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May 20, 2015

Lessons from ‘Japan Matters’

Sakura Hamada addresses the audience during "Japan Matters." — Sakura Hamada addresses the audience during “Japan Matters.”

Planning to do business with a Japanese person?

Then among other skills, you better learn the proper way to hang up a land-line telephone.

That was one of the lessons May 8 during “Japan Matters,” a presentation at Austin Hall co-sponsored by the College of Business, Oregon State’s Japanese Student Association and INTO OSU, which helps international students make smooth transitions into the local culture after they arrive in Corvallis.

Among the speakers was Yosuke Masuda, a graduate student and kengido instructor at Oregon State; kengido is a Samurai-based combination of martial arts and performing arts.

Masuda, who holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Yokohama National University, explained to the audience of two dozen the wrong way and the right ways to hang up a phone if you’re interested in showing respect to the person on the other end of the line.

Wrong way: Set the receiver down noisily.

Right ways: Replace it quietly, depress the hang-up button with a finger, or wait for the other person to get off the line before putting the receiver back in place.

Masuda also described proper etiquette for the exchange of business cards: Bow, hold the car with two hands and so the writing is right-side-up to the recipient, and, if the recipient is also trying to give you his business card, try to get your card below his. This double exchange, Masuda admitted, can be awkward as each attempts to get his card under the other, but somehow it works out.

“In general people in Japan pay more attention to the respect of others compared to the U.S. or other countries,” Masuda said.

Masuda also noted that in Japan, people making each other’s acquaintance don’t shake hands but rather just bow and exchange business cards.

He added that the U.S. features more workplace gender equality than Japan, and a somewhat less driven workforce; in his country, he said, it’s not uncommon for workers to sleep in their offices.

May 18, 2015

Collaborative Studio builds bridges

Danielle Lucia and Gabe Fleck talk about their Northwest Trek product line of hiking accessories.

Cooperation, creativity and the art of building a bridge from the historical to the modern all come together for students in Christine Gallagher’s DHE 360 class, Collaborative Studio.

The course is designed to examine a variety of collaborative methodologies and situations; students work across design disciplines to complete various and complicated projects.

Exemplifying that mission is a roughly two-week undertaking that saw three- and four-person teams draw inspiration from historical textiles to create product lines based on those fabrics and what they learned about and from them; the lines had to include at least one prototype.

The vintage pieces at the core of the project are part of the School of Design and Human Environment’s Historic & Cultural Textile and Apparel Collection.

As the project description explains, the collection “was started in the 1940s through the efforts of several professors in the Department of Clothing, Textiles, and Related Arts in the School of Home Economics. The collection … consists of Euro-American apparel, non-Euro-American cultural textiles and cultural apparel but also includes fabric samples, tapestry fragments, and accessories from many cultures. While the bulk of the entire collection is from the 19th and 20th century, there is cultural wear, textiles and textile fragments from the 15th, 17th, and 18th centuries.”

Among the items the student teams used as their creative muses were a civil rank badge from China’s Ch’ing Dynasty, a navy wool bathing suit, embroidered silk, a Guatemalan huipil, a tent coat and a skirt suit. The product lines those artifacts spawned were “conceptually rich and very interesting,” Gallagher told her students following their class presentations.

Examples:

Pacific Picnic, a “modern beach experience” inspired by the wool swimsuit; products included the Nautical Napkin and the Beach Basket.

The Bodhi Meditation Line, a set of home goods designed to foster meditation, such as a specialized lamp and floor mat; the civil rank badge led to this line’s creation.

Northwest Trek, a collection of hiking accessories (boots, field journal, picnic blanket) inspired by the huipil.

Chambri, a coffee shop and related products aimed at women seeking a break from day-to-day life; the Chambri are a woman-dominated tribe in Papua New Guinea, and the company and products were inspired by the tent coat of the 1960s, a time when women were beginning to enjoy new freedoms in American society.

Gallagher teaches two sections of Collaborative Studio, and the product lines developed by both will be reviewed by jurors for an exhibit that will be presented alongside the SDHE’s annual Spring Fashion Show on May 30.

Jessica Hammock and Cameron Lambert describe Chambri, a coffee shop by and for the modern woman.

May 14, 2015May 15, 2015

Event honors design high-achievers

Austin Hall hosted a display of design students' work May 1. — Austin Hall hosted a display of design students’ work May 1.

Jordan Clausen and her parents, Troy and Malissa Clausen of Salem, were among the happy throng of design students and their mothers and fathers on hand May 1 at Austin Hall.

“This is a great school for her,” Troy said of his daughter, who was among the honorees being recognized at the afternoon reception.

Jordan, a junior, is one of 19 recipients of a Cecelia T. Shuttle Worth Scholarship.

In all, some five dozen students in merchandising management and apparel, interior and graphic design were honored with various scholarships and awards during the event – recognition for their teaching, research, scholarship, creativity and overall excellence.

Among the honorees are five students selected as School of Design and Human Environment All-Stars: Ashtin Crawford, Lauren Davis, Eliot Frack, Haley Lillybridge and Sara Winick-Brown.

The event, which helped kick off Mom’s Weekend on the OSU campus, included a gallery of work by design students in multiple disciplines.

“This is so much fun,” textiles instructor Brigitte Cluver said as she toured the exhibits. “I never get to see what the other classes are doing.”

Design students Sarah Wilson, left, Sydney Juell and Brendan Spencer.

May 12, 2015May 12, 2015

How online apparel shoppers think

Minjeong Kim, associate dean of the College of Business, explained April 30 why she enjoys studying how people go about shopping for apparel.

“If you go to the grocery store for Coke or Pepsi, you know what you’re going to buy,” she told members of Triad, OSU’s faculty and staff club, at its weekly meeting at the Memorial Union building. “But if you go to a clothing store, you know you need a new jacket, or a new outfit for some event, but you don’t know what you’re going to buy. Every time you go in, it’s a whole new experience.”

The title of Kim’s lunch-hour presentation was “Online Apparel Shopping: A Peek into the Consumer’s Mind.”

“It’s about an emotional connection with the product,” she said. “So how can people buy apparel online when they can’t see it or feel it or try it on? My research came out of skepticism — how could they do that?”

Kim has studied a variety of e-commerce website design techniques and their effect, if any, on facilitating someone to make a purchase decision.

For example, she theorized that seeing a larger picture of an item would generate a stronger purchase intention than a smaller photo, but that did not prove to be the case. Seeing more product information in the form of text, however, did create a stronger purchase intention.

Kim explained to Triad the concept of concreteness, defined as the degree of ease or difficulty involved in eliciting a mental image. Concrete words such as “apple” tend to invoke a sensory experience, whereas non-concrete words such as “religion” do not.

She also spoke about mental imagery – the process by which sensory or perceptual experience is represented in an individual’s working memory – and speculated that mental imagery could be a key to facilitating a satisfactory virtual shopping experience without having physical experience with a product.

Putting those concepts together, she talked about how whether a product such as a swimsuit sells better online if the photo of the model has a blank background or a concrete one, such as a beach scene. Results depended, she said, on whether the shopper was a visual learner (generally more likely to buy with a concrete background) or verbal learner (more likely with a blank background).

And responding to a post-presentation question from the audience, she provided information that likely most suspected was true: For men, clothes shopping tends toward hasty and utilitarian, whereas for women it’s often a pleasure-seeking experience.

May 7, 2015

Why nation branding? Ask a Kazakh

Israeli diplomat Ido Aharoni told an Austin Hall audience that if a nation doesn’t brand itself, someone else will.

If anyone wonders what can happen when a nation doesn’t consciously, strategically and actively brand itself, just take a look at Kazakhstan, Israeli diplomat Ido Aharoni said.

Aharoni, speaking April 28 in Austin Hall’s Robert Family Events Room, noted how Kazakhstan’s brand is linked not to any actual aspects of the country but to British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and his 2006 movie, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”

“Borat is a Turkish name,” said Aharoni, Israel’s consul general for the New York City area. “The language he spoke was not Kazakh – it was half Hebrew, half gibberish. The movie was shot in Romania. Sacha Baron Cohen has never set foot in Kazakhstan, yet he’s the most famous person from the country.”

His visit sponsored by the Jewish National Fund and Oregon Hillel, a campus organization for Jewish people, Aharoni told the audience that branding is the ability to create and then manage a personality.

“A brand is a promise. A strong brand is a promise delivered,” said Aharoni, who contrasted his country with Brazil, which has gotten the world to associate it with fun.

“Brand Brazil is very strong, very powerful, very attractive,” he said. “Brazil the place is a little inferior to the brand, and the gap between the two is worth billions and billions to Brazil’s economy.

“Israel is exactly the opposite. The product is very attractive, very much fun, but the brand is so inferior to the product that it creates a huge deficit. The brand is about conflict; that is what defines brand Israel.”

Aharoni noted that each year 300,000 American students study abroad but only 1,500 of those land in Israel.

“The number should be in the tens of thousands,” he said. “We offer courses in English and have some of the best universities in the world, but there are more American students in Cairo than in Israel.”

Israel is working hard at rebranding itself with a focus on its creative energy – “vibrant diversity, building the future, entrepreneurial zeal,” said Aharoni.

“Creative energy is not a campaign, not a slogan – it’s the essence of who we are,” he said. “It’s a basic right of every place in the world to promote itself. And it’s not just about tourism – not every person can afford to travel, and if you can’t, then my goal is to develop a healthy curiosity about Israel.”

May 6, 2015

Adidas: A culture of empowerment

A culture built around honesty, commitment, passion, innovation, inspiration, teamwork, empowerment and student engagement has earned adidas this year’s Distinguished Business Partner award.

That culture is in sync with that of the College of Business, adidas executive Nic Vu said.

“The professors and other educators focus on placement,” said Vu, a senior vice president and a 1995 College of Business graduate who spearheaded his company’s partnership with the college. “College of Business students are very well versed in team dynamics, group projects and results orientation, and they’re open to learning.

“I work with lot of Ph.D.’s and consultants who have master’s, MBAs, whatever, and they don’t have all of that packaged together as well as some of the undergrads I see coming out of Oregon State,” he said. “That’s a compliment to the dean and all the educators at Oregon State.”

Beavers who have joined Vu at adidas have taken note of a supportive environment that mirrors that of the college that prepared them to launch their careers.

“The College of Business stresses networking and adidas allows recent grads to take networking to an entirely new level,” said OSU senior Jacob Knightley, who’s majoring in finance and business information systems and works 30 hours a week for adidas’ finance reporting team.

“All managers — junior, senior and above — are extremely approachable and will take time out of their day to talk with you. My CFO walks around and talks with everybody on a first-name basis and will make the effort to learn your name as soon as possible.”

Knightley said he and others consider the adidas culture to be an extension of their university life.

“We make sure our work is getting completed to the best degree, but we have fun while we do it,” he said. “Adidas benefits (from the College of Business partnership) by getting great local talent who bring new and fresh ideas about how to win in America, and the college benefits by having a local company that loves to recruit local talent.”

Adidas will be honored May 11 in Portland at the college’s annual Celebration of Excellence, along with the rest of the 2015 award winners as well as retiring Dean Ilene Kleinsorge.

The evening begins with a reception at 5:30 p.m., followed by dinner and the awards presentation. For more information or to register, contact Elsa Frey at elsa.frey@oregonstate.edu or call 541-737-6648, or register online at http://business.oregonstate.edu/awards.

May 1, 2015

Willener: COB students poised to soar

The College of Business prepares people to measure up against the best, says Curt Willener, this year’s Distinguished Early Career Business Professional.

The Hillsboro resident should know. Three years after his OSU graduation, he was accepted into the MBA program at Harvard Business School.

“OSU was on my list, but since I’d gone there as an undergraduate, I wanted a new experience,” who at the time was working at a mill in Albany. “I had just gotten done with a super dusty, 14-hour shift when I talked to (Dean) Ilene (Kleinsorge) about going to graduate school. I think I got her office dirty. But she was so open to talking with me and supporting me, and Ilene wrote a recommendation letter that helped me get into Harvard.

“You’re always a little nervous with something like that, but Ilene said don’t worry, we prepared you, and she was absolutely right,” Willener said. “The top students at Oregon State can compete anywhere in the world against anyone.”

For Willener, now operations manager and Danaher Business System leader at Tektronix/Danaher, the route to OSU began on Sauvie Island, where from age 12 to 18 he worked at a local farm and kennel. After graduating from Scappoose High School, he followed in the footsteps of his OSU alum father, Henry, and headed to Corvallis.

Willener graduated in management and finance from OSU in 2004 and earned a place in a Weyerhaeuser program designed to develop new leaders. Within a few months he was the night-shift supervisor, winning over the older, more experienced workers by “treating them with respect and giving them a fair shake” and “approaching situations with humility and common sense.”

“Listening is a really big part of it,” he said. “People respect you for it.”

Willener will be honored May 11 in Portland at the college’s annual Celebration of Excellence, along with the rest of the 2015 award winners as well as the retiring Kleinsorge. For more on the event and the honorees, follow the College of Business blog as the countdown to the celebration continues over the next couple of weeks.

April 30, 2015September 28, 2015

Haakenson: Success reflects on OSU

Katie Haakenson.

When Katie Haakenson was still an intern, Boeing tasked her with creating and hosting a conference for the company’s project managers in the Puget Sound area.

The idea was for them to talk about methodologies they’d used and lessons they’d learned.

About 20 people attended.

“Everyone thought it was very valuable and said, we want to do that again,” said Haakenson, who earned a finance degree from Oregon State in 2009 and added an MBA a year later. “So the next year when we hosted the Boeing Project Management Conference, it went from 20 to about 100, and they came from all across the country. The third year, there were more than 300 from around the world. The event still goes on, and all the project managers look forward to it. It’s pretty cool to be able to say I started it.”

The creativity, leadership skills and organizational savvy that Haakenson used in developing the conference are among the reasons she’s this year’s Distinguished Young Business Professional.

“I think it’s a great honor,” she said. “Any success I’ve had reflects back to my experiences at OSU.”

Haakenson, hired as a permanent employee after starring in her internship, spent nearly four years with Boeing at the Everett (Wash.) Delivery Center. She’s now a project leadership associate with Point B Management Consultants in Seattle, having started there in January following one-year stints at Microsoft and Logic 20/20, also a Seattle-based consulting firm.

The bustle of Seattle represents a stark change from Haakenson’s youth in Corbett, Ore., where her graduating class at Corbett High featured 45 people.

Choosing Oregon State after a campus visit and conversations with faculty made her feel at home, she worked two jobs to pay for school and still graduated in three years, then stayed a fourth year and collected an MBA.

“I really liked the IBP (integrated business plan) program, and I wanted some additional time with College of Business faculty since I’d learned so much as an undergraduate,” Haakenson said.

She mentioned in particular professor Erik Larson, who taught Haakenson project management, and professional development instructor Gene Young, whose lessons “helped me get positions that on paper I didn’t have enough experience for by defining and highlighting what I could bring to the table.”

“Going to OSU was a great experience, and the connections I’ve kept with the university are very valuable for me,” she said. “I don’t think I could have made a better choice.”

April 29, 2015

Spathas was destined for OSU

Matt Spathas with his wife and four children.

The son of an OSU-educated entrepreneur and a graduate of the same Portland high school that produced Linus Pauling, Matt Spathas’ trail to Corvallis was blazed early on.

“My dad told me, ‘You can go to any college you want, but the only one I’ll help you pay for is Oregon State,’” he said.

Four decades later, there’s little doubt in Spathas’ mind that his father really did know best.

“I’m really grateful for the education I received at Oregon State,” said Spathas, this year’s Distinguished Service Award winner.

Spathas, College of Business class of 1980, is one of three managing principals at SENTRE Partners, a San Diego-based firm that describes itself as “Stewards and Entrepreneurs of Real Estate.” He’s been with the company for 21 years and in his career has had a hand in more than $2.5 billion in transactions.

But what stands out for Spathas isn’t dollars or buildings, it’s “the mentors I’ve had along the way, and second to that are the relationships that we’ve built.”

Spathas grew up in southeast Portland, where his family operated Claudia’s Tavern. His father, Gene, had opened the saloon on Hawthorne Boulevard in 1958, fulfilling a promise to put his bride’s “name up in lights.”

“It wasn’t exactly what she had in mind,” Spathas joked.

As a senior, Spathas was named athlete of the year at Washington High School – where the principal was former OSU football All-American Bill Gray.

After earning his degree, Spathas landed a job as a sales associate with Portland commercial real estate firm Norris, Beggs & Simpson. There he found mentors in Clayton Hering, now the company chairman, and another OSU alum, Joe Wood, who’d earned the nickname “Mr. Downtown.”

“He was legendary,” Spathas said. “He’d leased virtually every new high-rise that had been built in Portland.”

After two years, Spathas and wife, Kristen, also an Oregon State graduate, moved to San Diego, where Spathas became a marketing principal for Trammell Crow, the nation’s biggest commercial development company. He joined SENTRE Partners in 1994.

Spathas will be honored May 11 in Portland at the college’s annual Celebration of Excellence, along with the rest of the 2015 award winners as well as retiring Dean Ilene Kleinsorge. For more on the event and the honorees, follow the College of Business blog as the countdown to the celebration continues over the next couple of weeks.

April 29, 2015April 28, 2015

COB alum gives ethics lessons

Retired Accenture executive Joe Lobbato.

University professor and retired executive Joe Lobbato delivered a series of powerful yet simple messages on business ethics April 27 to a crowd of about 150 in Austin Hall’s Stirek Auditorium.

Among them: If you’re unethical, it will eventually come to light.

Lobbato earned a bachelor’s degree from the College of Business in 1981 and added an MBA the following year before embarking on a 22-year career with Arthur Andersen, later known as Andersen Consulting and now Accenture. He was a managing partner the last 10 years and has worked and lived abroad extensively, currently residing in Thailand, where he teaches business ethics at Chulalongkorn University.

Lobbato graduated from Corvallis High School and noted one of his earliest business ventures was a paper route not far from Austin Hall.

That newspaper theme came up again later when he outlined strategies business people can use to remain ethical. They included the “newspaper headline test”: If you wouldn’t be comfortable with the news of what you’re doing being blared across the top of page one, don’t do it.

Also on the list: Take responsibility, develop personal discipline, know your weaknesses, align your priorities with values, admit wrongdoing quickly and ask forgiveness, take extra care with finances, use checks and balances, put your family ahead of work, place high value on people, and don’t associate with corrupt people.

Lobbato noted that a society’s culture, norms and values dictate which practices are acceptable. In some cultures, including Thailand’s, corruption is just considered part of the overall landscape.

But accepted or not, corruption brings many negative consequences, said Lobbato. It reduces the overall wealth of a country and the amount spent on “good stuff,” distorts the way money is spent, undermines trust, and harms the environment and innocent people

Lobbato noted that a person crosses three lines on the way to the most unethical types of conduct. The first line is violating the Golden Rule, the second is the “tort line” – venturing into territory that makes you vulnerable to civil action – and the third is the criminal line, i.e. doing something that makes you subject to prosecution.

He left the students in the audience some words of advice if they ever feel pressured by an employer to do something they know is wrong.

“Do not ever do anything that you believe is unethical,” he said. “You guys will always lose. The company will say, ‘we never told him to do that.’”