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Organizational leadership

Thursday, May 16th, 2013

Bruce Avolio, executive director of the Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking, led a discussion on organizational leadership on April 24, 2013 at the UW Foster School of Business. Panelists were Lt. Gen. Robert Brown, Phyllis Campbell and Brad Tilden.

LTG Robert Brown was commissioned into the Infantry in May of 1981 after graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 1986, LTG Brown completed the Armor Officer Advanced Course at Fort Knox, Kentucky and then attended graduate school at the University of Virginia, where he earned a master’s degree in education. Throughout his career he has held a variety of leadership positions, including Commander, 1st Brigade (Stryker Brigade Combat Team), 25th Infantry Division; Chief of Staff, US Army Europe and Seventh Army; and Commanding General, U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence. LTG Brown transitioned to Joint Base Lewis-McChord on July 3, 2012, where he serves as Commanding General, I Corps.

Phyllis Campbell is the chairman, Pacific Northwest for JPMorgan Chase & Co. She is the firm’s senior executive in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, representing JPMorgan Chase at the most senior level to clients. In her role, she manged JP Morgan Chase’s operations during a tumultuous time. She joined Chase shortly after it acquired Washington Mutual during the banking crisis. Previously, Campbell was the president and CEO of The Seattle Foundation, the largest community foundation in Washington. She has also served as President & CEO of U.S. Bank of Washington. She holds an MBA from the Foster School’s Executive MBA Program.

Brad Tilden is president and CEO of Alaska Air Group, the parent company of Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air. As CEO he leads the nation’s seventh-largest airline, with 9,600 employees, 60 destinations and 117 aircraft. Additionally, he oversees regional carrier Horizon Air and its 3,200 employees and 48 aircraft serving 39 cities. Previously, Tilden served as Alaska Airlines’ president. Before joining Alaska, he spent eight years with the accounting firm Price Waterhouse in its offices in Seattle and Melbourne, Australia. He holds an MBA from the Foster School’s Executive MBA Program.

The panel discussion was incredibly interesting and insightful. They covered a wide range of topics, including leadership obstacles, women in leadership positions, managing risk and more. Watch video highlights from the lecture.

Lt. Gen. Robert Brown, Phyllis Campbell and Brad Tilden were Foster School of Business Dean Jim Jiambalvo’s guest speakers at the Leaders to Legends Breakfast Lecture Series, which include notable leaders in an array of industries from greater Seattle and around the country.

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Seeing the future with Ken Denman

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

Ken Denman (MBA 1986) holds the Edward V. Fritzky Chair in Leadership at the Foster School of Business. He spoke in March at the Foster School about his career path and latest venture, Machine Perception Technologies, a software-based company working to merge emotion detection and machine learning to take personal technology to a new level.

Denman has held myriad executive roles which have spanned large corporations, startups, emerging markets ventures and turnarounds. He led iPass’ successful initial public offering, and led the strategy work for monetizing Openwave’s patent portfolio and spinning off the operating units. He is also an engaged angel investor and board member with public and private board experience. Currently he is president and CEO of Machine Perception Technologies (MPT).

Watch video highlights, which also include a demonstration of Facet, MPT’s emotion detection software. The demonstration was led by Dr. Marian Bartlett, lead scientist at MPT.

Ken Denman was one of UW Foster School of Business Dean Jim Jiambalvo’s guest speakers at the annual Leaders to Legends Breakfast Lecture Series, which include notable leaders in an array of industries from greater Seattle and around the country.

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Bruce Avolio TEDx video: Showing up for leadership

Monday, March 11th, 2013

Bruce Avolio, executive director of the Foster School’s Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking, spoke at TEDxUmeå on January 17, 2013. The theme was “Leadership, creativity and innovation” and Avolio’s talk was titled, “Showing up for leadership…Ta Dah!” In his talk Avolio discusses three types of leadership: leadership that grows people, leadership that sustains people and leadership that diminishes people.

When a leader grows people, she empowers them to take ownership and challenge conventions. Leaders who grow people share a common trait—they all had people in their lives who set extremely high expectations for them. When they failed to meet these expectations, they were supported and encouraged to get up and do it again, and this process was repeated over and over. As a result they developed the ability to transform other people into leaders.

Avolio shared examples of how people can show up for leadership. You can be a leader who grows people by:

  • Showing up with great expectations.
  • Showing up claiming leadership.
  • Showing up over and over.
  • Showing up with everyone.

Avolio said, “We can all grow a better world together. Why don’t we do it?”

Watch the 20-minute video.

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Paradigm shifts and P4 Medicine

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

Dr. Leroy Hood, a pioneer in the systems approach to biology and medicine, spoke at UW Foster School in January 2013 about innovation, complexity, P4 Medicine—predictive, preventative, personalized, and participatory—and much more.

Dr. Hood has played a role in founding more than fourteen biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Darwin, and The Accelerator and Integrated Diagnostics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. Of the 6,000+ scientists world-wide who belong to one or more of these academies, Dr. Hood is one of only fifteen people accepted to all three. Additionally, Dr. Hood has published more than 700 peer reviewed articles and currently holds 36 patents.

In a career of dramatic innovation, Dr. Hood has seen a number of paradigm shifts. He identified four common traits. Each paradigm change:

  1. Fundamentally altered how, in his case, scientists think about biology and the practice of biology.
  2. Faced enormous initial skepticism and, in some cases, actual hostility because there were perceived threats to the traditional way of getting things done.
  3. Forced the creation of new organizational structures—the bureaucracy that comes from existing organizational structures hurts the ability to change the way you think about something.
  4. Required enormous risk taking.

Watch the video below for more highlights from his talk, including how the Human Genome Project transformed biology, implications of P4 Medicine, and his thoughts on the future of systems biology.

Dr. Leroy Hood from Foster School of Business on Vimeo.

Leroy Hood was one of UW Foster School of Business Dean Jim Jiambalvo’s guest speakers at the annual Leaders to Legends Breakfast Lecture Series, which include notable leaders in an array of industries from greater Seattle and around the country.

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Great manager vs. great leader

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

Guest post by Ben Flajole, Evening MBA 2014 and Evening MBAA VP of Alumni Affairs at the Foster School of Business

“If you’re up at a whiteboard listing all of the things that make a good leader, I don’t think many of you would put ’4.0 student,’ right?” With that remark, Eric Sprunk, VP of Merchandising and Product at Nike, saw most, if not all, of the crowd breathe a sigh of relief. As the featured speaker at the MBA Perspectives on Leadership event on January 10, Sprunk spent time discussing what, if not perfect grades, makes people great leaders.

Sprunk’s presentation on leadership at Nike highlighted some key differences between being a good manager and a good leader. To him, a good leader creates an environment in which people are encouraged and allowed to achieve their best work every day; a good manager makes sure the employees have what they need to be able to do that. He then referenced the traits he considers necessary for good leadership, which were defined by a student in a prior session as “soft skills”:

  • Courage: having authenticity and honesty in your interactions with others.
  • Energy: bringing great enthusiasm to your team and never asking for more from them than you are willing to give yourself.
  • Balance: knowing that burnout is real and that feeling like a good son, daughter, dad, mom, husband, and/or wife is crucial for producing your best work.

Ideally, as Sprunk stated, we’re able to be great managers and leaders simultaneously. However, that’s not always the case. While good managers generate good results, it is often good leaders that produce the best results by leading with vision, strategy, and having and exercising the traits listed above.

Watch the video below for more highlights from his talk.

Eric Sprunk, VP of Merchandising and Product at Nike from the Foster School of Business.

The MBA “Perspectives on Leadership” Speaker Series is organized by the Full-time and Evening MBAA and the Foster School’s Alumni team.

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Learning how to lead

Wednesday, November 28th, 2012

Guest post by Staci Stratton, Evening MBA 2014
She attended the MBA “Perspectives on Leadership” Speaker Series. The speaker was Colleen Brown, CEO of Fisher Communications.

Colleen Brown shared her thoughts on leadership and her personal journey to becoming CEO of Fisher Communications. She talked about how we are a combination of both predisposition and learning how to be a leader. She also said in many cases leadership arises out of necessity. For Brown, she was the eldest girl in her very large family and took on responsibilities like grocery shopping and laundry very early on. She said these experiences helped her to develop a “get it done” attitude she still has today.

She also shared her four important characteristics of leadership:

  1. Character: understand who you are and why you are who you are.
  2. Resilience: develop, if you haven’t already, the ability to get back up after rough periods, mistakes, etc.
  3. Commitment: be committed to who you are and what you believe in. It has the effect of being contagious to others.
  4. Continuity: develop consistency and continuity in your behavior, as this helps your people to know what to expect from you-no surprises.

Brown feels the most important decisions you make on a day to day basis are about PEOPLE, which is why it’s so important to know yourself and be consistent in your behavior.

Watch highlights from Brown’s talk. Here she covers the importance of consistency, Aristotle’s leadership insights, and how to minimize office politics.

The next speaker is Howard Behar, former President of Starbucks, on December 6. Learn more.

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Emer Dooley TEDx video: Entrepreneurship education – an oxymoron?

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

University of Washington Foster School of Business lecturer and alumna Emer Dooley (MBA 1992, PhD 2000) recently gave a TEDx lecture on entrepreneurship. Her topic? Top five skills we can learn from entrepreneurs who build successful, enduring companies.

“That great business philosopher Confucius said, two thousand years ago, ‘What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. But what I do, I learn.’ And that’s what entrepreneurship education is all about,” says Dooley.

Watch the 17-minute video and catch lecture highlights below.

Top 5 skills  of a successful entrepreneur:

  1. Do something. Try something. Many successful entrepreneurs have been fired or let go from a former employer and have to act quickly to pay bills. So they start a business without having written a formal business plan, but have a sketch on the back of a napkin.
  2. Beg, borrow or convince people to give or loan resources. Entrepreneurs must figure out how to get resources, assistance and seed funding.
  3. Embrace surprise. Juggle the unexpected and shift gears quickly by seizing opportunities.
  4. Minimize the downside of risks. Great entrepreneurs do not take huge risks. They reside in a state of “heads I win, tails I don’t lose too much” in starting a new business.
  5. Be an effectual thinker. Through entrepreneurial education, emerging entrepreneurs learn to realize they are the pilot-in-command. They are running and starting a business and by trying a business idea out, they may fail. But they will learn from mistakes and can continue moving forward.

More entrepreneurship advice, insights from Emer Dooley’s TEDx lecture:

“Entrepreneurial thinking is a way of looking at and thinking about problems, but very much about doing something about problems.

“There’s this myth about entrepreneurship. Who pops into your brain? It’s Gates or Bezos or Richard Branson. But there is no one type of person that’s an entrepreneur. When I think about the characteristics of an entrepreneur, they can be incredibly gregarious. They can be really shy. They can be these big, big picture thinkers or they can be these obsessive control freaks.

“If you’re a loud-mouth like Ted Turner, it’s natural. You’ll start CNN. If you’re a geek and you’re afraid to approach girls directly, what are you going to do? Start Facebook. If the only way to be an entrepreneur was to be born one, Colonel Sanders would never have started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was in his 60s and on Social Security.

“There’s the strategic approach or the entrepreneurial or affectual approach. An affectual entrepreneur is someone who thinks they can affect their own world. What can I do with the resources I have at hand? Not, what is the end goal and how do I get there?”

After 11 years of teaching entrepreneurship to UW business, engineering and computer science students, Emer Dooley now serves as strategic planner, board member and faculty advisor for the UW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

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Video: McKinstry CEO Dean Allen on recession-proof innovation

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

How do you recession-proof your company? McKinstry CEO Dean Allen talks about how his firm broke down the silo approach in the construction industry and grew to be a full-service mechanical and electrical engineering, design and construction firm.

By integrating services, they operated faster, cheaper and with fewer change orders, improving customer relations and growing through strategic planning and innovation instead of reactive project by project. His now nimble company retrofits buildings and builds new ones that are energy efficient, earning McKinstry sustainability accolades from President Obama.

A few years ago, Obama visited McKinstry and called them a model for the nation, also saying, “They’re retrofitting schools and office buildings to make them energy efficient, creating jobs, saving their customers money, reducing carbon emissions and helping end our dependency on Middle Eastern oil.”

Watch video highlights from a Dean Allen lecture.

Dean Allen was one of UW Foster School of Business Dean Jim Jiambalvo’s guest speakers at the annual Leaders to Legends Breakfast Lecture Series, which include notable leaders in an array of industries from greater Seattle and around the country.

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Video: CEO Dave Roberts on PopCap Games success and luck

Monday, November 28th, 2011

To be successful in business, Dave Roberts says you have to be good, smart and lucky. You don’t expect to hear luck invoked as a key factor by the CEO of a company—PopCap Games—that was just sold for up to $1.3 billion. Classic CEO talking points include lingo such as “We were in the right place at the right time.” That kind of message implies that founders were in control of external events.

But Dave Roberts clearly said the “L” word—and for gamers everywhere, luck is a very powerful force. PopCap makes the blockbuster games Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies with a mix of creativity, business savvy and luck.

Capping the 2011 University of Washington Entrepreneur Week, Roberts shared PopCap Games’ growth timeline in the rapidly evolving landscape of social media and mobile devices. Watch highlights of his lecture.

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