Twenty years can create some distance between a university and one of its graduates. Not so for Kevin Kaseff. A member of the Class of 1989, Kaseff fondly recalls both the friends he made at Owen and his academic experience. “I loved the school and the experience,” he says. “I’ve maintained those friendships the past [...]
Professor Germain Böer and I have much in common. We both arrived at Owen in the same year, we both have practiced accounting, and we both are serial entrepreneurs. This last item is a shared passion of ours. Whether starting his own business before coming to Owen or launching the Center for Entrepreneurship at the [...]
Bill Christie, Frances Hampton Currey Professor of Management, was just a junior faculty member at the Owen School in the early ’90s when he and Paul Schultz, a colleague at Ohio State University, stumbled across some data that pointed toward collusion among market makers at NASDAQ.
Christie and Schultz discovered that the majority of the largest [...]
Are entrepreneurs born or made? Professor of Management Germain Böer believes it’s a bit of both. On the one hand, he says, “You have to know how to reach your customers, how to build an operation that works smoothly. These are things that many people who start companies don’t really know. That’s why, for entrepreneurs, [...]
Michael Lapré, an Owen faculty member who studies operations and performance in the airline industry, sees many challenges ahead for the major airlines. Maintaining customer satisfaction will continue to be a problem, he predicts, as fuel costs continue to soar and the industry works to keep costs down.
“Right now the biggest issue is cost,” says [...]
Doug Parker looks for the silver lining at US Airways.
Grounded. In airplane parlance, it’s an ironic way to describe someone who oversees the fifth largest airline in the country, but that’s exactly how friends and colleagues of US Airways Chairman and CEO Doug Parker, MBA’86, view him. While he’s adept at managing the 30,000-foot view, they say he remains one of the most down-to-earth people they know—even as his embattled industry confronts soaring costs and plummeting customer satisfaction.
Parker, who steered America West Airlines from bankruptcy to profitability in the ’90s and then engineered a successful merger with US Airways in 2005, launched his career in the airline industry with American Airlines. The Dallas-based company offered him his first post-MBA job during a recruiting visit to the Owen School.
“The fact of the matter is, I don’t think I would have been in this business if it weren’t for Vanderbilt,” he says from his company headquarters in Phoenix. “American Airlines recruited only MBAs, and they did so only at a very select group of schools. Because of the Vanderbilt connection, I was able to get hired.”