1. Leadership: Co-chairs Ruth Duggan and Jane Wong, both MBA 13.
2. The mix: Among the more than 400 attendees was a nine-year-old, who asked speaker Heidi Roizen, venture partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, “How do you get better at your job?”
3. Themes: What paths are you driven to bend? Is dreaming big and being a leader selfish?
4. Inspiration: Amanda Pouchot, founder of Levo League, an online community of professional women, challenged the audience to “ask for more” on Equal Pay Day (which was April 9), and Roizen shared war stories from the male-dominated VC world of the 1980′s, then inspired the audience by sharing how she negotiated a four-fold increase in compensation.
5. Perspective: “Today gave me a lot to think about.”–comment from male attendee.
Conference Co-Chairs Tara English and Darya Rose with Steve Burrill
Each year, more than 1,000 students, academics, and industry professionals build knowledge and expand networks at conferences organized entirely by Berkeley MBA students. This series will take a look at recent conferences, starting with the Business of Healthcare:
1. In charge: Co-chairs Tara English, Darya Rose, both MBA 13.
2. In attendance: A mix of about 30 percent students, 50 percent professionals, and 20 percent academics/other. People from more than 120 different organizations come, split evenly between small companies and large ones that include Kaiser, Genentech, and UCSF.
3. Questions: How are companies helping consumers manage complex healthcare decisions? How are organizations changing business models to adapt to increasing consumer choice? And who will consumers ultimately choose to meet their healthcare needs?
4. Answers: Keynote speakers Steve Burrill, CEO of the life sciences financial services firm Burrill & Co.,and Ken Shachmut, EVP & CFO of Safeway Health, a company founded upon the supermarket chain’s experience in controlling healthcare costs, were joined by attendees, and a host of experts in tackling healthcare’s big questions.
Congratulations to the full-time MBA classes of 2012 and 2013. In just one year you have accomplished an extraordinary amount, from organizing conferences and international treks to winning case competitions. We are so proud of all you achieve at Haas–and have captured what we could (i.e. some, certainly not all!) in this Haas Achieves video. We know you have many achievements yet to come and wish you the best.
At the heart of Berkeley-Haas are four defining principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself. These principles were in full evidence in the Berkeley MBA Program this past year. Take a look:
Who makes you proud to be Berkeley-Haas? Tell us in the comments below or share your stories with vgilbert@haas.berkeley.edu.
Berkeley-Haas Wins 2011 Education Leadership Case Competition
The winning ELCC team: German Freiwald, MBA 12; Paul Perry, MPP 11; Moritz Plischke, and Bruce Dos Santos, both MBA 12
A Berkeley MBA team took first place in the Haas Education Leadership Case Competition (ELCC), providing the nation’s second largest school district with ideas for implementing and marketing a new school governance model.
Bruce Dos Santos, German Freiwald, and Moritz Plischke, all MBA 12, teamed with Paul Perry, MPP 11, to win the February 18-19 Haas-run competition, which this year focused on the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The district is facing major budget cuts and, at the same time, moving to a budgeting model that allocates resources by students rather than teachers.
The ELCC creates cases for districts facing immediate challenges (New Orleans, D.C., and Oakland) and that genuinely rely on the participating MBA talent to provide readily implementable ideas. “Working with LA offered yet another tremendous opportunity for students to influence nationwide educational reform,” says Aaron Sokol, MBA 12, who co-organized the competition with second-year student Jason Dolan and led the case-writing effort.
In the LAUSD challenge, the Haas team realized that parents might believe that moving to the new budgeting model actually caused the budget cuts. “With this risk in mind, we proposed that they position the new model as a change that mitigated the negative impacts of budget cuts,” says Freiwald. The team also proposed a buddy program between Oakland principals and LA principals—since Oakland recently went through a similar budgeting transition.
LAUSD School Board President Monica Garcia served as the keynote speaker and a judge at the event.
She and other senior LAUSD officers weighed in on ideas from eleven competing teams, including ones from Stanford, MIT, Yale, Columbia, and the London Business School, the competition’s first international team.
“The ELCC is a terrific example of Haas providing leadership in a field,” says Andrik Cardenas, director of operations for the Haas School’s Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership and staff advisor to the ELCC. “It gives the school a written case, provides the MBA community with the learning experiences of the competition, and offers the education community solutions to very real problems.”
Who makes you proud to be Berkeley-Haas? Tell us in the comments below or share your stories with vgilbert@haas.berkeley.edu.
