USC Marshall Recognizes Alumni Success, and More – Los Angeles News
We’ve rounded up the top stories coming out of business schools in the Los Angeles metro this week.
Marshall Represents! – USC Marshall Newsroom
Graduates from the Marshall School of Business at USC have reason to celebrate this week, with the release of the Los Angeles Business Journal’s feature, “20 in their 20s,” which heavily features USC Marshall alumni. Nearly half of the list (9 out of 20) have ties to USC Marshall, and several used the feature to call out their most inspiring faculty mentors from the university, such as assistant and associate professors of clinical entrepreneurship, Tommy Knap and Greg Autry.
The list profiles young entrepreneurs already making an impact in their community, though the nature of their work can run the gamut. The organizations and products these entrepreneurs represent include real estate, fitness gear, home furnishings, and more. Laura Hertz, who encountered challenges throughout her career as a result of both age and gender, turned a Marshall class project into an agent for real change with her business gifting company, Gifts for Good.
“I tell [investors] that some of the most disruptive founders in history have been people in their ’20s with no industry knowledge—think Amazon, Airbnb, Uber,” Hertz commented.
Read more about the young Marshall entrepreneurs making an impact here.
Chapman Hosts First Shadow Open Market Committee Conference Towards the West Coast – Chapman University Newsroom
This summer, the Argyros School of Business at Chapman University served as host of the first-ever West Coast conference for the Shadow Open Market Committee. Created in 1973, the SOMC has met annually to discuss issues surrounding the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee. For the past 45 years, this conference has gathered distinguished monetary economists from both academia and private institutions in New York or Washington DC. This summer, the organization chose Chapman University as the location for its West Coast debut.
“They are very busy people and famous in the economics and finance world so we are very honored that the SOMC chose Chapman for their first meeting outside of the East Coast,” commented Argyros professor and conference organizer Marc Weidenmier. This year’s conference theme was “The Fed’s Return to Normalcy.”
You can read more about the SOMC conference at Chapman University here.
Their Future is Our Business – UCLA Magazine
This week, UCLA Magazine celebrates the Riordan Programs, now in their 31st year at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Beginning in the early 1980s, the Riordan Programs emerged as a way to counter the unrest plaguing the South Los Angeles Area. Now-retired Anderson professor, William Ouchi, believed that getting more people of color involved in business could help inspire a new professional workforce that had the needs of diverse communities in mind. With the help of philanthropist and eventual mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, Ouchi put his ideas into motion.
The program offers students from low-income backgrounds resources such as college preparation, career guidance and mentorship. Certain programs even help prepare first-generation college students to apply to MBA programs. For students like Denise Gonzalez-Kim, the program opened opportunities that might have never been available otherwise. “I know that my life could have gone a very different way,” she commented on her childhood in South Los Angeles. Today, Gonzalez-Kim is pursuing her MBA at Anderson, after graduating in 2008 with her B.A.
Read more about the Riordan Programs at UCLA Anderson here.
LA Small Business Growth, UCLA Time Management Advice, and More
Take a look at some of the top stories coming out of the Los Angeles business schools this week.
The Growing Role of the CIO – Wall Street Journal
Vijay Gurbaxani, professor of business and computer science at the the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, recently sat down with Ben Fried, CIO at Google Inc., and the Wall Street Journal for a conversation on the changing role of the CIO in today’s companies. The conversation was led by Nikki Waller, WSJ bureau chief.
Gurbaxani discussed changing technology and its impact on business, particularly the importance of cultivating talent in machine learning. For companies to stay current and competitive, he says, they must perfect the art of gathering data and putting it to good use.
“If you fall behind your competitors in developing this new know-how and leveraging, you’re going to fall further and further behind,” Gurbaxani said. “So my message to you would be get out there in a hurry.”
To read more excerpts from the interview, click here.
Study: L.A.’s Small Businesses Optimistic About Growth – Los Angeles Business Journal
A recent survey, conducted by 1st Century Bank in a partnership with Beacon Economics, has showed positive signs for LA small business growth, which is projected to continue through the end of the summer.
The study, which surveyed 150 small businesses in 30 core industries, reported a number of findings that offer hope and a positive outlook for small business owners in Los Angeles. About 78 percent of businesses reported that they expected to see an increase in market demand, while 54 percent witnessed an increase in profit margins over the past six months. Nearly 56 percent of the businesses reported a boost in sales during that same period, and over 70 percent expected to see further increase during the next six months.
More than 70 percent of small business owners in LA are expecting even more growth within the next six month.
According to Beacon Economics research director Adam Fowler, small businesses are a crucial part of the Los Angeles economy and throughout the nation.
“If we don’t understand small-business sentiment,” he comments, “we can’t know the direction this important sector will be heading in … nor can we improve conditions for their success.”
Click here to learn more about the LA small business growth research and look at the complete report here.
Time Management for Startups: Entrepreneurs Act as if Future Hours Aren’t Worth Much – UCLA Anderson Review
While larger companies have become increasingly aware about the importance of time management in a hyper efficient work environment, the same may not be true for entrepreneurs. Upstarts in the business world are as notorious for breaking certain conventions as they are for cutting their teeth, putting in triple-digit hour work weeks to build companies from scratch. And the reason being, says UCLA Anderson‘s Charles J. Corbett, is that there isn’t enough research quite yet.
“I realized there wasn’t much out there,” Corbett said in a UCLA Anderson Review interview. “A lot of the issues that entrepreneurs face don’t come up in our core management studies.”
Alongside fellow UCLA Anderson and INSEAD professor Guillaume Roels, and University College London’s Onesun Steve Yoo, Corbett found that entrepreneurs have to think of time management in the terms of their future, rather than today. And the trick is to understand “net present value (NPV).”
“But, according to Corbett, Roels and Yoo, people, including entrepreneurs, aren’t very good at thinking about their time in the same way. When people think about the value of their time, they tend to think about its current value, today, and not the future ramifications of having that time today. Correctly anticipating those dynamics, ‘NPV thinking’ is particularly important for entrepreneurs with the ambition to grow their business.”
You can read more from the trio’s time management research here.
