Silicon Valley, CA, December 5, 6 p.m.
Co-sponsored by CEN and Cornell Silicon Valley, "Entrepreneurship in the New Millennium." A keynote presentation by Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year 2002, Rob Ryan '69, founder of Ascend Communications and the Entrepreneur America Bootcamp.

San Francisco, CA, January 5, 4 p.m.
Co-sponsored by CEN and Cornell Silicon Valley, "Navigating Change (Again!) The 2003 Annual CEN Dinner." Alumni and guests will join Ken Derr '59, MBA '60, chairman of Chevron (retired), and Johnson School students who are visiting for the Week in Silicon Valley for networking, dinner, and a keynote address at the top of the Bank of America building in San Francisco in the Carnelian Room.

*Palo Alto, CA, January 7, 6 pm
Annual Johnson School Alumni Predictions Dinner. Join us for a great evening with Johnson School alumni, students and staff and make your predictions for the coming year! At the Garden Court Hotel, Palo Alto. Register today!

New York, NY, January 8
Abby J. Cohen will be speaking at a CEN event during the Johnson School students' Week on Wall Street trip. Details TBD.

*New York, NY, January 9 Johnson School Alumni event with Prof. Harold Bierman at the Cornell Club. More information to come.

Seattle, WA, January 9, 6pm
CEN Seattle Presents a Venture Capital Panel.

*Brussels, Belgium, March 22
Annual Alumni European Symposium. Tentative program for this year's symposium. It promises to be a great event!

*Johnson School specific events.

View and search a complete listing of Cornell University events.

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Sneak preview from Enterprise, the Johnson School magazine (coming in December).

Many people go through a life-changing event at some point. For Mike Hanf, it was being on the second floor of an earthquake-prone building during an earthquake. Hanf, then CFO of DPR Construction, was visiting his company's Seattle office at the time, about two years ago. The building nearly collapsed. "The experience resulted in my hitting the pause button," he says. After taking a few months off to finish building his new house and visit family, Hanf began searching for something bigger to do.

"I'm a sailor at heart, so I was looking for a sailing adventure," Hanf explains. He found it while thumbing through a local sailing magazine - the HM Bark Endeavour. A replica of Captain James Cook's square rigger, the new Endeavour proposed to replicate (though in the reverse direction) Cook's 1769 trip around Cape Horn. This journey, which involves sailing around the southern tip of Argentina and through the stormy Southern Ocean, is considered "the Mount Everest of sailing," Hanf says. "I had mixed feelings about it, especially the horrible seas, the cold weather, and the approaching winter."

But Hanf also realized that the voyage would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. That made up his mind.

Check out Enterprise for more alumni features, news, and other information.

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Among current students at the Johnson School, there is an unprecedented interest in issues of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Our first Sustainable Enterprise Symposium on September 10 brought speakers such as Paul Hawken to campus to introduce the triple bottom line to the school and faculty. The following month, thirty-five Johnson School students attended the 10th Annual Net Impact conference in Washington, DC. Over 950 MBA students from more than 50 schools participated in this event, which was sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton and Herman Miller. Community Impact, one of the largest clubs at the Johnson School, has renewed its ties with Net Impact, a 5,000-member national network of MBAs committed to using the power of business to create a better world.

One of the goals of the club, and the Career Management Center, is to develop a strong alumni network. If you are interested in sustainable business, corporate social responsibility, or the non-profit or public sectors, and would like to be involved in this growing network of Johnson School students and alumni, e-mail Donna Fleming in the Career Management Center. We hope this will be a way for all of us to learn from one another!

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Dean Robert Swieringa was recently elected to General Electric Co.'s board of directors as part of the audit committee. He was appointed in part to satisfy recent legislation encouraging companies to include a "financial expert" in their audit committees. The appointment of new GE directors (the other is Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley) generated significant media coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, and other outlets.

"Dr. Swieringa is one of the world's outstanding accounting scholars and educators and has helped shape and strengthen the nation's accounting standards," said GE board Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt. "The GE Board will benefit greatly from his diverse experiences and his vast knowledge of corporate accounting issues."

Before joining the Johnson School as dean and professor of accounting in 1997, Swieringa formerly was a member of the Financial Accounting and Standards Board (FASB) for a decade. He has held faculty positions at Yale's School of Management and Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

The dean's appointment to the GE board wasn't the only item generating visibility for the Johnson School. For the latest, see Johnson School in the News.

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Finance professor Maureen O'Hara testified before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last month. The SEC held hearings on whether current oversight is adequate to protect investors. The hearings focused on whether private companies that operate their own systems for buying and selling securities should be regulated as if they were actual markets. Professor O'Hara noted technological advances allow securities to be traded almost anywhere at anytime. This, she emphasized, makes the SEC a vital element in keeping markets fair and honest. "The difficulty is that as we move forward into an era of increasingly privately owned trading systems, we need a central market cop to keep things even," she said. "So I would encourage the commission to recognize that their role is probably more important now than ever." The entire securities industry in the United States is facing greater scrutiny in the wake of recent scandals involving dishonest accounting, manipulation of stock prices, and conflicts of interest within banks and brokerages. The SEC is itself being revamped and given greater power to regulate U.S. financial markets.

Professor Dick Conway recently received two honors. His book, The Theory of Scheduling, has been named number 22 on a list of the 25 books that were most influential to the development of Operations Research. (OR/MS Today, August 2002.) His co-authors are W.L. Maxwell and L. Miller. He was also named a Fellow of INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, which is the premier organization in the field.

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A team from the Johnson School's Operations Management Club won third place in Carnegie-Mellon's GSIA 7th annual Operations Case Competition on the first weekend of November - placing higher than such schools as the London Business School, Yale, Indiana, Vanderbilt, and Brazil's IBMEC. (The top two slots went to Carnegie-Mellon and MIT; a total of 18 schools competed.) Team members Peter Georgianna '03, Martine Kok '03, Tavish MacLean '03, and Christian Rhodes '04 analyzed the case of the electrical and electronic controls division of Eaton Corp.'s electrical distribution equipment business segment. They proposed actions the division should take in the face of a diminishing NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturers Assn.) market, a rising IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) market, a higher cost structure than their competitors, and industry-wide consolidation.

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November 18-22 was International Week in Sage Hall. Organized in conjunction with the International Business Association (a student group) and other sponsors, the week consisted of diverse, interesting, and entertaining activities designed to underscore the global nature of our community and today's business world.

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The atrium on the afternoon of November 6 resembled a scene from a Three Stooges movie, as whipped-cream pies whizzed through the air to land on the smirking countenances of ten members of the Johnson School community. It was all for a good cause - the culmination of the week-long MBA Food Fight, during which Community Impact members collected food and funds to benefit local food banks. The totals were impressive: the Johnson School collected $5,106.71 and 1,421 lb. of food, compared with $1,540 and 880 lb. last year.

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Alumni Job Postings now available in JAC!
Johnson School Alumni Relations gathers and e-mails MBA alumni job postings every two weeks, and now you can find an archive of current and past postings in the Johnson Alumni Connection (JAC). Just log in to JAC and these postings under Community: Alumni Job Postings. If you are interested in being on the e-mail distribution list for the job postings, or if you have forgotten your username and password to access JAC, please e-mail jgsmalum@cornell.edu.

Your Access to the Cornell Online Alumni Directory!
As Cornell graduates, you have access to the recently launched Cornell Alumni online directory. To access this, go to the directory and click "First Time User" - you will need to provide your last name and alumni id # to gain access (if you don't know your alumni id # e-mail jgsmalum@cornell.edu to request it). This directory is searchable by name, location, and company name under the "Custom Search" option.