Newsmakers
A Roundup of Media Mentions
Runner-Up and Lovin’ It: Kwame Jackson (MBA ’00)
Redefining Work Life: Ann Fudge (MBA ’77)
Who, Me?: James Currier (MBA ’99)
Roll the Credits: Jack Valenti (MBA ’3/48)
Consultant on the Go: Ram Charan (MBA ’65, DBA ’67)
Hot Tip: Cyrille Nkontchou (MBA ’97)
At Work in the Fields with the Lord: Sister Marsha Allen (MBA ’76)
No Nukes: James Kelly (MBA ’68)
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| Jackson Photo courtesy NBC |
Sometimes losing really pays off big time. Just ask Kwame Jackson (MBA ’00), runner-up in reality TV’s latest hit series, The Apprentice. Jackson chucked his job at Goldman Sachs to make a run at besting fifteen other would-be apprentices for a one-year, $250K gig with Ÿber-mogul Donald Trump. Twenty-two million people tuned in for the live final episode when Trump fired Jackson — “too textbook” — and hired cigar entrepreneur Bill Rancic.
So what’s next? “I’m taking advantage of every kind of capitalistic opportunity from the whole celebrity effect,” Jackson told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News (April 16, 2004). “I’ll be doing endorsements, book deals, et cetera.” He’s also planning to launch a media company and looking to raise $5 to $20 million for the start-up over the next year.
Then there’s the surprise investment management job offer from Mark Cuban, billionaire Internet entrepreneur and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. Being runner-up isn’t so bad after all, Jackson told Van Susteren. “I think where God closes a door, he opens a window,” said Jackson. “And you’ve got to look for the draft, and the draft has definitely come my way.”
Meanwhile, what about the HBS experience? Did it help? “Without a doubt,” Jackson told Alan Murray of CNBC (April 16, 2004). “What you learn there is how to present yourself in a succinct fashion and really be articulate and know that you have to defend your ideas in tough situations.”
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| Fudge Image courtesy Business Week |
When Ann Fudge (MBA ’77) found that her career was overtaking her life, she decided to take a sabbatical. Not the most unusual of decisions, except that her job happened to be running a $5 billion division of Kraft Foods. “Like a number of her peers, she simply wanted to define herself by more than her professional status and financial rewards,” reported Business Week (March 29, 2004) in its cover story on Fudge’s departure from — and return to — the workforce.
After two years during which Fudge did some nonprofit work, read, practiced yoga, served on several corporate boards, and traveled, WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell (MBA ’68) came calling, tempting Fudge with an offer to run Young & Rubicam, the struggling communications concern he’d acquired in 2000. Fudge, intrigued, was ready to take on a new challenge.
The opportunity to go back to work after taking a break bucks the conventional wisdom to kiss one’s career goodbye after time off. As for the idea that one can’t work as hard after a break, former Tropicana CEO Ellen Marram (MBA ’70) told Business Week, “The thought that you can’t take two years off and come back to work intensely is ridiculous.”
Ten months into it, Fudge remains grounded, unfazed by the scrutiny, criticism, and praise she’s received in her new role. “I really love doing things differently from the norm,” she said simply.
Is this a great country or what? Once upon a time, a journey of self-discovery usually involved biting insects, bouts of diarrhea, familial approbation, and staggering opportunity costs while one searched out a shaman or mystic to help find one’s true inner being. But nowadays, why bother? Just go online, specifically to Tickle.com, a social interaction Web site founded and run by James Currier (MBA ’99).
“Tickle is an interpersonal media company about everyone’s favorite subject: themselves,” Currier explained to the New York Times (March 8, 2004). The company offers a variety of tests on personality, careers, and sex, and includes a “social network” component comprised of dating and “friend-finding” services based on personality tests that link like-minded people. Users are charged for the dating service and for in-depth tests (developed by a staff of psychologists), which generate three-quarters of Tickle’s revenues, with the remainder coming from ads and memberships. Since the site was introduced in 1999, the company says some 50 million people have taken a Tickle test and some 18 million are active members.
“Everyone says that you can’t be scientific and fun, but we think you can,” Currier said.
After a 38-year run as Hollywood’s leading man in Washington, Jack Valenti (MBA ’3/48) announced in March that he will step down as president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Valenti, a Houston native, was a longtime political consultant to Lyndon Johnson, dating back to 1955 when Johnson was Senate Majority Leader. Valenti was in the Dallas motorcade the day President Kennedy was shot and hours later was sworn in aboard Air Force One as special assistant to the newly elevated President Johnson.
Valenti became MPAA head in 1966; two years later, “he helped create the ratings system, to challenge government boards that censored Hollywood content” (USA Today, March 24, 2004). In those days, the movies were the country’s undisputed entertainment choice; today, by contrast, there is an “onslaught of competition for the eye and ear of consumers,” as Valenti noted in a March speech to a convention of theater owners. But, he declared, “The movie theater will survive and prosper because the theater offers an epic viewing experience that cannot be duplicated in the home.”
The author of four books, Valenti told USA Today, “I’ve been lucky enough to live an exciting life. Maybe if I wrote about it, there would be some people interested in reading it.”
Most business travelers breathe a sigh of relief when they return home, happy to unpack their suitcase and sleep in their own bed. Ram Charan (MBA ’65, DBA ’67) is not your typical business traveler. One of the “world’s most renowned management consultants and authors” (Fast Company, February 2004), Charan has a client list that includes many household names — DuPont, Ford, Universal Studios, and GE, to name a few — and ten books to his credit, including the top-selling Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done.
The unassuming Charan has spent the last quarter-century avoiding publicity and staying on task. While accumulating some 500,000 frequent-flier miles a year, Charan pursues his passion: helping executives solve problems. The northern India native would rather talk — in plain English — about how to break down organizational silos than about himself. He has no Web site, produces no marketing materials, and finds his clients the old-fashioned way: through word of mouth. Charan can rarely be found in his office in Dallas, where his two assistants organize his hectic schedule and FedEx him fresh changes of clothes.
For Charan, who has no family, working 365 days a year is no sacrifice. “I’m a lucky man. This is all vacation for me,” Charan told Fast Company. “If you love your job, this is the juice of life.”
If you think that Africa might have some overlooked investment opportunities, but don’t know how to follow up on your hunch, that’s where Cyrille Nkontchou (MBA ’97) can help. His London-based company, LiquidAfrica Holdings, is a one-stop center for securities trading and for corporate and business information in countries across the continent.
Nkontchou (pronounced en-CON-choo) was born in Cameroon and moved to Paris with his diplomat parents when he was 13. Of his decision to earn an MBA from HBS, he told USA Today (February 9, 2004), “I thought it would help me go back to Africa and do something relevant.”
In 2000, Nkontchou, a veteran of Andersen Consulting and Merrill Lynch, started LiquidAfrica with $250,000 of his own money and $2.5 million from Modern Africa, a Washington-based private equity fund. Among his goals are helping to attract more institutional investors to Africa and modernizing its capital markets.
Prospects are intriguing: Last year, of Africa’s twenty stock markets, the indexes of Kenya and Uganda performed in the top ten globally, with Ghana’s stock market finishing number one in the world with a 144 percent gain in dollar terms. Stocks in those countries, and several others, Nkontchou noted, “were so cheap, you had to buy.”
At Work in the Fields with the Lord
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| Allen Photo by Taya Kashuba/thedesertsun.com |
In California’s Coachella Valley, Sister Marsha Allen (MBA ’76) is spearheading a coalition of nonprofits and charitable organizations in an effort to build a tent city for the 20,000 migrant farmworkers and their children who come to the valley every year to harvest its bounty of table grapes. Currently, the migrants are forced to seek shelter in dilapidated, overcrowded mobile-home parks, or to live in parking lots or in the brush, sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes.
“These are people who are visible to drive our economy, but who are invisible when it comes to meeting their needs,” Allen told the Riverside Press-Enterprise (March 14, 2004). A leader of The Global Church, a nondenominational religious organization based in Perris, California, Allen was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal from 1984 to 1986 and entered the ministry a decade ago. Despite setbacks and obstacles, she is determined that the project will succeed. “This is a clarion call to the faith community,” she said. “This is part of our commission from God, to address these issues.”
Often overshadowed by higher-profile conflicts, North Korea’s nuclear intentions have concerned the United States for many years. Now it is a high-stakes test of diplomacy in which China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea have joined the two past disputants in an effort to work things out.
Washington’s point man in all this is James Kelly (MBA ’68), assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. Kelly, who previously served in the White House and the Pentagon during the Reagan administration, was tapped for his current post in 2001. In 2002, Kelly confronted the North Koreans. They admitted to the existence of nuclear programs they previously had denied. Kelly has since told the North Koreans that the United States insists upon “complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement” of all nuclear programs, including plutonium- and uranium-based weapons (New York Times, March 15, 2004).
This diplomatic dance also has elements of cat and mouse. According to the Times, the North Koreans demanded that Kelly show proof that they had a nuclear-enrichment program. Replied Kelly, “If I were to give you all that information, it might make it easier for you to conceal it.”
