Newsmakers

DuPlessie: an interactive world where the customer determines the action. Photo by Mark Garfinkel

Pyramid Scheme

Start with a 6,000-square-foot space. Pack it with some $1 million of high-tech sound effects and visuals to create a pulsing, interactive world that combines elements of video games, theme parks, and museums. Make one and all who enter feel like intrepid adventurers, deciphering hieroglyphics (historically accurate, by the way), exploring secret chambers, and making fateful, action-determining decisions while seeking clues to an archaeologist’s mysterious disappearance.

It’s called TOMB, its plot line was developed from ancient Egyptian history, and it’s all “a ton of fun,” Matt DuPlessie (MBA ’03) told the Boston Globe (September 22, 2004). DuPlessie, who studied mechanical engineering at MIT, launched TOMB after gaining experience working on projects at Disney and Universal Studios. Boston-based TOMB, the first project of the new entertainment venue 5 Wits (www.5-wits.com), plans to locate to other cities and add a new and different adventure. “My main goal in starting a business,” DuPlessie told the Boston Herald (September 22, 2004), “was that I’d never be bored.”

Closing the Opportunity Gap

Gerald Chertavian (MBA ’92) used the wealth he acquired in the 1990s Internet boom to realize a longtime goal. He started a special school to help disadvantaged young adults find careers in the corporate world.

Chertavian’s Boston-based program, called Year Up, consists of six months of training and education, followed by six months of apprenticeship at major area companies. “Our model is based on high support and high expectations,” Chertavian told the Boston Herald (September 7, 2004).

Chertavian, who runs the four-year-old program full-time, is excited about Year Up’s recent expansion from Cambridge and Boston to Providence, Rhode Island. “I’m blessed,” he said, “to be able to do something that I have dreamed about and love.”

Barr Photo courtesy Poetry Foundation

Capitalizing Poetry

In 2002, pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly made a gift in excess of $100 million to the Modern Poetry Association (now the renamed Poetry Foundation). Tapped in February to figure out what to do with the foundation’s windfall was John Barr (MBA ’72), managing director of SG Barr Devlin, a New York firm that provides strategic and financial advice to clients in the electricity and gas industries. Barr, the foundation’s president and a poet in his own right, has published six volumes of verse and has taught poetry in the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence.

Barr told the New York Times (October 7, 2004) that the foundation intends to launch “the biggest and baddest Web site for poetry out there,” sponsor regional contests (patterned after the National Spelling Bee), and undertake major initiatives to promote poetry in schools and libraries. He said that the foundation’s strategy is to give poetry “a more vigorous presence. Instead of simply writing checks to poets, our idea is to grow the number of readers” (San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 2004).

Dent: a track record of being right on the money. Photo courtesy Harry Dent

Boom Times Ahead

For investors, 2005 is going to be a very good year, and several more will follow, stock market guru Harry Dent (MBA ’79) claims in his new book, The Next Great Bubble Boom. “Dent’s basic belief is that spending and productivity cycles drive economic booms that are further powered by the explosion of new technologies,” explained the Sacramento Bee (October 5, 2004).

People get excited when Dent gets bullish, because he’s been right on the money before — one of his earlier books predicted the boom of the 1990s. “Every study that we have seen shows the first few years of a decade start out weak, then there’s a rebound, a flattening for a year or so, and then a rebound,” said Dent. “We expect to see a 40 percent gain in the market for the Dow and more for the Nasdaq in 2005. Much of that will come in the second half of next year.”

Dent said that the four sectors that represent the best investments are technology, financial services, health care, and Asia. And don’t delay — according to Dent, the boom will end in 2009.

Poverty and Security

At the IMF and World Bank Group annual meetings in October, World Bank president James Wolfensohn (MBA ’59) declared that along with its fight against terror, the global community must also address the longer-term issues of “poverty, frustration, and lack of hope” that contribute to an insecure world (Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2004).

Wolfensohn noted that, in his ten years at the Bank’s helm, he has met with poor people in more than 100 countries and found that “they want security, but they define it differently than we do. For them, it is not about concrete barriers and military force. For them, it is a chance to escape poverty.” He cited a World Bank study in which 60,000 poor people in sixty countries were asked about poverty. “The $1 a day or $2 a day that they live on was almost the last thing mentioned. What mattered most was a voice, an ability to contribute to their future, women not wanting to be beaten up, opportunity for their kids” (USA Today, September 27, 2004).

Democracy and transparency are not always transferable because of cultural and historical factors, Wolfensohn asserted, but they are “probably not the only system that works.” He pointed to China, whose “predictable and decent government structures,” while not wholly democratic, can lead to “an effective result.”

Asked what the West doesn’t understand about Islam, Wolfensohn said, “When you’re in a conflict, typecasting happens. But there is a richness in Islam, and there are a lot of people in the Islamic world who are as anxious about peace as all of us.”