Category Archives: Industry Insights

Owen Podcast Series: Emma Email Marketing

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Blake Knight

This edition of the Owen Podcast Series welcomes Emma co-founder/CEO and Vanderbilt alum Clint Smith. Clint has been working with web-based products and communities for over 15 years and has overseen significant growth at Emma. He shares his thoughts on what makes the company unique, where it’s heading with future offerings, and how to craft the perfect email.

Visit: myemma.com
Follow: twitter.com/emmaemail
Like: facebook.com/emmaemail

 

Permanent link to this post (est. reading time 16 secs)
Posted in Blake Knight '12, Clark Bosslet '12, Industry Insights, Nashville | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

#OwenBowl 2012

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Clark Bosslet

Owen had its first ever Super Bowl Twitter Party on Sunday night, using the #OwenBowl hashtag to collect our various musings on the best and worst of the night. It was a fun exercise and collected a nice diversity of thought. For example, after Doug opined that the Cars.com “creepy second head representing the buyer’s confidence” commercial did not exactly warm his heart to the brand, I shared my differing opinion.

While exchanges like this happened all night, they were noteworthy not so much for the quality of their content (in something as subjective as this, we are all amateurs and our opinions are valued as such) but more for the fact that these exchanges were happening at all. And they were, all over the internet. According to Peter Kafka at All Things D, there were somewhere between 11 and 16 million social media comments during the game. While the increasing number of platforms make such estimates increasingly difficult to gauge, all estimates point to a substantial uptick year-over-year. According to Twitter, the final three minutes of the game saw an average of 10,000 tweets per second, peaking at 12,233 and setting a new record for the site.

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Owen Reading List Series: Brian McCann

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Clark Bosslet

The first in our series of professor reading lists comes from Brian McCann, who handles our core strategy class and our corporate strategy elective. We asked him to suggest some books and blogs for current and prospective students, and this is the list he came up with. (Editor’s note: The list Professor McCann provided was rather exhaustive, so I pared it down to only the non-fiction books and blogs. However, I’m sure Professor McCann would want you to know his interests are broader and more eclectic than what is represented below.)

Books:

The Power of Intuition – Gary Klein

*How We Decide – Jonah Lehrer

Judgment in Managerial Decision Making – Max Bazerman and Don Moore

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert Cialdini

Quirkology – Richard Wiseman

Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely

The Upside of Irrationality – Dan Ariely

*The Halo Effect – Phil Rosenzweig

*Fooled by Randomness – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

*The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

*The Strategy Paradox – Michael Raynor

When Genius Failed – Roger Lowenstein

The New Business Road Test – John Mullins

Getting to Plan B – John Mullins

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Innovation + Entrepreneurs @Owen

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Hannah Johnson

A few weeks ago I received a meeting invite from one of my favorite Owen Professors: David Owens. He’s our resident innovation guru and soon to be published author. He had invited a small group of students to meet with two representatives from the Financial Services Forum to discuss innovation and entrepreneurship. Plus, he was offering free lunch; so obviously I went.

I did a little research prior to the meeting to answer some questions like: What is the Financial Services Forum? What do they do? Why would they be interested in talking to me?

According to their website: “The Financial Services Forum is a non-partisan financial and economic policy organization comprising the CEOs of 20 of the largest and most diversified financial services institutions doing business in the United States. The purpose of the Forum is to pursue policies that encourage savings and investment, promote an open and competitive global marketplace, and ensure the opportunity of people everywhere to participate fully and productively in the 21st-century global economy.”

Basically, they were asking us for our ideas on how public policy can help promote small business creation in the U.S.

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P&G CEO Bob McDonald on Values-Based Leadership

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Blake Knight

P&G CEO Bob McDonald

Last week Owen students had the privilege of meeting Procter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald at a speaking even on campus. The subject of his talk was values-based leadership in what he calls an increasingly VUCA world. (VUCA = volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous)

Along with giving out his email address, he provided his ten rules of successful leadership:

  1. Living a life driven by purpose is more meaningful and rewarding than meandering through life without direction. “Choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.” – From the West Point Cadet Prayer
  2. Companies must do well to do good, and must do good to do well. P&G was the first company in the world to hire women in Saudi Arabia, and currently have 35 female employees. Due to the still constrained gender issues, the company had to install conference rooms with glass barriers that separates the men from the women. Additionally, because women in Saudi Arabia do not have the right to drive, P&G must hire male drivers to take the female employees around for work. It is inspiring and refreshing to hear about a company leading human rights issues around the globe and having a whatever-it-takes attitude to do what is right.
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Posted in Blake Knight '12, Industry Insights, Job Search | Tagged , , | 7 Comments