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The HBS Show Must Go On: STARt-up WARS Continues Tradition of Smash Hits
Harbus Foundation Supports Community Projects
HBS Community Reaches Out
HBS Business Plan Contestants Pin Their Hopes on the Internet
Of Dugouts and Sweatshops: Robert Reich Urges MBAs to Keep "Public Ethics" in Mind
Professors Fox, Mace Remembered

So began the legend of STARt-up WARS Episode One: The Venture Menace, this year's HBS Show, held in early April before capacity crowds in Burden Auditorium.

Spoofing the Star Wars films, STARt-up WARS poked fun at the "growing divide" between students pursuing dot-com millions and those seeking more traditional careers.

The cast of more than one hundred actors, singers, dancers, and musicians found plenty of material in the technology and Internet revolution, with songs such as "La Vida Nokia" and "The Heat Is in Dot-Com." Sprinkled throughout the three-hour production were 22 video segments, including one called "The Get Rich Project," a parody of The Blair Witch Project.

"It was a huge undertaking," said Anthony S. Marino (MBA '00), the show's producer. "It was on the scale of an off-Broadway production. There were lots of moving parts." Marino and director Shannon Kete (MBA '00) worked tirelessly on the show, often spending as much time on the production as on their studies.

Transforming the staid Burden Auditorium into a theatrical venue has often been half the battle for the show's producers. Marino brought in scaffolding to build light and sound towers for the high-tech show and bolts of black fabric to create a backstage area for the cast.

"This was only the third truly multimedia show that has been held in Burden," Marino said. "Ever year it gets more complex. It's sort of like running the new high-speed Acela trains on the old tracks. But we did it."

STARt-up WARS was the 27th HBS Show. The first was produced in 1974, when a student named Joseph R. Parrish (MBA '74) decided to stage a show in the tradition of Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals and the Law School's Review, as an antidote to the stresses of student life. The show, called Cheap Gas, featured sixteen skits and popular songs with humorously altered lyrics in a satirical look at HBS life. The organizers borrowed money to produce the show, which ran for two nights in Baker 100. A sell-out hit, the HBS Show has since become an annual tradition.

Indeed, the show has grown into a major enterprise. According to Marino, the operating budget for the 2000 production went "well into the six-figure range." Half of that money came from sponsors, the rest from ticket sales.

"This is my Hoover Dam," said Marino. "It is not a small show. Planning for the next one starts the day after the current show ends. It takes the whole year to make it happen.

"More than 10 percent of the B-School is somehow tied to the show," he continued. "It's an incredible organization. We had people here every night for weeks preparing and rehearsing, with dancers in one corner, actors in another, people going over scripts, and others working on sets. Even the spouses of the cast and crew helped. This is one event on campus that draws the entire HBS community together. It's easy to get hooked."

Marino drew many comparisons between the show's production work and the basic business concepts that he has learned at HBS. "There's the classic tension of product development versus delivering a final product. We'd come up with lots of ideas for the production, but at some point you have to stop developing and put the deliverables out there. Our challenge was to create a dazzling spectacle on time and within budget," he said, adding, "I even had a professor suggest that a case be written on it."

- Margie Kelley

Harbus Foundation Supports Community Projects

Miguel, a junior at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, is eager to tell others about the civil rights tour he took last summer in the South. He and fellow students involved in the Bill of Rights Education Project will be able to share their stories thanks to funding from The Harbus Foundation, an HBS student organization that awards grants to small, community-based groups in the Boston area.

"The trip really got me thinking," Miguel told a group of grant recipients gathered in April for an awards ceremony. "It was an inspiration listening to stories about the civil rights movement." Miguel has written about his experience for Rising Times, a student newspaper and one of the eleven projects that The Harbus Foundation will fund this year. Other Foundation grant recipients in 2000 include an African studies curriculum at the Boston Arts Academy, an afterschool program at the Hyde Square Task Force, and in-class libraries for early readers at the Winship Elementary School in Brighton.

The Harbus Foundation was formed in 1997, using surplus funds generated from the HBS student newspaper, the Harbus, as a mechanism to give back to the local community and to give HBS students a vehicle for learning about constructive philanthropy. "The same spirit that makes Harvard Business School students successful business leaders is also alive in the Foundation," says Trustee Daniel F. Curran (MBA '00). "Students use their skills in analysis, operations, and marketing to select promising organizations from among grant proposals."

The Foundation consists of four student trustees, a faculty advisor, and fifteen HBS students who volunteer to read grant applications. It has now awarded close to $250,000 in grants to more than a dozen organizations. Typical grants are between $3,000 and $10,000, and all the projects funded are related to journalism, literacy, or education.

HBS Community Reaches Out The School's longtime commitment to public service was once again demonstrated at this year's annual Project Outreach. On Saturday, March 25, more than four hundred HBS students, partners, faculty, and staff volunteered to perform community activities in the Greater Boston area. Working at twelve sites, participants took part in myriad projects that included painting at Allston's Gardner Elementary School and landscaping at Cambridge's Center for Sustainable Building. Volunteer Catriona Fallon (HBS '01) worked at Boston Senior Home Care. "It was both rewarding and eye-opening to see the impact that five hours of work could have on the lives of senior citizens," she said. "Project Outreach and other volunteer activities put my work at HBS into perspective."
			One MBA section cleaned and waxed an entire fleet of vans from SCm Community Transportation, a Somerville company that provides transportation for the elderly. All photos courtesy Project Outreach.
Kensuke Tojima (MBA '00) gets a little help landscaping Cambridge's Jefferson Park	Volunteers prepare to start their day painting at the Second Step Transitional Living Center, a home for battered women and their children, in Newton.

HBS Business Plan Contestants Pin Their Hopes on the Internet

The HBS entrepreneurial spirit was evident on May 1, when nearly nine hundred students and guests jammed into Burden Auditorium for the finals of the School's fourth annual Business Plan Contest. The winning entry, Bang Networks, provides Internet companies with a new kind of infrastructure network that "will revolutionize the Web," according to the start-up's four founders, Robert Rosin, Sarah Boatman, Robert Dreyer (all MBA '00), and Tim Tuttle, an MIT Ph.D.

The first-place team received the Dubilier Prize -- established in honor of the late Martin Dubilier (MBA '52), cofounder of the prominent LBO firm of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice -- as well as $10,000 in cash and in-kind professional services worth $10,000. The judges for the final competition included a number of HBS graduates and represented an array of top venture capital firms.

The three runner-up teams will also share awards in cash and in-kind services. They are KNUMI, which is developing technology to enable "media content providers to create a highly interactive experience for end-users"; Sound MicroSystems, which is commercializing technology for the development of a silicon microphone; and 3Plex.com, a B2B enterprise that has already garnered $16 million in funding to link shipping companies with suppliers via the Internet.

More than one hundred teams involving over three hundred students initially entered the competition. Some 95 percent of the submitted plans represented dot-com ventures. "The extraordinary level of participation and accomplishment in the Business Plan Contest reflects the fact that student interest in entrepreneurship at the School is at an all-time high," said Dean Kim B. Clark.

Past Business Plan Contest finalists include success stories such as Chemdex, the leading provider of e-commerce solutions for the laboratory supply market; CitySoft, which builds Web sites and intranet applications and recruits and hires employees from underrepresented urban areas; and ZEFER Corp., an Internet consulting firm.

The founders of Suppliermarket.com, a runner-up in last year's contest, were on hand at this year's event to offer some words of wisdom to those following in their footsteps. Jon Burgstone and Asif Satchu (both MBA '99) have raised $48 million in venture capital to fund their online marketplace for industrial buyers and suppliers. "Build the right management team and partner with the right investors," advised Burgstone. Satchu added, "Choose a business model you can be passionate about 24/7, then focus on the product and listen to the customer."