Marketing Professor Teck-Hua Ho Earns Top Campus Teaching Award

Haas Marketing Professor Teck-Hua Ho received the highest teaching honor the UC Berkeley campus bestows—the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award—at a ceremony April 22. He is the eleventh Haas professor to win this award.

Ho teaches Strategic Pricing and serves as chair of the Haas faculty's Marketing Group. He is also faculty director of several executive education programs, including Pricing for Profitability in the Information Age, and director of the Asia Business Center.

"I could not think of a more appropriate person to receive this award than Teck Ho," says Dean Rich Lyons, a 1998 Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award winner. "He has proven himself with an engaging, innovative approach to teaching marketing, while always remaining open to learning from his students as well."

Learning, according to Ho, is more concrete when it is hands-on. So his classes include interactive lectures, company case studies, computer role-playing simulations, in-class experiments, and outside guest speakers.

"My vision is to have students leave the class with the ability to think strategically about pricing and with the practical tools they need for their future careers," Ho wrote in a teaching statement submitted during the award selection process. "I also want to make learning fun so that students love the subject and see its relevance in practice."

"I learn a lot, too, from my students. I find that what I put in (my time in and out of class, energy, enthusiasm, and research) is what I get out of these students," Ho wrote. "I enjoy making a ifference in their lives."

Ho's students are equally positive about his teachings. "What sets Teck Ho apart is that he wants to get to know the students on a personal level and tries to find out what the students want so he can adjust his teaching material based on their needs," says evening and weekend student Vijay Bhaskaran, MBA 10. "At Haas he's the best I've ever had."

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High Marks for Teaching

At the end of the spring semester, students selected eight professors as winners of the Earl F. Cheit Award, which recognizes excellent teaching at the Haas School. The winners are:

Undergraduate Program
Frank Schultz

Full-time MBA Program
Rashi Glazer

Evening & Weekend MBA Program
Peter Goodson
Suneel Udpa

Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA Program
Steve Blank

PhD Program
Martin Lettau

MFE Program
Alexei Tchistyi
Michael Melvin

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Haas@Work Students Take Off With New Corporate Clients

Berkeley MBA students in the Haas@Work program hit the runways this spring with new client Virgin America.

The airline, one of four companies to partner with the Haas School's applied innovation program this semester, hired Haas@Work to help continue to drive innovative new guest and loyalty strategies in the airline industry. The other Haas@Work clients were McKesson, Haas@Work's first health care client; design software leader Autodesk; and returning client Cisco Systems.

Haas@Work dispatches 40 MBA students—split into 8-person teams—to develop solutions to pressing business challenges. New teams then follow up with 100 days on the ground, putting the favored ideas in motion.

Haas@Work will be one of several courses that students will choose from next fall to satisfy a new experiential learning requirement.

Cisco hired Haas@Work to help improve its worldwide service support process. Students at Autodesk developed solutions to re-engage, develop, and retain customers.

McKesson, meanwhile, asked students to develop a common, value-added approach for five of the company's businesses that share the same market— independent physicians. The company engaged students to move forward on one main recommendation and pieces of two others.

"We gave Haas students very little direction, and they dove into the market and the operations of five businesses," said Dave Henriksen, senior vice president and general manager for McKesson Physician Practice Solutions. "They brought six ideas, and we liked every idea they had."

Meanwhile, in June, a group of students began working with Virgin America to implement Haas@Work recommendations on innovating the company's pricing model, frequent flyer program, and other proposals.

"Haas@Work was an opportunity to tap into fresh thinking from students who weren't burdened by the knowledge of the industry," says Virgin America CEO David Cush.

"We plan to weave the students' recommendations together into a holistic comprehensive approach," Cush adds. "They gave us a lot to run with."

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Retired CFO Named Executive Fellow

Retired Chevron CFO Steve Crowe, BS 69, MBA 70, will share his knowledge and expertise in both the energy and finance fields with students and faculty as the school’s third Haas executive fellow.

As an executive fellow, Crowe will advise faculty and the dean while also participating in various events and programs for students throughout the school year.

Crowe retired from Chevron at the end of 2008 after holding more than a dozen positions during his 36 years with the company. He became CFO in 2005. The highlight of his career was his successful “quarterbacking” of Chevron’s $17.9 billion acquisition of Unocal in 2005 after the smaller rival received a surprise offer from a Chinese oil company.

Crowe is the fourth business leader to take an executive fellow or executive-in-residence role at Haas. The others include IDEO General Manager Tom Kelley, MBA 83; John Hanke, MBA 96, VP, product development for Google Maps, Local, and Earth; and former Yahoo! marketing VP David Riemer.

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Professors Honored for Accounting Work

Professors Patricia Dechow and Richard Sloan have been honored with a new national accounting award for a research article that helped fuel an explosion of governance-accounting studies.

The pair was recognized for their 1996 paper “Causes and Consequences of Earnings Manipulation,” in Contemporary Accounting Research.

The award from the American Accounting Association recognizes unique research from the past 5 to 15 years that has made a significant contribution to the accounting field.

Dechow, Sloan, and co-author Amy Hutton of Boston College demonstrated that firms most frequently manipulate earnings to lower the short-run cost of raising new financing and that weak governance structures facilitate such behavior. Their paper has received more than 1,000 Google Scholar citations.

"Although their paper was initially controversial because it challenged existing thinking, Professors Dechow and Sloan paved the way for a new emphasis in the accounting literature," Dean Rich Lyons says. "They are a great example of why questioning the status quo— one of the school's defining principles—is so important to innovative research."

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Haas Rejoins Diversity Group

The Haas School has rejoined The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, an alliance of U.S. business schools and firms aimed at fostering diversity among students and corporate leaders.

The move came as The Consortium made changes to its mission that allowed Haas to rejoin after a seven-year hiatus. “Being part of The Consortium is another way to show that Haas is welcoming of all forms of diversity,” says Dean Rich Lyons.

Haas will work with The Consortium to recruit full-time MBA students for the class starting in fall 2011.

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Home Run! Haas Students Score with Sports Courses

Haas is stepping up to the plate for students interested in careers in the $213 billion sports business industry with new courses taught by two respected industry leaders.

Sandy Alderson, former CEO of the San Diego Padres and general manager of the Oakland A’s, flew to the Bay Area once a week this past spring to teach MBA students The Business of Sports. Meanwhile, Mike Rielly, who represents professional golfers and organizes golf events for CAA (a sports and entertainment talent agency) in Los Angeles, began teaching Sports Marketing to undergrads in spring 2009 and returned this year. Both classes have had long waiting lists of students hoping to enroll.

“We try to take students’ interest in sports and combine it in a unique, interesting way with the general business concepts they’ve already learned at Haas,” says Alderson, whose course includes case studies and guest speakers.

Rielly also brings in guest speakers to judge class projects in his course. Two Oakland A’s executives, for instance, judged student presentations on whether the San Francisco 49ers should move to Santa Clara County.

Alderson and Rielly bring an insider’s view to the classroom. In one class discussing a Fox Sports case study, Alderson recalled hearing media mogul and Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner’s impassioned speech against Fox buying the Dodgers in 1998 at the Major League Baseball owners meeting.

“What he didn’t count on was Fox’s total ineptitude in managing a team,” Alderson quipped.

Students who shine in the sports classes also have scored internships and jobs. Even before graduating, Chris Giles, MBA 10, began working as director of business development for the Pac-10 Conference, a league of men’s and women’s college sports. “It’s really fun to marry a personal interest with my MBA and feel like I’m doing something that I love,” Giles says.

Watch a video about the Haas School’s sports classes at www2.haas.berkeley. edu/Videos/sports. aspx.

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