Gigi Lazenby

Virginia “Gigi” Banks Lazenby, BA’67, MBA’73, graduated from Vanderbilt with a degree in European history and fine arts—and few job prospects. When family friend Henry Hooker, BA’54, said that he would hire her as his assistant if she learned to type and take dictation, she was more than willing to oblige.

The job would turn out to be a window to some of the most exciting entrepreneurial ventures Nashville has ever seen. In the late ’60s Hooker helped launch the ill-fated Minnie Pearl Fried Chicken restaurant chain. He also helped found Hospital Corporation of America, which is today the largest private provider of health care facilities in the world.

As Lazenby witnessed these ventures take shape, her interest in business grew. At Hooker’s encouragement she decided to enroll at the Owen School. “What I really learned at Owen was the ability to work with people and deal with them,” she says. “There’s a lot more to running a business than crunching numbers.”

After graduation she joined up again with Hooker, who was then in the oil business. It was in this industry that Lazenby found her calling, and she struck out on her own in 1988 to form Bretagne LLC, an oil and gas explor-ation and production company with 40 employees in Eastern Kentucky.

As CEO Lazenby has successfully navigated the ups and downs of the oil and gas business for two decades. She also has served on the board of directors of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and on the National Petroleum Council. She credits her husband, Ted Lazenby, BA’54, former President of National Life & Accident Insurance Co. and Founder of Southlife Holding Co., with urging her to become involved in industry associations.

She may have come a long way since those days of few job prospects, but Lazenby has not forgotten the lessons she learned. For today’s students who find themselves in a similar position, she offers this advice: “Don’t worry so much about where your job is or how much you’ll be paid. Just find a job and do it well. Appreciate all the people you work with, and go from there.”

John Peterson Jr.

Inserted form tools may not be a familiar concept to most, but the products they help manufacture are integral to our everyday lives. Inexpensive turned metal parts for everything from spark plugs to bullets to bearings would not be possible were it not for the technology pioneered by Nashville businessman John Peterson Sr. in the 1950s. Today John Peterson Jr., BA’78, EMBA’82, carries on his father’s legacy as President of Peterson Tool Company, the world’s largest designer and manufacturer of inserted form tools.

In the past, cutting blades for metal lathes, shapers and other equipment had to be sharpened by hand—a time-consuming process that held up production. Peterson Tool, however, discovered a way to use electricity to machine accurate, repeatable blades that are easily removed and replaced by the manufacturer.

“Envision a razor,” Peterson says. “We sell you the holder, and then we sell you the repetitive parts—the blades—with free engineering in the box.”

Peterson admits that he may never have gone into the family business had his father not passed away unexpectedly in 1979. At the time John Jr. had some sales experience under his belt, but the thought of helping his newly widowed mother, Nancy, run Peterson Tool was daunting. So he enrolled in the then-new Executive MBA program at Owen.

“I learned more from the other students at Owen than anything else. They taught me some basic things that I was able to apply right away,” he says.

Over time Peterson has grown to love the business he is in. He is passionate about the innovation that goes into his products and cares deeply about the customer relationships that he has built over the years. More than anything else, though, he enjoys his employees.

“I love the people I work with,” he says. “I’ve grown up with most of them. That’s one thing you get to have in a family business.”

Doug Howard

Like a lot of record label veterans, Doug Howard, EMBA’85, has a good sense of timing—not just in terms of having an ear for music, that is, but in understanding the business trends as well. As the Senior Vice President of Artist & Repertoire for Disney’s Lyric Street Records and Disney Music Publishing, he has helped launch and develop the careers of some of country music’s biggest talents, including Rascal Flatts, all while navigating an increasingly competitive marketplace.

“When I first started out, a new artist could release four singles a year and build a fan base that way. But today we can spend up to $250,000 making a first album and another $500,000–$750,000 on marketing, promotion and a radio tour. Then it may take 25 weeks just to find out if we’ve got a hit on our hands,” he says. “In this business you have to know when to keep fighting and when to let go and try something else.”

In many ways Howard’s own career has benefited from this line of thinking. After graduating from the music business program at Belmont University, he tried his hand at different jobs in the industry. However, it was at the Welk Music Group—one of the major independent publishing companies at the time—where he found his true direction.

“Bill Hall, my boss at Welk, saw where the industry was heading with the mergers and acquisitions on the creative side and consolidation on the radio side. He knew that strictly creative guys like me would get killed if we didn’t bring anything else to the table. That’s why he encouraged me to enroll at Owen,” he explains.

Earning an Executive MBA at Vanderbilt proved to be “the turning point of my career,” Howard says. His degree helped him succeed as the Vice President/General Manager of Polygram Music in Nashville. It also served him well when fellow music executive Randy Goodman picked him to help start Lyric Street in 1997.

“My education and overall experience at Owen have opened a lot of doors for me,” he says. “I gained the confidence that I could ask the right questions, focus on the real issues and compete in both good and bad times. It allowed me to follow my bliss . . . and that is great music!”

Lucy Haynes

Lucy Davis Haynes, MBA’88, meant for her sales job to be something of a timeout, a way to keep her hand in the business game as she relocated to Nashville while pregnant with twins. Seventeen years later she is still with the same company.

“I never did go get that real job,” she laughs.

Haynes is a Sales Associate and National Trainer for The Worth Collection, a leading women’s luxury fashion company that brings in $95 million annually through private, invitation-only sales. She ranks at the top of its 750 sales associates and conducts national training sessions for other associates several times a year.

Why is Worth so successful? Haynes believes many women find shopping in department stores to be time-consuming and frustrating. “With Worth you can shop for the season in 15 minutes,” she says. Haynes has a customer base of about 700 women, and about 200 clients attend each of her four annual sales.

Before joining Worth, Haynes loved her career as a Brand Manager for Schering-Plough, an international health care company, and The Promus Cos., a hospitality company. But when her mother, Caroline Davis, started Worth in 1991, she jumped at the opportunity to be a part of the sales team in Tennessee. Haynes was successful from the start. “The beauty of sales is the harder you work, the more you make. That appeals to me,” she says. The flexible, work-at-home nature of the company has been a bonus as well.

Haynes’ favorite class at Owen was a leadership seminar her last semester. That’s where she learned that the best way to manage people is to listen. She puts that knowledge to use every day: “The customer will always tell you what she needs and wants, if you listen.”

James Hoffman

James Hoffman, MBA’83, has spent more than 25 years in the health care industry. Today he is Senior Vice President of Signature Hospital Corp., based in Houston. 

In the course of his career, Hoffman has developed definite opinions about the state of health care and health care delivery. 

“The dirty secret of health care is that we actually do have universal coverage,” Hoffman says. “It’s true that there are 40 million uninsured Americans, but they do get health care. If you show up at an emergency room with a life-threatening condition, that hospital—by law—will take care of you. 

“But somebody will pay for it,” he adds. 

Hoffman joined Signature, which owns three community hospitals, because of what it does differently from other companies.

“Every hospital will tell you that their goal is to deliver the highest quality patient care,” he says, “but I haven’t seen anyone actually document or measure that quality.” Signature Insights is the company’s proprietary software system that improves safety monitoring and reporting, which in turn improves the quality of health care that the patient receives. 

“In the past, hospital staffs have been reluctant to file reports when mistakes are made,” Hoffman says. “But we’ve learned that mistakes generally occur because the system is flawed—not the individual. We fix the system instead of penalizing the individual,” he adds. 

Signature has also adopted “lean” processes modeled after Toyota. “It’s a common sense approach to increasing efficiency,” he says. “Today the average nurse only spends about 30 percent of his or her time with patients. We want to know about the other 70 percent.” By studying and actually diagramming nurses’ routines, Signature has increased efficiency. The same processes have been put to use in outpatient areas as well, helping patients by more efficient layouts and fewer forms to fill out. 

Whether through innovative software or improved processes, Hoffman is helping Signature put a personal stamp on hospital care, and that’s encouraging news in an increasingly impersonal world.

Hugh Tanner

Hugh Tanner, MBA’85, is Managing Director in the Fixed Income Banking Group at Morgan Keegan & Co. Inc. in Nashville. He credits Owen with teaching him how to think critically and creatively. Those skills led him to create the first publicly offered, privatized student housing project on a college campus. 

“Colleges know that students do better when they live on campus rather than in an apartment five miles away,” Tanner says. “I work with universities to develop financing plans for on-campus housing projects. Whether it’s bond insurance, stand-alone financing or private placement, we find the avenue that makes the most sense for the school.”

The economic downturn has affected Tanner’s business, but housing projects are still moving forward. “University housing has an identifiable source of revenue, so they can use those revenues to finance the projects. It’s not something you can really do with a chemistry building,” he says. 

Tanner also owns Moody Packaging, which creates custom corrugated containers. “We do a lot of work with the local auto manufacturers and build containers to ship everything from engines to rear ends to transmissions,” he says.

Despite this full workload Tanner also finds time to serve on Owen’s alumni board. “I think it’s important to give back,” he says. “Vanderbilt and Owen are such integral parts of our community that you want to do everything you can to help them succeed.”

“I always viewed an MBA as basically having the right tools in a tool box or arrows in a quiver. You take them out when you need them. I doubt I’d be an investment banker today without my Vanderbilt MBA.”

Polo Romero

If anyone understands the changing face of America, it’s Polo Romero, MBA’02. In the decade since studying at Owen, the Mexico native has witnessed not only a boom in the Hispanic population of the United States but also a profound shift in the country’s demographic map. No longer are Hispanics concentrated solely along the southern border of the United States, in places like California, Arizona, Texas and Florida, or in major metropolitan areas like New York. Today some of the fastest growing Hispanic communities are located further inland, in states like Arkansas, Illinois, Colorado, Georgia and Tennessee. 

“When more job opportunities started developing for Hispanics in other areas, the migration patterns changed,” Romero says. “If you picture the population of 10 years ago on the map, it looked something like a thin smile. Today that smile is a wide grin.” 

And that wide grin means economic opportunity for Romero and his company, Univision Communications Inc., the premier Spanish-language media company in the United States with operations that include broadcast and cable television, radio and Internet. As Vice President of Marketing & New Business Development, Romero helps Mexican companies understand the potential of the U.S. Hispanic market. “This market has nearly $1 trillion of acquisitive power. If it were an independent economy, it would be the 15th largest in the world,” he says. “Take a few minutes to think about that—45 million Hispanics generating nearly $1 trillion.”

Among Romero’s responsibilities are presenting media opportunities to Mexican companies that already have a presence in the United States and educating those that do not. But Romero views his role in a much broader sense. “My daily role may be evangelizing to companies about having a clear marketing strategy that caters to the needs of Hispanics,” he explains. “But it’s also about getting people to look beyond the immigration debate and start reflecting on the fundamental changes the United States is undergoing as a result of Hispanic influence. As a daily witness to these changes, I can say that the positive effects far outweigh the negative. The success stories are simply breathtaking.”

Jeff Recker

Jeff Recker, MBA’08, can point to the moment when environmental issues became personal to him. It was Labor Day weekend,and the creek that runs through his backyard in West Nashville suddenly began filling up with dead fish. As he would later come to find out, a toxic spill had occurred at a construction site upstream.

This negligence prompted Recker, a member of his local watershed association, to take action. He convinced the company believed to be at fault into donating several trash cans as a goodwill gesture to the park area surrounding the creek. While park officials agreed that more cans would help cut down on trash entering the creek, they were unable to accept the donation due to the high cost of additional trash collection.

He remembers thinking then, “There has to be a better way.”

In his first year at Owen, Recker founded Flatstone Creek LLC, a consulting firm named after the waterway in his backyard. He later added “sustainability” advising to his expertise after taking one of Professor of Management Germain Böer’s entrepreneurship courses. Among the case studies was a product called BigBelly, a solar-powered trash compactor that reduces pick-ups because it has five times the capacity of a conventional trash can.

“It was a very practical case. In class you’re not always thinking about how to apply these cases in the real world, but this was the type of product that you could,” he says. 

Recker was so impressed by the BigBelly’s potential—not only the cost savings of fewer trash collections but also the “green” benefits of the resulting lower emissions—that he contacted the manufacturer about the rights to sell them. Today he distributes the compactors and recycling units throughout Tennessee and two neighboring states. The BigBelly can be seen at food courts, airports and even at Vanderbilt, where use of the compactors is being explored.

April 17-19, 2009

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Although the ancient document sounds as though it might glorify war, Huynh says it’s actually a treatise on peace, offering practical strategies for circumventing and diffusing conflict, whether on the battlefield, in the boardroom or at home. It is required reading for officers in the United States Marine Corps, as well as students at a number of B-schools, because of its innovative, still-relevant strategy for overcoming conflict. Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, who wrote the foreword to Huynh’s book, uses its classic principles to manage his company in an often hostile, highly competitive technology industry.

The text itself is a lesson in economy: 13 short chapters comprise The Art of War, but each is full of important lessons that teach the reader how to avoid conflict and resolve inevitable hostile situations using self-control, intelligence, courage and benevolence. Huynh’s annotations alongside the translation offer practical application of Sun Tzu’s philosophy.

Huynh enjoys a career in finance as Group Controller for Skyline Steel in Georgia, but has been dedicated to the study of Sun Tzu’s masterwork since he encountered the text as a teenager. In 1999 he launched Sonshi.com to provide Web space for authors, scholars and readers to gather and share information about Sun Tzu’s timeless approach to conflict resolution.

Says Huynh, “Conflict is part of life, but it is our response to the disagreement that has the greatest effect on our inner peace and personal happiness.”

Dave and Liz Marchese

Leverage. The power to get things done. That’s how Dave Marchese, BE’95, MBA’00, views his experience at Owen and his ability to switch careersfrom engineering to finance. Currently a Vice President at Haddington Ventures, a Houston-based private equity fund focused on the midstream energy sector, Marchese assists with deal sourcing, transactional work and portfolio company management. Prior to joining Haddington, he was Managing Partner at Eschelon Energy Partners, a company of similar ilk which he co-founded, as well as Reliant Energy, which was the launching pad for his industry changeover. 

Marchese credits the late Elizabeth Powitzky, Owen’s beloved Associate Director of Admissions, for helping him shift his focus toward finance. Powitzky, who, sadly, lost her battle to breast cancer in 2001, steered him toward his summer internship at Reliant. “Elizabeth had a huge impact on my career change and helped me leverage my engineering experience and Vanderbilt MBA to get into energy finance,” he says. 

His pre-MBA work with Jacobs Engineering translates into his current job, and he often draws on that knowledge in the development and construction of the energy infrastructure companies in Haddington’s portfolio. Additionally, he uses both his finance and engineering backgrounds to assist his wife, Liz, BA’95, in their development of a lakefront community, called The Point at Rock Island, on Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau.

Marchese chose Owen because of people like Powitzky, as well as the opportunity to work with high-quality students, and says he greatly benefited from the diverse professional backgrounds his classmates brought to the table. 

“My previous experiences combined with the people I encountered at Owen have allowed for my current success.”

A quick glance at LaVelle’s bio shows a career path punctuated by a diverse range of experiences across a number of sectors, including technology, telecommunications, financial services, media and entertainment, and government, but the anchor throughout has been marketing.

Although she began her career at AT&T in operations, she has always been keenly interested in understanding consumers’ needs and building organizations around the experiences those consumers want to have. “I have always had good instincts about consumers and an ability to see the obvious path,” says LaVelle. Indeed, her marketing acumen has enabled her to successfully launch over 100 brands and turn the tide on flagging market shares and profits. 

LaVelle’s instincts have been on point internally, too, in terms of recognizing when she has needed to change jobs, and she advises others to be aware of their own internal compasses. “We are the architects of our work life. We can be proactive or reactive, but regardless, change is inevitable.” 

LaVelle has chosen the proactive path, joining SIRIUS after serving as Chief Marketing Officer with PNC Financial Services Group. She realized she was ready for a change, but after 10 months of exploring other options, including launching a consulting business, she also recognized her desire to get back into corporate life as an operator, not just an advisor. 

She’ll no doubt continue to listen to her own internal cues, but for now, though, it’s SIRIUS business.

Cohron’s predilection for banking comes naturally, by way of paternal DNA. Her father spent his life building a successful community bank in Glasgow, Ky., and she has fond memories of learning the business at his knee, from the ground up. But Cohron also credits Owen with shaping her career. “My MBA is the reason I was hired to run Citizens,” she says.

Interestingly, she did not receive a college degree prior to her graduate work at Vanderbilt. Cohron jokes about “the bad old days” when she was denied a scholarship at another university because her husband was already in dental school. Not one to let adversity hold her down, she worked her way up in a local bank and spent a number of years serving on the Bowling Green Board of Education and the Kentucky School Boards Association, as well as the bank board that would later spin off as the group of investors behind Citizens First.

Cohron made the decision to apply to Vanderbilt, having learned that some B-schools admit non-degree candidates. Her then-role as a Corporate Director made her an appealing candidate to the Executive MBA program, and after clearing a number of required high hurdles, she was admitted.

“Without doubt, Owen has enabled me to leverage my gifts and talents to their fullest potential.”