The Dark Side

About a year ago, David Yelland (AMP 164, 2003) left the editorship of the British tabloid The Sun to join the PR firm Weber Shandwick (WS). It’s a familiar career switch that PR-averse journalists disparage as going over to “the dark side,” The Independent (July 4, 2005) noted.

As editor of The Sun for five years, Yelland learned what his readers wanted, including fare such as scandalous pols and topless royals. “The Sun is probably more plugged into British consumers than almost any other business in the country,” said Yelland. “It understands their wants and their fears, their preferences and their changing habits.” Those valuable insights are what Yelland now offers his WS clients. And it doesn’t hurt that, as one colleague noted, “Who Yelland doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing, and I’m not talking on the celebrity frothy circuit. I’m talking about business, about politics, about academia.”

Will He or Won’t He?

There’s another guessing game going on in Washington, and it doesn’t involve the direction of the Supreme Court. Give up? It’s all about how Christopher Cox (MBA ’76), chosen by President George W. Bush (MBA ’75) to head the SEC, will rule with regard to key issues before the agency. Some say that Cox will undo much of what his predecessor, William Donaldson (MBA ’58), accomplished during his two-year tenure; others aren’t so sure.

Quoting unnamed “people familiar with his thinking,” the Financial Times (June 29, 2005) said of Cox that he had “no intention of halting new accounting rules that required companies to treat stock options as expenses and make deductions from profits.” And Cox himself pledged he would not undermine Donaldson’s work. Describing his predecessor as “a standup guy,” Cox said, “I look at his record as one of great achievement” (New York Times, July 27, 2005).

Fixer Upper

Real estate broker Sharon Enloe Baum (MBA ’65) cruises the streets of Manhattan in a chauffeured black Rolls-Royce that sports the license plate SOLD 1. Actually, in terms of co-ops and houses, she’s sold a lot more than one during her eighteen-year career. But in terms of dollars, it’s true that she’s “sold 1” — as in $1 billion in sales.

Baum is senior vice president and “Director of the Exclusive Properties Division” at the Corcoran Group, the top-selling residential real estate firm in a city where the average sale price for an apartment hit $1 million in 2004. Previously, she spent almost two decades in marketing at Chemical Bank, before quitting to try her hand at real estate in 1987. Then came that year’s stock market crash, which precipitated a six-year tumble in housing prices as well. “I decided if I could make it in a market that was going down, down, down, then certainly I would be able to enjoy the good times,” Baum told Bloomberg Markets (July 7, 2005), explaining why she stuck with it.

What’s her secret to success? “It’s all about the relationships,” said Baum, whose happiest one began at HBS, where she met her husband, Stephen Baum (MBA ’65), and has grown to include sons Ben (Harvard Law School ’98) and Sam (Harvard ’98).

Upstart Startup

In 1999, Wall Street bankers Randy Altschuler (MBA ’98) and Joseph Sigelman (MBA ’97) founded OfficeTiger in Madras, India, to serve as an outsourcing shop to perform secretarial services for Wall Street financial firms. Today, the company has five Indian operations, employs 1,500 people, specializes in sophisticated financial analyses, and expects revenues of $100 million this year, according to Business Week (July 11, 2005).

In the beginning, “No one thought it was a viable idea, but we decided to do it ourselves anyway,” said Sigelman, who lives in Madras, while Altschuler does the rainmaking in New York. The company is a committed meritocracy, which can be distinctive in the Indian setting. “We have the best people, be they from the Brahmin caste or the lowest ‘untouchable’ caste,” Sigelman noted. He added that, looking beyond its own humble origins, “We’d like OfficeTiger to be a professional-services firm and outgrow being an entrepreneurial back-office venture.”

Change Channel

Brian Graden (MBA ’89) is president of MTV Networks and of Logo, the new gay-oriented cable channel launched in June. Logo features mostly movies but also documentaries, sports, travel shows, original sitcoms, concerts, and more. “When you tell a story about gay rodeo or gay surfers, it’s not a story about sex, nor does it need to be,” Graden explained to the New York Times (June 28, 2005). “So much connects us beyond sexuality.”

Graden was raised in a small town in Illinois and attended a Christian college before graduating from HBS and achieving executive stardom at VH1 and MTV. He sees his background as an example of the diversity of the gay experience in America. “Advertisers and cable servers seem to understand that this is one of the last great underserved market segments,” Graden noted. “If you’re gay or lesbian, you have seen yourself represented on television for the last twenty years, but you’ve never had a home.”

Flying High

Jim McNerney (MBA ’75) departed GE in 2000 to become, at 3M, a chief executive for the first time. Named chairman, president, and CEO of The Boeing Company in July, McNerney is the aerospace giant’s third leader since 2003, a period during which Boeing has been buffeted by procurement and regulatory issues, as well as intense competition from Europe’s Airbus.

“The task here is growth,” said McNerney of his new assignment at Chicago-based Boeing. “That’s the thing we’ve got to get right over the next couple of years” (Chicago Tribune, July 1, 2005).

A member of Boeing’s board when he was tapped for its top spot, McNerney also has industry experience from his days at General Electric, where he was chief of GE’s aircraft-engine division and was involved inits commercial-aircraft leasing and financing services. Of Boeing’s role in national security as a developer of weapons and defense systems, McNerney said, “You do feel that obligation intensely on the defense and space side of our business.”