short term, but also by adding to a deeper understanding of how businesses work in the long run, ensuring that we add to our knowledge base on an ongoing basis. If business schools veer too far over to only investing in the teaching mission and underinvesting in the research mission, society as a whole will be worse off, and in the long run, we will produce graduates less able to contribute new insights to the companies that they join.

More and more, the way eBay, Amazon, and Google run their businesses is based on a deep understanding of economics—and much of that knowledge doesn’t come from within those companies. They either hire people with extended research careers or they hire people who have read the literature and understand what that research is about. If business schools start downplaying the role of research, everybody will get hurt in the long run, and business itself will be negatively affected.

Q: Does the slower pace of academic research always fit into the rapidly changing business environment?

AA: Well, that’s changing quite fast. The typical time to get a paper from the initial idea all the way through the review process to being in print is probably around three years. And for a business, that can seem like an eternity. But there is an emerging approach where papers come directly out of current interactions that faculty have with companies facing challenging problems. The researchers interacting with these companies initially help them develop short-term tools and methodologies, but they walk away with the data that they’ve collected and invest a considerable amount of time developing a deeper, more generalizable understanding of the issues faced by that company. This provides companies with the rapid turnaround they need, while also leaving the researcher with some great data to develop deeper insights in the longer timeframe required to produce a more generalizable understanding of a complex problem.

Q: Your own background is truly international, so how does that inform how you approach your understanding of the world of business?

AA: It absolutely affects my managerial approach to running a business school. Our students come from every corner of the globe, and we increasingly place them around the world. More and more, universities have to make sure they do a good job of preparing graduates for an international career. However, at the same time, I frequently find myself questioning just how different the nature of business really is, as one moves from one country to another.

For example, does a Chilean wine producer really face a very different set of problems from those of an American wine producer? Is the Chilean situation different from the American situation? If there are differences, are those differences something where students need to be standing in Chile to understand them, or is that something that we can explain in the classroom here at home? It’s important for us to make sure we prepare students so they can understand the types of business problems they’re likely to encounter in other parts of the world, but it’s also important not to go too far in the direction of what sometimes seems more like tourism than real pedagogy that some business schools have embraced.

One of the advantages that we have on that side is that we have a very international student body. That means during their time here they will be learning from their peers about how business is done in different parts of the world, and that’s very important. One of the most important aspects of the learning that you get in a graduate-level program is not from professors, but from your interaction with your peers in the classroom.

Q: Recently, Simon Business School launched its Toughen up.® image campaign. What are your thoughts on that message?

AA: I’ve actually spoken to quite a few current students about the Toughen up campaign, and I’ve heard both positive and negative reactions. Alumni particularly seem to love the Toughen up campaign. It really does speak to the transformation that occurred during their time at Simon—developing a fantastic new set of analytic tools so they were able to enter the world of business better prepared and better able to handle the problems that were coming at them. And that is at the heart of what we mean by Toughen up. Some of the negative comments I’ve heard is that it feels as though we’re talking about some sort of a boot-camp, drill-sergeant approach to business, and that’s absolutely not what the Toughen up campaign is about.

Toughen up is about intellectually challenging students and giving them a rigorous set of analytic tools with which they can better face the business problems that they’re going to encounter for the rest of their careers. What’s going to be important for us over the next couple of years is making sure that we effectively communicate to everybody exactly what we mean by Toughen up. We don’t mean that you’re going to be able to do 100 pushups a minute, but we do mean that in some sense, intellectually you’re going to be able to do the same thing. You’re going to be able to listen to a business problem and immediately say to yourself, What’s the right framework to solve this problem? This can allow you to reach a solution quicker than somebody who hasn’t been through two years at Simon. That’s what Toughen up means to me.

Andrew Ainslie received his PhD in marketing and statistics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1998.

Q: Last question. What have you taken with you from your previous positions and brought to Simon? Are there successes you have experienced that you would like to apply here?

AA: During the last four years at Anderson, my task was to strengthen our MBA program in every possible way. It would have been easy when I looked at that task four years ago to say, “I simply want to get an immediate bump in the rankings.” That was not the approach we took. Over the last four years at UCLA, we rebuilt the MBA program from the bottom up in ways that did not have an initial impact on our rankings. In fact, I believe Anderson will only start to see the impact on the rankings in the next two to three years.

However, when I left, there was a genuine sense that we were on the right track. We had a level of satisfaction among the students that we hadn’t seen in a long time. Our number of applications was up over 60 percent from when I started. Our GMAT score jumped about five points in the last year I was there. Our percentage of minority students in the program more than doubled. So what we were beginning to do is create a group of students that was better in every possible way, and that took four years to achieve. That’s the point where I knew that Anderson was going to start moving up in the rankings. That’s the sort of approach I want to take at Simon.

One of the things I would ask everybody to do at Simon is to be a little patient. Quick fixes to problems or issues often leave you with a hangover in the long run. I feel it’s really important over the next few years that we be very considered and very measured in our approach to every challenge that we face, and that we put in place steps that will ensure not that we get a little bump tomorrow in some measurement, but that we place ourselves strategically in a situation that’s going to benefit us for years and decades to come.

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David Uhazie ’93S (MBA)
Independent Financial Executive

After more than 30 years in finance, David Uhazie still remembers his Simon professors and says what he learned at business school set the stage for a long and successful career.

David Uhazie began working at Eastman Kodak Company in 1982. Little did he foresee then that Kodak would be his career home for the next 30 years—time that would give him exceptional opportunities to grow in the field of finance and serve in the international arena.

“The analytical skills I learned at Simon were the foundation I needed to become a global business executive and an operational problem-solver,” says Uhazie. Looking back, he sees three areas of exposure early in his career that launched him forward.

“In my first three years at Kodak, I was able to gain a broad understanding of the business, hear the voice of the consumer, and act in a supervisory role, all of which enabled me to advance in my career,” he notes. In his time at Kodak, he served as vice president, finance, for four diverse groups, and acted as CFO and operations GM for the Asia-Pacific region in Hong Kong and Singapore.

“I’m still rooting for Kodak, even after the bankruptcy,” Uhazie says. “It’s easy to forget that this company has been around for more than 130 years. They had the best technology and a world-class brand, but in recent years, their strategy was flawed, making it tough to win in an ultra-competitive marketplace.”

While at Simon, Uhazie valued his classes with Gregg Jarrell, Ron Schmidt, and Avi Seidmann. “Professor Jarrell offered an exciting team-oriented approach to learning,” he says. “We all know Ron Schmidt as a legendary professor. I had the opportunity to witness firsthand his legendary competitiveness on the golf course. All three really cared about their students.”

Uhazie believes in giving back, particularly to the educational institutions that gave so much to him. He has served on the boards of the Hong Kong International School, Penfield (NY) Sports Boosters, and as a Penn State alumni admissions volunteer. He’s become increasingly involved with Simon alumni, students, and staff in his work with the George Eastman Circle and the Simon Advisory Council.

In his spare time, Uhazie enjoys golfing and traveling with his family. “We’ve made it to every continent except Antarctica, but it’s on the list,” he says. He also likes weekend reunions with friends and family at Penn State, where he and his entire family earned their undergraduate degrees.

—Joy Underhill

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Swati Patel ’08S (MBA)
Specialist Leader (Senior Manager), Deloitte Consulting LLP

While working as a clinical pharmacist, Swati Patel realized she wanted to make a career change. She says her Simon degree offers her business world credibility.

At Deloitte Consulting LLP, Swati Patel has found the perfect job, consulting with drug companies and health care organizations. Based in Chicago, she travels extensively to help her clients contain costs, enhance revenues, and improve performance.

Patel has a unique background. By combining her doctorate of pharmacy with a Simon MBA, she brings analytical skills to an industry often in need of a deliberate, measured approach to business. She credits her interest in such an approach to her former boss, Tom O’Brien, who served as chief pharmacy officer for the University of Rochester Medical Center.

“I had obtained my pharmacy degree from the University of Buffalo and was working as a clinical pharmacist,” says Patel. “I was looking for my next career move, and decided to go to law school to specialize in patents. Tom refused to let me leave and insisted I check out the Simon School right across the street.”

As it turned out, Patel’s Canadian citizenship meant she couldn’t be both a full-time employee and a full-time student. “Simon’s part-time program was a perfect fit, and I was sold on the world-class reputation of the School,” Patel says. She kept her job, studied part time, and began what would be a 180-degree change in direction.

“My father was a chemist, so I was exposed to science early on,” she says. When selecting coursework, Patel deliberately chose to focus on finance. “It challenged me to examine problems in new ways, and the combination of business and science ultimately differentiated me from my peers. The pivotal step was getting my MBA.”

Patel originally thought she would use her business degree to become a pharmacy director, but her exposure to Simon’s alumni network changed her mind. She accepted a management consulting offer after she earned her MBA, and she’s enjoyed consulting ever since. “I work directly with senior leadership at some of the largest health care institutions in the nation,” she says. “My Simon degree earned me instant recognition and credibility.”

At least once a week, she uses concepts learned in an Operations class at Simon. “It was a required class where we used a software program to simulate maximum throughput of a widget over 24 hours,” she says. “I hated doing it and thought it was just for software types. But the mindset I learned in that class is now part of my toolkit when working to minimize costs. I even find myself thinking about how to optimize grocery store operations when I shop!”

If Patel has any advice for students, it would be to invest in building strong relationships with peers and professors.

“I wish I had spent more time getting beyond a superficial level,” she notes. “In most any environment, you can learn a job by being there day after day. But the social connections will take you much further in your career.”

To de-stress, Patel bakes what she calls “healthy cookies” and enjoys spending time with her two-year-old son. She and her husband love the flexibility consulting has provided to enjoy their favorite leisure activity: traveling.

—Joy Underhill

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Eric Ball ’88 (MA), ’88S (MBA), PhD
Senior Vice President, Finance, Oracle

A leading figure in the world of finance, Eric Ball believes that technical skills are important, but to succeed in the real world and move up the ladder, you need to master soft skills and team building.

When Eric Ball came to Rochester to study economics and finance, he was uncertain if he wanted to pursue a career in academia or corporate work. He ultimately decided that his primary base would be in business—a choice that would lead him to a career in corporate finance, venture capital, and authorship.

Ball began at AT&T as a financial analyst and soon entered corporate treasury operations, building expertise in capital markets at large corporations. He moved to Silicon Valley and landed at Oracle ten years ago, where he now leads the team that manages treasury operations, corporate finance, risk management, and stock administration. After starting at Oracle, he began making venture investments and advising startups on the side. “Spending time with startups can be addictive,” he notes, “in part because they face real resource constraints and have to make decisions very quickly.”

Along the way, Ball earned his PhD from the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. He’s also a Kaufmann Fellow, a selective program that grooms leaders in venture capital. Ball has taught at the University of Rochester, Rutgers, and USC, and has published articles on venture capital in prestigious journals. In 2011, he was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Finance” in CFO and Treasury & Risk Management magazines.

Using his exposure to both corporate and academic arenas, Ball coauthored Unlocking the Ivory Tower with Joe DiPuma, who had a similar background. “We wanted to connect the two worlds,” says Ball. “Our book helped distill the academic research that was most relevant for managers in a concise format that was easily absorbed. From there, we converted the book into an online course on management research.”

Ball believes that big companies reward depth of knowledge before breadth, at least in early-to-middle management, and that, in general, it’s easier to move from bigger companies to smaller ones. “You always hear ‘passion drives success,’ but I think it’s better to find what you’re successful at first,” Ball says. “Then you may develop a passion for it as you gain expertise.”

Ball credits Simon for giving him the technical skills he still uses today. “Technical skills help get you that first job and move into middle management,” he says. “But to move into senior management, you need soft skills, particularly when it comes to team building. Schools do a great job at teaching the technical skills, but soft skills require experience and learning from feedback.”

Professor Cliff Smith at Simon was a role model to Ball in his teaching methodology. “[Smith] showed us that finance was not dry, that personality and passion make a real difference in performance,” he says. “Professor Mike Barclay also instilled an enthusiasm for finance that made me want to learn more on my own.”

Ball recently participated in a Simon roundtable in Silicon Valley that updated alumni on the latest in the School curriculum and faculty. “It was an eye-opener to learn how the school has evolved and to find out how many of us are out west,” he says.

“I believe that learning to learn is the most important skill any school can impart,” Ball adds. “While technical skills are pretty much required now, I urge students to look at their initial post-MBA job as a first date rather than a marriage. Regardless of where you start, you’ll likely be someplace completely different in ten years.” Ultimately, he believes that working with other people to accomplish a shared objective is what makes for a successful career, including the tricky work of balancing technical and interpersonal challenges.

In his spare time, Ball enjoys parenting his two young boys, coaching Little League, perfecting his piloting skills, and serving on numerous advisory boards.

—Joy Underhill

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Investment Unfazed by Interest Rates
Jerold Warner

Contrary to claims by the Fed, in-depth analysis shows little correlation between low interest rates and corporate investment.

How is corporate investment affected when changes in profits, stock returns, market uncertainty, and interest rates come into play?

In “The Behavior of Aggregate Corporate Investment,” Simon professor Jerold Warner, with coauthors S.P. Kothari, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jonathan Lewellen’97S (MS), ’00S (PhD) of Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, studied aggregate corporate investment by US firms from 1952 to 2010. Using quarterly information, they looked at the total amount of capital investment by all firms with public data. Their results challenge conventional wisdom and established theoretical models.

They found, not surprisingly, that investment grows rapidly following high profits and stock returns. Contrary to standard predictions, however, investment growth has little to do with recent changes in market volatility or interest rates.

In addition, when aggregate corporate investment goes up, future profits and market returns go down. This connection is so strong, in fact, that “it almost fully reverses the profit growth leading up to investment,” they write.

Warner and his coauthors also found little evidence that unusual conditions in credit markets lead to a large drop in investment over and above what would be expected given changes in the real economy. The standard story is that if the cost of capital goes up, investment should fall. But they found no evidence that investment growth slows after a rise in short- and long-term interest rates.

This lack of a link between aggregate investment and interest rates is particularly interesting, Warner says—and it shines a light on important macroeconomic and policy implications.

“This is not consistent with the story from the Fed, which is that if we reduce interest rates we’ll get more investment,” he says. “Reducing interest rates doesn’t seem to affect corporate capital investment. That’s something that people have found to be very interesting about our study. It certainly isn’t consistent with any claims the Fed might make about its ability to affect corporate investment.”

—Sally Parker

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Equity Sparks Bank Monitoring
Sudarshan Jayaraman

Associate Professor Sudarshan Jayaraman takes an international look at the link between laws protecting creditors and banks’ incentives to monitor their borrowers.

In the highly leveraged world of banking, what spurs banks to monitor their borrowers: bank debt or equity?

Theories abound suggesting bank capital structure plays a key role in encouraging banks to monitor their borrowers. But bank activities are hard to observe, and testing what form of capital structure spurs monitoring is hard to establish.

“How hard does a bank manager work? And does he or she work harder when the bank has more equity or more debt in its balance sheet?” says Simon associate professor Sudarshan Jayaraman. “We can’t really see the manager perform his day-to-day duties. We can’t observe it as researchers.”

In a working paper, “Who Monitors the Monitor? Bank Capital Structure and Borrower Monitoring,” Jayaraman and coauthor Anjan Thakor test prevailing theories in a new way. The coauthors examined changes to creditor rights in more than a dozen countries to understand what motivates banks to monitor their borrowers.

Some countries have strong laws protecting creditors, while others do not. In countries where such laws are on the books, banks have less incentive to monitor. That’s because there’s a legal process in place to recoup at least some of their losses should the bank not monitor and the borrower default on a loan.

The authors also found strong evidence that a climate of improved creditor rights spurs banks to shift their capital structures away from equity and toward deposits.

“What we find is that equity is providing banks with the incentives to monitor their borrowers,” Jayaraman says. “So why are banks so risky with so much debt? We don’t know; all we know is that’s not for monitoring. Debt doesn’t seem to provide monitoring incentives; it’s equity.”

In addition, the authors ran tests that showed such shifts in capital structure are not explained by supply-side effects—for example, that bank creditors are more willing to lend to banks when creditor rights become stronger. Their conclusion: Bank equity is a stronger source of discipline on banks than bank debt.

—Sally Parker

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Online Ads Drive Sales
Garrett Johnson

New research from Assistant Professor Garrett Johnson and his coauthors shows the cause and effect of online advertising and retail sales.

One of the largest and most statistically powerful studies of its kind provides proof that online ads improve retail sales.

A large-scale study by Simon assistant professor Garrett Johnson and two coauthors provides for the first time strong evidence that online retailer ads increase Internet and brick-and-mortar sales.

Especially effective is repeated ad exposure among the 80 percent of users who see up to 50 ads per person over two weeks, they found.

Johnson conducted the study as an intern at Yahoo! Research while earning his PhD at Northwestern University. He and coauthors Randall Lewis and David Reiley ran a controlled experiment examining two consecutive weeklong ad campaigns on Yahoo! that targeted three million customers of a nationwide retailer. Yahoo! Research and the retailer partnered to explore how online display advertising affects both online and in-store purchases. The coauthors share their results in a paper, “Location, Location, Location: Repetition and Proximity Increase Advertising Effectiveness,” now under journal review.

Advertisers have long questioned how much advertising a firm should purchase before diminishing returns set in. Equally puzzling is whether ads should target a company’s most loyal customers or woo those on the margins.

Effective advertising frequency is higher than many might expect, Johnson says. The returns to advertising hold strong even up to 50 ad exposures in two weeks. The coauthors also found ads had the biggest effect on the retailer’s most active customers and those who live near a store: in those groups, online and in-store purchases went up the most.

In the study, a full treatment group saw the retailer’s ads, and a control group was exposed to unrelated control ads. The study showed that retailer ads increase sales 3.6 percent in the full group relative to the control group—a statistically significant rise, Johnson notes.

The experiment is among the largest and most statistically powerful in the ad effectiveness literature. And because the research combined consumer-level ad exposure with valuable retail purchase data, it established important and unprecedented causal effects.

“Typically, it’s hard to get a sense of who sees the ads,” Johnson says, “and even harder to connect these people to their sales.”

As a result of the research, in 2011 Yahoo! launched Proximity Match, which helps marketers find consumers who live near their brick-and-mortar locations. The product has since brought in significant revenues for the company.

—Sally Parker

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Measuring a Prolific Career
G. William Schwert

Eugene Fama (left) receives his Nobel Prize in 2013 from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf at the awards ceremony in Stockholm. Fama was named the 2013 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economic Sciences.

The remarkable career of Eugene Fama gets a by-the-numbers look in a new paper coauthored by Simon professor G. William Schwert.

“Gene Fama’s Impact: A Quantitative Analysis,” written by Schwert and Rene Stulz of The Ohio State University, will be a chapter in an upcoming book about Fama’s career to be published by the University of Chicago Press.

Fama, the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago, is widely recognized as the father of empirical finance. He won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2013 and has published highly cited papers over six decades. His most cited papers were published in 1970, 1983, and 1993.

“Those papers were notable because they opened up new ways for financial economists to think about their field,” writes Schwert, who is a Distinguished University Professor and professor of finance and statistics. Fama’s work on efficient capital markets is so ingrained in the profession that he now is rarely cited in papers that incorporate it.

It is the rare scholar who stays involved with research at the forefront of his or her field for 50 years, Schwert says. Fama got busy early on and kept at it, making big contributions in his twenties and producing work in his fifties cited by the Nobel Prize committee.

Schwert’s analysis found more than 140,000 Google citations for Fama’s work. By comparison, the median number of citations for fellows in the American Finance Association is 32,792.

Schwert

Also eye-opening are the quantity and quality of Fama’s students—and the resulting reach of his influence in the finance profession. Among his students are a Nobel Prize winner, six AFA presidents, and four editors of top finance journals. Fama advised 102 students as chair or as a member of their dissertation committees. Of these, 57 have more than 1,000 Google Scholar citations. Eleven have more than 10,000.

Fama’s influence is evident at Simon. He served on the dissertation committees of Michael Jensen, Ross Watts, Ray Ball, and Schwert himself; he also taught Jerold Warner and Charles Plosser. As editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, Schwert is particularly fond of Fama’s history of quick and thorough work as a referee. “Throughout the last 20 years, he’s been one of the most frequent and one of the fastest referees for the Journal of Financial Economics, not typical of academicians over the age of 50,” Schwert says.

“He’s a Nobel Prize winner. He could be focused on himself and not take time out to read others’ papers. Besides that, referee reports are anonymous. You don’t even get any personal honor for giving somebody a good idea.

“It’s a good role model for the rest of us on how important the intellectual part to being an academic is,” Schwert concludes.

—Sally Parker

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Remembering James N. Doyle Sr.

The celebrated mentor educated and inspired Simon students for generations.

Professor Doyle

The Simon Business School community is mourning the loss of a beloved faculty member. James N. Doyle Sr. passed away on Sunday, March 22, 2015, at age 92.

A native of Galesburg, Illinois, Professor Doyle was a graduate of Knox College. He earned an MBA with a specialty in market research from Northwestern University. He began his career with Armour Toiletries, then went on to a senior-level marketing position at A.T. Kearney International, and later, president of Watkins Products Inc. and Sarah Coventry International. His passion for entrepreneurship led him to co-found and direct R.A. Schoeneberger & Associates Ltd., a management consulting firm.

Above: Son James Doyle Jr. and wife Allie look on as Professor Doyle congratulates Ron Goettler for being installed as the first James N. Doyle Sr. Professor in Entrepreneurship.

In 1981, Professor Doyle retired and began his second phase as a mentor and educator. He joined the Simon faculty in 1993 as executive professor of business administration and helped build the Entrepreneurship concentration. He lectured in marketing, general management, and entrepreneurship. During his 15 years at Simon, he led the Kauffman Entrepreneurial Internship Program, pairing second-year MBA students with local start-ups. "Jim was a great mentor to me in my role as Simon's area coordinator for entrepreneurship," says Duncan Moore, vice provost for entrepreneurship. "His leadership in obtaining the first Kauffman Foundation grant helped the University of Rochester win the major designation as a Kauffman campus in 2004." Doyle retired from Simon in 2008.

“We hired Jim to teach a course in entrepreneurship. Before long, his passion led to an entire concentration.”
—Senior Associate Dean Ron Hansen

“Jim left an indelible impression on a generation of students,” said Dean Andrew Ainslie. “His son’s generosity will help perpetuate that legacy.”

In 2010, Professor Doyle’s son, James N. Doyle Jr. established the James N. Doyle Sr. Professorship in Entrepreneurship to honor his father’s commitment to entrepreneurship education. Ron Goettler became the first Doyle Professor in November 2012. “Even in Jim’s later years, when I first met him, his business acumen and passion for teaching were apparent,” Goettler said. “Students and faculty are still reaping the benefits of Jim’s many contributions to entrepreneurship at Simon, and will continue to do so for years to come.”

Professor Doyle is survived by his wife, Alice (Allie), three sons, James Jr., Stephen, and Michael, and their families.

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Longtime Simon Professor Leaves Teaching  to Focus on Research

The respected author and theorist transformed the study of accounting.

Jerry Zimmerman stands out as one of Simon’s most accomplished and influential faculty members. As an author of seminal research in accounting and founding co-editor of a leading journal, Zimmerman has completed work that continues to shape business education.

Jerold L. Zimmerman, Ronald L. Bittner Professor of Business Administration and professor of accounting, is stepping away from the classroom in June 2015 to focus on his cutting edge research in the field of accounting.

Zimmerman joined the Simon faculty (then the Graduate School of Management) in July 1974. He is one of the founding co-editors of the Journal of Accounting and Economics, which has helped to transform accounting scholarship by bringing the discipline of economics to the study of accounting phenomena. Zimmerman’s research and teaching interests involve financial and managerial accounting.

In 2004, he and former Simon professor Ross L. Watts received the American Accounting Association Seminal Contribution to the Accounting Literature Award, the most prestigious research award in the field of accounting. He and Watts received numerous other awards for their groundbreaking research, and they coauthored a book, Positive Accounting Theory, published by Prentice-Hall in 1986. The fifth edition of Managerial Economics and Organizational Architecture, coauthored by Zimmerman, Clifford W. Smith Jr., and James A. Brickley, was published by McGraw-Hill/Irwin in 2009, and the coauthors collaborated with editor Janice M. Willett’78S (MBA) on a popular version of this text, Designing Organizations to Create Value, published by McGraw-Hill in 2003. The seventh edition of his textbook, Accounting for Decision Making and Control, was published in 2011.

When reflecting on his teaching career, Zimmerman says he will remember most the “fabulous colleagues” he has worked alongside at Simon. “People like Bill Meckling, Mike Jensen, Ross Watts, George Benston, Karl Brunner, Ken Gaver, Phil Meyers, and Marty Geisel are just a few of the colleagues who had an immense impact on my early development,” Zimmerman recalls. He will miss, he says, the stimulating classroom interactions with engaging and motivated students. “Students come to class with an enormous wealth of life experiences from a multitude of cultural and geographic backgrounds,” he notes. “I have learned that although their backgrounds vary greatly, the basic laws of economics are enormously powerful to understanding the functioning of their societies.”

Zimmerman’s current research examines how 21st century accounting firms differ fundamentally from their predecessors and how they are transforming the way firms are financed and governed and how their accounting systems are managed.

In addition to teaching at Simon, Zimmerman was a distinguished faculty member of the American Accounting Association’s Doctoral Consortium and a visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong University, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Marketing and Media Expert to Retire

From Super Bowl ads to the recall saga at General Motors, George Cook provided both his students and national media outlets unique insights and respected expertise.

The former Xerox and Ford Motor Company  executive brought the real world into his classroom. George R. Cook, executive professor of business  administration, is retiring in June 2015 after nearly  20 years teaching marketing at the graduate  and undergraduate level.

George R. Cook, executive professor of business administration, is retiring in June 2015 after nearly 20 years teaching marketing at the graduate and undergraduate levels, both as an adjunct and a full-time executive professor.

After a long and productive career as a senior executive in marketing for Ford Motor Company and Xerox Corporation, Cook joined the Simon faculty as an adjunct in 1995. When he retired after 30 years at Xerox, Cook was invited to join the Simon faculty full time. His teaching interests have included marketing, management, sales management, marketing communications, services marketing, industry/vertical marketing, industrial/organizational psychology, and telebusiness. He has also taught at Boston University, Nazareth College, St. John Fisher College, Roberts Wesleyan College, SUNY Geneseo, Keuka College, and RIT, where he was a distinguished professor and has served as the evening chairperson for the Marketing program.

During the last five years, Cook has served as faculty director of Simon’s MS program in Marketing and as a faculty advisor for Alpha Kappa Psi, the new business fraternity at the University of Rochester.

Cook’s research interests have focused on marketing in the retail and auto industries. He has served as president of the Rochester, New York chapter of the American Marketing Association and is on the review board of the Journal of Consumer Marketing. His research study with former Simon faculty member Paulo Albuquerque, “The (un)Importance of Marketing and the CMO in the American Auto Industry,” was published in the Chief Marketing Officer Journal.

A noted marketing expert, Cook has frequently appeared in national media outlets on topics including GM auto recalls, brick-and-mortar versus online shopping, holiday retail outlook, gas prices, and Super Bowl advertising, among others. During the GM recalls, he was interviewed live on CNN and Fox News. In January, he was interviewed on San Francisco CBS radio affiliate KCBS about the recent McDonald’s advertising campaign that generated significant controversy.

Cook earned a BS in Business Administration at Indiana University and an MBA in Marketing from The Ohio State University. He and his wife, Patti Curtis, plan to move to Ohio to be closer to family. He will teach part time, serve as a marketing consultant, and travel. “There is an often-used phrase, ‘Choose a profession that you love and you will never work another day in your life.’ That has always been my feeling toward teaching,” he says. “It has been my personal delight to help develop the most important product we have—our students and their successful futures.”

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Dean Ainslie Officially Installed

Senior Associate Dean Ron Goettler (left) with Dean Andrew Ainslie (center), University Trustee Janice Willett ’78S (MBA), Provost Peter Lennie, and President Joel Seligman.

On February 3, 2015, Andrew Ainslie was formally installed as the seventh dean of Simon Business School. At the Investiture Ceremony held at the University of Rochester Interfaith Chapel, President Joel Seligman presented Ainslie with a Dean’s Medal, recognizing his leadership of the School.

Unfortunately, winter weather kept two speakers away; however, Senior Associate Dean Ron Goettler read comments from Michael P. Ryan’81, ’84S (MBA), chief investment strategist, Wealth Management Americas, and head of Wealth Management Research Americas, UBS AG. Ainslie’s colleague and friend Peter E. Rossi, the James Collins professor of marketing, statistics, and economics at UCLA Anderson School of Management, addressed the audience on video from the Detroit Airport.

Ainslie spoke highly of Simon’s iconic former dean while offering his own direction. “So let me conclude that the spirit of Dean Meckling lives on in our deep-seated belief in economics as the guiding principle behind business education,” he said. “But how we proceed from that shared belief will be a little different under my watch. I ask all of you to not remain passively by the side, but to get fully engaged in this process. We’re in this together, and we will reach our objectives by all both helping to make the right decisions and living by the decisions that we make. There is no room for standing on the sidelines if we intend to retake the place that we earned during Bill Meckling’s time as dean.”

Rantakari

Simon Welcomes New Faculty Member

Heikki Rantakari joined the Simon faculty in January 2015 as assistant professor of economics. His
research interests are in applied microeconomic theory and organizational economics, and he is particularly interested in models of decision-making in organizations and organizational structures. Rantakari holds a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Economics from MIT.

Simon Games Scholarship Competition

The Simon Games online scholarship competition got underway on February 15, 2015. The top 20 scorers will return to the campus on April 25, 2015, for the final round of competition, where they will vie for full- and partial-tuition scholarships to the Part-Time or Executive MBA programs.

Economic Seminar with James Glassman

James E. Glassman, managing director, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and head economist/commercial bank, presented his outlook for the US and New York State economy during the 36th annual Economic Seminar on January 15, 2015, in Rochester. Glassman said 2015 is shaping up to be a year of growth for the US economy.

Mark Ain Competition Results

Carolyn and Mark. Ain

Aspiring student entrepreneurs presented their business models to a panel of judges during the eighth annual Mark Ain Business Model Competition. Twenty-one teams competed in this exciting challenge that rewards students for innovative ideas and smart business planning.

The University of Rochester Center for Entrepreneurship is introducing the Tibetan Innovation Challenge, a new intercollegiate social entrepreneurship business plan competition to improve the lives of Tibetan refugees. The goal is to develop self-sustaining and replicable business ideas to alleviate the economic difficulties the refugees are facing.

During the first phase of competition, teams of undergraduate and graduate students will develop practical business ideas for Tibetan refugees to implement in their communities. Each participating school will host internal or virtual qualifying competitions by May 31, 2015, based on University of Rochester Center for Entrepreneurship guidelines. Finalists and alternate teams selected in early June will advance to the National Finals on July 9–10, 2015, in New York City. High profile Tibetans and supporters of the cause will serve as judges and select the winning business plan.

“The Tibetan Innovation Challenge seeks to match the best business ideas from talented students from some of the top business schools in the US with a select group of Tibetan entrepreneurs who in turn will put the ideas into action to place both themselves and the Tibetan refugee community in India on a path of self-reliance and economic freedom,” says Kelsang Aukatsang, representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. “I wish this innovative enterprise much success.”

Criteria for business plans include business potential and feasibility; financial, social, and environmental sustainability; scalability or opportunity to grow the business; social value and impact; and likelihood of success.

It is an education many hope will have a lasting impact. “Every day, young Tibetan refugees in India are forced to leave their communities in search of gainful employment,” says Duncan Moore, University vice provost for entrepreneurship and area coordinator for entrepreneurship at Simon Business School. “Our goal is to promote leadership in sustainable economic development, while establishing the Tibetan Innovation Challenge as an annual cornerstone for international social entrepreneurship business plan competitions.”

All business plans in the finals will become the foundations of new Tibetan business ventures. The first place team will win a cash prize and have the opportunity to travel to India to meet the people who will implement their business plan. “The competition affords students the opportunity to engage Tibetans, their culture, and societal issues surrounding being a refugee,” says Michael Wohl’89, competition originator and associate director of social entrepreneurship. “It not only encourages creative and entrepreneurial growth but fosters a deeper understanding and connection to humanity.” For more information, visit the Tibetan Innovation Challenge online.

Henretta Delivers Kalmbach Lecture

Deb Henretta

Deb Henretta, group president of Procter & Gamble’s Global Beauty division, delivered a Kalmbach Executive Lecture on October 2. Henretta spoke about her experiences working for the world’s largest advertiser, whose worldwide beauty business includes Olay, CoverGirl, Old Spice, Secret, Head & Shoulders, and Pantene.

Will Reynolds Competes in Invictus Games

Will Reynolds’10S (MBA) was one of 400 wounded soldiers to compete in the Invictus Games last September in London. An Iraq War veteran and former White House Fellow finalist, Reynolds was wounded during an ambush in northwest Baghdad. Now a senior consultant with Deloitte in Washington, DC, he won two bronze medals in two track events (100 meter and 200 meter) just three months after getting his first running prosthesis.

Primo and Jackson Testify Before House Committees

Simon Business School faculty members shared their expertise while testifying before Congress last summer.

Thomas Jackson (left) and David Primo  testified before Congress on issues around  bankruptcy law and the US national debt.

On July 15, University of Rochester president emeritus and distinguished university professor Thomas Jackson appeared before the House Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law to discuss the Financial Institution Bankruptcy Act of 2014. The bill concerns proposed adjustments to the Bankruptcy Code and the Dodd-Frank Act around how to resolve systemically important financial institutions under bankruptcy.

In his testimony, Jackson wrote, “The Bill .?.?. effectively accomplishes all of the changes necessary to make the Bankruptcy Code a viable alternative to the proposed single point of entry procedure under Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act.” Prior to joining the University of Rochester, Jackson was a professor of law, specializing in bankruptcy, at schools of law at Stanford, Harvard, and vice president and provost at the University of Virginia.

On July 24, David Primo, the Ani and Mark Gabrellian Professor and associate professor of political science and business administration, testified before the US House Judiciary Committee about constitutional solutions to the nation’s debt. Primo’s related op-ed piece, “In the Eye of the Debt Storm,” appeared in the July 21 issue of U.S. News & World Report. According to Primo, there are three ways to think about budget claims: understanding reducing the deficit does not reduce debt, short-run stability does not equal long-run sustainability, and beware the politician heralding “good” budget news.

Simon Faculty Earn Awards for Scholarship and Research

Three Simon Business School faculty members have earned national awards for their scholarship and research.

Lovett

Associate professor of marketing Mitch Lovett has been named a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar for 2015, which recognizes individuals who received their doctorate four to seven years previously, and whose work suggests they are potential leaders of the next generation of marketing academics. The Marketing Science Institute’s biennial Young Scholar program brings together some of the most promising scholars in marketing and closely related fields. Lovett’s research interests include quantitative marketing, targeted advertising, advertising content and schedule choices, online and offline word of mouth, branding, social media listening, and consumer learning. He shares the recognition with Dean Andrew Ainslie, who was a member of the inaugural class of MSI Young Scholars.

Novy-Marx

For the second time, Robert Novy-Marx, the Lori and Alan S. Zekelman Professor of Business Administration, has won the 2014 Selected Research Prize from Whitebox Advisors for his 2013 paper, “The Other Side of Value: The Gross Profitability Premium.” The prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the art and science of investing, was awarded to Novy-Marx in 2012 for his 2011 paper, “Is Momentum Really Momentum?” A national expert on the government pensions crisis, Novy-Marx has testified before Congress and been widely quoted in The Wall Street Journal and U.S. News & World Report, among many others.

Wu

Joanna Wu, the Susanna and Evans Y. Lam Professor of Business Administration, and former Simon Business School faculty member Ed Owens won the Best Paper Award at the 2014 Review of Accounting Studies Annual Conference for their paper, “Quarter-End Repo Borrowing Dynamics and Bank Risk Opacity.” The study examines the extent to which banks’ quarter-end borrowings in the repurchase market deviate from their within-quarter levels, and the determinants of any such deviations. The co-authors found that quarter-end repo liabilities are materially lower than within-quarter averages for a large fraction of sample banks across the bank-size spectrum. Review of Accounting Studies (RAST) is one of the top five journals in accounting.

Recent Rankings Show Mixed Results

Simon Business School is again listed among the best business schools in the world, according to recent media rankings.

In its March 2015 release, U.S. News & World Report ranked Simon 12th for finance, up two spots from last year, and tied at 37th overall. Simon’s placement success was demonstrated in our at-graduation placement of 79 percent, which ranked us 20th overall. The three-months post-graduation placement numbers were even better at 95 percent, which put us tied for 12th among all ranked schools.

Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Simon 38th among the 85 US schools listed in the survey, up 12 spots from the 2012 ranking. Simon also ranked 3rd among private business schools and 13th overall for return on investment. Data from the 2014 and 2012 surveys were used to compile the rankings instead of the prior practice of creating a weighted average based on data from the past three surveys.

Simon moved up eight spots to 34th among US business schools and improved 20 spots globally in The Economist“Which MBA?” ranking of the top 100 full-time MBA programs. The Economist surveys thousands of MBA students each year about why they decided to enroll in a full-time MBA program.

The Financial Times of London ranked Simon 5th in the world for finance, 3rd in the world for economics, and 85th overall in its January 2015 survey of full-time MBA programs. “The results of this year’s overall ranking are indeed disappointing,” said Dean Ainslie. “While we would like the various rankings to accurately reflect the state of the School and the momentum we are building right now, Financial Times is different from most others as it is highly lagged. The result reflects where we were then versus where we are today.”

The Financial Times also released results of its annual survey of pre-experience Master of Science in Finance (MSF) programs in June. Simon ranked 7th among the US schools in the survey, and 37th globally.

Simon Supporters Honored at Meliora Weekend

Dean Andrew Ainslie (second from right) joins Meliora Weekend honorees (left to right) Steven W. Berglund, Meena Singh,  James N. Doyle Jr., and Danielle Beyer  at the annual awards luncheon.

Dean Andrew Ainslie presented Simon Business School alumni awards at the annual Meliora Weekend dinner on October 18, 2014.

Steven W. Berglund’77S (MBA) received the Distinguished Alumnus Award for “exceptional professional achievements, contributions to the chosen field, and service to the Simon Business School.” Berglund is president and CEO of Trimble Navigation, which designs and distributes positioning products and applications enabled by global positioning system (GPS), optical, laser, and wireless communications technology. He is also president of Geoline, a subsidiary of Trimble Navigation involved in transportation equipment and supplies.

Danielle N. Beyer’05, ’06S (MBA) was presented with the Alumni Service Award for “outstanding and extraordinary service, leadership, loyalty, and commitment” to the School. Beyer is managing director and head of investor relations at Mariner Investment Group, LLC. Specializing in alternative asset management, the firm manages more than $11 billion in assets and employs more than 170 professionals globally. Beyer has led the Simon Business School Alumni Network of New York City since 2008.

James N. Doyle Jr. accepted the John N. Wilder Award, honoring an individual, family, association, corporation, or foundation whose philanthropy inspires others in support of an “Ever Better” University of Rochester. The award is named for the first president (chairman) of the University Board of Trustees. Doyle is the executive director and founding member of ProVenture (Far East) Ltd., one of the leading worldwide providers of beauty-care instruments. The son of a retired Simon Business School faculty member, he established the James N. Doyle Sr. Professorship in Entrepreneurship to honor his father’s commitment to entrepreneurship education at Simon. In 2012, Ronald Goettler was installed as the inaugural Doyle Professor.

Meena Singh’85S (MBA) received the Alumni Service Award for her “extraordinary service, leadership, loyalty, and commitment” to the School. Singh is CEO of BRISC-CARR Group, a Canadian social enterprise she co-founded to build employable skills among underprivileged youth in India. She has consulted with more than 80 organizations in India and Canada, in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, in strategy development, facilitating transformation and change, and assessment and development of people. An active alumna, she has served on the Simon Alumni Council since 2009 and fostered its presence in both Toronto and Mumbai; in addition, she was integral in facilitating a $1.5 million commitment from the Wadhawan family, leaders of a multibillion-dollar retail, real estate, and hospitality conglomerate across India. The gift was the first of its kind from an Indian family to a top-tier US business school.

The Commerce Muse Returns

The nearly 140-year-old statue depicting Commerce, one of the “muse” statues from the original University of Rochester campus on Prince Street, is finally back home. For 23 years, the statue stayed in the backyard of former University English professor James Carley, who saved the piece from being destroyed. Now installed in the Florescue-von Manstein Plaza, the statue stands in tribute to the study of business and commerce.

Early Leaders® Case Competition

Simon Business School’s Early Leaders Case Competition was held on November 7–8, 2014. The competition brings together current students from various undergraduate institutions to compete in a business-case competition designed to simulate decisions faced by business leaders across the globe.

Simon Celebrates Africa

The Simon National Black MBA Association celebrated February as Black History Month with a special event that included poetry readings, dance, and the sound of authentic African drums. Simon National Black provides a forum for students who are interested in the issues concerning the economic advancement of people of color in the United States.