McCombs Magazine Fall 2016

THE MAGAZINE OF THE McCOMBS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

fall 2016

SKY’S the LIMIT

Six CEO Alumni Share Secrets from the C-Suite GARY KELLY, BBA ’77 CEO, Southwest Airlines

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BBA HISTORY IN 10 OBJECTS

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THE BUSINESS OF HEALTH CARE

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RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS AND MARKET VOLATILITY

y DEPARTMENTS

2. LETTER FROM THE DEAN

group-reading, CEOs and stock options, new social responsibility measurement, and overeating “healthy” food.

3. NEWS Short Takes: BBA program moves up to No. 6, Texas MBA rates best bang for the buck, Bieber lampoon goes viral, and more.

6. Behind the Scenes: Adventures in centennial history.

8. SYLF Foundation: 25 years of a global fellowship program.

35. COMMUNITY Up Close: BBA alumni yesterday and today, including a legendary coach, an African-American trailblazer, and a virtual reality entrepreneur.

42. Gatherings: Alumni events and celebrations.

44. Alumni Notes

9. RESEARCH Andrew Whinston: Prolific scholar.

10. Strategies: Retirement planning and market volatility.

13. Insights: Managers and

48. BOTTOM LINE

FALL 2016 McCombs is published in the fall and spring for alumni and friends of the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

David Wenger EDITORIAL MANAGER

Todd Savage EDITOR

Reaching 100: Two BBA ’37 alums tell their stories.

Molly Dannenmaier ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Kim Brown, Adrienne Dawson, Judie Kinonen, Jeremy M. Simon

y FEATURES

ART DIRECTION/DESIGN

CEO STORIES Six McCombs BBA graduates working at vastly different companies and facing a variety of challenges offer a candid glimpse into the reality of the top job.

BY C H U C K S A LT E R

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Lindsay Tucker Design CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Steve Brooks, Kim Brown, Adrienne Dawson, Gayle Hight, Jim Nicar, Chuck Salter, Jeremy M. Simon, Matt Turner, Selah Maya Zighelboim CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

100 YEARS IN 10 OBJECTS Trace the history of the BBA program through a bottle of Adams Extract, a Victrola record, a handful of computer punch cards, and other curiosities.

BY J I M N I C A R

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Jessica Attie, Darren Braun, Brian Goldman, Sasha Haagensen, Josh Huskin, Jeff Wilson CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS

Miles Donovan, Joseph McDermott, Jonny Wan ONLINE

today.mccombs.utexas.edu/ magazine

McCOMBS AND HEALTH CARE The opening of Dell Medical School offers new opportunities for collaboration, but McCombs has been laying the groundwork for the past decade, with innovations in health care delivery research, health care management education, and biomedical entrepreneurship.

BY STE VE B ROOKS

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

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512-232-2441 alumni@mccombs.utexas.edu FOLLOW US

facebook.com/utmccombsschool twitter.com/utexasmccombs linkedin: http://bit.ly/UTexasMcCombs

#McCOMBSMAG 1

McCOMBS: FROM THE DEAN

A Legacy as Big as Texas

J

U S T D O W N T H E H A L LWAY

from my office, where students stride past on their way to classes, a bold, wallsize, burnt-orange poster declares, “Think backward while moving forward.”

The poster displays the visage of Dr. George Kozmetsky. He inspired so many — including faculty, students, public policy makers, and business leaders — as the school’s dean for 16 transformative years.

As we welcome our 100th BBA class this fall, it is certainly appropriate to remember his words about striving toward the future.

We reflect upon and honor the contributions and unbounded vision of those, like Dr. Kozmetsky, who carried the banner of business education at Texas before us — all the while resolving to move forward with the same degree of frontier tenacity.

This summer, archivists spent hundreds of hours sifting through photos and accounts representing UT’s business legacy. Your valued role in that history is implicit, and we hope you enjoy and feel pride in this special centennial-focused issue of McCombs. Then, we hope you will go online to a new Texas BBA Centennial website full of stories and images from the school’s past, along with shared memories and inspiring profiles of alumni from the last 100 years: Texasbba100.com.

As a symbolic kickoff to our centennial celebration, the business school recently got some very good news. In May, following a rigorous examination to determine that we meet the highest standards of educational excellence, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business renewed our accreditation. UT Austin was among the first group of 16 business schools invited to become members of the association in

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1916, at a time, by the way, when our school was housed in a temporary wooden shack.

The far-sighted founders of this school clearly never doubted how important business is among the academic disciplines or how hard we would work in order to earn our leadership among the elite business schools of the world.

This year’s eager and high-achieving class of 2020 enters a school that is more robust and relevant to their careers and life goals than their parents or grandparents ever imagined. Just a few short years ago, McCombs re-energized our engagement in health care management research BELOW:

and teaching. Today, as the new UT Dell Medical School welcomes its inaugural class, we are fully prepared to collaborate with this vibrant campus partner.

Dr. Kozmetsky, and so many others who have contributed to this journey, would be pleased. Future historians take note.

JAY HARTZELL Dean and Centennial Chair in Business Education Leadership

Dean Hartzell reflects on the wise words of predecessor George Kozmetsky, appropriate to remember as the 100th BBA class starts this fall: “Think backward while moving forward.”

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NEWS

SPREADSHEET SERENADE GUITAR-STRUMMING FACULTY MEMBER’S BIEBER LAMPOON GOES VIRAL

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ITH 1.8 million views on UT Austin’s Facebook page, IROM Lecturer Clint Tuttle’s in-class performance at the end of the spring semester became an internet sensation. His song “Learn Excel” is a parody of the Justin Bieber track “Love Yourself.” Tuttle’s rendition extolls the virtues of the spreadsheet program (“Many years from now when you have left UT/And you use these skills will you think of me?”). The video continues to be a hit with more than just Tuttle’s students, landing Tuttle a gig at this year’s Microsoft sales conference and turning viewers around the globe into Beliebers in the power of creative teaching. “I’ve made lots of videos and songs in the past and never got that kind of response. I guess Bieber and Excel are the perfect combo for a great song,” Tuttle says. “Maybe next year we’ll do Taylor Swift and PowerPoint.”

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N E W S : S H O R T TA K E S MARKETING STUDENTS SHINE

NSF Grant Funds Career Study Management Professor Luis Martins and his fellow researchers were awarded a $278,359 grant from the National Science Foundation to study how students’ identities and early experiences encourage the pursuit of an engineering career. Martins, the new Entrepreneurship Programs director at McCombs, says the project takes what researchers have learned about how people form professional identities, including studying differences in gender and ethnicity, and applies it in a new way to improve early outreach to underrepresented groups. “With rapid technological change transforming a variety of industries,” Martins says, “attracting a broad range of smart people to the engineering profession is critical to our competitiveness.”

Investing Whizzes

Need a hand with investments? Ask one of the nine McCombs students whose top-25 finish placed the school above all universities at this spring ’s ETF Global Portfolio Challenge, a web-based simulated investment competition.

Alexander Parker, BBA ’17, came in second overall (with returns of 112.71 percent) by setting up a portfolio of exchange-traded funds linked to emerging-nation stocks and commodities.

“The undergraduates were aggressive and used leverage, but they were also very smart about the particular investments selected,” says Senior Finance Lecturer Kelly Kamm. “Hard work and smarts pay off, especially if the markets cooperate. This is what clinched it for McCombs.”

Karina Gonzalez, BBA ’17, Yoshiko “Cookie” Guck, BBA ’17, and Chan Lee, BBA ’18, won the national L’Oreal Brandstorm competition, where students present an original integrated marketing campaign for one of the cosmetic giant’s brands. The McCombs team proposed using artificial intelligence to provide skincare consumers with personalized results. Their win underlined what the students have learned in the classroom.

“Competing against the top schools in the nation and then actually winning is eye opening,” says Gonzalez. “You see how great our school is and how well they prepare us.”

BBA CLIMBS TO NO. 6

McCombs rose one spot to tie for sixth place in the 2017 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s undergraduate program rankings. The Texas BBA also tied for third best among the country’s public schools.

Sixth place represents a fiveyear high for McCombs and marks the 18th year in a row that the Texas BBA has landed in the top 10 in the country.

TEXAS MBA OFFERS STUDENTS NO. 1 ‘BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK’ The Texas MBA offers the “best bang for the buck” salary return on investment according to U.S. News and World Report. Although graduates of top business schools typically earn higher salaries than students who attend lower-ranked schools, graduates of better programs also leave school with greater debt levels.

But not so at McCombs: Graduates from the full-time MBA program had the largest gap between how much they earned in annual base salary following graduation and how much debt they owed in 2015. “MBAs who run the numbers know the value of the Texas MBA is one more compelling reason to have McCombs at the top of their list,” says Tina Mabley, assistant dean and director of the program.

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TRAILBLAZERS Mary Elledge and Alice Ketchum were the first women to receive BBA degrees as members of the class of 1920.

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McCOMBS

BY THE NUMBERS

STUDENT-ATHLETE INSPIRES ON AND OFF COURT Imani Boyette, BBA ’16, was drafted by the WNBA’s Chicago Sky and nominated for NCAA Woman of the Year. Boyette ended her UT basketball career with a milestone no other player on the women’s team has achieved: more than 1,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, and 200 blocks.

Her achievements extend beyond the court: Boyette received the 2016 Wilma Rudolph Student-Athlete Achievement Award, presented by the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics, which recognizes student-athletes who have overcome great odds to achieve academic success, and she was honored by the Texas Exes with a President’s Leadership Award.

FALL 2016

4,686 115 1362 Total BBA enrollment in 2016-17.

Combining Service with Business While at McCombs, Amy Enrione, BBA ’16, introduced a four-hour community service requirement to the school’s curriculum for incoming freshmen — and then helped take the program university-wide. Starting this fall, all UT freshmen will take part in four hours of volunteer work. "Combining service with business is my passion," says Enrione (holding check). "I came to UT with a mission to encourage all students to give back."

For her efforts at McCombs, Enrione earned the school’s 2016 Pal — Make a Difference Award, given to a student for a program or initiative that significantly contributes to the campus or broader community.

PROTECTING THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Professor Stathis Tompaidis is lending his expertise to the government as associate director of financial markets at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research.

Tompaidis is responsible for leading the program on central counterparties — organizations that collect collateral from two participants in a bilateral transaction — thereby guaranteeing their contract and helping avoid a situation similar to what happened with AIG’s issuance of credit default swaps ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. Tompaidis helps the OFR assess the systemic risk involved in such transactions. “The failure or weakness of a central counterparty can pose a threat to the stability of the entire financial system,” he says. Tompaidis also contributes to the office’s Financial Stability Report, which is made available to Congress.

Total BBA enrollment in 1916-17.

Average SAT score in 2016-17 for admitted first-year students.

47%

of all students enrolled in 2016-17 were women.

25%

of all students enrolled in 1974 were women.

45% of all BBA students study abroad.

No. 1

McCombs ties with Wharton for having the most top-10 undergraduate specialties in the nation.

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NEWS: BEHIND THE SCENES

ADVENTURES IN HISTORY: THE BBA CENTENNIAL As the McCombs School prepared to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its BBA program, the question was raised: Where do we find our history? A team of McCombs staff, along with unofficial UT historian Jim Nicar, worked to gather the records, photos, reminiscences, and artifacts that tell the BBA story.

Uncovering the history turned out to be an adventure.

It required rummaging through the less explored nooks of storage closets, examining thousands of photographs and slides, combing through old newspapers and yearbooks, studying the buildings that have housed the business school (below in color: Waggener Hall, opened 1932, the first permanent home for the business school), interviewing faculty and alumni about their memories, and wading through the immense collections of the UT Archives at the Briscoe Center for American History.

HERE is that story.

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I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y J O S E P H M C D E R M O T T

FIRST REUNION The first alumni reunion for the business school was held in 1951, attracting graduates from as far back as the class of 1919.

FALL 2016

Historian Jim Nicar sifted through mountains of records preserved at the UT Archives.

Dusty boxes filled with history were found in storage closets throughout the business building.

An ocean of color slides was found with images of business school activities dating back to the 1970s.

The story of John Treleven, a professor who died of pneumonia while serving in the Army during WWI, was discovered, along with a plaque on the fourth floor of the business school dedicated to his memory.

Stacks of yearbooks had to be searched and studied for clues.

Four phases will unfold over the next half year.

History is visible from outside.

Unique ceramic tiles designed by noted UT art professor Paul Hatgil adorn

the top of the business building and symbolize the “push-button society” of the 1960s.

“What are slides?” The student interns asked.

Assistant Dean Arthur Allert captured some fascinating stories in video interviews with the BBA alumni who attended a recent 50-year reunion.

A few staff are walking history books.

Allert, who has worked at the business school for decades, studied hundreds of old photos and documents to help identify the faculty, staff, and alumni in them.

The team assembled everything into a commemorative website.

Add your own memories to our history at TEXASBBA100.COM.

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NEWS: LEADERSHIP

GLOBAL FAMILY FORTUITOUS TOKYO CONNECTION HELPS McCOMBS STUDENTS EXPLORE GLOBAL SOLUTIONS

by Gayle Hight

I

N

1990,

AN

OVERHEARD

conversation at a conference, followed by some international sleuthing, launched a partnership with the Nippon Foundation that has been going strong

for 25 years.

When Robert Sullivan, senior associate dean at the time, returned to Austin from that conference, he told staff member Susie Brown about hearing mention of a Japanese foundation looking for universities interested in establishing fellowship programs. He asked for her help in tracking them down. Brown, who was born in Japan, got to work trying to identify the mystery foundation. Many past-midnight calls later (due to time zone differences) she reached them in Tokyo, and the rest is history.

The Nippon Foundation’s Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund established a $1 million endowment at UT’s business school in 1991. That original gift has grown to $3 million today and supports one of the most well-funded and prestigious fellowship programs offered to graduate students at McCombs. Since its inception, more than 200 UT Sylff Fellows have received funds to pursue travel and study devoted to pressing global issues. Individual fellowship awards range from $5,000 to $20,000 per year.

Every three years, Sylff program managers travel from Tokyo to Austin to meet with Sylff scholars. Fellows give presentations to their patrons, explaining the scope of their global business study programs and offering personal insights about how the fellowships have helped them pursue their dreams.

Tomoko Yamada, one of the officers who visited the school this spring, praised the action-oriented approach of McCombs Sylff Fellows. “I could feel the changes that are happening in the world reflected in these students’

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their careers. It offers $10,000 grants for the organization of social action projects or conferences and workshops addressing social issues. All fellows are welcome to apply. “We never consider Sylff Fellows to be alumni of our program,” said Yamada. “Once a fellow, always a fellow.”

It’s a partnership that has catapulted McCombs Sylff Fellows into a worldwide community of peers. More than 15,000 graduate students from academic institutions across the globe have received fellowships since Sylff’s inception in 1987, creating a network of fellows pursuing global careers in academia, business, government, and nonprofits throughout the world.

Brown, the staff member who tracked down the Nippon Foundation 26 years ago, is now associate dean for business affairs at McCombs. “In the days before the internet, it took weeks of late-night overseas phone calls, first to find them, and then to convince them of our worthiness,” she says. “But it was so worth it. Sylff sends our students to the corners of the world and immerses them in completely unfamiliar experiences. It gives them new perspectives about their lives in a global context,” Brown says. “They come back transformed.”

work,” she said after student presentations during her visit. “McCombs Fellows are very practical. I saw their passion for new technology, renewable energy, and starting businesses of their own. These students have concrete plans about how to put their ideas into action.”

McCombs, the University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business, and the global business school INSEAD are the only three business schools supported by the Sylff program. The 66 other Sylff Fellowship programs in 44 different countries focus on graduate student research in the social sciences and humanities.

The Sylff program aims to identify exceptional student leaders and nurture their capacity to overcome differences in nationality, language, ethnicity, religion, and political systems to tackle global issues together.

This year’s class of McCombs Sylff Fellows includes 10 MBA and two Ph.D. students. MBA global management study abroad placeBELOW: Sylff Fellowship program officers travel from Tokyo to Austin ments include Colomonce every three years to meet with McCombs Sylff Fellows. This photo was taken at their most recent visit, in March 2016. Left to right: Sylff bia, Israel, South Africa, Program Officer Tomoko Yamada, McCombs Associate Dean for China, and Southeast Graduate Programs Steve Limberg, Sylff Program Officer Aya Oyamada.

Asia. Ph.D. projects include research on international tax transparency regulations and rural marketing in developing nations.

Yamada took the opportunity during her recent visit to McCombs to share the news of a relaunched Sylff Leadership Initiatives program available to fellows who are still pursuing their studies and those who have graduated and started

RESEARCH

FALL 2016

EMINENT SCHOLAR ANDREW WHINSTON RECEIVES HIGHEST UT HONOR FOR PROLIFIC ACADEMIC CAREER

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VER THE LAST 54 years, IROM Professor Andrew Whinston has published more than 350 peer-reviewed articles on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to water allocation to content-sharing on Twitter. He has published more than two dozen books and five dozen book chapters, some of which are required reading in economics graduate programs across the country. He holds four concurrent academic appointments — in business, economics, computer science, and library and information science — and has been described by Microsoft’s chief economist as “perhaps the most creative researcher I have ever met.”

And now, Whinston has received UT’s highest faculty research honor, the CoOp Career Research Excellence Award.

“Only once before has a business school faculty member won this award,” says Laura Starks, McCombs’ associate dean for research. “Andy’s work is both path-breaking and legendary.”

He is perhaps best known for coining the term “e-commerce” years before the internet went mainstream.

Whinston credits his collaborators at UT. “My research productivity has always been stimulated by my UT colleagues and Ph.D. students,” says Whinston. “Our interactions consistently spark new ideas and avenues for inquiry.”

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RETIREMENT REFUGE YOUR RETIREMENT SAVINGS DON’T HAVE TO BOTTOM OUT EVEN IF THE MARKET DOES

by Adrienne Dawson

A BAD MARKET CAN

wipe out a lifetime’s

savings.

That was the lesson investors learned during the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2009, financial markets lost more than 30 percent of their value — causing American households to lose roughly $16 trillion in net worth. People ages 55-64 saw their wealth drop by more than 30 percent, and middle-aged Americans’ net worth decreased by more than half.

But some of the most exposed were those who had just retired: They’d left the workforce and begun withdrawing money from their retirement accounts, leaving their investments especially vulnerable to the sudden and sharp market downturn. For many, financial recovery was impossible.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are ways to safeguard your retirement investments against market volatility.

McCombs Finance Professor Keith Brown and Empower Retirement Senior Vice President Van Harlow, M.B.A ’80, Ph.D. ’86, recently collaborated on research that looks at retirement account performance under varying market conditions and investment strategies that can keep retirement accounts safe even if the market goes south.

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WHAT IS THE BIGGEST THREAT TO A PERSON’S RETIREMENT SAVINGS? “We tend to think about longevity and inflation risk as the biggest risks retirees face, but sequence-of-returns risk is the biggest by orders of magnitude,” says Harlow.

Sequence risk refers to the order of negative or positive returns your investments earn starting at the time you retire and begin withdrawing money from your account. In other words, if the market soars as you enter retirement, you’ll earn good returns on a large balance, and your funds will last much longer than if the market nosedives — as it did in 2008 — just as you leave the workforce, ushering in your retirement years with a depleted base.

WON’T THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE RETURNS AVERAGE OUT OVER TIME? No, because the combination of withdrawing funds while simultaneously losing money to negative returns in the early years of retirement means the total value of the account can’t rebound, even after the market does.

If you retire into a bad market, as many people did during the Great Recession, “you can deplete your retirement savings very quickly,” says Harlow.

BUT HOW CAN YOU PREDICT WHAT THE MARKET WILL DO? You can’t, so it’s wise to use financial vehicles that can protect your funds no matter what.

One of them, known as the costless collar option strategy, ensures that an account holds its value if there’s a sudden market downturn.

“It’s like an insurance policy for an investment fund,” explains Brown.

Here’s how it works: A costless collar is made up of a put option and a call option, which give the investor the right to sell or buy stock at a certain strike price. Together, they provide a floor and a ceiling beyond which the value of a fund can neither rise nor fall. It’s called “costless” because the investor accepts limits on profits by selling a call option (which caps how much you can earn) in order to pay for the expensive put.

A put option is the key. Once exercised, the value of the investor’s fund can’t drop any lower. For those who retired at the start of the Great Recession, for example, having a

collar in place would have prevented the value of their retirement fund from free-falling.

HOW DOES THIS WORK FOR THE AVERAGE INVESTOR? While buying derivatives to protect your investments is possible, it’s also difficult. “You’re going to be hard-pressed to find many financial advisors with the expertise to do that,” says Harlow.

An easier route is to invest in mutual funds that have a collar built in. Absolute return funds use hedging strategies like collars to protect investments from market volatility.

DOESN’T ASSET ALLOCATION DO THE SAME THING? Conservative asset allocation can keep an investor from being over-exposed to stocks, but that means the investor’s rewards are very limited when the equity market does well.

On the other hand, a collar offers a firm floor that guarantees a fund’s value won’t sink beyond a certain point, while allowing for a higher exposure to stocks. Gains are capped, but they aren’t eliminated.

WHAT IS THE BEST ASSET ALLOCATION FOR THOSE CLOSE TO RETIREMENT? Conventional wisdom says aim for a 60/40 equity/fixed income ratio, but Brown, an advisor to the board of trustees of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, says it’s a rule that’s been misinterpreted. “That allocation benchmark is meant for institutional investors, like TRS, with long time horizons, not for

BY THE NUMBERS

Two retirees each have accounts worth $1 million, and both withdraw $60,000 annually. They enter retirement just as the market plunges.

Both retirees’ funds are invested 100 percent in stocks, but retiree B’s fund also has a costless collar in place that doesn’t let the fund’s value drop more than 5 percent. The costless collar stretches retiree B’s savings an additional 10 years.

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R E S E A R C H : S T R AT E G I E S

WATCH OUT FOR FEES The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) offers an online expense analyzer that allows you to compare the fees of more than 18,000 mutual funds, ETFs, and ETNs.

individuals whose time horizon until retirement decreases daily,” he explains.

“From age 25 to 40, you need a high percentage of equity — 80 to 95 percent,” says Harlow.

“Then every year after 40, start rolling that down gradually to land at a conservative equity allocation by your selected retirement date.

Harlow and Brown’s research finds that for most retirees, the optimal equity allocation should actually be closer to 10 percent than 60 — if a person’s main goal is to protect their savings once those funds become their primary source of money.

So, if you’re looking to keep your retirement savings safe, both the 90/10 (fixed income/equity) asset allocation strategy and the costless collar are worth considering.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD INVESTORS KEEP IN MIND? McCombs Finance Professor Clemens Sialm, who studies retirees’ investment behaviors, says individuals need to take more responsibility for understanding and overseeing their accounts. “It’s important to be informed and learn as much as you can,” he says.

Watch out for fees: Every fund comes with a fee, and those expenses eat away at a fund’s profit, says Sialm. Expenses vary greatly depending on the type and amount invested — from a few basis points to several percentage points of the assets invested. Sialm says that

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y J O N N Y WA N

doesn’t mean investors should always go with the cheapest fund, but make sure the performance justifies the cost.

Think about your health: The healthier you are, the more you’ll need to save to pay for additional years of Medicare premiums and routine care co-payments. For example, in a recent study, Harlow and Brown find that a 65-year-old woman in good health will incur about $45,000 more in medical costs over time than someone with Type II diabetes.

Save, then save more: The exact percentage you should save depends on your goals, age, and constraints, but Sialm and Harlow agree that a good goal is to aim for 10 percent of your gross salary, and Harlow adds that someone who makes $250,000 will

need to save even more if they want to maintain their standard of living in retirement.

“You can’t invest your way out of a problem,” Harlow insists. “You have to save for it.”

W. VAN HARLOW, CFA, PH.D., is a senior vice president at Empower Retirement. He has previously served in executive positions at Fidelity Investments and as vice president at Salomon Brothers.

KEITH BROWN, CFA, PH.D., is a finance professor at McCombs, CEO of the MBA Investment Fund LLC, and is an advisor to the boards of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas and the University of Texas Investment Management Co. CLEMENS SIALM, PH.D., is a finance professor at McCombs, the director of the AIM Investment Center, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an independent contractor at AQR Capital Management.

401(K) PROVIDERS MAY FAVOR THEIR OWN FUNDS

In a new study, Finance Professor Clemens Sialm finds mutual fund companies that manage corporate retirement plans tend to favor their own “affiliated” funds — even when a track record of poor performance suggests they should have booted it from the menu of options available to employees. It’s a conflict of interest that can cost investors money. “It’s similar to favoring your own kids over your neighbor’s kids,” Sialm says. “What raises a red flag is when you see a high expense fund that’s performed very poorly in the past.” It could still be on the menu because of bias, not because it’s a good investment. He advises savers to pay attention to returns over time and make sure the fund’s fees are justified.

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RESEARCH: INSIGHTS

CAN YOU READ A GROUP? A NEW TEST WILL TELL

by Steve Brooks

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to live music, rock stars seem to sense what a crowd is feeling and adapt their performances to fit.

It turns out that effective managers have the same kind of magic — an ability to accurately read and respond to the mood in a room.

Associate Professor of Management Caroline Bartel recently conducted a series of studies on the link between leadership effectiveness and the ability to read a group. She and her co-authors developed an online assessment called the Emotional Aperture Measure, which rates a person’s ability to recognize group emotions.

Focusing effectively on an entire group is different from focusing on an individual.

When engaging in a one-on-one conversation, a manager can gather a rich collection of cues, from tone of voice to body language, because of the direct nature of the interaction.

It’s harder to read a group, by contrast, because people modulate their emotions differently in a group setting. Cues flicker on and off their faces in a hurry.

So, like the snap of a camera shutter, the EAM gives a viewer only two seconds to view a two-panel filmstrip — long enough to sense an overall mood, but not enough time to fully process each individual expression. In the first panel, all faces are neutral, while the second has a mix of neutral expressions, smiles, and frowns. The viewer assesses percentages of positive and negative reactions in 17 filmHEN IT COMES

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ABOVE: Associate Professor of Management Caroline Bartel’s new research on group-reading ability uses an online test with 17 two-second filmstrips of groups whose faces change to reflect a range of emotions.

strips and is scored for accuracy. The test takes about 8 minutes.

Strong emotional aperture performance “requires a distinct processing style that can be learned” says Bartel. One group of 148 research subjects took the test twice — first with no prep, and again after they were primed to think big-picture versus detail-oriented. After priming, they performed significantly better.

The researchers also ran the EAM with 96

high-level managers in an international leadership development program. After managers took the test, their subordinates evaluated their leadership performance anonymously.

The researchers found a strong correlation between leadership ratings and EAM scores.

“Leadership, by definition, requires influence and interaction with other people,” says Bartel.

“This test gives people a baseline of that ability.

And like any ability, you can improve it.”

CAN YOU READ A GROUP? Take the Emotional Aperture Measure online at bit.ly/EAMresearch

VOLKER LAUX SHOULD CEOs STILL GET STOCK OPTIONS?

BRIAN RICHTER RE-QUANTIFYING SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

JACOB SUHER DO WE OVEREAT BECAUSE IT’S “HEALTHY”?

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A new model for CEO pay finds that stock options have their place — along with restricted stock and severance pay — but the proper mix changes with the economic times. After the 2008 crash, stock options were maligned for encouraging CEOs to place too many risky bets. In an economic recovery, however, a bigger threat might be playing it too safe. Professor of Accounting Volker Laux has studied how firms can tailor their compensation packages to inspire the right amount of risk-taking among C-suite executives. “Incentive problems are different in different environments,” he says. In a boom, CEO pay should include options to encourage innovation while dampening the urge for runaway risk-taking by including restricted stock. After a crash, inducements need to be bold; severance pay can cushion the consequences of failure. The best incentive for today’s times, he concludes, is the stock option. “You’re neither too concerned about excessive risk-taking nor about excessive conservatism.”

In 2014, there were nearly 1,000 “socially responsible” investment funds, valued at $4.3 trillion. To create these funds, many portfolio managers rely on the KLD index, which ranks companies from least to most responsible. But a new study by Assistant Professor of Business, Government, and Society Brian Richter identifies a problem with the index. For every firm it ranks, the index adds one point for each socially positive company attribute and subtracts one point for each negative one, using the KLD STATS dataset, which lists more than 80 specific environmental, social, or governance ratings on thousands of firms.

Richter says the KLD index’s equal weighting of attributes is “fundamentally flawed.”

He proposes a new measure based on item response theory that recalculates companies’ scores, applying different weights to different company criteria. This approach, says Richter, yields significantly more accurate rankings of a company’s true position in the real world of corporate social responsibility.

As soon as you think of a food as being healthy, you’ve probably unconsciously decided to eat too much of it. That’s one of the key findings from new research by marketing professors Raj Raghunathan and Wayne Hoyer, with Jacob Suher, Ph.D. ’16.

In a series of studies examining how people make food choices, they found that the associations we have with specific foods influence how much we eat. People are more likely to overeat foods described as “healthy” because they believe they won’t be filling. Conversely, if the exact same food is described as either “unhealthy” or “nourishing,” people order less, eat less, and claim they feel fuller longer. Says Hoyer, “These findings are illustrative of the growing recognition that subtle changes in the environment can have a major impact on consumers’ behavior, and that one way to change people’s eating habits is to alter the context in which food is presented.” Says Raghunathan, “We find there’s another mechanism besides calories contributing to this tendency to overeat.”

I CO N M A D E BY F R E E P I K

#McCOMBSMAG 13

CREDIT TK

1 TODAY.McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

ART BY FIRST NAMELAST

BBA ALUMNI SHARE SECRETS FROM THE C-SUITE BY CHUCK SALTER K E L LY O N M A N AG I N G A L A R G E C O M PA N Y :

“There’s a long list of things that I don’t know and I’m not proficient in. It’s humbling.

Yet I’m responsible for all of the things that go on in the company.”

photograph by Darren Braun

CREDIT TK

ART BY FIRST NAMELAST

#McCOMBSMAGALUMNI15 2

ARY KELLY THOUGHT HE WAS READY. He’d been at Southwest Airlines for nearly 20 years, where he’d mentored under its legendary founder Herb Kelleher. He’d served as its CFO, which gave him insight into every aspect of the operation and every constituency, from the board to the banks to the unions. He’d been a vice president during the industry’s moment of crisis, the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the airlines were grounded. Now, for the first time in his career, Kelly wanted to be CEO. Believing he was the best prepared candidate, he considered it his duty to lead Southwest’s next important stage of growth. ¶ But despite his seasoning and his confidence, when Kelly took the reins that year, in 2004, he was hit with the same realization as many a first-time CEO: Nothing fully prepares you. For the weight of accountability. For the complete reliance on others. For the endless challenges that have as much to do with psychology as business strategy. “It was a huge change,” Kelly says. ¶ For such a high-profile position, where the hiring and firing and paying of many CEOs are well covered in the business press, the job itself remains largely opaque. To remedy that — and in honor of the school’s centennial — McCombs talked to a half dozen of the school’s BBA graduates who hold or have held the top job. Some, like Kelly, are longtime occupants of the C-suite. Others are so new that the ink on their business cards has barely dried. ¶ In offering a candid glimpse into the reality of the job, they demystify the work itself and humanize those holding the lofty title. As undergraduates, they had a vague notion of what a CEO actually does on a day-to-day basis and of the path to becoming one. Later, they discovered how idiosyncratic the path is and how much the role itself can vary. The CEO is many things — many roles — depending on the company and the circumstances.

T H E C O R P O R AT E C E O GARY KELLY, BBA ’77 SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

FOR THE CEO OF A COMPANY as large and complex as Southwest Airlines — with some 50,000 employees dispersed around the country — the job is often about finding ways to overcome its sheer size. Early on, Kelly had to relinquish his longtime role — and identity — as an expert. He had been Southwest’s controller at just 34 years old and eventually rose to CFO. If there was a budgeting or forecasting problem, he solved it.

That’s what big-company department heads do.

When the board chose Kelly to run the Dallas-based airline, he had to make a critical shift: from depth of knowledge to breadth.

“All of a sudden you realize you’re totally dependent on every member of the team,” says Kelly. “I don’t fly planes or serve customers or change oil in the planes. There’s a long list of things I don’t know and I’m not proficient in. It’s humbling. Yet I’m responsible for all of the things that go on in the company.”

The key to overseeing an entire enterprise,

16 TODAY.McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

as opposed to a single department, he says, “is knowing how much knowledge you need to gain, how many questions you need to ask, before you’re comfortable making a decision.”

Over the years, Kelly, now 61, has gotten comfortable with the resulting paradox, one that’s particularly acute for CEOs of large companies: The job entails both authority and vulnerability. Kelly may be the ultimate decider, but he bases his decisions in large part on what others tell him about what’s working at the airline and, more important, what’s not. “It’s the ultimate step in trust,” he says.

Consequently, Kelly focuses on sustaining a culture of trust, especially among department heads, that traces back to his early days as CFO. “When people make a mistake, they need to admit it, but that doesn’t mean they get shown the door,” he says. “Otherwise, it creates an environment of fear, and you won’t be getting the truth.”

PATH TO THE TOP Kelly has relied on that trust while making a number of major decisions in recent years: the $1.4 billion acquisition of AirTran Airways; the $250 million investment in a new CPA reservation system; the addition of international routes, Arthur Young & Co. a first for the low-cost carrier; and a $1 billion-plus order Dallas for a new model plane from Boeing. With the latter, Kelly 1977-1986 weighed the advantages of upgrading to more efficient engine technology and the risks of flying a new aircraft.

CONTROLLER “It’s very different from being the No. 2, No. 3, or so on and making a recommendation to the boss, as opposed to being Southwest Airlines the one who has to choose,” he says. He’s always aware of Dallas the stakes for a company with nearly $20 billion in annual 1986-1989 revenue and a streak of 43 profitable years. (Another streak to maintain: no layoffs in the airline’s history.)

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER But for all the focus on the price of fuel and the calculus Southwest Airlines of improving “passenger load factor” (the key measure of 1989-2001 efficiency), Kelly’s day-to-day work sounds relatable at first blush. “I think people would be surprised at how non-technical a lot of my day is,” he says. “It’s pure people. It’s basic EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT blocking and tackling and human relations.”

Southwest Airlines In his case, though, it involves vast numbers of people.

2001-2004 “Hopefully, you’re inspiring them to a cause, and then inspiring them all to work together, and when you have CEO conflict, to deal with it in a civil and respectful way,” Kelly Southwest Airlines says. “That’s a challenge. Our 50,000-member community 2004-present is a society in itself.”

THE MAKEOVER ARTIST ALICE SCHROEDER, BBA ’78, MBA ’80 WEBTUNER

verge of bankruptcy in 2014 when Alice Schroeder took over as CEO. The startup, based outside Seattle, in Redmond, had spent four years burning through its cash reserves while developing a product that had yet to come out — a device that streamed media over broadband. Management touted it as a breakthrough: It would offer four times more memory than Apple TV yet weigh a fraction as much. In a shake-up, WebTuner’s board brought in Schroeder, a former star analyst on Wall Street. She expected fixing the execution issues and cleaning up the balance sheet would turn things around.

Instead, Schroeder completely rewrote the business plan. She threw in the towel on WebTuner’s once promising hardware and switched to making software. The startup is starting over. “It took me over a year to make that decision,” she says. “If I could have done one thing differently, I would have done it all faster.” Instead of trying to salvage a broken business, she says, “I should have been asking, ‘If I had a blank piece of paper, what business would I choose to get into?’ ” For a tech CEO, time is of the essence. The rate of change, she says, “is breathtaking compared to other industries. You never know if you have a competitive advantage. You have to be quite sure there’s something you’re doing that adds real value.”

Despite WebTuner’s head start on the industry, says Schroeder, manufacturing delays allowed Google, Amazon, and others to catch up on the technology and undercut the struggling startup on pricing. Schroeder’s new business model is a video aggregation service supported by ad revenue. “In the early 2000s, if you were a good news aggregator, that was a viable biz,” she says. “Now we’re in the same place with video.”

Schroeder is orchestrating this pivot despite no previous experience in tech or in the C-suite.

WEBTUNER WAS ON THE

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y M I L E S D O N O VA N

SCHROEDER ON HOW EXTERNAL FORCES AFFECT YOUR BUSINESS MODEL: “COMPANIES IN DENIAL ABOUT THAT ARE IN DENIAL ABOUT HAVING THEIR LUNCH EATEN.”

She does have a singular advantage, however: She wrote the book on Warren Buffett. Literally.

In 2008, after some not-so-subtle nudging from him, Schroeder, once the top-ranked insurance analyst on Wall Street, wrote The Snowball, the bestselling biography of Berkshire Hathaway’s legendary chairman and CEO. “I spent years inside Berkshire Hathaway, hanging with Warren but also getting to know how some of his businesses work and understanding business models and seeing operational challenges,” she says. “They’re such diverse businesses, apparel to utilities, that it was like getting a Ph.D. I felt very prepared [as a first-time CEO].”

To her, one of the chief lessons from WebTuner’s troubles runs counter to Buffett’s hands-off approach, though. “Recognizing how external forces affect your business model is the most important thing that you have to do as a leader,” Schroeder says. “Companies in denial about that are in denial about getting their lunch eaten.”

She also learned firsthand the isolation of the job. “Being a CEO is a very, very hard job,” she says. “You’re facing incredible obstacles, and when things are tough, you can never let it show in front of your employees. Your role is to make it all happen.”

PATH TO THE TOP CPA (later senior manager) Ernst & Young Houston, Cleveland, New York City 1980-1991

MANAGING DIRECTOR CIBC Oppenheimer, Paine Webber, Morgan Stanley (also Senior Advisor) New York City 1994-2009

BOARD MEMBER AUTHOR The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life 2008

WebTuner Corp.

Redmond, Washington 2012-2014

CEO AND CHAIR WebTuner Corp.

2014-present

THE DEALMAKER JOHN GOFF, BBA ’77 CRESCENT REAL ESTATE HOLDINGS

“the chance of a lifetime” — the Halley’s Comet of investments. In the early ’90s, following an unbridled building spree, the Texas real estate market was in the doldrums. Investors scattered to the winds.

“We doubled the amount of real estate in the state in a 10-year period,” Goff says. “All this undisciplined capital led to bankruptcies and repossessions. The world was a mess.”

Goff, who was in his early 30s, suggested to his boss, billionaire investor Richard Rainwater, that they start a real estate company to take advantage of that mess. Quality real estate was cheap, Goff argued, and despite the glut, they could manage the properties well and profit handsomely after the downturn ended.

Rainwater agreed to fund the venture, as long as Goff put up everything he had — several million dollars. Goff took the gamble, becoming CEO of Crescent Real Estate Equities, a oneman operation based in Dallas. All he had to do was take his thesis, spelled out on a yellow legal pad, and sign on other investors. “It was very hard to find them, these unconventional real estate participants who believed in our strategy,” Goff says. “One attribute that people underestimate in a CEO is how important it is to be a good salesman. It’s not about hyperbole.

You need the ability to sell your ideas.”

Goff proved adept at it. Within a few years, he had won over enough investors to amass a

TO JOHN GOFF, IT WAS

CPA PATH TO THE TOP

KPMG Houston 1977

18 TODAY.McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

GOFF ON MAKING DECISIONS: “I LEARNED TO ACCEPT THAT UNCERTAINTY COMES WITH EVERY DECISION. YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO GET ENOUGH INFORMATION TO MAKE IT PERFECTLY CLEAR.”

portfolio of more than three million square feet of real estate. Crescent’s IPO, in 1994, was one of the largest at the time for a real estate investment trust: The company raised over half a billion dollars.

From an early age, Goff had wanted to be his own boss. But he didn’t put a name to this — CEO — until later. As a boy, he’d seen the frustration of his father, a superintendent at Dow Chemical, who enjoyed his work but chafed at reporting to others. “That drove my passion,” Goff says. “I wouldn’t say I was a loner, but I was independent. I marched to my own drummer.”

After graduating from UT, he worked as a CPA before switching to business. As a young investor at Rainwater’s firm, Goff was drawn to the action, the deal-making of commercial real estate. “I wanted to shake up the industry,” he says.

Some of the gambles paid off beyond his wildest imagination, in particular the decision to sell Crescent in 2007 for $6.5 billion. Two years later, he and Barclays Capital bought it back for considerably less than his original sale price.

Despite the high stakes, he is comfortable with risk. It’s part of the job of a CEO, especially one in real estate. “I learned to accept that uncertainty comes with every decision,” says Goff, now chairman and CEO of Crescent Real Estate Holdings. “You will never be able to get enough information to make it perfectly clear, which was tough because I tended to be a perfectionist. I wanted everything to be perfect. And it can’t be.”

VICE PRESIDENT CEO CEO Which means that data only gets Rainwater Inc. Crescent Real Estate Crescent Real Estate you so far. “You have to follow your Fort Worth Equities, Fort Worth Holdings gut,” says Goff. “It’s okay to have 1987-1997 1994-’96, 1999-2007 2009-present part of your decision be governed by some emotion.”

For Lo, help came from a source familiar to CEOs everywhere: She joined a local CEO group offering support for those who find it’s lonely at the top. The executives and entrepreneurs in the group get together monthly to talk about work issues, off the record, and help each other out. “You talk about your highs and your lows,” she says. “If it’s a crisis, you see if anyone else has experienced it.”

When she joined the group, Red Velvet was its smallest company. She was struggling to grow, to surpass the elusive $1 million mark in annual revenue. But no longer. And in the last several years, Lo has gone from four employees to 20.

“Before, I was doing whatever I needed to do to survive,” she says. “But now we’re forecasting and thinking about how to sustain the company for five, 10, 20 years out.”

THE SMALL BUSINESS OWNER

PATH TO THE TOP PROJECT MANAGER Trilogy Software Austin 1999-2003

FOUNDER AND CEO Red Velvet Events Austin 2002–present

LO ON THINKING LIKE A CEO: “IT’S WORKING ON THE BUSINESS VERSUS WORKING IN THE BUSINESS.”

CINDY LO, BBA ’98 RED VELVET EVENTS

THE UNEXPECTED CALL WAS EVERY event planner’s dream: The President’s coming to town — can you take care of it?

In 2012, in the heat of his reelection campaign, President Obama was scheduled to come to Austin for three fundraisers. All were top secret, requiring endless hurdles such as Secret Service clearance for each and every guest on the list — a Who’s Who of Austin. The person entrusted with pulling it off was Cindy Lo, the founder and CEO of Red Velvet Events.

“A client of mine called and said, ‘There’s no way I’d do this without you,’” Lo says. “That’s when I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve made it.’”

The President’s visit went just as Lo planned.

By then, she’d been in business for 10 years, but she didn’t feel like a CEO. She thought of herself as a small business owner, someone who wore multiple hats, who did whatever was needed at any given moment. Lo was a self-taught event planner who started her company in 2002 after leaving her job as a software project manager.

It wasn’t until recent years when she stepped back from every little detail and put together a leadership team that she felt differently. “It’s working on the business versus working in the business,” Lo says. “I started thinking like a CEO.” Running a small business can be so demanding that the predominant leadership challenge is often finding time to lead — to be the CEO. When you start your own company doing nearly everything for yourself, it’s a hard habit to break.

#McCOMBSMAGALUMNI 19

KELLY STECKELBERG’S FIRST

thought was, I don’t know how

PATH TO THE TOP

to be CEO. CPA It was a Friday afternoon in 2014, and she had been sumKPMG, San Francisco, moned to the office of the CEO of Zoosk, an online dating Austin, 1991-1995 service based in San Francisco. He told Steckelberg that he and his co-founder were stepping down and the board wanted FINANCE her to be the next CEO. DIRECTOR/EXECUTIVE “There was a little bit of ‘Oh, how am I going to do this?’”

PeopleSoft, says Steckelberg, Zoosk’s COO at the time. “I had to stop and San Francisco, remind myself, ‘You’ve had ideas every single day since you’ve Amsterdam been here about how to do things differently. And remember Epiphany, how much you’ve learned.’”

SF Bay Area Steckelberg accepted the offer. “I love the mission of the Cisco, SF Bay Area company — we bring people together,” she says. “And it was 1995-2011 an amazing opportunity as a woman to have the ultimate job.”

Despite efforts to diversify the executive ranks, a female CEO CFO/COO remains a rarity in Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large.

Zoosk As if the position wasn’t hard enough for a first-time compaSan Francisco ny head, the immediate 2011-2014 priority at Zoosk was STECKELBERG ON JUMPING INTO THE ROLE OF CEO: “THERE WAS A LITTLE BIT OF ‘OH, HOW AM I GOING TO DO THIS?’ I HAD TO STOP AND REMIND MYSELF, ‘YOU’VE HAD turning around a comIDEAS EVERY SINGLE DAY SINCE YOU’VE BEEN HERE ABOUT HOW TO DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY.’” CEO pany still reeling from Zoosk an aborted IPO. After 2014-present filing the paperwork to go public, executives had canceled their scheduled road show.

The winds of the market had shifted, from favoring fast growth — Zoosk had 30 million members after seven years — to favoring profitability.

And the company still hadn’t made a dime.

Steckelberg began her tenure with the difficult task of laying off 15 percent of the 200-person staff. “Because I’m a finance person, I understand the health of the business,” she says. “So when the team asked, ‘Can’t we wait?’ I said, ‘No, we can’t, and I can articulate why. The sooner we fix this, the better, so we can move forward.’”

She is still learning on the job. Because she had never aspired to become CEO, she never consciously prepared for it. Her goal had been CFO of a public company. Accounting was her long-time specialty. After graduating from UT, Steckelberg spent several years at KPMG, one of the “big four” auditors. “What I loved was the exposure to a lot of industries,” she says. “You get to see a lot of different companies and learn how they’re run. Are they conservative or progressive? Risk averse or risk takers? It helped me see which environment I wanted to work in.”

She gravitated toward tech, spending more than a decade at fast-growing startups and rising through the management ranks. Her aspiration was taking a company public — “the ultimate thing you can achieve as a CFO,” she says.

At Zoosk, she thought she’d have the chance.

She still might. But for now, Steckelberg is focused on maintaining the company’s recent momentum as it gets costs under control. After five quarters (and another round of layoffs), Zoosk finally grew subscriptions and bookings (dates arranged through the app) at a profit earlier this year.

“We’re getting to a better place,” she says.

THE NEWCOMER

KELLY STECKELBERG, BBA ’91 ZOOSK

effort to “grow our way out of the problem,” he says, by acquiring half a dozen 7-Eleven stores.

Things improved. A few years later, at 28, Susser became CEO, a job he’d hold for the next 22 years. (He also served as CEO of the wholesale fuel business.) As the business generated more cash, he accelerated the expansion of the convenience store chain, Stripes, doubling overnight on four ocHIS FATHER DIDN’T SAY A WORD. Sam L. Susser casions through acsaw in his dad’s eyes what needed to happen. quisitions. Ten years Sam should leave Wall Street and come home in, he bought out his to help save the family business. father and uncle and The year was 1988, and the banks had called the early investors a meeting to determine the fate of Susser who had enabled the Petroleum Company, the fuel, convenience company to survive. store, and real estate business that Sam’s In 2012, with more grandfather had started following the Great than 500 stores and Depression. Fifty years later, the enterprise nearly $5 billion in anSUSSER ON CRITICAL ADVICE FOR ANY CEO: “ONE OF OUR BOARD was on the brink of bankruptcy, undone by the MEMBERS URGED ME TO THINK HARD ABOUT WHAT DECISIONS I WANTED nual revenue, Susser collapse of the energy, real estate, and banking TO KEEP CONTROL OF. HE SQUEEZED HIS HANDS IN A FIST AND SAID, ‘HOLD Holdings cracked the industries in Texas. Because Sam’s father, Sam ONTO THOSE LIKE YOU’RE SQUEEZING THE LIFE OUT OF A CHICKEN, BUT LET GO OF EVERYTHING ELSE.’” Fortune 500. In 2014, J. Susser, BBA ’62, and uncle, Jerry Susser, had when Susser decided personally guaranteed the company loans, the to sell the company to the oil giant Sunoco, it had grown to 650 stores in Texas, New Mexico, family was facing financial ruin. and Oklahoma, nearly $7 billion in revenue, and some 12,000 employees.

Sam, a 24-year-old analyst at Salomon Throughout his career, rapid and massive growth forced Susser to continually adapt. The Brothers in New York, quit his job and returned organization outgrew his early hands-on approach. (The first year, he’d actually delivered to Corpus Christi to help his uncle, who was donuts to the stores himself.) Susser, regarded as one of the industry’s leading innovators, running the company. (His father, president of embraced technology to better manage the sprawling organization. “Our biggest competitive Citgo Petroleum, needed to keep his steady and advantage became our analytics,” he says. “We knew every keystroke on the register, the length lucrative income.) The core business, selling of time of each transaction, what was selling in each store.” motor fuel, was in free fall. “I had to engineer He also learned the key to delegating — critical advice for any CEO. “One of our board mema plan for survival,” Sam says. bers urged me to think hard about what decisions I wanted to keep control of,” Susser says.

To pay off the debt, his plan involved enlisting “He squeezed his hands in a fist and said, ‘Hold onto those like you’re squeezing the life out of more than a dozen outside investors to help a chicken, but let go of everything else.’” start a new company, later Susser Holdings, Today, Susser is a former CEO — in some ways, a reluctant one. “My wife [Catherine G. built around the family’s one cash-flow positive Susser, BBA ‘91, MPA ‘91] and I didn’t want to sell the business,” he admits. “But after months business: five convenience stores in Texas. of painful reflection, we came down on the side of this is something we had to do. We had a Susser, whose family retained a 30 percent fiduciary responsibility to investors.” After all, Sunoco paid nearly $2 billion. stake in the new entity along with its original But Susser, 52, is also experiencing the upside of leaving the CEO lifestyle behind. For years, wholesale fuel business, then spearheaded an he spent half of every month on the road, away from his wife and three children. “I missed the window on my first born,” he says of his daughter, Sophie, a freshman at McCombs. “But I’m spending more PATH TO VICE PRESIDENT AND time around my boys. I wasn’t making Boy Scout THE TOP GENERAL MANAGER camping trips when I was running a Fortune 500 Southguard Corp CEO company.” But he is now. (later Susser Susser Holdings PRESIDENT ANALYST Chuck Salter is a senior editor at Fast Company.

THE BUILDER

SAM L. SUSSER, BBA ’85 SUSSER HOLDINGS

Salomon Brothers

Holdings)

and Susser Petro-

Susser Holdings

New York City

Corpus Christi

leum Partners

II, L.P.

1985-1988

1988-1992

1992-2014

2015-present

#McCOMBSMAGALUMNI 21

100

YEARS IN 10 OBJECTS

by Jim Nicar | photographs by Brian Goldman 1.

LETTER TO SPURGEON BELL

“I take pleasure in informing you,” wrote UT President Sidney Mezes to Spurgeon Bell on April 1, 1912, “that the Board of Regents of the University of Texas … elected you Professor of Business Training at an annual salary of $3,400.” The letter completed a two-year effort by Mezes to initiate business studies on the campus. Bell, a 1903 UT graduate in economics, was then teaching at the University of Missouri when Mezes recruited him to return to Austin. Bell’s arrival led to the first business classes being taught on the Forty Acres, followed in 1922 by the creation of a College of Business Administration. Bell would be its first dean. ¶ Before all that could happen, however, Bell had to create an entire program

from the ground up. By fall 1912, he had established the School of Business Training as a department of the University’s College of Arts and Sciences. It offered courses in accounting, statistics, banking, and corporations. ¶ Conditions for Bell’s first classes were far from ideal. The university was expanding faster than funding allowed, and monies for new classroom facilities simply weren’t available.

Instead, Mezes ordered cheap, pinewood shacks be constructed.

Without proper foundations and outfitted with potbelly stoves for heat, the shacks were purposely left unpainted in the hope that the state would find their appearance too embarrassing and replace them with adequate buildings. In the cooler months, Bell’s daily

routine began by stoking the coals left by the custodian the night before, then hauling in firewood from a pile stacked behind the building. ¶ Despite these humble beginnings, Bell was able to hire an additional professor after a year and add courses in advertising, marketing, and sales. By April 1916, University President William Battle asked the Board of Regents to rename the department as the School of Business Administration and approve a new Bachelor of Business Administration degree. “So strong an impression has the school made upon the University community,” lauded Dr. Battle, “that the general faculty, after full discussion, has voted to recommend the creation of a new degree.” The regents agreed.

#McCOMBSMAGALUMNI 23

3.

ADAMS EXTRACT

2.

HERMES THE PATRON SAINT

In 1922, the School of Business Administration, now separated from its original home in the College of Arts and Sciences, sought to gain its own identity. Dean Bell introduced the idea of an annual banquet for the school, and to help with the festivities, students looked for a mascot they could call their own. Several UT schools and colleges had adopted “patron saints” as a part of their campus identity.

At a meeting in the Old Main Building, the business students selected as their patron saint Hermes, the Greek god of commerce, noted for his eloquence, speed, shrewdness, and wisdom. The inaugural business school banquet was held May 10, 1922 at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel on Congress Avenue. A rough drawing of Hermes was framed and placed on the head table. The following year, Peter Mansbendel, an internationally known woodworker from Austin, was employed to create a more appropriate likeness from a block of oak.

Mansbendel’s three-foot-tall carving wears winged sandals as a symbol of his swiftness. With his left hand near his heart he holds a caduceus, a staff with two entwined snakes symbolizing commerce to the Greeks, declaring Hermes the authority of strategic negotiations.

In his right hand he carries a bag of gold, a trophy of his successful commercial transactions. An eagle sits at his feet, evidence that the business school’s Hermes is “one hundred percent American” despite his early origins, reported The Daily Texan at the time.

Hermes continued to make annual appearances at business school banquets until they were discontinued in the 1940s. He is still on display in the BBA offices.

24 TODAY.McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

At first glance, it might seem to be an unassuming bottle of vanilla flavoring, something you’d find perched on the shelf of a local grocery store. For the McCombs School, it’s an important connection to the BBA program’s first graduate.

The university’s 34th annual spring commencement was held on the warm and humid Tuesday morning of June 12, 1917. Just over 350 degree recipients — UT’s largest graduating class to date — gathered in front of the ivy-draped, Victorian Gothic Old Main Building.

Nine of the graduates had completed the requirements for the Bachelor of Business Administration degree that had been authorized the previous year by the Board of Regents. The first to receive the BBA was Fred Ward Adams.

Adams hailed from Beeville, Texas, where his father, John, owned the Adams Extract Company, which specialized in high quality vanilla extract for baking. John had founded the business in 1888 in Michigan before moving his family to Texas in 1905, but was starting to look ahead to retirement. John sold it in 1922 to his son Fred, who moved the entire operation to Austin.

For the next several decades, Fred Adams used what he’d learned in those marketing, accounting, management, and economics courses at UT to shape Adams Extract into a nationally known company.

Under Fred’s direction, the company expanded into other flavors and created a food coloring product, particularly important during the Great Depression. Adams Extract is credited with popularizing Red Velvet Cake throughout the country in the 1930s, as it was the first to sell a red food coloring dye marketed with point-of-sales posters and tear-off recipe cards.

(The red on Adam’s Extract labels and bottle caps wasn’t a random choice, but part of the marketing.) In 1947, the company introduced the four-pack food coloring line that’s still sold today. The company, now located in Gonzales, continues to be one of the oldest continuously operated businesses in Texas.

4.

VICTROLA RECORD

Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! ¶ Florence Stullken listened to that sound in her classroom for nearly 40 years. Hired in 1919 as the first woman on the business faculty, she taught classes in typing and shorthand. Into the 1920s, as the school’s curriculum expanded into cotton marketing, life insurance, Latin American commerce, and hotel management, Stullken’s popular typing classes were a mainstay for business students. ¶ Always looking for a new approach to teaching, in 1928 she discovered the Rhythm Method. It

was organized around a series of six Victrola records with 12 songs that varied from Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” to the “Toreador March” from the opera Carmen. Starting with the slowest tempo, students typed in unison to the beat of the music and gradually worked their way up to faster speeds. “I am very well pleased with the results,” she told The Daily Texan, “for even the beginners are able to keep perfect time to the elementary pieces.” ¶ As an added incentive for her students and to promote UT spirit, Stullken added a seventh

record to the course. In May 1928, the university band travelled to San Antonio to professionally record “The Eyes of Texas” and “Texas Taps” — better known today as the “Texas Fight!” song — for the first time.

Victrola records were ready by the next football season, and the songs were in high demand during typing classes. ¶ Stullken remained on the business faculty until 1958. With her retirement, typing classes were discontinued as the school updated its curriculum to emphasize technology, mathematical analysis, and leadership development.

5.

GRADUATION MACE

Every year at commencement, two members of the McCombs faculty serve as marshals, each carrying a graduation mace at the start and finish of a single-file line of graduates as they march into the commencement arena. Originally symbols of authority, college maces were first seen in the 13th century when they were carried in the graduation processions of Oxford and Cambridge. This one used by the

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McCombs School is of more recent vintage. Âś Made of a 42-inch oak shaft and decorated with brass icons, this business school mace features symbols of each of the academic departments that existed in the 1960s when it was created. At the top is a coin, representing the Department of Finance, with the face of Liberty on both sides. Just below the coin and around the shaft are four brass plates. Inscribed in one is a window

envelope with an opened letter, intended to emphasize the importance of proper correspondence in the Department of General Business. Another features a ledger and calculator, icons of the Accounting Department.

Management is represented by the image of a board of directors seated around a conference table. On the fourth plate is a cash register, signifying what was then the Department of Marketing Administration.

7.

JOHN SIBLEY BUTLER'S BRONZE STAR

6.

INVITATION TO THE BEB DEDICATION

When the Business-Economics Building opened in 1962, it was the largest classroom facility on campus. Students dubbed it the “Big Enormous Building.” It was modern in design, based on function and efficiency, though its limestone and brick still identified it as a part of the university. On the south side, a five-story classroom building featured a 400-seat auditorium, a 10,000-volume business library, study halls, conference rooms, and much needed interview rooms for the placement office. The basement was reserved for student recreation, with lounges, games, and vending machines. To the north, a seven-story office building housed the faculty and dean. A screened crossover provided a connecting hallway between the two units, along with the first escalator on campus. The escalator, though, only went up, prompting students to joke that at the end of the day everyone wound up on the top floor.

University of Texas Art Professor Paul Hatgill designed a series of ceramic panels that were placed above the top row of windows around the office unit. His whimsical creations not only added color to the building, their stylistic rows of small, raised circles were meant to suggest buttons, as the many inventions of the 1950s had transformed the modern world into what was then called a “push button society.”

The building’s opening was a seminal moment for the College of Business Administration. For the first 15 years, BBA students attended their business classes in unpainted wooden shacks, and it wasn’t until 1931 that Waggener Hall opened along the west side of Speedway. Named for Leslie Waggener, UT’s first president, the building was designed for Business Administration, but for several years shared its quarters with English, math, and public speaking courses. Designed to blend in with the familiar Mediterranean Renaissance style of other campus structures, Waggener Hall was constructed of white limestone, multi-colored brick, and a broad red-tile roof. The clean lines and sharp details were a welcome addition, and the 26 terra cotta medallions that adorned its walls sent a clear message as to the purpose of the building. Each represented an export of Texas at the time: oil, cotton, lumber, corn, pecans, and cattle, among others. As Business Administration grew more popular with students, Waggener Hall was short on space within a decade and led to the call for what became the BEB. Today the BEB is simply known as the College of Business Administration, and is part of a larger McCombs School complex that now includes the Graduate School of Business. When Rowling Hall is completed in 2017, graduate courses will be moved there, and the current complex will undergo a complete renovation, after which it will be renamed Mulva Hall.

John Sibley Butler, a management professor, former IC2 Institute director, and founding director of the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship, was awarded the Bronze Star with Valor while serving in the Vietnam War from 1968-1972. He was a medic in the U.S. Army.

In wartime, the business school has always done its part. When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, the university completely transformed itself to support the war effort. The business school’s first two professors, Spurgeon Bell and John Treleven, both joined the U. S. Army. Stationed in Washington, D.C., Treleven helped manage the Quartermaster Corps, while Bell worked in the Army’s statistics office. Near the end of the war, Treleven died of pneumonia in the influenza pandemic of 1918. The UT chapter of the Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity, which Treleven helped found, had a bronze tablet created in his memory. It is currently found on the fourth floor of the Graduate School of Business building.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, the university community once again joined in the nation’s service. Dean J. Anderson Fitzgerald led the campus effort to sell war bonds, and in 1943, the business school volunteered to assist the Naval V-12 unit that had been established on campus. More than 100 sailors of the U.S. Navy were enrolled in classes. Most of them were business majors, taking their courses in Waggener Hall, knowing they could be called to service at any time.

In 1945, word reached campus that the V-12 unit would soon be needed. If called, the agreed-upon signal was that the bells in the UT Tower would play “You’re in the Army Now.” (At the time, the Tower’s carillon didn’t yet have the correct bells to perform “Anchors Aweigh.”)

On a sunny afternoon in May 1945, the Tower bells began to ring. The V-12 students, jubilant that they would finally be joining the war, leapt out of their chairs in classrooms throughout Waggener Hall, leaving their open notebooks and textbooks on the desks behind them, and ran up to the Main Mall to celebrate. Their girlfriends, though, were less joyous, worried about the men leaving for combat. Some of the sailors did not return.

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9.

COMPUTER PUNCH CARDS

8.

BOOKS WRITTEN BY GEORGE KOZMETSKY

The stack of books speaks not only of a prolific author, but of a productive and creative person. George Kozmetsky’s accomplishments were many, though to the McCombs School he is best appreciated as the dean who transformed a regionally strong college business program into a national leader.

Kozmetsky co-founded Teledyne, Inc. in 1960, an entrepreneurial startup that grew into a Fortune 500 company within six years. His academic credentials and business successes were getting noticed, particularly by the University of Texas, which recruited him to be the dean of its business school in 1966.

Over the next 16 years, Kozmetsky put in long days. He was regularly in his office by 4:30 a.m., meeting with local and national business leaders who were treated to breakfasts of corn flakes and orange juice. He recruited star-quality faculty, encouraged a cross-disciplinary approach to faculty research, emphasized technology in the business curriculum, and oversaw the completion of

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the Graduate School of Business Building in 1976. He made personal financial contributions to the school and tirelessly solicited important endowments that helped boost the business program into the national rankings.

Toward the end of his tenure, Kozmetsky founded the IC2 Institute, a think tank devoted to researching the intersection of business, government, and education. By 1983, just as Kozmetsky had finished his term as dean, he and the IC 2 Institute were instrumental in bringing the Microcomputer and Technology Corporation (MCC) to Austin, chosen among 60 competing cities. Similar efforts wooed 3M in 1984 and Sematech in 1988, followed by AMD, Motorola, Samsung, and others, which transformed Austin into a high technology center and fulfilled Kozmetsky’s vision of what he termed a “technopolis.”

“His institutional legacy at The University of Texas at Austin is extraordinary,” UT President Larry Faulkner said of Kozmetsky, “and his influence will be felt for generations.”

For BBA students in the 1960s, computer punch cards were a way of life when the business school was the first on campus to offer computer programming courses.

With the opening of the Business-Economics Building in 1962, Dean John White initiated a complete review of the undergraduate curriculum. More courses emphasized mathematics, analysis, leadership development, and, especially, the use of technology. Caught up in the fervor of the Space Age, many envisioned a future where business and technology worked together to solve the problems of modern society. A familiarity with computers was vital for BBA students.

In 1962, White invested a hefty $75,000 to purchase an IBM 1620 Data Processing System, a room-size computer that could perform more than 1,500 calculations per second. Every undergraduate student was required to develop a proficiency in its use. “In preparation for the computer world of the Seventies and Eighties, all students in the College of Business explored the mysteries of this fantastic machine,” explained the Cactus yearbook.

Introductory computer programming meant tedious work with punch cards. Each was 7 3/8 x 3 1/4 inches with 80 columns of numbers. The holes punched into the card could be a record of data or an instruction for the computer. Complex programs required stacks of cards — called “decks” — to be read by the computer. A separate keypunch with a typewriter keyboard was used to prepare the cards.

By the mid-1980s, punch cards gave way to the personal computer, and the college sought an innovative new approach to combine technology, business, and instruction. In 1985, a renovation to the business building created what today is the Hall of Honors, with a room above it that was literally suspended from the ceiling. With a multimillion dollar grant from IBM, the room was outfitted with 48 workstations, each connected to a variety of computer information networks across the country years before the popular use of the internet. This “classroom of the future” was christened Classroom 2000 and launched the college’s Management of Information Systems program. Equipped with the latest audio, visual, and telecommunications technologies, some of which were invented by the instructors, the facility was nationally recognized and considered a showpiece on the campus.

10.

SUSIE BROWN'S TYPEWRITER For Susie Brown, associate dean of business affairs at the McCombs School, the white IBM Selectric typewriter in her office has been a longtime friend, and she’s not quite ready to part with it. In the 1980s, before the advent of modern computer word processing, Brown and her typewriter produced endless memos to colleagues, reports for the dean, and, perhaps most important, thank-you letters to alumni and friends who had contributed financially to the business school.

While Red McCombs’ exceptional $50 million gift in 2000 might be the best known, alumni support has always been essential to the success of the BBA program. In the 1920s, when Dean Anderson Fitzgerald first included internship experience as a degree requirement, alumni of the fledgling school were solicited to help create internship opportunities. A career placement office was opened in 1940, and alumni were again called upon to assist with employment leads and volunteer as mentors. As financial needs for the school increased, Dean John White created an advisory council in 1960, both to “provide an avenue of direct liaison between the faculty and the business community” and to “promote the objectives of the College of Business Administration through fundraising activities.” Alumni came through with the 1964 purchase of an IBM 1620 Data Processing System, which introduced computer programming courses to the campus before a computer sciences department existed.

In more recent times, assistance for undergraduate students has taken many forms. Annual giving has been a mainstay for alumni support since the 1980s, and in 1990 the business school could boast of being the first UT college or school to achieve $1 million in donations within a year. Dozens of professorships have been endowed by generous alumni to promote cutting-edge teaching and research, while other endowments help bolster the efforts of the BBA Undergraduate Program Office, which include leadership development, student organization assistance, and the BBA Exchange Program, where almost half of all McCombs undergraduates participate in study abroad. The BBA Alumni Endowed Excellence Fund supports student-led initiatives that enhance the educational experience, while the McCombs Scholarship Fund, initiated in 2010, has already created 120 scholarships totaling $33.5 million in philanthropic support and is used to recruit top-tier students to McCombs. Since 2013, the McCombs Parents Council has been involved with UT’s Family Weekend and student recruitment and raised more than $220,000 in assistance. Austin writer Jim Nicar runs the website uthistorycorner.com

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ABOVE:

Noah Minor, BBA ‘16, is one of only 50 students selected, out of more than 4,500 who applied, for the inaugural class of UT’s new Dell Medical School.

RE-IMAGINING THE BUSINESS OF HEALTH CARE WITH THE OPENING OF DELL MEDICAL SCHOOL AT UT, McCOMBS CONNECTIONS OFFER TRANSFORMATIVE POSSIBILITIES

by Steve Brooks photographs by Jeff Wilson

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intrigued by his dermatologist’s atypical medical office. Examining rooms had picture windows, the waiting room offered refreshments, and even if he walked in without an appointment, the doctor would see him within a half-hour.

Last summer, Minor, BBA ’16, found out what really made that office tick. As a student consultant there, he discovered that patient service at Austin’s Westlake Dermatology was deliberately built into its business model. The experience helped solidify his determination to meld business with health care, and this fall, Minor is one of only 50 students selected, from more than 4,500 who applied, for the inaugural class of UT’s new Dell Medical School.

Minor credits his McCombs experience, both in the classroom and out, with helping him make the med school cut. While he studied topics like design thinking and lean startups in business school, he also did fieldwork at University Medical Center Brackenridge and helped create a smartphone app for student health. “It was meaningful service work that really strengthened my medical school application,” he says.

As an undergraduate, Minor also founded a program that places McCombs student consultants with local organizations to help redesign their business processes. It’s a concept close to the heart of Dell Med’s new dean, Clay Johnston, who left a job as associate vice chancellor of research at the University of California, San Francisco, to lead UT’s new medical school. One of Johnston’s early initiatives was to create the Design Institute for Health, a collaboration with the UT College of Fine Arts, to harness the principles of design thinking and apply them to health system challenges.

“Noah Minor is a perfect example of the kind of student we want to draw to Dell Medical School,” says Johnston. “The problems of health care are not going to be solved in the traditional silos developed around it. They’re more likely to come from interdisciplinary work — and business is a key area of opportunity.”

McCombs Dean Jay Hartzell says health care offers many opportunities for those on the business side. “Business students are trained to reduce costs while improving quality and yet are grossly underrepresented in the health care industry,” says Hartzell. “Business research on organizational and operational design, innovation, and process improvement is vital in an economy where health care is projected to represent nearly 20 percent of the gross domestic product by 2020.”

For Dr. Mark Shen, an associate professor of pediatrics at Dell Med, the disciplines of business and medicine came together out of necessity when he received a big promotion. After being appointed president of Dell Children’s Medical Center in 2014, he immediately enrolled in McCombs’ 21-month Executive MBA program.

“When I stepped into this new role as leader of a complex medical institution, I decided that getting my MBA was crucial,” says Shen, who graduated in May. “Now I’m able to apply something from every course — from accounting and finance to strategy — to the issues I face every day. On a broader level, the program has helped me apply fundamental principles from the capitalist model to the world of nonprofits.”

If medical school connections are new to McCombs, the underlying drive to develop health care delivery solutions is not. For nearly a decade, the school has been beefing up its research, curriculum, and networks to prepare graduates to work at existing health and biomedical companies or start their own. The story illustrates not just how McCombs is helping to transform health care but also how the school is transforming itself.

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BRINGING HEALTH CARE INTO THE McCOMBS PORTFOLIO Reuben McDaniel Jr., who had long used complex systems concepts to study health care, became a bridge-builder across disciplines. The schools of nursing, social work, pharmacy, public health, and natural sciences, to name a few, were all doing health-related research, but faculty members weren’t talking to one another across academic boundaries. To start the conversations, McDaniel (who passed away in February) launched the McCombs Health Care Initiative.

Today, those efforts continue. “Essentially, what we did was create an invisible college of health care delivery here at the business school,” says Edward Anderson, professor of Information, Risk and Operations Management and current director of the initiative, now called Healthcare@McCombs.

The annual interdisciplinary health care research symposium that McDaniel launched is the university’s only — and one of the state’s largest — fully multi-disciplinary conferences on health care delivery. Since it started in 2010, it’s more than doubled in size and draws participants from across the UT campus, the state, and the nation.

Between symposiums, the interdisciplinary connections continue.

When Austin Regional Clinic wanted advice on getting diabetes patients to comply with treatment plans, Healthcare@McCombs Program Coordinator Roanna Flowers introduced the clinic to researchers at UT’s Moody College of Communication. At the request of the Dell Children’s

IN 2009, MANAGEMENT PROFESSOR

BELOW: Senior Lecturer Kristie Loescher oversees the Business of Health Care under-

graduate certificate and MBA concentration programs at McCombs. BELOW RIGHT: Dr. Mark Shen, president of Dell Children’s Medical Center and associate professor of pediatrics at Dell Med, just completed the Texas Executive MBA program.

CREDIT TK

HEN NOAH MINOR was a teenager, he was

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Medical Center, she helped organize a conference that brought physicians and business professors together.

gene therapy for cancer was a finalist in a pitch contest for the health care accelerator OneStart.

WHAT STARTS HERE CHANGES HEALTH

INTERNALIZING HEALTH CARE

“THE DOCTOR WILL see you now.” It’s a phrase many patients spend too long waiting to hear. At a San Antonio outpatient surgery clinic, the wait has gotten shorter, thanks to IROM Professor Douglas Morrice.

Morrice’s work represents one of many partnerships McCombs has forged with medical schools across the state. He has dissected industrial operations for companies like Schlumberger and Texas Instruments, but in partnership with UT Health Science Center in San Antonio, he looked at a different kind of process: clinic scheduling.

“People are not widgets, but a lot of the same principles from supply chains and assembly lines can apply in a health care setting,” says Morrice. His team identified bottlenecks caused by incomplete or missing test results and other data. The clinic created a new nurse navigator position to address the problems. Eight months later, the facility was seeing 19 percent more patients, while decreasing its average clinic time by 9 percent. Patient satisfaction improved.

McCombs also partners with UT Medical Branch at Galveston to offer a 15-week biomedical innovation course that turns biotech researchers into entrepreneurs. It’s like a condensed version of McCombs’ Master of Science in Technology Commercialization program.

“The class helps students ask two questions,” says course director Stan Watowich, UTMB associate professor of biochemistry. “First, is there commercial potential in your biomedical technology?

Second, do you understand the landscape enough to excite investors?”

Chantal Delys, McCombs assistant dean of executive education, notes that several of the UTMB students have taken promising next steps, like the startup Ovodex. Its

are hungry for managers with business expertise in health care industry issues. And yet, until recently, says Senior Lecturer Kristie Loescher, McCombs did not address this. “We had programs to prepare students to work in real estate, energy, and supply chains, but we didn’t have one for health care.”

Now that has changed. In 2017, the first class of Loescher’s undergraduate Business of Health Care Certificate Program will graduate.

Like McCombs’ popular Business Foundations Program, the undergraduate Business of Health Care Certificate Program is open to all majors at UT. Loescher also oversees a Health Care Concentration for MBAs, launched in 2010, and now augmented with new courses that reflect growing student interest in med tech and digital health commercialization.

Loescher, who spent years in hospital administration, makes sure hands-on practicums are an integral part of her students’ experience.

McCombs students themselves created another hands-on program: the Health Innovation Fellowship for MBA students. Last spring, fellows helped Dell Med design a business accelerator program.

Founding fellow Jennifer Thomas, MBA ’16, has just started a job with Bayer Pharmaceuticals. “I’ve seen models from other industries and how they work, how they can be applied to health care,” Thomas says.

HEALTH CARE INSTITUTIONS

“WHEN I STEPPED INTO THIS NEW ROLE AS LEADER OF A COMPLEX MEDICAL INSTITUTION, I DECIDED THAT GETTING MY MBA WAS CRUCIAL.”

Alec Grubbs, MSBA ’16, agrees that practical skills make a big difference. At McCombs, he developed a model that predicts which hospital claims likely will be denied. He’s taken the experience to powerhouse Athenahealth, where he is now manager of data insights.

“I would not have had the technical skills and claim-specific knowledge if not for the Business Analytics program,” says Grubbs. “I was able to answer detailed technical job interview questions about predictive modeling and the database programming language SQL.” BIRTH OF BUSINESSES

CREDIT TK

PARADIGM SHIFTS, new technologies, and new reimbursement models can all bring about innovative health care business solutions.

Neal Wendt, MSTC ’14, took his degree into oil and gas — until oil prices collapsed. Facing slim pickings in the oil industry, he ended up acquiring a whole different kind of business: ManCenters, a men’s health clinic in Houston. Now he’s redesigning workflow around the lean production

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TODAY.MCCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU 33

principles he learned in the oilfields, such as making sure equipment and tests arrive at the same moment as the patient.

Other former McCombs students are starting companies from scratch.

At a tailgate party in 2013, MBA student Charlie Kolb met classmate Andrew O’Hara. They talked about insurance reimbursement regulations for video visits between doctors and patients, and an entreprenieurial idea came to life. With support and introductions to investors by McCombs staff, the two founded Chiron Health to streamline the emerging practice of telemedicine. Today, their company has 19 employees and $3.2 million in funding. “It’s a great example of McCombs backing all the talk on entrepreneurship,” Kolb says.

It’s not just students doing startups, though. IROM Professor Paul Damien, who teaches business analytics, helped create the Profitability and Operational Excellence Index for hospitals. He crunches numbers to compare a facility to its peers, allowing institutions to see how and where they could improve performance. Individual hospitals use the index to pinpoint problem areas, like hospital-acquired infections or readmissions. The facilities that use his service routinely report strong increases in both profitability and positive health outcomes.

NEXT LEVEL WITH DELL MED IN THE HEART OF AUSTIN, only six blocks separate the Dell Medical School from the McCombs School of Business. On both sides, administrators and faculty expect a boost from being partners.

For the medical school, it’s about transforming an industry that’s decades behind banks or automakers in areas like efficiency, cost-control, and customer service. “We’re working to create practical new business models for health care, and we need a collaborative partnership to figure out how to do that,” says Dell Med Dean Johnston. “We hope for tremendous leadership from McCombs.”

McCombs is stepping up to the plate. “We have already started working with Dell Med in the areas of design, surgery, and innovation,” says Dean Hartzell. “We are in the process

She’s been a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Harvard Business School, and Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

Teisberg, who holds joint faculty appointments with McCombs and Dell Med, is nationally recognized for the concept of value-based health care: making patients healthier at lower cost by organizing services around the needs of patients rather than doctors. She’ll direct a joint institute to focus on goals like person-centered results measurement and integrating diverse specialties into unified care teams.

“Business offers powerful insight into measuring and improving results; health care needs that dynamic,” says Teisberg. “Working to create bridges between disciplines will help us take advantage of the strengths of the entire academic community.”

Anderson, the leader of Healthcare@McCombs, looks ahead to lifting both schools to new levels. “We in the business world can’t create substantive change in health care delivery without medical collaborators,” he says. “And a medical school can’t revolutionize health care without business school partners. To just have one or the other looking at health care delivery is sort of like the sound of one hand clapping.”

Besides, there’s the satisfaction of helping people in life-changing and lifesaving ways. “You have the real potential to make people’s lives better,” says Program Coordinator Roanna Flowers. “Because whether we work in health care or not, we’re all patients.”

Steve Brooks is a freelance writer who contributes frequently to McCombs School of Business publications.

BELOW: Elizabeth Teisberg, a nationally recognized leader in the value-based health care strategy movement, holds joint faculty appointments with McCombs and Dell Med.

“BUSINESS OFFERS POWERFUL INSIGHT INTO MEASURING AND IMPROVING RESULTS. HEALTH CARE NEEDS THAT DYNAMIC.” of developing specific research collaborations with the Department of Surgery and Perioperative Care, and have begun to discuss curriculum development with Dell Med’s Department of Health Product Innovation, Texas Health Catalyst,” says Hartzell. “Going forward, we are excited about the prospect of creating innovative new executive education and graduate courses and perhaps even a degree in conjunction with the medical school.”

Faculty with one foot in each school is another step in this partnership. The first such hire is Elizabeth Teisberg.

34 TODAY.MCCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

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COMMUNITY

A Century of Trailblazing BBAs by Selah Maya Zighelboim

POISED PIONEER FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN BBA GRADUATE RECALLS TOUGHER TIMES EGGY DRAKE

Holland, BBA ’63, says she stepped onto the UT campus in 1958 with no preconceived notions. “I was an idealist,” she says. But when students in the hallway jostled her books to the floor the first week of class, She knew she had a long road ahead.

She had graduated from the segregated Phillis Wheatley High School in San Antonio at only 16 — as valedictorian. The option to desegregate began her junior year, but most of her class had chosen to stay at their school so they could graduate together.

“We were like a family,” Holland says.

So it was as a student at newly desegregated San Antonio College that Holland first tasted racism in an educational setting. Her math professor assigned her to a corner seat, so that his body fully obstructed her view of his demonstrations. “It was as if I were invisible,” she recalls.

But most of her junior college professors welcomed Holland’s work ethic and bright mind, which earned her a spot in the honor society. She enjoyed her accounting classes there, so she enrolled in UT’s business school as an 18-year-old junior — the only black person and the only woman in her classes.

Nothing Holland had faced in San Antonio prepared her. >

C O M M U N I T Y: U P C LO S E “Students would move if I sat near them. It was as if I were contagious,” she says.

“One of my professors explained on the first day of class that a significant part of our final grade would be based on classroom discussion — and he would call upon students to discuss the subject,” she says. “He never called my name.”

But, says Holland, “I believe the good people I’ve met and the positive experiences I’ve had outweigh the negatives.”

Seward Robb, a professor of personnel management, stands out. During a period of Ku Klux Klan activity on campus, one of Holland’s classes traveled by bus to a conference in Houston.

Robb felt that Holland — who was not allowed to live in a dormitory, but in a segregated house for black girls — faced potential danger when boarding that bus. So Robb personally saw her onto the bus that morning and ensured her safely home when it returned that night.

Another professor helped her to take the steps she needed to finally graduate — five long years after she had begun as a junior.

The delayed graduation was a result of breaks that Holland took when she “got tired of fighting.” She either went home to San Antonio to work for a semester or two, or she took classes in the more welcoming Schools of Education or Liberal Arts. One literature professor even pulled her aside to ask if she would be offended by a discussion of Huckleberry Finn. “I told him, ‘Certainly not,’” she recalls.

As much as she enjoyed her experience in other parts of campus, in the end, Holland set her mind to earning a UT business degree: “It was my right to do so,” she says. In 1963, she became the business school’s first African-American graduate.

Holland married fellow UT alum Leon Holland, an ROTC student who graduated from the College of Natural Sciences and entered the Army as an officer. She travelled the world, dedicated herself to various causes, and raised two children.

When Holland’s daughter sought to attend UT, her mother did not relate her experiences.

“I thought it had probably changed.” Indeed, her daughter enjoyed UT, graduating with a communications degree. As for herself, Holland says she is a more compassionate person because of what she endured. “It’s strengthening to rise from that type of experience.”

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THE ALL–BUSINESS LONGHORN BEHIND “AMERICA’S TEAM” y

T OM LANDRY, BBA ’49

UNSHAKABLY BUSINESS-LIKE in his sports coat and

fedora, Tom Landry reigned over 29 seasons of Dallas Cowboys football, never cracking a smile. But don’t let his stoicism fool you, says his son-in-law Eddie Phillips, BBA ’72, who insists Landry, who passed away in 2000, was one of the funniest, most genuine family men he’s ever known. “It’s just he was all about the game,” Phillips says.

Landry would enter his football career right out of college, but he did not assume it would last, says Phillips.

Even when he started as defensive coach for the New York Giants, Landry dressed as a businessman for the benefit of any of his future insurance clients.

But in coaching football, Landry found another way to put his analytical business mind to good use, says Phillips: “He was able to break down the offense and what it showed him, to g e t a st e p a h e a d of receivers.”

Landry ’s focus on the game began in his hometown of Mission, Texas, as a defensive back at Mission High School where, his senior year, the team allowed only one

touchdown. After a semester at UT, Landry volunteered to serve in World War II, flying more than 30 combat missions before returning to Austin to pursue his business degree — and to play Longhorn football.

As fullback and defensive back, Landry earned All-Southwest Conference honors as a junior. Then as a senior and co-captain, he led the team to an Orange Bowl victory in 1949, the same year he married fellow UT student Alicia Wiggs.

A fellow McCombs alumnus and Longhorn football player who also went pro, Phillips saw much to admire in Landry, both on and off the field. “He had great faith, which brought him peace of mind,” says Phillips, always amazed at how Landry managed disappointment.

“He might have to think about it for a day or two, but the next day, his attitude was full speed ahead.”

FALL 2016

CHARTER CEO y Y ASMIN

BHATIA, BBA ’98

for all kids is the challenge Yasmin Bhatia took on when she assumed the role as CEO of Uplift Education, a chain of Dallas-area charter schools. After nine years with McKinsey & Co., and on the brink of partnership, Bhatia stepped back to consider a new direction for her career after meeting with Uplift’s founder.

“I thought, ‘What if I could work professionally for an organization that really makes a difference in the lives of kids?” she recalls. Bhatia had mentored with Big Brothers, Big Sisters at UT, and was also active with Make-a-Wish Foundation and a children’s program through the North Texas Food Bank. So Uplift seemed a perfect fit.

Eight years later, she hasn’t looked back.

“I think sometimes there’s this perception that if you go into nonprofit leadership that that’s a lesser career,” Bhatia says. But she tells new UT grads, “there are really high-performing, high-quality nonprofit organizations out there.”

As for Uplift, which now serves 16,000 students in 36 schools, “We’ve maintained a track record of 100 percent of our kids being accepted into college, and 70 percent are the first in their families to do so,” Bhatia says.

To those who criticize charter schools for robbing public schools of students, Bhatia says, “Competition breeds innovation and makes everyone raise our game.” She says the success of charter schools calls to question longheld assumptions. “The broader community is starting to see that it is possible to send large numbers of first-generation kids to college.

And that’s a really powerful thing.”

CLOSING THE OPPORTUNITY GAP

TEXAN TO THE CORE y

GEORGE SEAY, BBA ’89, MBA ’98

GEORGE SEAY RECALLS the ribbing he faced in junior high school when he wore his burnt orange

windbreaker over his gray uniform. “I proudly wore it anyway,” Seay says. “UT is core to who I am and who most of my family are.”

The founder and chair of Annandale Capital, a global investment firm for high net worth individuals, families, and institutions, Seay credits his deep Texas roots for his business success. “We believe in hard work and being a person of your word, a person of honor. Basically just earning your keep in life,” he says. “That was the message my family gave me all throughout.”

His family tree was planted in Texas in 1819 before the state was … well, a state. His grandfather Bill Clements served twice as Texas governor, and the family’s association with UT goes back about 100 years — a legacy that reads like a “Who’s Who” of Texas business, law, and philanthropy.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Seay thought he would follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps — his Grandfather Seay was salutatorian and the first distinguished alumnus at UT Law School. The younger George Seay also excelled in his law studies, earning head of Law Review at Southern Methodist University, but “it didn’t come easily,” he recalls.

When his work for a Dallas law firm proved unsatisfying, Seay came home to UT for his MBA. “I’m indebted to McCombs forever for giving me the credentials and training in money management finance that I needed,” he says. Seay shows his gratitude to UT through service on several boards, including chair of the Clements Center for History, Strategy, and Statecraft, founded in 2013. The Center draws on research and teaching in diplomatic and military history, with a goal to train the next generation of national security leaders.

Deeply patriotic, Seay says that next to his Christian faith and his family, his identity as a Texan is most important. His daughter is a rising sophomore at UT — a fifth generation Longhorn— and Seay finds himself on campus several times a year. “I bleed orange,” he says.

#McCOMBSMAG 37

C O M M U N I T Y: U P C LO S E

THE POWER OF SPORT y

TAPPING THE WORLD’S ENERGY y

JIM MULVA, BBA ’68, MBA ’69

NOT ONE TO PASS on a smart financial move, young Jim Mulva didn’t think twice when, right out

of high school, the Navy ROTC offered him a scholarship to UT. So the son of a small-town Wisconsin banker moved to Austin — the first of many smart moves credited to the man who would become CEO and chair of ConocoPhillips, the world’s largest independent exploration and production company.

At UT, Mulva dove into leadership, working as a dormitory counselor and head resident — an invaluable experience, he says. After earning his BBA, Mulva took a leave of absence from the Navy to pursue his MBA, which he says he “crammed” into one year of study before entering active duty in the Middle East.

During his four years of service, Mulva says he learned how a large organization operates, and he learned “that the world was greater than what I’d known.” His time in the Persian Gulf would yield remarkable dividends for Mulva, sparking his interest in a region so important to the energy industry.

He took his first post-military job in the treasury department at Phillips Petroleum, soon leading to his work on financing for Ekofisk — still today the largest offshore development in the North Sea. Mulva steadily climbed the company’s ladder until achieving CEO in 1999. Then in 2002, he oversaw the merger between Phillips Petroleum and Conoco — a step that garnered him Petroleum Executive of the Year, as it positioned the company to compete in an increasingly difficult business environment.

Since retiring in 2012, Mulva and his wife, Miriam, have dedicated themselves to philanthropic work, including a $60 million multiyear pledge to UT, which will be used to renovate the current business school building. “We believe that as a family, we’ve certainly been blessed,” Mulva says.

“So it’s important for us to respond with whatever we have, to try to help people and help society.”

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KALEN THORNTON, BBA ’03

T H E M E TA P H O R O F S P O R T to life has never been lost on Kalen Thornton. A star Longhorn turned Dallas Cowboys linebacker, Thornton believes his hours on the field have yielded huge dividends in his career in marketing with Nike.

“Sports offer the same discipline, the same process, that you go through to be a wealth management expert, a Fortune 500 CEO, or a marketer,” Thornton says. It’s a process familiar to him from childhood. Son of Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Bruce Thornton, the younger Thornton played “everything under the sun” as a kid.

After earning Academic All-Big 12 student -athlete honors at UT, Thornton joined the Cowboys in 2004, knowing that a long-standing knee injury would limit his career longevity.

After his time in the NFL, Thornton worked for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and then took an MBA at Stanford, hoping to make a career transition that reconnected him with athletes — that subculture of people “aspiring to be the best versions of themselves,” he says.

He found it. As global brand senior director for Nike skateboarding, Thornton’s job is “to figure out the right way to engage with our athletes.” His Nike highlights include helping launch FuelBand and piloting Nike+ Run Club, which made him a runner himself — an “interesting transition” for a linebacker, Thornton says.

Pushing such limits while bringing people together: this is the magic of athletics, and it has global implications, he says: “I think there’s so much power in it that’s unrealized.”

FALL 2016

SINGLE-MINDED AND WHOLEHEARTED y

40 WITH THE FED y

HELEN HOLCOMB, BBA ’76

40 years, it’s hard to think about going cold turkey,” says Helen Holcomb, first vice president and chief operating officer of the Dallas Federal Reserve. Her pending retirement this year may be the one issue Holcomb is unable to reconcile since she walked into the Dallas Fed office, fresh out of McCombs, in 1976.

After her first job as an internal auditor, Holcomb stepped up the ladder through a wide variety of positions at the bank, achieving first vice president and COO. “The financial industry has become much more complex,” she says. Holcomb has helped steer the Fed into the 21st century — from paper check processing as its largest operation, to risk management and cybersecurity as its vital functions today.

Beyond shifting technologies, the Fed has had to adjust to a dramatically shifting economic climate. “As a result of the financial crisis a few years ago, we’ve had to come up with new ways of looking at financial institutions, how we oversee them,” Holcomb says. Holcomb was directly or indirectly responsible for creating several functions within the Fed, including corporate communications, community affairs, and corporate planning.

Today, she sees communication as a top priority for the organization. “Given this current state of our economy, we have a strong need to increase the public’s understanding of what we’re doing from a policy perspective,” she says. Holcomb says the Fed’s policies are a public service, “making sure that the country has a smoothly functioning economy.” That sense of mission has made her long career uniquely rewarding.

With a daughter who graduated from McCombs in 2012 and a son who’s a current student, Holcomb is ready with advice for people starting out in a business career: “Figure out what you like to do,” she says. “Buy into the mission of the organization. I’m obviously evidence that careers can be very long, and you want to enjoy the time you spend working.”

“AFTER WORKING SOMEPLACE

JACK HARBIN, BBA ’39

THE BOY FROM WAXAHACHIE, Texas, who would become chief executive officer of one of the world’s largest oil field services companies, grew up “poor, hungry, and driven,” says Joel Robuck about his father-in-law, Jack Harbin.

As CEO of Halliburton from 1972-1983, Harbin knew the presidents of every major oil company in the world. He and his wife, Dorothy, lunched with Queen Elizabeth II and visited the demilitarized zone in Korea. But despite his high profile, Harbin remained humble, gracious, and giving, says Robuck.

Raised during the Depression, Harbin passed his childhood days doing painting jobs and delivering newspapers. He worked his way through college grading papers and doing bookkeeping.

After graduating from business school with honors, Harbin entered the energy industry.

A stint in the Venezuelan oil fields for Creole Petroleum ignited a lifelong love for the oil and gas industry. Shortly before his Navy deployment, Harbin won a coin toss with a friend and ended up on a blind double date with Dorothy Middleton, the woman who would be his wife for 60 years until her death in 2002.

In her honor, Harbin established the Harbin Chair and Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas in 1997. Other examples of Harbin’s philanthropy were his two $1 million gifts to the Texas Exes for the preservation and development of its grounds and renovations to the Alumni Center.

Harbin worked almost until the day he died in 2014, at 97. Robuck says that work ethic was matched only by the man’s generous spirit. “He did a lot of things to help people financially and in other ways that were never reported, never publicized.”

#McCOMBSMAG 4

C O M M U N I T Y: U P C LO S E

FUN AND PASSION: INSIDE INTEL y

STACY SMITH, BBA ’85, MBA ’88

when a young Steve Jobs took the McCombs Distinguished Lecture Series stage and lit a fire in student Stacy Smith, now CFO and executive vice president of Intel.

“He just talked with such conviction about how technology could help solve some of the world’s problems,” Smith recalls.

So during his job hunt, Smith flew to Silicon Valley on his own dime to try to get an interview with Apple — but they weren’t hiring. “I got on the interview list with Intel. I got on the interview list with Hewlett Packard. Of course, I interviewed with some of the investment banks because that’s what one does,” he says. But it was Intel — a small, little-known company at the time — that stood out.

“They were kind of young and aggressive and doing interesting things, and I had a sense that you could grow at your own pace and advance,” he recalls. “It was my lowest offer of six offers, and I’ve never looked back.” Recently promoted to executive vice president, Smith says his best moments with Intel have come through teamwork and problem-solving: steering the company through the Great Recession after just becoming CFO in October 2007 and helping improve Intel’s operations in areas where it had been sluggish, such as the Middle East and Africa.

“Intel Finance has a culture of rotations,” Smith says. “We bring people in, you do a job for a period of time, you learn a skill, then you rotate into a different group or a different function — typically both — so that you can broaden your skill set.” In this model, Smith has served in roles all over the world. “I think it created a lot of opportunity and growth for me,” Smith says. “It’s been a great place to be.”

In addition to his work at Intel, Smith is on the McCombs Advisory Council, and is involved in the Corporate Finance Fellows Program, which allows McCombs students to work on real business problems with Intel finance professionals.

The passion he saw in Jobs is still key to Smith: “If you’re doing something you’re passionate about, you’re going to be more enthusiastic,” he says. “You have more fun. You do better. You progress in your career—which becomes this nice self-reinforcing process.”

IT WAS 1986

CONSCIOUS CAPITALISM IN THE SEGREGATED SOUTH y

JOE C. THOMPSON JR., BBA ’22

J O E C . T H O M P S O N J R . , the founder of the 7-Eleven empire, was a conscious capitalist when it wasn’t cool.

Known as the father of convenience retailing, Thompson was an early champion of profit sharing for employees — a move that marked “the first real entry of the modern age towards conscious capitalism,” says his granddaughter, Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk.

Thompson began his business career in Dallas in the 1920s with a chain of icehouses.

Before long, he had a simple idea: selling chilled watermelon too. That venture foreshadowed the idea of another Southland Ice Company employee: Why not add in a few groceries?

Thompson ran with it, and within a decade the company owned 60 retail ice docks. Under Thompson’s guidance, the world’s first convenience store chain would grow to 600 locations

40 TODAY.McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

FALL 2016 nationwide and become a staple of American life.

Whereas old models of commerce had emphasized standard operating procedures, Thompson always prized innovation: “Anyone could suggest something different,” Thompson-Frenk says. He also understood how a racially integrated business bred out-of-the-box thinking, as people from different backgrounds swap ideas.

She says his profit sharing model had the same win-win effect: “If one store was doing significantly well, then everyone celebrated, and the store that had innovated wanted to share what worked.”

Above all else, Thompson, who died in 1961, valued his employees’ work ethic and integrity, says Thompson-Frenk. So even in the segregated South, her father — the boss’s son — trained under people of different races and worked his way up from delivery boy.

All three of Thompson’s sons followed in his footsteps: they went to business school at UT, managed the football team, joined Phi Gamma Delta, and took on leadership roles at 7-Eleven. According to Thompson-Frenk, he also instilled in his sons the values of empathy, compassion, and social justice.

Those values were certainly at play during Thompson’s long tenure on the board for the State Fair of Texas, where he spoke out for desegregation. When the Ku Klux Klan showed up on his lawn, his wife would wake the boys and hustle them into a back room for “reading time,” while Thompson manned the door with his rifle.

Thompson-Frenk says such an example is both inspiring and intimidating: “In our family, ‘The eyes of Texas … ’ is not just a shared alma mater, but a reminder that what we each do and say had better be up to the standard of the legacies written by those who’ve come before us.”

VIRTUAL REALITY MEETS LIVE SPORTS y

ANDRE LORENCEAU, BBA ’13

FOR THE FIRST TIME, this season, college football games are being broadcast live nationwide in virtual reality thanks to 26-year-old McCombs alum Andre Lorenceau. A few days after the first VR game aired — Ohio State versus Oklahoma on Sept. 17 — Forbes announced that former NBA commissioner David Stern and several other backers had invested $5 million in Lorenceau’s fledgling company LiveLike.

The Red River showdown between Texas and Oklahoma Oct. 8 was LiveLike/Fox Sports’ next virtual reality football live stream. Viewers use Gear VR and Google Cardboard headsets — or a smartphone or iPad — to experience the game in VR. “The skyrocket to success has been nothing short of mind-blowing,” says Lorenceau, recalling how it all started two years ago.

“I had this visceral stomach lurching,” he says, remembering the epiphany that launched his career. It was March 2014 when Lorenceau tried out an advanced prototype of a virtual reality game at South by Southwest. As he pulled down the joystick, he recalls the real sensation of centrifugal force: “My body was convinced I was going to take a 90-degree turn in a spaceship.”

Immediately sensing the technology’s commercial potential, Lorenceau realized that time was of the essence: “If I want to have a competitive edge in VR,” he thought, “this is the moment.”

He posted ads on VR forums that read, “I have a business degree. I’ll help anybody for free.”

This was music to the ears of a small but talented French-Korean animation VR storytelling studio called Innerspace, which took Lorenceau on as their business officer. For three months he lived in a six-by-six foot apartment in South Korea, an hour from the office. He worked 12hour days. “It was fantastic,” he says. Samsung discovered the team and included its program in its first GearVR mobile headset. Within a year, he went from “the most un-hireable person” to owning LiveLike.

“In frontier technology, you know and extend the edge of knowledge in no time,” he says. “You study it for six seconds, and you know more than 90 percent of the population.”

#McCOMBSMAG 41

C O M M U N I T Y: G AT H E R I N G S A REVIEW OF McCOMBS CELEBRATIONS, HONORS, AND ALUMNI EVENTS. 1

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McCOMBS ALUMNI AUSTIN CHAPTER EVENT APRIL 4, 2016

CORPORATE RECOGNITION EVENT APRIL 29, 2016

WELCOME TO WALL STREET BRUNCH JULY 16, 2016

The Austin Chapter of the McCombs Alumni Network hosted an after-hours shopping spree at the Kendra Scott flagship store. The Austin-based jewelry retailer donated 20 percent of the sales from the event to McCombs. Pictured: Valerie Sy, MBA ’07, and Kira Scott, MBA ’07.

Five honorees and more than 300 companies and foundations were recognized for their support of McCombs. Honorees included: Niloufar Molavi (pictured) of PwC, Outstanding Corporate Champion Award; Toyota, Newcomer Award; Chevron, Outstanding Corporate Partner Award; Google, Trailblazer Award; and USAA, Outstanding Executive Education Partner Award.

The NYC Alumni Chapter and the Wall Street for McCombs Board hosted brunch for approximately 65 BBA, MPA, and MBA summer interns and recent graduates. Pictured: Xavier Sztejnberg, finance lecturer, director of Wall Street for McCombs Board, and associate director of Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst Center for Private Equity Finance; Jake Foley, BBA ’88, MPA ’88, WSFM Board chair; and Kiley Baker, MBA ’13 chair of the associate level of the WSFM Board.

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McCOMBS SCHOOL APPRECIATION DINNER MARCH 31, 2016

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Students were able to thank benefactors for their support at the annual McCombs School Appreciation Dinner. Scholarships allow McCombs to recruit and retain some of the nation’s top students. Thanks to donors, McCombs currently has 378 endowed scholarships. Pictured: Red McCombs flanked by (on left) Alex Rabinovich, BBA ’19 (BHP and Plan II Honors), and (on right) James “Ron” Richard, BBA (BHP) ’17, both recipients of the Charline and Red McCombs Family Forty Acres Scholarship.

2016 TEXAS CHILI COOK-OFF MAY 14, 2016 The Texas Exes New York Chapter, including McCombs alumni, hosted a Texas Chili Cook-off where twenty amateur teams competed for bragging rights. Proceeds help fund UT scholarships. Pictured (left to right): Josh Tinch, MBA ’13; Kristen Pranke, MBA ’13; Katie Dochen, MBA ’12; Max Brodsky, MBA ’11; Cheryl Lewis, MBA ’13; and Emily Behncke, MBA ’13.

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NASDAQ CLOSING BELL RINGING JUNE 8, 2016 Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs and Progrys Field Solutions, winners of the 2016 Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition, rang the Nasdaq closing bell in New York City. Pictured (left to right): Saikiran Kolla, MSTC ’16; Olu Kole-James, MSTC ’16; and Matthew Mato, MSTC ’16.

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• M ARK YOUR CALENDAR WITH UPCOMING EVENTS OF INTEREST TO THE McCOMBS COMMUNITY AT WWW.TODAY.McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU/EVENTS

FALL 2016 7 9

TEXAS 4000 BAY AREA WELCOME EVENT JULY 7, 2016

McCOMBS ALUMNI DALLAS CHAPTER EVENT JULY 14, 2016

Alumni from McCombs and the Cockrell School of Engineering hosted a welcome event for the Texas 4000 team as they biked through the San Francisco Bay Area on a 4,000-mile trek from Austin to Alaska with the goal of engaging communities in the fight against cancer. The event was hosted at the home of Tom Fallon, MBA ’85, and Shannon Fults Fallon, BBA ’85.

Pictured: Eric Hirst, McCombs senior associate dean; Eva Agoulnik, BBA ’12; and Kyle Campbell, BBA ’16.

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McCOMBS ALUMNI ATLANTA CHAPTER EVENT JULY 28, 2016

The Dallas Chapter of the McCombs Alumni Network held a summer social welcome reception for McCombs students interning in the area. The event gave alumni and students an opportunity to network and share their experiences in Dallas. Pictured: Alexis Prager, BBA ’19; Noa Barazani, BBA/MPA ’19; and Sonia Hedge, BBA ’17.

Mark Huffstetler (far right), a MSF advisory council member and managing director at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, hosted an 18-person dinner in his Atlanta home. In attendance were five MBA interns, two recent graduates and employees, and alumnus Michael Roddy, BBA ’20.

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GLOBAL CONNECTIONS SHANGHAI MEETUP JULY 22, 2016

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2016 SPRING COMMENCEMENT MAY 20-21, 2016

BHP ALUMNI/INTERN SOCIAL JULY 27, 2016

During their Global Connections trip to Shanghai, students from the McCombs Working Professional MBA Programs in Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin met with alumni living in the area. During their week-long trip, the 10 students met alumni as well as business leaders from the American Chamber of Commerce, SAIC-General Motors, Dianping.com, Dentons Law Firm, Innospace, and United Family Hospitals.

Nearly 1,600 McCombs students received their diplomas this year, becoming the newest members of the McCombs Alumni Network.

The 2016 alumni commencement speakers included Charles Holley, BBA ’79 (pictured); Holly McMullan, MBA ’04; Jim Recer, BBA ’82; Laura Kilcrease, MBA ’92; Mark Gibson, BBA ’81; and Sara Martinez Tucker, MBA ’79.

BHP alumni living in London met with McCombs students interning over the summer in London. Pictured (left to right): Sunny Pamidimukkala, BBA ’18; Anna Anderson, BHP ’18; Katherine Kennedy, BBA ’18, Hank Golman, BBA ’18; Sarah Stubbs, BBA ’19, MPA ’19; Tom Li, BBA ’05, Sutin Yang, BBA ’03, Olivier Froment, BBA ’72, and Hannah Love, BBA ’18.

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#McCOMBSMAG 43

C O M M U N I T Y: A L U M N I N O T E S Please send your updates to alumni@mccombs.utexas.edu to be published in the spring issue of McCombs magazine and online at McCombs Today. Feel free to share news on behalf of a fellow graduate.

1950s Bobby Stillwell, BBA ’59, was recognized

by the Texas Exes as a 2016 Distinguished Alumnus, the alumni organization’s highest honor. Stillwell is a retired partner of the Houston law firm Baker Botts and is a former member of the UT System’s Board of Regents.

1960s William (Bill) Fred Miller, BBA ’60, re-

tired from Ben Miller’s Used Cars, the oldest car dealership in Waco, Texas. He closed the 105-year-old business, which was founded by his grandfather.

Dwight Sharpe, BBA ’62, wrote an article for the Wise County Messenger recommending people write their own obituaries to ensure their accuracy. Now retired, Sharpe has served as chairman of the Wise County (Texas) Republican Party.

Woody L. Hunt, BBA ’66, MBA ’70, was

recognized by the Texas Exes as a 2016 Distinguished Alumnus, the alumni organization’s highest honor. Hunt is the chairman of the board of directors at the Hunt Companies, as well as the chairman of the Hunt Family Foundation.

1970s Ernest Cockrell, MBA ’70, was recognized

for “superb leadership, exceptional service, and generous support,” with a Presidential Citation by UT Austin President Gregory Fenves. Cockrell is the former chairman and CEO of Cockrell Oil Corporation and president of the Cockrell Foundation.

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Robert Boswell, MBA ’73, was elected to the

Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. board of directors. Boswell is chairman and CEO of Laramie Energy II, a privately held Denver-based oil and gas exploration and production company.

Linda Brown, MBA ’75, was interviewed on the literary history of Oakland, California, as part of C-SPAN’s Cities Tour. Brown is a former president of the Berkeley branch of the California Writers Club.

Mike Alsup, MBA ’76, was honored by the

Houston Technology Center as its Celebrated IT Entrepreneur for 2016. Alsup founded Houston-based Gimmal LLC, where he is a senior vice president.

Charles Holley, BBA ’79, spoke at the McCombs Masters in Public Accounting convocation ceremony. Holley is the former executive vice president and CFO at Walmart.

Sara Martinez Tucker, MBA ’79, a

former undersecretary of education at the U.S. Department of Education and a member of The University of Texas System Board of Regents, delivered the keynote address during the 133rd Spring Commencement on May 21.

Martha Voss, BBA ’79, MBA ’82, was one of five new members appointed to the wealth management team at Northern Trust. Voss will serve as senior vice president, senior lender, and banking practice leader.

1980s

Ryan Crouser, MSF ’16, won the gold medal and set a new Olympic record in men’s shot put this summer at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Crouser — a four-time NCAA shot put champion — spent last year balancing academic demands with athletic training, which required about four to five hours a day, six days a week. “I don’t think there are very many master's programs that could have taught me so much and offered so much real world experience while also allowing me to pursue my dreams of being in the Olympics,” Crouser says.

Dorothy Ables, BBA ’80, was elected to the Cabot Oil and Gas Corp.’s board of directors. Ables has served as Spectra Energy Corporation’s chief administrative officer since 2008.

Kevin J. O’Mara, BBA ’80, was appointed the new dean of Campbell University’s Lundy-Fetterman School of Business in North Carolina. O’Mara has been a faculty member at Elon University’s business school since 1990 and a management professor since 2007.

Rob Jones, BBA ’80, MBA ’86, was

Greg Abbott, BBA ’81, was recognized

elected to the Laclede Group Inc.’s board of directors. Jones retired in 2012 from his position as co-head of Bank of America Merrill Lynch Commodities Inc.

by the Texas Exes as a 2016 Distinguished Alumnus, the alumni organization’s highest honor. Abbott is serving as the 48th governor of the state of Texas.

FALL 2016 Barbara Johnson, MBA ’82,

has accepted an offer to become chief operating officer of AmeriSave Mortgage Corp., where she will play an integral role in every area of the company, focusing on increasing efficiency and production.

Mike Lafitte, BBA ’83, was

promoted to the newly created global group president role at CBRE Group Inc., the highest global operating role in the firm.

Jim Recer, BBA ’83, spoke

at the McCombs Master’s of Science in Finance convocation ceremony. Recer is the head of U.S. corporate client coverage at BBVA Compass.

Ben Moreland, BBA ’84, was

appointed to the board of directors at Monogram Residential Trust Inc. Moreland has served as president and CEO of Crown Castle International Corp. since 2008.

Pat Clubb, Ph.D. ’85, MBA ’96, spoke at UT Austin’s School

of Architecture convocation ceremony. Clubb is the vice president for university operations at UT Austin.

Tim James, MBA ’86, joined CrossFirst Bank as partner and managing director, real estate banking. James has nearly 30 years of banking experience at the Bank of Oklahoma and MidFirst Bank.

Loreen Gilbert, BBA ’87, was

named Business Owner of the Year by the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) in Orange County,

California. Gilbert is also on the NAWBO board.

Jim Ulm, BBA ’87, MBA ’14, has

a new job as president and CEO at NewVista Energy Partners LLC, an oil and energy company. He previously served as senior vice president and CFO at Northstar Offshore Group LLC.

David Druley, BBA ’88, MBA ’03, was appointed chair-

man and CEO at Cambridge Associates. Druley has worked for Cambridge Associates since 2003, most recently as the head of the firm’s Global Investment Group.

Diane Kelly, BBA ’88, pub-

lished a new book, Above the Paw, the sixth novel in her mystery series about a Fort Worth-based officer and her crime-solving K-9 partner.

Kelly is also the author of the “Death and Taxes” romantic mystery series.

Jill Lampert, BBA ’88, spoke at the Women’s Energy Network North Texas chapter’s sixth annual leadership conference.

Lampert is chief financial and administrative officer at NGP Energy Capital Management.

Ashok Gupta, MBA ’89, has joined Stone Bridge Energy Partners as partner and executive vice president to help develop non-traditional energy infrastructure projects. He previously worked at Mizuho Corporate Bank, Fuji Bank, and Enron International.

Katie May, BBA ’89, MBA ’94,

CEO of ShippingEasy, had her company acquired by

Aimy Steadman, MBA ’13, and Justin Fenchel, MBA ’13, appeared on an episode of “Beyond the Tank,” a television series that follows entrepreneurs after their appearance on “Shark Tank.” Steadman and Fenchel are co-founders of BeatBox Beverages.

Stamps.com for $55 million.

ShippingEasy developed software that integrates various marketplaces to compare shipping rates.

1990s

David Baldwin, MBA ’91,

bicycled across the country, from Astoria, Oregon, to Washington, D.C., in support of people with disabilities. His ride was part of a campaign to raise money for the Houston non-profit The Center.

Laura B. Cardinal, Ph.D. ’90,

was named the SmartState Endowed Chair and director for the new Center for Innovation and Commercialization at the Darla Moore School for Business at the University of South Carolina. Cardinal has been a faculty member at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and SMU, among others.

Rick Szelc, MBA ’90, was

named the top financial advisor in Texas by Barron’s.

Szelc, a managing director at Neuberger Berman, improved over his third-place rank last year.

Mark Gibson, BBA ’91, spoke at the McCombs convocation ceremony for undergraduates.

Gibson is the CEO and executive managing director of HFF, a Dallas-based commercial real estate firm.

Niloufar Molavi, BBA ’91, MPA ’91, was promoted to Glob-

al Energy Leader at PwC, where she will oversee 6,000 experts in helping energy companies adapt to industry changes. Earlier, Molavi was vice chair at PwC’s U.S. operation and its greater Houston market managing partner and U.S. energy leader.

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C O M M U N I T Y: A L U M N I N O T E S

Sarah Malm, MBA ’01, has accepted a political appointment as senior advisor in the Office of the Executive Director, Global Development Lab, at the United States Agency for International Development. One of her projects includes developing technologies and approaches to fighting the Zika virus.

of Elle’s 2016 Women in Tech. She also helped found the all-women’s angel investment network #Angels.

Stephanie Greer, MBA ’02, completed a trip traveling in an RV to see all 48 states in the continental U.S. Greer has worked for Empaxis Data Management LLC, Patriot Wealth Management, and Tolleson Wealth Management.

Jeffrey Robin, BBA ’02,

was promoted to partner at Miami-based Akerman law firm. In the past, Robin has represented national banks, state banks, and mortgage lenders.

Laura Kilcrease, MBA ’92, spoke at the McCombs Master of Science in Technology Commercialization convocation ceremony. Kilcrease, a former entrepreneur-in-residence at the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at McCombs, is the founder and managing director at Triton Ventures.

2000s Shawn Ewbank, BBA ’00, won a design

award at an architecture competition for his design of the Fisher Artist’s Studio and Gallery in Rehoboth Beach. Ewbank is a Delaware-based architect.

Hal Jenson, MBA ’03, was elected to the

Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra’s board of directors. Jenson is the founding dean

Robert Dartanian Thomas, MBA ’00, Mark Madrid, BBA ’95, spoke at UT Aus-

tin’s Center for Mexican-American Studies convocation ceremony. Madrid is the president and CEO of the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Rehan Alimohammad, BBA ’96, spoke

about services and programs offered by the State Bar of Texas at a Katy Bar Association luncheon. Alimohammad is a founding partner at Alimohammad & Zafar PLLC.

Harmon Smith, MBA ’98, was named CEO at PulteGroup, a Georgia-based homebuilding company. Smith previously worked as executive vice president at the company.

Doug Jones, MBA ’99, joined Patterson

Animal Health as president of its Compassion Animal Group. Previously, Jones worked at Merial North America as president and head of the pet sales and national accounts teams.

46 TODAY.McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

was appointed chairman of the Texas Facilities Commission. Thomas, the founding principal of Thomas Consulting Group in Austin, was also recently appointed to the American Heart Association’s state advocacy committee.

Brian Farmer, MBA ’01, has joined Frazier Healthcare Partners’ Life Sciences team as one of three entrepreneurs-in-residence. The three have formed Hawkeye Therapeutics, a search company that in-licenses and develops assets from pharmaceutical companies.

Stephen Phillips, BBA ’01, MPA ’01,

was appointed executive vice president and chief banking officer for Texas at First United Bank. Phillips has worked for First United since 2007 and earlier was employed by Bank of America and Ernst & Young.

April Underwood, BBA ’01, vice presi-

dent of product at Slack, was named one

Mitchell Towner, Ph.D. ’15, won $1 million at the 2016 World Series of Poker against nearly 7,000 other competitors, despite being a novice player. Towner is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Arizona.

FALL 2016 at Western Michigan University's Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, which welcomed its first class in 2014.

Cassandra Farrington, MBA ’04, founder and CEO of

Marijuana Business Daily, has a trade show that was named one of the 50 fastest-growing in North America by Trade Show Executive Magazine. She was recognized as a Top Woman in Media 2016 by Folio: Magazine.

Holly McMullen, MBA ’04,

spoke at the McCombs MBA convocation ceremony.

McMullen is the head of business development for North America at Apollo Global Management.

Ivania Konieczka Palacios, MBA ’05, was elected to the

Certified Automotive Parts Association’s board of directors. She is the vice president of personal insurance claims at Liberty Mutual Insurance.

ident, legal and corporate development, at Rosetta Genomics Ltd., a developer and provider of microRNA-based and other molecular diagnostics. Ward has worked at Rosetta Genomics for nearly 20 years.

Harke Jan Meek, MBA ’07,

was appointed to the International Marine Contractors Association’s Council.

He is the chief commercial officer for Heerema Marine Contractors, where he has worked since 2012.

Garrett Greer, BBA ’08, MPA ’08, has a new job as

vice president at Trinity Hunt Partners, where he works on sourcing, deal execution, and portfolio company growth initiatives.

Greer was previously vice president at Lone Star Investment Advisors.

appointed vice president of worldwide channels and business development at Duo Security. Smith joined Duo with more than 15 years of experience in the technology industry.

Vivek Jain, MBA ’08, was appointed CEO at CA Media Digital (India) Private Ltd. The company is India’s only organization managing the exclusive digital rights of India’s top talents in the fields of film, sports, entertainment, and music.

Steven Boivie, Ph.D. ’06,

Heather Wong, MBA ’08,

had an article published in the Harvard Business Review entitled “When Star CEOs and Star Analysts Disagree, the Market Trusts the Analysts.”

Boivie is an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University.

won Downtown Sacramento Foundation’s Calling All Dreamers contest. Wong is using the winnings from the competition to open a new store called Allspicery in Sacramento, California.

Matt Smith, MBA ’05, was

Michael Koetting, BBA ’12, is pursuing his MBA at the Columbia School of Business. Koetting earlier worked as a consultant at Deloitte and intends to return to the company when he completes the degree.

at Simplilearn. He previously worked at Rackspace, where he headed the cloud computing product portfolio.

2010s Nikishka Iyengar, BBA ’11,

was named one of GreenBiz Group’s “30 Under 30” business sustainability leaders. Iyengar is a sustainability strategist at Rubicon Global, a provider of cloud-based waste and recycling solutions.

Anand Narayanan, MBA ’09, Ana Ward, MBA ’06, was appointed executive vice pres-

was appointed vice president of product and engineering

Brooks Morgan, BBA ’12, has been appointed portfolio man-

ager and lead advisor at WorthPointe. Morgan has worked for WorthPointe since 2011, when he began as a college intern.

Brian Williams, MBA ’13, is a national finalist in the FedEx Small Business Competition with his company, Purchase– Black.com, a shopping website and app.

Mitrankur (Mit) Majumdar, MBA ’14, wrote an article about

new technology and robots in the hospitality industry.

Majumdar is vice president at Infosys.

#McCOMBSMAG 47

M c C O M B S : B OT T O M L I N E

100 YEARS IN THE BUSINESS OF LIFE

by Matt Turner

S

HUDDE BESS BRYSON FATH, BBA ’37, of Austin and Dr. Light Townsend Cummins, BBA ’37, of San Antonio turned 100 this year, but a century can’t contain all the life inside these two alumni. Back when UT tuition was about $25 per semester, both went to business school and graduated during the Great Depression with the same formula for success: a little tenacity and lot of doing what you love.

Also bearing her name is a 77-acre tract along the Barton Creek Greenbelt. She served 29 years as treasurer of the Save Barton Creek Association. And in 1980, Fath was the first woman in Texas to win a sex discrimination case, against the TEC — breaking the glass ceiling for countless women. Her advice to new graduates: “You gotta give a damn about something and then work hard to try to make it happen.”

PLANNING FOR HAPPINESS: DR. LIGHT T. CUMMINS PASSION AND GRIT: SHUDDE FATH “I talk so much you won’t believe it, but I’m an introvert,” says Fath, the famed Austin civic activist whose voice has rocked city hall for more than five decades. Always gifted with numbers, Fath graduated valedictorian of Bastrop High School. Her father, a physician, ran a small hospital, and her mother — who had completed two years of medical school herself — administered anesthetics and took X-rays for him while raising their six children.

In 1933, when women's work choices were mostly limited to teaching, nursing, and clerical jobs, Fath met with some skepticism as a UT business major. One professor of accounting, C. Aubrey Smith, “picked on me,” she recalls. “He would call on me more often in class, and seemed to hope that I would fail to answer the question.” She would always disappoint him.

Fath graduated with highest honors and, in 1938, landed a job at $90 a month in the tax department at the Texas Employment Commission — the same year she married UT student Conrad Fath. The two would have one child, Betsy, and Fath would eventually retire after 42 years with TEC. But her life was never about quietly crunching numbers. “I’ve always cared about some issue or some cause,” says Fath. Indeed, in the early 1970s, the issue was a large difference between commercial and residential electric rates; as a member of the advisory Electric Utility Commission, Fath helped keep residential rates low for decades. She still sits on the commission, which meets in the Shudde Fath Conference Room.

BELOW: Dr. Light Townsend Cummins (left) and Shudde Bess Bryson Fath (right) in the 1930s when they were business school students at UT.

48 TODAY.McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

He had long known he would be a dentist like his father — a renowned physician dentist who conducted medical experiments with the Curies.

“I had no intention of going to business school to be a businessman,” says Cummins. From high school, Cummins knew his path; and he knew his business classes would fuel the journey.

After completing his studies at UT, Cummins landed a job in New York City, where he worked three years as an account representative for the Black Diamond Steamship Lines. He roomed with several friends from UT, including Walter Cronkite, and earned his MBA from Columbia University.

But dental school — and Texas — beckoned. Cummins took his DDS from Baylor University straight to the Army Dental Corps, where he served as a captain. Married in 1945 to Roberta Kelley, whom he’d met in New York, the young oral surgeon devised his own retirement plan by investing in oil — a little trick he’d learned in business school. For the bulk of his career, Cummins specialized in prosthetic reconstructions, rebuilding the palate in patients with birth defects or cancer. “There were only two of us doing this kind of work in South Texas, so I traveled a lot,” he recalls.

His reputation as a surgeon was matched only by his leadership in the business of dentistry. In the 1950s, Cummins incorporated his private practice — the first dentist in Texas to do so. Today it’s almost standard.

His colleagues also followed his lead in financing, billing operations, and insurance coding. Texans can, in large part, thank Cummins for their corporate dental insurance plans. As hard as he worked, he was “always happy” in his career. “That is a difficult thing for most people — to find what they like to do,” he says. “I found it.”

Cummins stayed true to his plan: practicing dentistry in San Antonio for 25 years and retiring in 1976 at age 60. He tracks the investments that have made a 40-year retirement feasible using double-entry bookkeeping — by hand — which he learned at UT in the 1930s and has been using ever since. Cummins has filled his retirement with service, helping homeless people “get back on their feet” through Christian Assistance Ministry, and volunteering at museums and schools. The trick to reaching 100?

“Keep breathing!” he says with a hearty laugh.

Matt Turner is a market researcher in the Communications Department at McCombs.

Dr. Light T. Cummins, BBA ’37 100 years old Photographed in his Chandler Estate home in San Antonio, August 2016

Texas Business Set My Life’s Course AS A YOUNG MAN, I GOT A GOOD START: an undergraduate business degree from UT, then a responsible position in New York. It was an exciting time.

But when the war broke out, my priorities changed.

After serving in the Army, I came home. I started my family.

I started my practice. My business education enabled me to sum up market conditions, and I invested in oil, real estate, farming, and ranching. Business thrived. Life has been good.

Since retirement, I’ve focused on giving back — including to my alma mater. I am proud to invest in a new generation of business leaders.

give.texasbba100.com

NON-PROFIT ORG US POSTAGE

PAID

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN McCombs School of Business 1 University Station B6000 Austin, Texas 78712

BURLINGTON, VT 05401 PERMIT NO. 19

I Went to Business School During the Depression BACK THEN, WOMEN COULD BE teachers, nurses, secretaries, or sales clerks. We seldom had business careers.

I was one of three students in the business school to graduate with highest honors in 1937, in a class of more than 160.

But I was a woman, and it was the middle of the Great Depression, so when I was offered a job as a file clerk, I was grateful for it. That position led to a career, 42 years with the Texas Employment Commission. That career gave me the confidence to make my voice heard in the community. And that’s what I’ve been doing now for more than 50 years.

Shudde Fath, BBA ’37 Legendary Austin Activist 100 years old Photographed in her Zilker neighborhood home in Austin, August 2016

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