Students Top Marketing
Contest
In January, Melissa Lau, Yanlin Liu, and Deena Malkina (all HBS ’08) took home top honors in Rice University’s seventh annual Marketing Case competition, besting student teams from nine other business schools, including Kellogg, Stanford, and Sloan. With the teams working from an HBS case about China’s PC maker Lenovo, the HBS trio won first prize for its plan to recast Lenovo as a global brand based on its 2004 IBM ThinkPad acquisition.
AASU’s 35th Annual Conference
Named after the late H. Naylor Fitzhugh (MBA ’33), the annual conference of HBS African-American alumni and students sported a celebratory air as it convened, with a record number of participants, for the 35th time in February. Special guests were keynote speaker Ann Fudge (MBA ’77), former chairman and CEO of Young and Rubicam Brands, and Lillian Lincoln Lambert (MBA ’69), the first female African-American to graduate from HBS.
Reaching New Heights
First-year students in Section G raised nearly $12,000 toward the construction of a new primary school in Nepal after hearing a presentation from former Microsoft executive John Wood. After a trek in the Annapurna region, Wood quit his job and seven-figure stock option package to start, in 1999, a nonprofit to help build schools and libraries in Nepal and supply them with books, the Harbus reported. With expansion into Southeast Asia and soon into Latin America and Africa, Wood’s Room to Read has established 3,600 libraries, built 287 schools, donated 1.4 million books, and funded more than 2,000 scholarships for girls.
HBS Faculty Member Honored
The first-place McKinsey Award for the best article to appear in Harvard Business Review during the previous year has gone to University Professor Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, a senior fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. In their December 2006 article, “Strategy and Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility,” the coauthors propose a way for firms to contribute to social welfare without sacrificing corporate success.
Porter was also honored (with coauthor Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg of the Darden School) by the American College of Healthcare Executives, which gave its 2007 award for the most outstanding book on management or health care to Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results.
More Faculty Honors
Professor Max Bazerman has received the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program. The institute, dedicated to fostering enlightened leadership, recognizes exceptional professors who are leaders in integrating social and environmental issues into their teaching and research.
Professor Joseph Bower is the coeditor of From Resource Allocation to Strategy, which was named Best Management Book of 2006 by strategy + business magazine. A book coauthored by Professor Sunil Gupta, Managing Customers as Investments: The Strategic Value of Customers in the Long Run, has received the 2006 Berry-AMA Book Prize from the American Marketing Association as the best marketing book reviewed last year. For details and more faculty awards, visit www.hbs.edu/news/releases/022107_awards.html.
For NFL Players, 3rd Down at HBS
Twenty-eight National Football Leagueplayers representing teams from across the league were recently on campus for an Executive Education program that addresses the unique business opportunities and challenges that players face during and after their professional football careers. This is the third year that the School has worked with the NFL and the NFL Players Association on a customized program to help athletes prepare for life after football.
