McCombs Magazine Summer 2021

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

summer 2021

KELLY STECKELBERG, MPA ’91, MANAGES ZOOM’S WHIRLWIND YEAR AS CFO

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ADAPTING WITH CREATIVITY AND GRIT

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WOMEN WHO MEAN BUSINESS

M.S. STUDENTS PURSUE BIG DREAMS IN A PANDEMIC YEAR

TEXAS EXECUTIVE EDUCATION What you learn here today, you’ll use tomorrow.

FOR INDIVIDUALS Two- to five-day classes in leadership, strategic decision-making, risk management, finance, and negotiation.

FOR ORGANIZATIONS Private classes customized to the specific challenges your team is facing.

www.mccombs.utexas.edu/execed

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y D E PA RT M E N T S

2. LETTER FROM THE DEAN

15. RESEARCH

Fair Forecast: Researcher is on a mission to uncover biased data.

16. Vaccine Contracts: Incentivizing pharmaceutical companies to increase doses to poorer nations.

18. Hostile Takeovers: Worried chief executives focus on negative news.

3. NEWS

Short Takes: A hybrid spring Commencement, McCombs revamps Executive MBA, students help health organizations reopen, and more.

6. New Dean: Meet Lillian Mills, the new permanent dean of McCombs.

8. Hooked for Life: New McCombs team supports alumni throughout their careers.

9. Nursing Texas Back to Economic Health: Experts at McCombs Business Outlook series offer insights.

10. Making Better Decisions: A new course explores bias and stereotyping in marketing.

12. Women Who Mean Business: CEOs launch leadership program to develop female executives.

37. COMMUNITY

Donor News: BBA and MBA alums endow scholarships.

40. Gatherings: Alumni events and celebrations.

42. Up Close: Beverage entrepreneurs launch bubbly brews, TxDOT director kept Texans safe, and more.

45. ALUMNI NOTES Tomorrow’s Leaders: In a new book, Paul Shoemaker identifies five key traits needed for changing times.

y F E AT U R E S

Kelly Steckelberg, MPA ’91, has always looked for opportunities to learn something new.

Here’s how the CFO managed Zoom’s whirlwind year.

BY TO D D SAVAG E

PANDEMIC PIVOTS

How students, faculty, and alumni changed during uncertain times.

BY S H A R O N J AYS O N A N D M AT T W. T U R N E R

MASTERS OF ADAPTABILITY

MASTERS OF ADAPTABILITY

Students in McCombs’ four Master of Science programs make the most of difficult times in a year like no other.

BY A L B E RTA P H I L L I P S

McCombs is published twice a year for alumni and friends of the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

DEAN

Lillian F. Mills MANAGER, CONTENT STRATEGY

Todd Savage EDITOR

Molly Dannenmaier ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Mary Ann Roser, Jeremy M. Simon ART DIRECTION/DESIGN

48. BOTTOM LINE

WORLD TRAVELER

SUMMER 2021

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Tucker Creative Co. CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Deborah Lynn Blumberg, Steve Brooks, Matthew Higginbotham, Sharon Jayson, Judie Kinonen, Alberta Phillips, Gretchen Sanders, Matt W. Turner CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Lauren Gerson, Sasha Haagensen, Dustin Snipes CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS

Alessandro Cripsta, Melissa McFeeters, Yann Sadi, Brian Stauffer, Israel Vargas ONLINE

http://issuu.com/mccombs schoolofbusiness CHANGE OF ADDRESS

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

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

STUDENTS IN McCOMBS’ FOUR MASTER OF SCIENCE PROGRAMS MAKE THE MOST OF DIFFICULT TIMES IN A YEAR LIKE NO OTHER

by Alberta Phillips | illustration by Brian Stauffer

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McCOMBS: FROM THE DEAN

Embracing Change in Challenging Times

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and the first woman to take on that role in the school’s nearly 100-year history. While I am overjoyed, I understand and take seriously the enormous responsibility that comes with the job. I am honored to have the trust of President Jay Hartzell, interim Provost Daniel Jaffe, the search committee, and my colleagues to fiercely lead this world-class business school in Austin, Texas, a city at the intersection of big and bold innovations.

Change has become a familiar part of our lives during the past year. Current students and recent graduates know well that the continuous influx of new business, new investment, new technologies, and new ideas here in this city of risk takers and independent thinkers demands a change mindset. At The University of Texas at Austin, “What Starts Here Changes the World” is what we call our fantastic feats and groundbreaking accomplishments across the Forty Acres.

It is more than a tagline; it is how we see ourselves, how we prove our positive influence across the country and around the globe, and how we stay true to our mission.

That motto was never more important than during the pandemic as we dug deeper, moved out of our comfort zones, and grew our skill set to continue functioning and fulfilling our mission of changing the world. One thing the pandemic has intensified is the idea of change. At our university, Professor Jason McClelland identified the spike protein that enabled the rapid development of vaccines against COVID-19. And at UT Austin, but especially McCombs, we offered a residential education with 40% of our courses available for an in-person student experience. Throughout this year, there were zero known cases of on-campus transmission, as faculty devoted huge effort and true courage to delivering exceptional education in new ways.

Change requires courage and adaptability, both of which we’ve embraced and championed here at McCombs. In this new issue of McCombs magazine, you will read our cover story about Kelly Steckelberg, MPA ’91,CFO of the iconic company of the times, Zoom. Her story highlights how, in a matter of weeks, she and her company became responsible for the enormous task of connecting organizations to their employees, no matter where they were in the world.

Kelly speaks about how Zoom suddenly

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J U N E 1 I B ECA M E T H E N EW P E R M A N E N T D E A N O F Mc CO M BS

went from 10 million clients in December 2019 to 300 million by April 2020. That instant growth also doubled the number of employees from 2,200 to 5,000 within the same time frame. Kelly shares the ways Zoom innovated new strategies that could accommodate and deliver consistent, reliable technical services in the midst of a major growth surge. Kelly’s story started here at McCombs and her expertise and experience have quite literally changed the world and the way it connects and communicates.

Further in this issue, we follow a group of students in our 10-month Master of Science degree programs. Like so many, they too were forced to change their expectations of experiencing campus life in person. The degrees are designed to provide students with an immersive experience and curriculum, but students, staff, and faculty found themselves adapting to change simultaneously. Many students decided to defer their education, and others were faced with harsh circumstances: closed borders, family illness, and even loss. McCombs had to figure how to change and still offer the same program in a hybrid setting all while supporting students in every way possible. Jade DeKinder, associate dean of McCombs Master of Science programs, summed it up: “The faculty really moved mountains to make the most of the situation.”

It’s my hope that the stories you will read in this issue will inspire and give you a greater sense of connection to others who have also accepted change. It’s also my hope that we have not only changed for the better but that we have also influenced positive change within our own spaces. I look forward to this journey together with all of you.

With my warmest Hook ’em,

LILLIAN F. MILLS, Dean Lois and Richard Folger Dean's Leadership Chair The Beverly H. and William P. O’Hara Endowed Chair in Business

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NEWS

HE’S NOT HORSING AROUND AMID VIRTUAL CLASSES, IMPA STUDENT RETURNED TO HIS EQUESTRIAN ROOTS

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HEN STAY-AT-HOME ORDERS

began in March 2020, many turned to their pastimes for comfort. Keith Asmussen, iMPA ’22, turned to horse racing. When classes went virtual, Asmussen packed for Arkansas to work for his father, a Hall of Fame trainer and former jockey at Oaklawn Park Race Track in Hot Springs.

“Being born into a horse racing family, some of my earliest memories are of horses,” says Asmussen. “I started galloping horses on the racetrack when I was 16 and have ever since.” Every morning before class, Asmussen rode horses, an opportunity he usually gets only during the summer.By mid-June, he was fit enough to race professionally for the first time and rode at Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, Texas. By the end of July, he had ridden in more than 15 races.

“What I admire most about horses,” Asmussen says, “is their variety of personalities and response to being treated with class and respect.” —Matthew Higginbotham

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Elevating

Equity

Jessica Reese-White, Kyle Johnson, and Andie Parazo, all MBA ’21, organized the third annual Elevate Conference, which focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The virtual conference, held earlier this year, examined what equity looks like in the workplace and how workers can contribute to equitable actions. (From left, Tamara Fields, BBA '96, of Accenture, and Corey Weathers of Twilio from the first conference.) The conference invited speakers from Nike and the Hershey Company and featured networking sessions with Dell Technologies and Deloitte.

FACULTY MOVING UP

HEALTH CARE FELLOWS JOIN IN COVID RESPONSE

President Jay Hartzell recommended a slate of McCombs faculty members for promotion.

Francisco Polidoro (below) was promoted to full professor in the Management Department. Braden Williams in Accounting and Shefali Patil in Management were promoted to associate professors. Steven Brister in Marketing and Frances Pedersen in Business, Government, and Society were promoted to senior lecturers.They will begin their new roles in September.

McCombs’ Health Innovation Fellows, a group of MBA students studying the health care industry, worked with the Austin Healthcare Council to address the challenges and opportunities posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In collaboration with local leaders, experts, and faculty members, the fellows presented recommendations to assist Austin health organizations in reopening to best protect their consumers, workers, supply chains, and finances. The fellows were invited on a health care podcast to discuss their findings.

Honorary Degree Professor Clemens Sialm (above) received an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland for outstanding research in the fields of investments, mutual funds, retirement savings, and taxation.

Sialm teaches in the Economics and Finance departments, directs the AIM Investment Center, and holds the Texas Commerce Bancshares Inc. Centennial Professorship in Commercial Banking.

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E L EVAT E P H OTO BY L AU R E N G E R SO N

GOOD REVIEWS Inc. magazine ranked a course from Professor Raj Raghunathan as one of the top 25 online courses of all time. The rankings were determined from more than 125,000 student reviews. Raghunathan’s class examines the link between career success and happiness and teaches how to create a happier environment at work.

SU M M ER 2021

McCOMBS

BY THE NUMBERS

Full-Time MBA STEM-Certified Fourteen of McCombs’22 concentrations in its highly ranked full-time MBA program are now STEM-certified, demonstrating a level of quantitative rigor across the MBA program. “The breadth and depth of our full-time MBA curriculum is a unique complement to our close-knit class of 260 students, and we wanted to focus our STEM certification efforts on areas where we’re seeing strong and active job recruitment post-graduation, such as business analytics,” says Tina Mabley, assistant dean for the full-time MBA program. The certification applies to topics in a range of areas, from information management, business analytics, supply chains and operations to investment management, energy finance, and clean tech.

EXECUTIVE MBA UPDATED

The Executive MBA program at McCombs has been revamped to meet the changing needs of today’s experienced professionals.

The program now offers more flexibility and places a stronger focus on leadership and organizational strategy. “Market research and feedback from employers and alumni helped inform updates to the curriculum and program format,” says Joe Stephens, senior assistant dean and director of the Working Professional and Executive MBA programs. “This evolution will prepare our Executive MBA students for what’s ahead and will keep them competitive in high-level executive leadership roles.” McCombs will launch the new curriculum this fall.

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ENRICHING GIFT

Helen and Jeff Herbert, BBA ’84 and BBA ’82, provided a generous gift to the University Lecture Series to finance it for five years. The newly named Helen and Jeff Herbert Family University Lecture Series gives first-year students an opportunity to interact with leading faculty members.

“Helen and I are excited to support a program that will enrich the educational experience of thousands of undergraduates at The University of Texas at Austin,” Jeff Herbert says. “It’s important for first-year students to have access to some of the university’s top minds, and we are proud to create that opportunity through our support of the University Lecture Series.”

BLOCKCHAIN MEETS HEALTH CARE With a grant from McCombs’ Blockchain Initiative, researchers at Dell Medical School are working on using the technology to aid Austin’s homeless population. Health care and social service systems often require identity documents, which many Austinites experiencing homelessness do not have, according to previous Dell Med research. By using blockchain technology, researchers hope to set up a network that allows a service provider to verify a patient’s identity once, then securely shares that information with other providers. This setup would allow people experiencing homelessness to use services without needing to show physical ID each time.

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McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

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THROWING THE DOORS OPEN WIDER LEADING THROUGH THE PANDEMIC AND BEYOND, THE SCHOOL’S NEW DEAN, LILLIAN MILLS, IS EAGER TO CULTIVATE RELATIONSHIPS AND ACTIVATE ALUMNI AND THE ENTIRE McCOMBS COMMUNITY

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ILLIAN MILLS, THE NEW PERMANENT

dean of Texas McCombs, is a “connector,” someone with a flair for building relationships and making introductions. Connection will be a theme of her leadership. After all, it brought her to this job.

Mills, who became interim dean in April 2020, has been heavily involved in leading operations and strategies to continue advancing the mission of the college and was not deterred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout, Mills has made connecting with alumni a priority. Despite virtual visits, she found meeting alums and hearing their stories to be the most enjoyable part of the job.

After 15 months as interim dean and 15 years at McCombs, she was elevated to the top job June 1, becoming the 12th dean and the first woman to hold the job in the school’s nearly 100-year history.

Does she feel pressure being a pioneer?

“Being dean at a prestigious place like Texas McCombs requires being a scholar with gravitas, of course, but being an extravert provides the energy to be the external face of the college in an ever booming economy in Austin,” Mills says. “I don’t feel extra pressure being a woman in this role.”

UT Austin President Jay Hartzell, her immediate predecessor as McCombs dean, says he witnessed Mills’ strengths as a leader when they were department chairs at McCombs.

“After a highly competitive national search, it was clear we already had the best candidate right here at UT,” Hartzell said in a university-wide statement about Mills. “Beyond her infectious energy and sense of optimism, she exemplifies the drive for excellence in teaching and research that we seek to instill across the Forty Acres.”

Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Daniel Jaffe says Mills’ “experience and her commitment to supporting faculty, students and staff set her apart. During the past year, she has worked tirelessly to support the McCombs and university community with enthusiasm, creativity and focus.”

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She is a top-ranked researcher at the intersection of tax policy and financial reporting, and she enjoyed a research consultancy with the IRS for 20 years. Mills is also a devoted academic citizen, a champion for education in multiple, diverse settings, a nationally renowned and award-winning classroom educator, and a scholar with consistent dedication to instructional innovation at the university, college, and department levels. In 2019, she was the first to receive the student-managed McCombs Undergraduate Amplify Award, which recognizes faculty members who foster highly inclusive classrooms.

For her part, Mills calls it an honor to have the trust of her colleagues and the enthusiasm of alumni. Indeed, alumni connections made her realize she wanted the job.

“The dean can have an important impact on programs and supporting faculty and helping

students thrive,” she says. “All of that is rewarding but much of it is difficult. And on any given day, if I can spend a couple of hours talking to our alumni, that is just sheer fun. They love the school so much, and they’re such accomplished and interesting people.”

When she meets alumni, she tries to think of the professors they need to meet. “If I can inspire 20% of my colleagues to adapt that framing with everyone they meet and broker that next introduction, the leverage for our research and teaching will be huge,” she says.

It’s a priority, she says, because the nation’s most elite schools have long practice in cultivating alumni, not just to provide financial support, but to engage with faculty members on their research and with students as their mentors. Doing that better will help McCombs “compete among the elites for the strength of our networks,” Mills

After 15 years at McCombs and 15 months as interim dean, Lillian Mills was elevated to the top job June 1, becoming the first woman to hold the position in the school’s nearly 100-year history.

P H OTO G RA P H BY SAS H A H A AG E N S E N

W I2020 N T ER says. Besides, she adds, “Alumni are hungry for ways to meaningfully engage.”

She also wants to build stronger ties with the business community, not just in Austin but in other major cities. One plan to accomplish that is by making a push this fall for students and alumni to connect over UTHookedIn.com, a new online site aimed at helping Longhorns advance educationally and professionally. She intends to tie that push to the school’s 100th anniversary, coming in 2022.

In August, at a McCombs faculty and staff retreat, she will share her vision for how McCombs can “throw our doors open wider.”

Mills came to McCombs in 2006 as an associate professor in accounting and became chair of the Accounting Department in 2011. She was named the Beverly H. and William P. O’Hara Endowed Chair in Business in 2014.

Before her academic career, she was a senior manager in public accounting, working at Deloitte in 1981 and at PwC from 1982 to 1989. Mills earned a 1996 doctorate in accounting from the University of Michigan and master’s and undergraduate degrees in accounting from the University of Florida. She was on the University of Arizona accounting faculty, and, a year before joining McCombs, worked at the U.S. Treasury Department as a senior research fellow in tax analysis, working to promote business-friendly tax reform.

Mills has demonstrated fundraising prowess and listens hard to corporate partners and individual donors to match their passions to McCombs’ strategic priorities, whether that is the new Mulva and Hildebrand Hall facilities, scholarships to recruit students and expand access, or support for faculty research and educational program needs.

In her free time, she enjoys visiting grandchildren and walking her silver Labrador, Reacher, or cooking with Jim Mills, her husband of 32 years.

“He’s a very calm retired physicist who is a perfect counterpoint to my energetic self,” she says.

Responding to congratulatory messages on the McCombs Facebook page, she wrote: “Thanks friends! This is the most rewarding job I have ever held, and if Covid was an energizing year, I am willing to lean in further!” — Mary Ann Roser

COMMENCEMENT moments 2021 STUDENTS, THEIR FAMILIES, AND THE ENTIRE McCOMBS COMMUNITY CELEBRATED 2021 COMMENCEMENT ON MAY 20-22 WITH A BLEND OF VIRTUAL AND IN-PERSON CEREMONIES AND CELEBRATIONS, A STEP TOWARD RETURNING TO NORMAL AFTER A YEAR OF ADAPTING TO THE PANDEMIC.

ABOVE: McCombs students experienced a variety of celebration opportunities. Some crossed a stage in person for a Graduation Recognition Moment with a select number of family members often joining them. Others streamed a virtual ceremony with names called out and prerecorded speakers and slides for all graduates. The big final moment was the university-wide ceremony in DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium on May 22, followed by fireworks lighting up the Forty Acres.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAUREN GERSON

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HOOKED FOR LIFE McCOMBS LAUNCHES A “ONE-STOP SHOP” TO PROVIDE GRADUATES WITH CAREER SUPPORT THROUGHOUT THEIR PROFESSIONAL LIVES

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ITH A BOLD VISION TO PROVIDE

members of the Texas McCombs community with lifelong career support, the school launched Alumni Career Management on June 1, 2021.

Degreed McCombs alumni at any career stage can log in to a McCombs-specific hub on UT’s HookedIn alumni connection platform or explore the McCombs Alumni Career Management team’s website to schedule appointments with highly credentialed coaches, find networking opportunities, access résumé and interview resources, and search a dedicated jobs board.

“Whether they’re first-time job seekers, they just lost a job, or they’d like to change careers, McCombs alumni will now have key resources at their fingertips,” says Ellen Bartkowiak, who heads the new team of career coaches.

Alumni Career Management first rolled out in April for the classes of 2020 and 2021. Now, alumni needing career support can find it by reaching out via email or the team’s website.

Janet Huang, senior assistant dean for career management and corporate relations, says the team’s creation was driven by feedback from alumni to support their career goals beyond graduation.

During the pandemic last year and the resulting economic downturn, the need became clear for a holistic approach to career support. “It has become more important than ever to provide our McCombs community with an opportunity to reconnect, learn from each other, and build mentoring relationships,” Huang says.

“We are proud to provide alumni with these services during any moment of their career journey,” says Stefani Sereboff, senior managing director of the McCombs employer and corporate ecosystem.

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She helped build and plan the creation of this team and online resources as a “one-stop shop” for alumni career support.

The team offers two coaching sessions per year, along with webinars and small-group workshops; the website provides links to resources and a McCombs-specific HookedIn hub, where alumni can network and connect with students to mentor.

“The top two alumni requests the alumni relations staff shared are, number one, career coaching and, number two, a job board just for them,” Sereboff says. “They’ll now have both of those, plus multiple

avenues to network with other alumni and students to create meaningful connections for career growth.”

Coaching sessions aim to help alumni understand their value proposition as they market themselves, said Sarita Soldz, senior director of career education and coaching for working professional programs and alumni.

That value proposition is not static, as workers today change jobs on average every 4.2 years, according to a recent report on employee tenure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Lifelong alumni career management gives students the reassurance that you don’t have to have it all figured out right now,” Soldz says. “We know that career transition isn’t a one-time occurrence, and we want to meet our alumni where they need us most. ”Building that lifelong connection with alumni is at the heart of this team, says Huang: “McCombs is already known to have the strongest community of alumni, but let’s make it even stronger. Let’s make it unstoppable.”—Judie Kinonen To get connected via HookedIn, visit https:// uthookedin.com. To reach out to Alumni Career Management, email MSB-AlumniCareer@ mccombs.utexas.edu

Alumni, such as this group gathering in prepandemic times, can use the McCombs Alumni Career Management team’s website to schedule appointments with coaches, find networking opportunities, access résumé and interview resources, and search a dedicated jobs board.

NURSING TEXAS BACK TO ECONOMIC HEALTH EXPERTS AT A PAIR OF McCOMBS BUSINESS FORECAST EVENTS OFFER PRESCRIPTIONS AND PROGNOSES FOR THE STATE

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ORONAVIRUS VACCINES ARE A SHOT IN

the arm for Texas’ economy, but a full recovery from the pandemic-induced recession may be a long way off, according to panelists at the annual Texas McCombs Business Outlook Series in February. The two virtual events in the series, titled “Focus on the Future,” featured top business leaders and economists who highlighted health care and technology as paths back to economic vigor.They were hosted

by Texas McCombs interim Dean Lillian Mills.

The health care event, held Feb. 4, featured Dr. Marc L. Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist; Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas; and Indranil Bardhan, professor of information systems, McCombs School of Business. The technology and innovation speakers on Feb. 11 were Amir Husain, founder and CEO of Spark Cognition; Mellie Price, executive director, Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs at Texas McCombs; and Keith R. Phillips, assistant vice president and senior economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, San Antonio Branch.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has forecast job growth of a whopping 4% this year, yet it might be the summer of 2022 before employment is back on track, said Orrenius.

Texas’ oil and gas sector lost a quarter of its jobs last year, and the state lost 11% of its total workforce —more than 1.4 million jobs, Orrenius said. A year later, only about half of those jobs have returned.

“The recovery has been slower than we hoped,” she said.

Hospitality and leisure are especially sluggish.

A Dallas Fed survey of businesses revealed

Dr. Marc L. Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist, took part in the first of two Business Outlooks events, focused on the future of health care, on Feb. 4.

only 7% in that sector expect to return to 2019 levels this year, 32% by next year, and 71% by 2023, Phillips said.

By contrast, residential construction has surged, and Texas enjoyed a 6% increase in the homeownership rate last year. “That’s just unprecedented,” Orrenius said. “So, it's a little bit a tale of two cities with regard to the pandemic’s sectorial impact.”

RX: TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION

One positive effect across sectors is an openness to new technologies, said Phillips, citing a January survey that found 28% of businesses increased technology adoption during the past year.

That trend leaves room for artificial intelligence to “work out of the box,” said Husain of Spark Cognition. AI sophistication and adoption, he said, will only expand in the years to come. “It's going to take the form of an intelligent fabric that wraps around infrastructure: pumps, turbines, oil rigs, solar farms, and so much more,” he said. “AI that can control physical systems in the real world is about to get real, and it's going to have massive impact.”

Protecting companies from the risks inherent in technology adoption is the cybersecurity industry, which has grown at an average annual rate of 8.2% since 1990, Phillips said. Even last year, while overall job growth declined 4.5% in Texas, cybersecurity grew 6.7%, he said.

MONITORING HEALTH CARE

Health care is growing, albeit more slowly, after the“absolutely brutal” shutdown of nonelective services during spring 2020, said Boom of Houston Methodist.

Hospital spending dropped about 36% inMarch and April of 2020 alone, and hospital care and related services were down about 3.6% for the first 10 months of 2020, explained Bardhan of Texas McCombs.

Bucking that trend is home health care, which grew about 14% last year and may exceed that rate this year, driven by investments in telehealth and remote patient monitoring, Bardhan said.

But access is a pressing issue, Boom said, noting 18% of Texans are uninsured — double the national rate — even as the state chose not to expand Medicaid. “If [President] Biden's serious about unity and bipartisanship, I think that administration working with the Texas administration really needs to ask how we close these gaps,” he said.

A DOSE OF NEW JOBS

The new administration would also do well to focus on full employment, said Price of Texas Venture Labs. Price is excited about the influx of venture capital and corporate headquarters to Austin and what it means for workforce diversification. “Keeping employment high allows us to stimulate innovation and keep that flywheel in motion,” she said. —Judie Kinonen

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MAKING BETTER DECISIONS A NEW COURSE EXPLORES BIAS AND STEREOTYPING IN MARKETING

IN

THE WAKE OF GEORGE FLOYD'S

murder in police custody and America’s scrutiny of social justice, Andrew Gershoff and Steven Brister asked how they could respond in their roles as chair and assistant chair of the Department of Marketing at Texas McCombs.

Knowing how marketing influences societal attitudes and behaviors on diversity and inclusion, they sought input from their colleagues and drafted a list of marketing decisions that have perpetuated stereotypes, normalized biases, and led to inequitable access to goods and services. Examples abound in famous brands and mascots (Aunt Jemima, Land O‘Lakes, Washington Redskins), gender-based pricing (“pink tax”), tolerance of hate symbols (Confederate flags at NASCAR), and the role of redlining in location decisions.

With help from a seed grant from Actions that promote Community Transformation (ACT), an initiative of the Provost’s Office at UT Austin, they proposed a new course that would help students think about marketing’s role in these issues.

Enter Trenzio Turner, a member of the McCombs advisory council for the M.S. in Marketing program. Armed with 20 years of experience in marketing and advertising with Fortune 500 clients, including campaigns that involve race and gender bias, he was looking for an opportunity to teach.

Using the proposal as inspiration, he created a course from scratch that launched in spring 2021. Bias and Stereotyping in Marketing, a one-credit-hour elective, was first offered to BBA students, and a few weeks later, to graduate students in McCombs’ M.S. programs.

“Many top business programs do offer courses that examine related topics such as multicultural marketing, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder value, and employee diversity,” says Gershoff. “Departments of anthropology, sociology, and public policy also offer courses

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that address some of these issues. What’s special here is we are offering our students an explicit focus on the role of marketing decisions on bias and inclusiveness.”

Foundational to Turner’s class is empathy, which he defines as “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand their situation, beliefs, concerns, and motivations in order to generate a reaction that solves a problem.”

Calling empathy “corporate America’s secret weapon,” Turner discusses how it permeates today’s brand messaging and company culture, and how the best products and services are being developed through an empathetic lens.

Millennials and Gen Z, he adds, are driving the train. “What a company stands for—what its values are as a brand—is critically important to

this generation, and, in fact, directly correlates to the company’s bottom line,” says Turner.

Mariana Muñoz, who attended Turner’s class as part of her M.S. in Marketing degree this past spring, says she thinks the course material is important enough to be required for all marketing majors. She recalled the swift backlash to the Las Vegas Raiders “I can breathe” tweet when she was taking the class, and how it exposed the consequences of not vetting content through inclusive decision channels.

“The best advice Professor Turner gave us,” she adds, “is that it’s not our job to make people feel comfortable. They need us—a diverse team—in the room to help them make good business decisions.”

Gershoff concurs. “These are issues that big business is grappling with daily. Preparing students to think about solutions is going to make them better employees and work better for the business.”

MBA students will have a chance to take the current version of this class this fall. Plans are underway to expand the class to a threecredit-hour version for undergraduates next year. —Matt W. Turner

Trenzio Turner created Bias and Stereotyping in Marketing, a one-credit-hour elective that launched this year. Foundational to the class is the concept of empathy, which Turner calls “corporate America’s secret weapon.”

Bring Your Dreams To Market MASTER OF SCIENCE IN TECHNOLOGY COMMERCIALIZATION The Texas McCombs MS in Technology Commercialization (MSTC), launched in 1995, was the first go-to-market graduate program in the U.S. The vision of former dean and legendary entrepreneur George Kozmetsky, MSTC is a STEM-designated, top-ranked, one-year graduate program designed for working professionals and entrepreneurs, with classes on alternating weekends, either on-campus or online.

Through high-quality instruction, experiential learning, and the pursuit of relevant, groundbreaking research, MSTC is in the business of helping students bring their dreams to market.

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FOLLOW US /TexasMSTC McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU 11

N E WS : P R O F E S S I O N A L D E V E L O P M E N T

WOMEN WHO MEAN BUSINESS IN A NEW LEADERSHIP TRAINING PROGRAM, VETERAN CEOS OFFER THEIR ENTREPRENEURIAL AND CORPORATE EXPERTISE TO KEEP BELEAGUERED CAREER WOMEN FROM JUMPING SHIP

H

O P I N G TO H E L P ST E M T H E S U R G E

of women exiting the workforce, Texas McCombs is launching Women Who Mean Business, a sixmonth leadership development program through Texas Executive Education starting in September.

The leaders are two CEOs and McCombs Hall of Fame alumnae — Gay Gaddis, founder of T3 advertising agency and author of Cowgirl Power: How to Kick Ass in Business and Life, and Lynn Utter, a serial C-suite executive who advanced through the ranks at Coors Brewing Company and Frito-Lay. With the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting nearly 3 million American women left the workforce during the past year, the percentage of women working has fallen to 57%, the lowest since 1988, according to the National Women's Law Center. Gaddis and Utter say there has never

been a better time to teach high-potential women how to stay in the game and achieve equity in the workplace.

“As much progress as women have made since we started our careers, they’re still not where they should be,” Gaddis says. In fact, only 37 Fortune 500-ranked businesses had female CEOs in 2020. That’s 7.4%.

“Lynn and I made it to a certain level, and the question is, ‘How did we do that?’” Gaddis says.

“We’ve been dissecting our individual careers: What were the times when we almost threw in the towel or stepped aside? What kept us going? And what are the factors that will get more women into the C-suite?”

IN THE CRUCIBLE

Ideal program applicants are women with more than five years of leadership experience who are

Ideal applicants for the program are women with more than five years of leadership experience who want to improve decision-making skills and define their personal leadership styles.

looking to hone their decision-making skills, define their personal leadership styles, and push through the “crucible moments” in their careers, Utter says. Those are the times when outside pressures pose work-life challenges.

“These women may be dealing with maternity, child care, elderly care, or a spouse with a relocation opportunity,” Utter says. “We want to meet them there and give them perspective.”

She points to studies that show women who drop out of the workforce find it difficult to return and often end up in jobs beneath their education and experience. “Couples make short-term economic decisions, but they don’t factor in the long-term cost,” Utter says.

She and Gaddis note the pandemic posed a new level of crucible, as women have disproportionately shouldered the responsibilities of education and child care. A September 2020 report by Lean In and McKinsey & Company found 1 in 4 women have or are considering downshifting their career or leaving the workplace early.

Women around the world lost $800 billion in income last year, according to Oxfam International. In the United States alone, women lost 700,000 more jobs than men did as of November 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. “The opportunity for this program has been there always, but the need is exponentially greater now,” Utter says.

Shortly before the pandemic shuttered the campus, Gaddis approached then-Dean Jay Hartzell with the idea for a seminar to help women recharge, connect, and focus their careers.

It’s a subject she’s written about and spoken on in corporate environments for decades, so she knows businesses are eager for initiatives that point their talented female employees up the corporate ladder.

12 McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

P H OTO S BY L AU R E N G E RSO N

A RIPE TIME

WOMEN IN THE WORKFORCE 87 %

of female business owners have been adversely affected by COVID-19.

(Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs 2020)

Women of color expect financial recovery to take six years:

7 in 10 women say the pandemic has some effect on their finances, with 1 in 3 saying recovery could take more than a year.

Veteran entrepreneurs Gay Gaddis (left) and Lynn Utter are the leaders of Women Who Mean Business, a six-month leadership development program offered through Texas Executive Education starting in September.

When she asked her friend and admired colleague, Utter, to partner with her, the subject line of her email read, “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

Planning to retire this year and focus on her board duties, Utter laughs as she recalls she almost didn’t answer the phone when Gaddis called. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realized she was right: Women need this kind of connection right now.”

Networking among participants is a key part of the program. As Utter and Gaddis say, getting advice from like-minded female peers was a lifeline during trying times in their own careers.

Utter proposed they split the program into four sessions, with each meeting about a month apart. Attendees will be immersed in a two-day curriculum, return to their workplace to practice

their new skills, and then circle back to campus with relevant questions and fresh insights.

Applicants for the inaugural session come from such male-dominated fields as the military, law, science, and manufacturing. Texas Executive Education is accepting applications and nominations this summer on a rolling admissions basis.

“By definition, women are ‘other’ in leadership ranks, so I tell them they have got to learn to fit in,” Utter says. “But fitting in is not what gets you into leadership positions: You also have to learn to stand out in a way that makes people want to follow you.”

Striking that balance is at the core of the curriculum Utter and Gaddis have designed. “We’re going to guide these women to be true to themselves and discover what their strengths are,” Gaddis says. “That’s when you do your best work.”

(EdelmanFinancialEngines)

Company profits and share performance can be close to

50% higher when women are well represented at the top.

(McKinsey)

Women are

3X more likely

to sacrifice their career for their family.

(U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

—Judie Kinonen

McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU 13

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RESEARCH

SUMMER 2021

FAIR FORECASTS MARIA DE-ARTEAGA IS ON A MISSION TO UNCOVER BIASED DATA LTHOUGH MACHINE LEARNING

relies on massive amounts of data to aid in decision-making, it still can be biased. Researcher and IROM Assistant Professor Maria De-Arteaga studies the dangers of biased algorithms, and the role of humans in the loop, to offer solutions.

Before joining the McCombs faculty last year, De-Arteaga studied math as an undergraduate and worked as an investigative reporter. She became interested in uncovering patterns in data and earned a joint Ph.D. in machine learning and public policy. As De-Arteaga, winner of last year’s Google AI Award for Inclusion Research, created machine learning solutions, she kept asking about fairness.

“When we thought about the idea of potentially deploying the system, the risk of overburdening or underserving a population kept surfacing as a big challenge,” she says. “That’s what led me to refocus my attention on better understanding what the risks are and how can we address them.” In addition to studying bias in predictive policing, she recently looked at human-algorithm interaction in child welfare decisions and found that while call workers did take their scores into consideration, they were not blindly following the algorithm. —Jeremy M. Simon

McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU 15

RESEARCH: BIG IDEAS

CHANGES TO VACCINE CONTRACTS COULD SAVE LIVES WORLDWIDE

BY RETOOLING THE WAY VACCINES ARE PAID FOR, HEALTH ORGANIZATIONS COULD INCENTIVIZE PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES TO INCREASE DOSES TO POORER NATIONS

by Steve Brooks

URING THE PAST YEAR, THE PHARMACEUTI-

industry has created, tested, and won regulatory authorizations for multiple vaccines to prevent COVID-19. Now, another mammoth task lies ahead: vaccinating the world.

Not just the industrialized world, but countries that can’t afford the U.S. cost of $20 per dose.

New research by Diwakar Gupta, professor of information, risk, and operations management at Texas McCombs, might give that mission a shot in the arm. It finds that by changing the design of vaccine procurement contracts, international agencies could entice manufacturers to produce more shots for developing nations — at no extra cost beyond the allotted budget.

Testing his model on an existing pneumococcal vaccine, Gupta found the alternate design could produce almost 600,000 more doses than existing contracts over 10 years. Because the vaccine requires three shots, that would be enough to immunize 200,000 more infants.

Could such a contract help to get more vaccines for COVID-19 to needy nations? Gupta hopes it might. “You cannot prevent the spread unless sufficient numbers of people worldwide are vaccinated,” he says. “How can you make sure that firms are committing the highest possible capacity to supplying doses?”

CAL

SUBSIDIES FOR SHOTS

When Gupta first became interested in this

16 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

subject, the COVID-19 pandemic was not on the horizon. He had analyzed other kinds of purchasing contracts in health care, and he saw an opportunity to apply the principles to vaccines.

He focused on the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), which has immunized more than 760 million children worldwide. It raises money from donors like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and it negotiates production commitments from pharmaceutical companies.

Once those commitments are made, each country decides how many doses to order.

But the lack of financial incentives for producers presents a major hurdle. A pneumococcal vaccine, which protects infants against diseases such as pneumonia and meningitis, sells in the U.S. for $143 a dose. Gavi’s contracts set the price for developing countries, which pay on a sliding scale based on their gross national income. A typical payment is a mere $2.90.

That’s barely enough for pharmaceutical companies to break even. So Gavi adds $3.50 to each of the first 20% of doses they sell. Says Gupta, “It encourages firms to invest in the capacity to supply the vaccines.” However, companies receive the subsidy only if there is demand for their product.

Since 2009, the contracts have brought pneumococcal vaccines to more than 225 million children. But Gupta wondered whether companies were manufacturing all that they could.

“It’s been a success story,” he says. “I wanted to see whether it could be even better. Companies

are willing to provide vaccines at cost, but it’s not clear how much they’ll prioritize them.”

PAYING FOR WHAT’S NOT PRODUCED

The problem, he explains, is uncertain demand. If countries don’t order as many doses as projected, a manufacturer gets stuck with idle capacity. To avoid that risk, a manufacturer doesn’t commit itself to produce the maximum possible number of doses.

In the retail field, buyback contracts solve that problem by compensating a producer for unused capacity. It gets partial payment from the retailer for units that don’t get sold, encouraging the producer to boost its commitment.

Could such a contract be used to increase vaccine supplies? With Karthik Natarajan of the University of Minnesota and McCombs graduate student Paola Martin, Gupta modeled three kinds of contracts: Gavi’s existing one and a variation, which subsidize only actual doses sold, and a hybrid contract, with one subsidy for sales and another for unused capacity.

For a Gavi budget of $225 million, the researchers found, all the contracts would produce about 300 million doses of pneumococcal vaccines over 10 years. But the hybrid contract had an edge. Compared with the existing one, it produced 589,980 more doses.

Although the difference might sound slight, Gupta says, “It could potentially save tens of thousands of lives.”

For more stories based on faculty research and insights from Texas McCombs, visit Big Ideas at https://medium.com/texas-mccombs

SU M M ER 2021

To protect vaccine makers from uncertain demand and encourage them to increase vaccine supplies, buyback contracts similar to those used in the retail field could compensate manufacturers for unused capacity.

CONTRACTS AND COVID-19

With vaccines for the coronavirus, even more lives are at stake. At present, says Gupta, the chief challenge is supply. But as pharmaceutical companies catch up with demand in the U.S. and Europe, they’ll turn to developing nations.

Gupta notes that Gavi is already negotiating with manufacturers, with the goal of reserving enough capacity for 1 billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021. Its initial goal is to raise $2 billion,

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y M E L I S S A M c F E E T E R S

providing shots in developing countries for no more than $2 a dose.

That’s probably just the beginning of a multiyear series of contracts, he says. “Immunity doesn’t seem to last long term. COVID vaccinations are likely to become a yearly problem, with annual cycles, like the flu.”

Gupta is currently collecting data to analyze those contracts, to see whether lessons from pneumococcal vaccines can carry over

to COVID-19, and whether alternate contract designs can get more shots to the poorest countries.

“It’s going to be an interesting few months,” Gupta says. “Contracting issues are likely to be front and center.”

“Vaccine Procurement Contracts for Developing Countries” is published in Production and Operations Management, November 2020.

McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

17

RESEARCH: BIG IDEAS

GUARDING AGAINST HOSTILE TAKEOVERS, WORRIED CEOS EMPHASIZE THE BAD NEWS CHIEF EXECUTIVES FOCUS ON THE NEGATIVE TO PROTECT THEIR COMPANIES, NEW RESEARCH SHOWS

by Deborah Lynn Blumberg

“O

ur profit margins aren’t looking good,” the chief executive glumly told investors listening in on the company’s earnings call. “Unfortunately, I see gathering storm clouds in the coming quarter.”

Asked to picture CEOs, investors probably think of confident leaders offering positive statements about their companies, predicting rosy future earnings and pointing to news that’s favorable to their business.

But chief executives whose peers are targeted for hostile takeovers — and who worry their companies could be next — take an approach that departs from the common wisdom about cheerleading CEOs. “Peer companies of hostile takeover targets promote bad news forecasts to mitigate the probability of becoming the next takeover target,” says Shuping Chen, the Wilton E. & Catherine A. Thomas Professor of Accounting at Texas McCombs. She is the lead author of a new paper that looks at the voluntary disclosures made by takeover targets’ peer companies.

Their CEOs voluntarily offer company forecasts that highlight the negative, and they tend to bundle these downbeat outlooks with earnings announcements to increase the visibility of the bad news.

The anxious executives also use a more negative tone and words during conference calls as a way to highlight the bad news, which tends to increase

18 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

the market’s uncertainty about a company’s value and limit takeover interest.

To show how these peer companies tend to strategically emphasize bad news, Chen and her colleagues Bin Miao of Chinese University of Hong Kong and UT alum Kristen Valentine, Ph.D. ’19, of the University of Georgia examined a group of hostile takeover targets during a seven-year period along with companies they identified as the takeover targets’ peers.

THE PRESSURE OF BEING ACQUIRED

Chen and her colleagues identified 112 hostile takeover targets from 1997 to 2014 using the Securities Data Company (SDC) database, which provides information on M&A transactions. One takeover target was pharmaceutical company Allergan Inc. Its peer businesses Bausch Health Companies Inc. and Gilead Sciences Inc. both saw a three-day stock price increase on the heels of the news of the takeover. Other companies in the study included AIG, Morgan Stanley, Ford, GM, CVS Health, and Microsoft.

By zeroing in on companies whose stocks saw positive three-day cumulative abnormal returns at the time of the hostile takeover announcement, the authors identified about 3,500 unique peer companies under pressure of acquisition. Higher-than-usual stock moves suggest investors believe these companies could also become takeover targets.

Using four measures, the researchers compared these peer companies to a control group of companies neither under threat of takeover nor considered to be a peer of a company under threat.

The four measures were the number of positive or negative earnings forecasts, how often forecasts were bundled with earnings announcements, the tone of the presentation section of quarterly conference calls, and whether companies spread negative words (including “arrears,” “canceled,” “insufficient,” “lack,” and “refusal”) evenly throughout the conference call presentation to reinforce the negative message. The researchers found that peers of companies under the threat of acquisition tended to hone in on bad news when discussing their own company.

A PENCHANT FOR NEGATIVE NEWS

Chen also found that peer companies with CEOs under age 60 and those with a higher total compensation relative to their industry peers, especially, focused on negative news because they have more of an incentive to avoid an acquisition.

“If I’m 30 years old, I have a lot more lifetime earnings to lose if I’m acquired,” she says. “And if I have more to lose, I fight harder.”

Earlier research has found that two-thirds of CEOs at acquired companies get fired and rarely find another CEO position after they’re let go.

SU M M ER 2021

Anxious executives use a negative tone during conference calls as a way to highlight bad news, which tends to increase the market’s uncertainty about a company’s value and limit takeover interest.

Chen and colleagues also noted more negativity from companies with weaker anti-takeover provisions, such as staggered boards, blank check preferred stock, and restrictions on calling special meetings or acting through written consent.

What’s more, the researchers found that managers at these peer companies under threat managed earnings expectations downward, in line with their overall strategy of sticking to negative news.

This penchant for negative news contrasts with the behavior of managers at companies

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y A L E S S A N D R O C R I P S TA

in the midst of takeovers who favor projecting good news as they attempt to secure favorable acquisition terms.

NO ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL APPROACH

The study reveals that not all of CEOs’ career concerns automatically prompt them to promote good news about their companies.

“In other words, a one-size-fits-all approach to infer CEOs’ disclosure incentives is premature,” Chen says.

What’s more, the research shows that while some bad news disclosures are truly about the

company underperforming, others are about obfuscating the good performance of the company, she adds.

Future research might look at whether acquirers can differentiate between the two kinds of bad news disclosure made by potential targets: true bad news versus bad news that’s disclosed to hide good performance.

“Corporate Control Contests and the Asymmetric Disclosure of Bad News: Evidence from Peer Firm Disclosure Response to Takeover Threat” is forthcoming, (online in advance) in The Accounting Review.

McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

19

20 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

traveler

KELLY STECKELBERG, MPA ’91, HAS ALWAYS LOOKED FOR OPPORTUNITIES TO LEARN SOMETHING NEW. FOUR YEARS AGO, SHE JOINED A COMPANY CALLED ZOOM. THEN THE PANDEMIC HIT. HERE’S HOW THE CFO MANAGED THE COMPANY’S WHIRLWIND YEAR.

by Todd Savage | photograph by Dustin Snipes M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 21

The pandemic halted Steckelberg’s annual trips with family (at right with her late mother and a niece in London). A career highlight was Zoom’s IPO in April 2019 (below on the right with CEO Eric Yuan, second from left, and other members of the C-suite.

Just as dramatic as the growth in their customer base has been the expansion of their head count. Pre-pandemic Zoom had about 2,200 employees; today, that number has more than doubled to 5,000. “The brand awareness for Zoom and the flexibility of hiring has made it really easy,” Steckelberg says. “Of course, it comes with very unique challenges to double your workforce in a complete remote environment, but we’ve done it.”

She has a strong memory of all-hands-ondeck days when they worked hard to keep pace with an accelerating increase in sales. “We were recruiting people from around the company to help and started each day with a review of the queue, which kept growing!” recalls Steckelberg. “But our team stayed with it, doing all we could to get the product to our customers as quickly as possible, and the reward for the long hours was happy customers at the end.”

changed earlier for Kelly Steckelberg than it did for most of us. As CFO of Zoom, the Silicon Valley video communications giant, she and other company leaders had been watching the approaching coronavirus storm and anticipating the disturbance it might unleash. ¶ For Zoom, it would be a deluge. ¶ Steckelberg’s last day in the office was March 4, making an earnings call with CEO Eric Yuan, the head of investor relations, and a technical person who came in to assist them. The office had closed to workers the day before, and Zoom’s leaders focused on making sure their employees Locking Down felt safe and supported. Then they went home. ¶ “We had the luxury that we all lived in the technology,” Steckelberg explains. “We had to adjust to all When Steckelberg was faced with the prospect of lockdown, she knew she didn’t want to spend being remote, but the technology itself obviously was something we were an uncertain future living and working alone all using every day for every meeting. Really, we were watching very closely near Zoom headquarters in San Jose, California. what was happening. Even watching, I don’t think we could have predicted She headed to what turned into more than 15 how quickly it accelerated. On March 15 everything changed overnight for months living with her sister, brother-in-law, Zoom.” ¶ That was when many Americans started working from home, their two daughters, and two dogs in Southand Zoom was on its way to becoming a household name. The company ern California. If Steckelberg was going to be spending the year isolated and working blew up, going from an average 10 million daily meeting participants in screen-to-screen with her colleagues, she knew December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020. ¶ “Thirty times increase in four months,” Steckelberg says. “We did as much business in six weeks as we she would relish time with her nieces, ages 8 and 10. “I don’t have any children of my own,” had almost done in seven years behind us. It was just incredible. The reaction she says, “so it’s been a real special experience of the employee base was just as amazing. Everybody rose to the occasion.” being there with them.” ¶ For six weeks, she and the rest of the staff worked every day, including She set up a candy jar on her desk in her weekends to keep up with customer demand for Zoom. Days blurred as makeshift office. During our interview, she was everyone tried “to make sure that all of our customers and prospects that dressed comfortably in a Zoom hoodie with a had a need for Zoom had access to it,” she says. ¶ It was an exhausting pace, and Steckelberg still had to juggle her many duties at Zoom. She is responsible for the chief account“WE WERE WATCHING VERY CLOSELY WHAT ing officer function, financial planWAS HAPPENING. EVEN WATCHING, I DON’T ning and analysis, budgeting and THINK WE COULD HAVE PREDICTED HOW QUICKLY forecasting, procurement, investor IT ACCELERATED. ON MARCH 15 EVERYTHING relations, tax and treasury, corporate development, and Zoom’s real CHANGED OVERNIGHT FOR ZOOM.” estate portfolio, including its offices.

22 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

CREDIT TK

M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 23

corporate virtual background. At one point her nieces broke through the screen to cozy up to her. “They came to say hi. This happens,” Steckelberg says, with a laugh. “They know where the candy stash is.” During high-profile interviews with CNBC and other media outlets, she locks the door.

While she has been locked down like the rest of us, she has had to put aside her wanderlust.

Her tally stands at 60 countries — but over the last year and a half, the farthest she’s gone is to the nearby beach.

Early in her career, a stint as an expat working for PeopleSoft in Amsterdam whet her appetite for exploring new places, because it was easy to visit other countries in Europe.

“That really spurred my love for travel,” she says. “Living in another country and being in Amsterdam, I got the opportunity to experience countries in a different way, which was go sit, have a coffee, and not just run around.”

After she moved back to the States, she started taking her three eldest nieces from another sister on an annual trip to a new country. About 10 years ago, the excursions expanded to include Steckelberg’s mother and a sister. The first “big family adventure,” she says, was to Africa where they all volunteered at a children’s home and went on a safari.

Since then, they’ve gone to the Galapagos, Fiji, and Bora Bora for her 50th birthday. COVID-19 ended that. Next year, she hopes to resume the annual trip, perhaps with a trip to Brazil.

On the Move

24 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

“It’s a lot more about how you think through problems, how you problem solve, and how do you help make decisions. I think McCombs helped me do well.”

At each stage in her career, she has looked for opportunities that would broaden her skill set. Her first job was with KPMG in public accounting, where she gained exposure to different industries traveling around with Bay Area clients. She started in audit and then did tax work to learn something new. She went on to work in tax forms at PeopleSoft for a year, and then the company offered her a chance to move to Amsterdam.

“I was like, ‘OK, here we go. An opportunity to learn something new.’ I agreed to move to the Amsterdam sight unseen.”

At the same time, she set a goal to become a public company CFO. “That started to help me target the types of roles I was going for,” she says.

She landed at WebEx as the corporate controller, and although she thought one day she might have a shot at becoming CFO, the company was acquired by Cisco. New doors, however, opened.

“I had never worked for a company of that size,” she says. “That’s why I got to learn about hardware. I learned about consumers. I continued looking for new things I hadn’t done yet.”

From there she became CFO of the dating site Zoosk, her first experience working in a private company, a start-up, and a consumer web company. She moved into the COO role and learned the operation side of the business.

A long sought-after goal of any CFO — taking a company public — ended with disappointment when Zoosk wasn’t able to adjust its business model quickly enough and called off its IPO. When the founders exited the company, the board asked Steckelberg to take over as CEO. “It was one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever done, but it was amazing and rewarding in the end.

When you start to see your strategy come together, it’s really rewarding.”

After Zoosk, she expected to take a break, but within two days of updating her LinkedIn

profile, she heard from a former colleague who would change her life. A colleague at WebEx, Eric Yuan, now the founder and CEO of Zoom, sent her a message. “I think he wrote something like, ‘It would be a dream if we could work together again.’”

At the time, Zoom was not the noun, verb, and adjective—as in “Zoom fatigue”—that it is today. Nor was Steckelberg very familiar with the company. “I had not paid attention to it,” she says. When she did, she was impressed.

Joining Zoom Steckelberg was drawn by the opportunity to work with Yuan again and the chance to achieve her ambition of helping take the company public. When Zoom went public in 2019, it was a career highlight, she says. Of course, no one knew Zoom would command the world stage by spring 2020.

Yuan today is pleased he brought her on board. “Kelly is a brilliant leader and someone who makes Zoom a better place. She has an adept ability to make tough decisions and lead by example. We are so lucky to have her on our leadership team.”

Her earlier CEO experience came into play, especially in a growing company.

As a former CEO, “I had to learn exactly how products, engineering, marketing and sales — and your go-to market strategy — how that all comes together to drive a business and what the levers of that are,” Steckelberg says. “It’s helped me as I came back into a CFO role again to understand how to think about prioritization when things like, we’re setting budgets so that I know, ‘OK, if we’re going to invest here, this is likely what the outcome is going to be,’ and really having seen it and lived it in a very different way than just being more on the sidelines.

“I can be much more active and I can ask different questions because I've really seen it and lived it. I think it’s made me a much better CFO.”

CREDIT TK

Steckelberg is used to moving around. Her family moved often during her childhood, finally settling in Harper, Texas, a small Hill Country town where she had 15 students in her graduating class. She had just two electives in her high school: shop or home economics. She chose the latter. “I had four years of home economics and I was also, by the way, the president of Future Homemakers of America, which is really funny if you know me because I’ve obviously gone on a different trajectory in life.”

Arriving at the Forty Acres, she quickly switched majors from fashion merchandising to accounting at McCombs. (Her father was a CPA.) She took advantage of the five-year MPA program as a student in the program’s early days. “It seemed like a great opportunity to get my master’s done all at one time,” she says. The comprehensive curriculum also prepared her for the CPA exam and gave her a leg up on the competition, she says.

More than that, she says many of the analytical skills she learned have stayed with her.

“THE BRAND AWARENESS FOR ZOOM AND THE FLEXIBILITY OF HIRING HAS MADE IT REALLY EASY,” STECKELBERG EXPLAINS. “OF COURSE, IT COMES WITH VERY UNIQUE CHALLENGES TO DOUBLE YOUR WORKFORCE IN A COMPLETE REMOTE ENVIRONMENT, BUT WE’VE DONE IT.”

“Zoom has become embedded in all aspects of our lives,” says Kelly Steckelberg, who last year was named CFO of the Year by the finance news site CFO Dive.

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Steckelberg is generous with her time. She has mentored young women and recently “came back” to McCombs for a conversation—on Zoom, of course—in the VIP Speaker Series, hosted by the Undergraduate Business Council at UT Austin. A student asked how she handled failure, and she answered in her open, down-to-earth style.

“One of my friends told me, ‘I’ve never interviewed for a job that I didn’t get. And I was like, ‘What?! Then you are definitely not putting yourself out there enough, because I can tell you I’ve interviewed for a lot of jobs that I haven’t gotten.’ And yet look where I am. I’m sitting in what I think is the best job in the world.”

Over the past year, she says, the company has stayed focused on two goals: making sure their platform was stable and available to their customers, and supporting a boom in employees.

At the same time, they have strived to make decisions that would be sustainable after the pandemic has calmed. They had to continue adding sales reps to serve their customers and

engineers to keep developing their platform.

It was a difficult balance to strike.

“We didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves from a hiring perspective,” she says. “How do you prioritize and think about our employees who need some support and help? Our customers need support. In that situation, for example, we turned to third-party partners to help us so that we can get an immediate influx of talent to support us but providing us the ability for long-term flexibility to scale that back down if we need to. That was the challenge.” She had to make sure the company wasn’t overcommitted, or, as she says, “out over our skis.”

Late last year, Steckelberg was named CFO of the Year by the finance news site CFO Dive.

The magazine cited her earlier CEO experience, saying that knowing the “strategic side of running a company made her the ideal partner to manage Zoom's explosive pandemic-led growth.” In the story, analyst Ryan Koontz, who follows Zoom as managing director of Rosenblatt Securities, said, "Kelly and her team have done a tremendous job. She's an integral part of the machine there."

Of course, none of that could prepare her for the pandemic’s impact on Zoom. Now as cases of COVID-19 recede, at least in the U.S., and workers begin coming back to the office, how will that impact the company’s fortunes?

Steckelberg says she doesn’t expect us to stop Zooming. “Zoom has become embedded in all aspects of our lives. It’s in our work life. It’s in our children’s learning. It’s in our social life now,” she says. “As we move toward the time where we can all move around the world again more safely, we’re going to want to leverage Zoom for the aspects that make our lives the most convenient.

“The future of work is not ever going to look the way it did before.”

Zoom is positioning itself for the post-pandemic world by building out some features that the company hopes will continue showing its value. One of them is the Smart Gallery, an innovation meant to improve the experience for a mixed environment where some employees are in a conference room and others are remote. Another new development: Zoom Apps— in-meeting applications by third-party developers to improve the meeting experience, such as integration with a service like Dropbox.

“Over time, what you're going to see is Zoom continues to evolve to be a platform where you spend your workday,” she says. “It’s not just where you come together to meet, but it’s also where you do your work and especially continue to collaborate with colleagues or with friends and family.”

CAREER AT A GLANCE

WIN T ER 2020

 HOMETOWN Kerrville, Texas  EDUCATION McCombs School of Business BBA/MPA ’91  FIRST JOB Tax Manager KPMG 1991-1995  CAREER MOVES European Finance Director PeopleSoft 1995-2000 Various roles, including CFO of WebEx Division Cisco 2006-11 CFO, COO, and CEO Zoosk 2011-17 CFO Zoom 2017-present  OTHER ROLES Board Member, Qualtrics, Audit Committee Chair Board Member, Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco

After a year like no other, Steckelberg hasn’t visited Brazil yet, but her role at Zoom has taken her to places few people have been. She is proud of what the company has accomplished and says, “I can't imagine not having been here with the amazing team and gone through this.

It’s a lifelong experience that I’ll never forget.”

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PANDE MIC

PIVOTS

HOW STUDENTS, FACULTY AND ALUMNI CHANGED DURING UNCERTAIN TIMES STORIES by SHARON JAYSON and MATT W. TURNER ILLUSTRATIONS by YANN SADI

McCOMBS STUDENTS, FACULTY MEMBERS, AND ALUMNI SHOWED RESILIENCE,

creativity, and determination in a strange, new world brought on by the pandemic.

They all pivoted. Facult y members moved to online instruction, students found ways to network and fulfill internships, and alumni found new approaches to maintain their livelihoods. Through it all, the McCombs community learned new skills, new strategies for solving problems, and new truths about themselves.

These are their stories.

M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 27

locking down? What would resonate? And then she thought, with more people staying home, demand for home delivery was rising.

"I wanted to do something at the intersection of my passions and my talents,” says Laseter, founder and CEO of Peck Boards, which launched in September 2020. “I'm passionate about good food, and I've always worked in e-commerce. And, among my friends and family, I'm famous for charcuterie boards."

Peck Boards include a variety of meats and cheeses, as well as dried fruit, chocolates, and fig spread, among other extras.

The business had a successful holiday season, says Laseter, who lives in Austin. Now, she’s making a five-year plan, which includes increased marketing, hiring some help, and expanding into more DIY home food experiences for businesses and individuals.

"My business strategy rests on one core assumption: that remote working is going to continue,” she says. “The office environment is evolving, and we're going to be there to help folks celebrate their teams virtually — with delicious food.” – Sharon Jayson After his semester abroad in Prague ended abruptly in spring 2020, Rodrigo Rivera, BBA ’21, resumed classes remotely from his hometown of Tampico, Mexico.

“Classes started in the morning in Mexico, which was afternoon in Prague.”

STR ATEGIES FOR SOCIALIZING

THE REMOTE INTERN TALK ABOUT A PIVOT. THE PANDEMIC COULD HAVE

left Rodrigo Rivera, BBA ’21, at loose ends. Instead, he has learned a new skill: adaptability.

In spring of 2020, Rivera’s semester abroad in Prague abruptly ended. He would have to leave but could later resume classes remotely.

“I went in February and came back in midMarch,” he says, explaining that because “most countries in Europe were closed, I had to fly to Istanbul and then to Mexico City” to get back to his hometown of Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Tampico is in the same time zone as Austin.

So, it was a challenge taking four spring semester classes that were really remote — from Prague.

“I had to take my classes during European hours,” he says. “Classes started in the morning in Mexico, which was afternoon in Prague. It was a seven-hour difference.”

In summer 2020, Rivera had a remote internship with Goldman Sachs in Manhattan. He was still in Mexico, and everyone at the firm worked remotely. “My internship was most challenging,” he says. “It’s different working online and trying to network.”

Still, he made an impression. Goldman Sachs offered him a full-time job in New York, to be-

28 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

gin later this summer. Rivera, who arrived at UT in 2017, wrapped up his final semester at McCombs during the spring, with a double major in the Canfield Business Honors Program and finance and a minor in management information systems. He also managed to serve as a research assistant at the Salem Center for Policy through his graduation in May. Reflecting on the past 15 months, Rivera says he “learned priorities” and the “soft skill to pivot.”

– Sharon Jayson

FROM PANDEMIC TO PASSION CECILIA LASETER, MBA ’15,

was trying to figure out her next step when the pandemic made it clear.

As the mother of a 1-yearold in March 2020, Laseter, who had worked in corporate marketing at Whole Foods Market Inc., wanted to launch her own business “in a way that allows me to have a balanced life and keep working with a little one.”

But was launching a new venture a good idea during a pandemic when cities and states were

believe she was going to study abroad until it actually happened. After all, this was a pandemic, and many countries’ borders were in flux.

“Definitely, there was a lot of uncertainty,” she says. “Until the last moment, I was doubting whether it would happen. Countries could start enforcing new restrictions. It made me a little nervous. I was ready to go as long as it was possible.”

Reddy, a marketing major from Dallas, spent this spring studying at Corvinus University in Budapest as one of a handful of UT students who spent the past semester in Hungary. She was also named one of UT’s Spring 2021 Global Ambassadors, who shared their international experiences blogging and posting photos on Instagram.

“Classes were fully online in the beginning,” Reddy says. “They were hoping we would eventually go to a hybrid format, but that never happened.”

Even so, she was determined to make connections. Reddy met new friends through in-person events organized by a nonprofit international student group.

Increased COVID-19 cases in Hungary forced a government lockdown during spring break P H OTO G R A P H S B Y J E F F W I L S O N

C EC I L I A L AS E T E R C R E D I T H A N N A J A M A L

SANJANA REDDY, BBA ’23, WOULDN’T LET HERSELF

To ensure students stay engaged, lecturer David Quintanilla uses the same tricks for online teaching as he does in the classroom. If someone yawns, he says, “Hey! I saw that yawn.” It tells students he is paying attention to them.

that curtailed typical travel plans. She ended up exploring the country with friends on day trips and weekend visits at other times during the semester, which made her realize her biggest pivot “was really having to plan out my social interactions.”

“I really took it for granted,” she says. “In the past, I’d meet people wherever I went. I didn’t realize I was a social person until I didn’t have that interaction.” – Sharon Jayson

imported these simple acknowledgments to the online world, he was surprised to discover that not only did students laugh just as hard, they knew he was really paying attention to them.

“I’ve heard from many students that this simple thing truly made them feel connected, as if we really had been in a live classroom together.”

Quintanilla recently won the Hank and Mary Harkins Foundation Award for Effective Teaching in Undergraduate Classes. – Matt W. Turner

NO YAWNING IN CL ASS!

DISCUSSION WITHOUT PRESSURE

WHO KNEW A SNEEZE COULD FOSTER CLASS

THE PROFESSOR DELIVERS AN INSIGHTFUL,

engagement?

Teaching more than 500 students a semester across multiple sections this past year, David Quintanilla, a lecturer in the Business, Government and Society Department, finds keeping students’ attention in a live classroom hard enough, but engaging them for an hour or more in “Zoom U”? That challenge is in a class by itself.

Quintanilla employs an array of techniques to make sure students are following the lecture, but to his surprise, the simplest is the most effective. When teaching in a live classroom, he has a habit of saying “gesundheit” or “bless you” when people sneeze. If someone yawns, he says, “Hey! I saw that yawn,” or “Stay with me. Don’t get too bored,” or “We’re almost there!” When Quintanilla

thought-provoking lecture, and the students are a) riveted, b) confused, or c) eager to ask a piercing question or offer a brilliant rejoinder?

It’s often difficult to gauge how students are thinking about topics and new concepts, says Insiya Hussain, an assistant professor of management. Even in a live classroom, an instructor only has time for a few student comments, which gives a limited view of how students are processing new information, she says.

The pivot to online instruction motivated Hussain to try a feature of Canvas, the webbased learning management system used by UT and thousands of universities worldwide.

She had given only scant attention to it before the pandemic. Hussain posts weekly reflection

questions on Canvas’ discussion board feature, which allows students the freedom to discuss their answers with one another, as well as post video and audio files, without the pressure of being put on the spot when called on.

“Discussion boards offer distinct advantages over speaking out loud in the classroom,” she reports.

First, they ensure that 100% of the students have a chance to share their thoughts, which gives the instructor a much better take on their enjoyment and comprehension of the material. They also allow students to shine in different ways, especially those students who are stronger writers than speakers and are hesitant to voice their opinions out loud.

Above all, Hussain finds that students are more honest and vulnerable when writing.

“I often ask students to relate the current topic to their own experiences and am amazed at the rich and relevant examples they provide, often talking about personally difficult situations from their own lives,” she says. And the feedback from fellow students to this sincerity can be quite validating.

“This is something I may continue to use even when we resume in-person learning.” – Matt W. Turner

THE INTERNSHIP JUGGLER JOSEPH TABUENA, BBA ’22, had many balls in the air during the spring semester, juggling two internships with UTNY, the university’s internship program in New York City.

There from Januar y through May, he alternated work at two companies where he interned. “Both of them were remote,” says Tabuena.

“I never went to either of the actual offices.”

He knew that going in. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he worked at Magnet Media Inc., where he assisted the marketing team with client development. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he worked for Collegiate Sports Management Group, mostly working on spreadsheets to support marketing and analytics.

“It was a little strange, but that was also what they required at the time I applied,” he says. “They wanted someone in the same time zone for location and convenience.”

He was experienced at adapting to change.

In spring 2020 when the COVID-19 outbreak sparked lockdowns worldwide, Tabuena left the UT campus and headed home to Coppell (in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex), where he completed his second year of college in his room.

M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 29

“It was a huge adjustment at first,” he says.

“At UT, it’s really easy to separate when you’re working on school and when you’re not. You’re not really able to have that luxury at home. You have to force yourself to stay disciplined at home.”

Tabuena says he did get a taste of collaboration with other interns. One company assigned its dozen interns to work on a final project together.

“I was really excited about New York. I knew it was a great opportunity for my career with the internships and letting me grow more as a person,” he says. – Sharon Jayson

NAVIGATING ON SCOOTERS KEEPING A REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT COMPANY

thriving during the pandemic presented several challenges to Erik Johnson, MBA ’08, a co-founder of White Point Partners in Charlotte, North Carolina.

White Point’s five-person team got creative, Johnson says, so it could keep its focus on the tenant and capital relationships it had nurtured.

To show properties to potential capital partners when “no one was comfortable getting into a car (with others),” he says, they looked for an alternative. “We found a bunch of electric scooter rentals and brought them to where we needed

to start. It ended up being productive, and we were able to see the neighborhood fairly quickly.”

Johnson says navigating on scooters and trying to communicate with the wind blowing was challenging but worked well enough that they did it again.

The company also improvised at its development Optimist Hall, an 1890s-era former gingham mill that had been transformed into a 147,000-square-foot mixed-use development.

It opened in August 2019 and had 20 food and beverage tenants when COVID-19 emerged.

Johnson says the development’s pivot to curbside and takeout — the only permitted food service allowed in the state in March 2020 — made Optimist Hall “the largest drive-thru in Charlotte.”

The rideshare drop-off became the curbside pickup, and the janitorial staff became food runners.

White Point was nimble on its other projects, says Johnson, who serves on McCombs’ Real Estate Investment Fund advisory board. It sold some proposed office developments while proceeding with construction on other projects.

“We took a stand not to drop everything and see what happens and hope it was short-lived,” he says. “As we got further into it and realized it was not going away super quickly, we pivoted.”

– Sharon Jayson

LESS ‘GROUP THINK’ GETTING TO KNOW EACH STUDENT PERSONALLY,

rather than just as a class member, has been the big surprise in the pivot to virtual teaching for Linda Golden, a faculty member in Marketing and Business, Government and Society who holds the Joseph H. Blades Memorial Centennial Professorship in Insurance.

For starters, the simplest tech feature — the placement of student names at the bottom of each Zoom tile — gives instructors a leg up, Golden says. “You can call on students by name early in the semester, instead of waiting weeks until you’ve mastered them.” That also prevents students who might choose not to display their names in a live classroom from sitting on the sidelines, thus leveling the playing field, she says.

But a more remarkable advantage to virtual teaching, according to Golden, is the elimination of “group think.” She found that by setting strict time limits to Zoom’s chat feature, students didn't have time to read their classmates’ comments, and their thoughts ended up being more original and honest. They were more likely to pose questions they might otherwise be hesitant to ask. When she used the chat feature without time limits, she found that shyer students would “speak up” in front of their peers in writing much more than they would out loud. “Some students are simply uncomfortable speaking in a group even when it is clear that the environment is welcoming to whatever they have to say,” she adds.

Golden used Zoom’s polling feature to take a snapshot of how students were thinking about course material. Because they could not see one another’s answers, she maintains, group think was less likely.

Finally, the online classroom brought professors and students directly into each other’s office and living spaces, complete with decorations, memorabilia, and wandering pets, which opened a window into the lifestyles of others. Not only was this another example of real connection, she says, it injected a bit of “sheer fun” into the learning environment. – Matt W. Turner

When the pandemic ruled out using a car to show properties to potential partners, Erik Johnson and his team got creative. “We found a bunch of electric scooter rentals and brought them to where we needed to start,” said Johnson, MBA ’08.

30 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

CINDY LO, BBA ’98, DIDN’T KNOW HOW CRITICAL

her first moves would be in transforming her Austin-based company Red Velvet from an ART BY FIRST LASTNAME

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STR ATEGIC SHIF T

high-profile researchers who otherwise would decline invitations to travel to campus due to their heavy schedules are more than happy to give virtual research talks.

Another silver lining she cites during this unusual, difficult time: Professors and doctoral students have participated in more academic conferences because of the flexibility and lower costs that being online affords. – Matt Turner

MORE NIMBLE INNOVATION SALOMI NAIK, MBA ’16, COULD NEVER HAVE

When the pandemic hit her events planning company’s business, Cindy Lo, BBA ’98, acted quickly. By April 2020, Austin-based Red Velvet had added new services and products. A month later, it produced its first all-digital event.

SA LO M I N A I K C R E D I T A M O G H R A I C H U R

events-focused agency to one that has successfully melded the in-person hybrid world with the virtual.

On March 6, the day South by Southwest canceled its 2020 festival, Lo says she started receiving cancellations from clients for in-person events taking place through April 2020.

“We became virtual event producers,” she says, giving clients the choice to cancel or stay on and evolve with her company.

By April, the business had added new services and products, including designing T-shirts and selling them online even though it had never sold products. Red Velvet also offered business consulting and résumé assistance — anything it could do to keep customers, she says.

Although Red Velvet had never produced all-digital events, the quick response enabled the company’s first such event by early May. Still, the pandemic took a toll.

“We were 27 when it started. Now, unfortunately, we are 12. I did layoffs that started off as furloughs,” Lo says. “I have not paid myself since April 2020.”

Lo says she lost more than 70% of her business.

“We lost so much business so fast,” says Lo, who serves on the McCombs BBA Advisory Board. “We ended up losing 80% and gained 10% through virtual.

ART BY FIRST LASTNAME

“I’ve done everything I can to keep things going,” Lo says. “I was physically with my family but not mentally with them. Genuinely, I did feel like I was losing everything we built up for 18 years.”

The pandemic solidified Red Velvet’s metamorphosis from being viewed as a “party planner” to an “event strategist.” Now, she says she is poised to rebuild. – Sharon Jayson

MINGLING AND MEETING McCOMBS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR WEN WEN’S

surprise with the online pivot is that it has increased personal interactions and communication among students and instructors.

In a regular, in-person classroom, Wen, who teaches in the Information, Risk and Operations Management Department, notes that students tend to sit with the same group day after day and discuss class exercises exclusively with one another. Zoom’s breakout rooms randomly assign students to groups across class sessions and even across various exercises within a session. That forces students to interact with people of different backgrounds and perspectives and “significantly enhances their learning experience,” Wen says.

Going virtual also has easily enabled scholars around the globe to connect and learn about one another’s research as never before, she says. Even

imagined how prescient her job title as head of innovation would be. The pandemic required a pivot toward more nimble innovation at the startup she joined in July 2019.

“We’re a lean startup always running tight on resources,” says Naik, the first employee hired at Ai Palette, a predictive analytics company. “We had to be very agile and make decisions very rapidly.”

The company is based in the tech hub of Singapore, where Naik also lives. She had made her way from Mumbai to Texas McCombs and then New York City before returning to Asia in 2017.

At Ai Palette, the company analyzes public data and uses artificial intelligence to identify food trends, as well as consumer needs and motivations to help client companies create successful product concepts for rapidly evolving tastes.

“In the midst of the pandemic, we were seeing digital data really having its moment in the sun. At a time when traditional research was no longer an option, more people were shopping online and posting more on social media,” Naik says.

With clients across Asia and in the U.S. and Europe, Naik says the company shifted from traveling to meetings to virtual-only sessions. Ai Palette was already analyzing pandemic-inspired food trends when it captured the international spotlight and showed how quickly it could answer its clients’ most pressing questions.

Food Industry Asia, a research and advocacy group, told the team it wanted to better understand how consumer behavior was changing because of COVID-19, Naik says.

“The Food Industry Asia study really helped us get tremendous exposure,” Naik says of the resulting eight reports and seven webinars her company produced. “It reached almost 2,500 C-suite executives across 43 countries.” – Sharon Jayson M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 31

32 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

MASTERS OF ADAPTABILITY

STUDENTS IN McCOMBS’ FOUR MASTER OF SCIENCE PROGRAMS MAKE THE MOST OF DIFFICULT TIMES IN A YEAR LIKE NO OTHER

by Alberta Phillips | illustration by Brian Stauffer

M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 33

34 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

THE HYBRID CLASSROOM Cathcart wasn’t ready to fully surrender an in-person education. To accommodate those concerns, McCombs put together a hybrid of in-person and virtual classes, DeKinder says, devising at least three ways to attend classes: face-to-face in a classroom with a faculty member; online in a classroom, campus building or other location without an in-person faculty member; and online from home.

McCombs leaders left it up to faculty members and students to decide whether they were comfortable attending classes in person. “The faculty really moved mountains to make the most of the situation,” DeKinder says. “They kept students safe while pedagogically coming up with the best solutions.”

In-person classes were limited to 40% of the students wishing to be around their peers. Those who didn’t feel comfortable doing that could log on from home.

LIKE MANY STUDENTS,

“I definitely was wanting an in-person experience to wind up, hopefully, what would be my last time in school,’’ Cathcart says. She opted to see peers in the classroom.

“I chose to go in person because I cannot stand being behind a screen all day,” she says. “Going to class has helped me put names with faces and get to know people a little better.”

The hybrid system also made a difference to Danielle “Ella” Akl, 25, who enrolled in the M.S. Information Technology and Management program after graduating from George Mason University in 2020.

“Most of my days were in person in that I myself went to campus,” says Akl. She set up her computer in the graduate student lounge and logged on to class with three to four students.

Sometimes as many as nine others joined in, which she says, “essentially created this little classroom setting.”

HELPING STUDENTS LAUNCH THEIR CAREERS AT THE SAME TIME, McCombs officials and faculty members went the extra mile to help students succeed and secure the lucrative offers from employers, just as their predecessors had under different circumstances. When all the data are in, officials expect the class to be as successful as past ones, says Merri Su Ruhmann, director of career education and coaching for the Master of Science programs.

E L I Z A B E T H CAT H CA RT C R E D I T: A N G I E Z H A N G ; DA N I E L L E A K L C R E D I T: L AU R E N G E R S O N

LIZABETH CATHCART was all set to graduate from Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, in spring 2019 and start an exciting, new chapter that fall: She had been accepted into the Master of Science in Finance program at Texas McCombs, the culmination of a long-held goal.

But then tragedy hit.

Her basketball coach at MSU Texas was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Cathcart graduated but stayed another year to spend time with her beloved coach and play basketball on an extended scholarship. She fast-tracked an MBA at the Wichita Falls school that year, but keeping a promise to “Coach J” to “make her proud,” she applied again to McCombs for the next year.

Again, she was accepted.

Then the pandemic struck.

Amid shutdowns and COVID-19 restrictions, Cathcart, 24, and other students selected for the 10-month M.S. program weighed the benefits of giving up a traditional college experience against the advantages of earning a McCombs graduate degree, much of it online. Most students stuck with McCombs, whose M.S. programs are ranked in the top five worldwide. But it was a year like no other in the programs’ history, and this spring the students graduated and reentered the working world.

With fewer face-to-face classes, students battled Zoom fatigue and COVID-19, and endured tragedies, including deaths of loved ones. With the help of McCombs faculty and staff members, however, they carved out unique experiences that incorporated traditional aspects of campus life into their virtual experiences.

“The number of heart-wrenching emails I received has never been so high,” says Jade DeKinder, associate dean of McCombs Master of Science programs. “Students in our program lost parents to COVID and faced challenges so very close to home.”

The M.S., which runs from July to May, offers four graduate degree programs: Business

Analytics, Finance, Information Technology and Management, and Marketing. All maintained their regular features, including McCombs signature Capstone projects, in which teams of four to five students work directly with organizations to solve realworld problems.

In all, 260 students enrolled in M.S. programs for the class of 2021, about the same as in previous years, though COVID-19 brought more deferrals and dropouts than usual.

“We did see a number of students who had been admitted say, ‘The world has changed so much that I don’t want do this anymore,’” DeKinder says, noting that international students, in particular, were affected by the pandemic.

“There were lockdowns and shutdowns around the world, so students literally and physically couldn’t go to embassies to get visas,” she says. “We saw a significant number of international students ask for deferrals because they just could not get here.”

Virtual-only study from their home countries was not an option for international students, DeKinder says. The U.S. government requires students on F-1 visas to attend all but one class in person. Many students, concerned about whether they could meet such requirements in a given period, deferred admission.

That enrollment drop for international students was offset by a surge of applicants in early spring, DeKinder says, of students wanting to expand their educational credentials during uncertain economic times.

E L I Z A B E T H CAT H CA RT C R E D I T: A N G I E Z H A N G ; DA N I E L L E A K L C R E D I T: L AU R E N G E R S O N

“I tell incoming students that we don’t give you a job,” she says. “We give you the skills you can use for a lifetime of career success.”

Her team prepares students with skills to improve their résumés, interviewing techniques, job search strategies, and personal branding.

“Career Education and Coaching are amazing,” Akl says. “They work with you one on one (virtually) on résumé strength, mock interviews, and workshops. I have felt supported through every journey of my career program at McCombs.”

She accepted an offer to work in Austin for Google in a residency program in which employees rotate through various client-facing roles in the Google Cloud department. Akl describes it as her “dream job” because “it ties in the more business aspect of technology.”

Cathcart also praised Ruhmann and her team, saying they helped substantially in polishing her résumé and interviewing skills, with all employers conducting interviews virtually. She received six job offers, including from three of the big four accounting firms: KPMG, Deloitte, and Ernst and Young (EY). She accepted the EY offer in Dallas.

Other students say they found their “dream jobs.” Ruhmann’s team works with all of the students to navigate their job searches and launch their careers—up to six months after they graduate.

“We offered tailored workshops on interviewing virtually, networking virtually, and how to navigate the job search from home when (in the past) the typical advice assumed in-person

“THE FACULTY REALLY MOVED MOUNTAINS TO MAKE THE MOST OF THE SITUATION,” SAYS JADE DeKINDER, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF McCOMBS MASTER OF SCIENCE PROGRAMS. “THEY KEPT STUDENTS SAFE WHILE PEDAGOGICALLY COMING UP WITH THE BEST SOLUTIONS.”

networking, interviewing, and recruiting,” Ruhmann says.

Did it work? Yes, she says, noting that while data are still being gathered, “we are seeing employment outcomes comparable to the class of 2020.”

In 2020, 93% of students in the M.S. Business Analytics program accepted offers within six months of graduation, with an average salary of $89,832. For M.S. Finance, 97% reported accepting offers during that period, with an average salary of $71,109; for M.S. Information Technology and Management, 95% accepted offers in that time frame, with an average salary of $91,444; and for M.S. Marketing, 86% accepted offers within six months of graduation, with an average salary of $64,625.

UPS AND DOWNS THE ALL-VIRTUAL classes, group activities, and

employer interviews have their downside, with

Zoom fatigue being chief among them. But program leaders also found opportunities. DeKinder says online programs allowed McCombs to do something it hasn’t done before: bring in worldclass experts “who can come in and engage with students” from wherever they are.

Students also found ways to benefit from their online world. Jenny Robinson, who is in the M.S. Business Analytics program, says virtual interactions with her professor helped her stay on track after contracting COVID-19 in late summer. “I was tired and barely had energy,” says Robinson, 23, BBA ’20. “But I was able to get on a Zoom call with my professor and tell him the situation. He helped me out with the

Left to right: Aneeque Baqai, Elizabeth Cathcart, and Danielle “Ella” Akl decided that earning a McCombs Master of Science degree was worth the challenges of learning amid a pandemic.

M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 35

could download to prepare for exams or to better understand more complicated lessons.

Benefits aside, the downside of all-virtual instruction “were very present and real,” says DeKinder, a sentiment echoed by students, who say they had virtual classes or groups/cohort assignments from four to 12 hours multiple days a week.

“There’s something about being in a classroom that is less exhausting for a student,” DeKinder says.

Getting to know classmates also was harder, students say. Meeting online “really takes away from the networking you get to do with classmates,” Cathcart says. “I still had an amazing experience, but I feel like I would know people better if we were all in person.”

To break up the monotony, McCombs staffers hired a company that had crafted “escape rooms” for M.S. Information Technology and Management students. To escape the rooms, students had to unlock the doors by solving puzzles together.

“This event was definitely a great team-building activity, and everyone had a fun time,” Akl says. “My cohort of 22 students was broken up into six- to eight-people groups, each in their own escape room. After we finished, we chatted about how the different groups did, and it was friendly and supportive.”

ADOPTING CHANGES DeKINDER SAYS M.S. graduates consistently cite

in-person networking with other students as a

key benefit of McCombs. Those connections last years beyond graduation, students say on surveys. That’s one reason DeKinder says McCombs is looking forward to returning to all in-person instruction, as early as July 2021, when the new M.S. programs begin.

“We have felt a sense of loss not being face to face with our students,” she says. But, she adds, McCombs will take some of the things that worked well from their 10 months of virtual instruction, including career coaching opportunities for students who are unable to go to campus and guest speakers who can lecture from anyplace in the world. She says online faculty office hours are likely to continue, along with in-person hours.

Cathcart, who also battled grief, illness, and side effects of a COVID-19 vaccine, says it has been a tough year but worth the struggle. “It is true that I formed more bonds and memories with classmates in undergrad, but I am proud of our Zoom-U class of 2021.”

Alberta Phillips is an award-winning journalist in a career spanning more than 30 years. She lives in Austin.

Merri Su Ruhmann (left) and Jade DeKinder are among the McCombs officials and faculty members who go the extra mile to help M.S. students succeed.

J A D E D E K I N D E R C R E D I T: L AU R E N G E R S O N

classes I missed. I felt bad because I didn’t know how long (COVID) would last.

“I could sit in my living room on the couch and still get on (classes and group activities). …

I honestly felt like I didn’t get behind.”

She accepted an offer from Deloitte, working with its Houston office.

Other benefits, says Aneeque Baqai, 24, who enrolled in the M.S. Marketing program, are the flexible office hours and help sessions professors held on Zoom. Baqai, an international student, graduated from UT Austin’s College of Liberal Arts in 2018.

During the five-week summer session in which students take nine credit hours, Baqai was having trouble working out a certain calculation, coming up with a different answer each time. He was concerned: “If you don’t understand one thing, you fall behind. Then it becomes like the domino effect. You keep falling more behind.”

He emailed his professor, who wasn’t available during day hours. Baqai didn’t expect what happened next. The professor responded, saying, “Let’s jump on a Zoom call at 9:30.” That is 9:30 p.m.

“It was a silly mistake, but the point is, I was able to have a one-on-one with my professor on Zoom,” Baqai says. Straightening out the mistake swiftly made all the difference in staying on track in an “intense five weeks,” he says.

Baqai accepted an offer from H-E-B, working as a quantitative research analyst from Austin.

Robinson also likes that Zoom provides audio and visual transcripts, which students

36 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

COMMUNIT Y

STUDY ABROAD SCHOLARSHIPS GLOBE-TROTTING ENTREPRENEUR HELPS PUT THE BENEFITS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL WITHIN STUDENTS’ REACH

S

tudying abroad as an undergraduate, Sarah Groen, BBA ’05, says what she learned about leadership, allocating scarce resources, and other cultures was so enriching she wants others to have that opportunity.

“These are all great things to learn in college at an age when you're still building so many neural pathways and opening your mind to new ways of thinking and being,” says Groen, founder of Bell and Bly Travel.

To share her passion for expanding one’s education and life experience with travel, Groen recently created a fund that will provide study abroad scholarships for undergraduate students at McCombs.

She caught the travel bug in high school and studied in Vienna and Singapore as a McCombs undergraduate. Now, she’s visited 100 countries and every continent.

After working in investment banking and private equity, and eventually as an executive with Uber, Groen says entrepreneurship beckoned.

She started planning her friends’ bucket-list trips as a side hustle, but in 2018 she left the corporate world and established her travel business to help top executives and business owners make the most of their precious downtime.

Sarah Groen, BBA ’05, created a fund to provide study abroad scholarships for undergraduate students at McCombs. The fund has been endowed to provide travel scholarships in perpetuity.

McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU 37

C O M M U N I T Y: D O N O R N E W S

NEW MBA FELLOWSHIP: A former Texas All-American helps other student-athletes test their limits—academically

“The people who’ve been rock stars and helped me to get where I am today were all MBAs,” says Lee Jamieson, BBA ’88. Jamieson and his wife, Krystyna, established a graduate fellowship at McCombs, specifying that it be awarded to a qualified former Longhorn athlete. This year’s recipient is Bailey Webster (above right), B.S. ’12.

When the pandemic crashed down on the travel industry, Groen was not sure her fledgling business would survive. But thanks to socially distanced travel, Bell and Bly handled 55 excursions and actually increased revenue in 2020.

Now, the company is planning more trips than ever, Groen says.

The scholarship fund is a longtime goal for her and her husband, Alex. “I've always dreamed about helping children or students who don't have the opportunity to travel,” she says. “So, when we had the funds to do so, we made it happen.”

38 McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

The couple have endowed the fund so that it provides travel scholarships in perpetuity, and Groen will contribute $100 in her clients’ names for every successful client referral.

She says the importance of travel for business students cannot be overrated.

“In a different culture, you learn to underst a nd mult iple perspec t ives, so you become more creat ive, more empat hetic, and less likely to think you know it all,” she says. “It makes you a bet ter leader.”

– Judie Kinonen

The new slogan circulating in Longhorn locker rooms, “All Gas, No Breaks,” aptly describes Texas athletes—and it applies doubly to the ones who go on to pursue a Master of Business Administration degree, says Lee Jamieson, BBA ’88.

That’s why Jamieson and his wife, Krystyna, recently established a graduate fellowship at McCombs, specifying that it be awarded to a qualified former student-athlete, if possible.

“The people who’ve been rock stars and helped me to get where I am today were all MBAs,” says Jamieson, who earned an MBA from the University of Southern California after an athletics career at Texas. “I wanted to be able to pass on that legacy.”

This year’s recipient, Bailey Webster, B.S. ’12, was team captain and outside hitter for the Longhorn volleyball team, earning Most Outstanding Player at the 2012 NCAA tournament.

SUMMER 2021 As an All-American swimmer for Texas, Jamieson knows what it takes to compete at that level. “When people tell me they want to be a Division I athlete, I tell them to be careful what you wish for,” Lee says. “It’s a massive sacrifice.

“And if that person also qualifies to get into McCombs’ MBA program—that’s a special person.”

The Jamiesons, whose philanthropy focuses on youth projects and homelessness, have given generously to several scholarships, including a Texas Challenge fund that’s helping 31 UT undergraduate students across campus.

But when they decided to target giving toward McCombs, they wanted to support MBA students, many of whom have already launched their careers and are pausing in order to up their game. “When you get an MBA, often you’re leaving a comfortable life and a great salary,” he says.

That’s the case for scholarship recipient Webster, a senior associate at Dimensional Fund Advisors in Austin, who has worked in financial services for four years.

“When I started working, I committed to learning whatever I needed to best serve clients,” she says. “It’s important to me to push myself to be the best at my craft.”

Jamieson says it’s this kind of discipline required of a Longhorn athlete and an MBA candidate. “Both require hard work and leadership and sacrifice,” he says. “I think that should be rewarded.” – Judie Kinonen TEXAS CHALLENGE: TWICE THE IMPACT The memory of his first Texas friends moves one international alumnus to help future students Memories of a friendship forged more than 50 years ago inspired Chester Liu, MBA ’68, to endow a Texas Challenge scholarship.

Texas Challenge matches new gifts over $100,000, doubling the impact on high-potential McCombs students who come from low- to medium-income families.

“I want students to broaden their horizons, just as I was able to,” Liu says. Born into a family of Chinese immigrants in Taiwan, Liu says he learned early the importance of families helping one another access education for their children.

His own scholarship to UT came from a U.S. chemical company.

Chester Liu, MBA ’68, says his horizons were broadened with the help of Amy and Darrell Jackson who opened their home to him during his time at UT. To help others broaden their horizons, Liu has endowed a Texas Challenge scholarship.

Liu had been in Austin only two weeks when he arrived at his host family’s house and discovered taped to the front door a bag of peanuts and a welcome note from Amy and Darrell Jackson. The Jacksons had volunteered as part of a program to open their home to international students.

Darrell, a retired lawyer turned rancher, and Amy, a retired artist, took Liu on trips, invited him to church services, and engaged him in dialogues on philosophy. Amy even taught him how to drive.

“Their understanding, compassion, and open-mindedness provided us with lots of conversations, without boundaries,” Liu says.

“Amy Jackson had higher expectations of me than my own mother back in Taiwan.”

Liu retired in 2002 as vice president of

systems development for Automatic Data Processing in Jersey City, New Jersey. Looking for a way to instill confidence in future generations of McCombs students, he established an endowed scholarship by directing the required minimum distribution from his IRA to the university.

Many of the scholarship recipients are first-generation college students from South Texas. “When I heard the many stories about the potential of students from the Rio Grande Valley, I wanted to provide the same opportunity to them as was provided to me,” Liu says.

He knows firsthand what a little help from friends can do. – Judie Kinonen For more information on the Texas Challenge, contact wendy.anderson@mccombs.utexas.edu

McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU 39

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 Despite the ongoing pandemic and the continuation of virtual events, the McCombs community had numerous and varied opportunities to learn together and have fun.

Here are some highlights of events held from November through May: 7 4 1

PROFESSOR OF MARKETING RAJ RAGHUNATHAN NOVEMBER 10, 2020 Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C., alumni chapters hosted Raghunathan to discuss career fulfillment and personal happiness.

2

ACADEMICS IN GOVERNMENT NOVEMBER 20, 2020 At this conference designed for academics, the Salem Center for Policy hosted officials and scholars speaking about how they use research skills in their work.

3

BRENÉ BROWN DECEMBER 4, 2020 The author, researcher, and Texas McCombs visiting professor presented “Dare to Lead,” a leadership session for fellows of the Center for Leadership and Ethics.

3

40 McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

SCOTT McCLELLAND, PRESIDENT OF H-E-B DECEMBER 9, 2020

DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION SUMMIT APRIL 14, 2021

Texas McCombs Presents event on “Helping Texans Thrive” explored how the iconic Texas grocery store chain has navigated the pandemic.

Blanca Lesmes, CEO of BB Imaging & Consulting, was among the presenters sharing with students how entrepreneurs from underserved communities launch ventures and find support.

5

8

EXPLORING TRADE-OFFS IN THE TEXAS ENERGY SYSTEM MARCH 1, 2021

TEXAS SOCIAL INNOVATION CHALLENGE: THE LIVE PITCHES! APRIL 24-25, 2021

The Salem Center for Policy and the McCombs Energy Initiative co-hosted industry leaders and faculty members who discussed the Texas energy system, the state’s regulatory approach, and ways to reduce future outages.

Sponsored by Bumble, this workshop series culminated in a pitch competition with an opportunity to win $10,000 in seed funding.

6

MARKETING EXCELLENCE: A NEW PLAYBOOK FOR MARKETING APRIL 8, 2021 Assistant Professor of Marketing Sebastian Hohenberg led an alumni “Knowledge To Go” webinar.

4

9

ROBERT KAPLAN OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF DALLAS MAY 14, 2021 Texas McCombs Presents event “Moving Forward” explored the economy and assessed the pandemic’s impact in a conversation between the Federal Reserve Bank president and CEO and Dean Lillian Mills.

9

KEEPING TEXAS ON TOP University of Texas at Austin alumni Richard and Lois Folger manage successful careers in business and energy, and they believe their degrees from a world-class university helped open doors for them. They are committed to keeping Texas on top and together created an endowed chair for the McCombs School of Business — and a planned gift to support it for generations.

By making a gift to Texas McCombs through your will, trust, estate plan — or even your IRA — you too can shape the future of business education and help UT students and faculty reach their full potential.

Every gift counts, so make your plans to change the world today.

To learn more, visit mylegacy.utexas.edu/mccombs or email giftplan@austin.utexas.edu.

One of our goals is to provide permanent resources to recruit top faculty to McCombs.

Designating UT as the beneficiary of our retirement accounts was a simple and tax-efficient way to help the university we love stay on top.”

RICHARD AND LOIS FOLGER

C O M M U N I T Y: U P C L O S E flavors. By December, Ranch Rider was the No. 1 selling, ready-made spirit brand in Texas, outpacing competitors with massive marketing budgets.

“Our investors were thrilled,” Murphy says.

The company recently took another big step by hiring as CEO former Deep Eddy Vodka President John Scarborough, MBA ’04. It has expanded business to eight new states and plans to sell to 10,000 retail outlets by the end of this year.

That two successful businesses spawned from one night of brewskie-fueled brainstorming doesn’t surprise Murphy. “We went back to business school so we could build a great brand that could move quickly,” he says, noting that he and Cantu sold Ranch Hand in 2020. Now they have their hands full expanding Ranch Rider Spirits across the country. —Gretchen Sanders

Brian Murphy and Quentin Cantu, both MBA ’18, launched Ranch Hand, a meal delivery service, in 2017. A few years later, interest in their cocktails led to a second venture, Ranch Rider Spirits. They sold Ranch Hand in 2020.

HEEDING A CALL FOR LIBATIONS y Q UENTIN CANTU AND BRIAN

MURPHY, BOTH MBA ’18, FOUNDERS, RANCH RIDER SPIRITS

R

elaxing over beers one night in Austin backin 2016, two McCombs MBA students hatched a novel business idea.

Brian Murphy and Quentin Cantu were lamenting the dearth of healthy lunch options on the UT campus, especiallythe hearty salads they could find easilyin New York City and Washington D.C. “We thought it would be fun to make our own healthier food concept, do it alongside our business school classes, and serve those meals to our classmates,” says Murphy, a native upstate New Yorker who met Cantu during his first week at McCombs. “We wanted to solve a problem close to us.”

They launched Ranch Hand, a meal delivery service and eventual food truck, in early 2017, using proceeds from pitch competitions, start-up

42 McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

incubators, and angel investors. McCombs students, staff, and alumni also backed the venture, which featured ingredients from Texas ranches and a nutritious menu. Hungry Longhorns went wild over protein bowls stuffed with chimichurri-topped Akaushi sirloin, grilled kale, sweet potatoes, avocado, and roasted pumpkin seeds.

Soon, Ranch Hand fans wanted libations to wash down the Texas beef.

In 2019 Murphy and Cantu began testing cocktail recipes on their customers. Reposado tequila mixed with sparkling water and freshsqueezed lime juice produced liquid gold. When one patron suggested they can the concoctions and sell them in stores, lightning struck.

“We realized we could continue investing in the food business and open brick-and-mortar restaurants, or we could pivot and create a product that could sell to thousands of retailers,” Murphy says. Their audience was adults who wanted natural beverages that contained premium spirits over the malt liquor found in White Claw or Truly hard seltzers and that had a local brand story. Blistering real estate prices for restaurant space sealed the path forward.

Ranch Rider Spirits hit Austin shelves in January 2020. The bubbly brews crossed ready-todrink cocktails with hard seltzers in three canned

HELPING WOMEN ASCEND y M ELBA TELLEZ, M.S. ’18,

FOUNDER, MUJERES ON THE RISE

Melba Tellez dropped out of high school when she was 16. Today, she’s a marketing manager at Amazon. Her unconventional career path is inspiring women worldwide.

Tellez grew up bouncing between San Antonio and Monterrey, Mexico, in the 1990s. When money got tight in her single-parent household, Tellez went to work instead of class. “College felt out of reach,” she remembers.

By age 19, Tellez had seen ambitious women thriving around her. She wanted what they had: an education. While working full time at AT&T and then Citibank, she earned a GED diploma in 2012, a bachelor’s degree in communications from Texas A&M University-San Antonio in 2017, and a master’s degree in marketing from McCombs in 2018.

“I felt behind when I went back to school and had to play catch-up,” she says. “As a first-generation college student, I made mistakes and figured it out as I went.”

That lonely journey prompted Tellez to start Mujeres on the Rise in 2019. The online platform connects Hispanic women with resources and tools to grow their careers. Services include

LIFE SAVING MESSAGES y T ERRY PENCE, BBA ’77, RETIRED

DIRECTOR, TxDOT'S BEHAVIORAL TRAFFIC SAFET Y SECTION

Melba Tellez, M.S. ’18, started Mujeres on the Rise, an online platform that connects Hispanic women with resources and tools to grow their careers.

résumé consultation, career coaching, and access to a community of professional women who can mentor aspiring Latinas.

“Mujeres on the Rise is my way of giving back by providing information I wish had existed when I was starting my education,” Tellez says.

Latinas tend to be underserved and underrepresented in academics and the workplace; they need encouragement from successful professionals who look like them, she says. “We help them overcome feelings of inadequacy, imposter syndrome, and fear of failure,” Tellez says. She donates up to 20% of proceeds from her virtual résumé courses and coaching sessions to nonprofits that support women, such as Latinitas in Austin, which helps girls develop media and technology skills.

Since starting Mujeres on the Rise, Tellez has mentored women across the globe. They want help strategizing career moves or negotiating higher salaries. One recent client secured a new post earning $10,000 more than she made previously. When a stay-at-home mom applied for a corporate job, Tellez helped her prepare for the interview. Most clients are in the early to middle stages of their careers and want to reach the next level. Tellez makes time for them despite her full-time position at Amazon.

“If Mujeres on the Rise makes a difference to one person, then that’s enough for me,” she says. —Gretchen Sanders

For decades, Terry Pence’s job was to protect Texans on the roadways and think about their safety, even when they were not.

Pence met that challenge by developing and managing public awareness campaigns.

“We’re working to change people’s behaviors—whether it’s to not drink and drive, to buckle up, to not drive distracted, or to wear proper gear when riding a bicycle or motorcycle,” Pence says.

As director of the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) Behavioral Traffic Safety Section since 2004, he also promoted safe walking. That means being alert when crossing the street, not keeping eyes glued to a phone.

On May 31, Pence retired a few months shy of 40 years with the agency. He oversaw a budget of $85 million and a team of 47 employees spread across 25 district offices. His most notable

campaigns include Drink, Drive, Go to Jail; Click It or Ticket; and the Faces of Drunk Driving.

“We know we saved over 6,000 lives with the Click It or Ticket campaign that started in Texas in 2002,” he says. Back then, just 76.1% of Texans buckled up; by 2019, 90.99% did, he says.

Pence’s TxDOT career began in 1981 as a traffic safety program manager overseeing grants, many focused on behavioral change. After his UT graduation with a business degree in management, he worked in restaurant management before joining TxDOT. Pence’s dedication is clear, but his life isn’t all work and no play. In fact, he has played tenor saxophone since sixth grade. He performed with the Longhorn Band, and since his first year of college, he has played sax with the Nash Hernandez Orchestra. The orchestra performs monthly at Donn’s Depot in Austin and at private events.

“I started playing with them and loved it and played with them through college,” Pence says.

“When the pandemic started, we went 14 months not being able to perform. That was really tough.”

Despite being retired, Pence says he’ll continue consulting with state and national highway safety efforts. “I just love what I’ve been able to do.” – Sharon Jayson

After nearly 40 years with the Texas Department of Transportation, Terry Pence, BBA ’77, retired May 31. As director of the department’s Behavioral Traffic Safety Section, he oversaw campaigns including Click It or Ticket.

McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU 43

No Solutions, Only Trade-Offs The Salem Center works with students, policy makers, and business leaders to advance the use of data science in public policy research and practice.

Our mission is to help students of all ages appreciate the difficulties of designing, enacting, and measuring the effects and trade-offs of policy interventions.

Visit our website to access our most recent events, podcasts, student opportunities, research initiatives, and blog posts.

salemcenter.org

44 Mc COMBS.UTEXAS.EDU

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 for publication in the next issue of McCombs magazine and online in the alumni news section of the McCombs website. Feel free to share news on behalf of a fellow graduate.

1970s Donald L. Evans, MBA ’73,

director of debt capital markets for Revelstoke Capital Partners.

Lipshutz has more than 37 years of experience in private equity investments and corporate lending.

Bianca Martinez Rhodes, BBA ’81, was elected to the board of directors of Lawson Products, a distributor of products and services in the MRO (maintenance repair organizations) marketplace. Rhodes is the president and CEO of Knight Aerospace Medical Systems.

was appointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ El Paso Branch board of directors.

Evans is the chairman of the Permian Strategic Partnership and was the 34th U.S. secretary of commerce under President George W. Bush.

Marc Delesalle, MBA ’82, co-authored an article on the Thrive Global website about ways consumers can assess a company’s cybersecurity strategy to guard consumer data. Delesalle is the director of investments at SVK Crypto.

Michel Accad, MBA ’78, was

Jim Richter, BBA ’82, joined the board of directors for the Produce Marketing Association. Richter is the president and CEO of Amerifresh, a business unit of U.S. Foods and a shipper, marketer, and sourcing company for food service, retail, and wholesale customers in North America.

appointed to lead the executive management team at Bankmed.

He has over 30 years of experience in the financial services sector and has held leadership positions at multiple regional and international banks.

1980s Antonio Garza, BBA ’80, was recently named to the board of directors at Tricolor, a used-vehicle retailer and lender. Garza is counsel to White and Case LLP in Mexico City and is a director and adviser to publicly and privately held companies.

He is a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and was a Texas secretary of state.

Howard Lipshutz, BBA ’81, was promoted to managing

SUMMER 2021

Jay Reed, BBA ’84, was named vice president of information technology for Capital Senior Living, which operates 100 residential communities in 22 states. Reed previously led IT operations in the hospitality, real estate, and restaurant industries.

Chris Goodwin, BBA ’85, was named managing director for Star Mountain Capital and opened Star Mountain's Dallas office. Goodwin has more than

Susan Dawson, MBA ’90, was named Austinite of the Year for 2020 by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. Dawson is the president and founder of E3 Alliance, a regional collaborative that works to increase educational equality.

30 years of experience in finance, investing, and operations.

nental Airlines, and Delta Air Lines.

Pam Friedman, BBA ’87, MBA ’90, joined the board of directors for the Association of Divorce Financial Planners.

Friedman is a wealth manager at Robertson Stephens and has specialized in divorce financial planning for the past decade.

Michael Brown, BBA ’93, was named senior vice president for PlainsCapital Bank's downtown Austin lending group. Brown has more than 30 years of experience in banking and previously managed loan and deposit portfolios at Texas Capital Bank.

1990s Michelle McKinney Frymire, MBA ’91, was promoted to president of strategy and transformation and chief financial officer at CWT business travel management. Frymire previously held financial leadership posts at Starwood Vacation Ownership, Conti-

Sukumar Rathnam, Ph.D. ’93, was named the chief technology officer at Uber. He previously worked at Amazon for nine years and has held leadership roles at Microsoft, PeopleSoft, and Oracle. At McCombs, he worked with faculty members Vijay Mahajan and Andy Whinston on a disserta-

M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 45

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

Judson Kauffman, MBA ’18, Ryan Campbell, MBA ’17, and Brent Looby, MBA ’17, were featured in Spirited magazine for a new line of alcoholic beverage products focused on land, water, and wildlife conservation. They are the founders of Desert Door Texas Sotol, the only U.S. producer of sotol.

tion that received the American Marketing Association's John A. Howard Award in 1994.

Christopher Bray, BBA ’94, MBA ’94, was selected as chief revenue officer for Aura, a digital security provider. Bray previously served as senior vice president and general manager of consumer and small business at Cylance, an antivirus software company.

Phil Bienert, MBA ’95, was promoted to president of 1-800 Contacts, an online contact lens business. Bienert was chief marketing officer at the company, a role he will maintain.

Mark Madrid, BBA ’95, will join the Biden administration as associate administrator for the Office of Entrepreneurial Development at the Small Business Administration. Madrid

46 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

was CEO of the Latino Business Action Network.

Paul Cavazos, MBA ’96, was appointed chair of the Committee on Investment of Employee Benefit Assets (CIEBA), an organization of corporate investment officers. Cavazos has held leadership positions with CIEBA for 15 years and is chief investment officer of American Beacon Advisors.

Emil Sayegh, MSTC ’96, was interviewed by Authority Magazine for a story titled “5 Things You Need To Know To Optimize Your Company’s Approach to Data Privacy and Cybersecurity.” Sayegh is a cybersecurity expert and president and CEO of Ntirety, a cloud service platform.

Chirag Shah, BBA ’97, MBA ’06, joined the Alaska Perma-

Jose Murillo, BBA ’97, MPA ’97, was appointed deputy assistant secretary for international tax affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Office of Tax Policy. Murillo served at the Treasury Department in two previous administrations and was most recently a partner at Ernst & Young LLP, where he was director of international tax and transaction services.

Emily Reagan, MBA ’99, was promoted to vice president and chief marketing and communications officer of The University of Texas at Austin. Reagan was previously the chief marketing officer at Texas McCombs for more than two years and before that was a senior vice president at Bazaarvoice.

Lane Walker, BBA ’99, was appointed CEO of The Flexitallic Group, which creates sealing products and solutions for the energy industry. Walker was president of the energy group at CIRCOR International, a flow control products and services provider.

Steven Weber, BBA ’99, MPA ’99, was appointed principal accounting officer of Aeglea BioTherapeutics. He has more than 20 years of experience in finance and was Aeglea’s vice president and corporate controller.

2000s Ryan Stash, BBA ’00, MPA ’00, MBA ’07, was appointed CFO of Evolution Petroleum Corp. Stash was vice president and CFO of Harvest Oil & Gas Corp.

Jessica Griffith, BBA ’01, wrote a commentary for the San Antonio Express-News about her experience as a Bexar County elections clerk.

Brent Worthy, BBA ’01, joined BDO USA's Business Restructuring and Turnaround Services practice. BDO provides restructuring advisory and professional services to U.S. middle-market companies. In his role, Worthy will cover regional markets in the Southwest.

Srivatsan Iyer, MBA ’04, was appointed global CEO of Hero Future Energies, the renewable energy arm of the Hero Group. Iyer was a vice president at Braskem, a petrochemical company.

Vanessa Perez, BBA ’04, was elected to the Laredo City Council, representing District 7.

David Kuhlken, MBA ’05, was featured in an article in Texas Lifestyle & Travel Magazine about Pedernales Cellars, a boutique winery he co-founded with his sister, Julie. Pedernales Cellars began with their parents, who started Kuhlken Vineyards in the 1990s.

Kellen Stailey Martin, BBA ’05, was named vice president of marketing for Hazel Technologies, a USDA-supported

K AU F F M A N , CA M P B E L L A N D LO O BY I M AG E C R E D I T: J O H N DAV I D S O N

nent Fund Corporation as a senior portfolio manager. Shah is also the Vertical Initiatives co-chair for New York for McCombs and a member of the Hicks Muse Tate Furst Center Advisory Council.

SUMMER 2021 technology company delivering new solutions for fresh produce. She has more than 15 years of experience in the produce industry.

Sean Scott, MBA ’05, was hired as the first chief product officer for PagerDuty, a global leader in digital operations management. Scott was vice president of shopping experience technology at Amazon.

Josh Bank, BBA ’06, was appointed managing director and market leader of Miami business for real estate company CBRE. He also leads CBRE’s Global Law Firm Practice Group and most recently served as managing director of the company’s advisory and transaction services business.

Charles N. York II, MBA ’06, was appointed chief operating and financial officer of Day One Biopharmaceuticals. York was CFO and head of corporate development at Aeglea BioTherapeutics.

Ishmael Cooper, MBA ’07, was appointed CIO for Nordson, which engineers and manufactures products for industrial use in a variety of markets including energy, medical, construction, and transportation. He brings more than 20 years of business technology leadership experience to the role.

Tyler Day, BBA ’08, was appointed partner of Creation Investments Capital Management LLC. Day has been with Creation since 2011 and was a director at the company.

Lanaya Irvin, MBA ’08, was named CEO of Coqual (formerly the Center for Talent Innovation), a 17-year-old nonprofit think tank that studies diversity, equity, and inclusion and advises many of the world's largest corporations. Irvin was Coqual’s president.

2010s Hanley Sayers, MBA ’10, was hired as a partner, managing director, and wealth adviser for Cresset Asset Management. He was a vice president at Goldman Sachs.

Amanda Hill, MBA ’12, was interviewed by Thrive Global for a series about leading businesses in difficult times. Hill’s interview also appeared in Authority Magazine. She is the CEO of Three Box Strategic Communications.

Jayanth Rangaraju, MBA ’15, has been named a systems manager at Texas Instruments.

His work will be focused on renewable energy. He has worked in various roles at TI, including design engineer, applications and systems manager, and marketing manager.

Mary “MJ” Hegar, MBA ’16, won the 2020 Texas Democratic primary and challenged U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the general election. She is a senior manager and consultant at Deloitte. A combat veteran, she received the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor.

David J. Kim, BBA ’16, MBA ’22, opened Boba Republic, a

Mezuo O’Kehie, BBA ’18, was featured in the Thisis50 blog, where he discussed his work as a rapper, producer, and screenwriter. He recently released his debut music video for his song “30.”

milk tea café in Dallas, during the pandemic. Kim owns several other businesses and was vice president of Jumping World, an entertainment company.

Corey Mazza, MBA ’16, was recruited as part of a seven-person team for UBS Private Wealth Management. Mazza previously worked in private wealth management at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

Blake Harlan, MBA ’17, was promoted to president of biotechnology company Pure Protein LLC and its subsidiary, Pure Transplant Solutions LLC. Harlan will oversee the launch of Pure Transplant Solutions clinical diagnostics and transplant monitoring programs.

Judson Kauffman, MBA ’18, Ryan Campbell, MBA ’17, and Brent Looby, MBA ’17, were featured in Spirited magazine

for a new line of alcoholic beverage products focused on land, water, and wildlife conservation. They are the founders of Desert Door Texas Sotol, the only U.S. producer of sotol.

Cliffe Killam II, MBA ’19, president of Killam Oil, was selected for "Forty Under 40" by Oil and Gas Investor magazine for transforming his family’s 100-year-old company into an innovative, efficient organization. Killam also chairs the board of Laredo's Chamber of Commerce.

Beth Winters, MBA ’19, was interviewed by Authority Magazine for a story about how businesses should store and protect customer information.

Winters is a licensed attorney, data privacy expert, and solution marketing manager with Aparavi, a cloud-based data intelligence platform.

M c C O M B S . U T E X A S . E D U 47

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

TOMORROW’S LEADERS IN A NEW BOOK, PAUL SHOEMAKER, MBA ’85, IDENTIFIES 5 KEY TRAITS NEEDED FOR CHANGING TIMES

By Mary Ann Roser

W

H E N H E WA S W O R K I N G O N A N M B A AT M c C O M B S DURING

the mid-1980s, Paul Shoemaker became fascinated by the traits that define leaders.

A Methodist minister’s son, he had witnessed leadership at church and in the Iowa community where he grew up, but until he went to McCombs, he had not thought deeply about business leadership. As he studied what makes companies tick, he realized, “At the heart of all that stuff is leadership.”

Now he has written a book, Taking Charge of Change: How Rebuilders Solve Hard Problems (Harper Collins Leadership). In it, he describes five essential traits of new leaders, whether in business, nonprofits, or government. Those characteristics are having authenticity, 24/7; great capacity for handling complexity; a mindset of generosity; a passion for data and interpreting it accurately; and an understanding of how the public, private, and nonprofit sectors work, which he calls “cross-sector fluency.”

Shoemaker includes profiles of 38 leaders, including UT alumni Madge Vásquez, CEO of Mission Capital in Austin, and Suzi Sosa, co-founder and CEO of Verb Inc. in Austin.

Shoemaker, who lives in Seattle, is the founding president of Social Venture Partners International, a global organization of philanthropists, business leaders, and innovators who make grants to strengthen nonprofits.

He left in 2015 to pursue consulting and recently spoke about his book during a virtual McCombs Social Innovation Initiative talk and in this interview with McCombs magazine. His responses have been edited and condensed.

Paul Shoemaker hopes readers of his book will use it to reflect on and inform the kind of leader they need to be.

D ID YO U R TIM E AT M c CO M B S IN FLU E N CE TH E FIV E TR AITS YO U D E SCRIB E ?

McCombs was the first time I was in an environment with teachers and classmates who thought about the world at a higher level and in a different way than what I was used to. UT Austin and the business school taught me how to think about business and opened my eyes to what leadership is about. It definitely informed my initial thinking. You meet leaders and the first decision you make is: Does this person have integrity, honesty, and authenticity? That’s always been the lens I see stuff through.

YO U R BO O K TALKS ABO U T “ WO RK WITH A PU RP OSE ,” SO M E THIN G MILLEN NIAL S AND GEN Z WANT. DON'T NEW LE ADERS HAVE TO RESPOND TO THEM?

What you say is absolutely true. 2020 shifted a lot of companies, and I don’t think it's ephemeral. Companies have had to step up in a whole new, different way, and they’re not just doing it out of social responsibility.

They're doing it because their millennials and Gen Zs are telling them, “If you don’t do it, I’m out of here.” Half the talent pool is gone if they don’t see a sense of purpose in your company.

WHY DO WE NEED A NEW KIND OF LEADER?

The book isn’t trying to say that every leadership model is broken, but those five traits—in my two years of working on this—are vital for the challenges of this decade. Those challenges are a siloed, divided America; technology and hypermedia that separate us in so many ways; the three sectors (public, private, and nonprofit) blurring together; and the range and complexity of problems we face. Each of those challenges translates into a trait, and if we don’t have leaders who have those traits, America is not going to be fully prepared for the challenges in the decade ahead.

YO U M ENTIO N ED YO U R BO O K WAS D O N E IN FEBRUARY 2020 AN D TH EN TH E PANDEMIC HIT. HOW DIFFERENT IS THIS REVISED BOOK FROM THE ORIGINAL?

The five traits didn’t change, but what 2020 did was sharpen my focus.

It made me think more clearly and specifically about why I thought what I did. It changed who I chose to highlight in the book. I went from a book that I thought about writing, that I wanted to write, to one I felt compelled to write.

WHICH TRAIT HAS BEEN MOST IMPORTANT FOR MEETING THE PANDEMIC’S

M E R R I L L I M AG E S

D O YO U C O N S I D E R R A N K-A N D - F I L E W O R K E R S A S L E A D E R S ?

CHALLENGES?

Yes, that’s really one of the planks of the book. The 38 folks I profile, some of them are CEOs, but some of them are in the middle layers of an organization and some are just people out in the community. We need more leaders with those five traits who don’t have a title, didn’t go to business school, don’t look like me, and are at all levels of communities, companies, and organizations. That diversity is so critical.

Generosity mindset and complexity capacity. We have not faced a decade this complex in 60 to 80 years. I’m really confident of that. So,the ability to understand that, communicate it, and know what to do about it has become way more important in the past year. And we need people with generous mindsets in the years ahead, or the fractures are going to just keep getting worse.

48 M c C O M B S .U T E X A S . E D U

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TEXAS McCOMBS TEXAS McCOMBS HOMECOMING WEEKEND HOMECOMING WEEKEND

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REUNION REUNION

SAVE THE DATE SAVE THE DATE Join us for Homecoming Join us foron Homecoming Weekend September 17-18 — Weekend on September 17-18 — a full-day business conference a full-day business conference with outstanding McCombs with outstanding McCombs faculty, a BBQ tailgate before faculty, a BBQ tailgate the home football gamebefore against the home footballreceptions game against Rice, and special for Rice, and special receptions for five-year class reunions (classes five-year reunions (classes of ’16, ’11,class ’06, etc.). of ’16, ’11, ’06, etc.).

Reconnect with your classmates, Reconnect with youralumni, classmates, network with fellow and network with fellow alumni, get back into the classroom!and get back into the classroom!

Watch for more information. bit.ly/TexasMcCombsHomecoming Watch for more information. bit.ly/TexasMcCombsHomecoming