Update

• Latin American Conference Highlights Region's Diversity
• Africa Business Conference Creates Ongoing Forum for Change
• Hawes Hall Dedicated
• Dinner Celebrates Professorships
• Faculty Debate Lessons from Enron's Collapse
• Pursuing the Ultimate Deal: Negotiating Peace in the Middle East
• Be Our Guest: HBS Show 2002 Goes Off without a Hitch
• Fellowship Dinner Brings Students and Donors Together
• HBS Students Negotiate a Victory
• Late Start, Dramatic Finish
• HBS Vets Support Homeless Comrades
• New Fellowship Program Encourages Young MBAs to Work for Nonprofits
• Time Out: Steven Murch: Philanthropist-in-Training

Fellowship Dinner Brings Students and Donors Together

Thanking donors for their “selfless generosity” and promising that HBS fellowship students “will repay the world many times over,” Christopher E. Crane (MBA '02) expressed his appreciation at this year's FellowshipDinner, an event that attracted three hundred fellowship donors, recipients, and guests. Crane, a Robert K. & Myra H. Kraft Financial Aid Fund recipient, spoke on behalf of the eight hundred students in the MBA Classes of 2002 and 2003 who have received financial aid through fellowships. He was able to give personal thanks to New England Patriots owner Robert K. Kraft (MBA '65), himself a former HBS fellowship recipient as well as a featured speaker at the event. Dean Kim B. Clark underscored the importance of fellowships at HBS, calling them “the lifeblood of Harvard Business School.” “They ensure our commitment to admitting and supporting the most talented and promising young men and women from around the world, regardless of need,” he noted.

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HBS Students Negotiate a Victory

Two students in the MBA/JD joint degree program took top honors at Harvard Law School's 79th annual Williston Competition in Contract Negotiation and Drafting. Patrick Chung and Aman Kapadia worked together over the course of six tension-filled days in March to draft a contract between a flight attendants union and an airline struggling to survive the turbulence of a post–September 11 environment. The pair will return to Soldiers Field this fall to complete the third year of the four-year program.

Describing the factors that contributed to their success, Chung credited tactics learned during the first year of studies in the classroom of HBS professor Max Bazerman, a negotiation specialist, as well as the ability to strategize and execute decisions as a team. “We trusted each other 100 percent,” Kapadia told the Harbus. “I was confident that Patrick would always say the right thing, and I think he felt that way as well.”

In the end, the HBS team (representing airline management) struck a creative deal that made the union a part owner of the airline, curtailed the union's right to strike, and indexed pay scales to profitability. “We concentrated on our common interests; the measure of our success was that both sides felt they got a great deal,” said Chung.

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Late Start, Dramatic Finish

A team of five first-year MBAs overcame significant obstacles to win the twelfth annual Babcock Marketing Case Competition, held in January at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Due to weather delays, the students' flight didn't land until 4 a.m. on Friday, thirteen hours after teams from schools including Yale, the University of Texas, and Cornell had arrived at Wake Forest to begin analyzing the issue at hand and organizing their presentations for Saturday's competition.

This year's case focused on the public relations difficulties that sponsor GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) encountered regarding the availability and cost of drugs used to treat HIV and AIDS in Africa. Fueled by doughnuts and an unsinkable team spirit, the HBS group worked for 24 hours straight to formulate the winning action plan.

“We decided not only to design a new marketing campaign for GSK, but also to give the company a bold new strategy for dealing with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa,” team member Lyn Baranowski wrote in the Harbus. Noting that the case encompassed ethics and leadership issues as well as marketing challenges, she added, “When the GSK officials told us after the competition that our recommendation would be sent to their CEO for consideration, it made the sleepless nights completely worthwhile.”

In addition to praising their plan, judges cited the presence and chemistry of Baranowski and teammates Edrienne Brandon, Wesley Brandon, Jeff Norton, and Sheeba Philip. “The value of the HBS education is in thinking boldly and understanding and attacking complex problems,” reported Baranowski. “I am convinced that our team's ability to do this under extreme pressure was the reason why we won the competition.”

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HBS Vets Support Homeless Comrades

Buffeted by chilly winds and dwarfed by the nearby Spangler Center, a small green tent on the grounds of the School took on symbolic importance for students and other members of the HBS community last February. The two-person tent was pitched by the HBS Armed Forces Alumni Association (AFAA) and manned for more than eighty consecutive hours by AFAA members seeking to call attention to the plight of homeless veterans and to raise funds for a local shelter that assists them.

“We thought this would be an effective way to raise awareness about the New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans, an amazing organization in Boston that really makes a difference,” said Dann V. Angeloff, Jr. (MBA '02), a Marine Reserve officer and the organizer of the effort. “The shelter does a great job of helping homeless vets build a life for themselves off the streets, and we're glad to do a little to support their mission.” Angeloff noted that the number of homeless Vietnam-era vets exceeds the number of personnel who died in that conflict and that more than a third of all homeless vets served in war zones. Each year, approximately five hundred thousand veterans — from World War II to the present day — are homeless.

The AFAA, composed of some 85 people, is open to students who served or still serve in the U.S. Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, and Navy, or in foreign armed forces. Several of its members logged overnights in the tent, while many others took turns at the site during the day and evening to talk with interested students and other members of the HBS community. Those who would like to make a donation may send checks payable to the New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans to the HBS Armed Forces Alumni Association (attn. New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans), 2411 Harvard Business School Mail Center, Boston, MA 02163. To date, the AFAA initiative has raised more than $9,000.

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New Fellowship Program Encourages Young MBAs to Work for Nonprofits

Doing good or doing well. Usually, new HBS graduates have to pick one or the other. But now, both possibilities — bundled together and available after graduation — are a viable option for MBAs seeking jobs in the nonprofit and public sectors. Last February, HBS officials announced a new Service Leadership Fellows Program, funded by the School, that each year will subsidize the salaries of ten or more newly minted MBAs who are interested in working at public and nonprofit organizations. The goal is to boost the compensation they would receive to levels commensurate with what they would earn in the private sector.

The one- or two-year postgraduate fellowships are indicative of the “growing desire on the part of our students to be involved in the public and social sectors,” said Professor W. Carl Kester, senior associate dean and MBA Program chair. “They also reflect the desire of key organizations around the world to avail themselves of the unique gifts and talents of HBS graduates. Our aim is to make the program a tremendous learning experience for graduates and to make it affordable for participating organizations.”

Along with the Nonprofit and Public Management Summer Fellowship Program, begun twenty years ago, and the Initiative on Social Enterprise (ISE), established in 1993, the new service leadership program represents a further expansion of HBS's interest in the management and leadership of social-sector entities. Observed HBS professor V. Kasturi Rangan, a founding cochair of ISE and an expert on nonprofit organizations, “The carryover effects of a program like this are fantastic. The fellows will bring a culture of change to nonprofit organizations that can be tremendously helpful. In addition, when they return to the corporate sector, the fellows will have a deep knowledge of the challenges facing communities and society.”

To date, some eleven organizations from Boston to Brazil have indicated they would be interested in hiring Service Leadership Fellows. This enthusiastic response suggests to HBS professor Michael E. Porter, who first proposed the idea for the program, that it represents “a real opportunity” for the School. Porter, whose research has included studies of the competitive advantage of inner cities, declared, “Through this program, the School can have a major impact on society, given the intertwining today between business, government, and the nonprofit sectors.” Because they will possess a heightened familiarity with the overlapping relationships across sectors, Porter believes that former fellows will, over time, constitute a key network of managers.

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Steven Murch: Philanthropist-in-Training

Another in a series of occasional articles on HBS graduates who have taken a leave from their careers to explore nonbusiness endeavors.

After building his fortune in the virtual world, Steven D. Murch (MBA '91) has taken up a hammer to build a lasting legacy in the real world.

“My dream is to create a foundation that helps people,” says Murch, a Microsoft veteran and Internet entrepreneur who shares that vision with his wife, Heather, a sixth-grade teacher. The pair live in Seattle with their infant son, Collin. “But before that, I want to work at many different nonprofits — to sample what it's like and to see how well they apply resources to their cause.”

To that end, Murch took a two-month sabbatical last fall from his post as a vice president at Internet travel giant Expedia to become a philanthropist-in-training. His “teacher” has been Seattle's chapter of Habitat for Humanity, where he has been busy helping to build interest-free, at-cost homes for needy families in his community.

“I chose Habitat because I've always loved to build things,” Murch remarks. “It's refreshing, especially after years of e-mail, meetings, and working on electronic stuff. High technology is so ephemeral. For all you know, what you work on today is going to be obsolete in three years. So it's really gratifying to nail in a foundation floor for a house that you know is going to provide shelter for a family for many years, especially when you're hammering in boards alongside the people who will be living there.”

The fleeting nature of ones and zeros aside, Murch knows he's been fortunate in his career to have been in the right field at precisely the right time. Upon adding an MBA to his computer science degrees from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, Murch (who graduated from HBS as a Baker Scholar) went straight to Microsoft. For more than six years, he had a hand in the development and release of several software programs and CD-ROMs, including a travel title called Expedia, which was later spun out of Microsoft as an Internet IPO.

With the rise of the Internet, Murch led Microsoft's online games division and produced the hugely popular MSN Gaming Zone before he got an idea for his own Internet company. He wrote his business plan, found a partner, and left Microsoft in 1997 in order to start VacationSpot, an online reservations network for consumers seeking to rent vacation properties.

“We worked hard on it for three years,” states Murch. “It was during the dot-com gold rush, and it was fairly easy to get financing and build a network of 25,000 vacation properties.” VacationSpot's success appealed to Murch's former colleagues at Expedia, who bought it in March 2000 for $82 million in stock options and brought Murch back on board as vice president. Recognizing his good fortune, Murch says he decided last summer that the time had come to “start looking outward before I get too old to do anything” and find his own way to give back to the world.

Murch's leave from Expedia ended in January, but he's decided not to return for now. Instead, he's agreed to become a leader for Global Village, Habitat's traveling volunteer program. He took on the new role after returning from a February trip to New Zealand, where he worked with a family for three weeks to build their home.

And Murch has found yet another way to help. To keep his programming skills current, he has made a hobby of writing software and recently created PocketShop, a grocery shopping list program for the Pocket PC. Available at www.sdmventures.com, Murch notes that all profits will go to Habitat and the World Wildlife Fund.

Working with Habitat, observes Murch, “has helped me to see more clearly the need in the world for affordable housing, as well as the positive impact individuals can have by working as a team. Getting to know more about Habitat's smart model will help me immensely in thinking how to build a lasting contribution.”

—Margie Kelley

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