Tag: weatherford awards

Posted on

Celebration of Excellence Awards Banquet an Experiential Learning Opportunity for Students

Dean Kleinsorge with all five student presenters
Dean Kleinsorge with all five student presenters. FROM LEFT: Obum Gwacham, Frances Chen, Margo Botti, Dean Ilene Kleinsorge, Alexander Mason and Josh Gilardi

At this year’s Celebration of Excellence, 25 students representing all 10 majors within the College of Business and the School of Design and Human Environment (SDHE) were invited to attend the annual awards banquet. Staying true to the spirit of the college’s passion for and strong belief in experiential learning, five of these students got the opportunity to do much more than simply spectate.

Seniors Obum Gwacham (Marketing) and Alexander Mason (Finance), along with MBA student Frances Chen each served as awards presenters throughout the evening, while junior SDHE student Margo Botti accepted a Weatherford Award on behalf of her Grammy Award-winning uncle, Chris Botti, who was unable to attend; and senior Josh Gilardi (Marketing) was selected by Dean Ilene Kleinsorge to present a speech offering a current student’s perspective about the College of Business.

Despite the students’ different roles in the ceremony, each of them had to speak on stage to more than 400 attendees made up of distinguished alumni and business partners, as well as their peers and professors.

Obum Gwacham speaks to the audience
Senior Obum Gwacham presents an award to one of the college’s award winners

“I had never done anything like that before,” said Gwacham. “It was certainly the largest audience I’ve ever had to speak in front of, but I enjoyed every moment of it. Seeing how excited the other student presenters were before the event helped calm my nerves, and I was able to feed off their energy,” he said.

“When I was asked to be a presenter earlier in the year before the original event was postponed, I was told that the event had around 300 RSVPs,” said Gilardi. “I was terrified because it’s not just peers I’d be talking to but alumni, business professionals and important others. Talk about an intimidating first impression! After the event was canceled in February, I was relieved but disappointed that I would miss out on the opportunity. I was emailed in April saying the event was rescheduled for May and now they had 400-plus RSVPs,  so you can imagine what I was feeling. I was nervous starting the day of the event up until I stepped on stage to speak. Once I started giving my speech though, I felt a lot more comfortable,” he added.

Chen and Botti also learned a lot from the experience after shaking off some early jitters.

Josh Gilardi
Senior Josh Gilardi presents his views of the College of Business from the perspective of a current student

“Speaking at the Celebration of Excellence forced me to step out of my comfort zone,” said Chen. “Not only did I have to remember to speak with confidence and personality, but it was also a learning experience for me in that I learned how to behave properly at such an elegant, formal event,” she said.

“I thought I was inadequate to speak on behalf of my uncle and the  College of Business at such an important event, but I quickly got comfortable, and it felt like second nature to me,” said Botti.  “The experience confirmed how much I love speaking in front of large audiences,” she added.

Not only did the students hone their public speaking and presentation skills, but they also discovered the power of networking.

“I always knew that Oregon State had a great alumni network, but I truly felt it that evening,” said Gwacham. “I was approached by a number of alums that wanted to help me out with just about anything or answer questions I might have about what could be next for me after graduating,” he added.

Gilardi was also impressed with the alumni he encountered at the event.

“This event was proof that hard work pays off,” said Gilardi. “The award-winning alumni worked hard and were recognized for their efforts and accomplishments in different ways. I worked hard and was selected to speak because of it,” he said.

Overall, the students all said that they had a great time at the event.

“The number of attendees was simply amazing,” said Gwacham. “Some even came in from other states! It’s an event I look forward to being a part of after I finish with my undergrad at Oregon State,” he said.

“It was just a really fun experience for me as I got to see some old friends who are alumni at the event,” said Chen. “They mentored me in different stages of my life, and it was so good to show them my growth and how I’ve changed and make them proud of me,” she said.

One of the keys to a great experience is putting your education into action, and it was exciting getting to see these students thrive on the stage, handing out awards to distinguished alumni and business partners. Perhaps in the future,  these students will be back at the Celebration of Excellence receiving awards of their own.

View some photos of the student presenters from the event in the image gallery below:

 

 

We asked

Posted on

Weatherford Award ceremony shows entrepreneurs come from all walks of life

Thursday night Oregon State University MBA candidate Dale McCauley told the crowd at the 2013 Weatherford Awards in Portland how he got started as an innovator.

“When I was 4 years old my parents gave me a tool box. With real tools,” McCauley said. “Nothing with bolts was safe.”

It was a fitting start to an evening honoring entrepreneurs and innovators, those who saw the tools they had at their disposal and found a way to change the world, or in the case of 4-year-old McCauley, his mother’s Cuisinart.

McCauley is also a key part of the Austin Entrepreneurship Program, which sponsored the awards and is housed in Weatherford Hall. The program, supported by a gift from Ken and Joan Austin, helps expose current Oregon State students to the ideas and practice of entrepreneurship and teach the next generations of business visionaries.

One of the first students to come out of the program was Alex Polvi, who was honored with fellow OSU alumni Dan Di Spaltro and Logan Welliver for the their startup, Cloudkick.

“We had no clue what we were doing,” Di Spaltro said.

“We had some clue,” Polvi interjected.

“No clue.”

Di Spaltro spoke of the trio’s defining ideas of humor, trust, determination and keeping the operation lean.

“We had a team in it for the dream, not the paycheck,” Polvi said.

Also honored was Dr. Albert Starr, who helped develop the first artificial heart valve while working at what is now Oregon Health and Science University in 1958.

He said one of the keys to innovation is confidence, having the strength to push ahead even when the outcome is uncertain.

Starr remembered the first time OHSU approached him about cardiac surgery, something he hadn’t trained for specifically.

“He said Starr, can you do this type of surgery?” Starr said. “Of course.”

While Experian CEO Don Robert is confident in his business life, he was less so when he received the letter informing him he was a 2013 Weatherford Award honoree.

He called College of Business Dean Ilene Kleinsorge to let her know she had the wrong guy. He was the CEO of the world’s largest credit services company, not an entrepreneur.

“She told me maybe we have the wrong guy, but we’ve got the right company,” Robert said.

That he agreed with. Experian thrives on institutional innovation, Robert said, with much of the company’s business coming from products that didn’t exist five years ago.

“The job of our management team is to not screw that up and get in the way of good ideas. I will take the credit humbly for not screwing it up.”

The final honoree of the evening was Oregon’s first and still only woman governor, Barbara Roberts.

“Some of you are wincing to think about innovation in government,” Roberts said. “But in Oregon it does and has happened.”

Roberts mentioned Oregon’s vote by mail system, the Death With Dignity Act and a number of other legislative firsts which show Oregon’s pioneering character.

“I am a descendent of Oregon Trail pioneers,” she said. “You don’t stop. You don’t turn back.”

Roberts left the stage with a line from her inaugural address (“Not everyone gets to say that,” she added with a laugh).

“Each generation has but one chance to be judged by future generations,” Roberts said. “Now is out time. Let us be worthy of their judgment. ”

 

Posted on

2013 Weatherford Awards: Cloudkick

To celebrate the 2013 Weatherford Awards, we’re profiling each of the honorees here at the College of Business blog. Today are Dan Di Spaltro, Alex Polvi and Logan Welliver, the founders of Cloudkick. For more information about the awards and links to other honoree profiles as they’re posted, check out our introduction to the series.

For Alex Polvi, entrepreneurship comes down to one simple phrase:

“Just go for it.”

That’s exactly what he and fellow Oregon State alumni Dan Di Spaltro and Logan Welliver did after graduating from OSU.

In 2008, the trio moved to Silicon Valley and created Cloudkick, a startup dedicated to helping customers better manage their cloud computing resources.

Exactly two years later they were finalizing the sale of the startup to Rackspace, the second-largest cloud-computing company in the world.

All three took a risk, driven by a desire to do something they loved with the skills they had acquired at OSU. Now, just more than five years removed from graduation, the group has cemented their reputations as innovative entrepreneurs.

The story of Cloudkick began before OSU, when Polvi and Welliver met growing up in McMinnville, Oregon.

At OSU Polvi studied computer science, where he met Di Spaltro, while Welliver pursued graphic design.

Polvi says working in the Open Source Lab at OSU gave him the skills he needed to land internships with Mozilla and Google and eventually his first job out of school.

After graduating, Di Paltro and Polvi moved to San Jose, California. A year out of school the pair decided to start a new venture, and Polvi called Welliver to join them.

“It sounded like a good opportunity, and I knew Alex well enough to trust his nose for business, so I flew down to San Jose to meet with him and Dan,” Welliver remembers. “After that meeting, I closed up shop in Portland and moved down to San Jose to give it a shot.”

Di Spaltro and Polvi created the technical aspects of the project while Welliver used his graphic design talents to make the final product visually appealing and intuitive for users.

After participating in the Y Combinator accelerator program in 2009, the company launched and started its ascent in the cloud-computing world.

Less than a year later the company had grown to 12 employees — including six OSU alumni.

In December of 2011, Rackspace acquired Cloudkick, capping an amazing journey for the startup and its three founders.

Looking back, Polvi says the group had its share of luck, but they made it possible by following their passions and starting something of their own.

“Just the fact that we started a company in the first place positioned us to have 20 times more luck than someone who didn’t,” Polvi said.

Welliver said his main piece of advice for students and young entrepreneurs is to start working on what they love now instead of waiting for more favorable conditions.

“If you’re truly passionate about something, start working on it today,” Welliver said. “I hear too many people endlessly pitching ideas instead of building them. Executing a poor idea has infinitely more value than postulating you have a great one.”

Posted on

2013 Weatherford Awards: Dr. Albert Starr

To celebrate the 2013 Weatherford Awards, this week we’re profiling each of the honorees here at the College of Business blog. Today is Dr. Albert Starr. For more information about the awards and links to other honoree profiles as they’re posted, check out our introduction to the series.

Dr. Albert Starr, courtesy OHSU
Dr. Albert Starr, courtesy OHSU

While all innovators have pressure to succeed, few work with the possibility of actually saving a life with their inventions.

Those were the stakes for Dr. Albert Starr just more than 50 years ago as he and co-creator Miles Lowell Edwards developed the first artificial heart valve.

On September 21, 1960, Dr. Starr and his surgical team successfully implanted the first heart valve. Since the valve’s first use, heart valve replacement surgery has saved millions of lives, giving hope to those with heart disease.

“Up until that point those patients were doomed to progressively worse heart failure, medication and spiral toward death,” heart surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Swanson told the Portland Business Journal in 2000.

Today, life-saving heart valve replacement surgery is performed 300,000 times each year around the globe, with more than 90,000 of those operations taking place in the U.S.

“Valve replacement turned the corner of cardiac surgery enormously,” Dr. Starr said. “It was the first implantable life sustaining cardiac device. And before that we were nibbling around the outside of the heart but nothing was put inside. This was the first life sustaining device.”

Dr. Starr came to Oregon in 1958 after graduating from Columbia College (now Columbia Univeristy) in New York. Soon after Dr. Starr was approached by Edwards, a retiring mechanical engineer, about the possibility of creating an artificial heart.

Dr. Starr, seeing an entire heart as too much for their first attempt, suggested the smaller but still never-accomplished task of an artificial heart valve.

Just two years later, after an exhaustive testing and selection course, Dr. Starr performed the first of thousands of valve implantation surgeries.

“I’ve done 8,000-9,000 heart surgeries during my career,” Dr. Starr said. “Actually, at one time I had callouses on my fingers from handling instruments all of the time.”

That drive has kept Dr. Starr a pioneer in the field. In 2007 he was named a winner of the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research.

Even today, 50 years after his initial breakthrough, Dr. Starr continues to push for innovations in treatment.

Recently he took on a new role at OHSU. A historic $125 million gift from Nike founder Phil Knight and his wife Penny established the OHSU Knight Cardiovascular Institute and Dr. Starr and Dr. Sanijiv Kaul were chosen to lead the Institute that will bring clinicians and researchers together to take lab discoveries and turn them into new treatments for heart disease.

Posted on

2013 Weatherford Awards: Don Robert

To celebrate the 2013 Weatherford Awards, this week we’re profiling each of the honorees here at the College of Business blog. Today is Experian LLC CEO Don Robert. For more information about the awards and links to other honoree profiles as they’re posted, check out our introduction to the series.

Experian, LLC, CEO Don Robert
Experian, LLC, CEO Don Robert

Looking only at Don Robert’s title, one may not immediately think of entrepreneurship.

But as CEO of Experian, LLC, the world’s largest credit services company, Robert must constantly be on the lookout for the next great idea and foster an environment that encourages and rewards innovation.

“I really think that defines entrepreneurship, constantly having to make left-hand turns and constantly having to reinvent the plan as you go along,” Robert said.

A native Oregonian, Robert grew up in North Portland and attended Oregon State, where he earned a degree in business administration.

“I got a great business education at Oregon State and it stood me in good stead when I graduated and entered banking,” Robert said. “I had fantastic professors. Two or three who were particularly noteworthy, and I still think about and I still have their books on my bookshelf at home.”

Robert was also introduced to the idea of leadership at Oregon State thanks to his roommate, then-ASOSU President Jeff Strickler.

Strickler made sure Robert was involved and active, encouraging him to join the Memorial Union Program Council and other student activities.

“Jeff dragged me into a lot of activities on the periphery of student activities and student government and it was in those activities I became more comfortable with the idea of leadership,” Robert said.

From Oregon State Robert went straight into the business world, excelling at every step.

Starting at US Bancorp and then First American, Robert advanced to become a Group Executive.

In 2001 he joined Experian as Chief Operating Officer in North America, before becoming North American CEO and eventually Group CEO.

At each stop he worked hard to expand his skillset. Robert learned how to be an effective communicator, a strong leader and a pragmatic executive.

At Experian, Robert said one of his major goals as CEO is creating an environment that makes it possible to develop and support the ideas that become new Experian products.

“Institutional innovation and a big part of my job is to create a platform where we allow the best ideas to come forward, to be developed, to be bankrolled and put into the marketplace at a very rapid pace, because one of the primary growth vehicles we have in the company is bringing new products into the marketplace,” he said.

Robert said a major entrepreneurial challenge for Experian has been moving into new markets, such as India and Columbia. Both areas required new solutions and quick thinking to make the endeavors successful.

“We’ve had to create new products, throw away our original business plans,” Robert said. “We’ve had to raise financing locally. We’ve had to do things we didn’t anticipate.”

Robert’s advice for current students is to find something they’re passionate about, work harder than anyone else to get it, but not to be afraid to fail along the way.

“You never learn and you never grow when everything is going great,” he said. “It’s only during the tough times that you get stretched and that you develop as a person.”

Posted on

2013 Weatherford Awards: Barbara Roberts

To celebrate the 2013 Weatherford Awards, this week we’re profiling each of the honorees here at the College of Business blog. Today is former Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts. For more information about the awards and links to other honoree profiles as they’re posted, check out our introduction to the series.

 

Former Gov. Barbara Roberts.
Former Gov. Barbara Roberts. Photo: Edmund Keene Photography

Barbara Roberts has never let convention get in the way of doing what she knew to be right.

As a young mother of an autistic son, Roberts began advocating for special needs children.

In 1984 she became Oregon’s first woman House majority leader, then in 1990 was elected as the state’s first and still only woman governor.

“It’s impossible to be a leader without being a risk-taker,” Roberts said. “You must take a risk to lead. You have to walk out on a limb to make the kind of changes to make you that leader.”

Roberts was born a fourth-generation Oregonian in Corvallis before moving to Sheridan. She graduated from Sheridan High School and then Portland State University.

Though Roberts never saw herself as a reformer, in 1971 she saw a need and began to fight for the rights of special needs children, inspired by her own son, Mike.

In her new role as a lobbyist, she spent four days a week at her job as a bookkeeper and one day at the capitol building in Salem.

In the next six months, she became an expected presence, talking to all 90 members of the Oregon legislature, telling her story and advocating for educational rights.

Roberts’ efforts helped Oregon make history, passing the first law in the nation requiring special education for children.

“Women have a tendency to be more collaborative leaders and it was that collaboration that allowed me to bring all kinds of people to the table,” Roberts said. “The table was full – out of that collaboration, we came up with a lot of innovations.”

From there Roberts become involved at every level of Oregon’s political landscape, serving on the Parkrose School Board, Multnomah County Commission and the Oregon House of Representatives.

In 1984 Roberts was elected Oregon Secretary of State, winning re-election in 1988.

Soon after, the Democratic candidacy for governor was open and, with this newfound confidence and understanding of herself, Roberts announced her campaign.

During her time in office, Roberts had a significant impact on the state – on the economy, on the people, in education and the environment.

Roberts initiated the “Conversation with Oregon,” a statewide project to meet with citizens and hear opinions on how the state should address issues with taxation and government spending. The Roberts administration is also a strong supporter of gay rights and appointed a number of women and minorities to positions in state government.

After her term as governor, Roberts served as Director of the State and Local Government Executive Programs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, as Associate Director of Leadership at Portland State University’s Hatfield School of Government and as a member of the Metro City Council in Portland.

“I like to look at the fact that I served in public office for more than thirty years and no one ever questioned my honesty and ethics,” Roberts said. “If I had to pick a thing that I am proud of, that would be it.”

For a career of service that always found new ways to bring people together for innovative solutions to the problems of government, Roberts is being honored as one of the 2013 Weatherford Award Winners.

“At first I was surprised to hear that I was getting this award,” Roberts said. “It became clear to me that there was more than one way to be innovative. ”

Posted on

Meet the 2013 Weatherford Award Winners

Oregon’s first woman governor. A groundbreaking heart surgeon. A dynamic chief executive. Innovative tech startup founders.

Over the next few days on the College of Business Blog we’ll introduce you to the honorees of the 2013 Weatherford Awards, which honor entrepreneurs and innovators who further Oregon’s pioneering spirit. As posts are added we’ll link to them below. This year the awards will recognize:

Each day we will  profile a different honoree with a glimpse into how they changed the world by advancing entrepreneurship, innovation, and social progress.

If you’d like to join us to honor this distinguished group and their achievements, the awards take place Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013 at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower. Registration runs until Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013. Click here to register.