Undergraduates lead national conference

It is said that great leaders are not born but made. Goizueta Business School is certainly doing its part to create great business leaders. In January, nearly 100 undergraduate student leaders from twenty top-tier business schools met at Emory for the third annual Home Depot Undergraduate Business School Leadership Conference. For three days, the students learned directly from top executives at The Home Depot, Earthlink, and AOL, compared best practices, discussed leadership, and networked with peers from across the country.

Conference highlights included a keynote address by AOL President Bob Friedman. Other speakers included Peter Vegso, publisher of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, who discussed his philosophy of success and leadership.

Vegso told students that leadership requires competence and character. “If you have to be shy on one of those, be shy on competence. Never surrender character,” he said, ticking off a list of attributes including honesty, integrity, generosity, and compassion. “It’s very hard to live by these every day,” he said, “but if it wasn’t hard, it probably wouldn’t be worth much.”

The students enjoyed both a break from routine and the chance to exchange information and ideas. According to Amanda Miller, a student at the Henry B. Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, “Networking is the key here, meeting other future business leaders. These are going to be our peers once we’re out of school.”

Andrew Collins and Kevin Kundinger represented the Eller College of Business and Public Affairs at the University of Arizona. “We’re looking for ideas on how other schools are running their classrooms and curriculum, and how the schools use their clubs and councils,” said Collins. Kundinger added, “Each of us is in some position of leadership where we can introduce new ideas and really improve on what the business college is doing to make it even better.”

Joshua Sigel ’02BBA, BBA Council president, chaired the conference’s planning committee. “The conference has been an enormous success, and with the participation of outstanding schools, it continues to be a dynamic event,” he said.

“To me, the most impressive component of this program is that it has been conceptualized and run entirely by our students from the beginning,” said Andrea Hershatter, BBA Program director and assistant dean. “There is no other business conference of this sort anywhere in the country, and I am very proud that it was started at Goizueta.”

Soul food

Peter Vegso, owner of Health Communications Inc. (HCI), publisher of the successful Chicken Soup for the Soul series, spoke on his philosophy of success and leadership. HCI bills itself as a “life issues publisher” with a mission of “changing lives, one book at a time.” The twenty-five-year-old company, based on Boca Raton, Fla., is considered a pioneer in the visionary fiction and recovery book market.

Vegso told the audience that he did not usually speak in public, but he relented when the student who issued the invitation refused to take ‘no’ for an answer. One tenet of success, he said is to always “Ask, ask, ask.” Vegso accepted the Chicken Soup series after Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, the series’ authors, ran out of other publishers to ask. They spoke with 133 publishers across the country before handing him their manuscript. “Not many people get past the first rejection,” he said. “Here are a couple of guys who got past 133 rejections. Just ask yourself, how many times would you take ‘no’ before you give up on a dream? Don’t give up: keep asking, persevere.”

The Chicken Soup series now includes more than fifty titles, including Chicken Soup for the Soul of America, Chicken Soup for the Traveler’s Soul, and Chicken Soup for the Couple’s Soul. The books have sold more than sixty-five million copies worldwide, and they have been translated into thirty-nine languages.

Vegso stressed that success is not an overnight accomplishment, despite recent examples in the dot-com world. He credits his own dreams, his parents, his wife, and his children as major contributors to his business. “We’ve enjoyed some success and some pain in our lives. There is a spectrum of everything. You can’t really imagine joy unless you can understand pain. So we’ve had all of that. And we’re the better for it.”

Much of Vegso’s talk centered around his four pillars for success: successful habits, excellent relationships, unusual clarity, and a focus on priorities.

Perseverance and learning to say ‘no,’ are important habits. Relationships are just as vital. “Business partnerships are like marriage—you really have to work at it,” said Vegso. “Do I like this person? Do I trust him? Do I respect him? When I was down, he was up. When he was down, I was up,” he said of his former partner, who retired several years ago.

A clear vision and a focus on that vision have helped HCI stay on track through changes in the company’s market. Before founding HCI, Vegso worked for several corporations, in addition to the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto. “It wasn’t until I got to the Addiction Research Foundation that I came into contact with individuals who were interested in people, interested in delivering service. They cared about what they did. They were impassioned. This helped me refocus, and not look so much at money as a measure of what you’re doing. It’s not the ultimate measure.
“I’m happy when I go to work every day knowing that I’ve touched thousands of people,” he continued. “Do what you love and love what you do. The rest will just follow.”

His concept of leadership mirrors that of General Norman Schwarzkopf: It requires competence and character. “If you have to be shy on one of those, be shy on competence. Never surrender character,” he said, ticking off a list of attributes including honesty, integrity, generosity, and compassion. “It’s very hard to live by these every day,” he said. “But if it wasn’t hard, it probably wouldn’t be worth much.”

AOL’s Friedman talks on branding’s true meaning

When AOL announced its merger with Time Warner in 2000, then AOL CEO Stephen Case told Fortune magazine “America Online does want to become a Wal-Mart-style superstore of interactivity, linking people to each other and to information, entertainment, shopping, and learning through a variety of devices, including PC, TV, and phone.” (Case is now Chairman of the board of AOL Time Warner, Inc.)

So when Robert Friedman, AOL’s president of worldwide interactive and TV, spoke at the Undergraduate Business School Leadership Conference at Goizueta Business School, it was not surprising that his main emphasis was on branding—or more specifically, how to ensure that in a media cluttered universe, consumers will choose AOL’s products.

“Today, there are a billion TV sets, 200 million people are online for an average of fifteen to seventeen hours month, and those in the highest quadrant [of use] are online up to fifty hours a month,” Friedman says. “In the next three years, more than 500 million people will be online, and obviously the number of websites will grow exponentially. In the not too distant future, people will be able to access more or less anything, anywhere, any time ... people will be connected twenty-four hours a day to their Internet-enabled alarm clocks, set to wake them up and to e-mail them whenever a major news story breaks.”

Friedman contends that all this access and information is leading us to an even more cluttered media universe, which means consumers will constantly “have to make choices about what matters and what doesn’t. And that in turn means branding issues become far more important in the business world.”

Branding is so important that Friedman took pains to clarify the term and its process. “I think there are misunderstandings about what a brand is,” asserts Friedman. “Many people, perhaps having watched too many cowboy movies, think that the words ‘brand’ and ‘logo’ are the same thing. Others think that brand is the name of the product. But in the truest sense, the synonym for brand is ‘reputation.’ It’s the power of a blend of ideas, a sense of identity, and it helps consumers make decisions in a crowded marketplace.”

Building on that relationship with the customer is vital, Friedman says. In fact, “that’s at the heart of what I want to talk to you about: the power of reputation and the power of relationships. Because in the world we’re all living in today, which is very different than even ten years ago, brand execution and reputation and consumer relationships are really the keys to success. They’re transforming the way products of every kind imaginable are promoted.”

Friedman says, “I first learned the importance of branding when I graduated from college.” His first job out of Columbia University’s business school was with Procter and Gamble, where he was immediately immersed in the intricacies of branding: “I spent literally a year of my life deciding whether Joy was ‘virtually’ or ‘practically’ spot-free.” After being told that cable TV “would never happen,” he chose to “take a few risks,” and left P&G to help launch MTV in 1981.

“MTV was the first network, besides Turner, to really understand that a network is not just a few shows--[it’s] more a destination, providing a process of getting the entertainment you want. It seems obvious today, but it wasn’t in ’81.”

Around that time, someone asked Friedman whose job he wanted. “I said Steve Ross [the late chairman of Warner Communications], because he believed in vertical integration--taking a brand or set of ideas and exploiting them wherever you could. So when I had a chance to join Warner’s later, I took it, because it provided me with a way not only to approach network TV in a new way, but also to approach the movie business in a different way.”

Moving ahead to his current job, Friedman says any discussion about vertical integration and branding in the Internet arena must include AOL. “We’re still a young brand,” notes Friedman, “but we’re a company laser-focused about building a business around our reputation for ease of use and convenience. You’ve heard our tagline a million times: ‘So easy to use, no wonder it’s Number One!’ But it goes way beyond a slogan and an ad: every decision the company makes--about service, about marketing, about new products--is put through this filter of reinforcing that [ease and convenience] idea.

“How well has it worked?” Friedman asks. “Consider that a few years ago, people on Wall Street were convinced that AOL was going to get beaten by a new group of free ISPs. Why would people go with AOL and pay $24 a month for something they could get free? First and foremost, they did it because they loved the more reliable connections and the better customer service--sometimes you do get what you pay for.

“But another factor was the power of the brand. To the vast majority of consumers, the Internet is still a pretty confusing place and all of those [free] ISPs didn’t have a clear identity, whereas AOL had established an identity as a company you could rely on to provide a convenient service. When you have more choices than you have time, patience or desires, you look for something familiar.”

Friedman says people have asked him what really makes a brand work or not work, and he answers that it’s best to think of branding as positioning. “It’s an idea, a process that defines a company or its products to its buyers, and not just in the wake of an exciting launch or major event. Good positioning will never change. And it works because it’s something the consumer already knows. When you hear [such a] positioning, you say, ‘Of course’—it’s obvious, you just know it.”

Friedman shared a few examples of what he considers to be highly effective positioning:
• “Avis wasn’t number one, but they could be better by trying harder--that position eliminated Hertz’s [superiority claim], and gave Avis a true identity and direction. Even when they were number one, they could always try harder--it was a position Avis never had to give up.”

• “7Up actually created a new category for itself: the uncola. It gave itself something no other product had ... something its customers could identify with, something a little off the beaten path. Five or six years ago, they gave up that position and lost market share. They [eventually] came back to it, and have regained what they lost.”

• “When I was at MTV, we developed a position of ‘not normal’ TV. That meant we wanted everything to be different, an attitude that was not normal. For one of our ‘I want my MTV’ commercials, we got Tony Bennett; even our young viewers knew something about him was cool. And we took all the music out of our spots, just to be different, and to cut through the clutter.”

“Today,” says Friedman, “networks have a brand, a personality you can believe in and relate to. Interactive TV was not particularly successful because consumers never really understood what it was. But if I say, ‘AOL on your television set,’ you understand what it is. Fifty-six percent of people have shopped on the web, three-fourths of doctors say patients come in with information from the web, and when consumers are asked what one thing they’d choose to have while stranded on a desert island, sixty-six percent say a computer and the web--only twenty-three percent say a phone!”

To illustrate how AOL is constantly seeking new vertical integration avenues, Friedman offered these examples: “Last year, Volvo decided to try launching a new model [of car] on AOL only. We worked with them to develop online promotions, and the results were amazing: 45,000 consumers configured a car online, and eighty percent of the model’s buyers in the first three weeks of the promotion had never been in a Volvo showroom before!

“We also did a major promotion for the Harry Potter movie online--and you know why there weren’t any lines its opening weekend? It’s because seventy percent of the tickets were sold online.

“And with Lord of the Rings, we encouraged a viral marketing effort. There were hundreds of websites, and we premiered the trailer online--in the first twelve hours, we had 1.7 million hits. The Internet is a truly transformational business model.”

In a question and answer session after his talk, Friedman was asked how much the ubiquitous AOL CD-ROM campaign costs, and while not naming a dollar amount, he says, “It generated six million new subscribers last year. The challenge is that at some point they may become parodies of themselves, and [then] we could use those discs to possibly distribute some other things, like a song that will be coming out on a Time Warner property next year—it’s a preview, so you pick up a disc and it has other value.”

Friedman was also questioned about AOL’s position on sharing its subscriber information: “Our policy is that we don’t share stuff unless the consumer says it’s okay--and we won’t exploit it at all, even though we own the technology. This is about the stuff that you can never mess around with, because you’ll lose your franchise.”—Sarah Banick