2003 Headlines
Eric Beringause '82 Named President of Alcoa Consumer Products 
Eric Beringause, '82 has joined Alcoa as President of Alcoa Consumer Products (ACP), the global consumer business within Alcoa, and the market leader in the consumer wraps and bags category. Among the well-known brands in the ACP portfolio are Reynolds Wrap® Aluminum Foil, Reynolds Plastics Wrap, Reynolds Cut-Rite Wax Paper and BacoFoil in the UK. Mr. Beringause most recently was senior vice president and global head of International Strategy with Novartis' Gerber Infant and Baby Products business, based in Parsippany, NJ.
Alcoa is the world's leading producer and manager of primary aluminum, fabricated aluminum and alumina facilities, and is active in all major aspects of the industry. Alcoa serves the aerospace, automotive, packaging, building and construction, commercial transportation and industrial markets, bringing design, engineering, production and other capabilities of Alcoa's businesses to customers. In addition to aluminum products and components, Alcoa also markets consumer brands including Reynolds Wrap? foils and plastic wraps, Alcoa? wheels, and Baco? household wraps. Among its other businesses are vinyl siding, closures, fastening systems, precision castings, and electrical distribution systems for cars and trucks. The company has 129,000 employees in 42 countries and has been named one of the top three most sustainable corporations in the world at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. More information can be found at www.alcoa.com.
Mr. Beringause has extensive marketing and business development experience with several well-known global consumer products companies including Novartis, the Edgewood Consulting Group, Inc, ConAgra Food, Inc, Pillsbury, Nabisco Brands and Nestle, Inc.
Cornell Brings Executive MBA Program to State of Washington
Nine Information Sessions for Top Ivy League Program Set for Seattle Area
(January 9, 2006, Ithaca, New York)...The Johnson School at Cornell University is pleased to announce that its Cornell-Queen's Executive MBA program has been approved for offering in Washington State. Information sessions for the program will be held January 23 & 24, March 13 and May 1 at the Grand Hyatt Seattle; March 14 and May 2 at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue, and January 25, March 15 and May 3 in Portland.
The Cornell-Queen's Executive MBA program, which is taught in partnership with Queen's School of Business in Kingston, Ontario, enrolls 60 participants currently and has Learning Teams in several locations in New York State and across many provinces of Canada. There are two learning teams currently in Vancouver, Canada."The Cornell-Queen's Executive MBA delivers an intense, interactive, and comprehensive business education to experienced and motivated managers and professionals," said Danny Szpiro, the director of this groundbreaking program. "This program enables our participants in Washington State to earn their MBA without disrupting their career, and without requiring frequent trips to the Cornell campus."
The Cornell-Queen's Executive MBA program uses a different learning model from the Johnson School's residential MBA and its New York City-based Executive MBA program. Participants in this new program are organized into Boardroom Learning Teams of approximately 6-8 people and each team is assigned a boardroom location in the city where the participants live and work. The program is 17-months long and during this period courses are delivered in a combination of three on-campus residential sessions and three Saturdays per month. On these Saturdays, participants across the US and Canada gather in their respective boardroom sites as Learning Teams, and are connected via a multi-point, interactive videoconferencing to an on-campus studio where the professor is located and from which the professor conducts the class session.
The partnership between the Johnson School at Cornell and Queen's School of Business in this program means that participants graduate with two MBA degrees - one from Cornell and one from Queen's - and become full-fledged alumni of both universities. The inaugural group of participants will complete this team-based, dual-degree program in November 2006 having met the same high academic standards and with the same MBA degree as the Johnson School's MBA, Twelve Month Option (TMO) and Executive MBA programs.
The all-inclusive fee of $92,000 covers tuition, books, cases, learning materials, meals and accommodation during residential sessions, as well as travel, lodging and expenses for a one-week international business project. The fee also covers all of the software required for the program and in-house technical support. For more information about the program visit: www.johnson.cornell.edu/academic/boardroom.
Queen's School of Business (www.business.queensu.ca) is one of the world's premier business schools. Its programs include: Queen's MBA for Science & Technology, ranked by BusinessWeek magazine (US) as the #1 MBA in the world outside the US; the one-year Queen's Accelerated MBA for Business Graduates, offered across Canada by real-time, interactive videoconference; the market-leading Queen's Executive MBA - delivered at Queen's facility in Ottawa, as well as by videoconference to 14 cities across Canada; Queen's Executive Development Centre, Canada's largest provider of executive education, ranked #1 in Canada and in the world's top-12 by the Financial Times (UK); the undergraduate Bachelor of Commerce, renowned for its rigorous entrance standards that stress both academics and leadership potential; and MSc and PhD programs that produce leading researchers for industry and academe.
The Johnson School at Cornell University, founded in 1946, is Cornell's graduate school of management. The Johnson School combines leading edge intellectual capital with "real time, real world" business practice and is among the top business schools in the world. Opportunities for experiential learning, such as immersion programs and student-run venture capital and hedge funds, distinguish the Johnson School's curricula. Programs include MBA and doctoral degrees, a twelve-month MBA option for students with advanced degrees in science or engineering, an executive MBA and the Cornell Boardroom EMBA. The Johnson School is located at the center of Cornell University-the largest of the Ivy League schools.
Hart's Book is One of Best Books of 2005
Professor Stuart Hart's book, Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems, has been named one of the best business books of 2005 by strategy+business magazine.
Says strategy + business magazine,
"The private sector has an essential role to play in lifting the developing world out of poverty, but it must be provided with the tools to do so. Two business professors take up the theme of sustainable capitalism in books that are strong complements to The End of Poverty.
Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems, by Cornell University Johnson School of Management professor Stuart L. Hart (Wharton School Publishing, 2005), and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, by University of Michigan professor C.K. Prahalad (Wharton School Publishing, 2005), both show how multinational corporations can develop new growth markets while elevating living standards among the poor. The professors first presented their ideas about "the bottom of the pyramid" - a reference to the 4 billion people, living mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with per capita incomes of less than US$1,400 a year - in strategy+business. (See "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid," by C.K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart, s+b, First Quarter 2002.) They present this concept as an approach to corporate strategy. (See "Sailing Beyond Luck," by Chuck Lucier and Jan Dyer, s+b, Winter 2005.)
Professor Hart is a leading scholar and innovator in strategy and corporate environmentalism. He was the founder of the University of Michigan's first program in corporate environmental management, and later started the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the Flagler School of Management at the University of North Carolina. In 2003, he assumed his current position at Cornell as the S.C. Johnson Professor of Sustainable Global Enterprise.
Capitalism at the Crossroads is a generally well-written and well-argued collection of ideas developed over several decades of research on the promise of what Professor Hart calls the sustainable global enterprise - "a new private sector-based approach to development that creates profitable businesses that simultaneously raise the quality of life for the world's poor, respect cultural diversity, and conserve the ecological integrity of the planet for future generations."
The book provides many valuable examples of the experiments, innovations, and market success stories of companies that are building businesses to address the specific needs and desires of people living in the poorest nations. His stories and insights are especially strong when he explains what multinational companies do to become effective in these markets. For example, Unilever's Indian subsidiary, Hindustan Lever Limited - which increased its revenues and profits by 20 and 25 percent per year, respectively, between 1995 and 2000 - requires all employees in India to spend six weeks living in rural villages to get information directly from consumers, while the company develops new products for them and works with local producers to source local materials. Unilever also built an R&D center in rural India. These efforts he describes as part of a strategy to become "indigenous."
Even more valuable to the strategy+business reader is the void this book fills in leveraging familiar management concepts, frameworks, and language to connect business strategy to sustainability strategies. Professor Hart devotes an entire chapter to the subject, citing Clayton Christensen's work on disruptive innovation several times, and presenting a useful diagnostic approach for managing today's businesses and creating tomorrow's opportunities. One chapter, "The Great Leap Downward," shows why the poorest nations can be viewed as potentially lucrative markets in which to incubate "clean" technologies. For instance, Professor Hart cites the development of fuel-efficient cars for use in heavily polluted countries such as China and India as a prime opportunity that auto manufacturers have so far missed."
2005 Fried Fellowships Announced
Dean Robert Swieringa recently announced the 5 recipients of the Johnson School's most prestigious award, the Fried Fellowships. The recipients are Justin Crow, Juan Duarte, Bob Glass, Kiran Prasad, and Tyhler Raye. The Fried Fellowships were established in 1989 by a generous endowment gift by a distinguished Cornell alumnus, Albert Fried, Jr. The fellowships are awarded to five second-year students each year solely on the basis of leadership potential and academic achievement. The award includes a stipend and requires that the recipient work with a faculty or senior staff member on a project of mutual academic or professional interest. Congratulations to these extraordinary students!
Johnson School Team Places in Top 10 of Innovation Challenge
The Johnson School team includes Jenny Chang, Daniel Antonio G. Tirol, Natalie S. Messerle, Amy C. Cham, and Erica Bliss has been named a top ten finalist of the 2005 Thunderbird Innovation Challenge: "Most Innovative MBA Team in the World". Competing against 320 teams from around the world, at stake is the title "Most Innovative MBA Team in the World and a $20,000 cash prize. In the competition, teams solve real-world business problems developed by sponsors of the event. All teams were judged by CEOs from major corporations around the world and the final competition is to be held November 17 and 18 in Arizona. Good luck to the Johnson School team!
PhD Candidate Kartono Wins Two National Awards
Johnson School PhD candidate Benjamin Kartono has won two national awards for his doctoral dissertation, "Linking Consumer-Based Brand Equity to Market Performance: An Integrated Approach to Brand Equity Management."
Kartono's first award is the 2005 Alden G. Clayton Award from the Marketing Science Institute (MSI). The award is given to the marketing scholar who submits the best dissertation proposal on topics relevant to MSI's research priorities. Kartono was selected from 81 entries and his dissertation was reviewed by 160 academic reviewers.
Kartono's second award is for best paper from Goizueta Business School's Zyman Institute of Brand Science Doctoral Dissertation Competition. A cash prize of $5000 for research accompanies this award.
Kartono's dissertation advisor is Professor Vithala Rao. Congratulations to both of them on these wonderful awards.
Professor Russo Named Filene Research Fellow
J. Edward Russo, the S.C. Johnson Family Professor of Management & Professor of Marketing and Behavioral Science, has been chosen as one of eight people named as inaugural Filene Research Fellow created by the Filene Research Institute (FRI). FRI has created this new program in an attempt to broaden its ties with top researchers on subjects related to consumer finance and public policy issues. The eight initial fellows will each serve two-year terms and may serve up to a maximum of three terms. The group will meet twice each year via conference call and once each year at a designated Filene Research Council event.
The Filene Research Institute examines vital issues affecting the future of credit unions and consumer finance. Through this unique, non profit organization, leading scholars and consultants analyze managerial problems, public policy questions, and consumer needs. The Institute's name honors Edward A. Filene, the "father of the U.S. credit union movement." Filene, a brilliant business person and wise philanthropist, relied on solid, innovative research when encouraging credit union development. His spirit lives on as the Institute pursues knowledge that will benefit credit unions, their members, and all consumers of financial services.
