Dean Thomas Gilligan interviewed Michael Dell, CEO, founder and chairman of the board of Dell, Inc., Nov. 11 as part of the VIP Distinguished Speaker Series.

Dean Gilligan began by asking Dell about his first job, which Dell said was at a Chinese restaurant when he was 12 years old. He said he left because he was recruited by a Mexican restaurant at 13 to be the assistant host.

However, he said his first real job was selling subscriptions for a small, local paper in Houston when he was 16. He figured out rather quickly that his target audiences were newlyweds and people new to the area. Given that knowledge, he used public information on marriage licenses and mortgage applications to develop a direct mail campaign for the newspaper.

As for his interest in computers, Dell said that it all started when he was in the seventh grade.

“I was in an advanced math class at my public school in Houston and my math teacher got the only [computer] terminal at Johnson Junior High School, now Johnson Middle School,” said Dell. “You type in the program, you send it off and back comes the answer. I got pretty fascinated with it. I thought it was really interesting and I started writing programs and playing around with this computer as much as I could.”

When asked who he most admired, Dell admitted that he was more likely to admire people who had certain traits, such as having overcome adversity. He talked specifically about his experiences with Harlem Academy, a school in Harlem, New York that he said has done great things with their programs in what he called “an otherwise pretty tough environment.”

Gilligan then asked Dell what he thought Dell could improve about his personal or professional style. Dell said that he tends to jump to the answer very quickly, and that he needed to work on being more understanding of the process involved. He also said that it was good to remember that there are different styles of doing things and it was important to find a way to connect those styles together. He also said that while it is important to reflect on the past to determine what could have been done better, it is not good to spend too much time in the past because you still need to look toward the future.

As for his biggest mistake, Dell said it was hard to pinpoint one instance but that the company had gone through times when it was trying to do too many things at once and had to pull back. He also said that sometimes the company had success in an area and because of that success was slow to change when the industry did. Dell noted that he doesn’t live with regrets because he is proud of where the company is today and how it helps customers thrive.

Dell said that his greatest accomplishment is seeing how the capabilities that the company provides to its customers have helped those customers thrive. He also remarked that the company helped drive the efficiency movement and helped make computers available to a much larger audience. He also said he gets excited when he sees how the company has changed the lives of its employees and employees of associated companies over the past 10 years.

A few highlights from student questions are below.

What advice can you give to students who want to start their own businesses?

Advice on Start-Ups.mp3 (1m35s,1.5MB)

How do you balance work and family life?

Balancing Work and Family.mp3 (1m29s, 1.4MB)

How would you describe your personal leadership style?

Leadership Style (1m29s, 1.3MB)

How do you communicate Dell’s corporate culture throughout all your international locations so that all employees share the same values and goals?

Communicating Corporate Culture (3m8s, 2.9MB)

Bijal Mehta, Elaine Hsu and Zoe Gabbard were the only undergraduate team to enter the competition and they beat out more than 30 MBA teams for a spot in the finals. Teams from Northwestern, MIT and Cornell joined them in the finals, hosted at Cornell University Nov. 13-14.

The Re-Source Challenge asked students for innovative solutions to boost PET recycling rates on college campuses. It was sponsored by Net Impact, Nestle Waters and GreenOps.

The teams created marketing plans that utilized the GreenOps tracking system, which scans the bar codes of recycled items and gives users points that they can redeem for items online and coupons to use right away. In addition, students were asked to include plans to sell Nestle re-source water, which is packaged with 25 percent recycled PET plastic.

The McCombs team did all of their research on campus as if they were already implementing their plan. What they found was that bringing the GreenOps systems on to campus would be extremely difficult because of the corporate branding.

“At this point we were rather disgruntled, but our sophomore team member Zoe Gabbard came up with a rather genius observation that campus is not just campus,” says Mehta. “So we looked for non-UT venues that still attract lots of students, and hence we thought of the University Co-Op.”

The team planned to sell re-source water and place the GreenOps systems at the Co-Op to take advantage of the store’s location and student foot traffic. To encourage student use the team would select five student organizations each month to partner with the project. Students who recycled with the GreenOps system could select one of those organizations to receive part of the proceeds from that recycling. The student organizations would also receive a portion of the proceeds from the re-source water sales. Finally the system would educate students on the location of on-campus recycling bins for future reference.

Mehta thinks that this honesty in how difficult it would be to gain access to campus helped them secure the grand prize.

“We were honest to Nestle and GreenOps and the other judges about weaknesses we saw in this system [and] we didn’t sugar coat how hard bringing this system to campus will be,” says Mehta. “Our honest approach was what makes me the most proud of our accomplishment.”

The team won $5,000 to implement their plan at UT as well as a trip to Connecticut to present the idea to the CEO of Nestle Waters.

Congratulations, team!

Professors Linda Golden and Patrick Brockett discuss Internet survey and research metholody

The proliferation of internet survey tools is making it easier for researchers to gather data, but internet surveys also produce their own set of challenges. That was the message from Marketing Professor Linda Golden and IROM Professor Patrick Brockett at the Undergraduate Business Council’s Faculty Research Presentation Nov. 9.

Golden said that in the future, students will all be using or directing surveys generated on the Internet. They are inexpensive, easy to set-up and very fast.

But, she warned that it’s important to monitor for technology glitches. For example, in an H1N1 survey that Golden and Brockett conducted, the multiple choice buttons weren’t working. They found out about the problem because participants added comments on the survey. They were able to pull the survey and fix the problem, but they had to start the survey over again.

Another common problem - results from Internet surveys may have a bias from professional survey takers who take multiple surveys for the money and care nothing about your survey. People are paid to take the surveys and some offers come with the chance to win large sums of money. Brockett quoted Ronald Reagan’s signature phrase – “Trust, but verify.” It’s important to know you have qualified participants in your pool who are randomly selected, he said.

Golden is currently working with an internet survey company to develop safeguards for reliability and accuracy for internet surveys.

MPA student Emily Anderson, a member of the Longhorn soccer team, team was named to the 2009 ESPN The Magazine Academic All-America Women’s Soccer First Team. Anderson is the first Longhorn in program history to earn Academic All-America honors twice in a career and the second to be tabbed as a First Team honoree. The defender earned a Second Team Academic All-America nod in 2008.

The defender out of Austin, Texas, boasts a 4.00 GPA in the prestigious Accounting/MPA program in the McCombs School of Business and is no stranger to academic awards. Since starting on the Forty Acres in 2006, Anderson has picked up three First Team Academic All-Big 12 Honors, two ESPN The Magazine/CoSIDA First Team selections and an ESPN The Magazine/CoSIDA Second Team All-America honor.

On the pitch in 2009, Anderson was one of four Longhorns to start every one of UT’s 21 matches over the course of the season, and contributed one goal and one assist while helping the Longhorns hold six opponents scoreless. Over her four-year career she posted 11 goals and four assists for 26 points.

To be eligible, a student-athlete must be a varsity starter or key reserve, maintain a cumulative grade point average of 3.30 on a scale of 4.00, have reached sophomore athletic and academic standings at his/her current institution and be nominated by his/her sports information director. Since the program’s inception in 1952, CoSIDA has bestowed Academic All-America honors on more than 14,000 student-athletes in Divisions I, II, III and NAIA, covering all NCAA championship sports.

Left to right: Ty Zieman, Garrett Frank, Taylor Thompson, Aneal Tenjarla

Aneal Tenjarla, a finance senior, won the Tulane Energy Trading Competition Nov. 14 in New Orleans, triumphing over 28 students from six universities, many from MBA programs, in the competition’s final round. 

Tenjarla said the contest was a great opportunity to learn trading strategy from industry insiders in a realistic environment that felt like an energy trading firm.

“This is probably the closest thing you can get to actually trading besides committing actual value and risking actual money,” Tenjarla said. Read Tulane press release. 

Following his return, Tenjarla addressed his classmates in Ehud Ronn’s energy finance course, where he discussed the strategy of the team from McCombs, which included Ty Zieman, Taylor Thompson and Garrett Frank, in order to make it to the finals at Tulane, when it became an individual competition.

Tenjarla offered this report: “During the finals, we started with a 60-second presentation to the judges regarding our trading strategy. Then we proceeded to trade natural gas for an hour. Afterwards, we traded crude oil. Finally, we had to give another 60-second presentation explaining how closely we followed our strategy and what worked or what did not.

“Regarding my trading philosophy, from a macro perspective, I took advantage of nonfundamental-related volatility in both the natural gas and crude oil market. I did this by first developing a market view on each product. Then I used technical analysis, primarily Bollinger Bands, to buy/sell at ideal times. I answered the question of how to use the prompt month contract as a proxy for an illiquid later-dated contract by looking at the hedge ratios between the two contracts (this information was given to use). Where I stood out, however, was I looked at past three-month hedge ratios and also dynamically measured the hedge ratio using a Reuters formula. The purpose of that was to measure if there was a sustained difference between the current hedge ratio and the historical ratio.”

Congratulations to Tenjarla, who brought home a trophy and a $500 prize.

The conversation was lively and opinionated at last week’s Sports, Entertainment & Media Association (SEMA) Conference at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center. SEMA is an organization that helps graduate students at UT explore career options. From risk, to digital disruption and pricing strategies, attendees were treated to a wide range of business discussions affecting professionals in the fields of sports, entertainment and media.

Industry luminaries included Red McCombs, former owner of the NFL Minnesota Vikings, the NBA Denver Nuggets and the NBA San Antonio Spurs, which he secured for San Antonio in 1973. Other panel experts included several graduates of the McCombs School, such as Bart Knaggs, whose company Capital Sports & Entertainment manages the Lance Armstrong Tour de France team, and Randy Cohen, founder of TicketCity.

Managing change was the on-going theme of the day. In the panel discussion regarding digital media, panelists were asked whether consumers would pay for digital media once they find ways to get it for free. Jason Brenek, senior vice president for Worldwide Digital Cinema and Cinema Programming for Walt Disney Studios, stated that while digital delivery systems would reduce the costs of movie distribution, and open the door for new forms of interactive entertainment, the price point for what consumers will pay is dropping. Such pressure is putting the squeeze on entertainment producers.

Read more.

That magazine grew into a nonprofit organization designed to foster artistic expression for people of all levels of skill. “I don’t want art to become this thing that you have to go to museums to see,” Kanegi explains. “Visual art is very alive…so bring that out into the public and it enriches people’s lives.”

The young entrepreneur predicts that his nonprofit will endure because of the passion of the volunteers who support art. “That’s very different in a for-profit, because sometimes you’ll get people who pretend to be passionate about the company but they really just want money,” he says. “That’s how you corrupt your company culture.”

Kanegi encourages business students to get involved in interests and hobbies that balance their other interests. “It makes you a more competitive individual for companies,” he claims, “Because they can see you have a diverse skill set, and you’re good at thinking from different angles.”

“Robert Heinlein, one of my favorite writers, has a quote that starts with ‘Specialization is for insects.’ You should be as much of a renaissance man as possible.”

Read more.

Keith Brown, professor of finance at the McCombs School of Business, presented his research on the investment performance of mutual fund managers as part of the Faculty Research Series Sept. 22 at McCombs.

Brown and his research team found that while a mutual fund’s investment style (small cap vs. large cap and value vs. growth continuum) influences the returns it generates, little is known about how a manager’s execution of the style decision affects portfolio performance. Brown’s research shows that when mutual fund managers maintain a consistent investment style it leads to a higher risk-adjusted profitability.

Former University of Texas at Austin President Larry Faulkner talked about leadership, decision-making and ethics with a group of students at the McCombs Leadership Forum on Oct. 29.

Faulkner believes leaders create “an environment of the possible” when they use effective decision-making skills. The ability to make quick and decisive decisions is key to creating an environment that motivates employees and defines boundaries of their working space.

People will grant you the right to make decisions for them, he said, but only if you talk and listen to them first. You don’t have to agree with them, or incorporate their ideas into your program, but you do have to really listen to them.

Faulkner also said that after he’s made a decision but before he announces it, he makes sure he can very clearly explain to himself why he made that decision. That step is key in being prepared to handle questions about the decision.

Faulkner was president of the university from 1998-2006. He is currently president of the Houston Endowment, a private foundation serving charitable organizations and educational institutions in the Houston area.

Audio Clips

Decision-Making.mp3 (2m36s,3MB)

Consultative Leadership Style.mp3 (2m30s,3MB)

Right and Wrong.mp3 (2m30s,3MB)