By Connor Bloom ’19

“…[SLE] gave everyone who participated a deeper understanding for the struggles and triumphs that we all have endured in the past year.”—Andrew Friedlander ‘19

The weekend of September 18th, 2016 marked the annual Sophomore Leadership Experience (SLE) hosted by the Kravis Leadership Institute. The annual program focuses on developing leadership skills within the Sophomore Class in an off-campus retreat while simultaneously allowing the class to bond on a deeper level than typically takes place on campus. This year’s program saw 95 sophomores participate led by Sara Thompson, Director of Leadership Programs, Scott Busiel, Assistant Director and Events & Social Media Coordinator, Career Services, and Sherylle Tan, Interim Director. Over the course of the three-day retreat, students discussed what it means to be a leader, what aspects of their own leadership styles they could improve upon, and got to know one another on a richer personal level. The retreat culminated with students pitching ideas to their peers on what they believe could change Claremont McKenna for the better. In the words of one small group facilitator (SGF) and former SLE participant Tyler Finn ’17, “Being a SGF reminded me how committed younger CMCers are to making CMC the best it can be.”

““…[SLE] gave everyone who participated a deeper understanding for the struggles and triumphs that we all have endured in the past year.”—Andrew Friedlander ‘19”

This year saw SLE move to an exciting new location in Malibu. The camp where the program took place sat atop a bluff looking over the ocean complete with fog that rolled up the hills in the morning and stunning sunsets over the ocean. The location also featured a high ropes course which ensured that students were challenged as they took “leaps of faith” off of 25ft poles along the bluff’s edge, trusting their peers to belay them to safety. In addition to the change of location, SLE employed more upperclassmen small group facilitators than ever before (14 in total) allowing for the groups themselves to be smaller and more intimate. Furthermore, the programming itself was slightly condensed in order for more student centered discussion rather than curricula.

For the past 11 years, the Kravis Leadership Institute has been offering SLE. Each year brings new classes with unique experiences and views on their community and the greater Claremont McKenna community as a whole. Like each class of sophomores before it, the class of 2019 is unique. It would not be an exaggeration to say that we had an atypical freshman year. In early November 2015, tensions that had been bubbling beneath the surface for years at CMC finally erupted in a series of protests that shook the campus to its core and at points in time created a very divisive atmosphere. At the time, the class of 2019 was still comparatively new to CMC—still getting to know one another and the school community as a whole. As a result of the events of last fall, the Class of 2019 had the traditional freshmen bonding time cut short. Many sophomores noted that during SLE, the class felt more like a community than ever before, and that in some ways, it was a much needed time to have difficult conversations about last year. Riley Hoffman ’19 remarked, “I loved how the sophomore class felt like such a community and I gained an immense amount of respect for the leaders we have.” Similarly, Payson Ruhl ’19 said, “The best part of SLE was being pushed out of my comfort zone…[I] had some difficult, but necessary conversations and came out of SLE feeling both more connected to my classmates and more in tune with myself.”

One of the most interesting insights into a class’s priorities came in the form of the pitch presentations that students gave on the final day of the retreat. Leading up to the pitches, students had discussed aspects of CMC social life, curricula, and other areas that could be improved upon. Students then split into groups based on what projects they wanted to work on and devised rough outlines of proposals—solutions of sorts to the issue their group tackled. The Class of 2019’s proposals revolved around several key areas. These ranged from a stronger arts presence on campus to creating an avenue for off campus sequences (minors). And from easier access to financial aid to a stronger focus on campus sustainability to devoting more resources to students’ mental health. When looked at wholly, these ideas reflect a class that prizes students’ health and recognizes that our community is a group of individuals that have come to better in the pursuit of knowledge, each bringing different talents that deserve equal support. Isabel Chavez ’19 agrees that these pitch presentations were one of the highlights of the program saying, “[One of my favorite parts of SLE] was hearing all the wonderful, tangible ideas that people had to better our school and the greater CMC community.”

There are many ways of evaluating whether or not a program was successful. One can look at the number of people it reached, or can attempt to quantify the program’s impact on those individuals that did attend. In both of these respects and more the 2016 Sophomore Leadership Experience was a success. Program evaluations showed that sophomore participants found value in learning new skills and SLE useful in building a closer community.

Sophomores came back to campus feeling closer to their peers, having developed meaningful relationships, and feeling reinvigorated—ready to grab their time at CMC by the reins and make the most of it by being more engaged on campus. These aren’t things that you can learn in a classroom and were only possible because of SLE. Perhaps this quote from Jahnavi Kocha sums the weekend up best, “SLE reminded me why I loved the CMC community and how each person’s identity that makes up the class of 2019 is what makes it so special.”

“Quisque iaculis facilisis lacinia. Mauris euismod pellentesque tellus sit amet mollis.”

By Tierra Patmavanu ’18

As a native from Las Vegas, combined with my interest in public service, I was excited to work at an organization that is integral in creating a culture of sustainability in Southern Nevada. From my previous work as a law clerk at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, I was interested in working at this local nonprofit because of its community-centered mission and values.

In the land of waste and excess, it is easy for the leaders in Las Vegas to be portrayed as such; however, the contrary is true. Las Vegas has now become a national leader in sustainability. With their philanthropic spirits, major businesses in Southern Nevada have adopted social responsibility into their daily practices. I found it exciting to be at the forefront of the community’s sustainable initiatives and address critical issues that will affect future generations.

Green Chips, as Southern Nevada’s leading voice in sustainability, partners with local corporations, like Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International, government agencies, and other nonprofit organizations to develop sustainable efforts. Throughout this internship, I had the opportunity to understand the transformational nature behind sustainability. While many believe that sustainability only encompasses the environment, this concept captures a diverse range of areas that are essential for a community’s prosperity, such as the economy, health, nature, build environment, energy, social equity and transportation. Through events like the annual Convene for Green conference and the publication of the organization’s first State of Sustainability Report, Green Chips aims to expand Southern Nevada’s definition and understanding about sustainability.

Working at Green Chips was particularly rewarding because of the challenging projects. I applied my research and analytical skills that I have developed through my work as a research assistant at the Kravis Leadership Institute in designing Sustainability Toolkits. In this particular project, I researched the trending practices for energy efficiency and eco-friendly consumption, surveyed clients, developed marketing materials, and made recommendations to the Executive Director to encourage businesses and individuals to adopt sustainable practices. I also met with former and potential clients at events, such as Urban Seed Inc. Ground Breaking Ceremony, Las Vegas Business Press Green Awards, and U.S. Green Building Council Discussion on the State of Sustainability in Southern Nevada.

From my research with Professor Ron Riggio, I learned about the qualities of a transformational leader. A transformational leader is not only an effective communicator with good judgment and strong interpersonal skills, but more importantly, has the ability to identify a problem, create a vision to guide the change, and works with the team to achieve the goal. Following the guidance of the Executive Director of Green Chips, someone who I would characterize as a transformational leader, was an enlightening experience. When challenges arose, she was able to inspire her employees with her encouraging words during our weekly team meetings. By directly engaging with transformational leadership, I learned how to incorporate these qualities to my leadership style.

I learned more about leadership after attending NV Energy’s Senior Energy Assistance Expo, an event intended to provide assistance to senior citizens who struggle to pay their energy bills. Following this function, Green Chips received 300 requests for energy assessments. The large volume of audits in a short span of time presented a challenge for the organization. With a considerable number of audits, I quickly finished my project and shifted my priorities to attend to the organization’s most pressing needs. As an intern, I had the opportunity to work at every stage of NV Energy’s PowerShift Energy Assessment program, from scheduling the audit to pulling the client’s usage and assisting with performing the audit.

However, what I love most about working at Green Chips is the culture. The people I worked with were not only incredibly smart, but also very passionate about the organization’s work. In a small, collegial environment, Green Chips is practically a family and I was grateful to see my contribution increase the organization’s overall productivity and efficiency. Today, I am thrilled to continue assisting Green Chips with managing its social media presence where I am responsible for generating community outreach materials, actively promoting sustainability to target audiences, and analyzing the web traffic, page views, and Facebook and Twitter followers.

About the Author: I was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, where I attended a small, private school, The Meadows School, for 13 years. Since I enjoyed the small classroom environment and wanted to pursue a strong liberal arts education with an emphasis in economics, I viewed Claremont McKenna College as a perfect extension. I am currently a junior, double majoring in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) and Economics with a sequence in Financial Economics.

In conjunction with ImpactCMC Weekend, we are honored to have several distinguished senior leaders and entrepreneurs from the business and social enterprise worlds who will be on our campus for KLI’s Advisory Board meeting.  They have asked to spend their time with you, sharing their lessons about finding careers that they are passionate about, as well as what they have learned about becoming exceptional leaders!

Join us next Friday, September 30th, for this unique opportunity to hear from KLI Advisory Board Members, Kravis Fellows, and KLI faculty in three panel sessions. You will learn firsthand advice on choosing the right career for you and discover the most important skills to help you become a successful leader. The panelists will engage in dialogues with you and answer any questions that you may have about life after college, and what they learned during their journey as leaders and entrepreneurs. This is a special opportunity to interact and learn from these remarkable individuals who can help you kick start yourself off to a great career. Our panel sessions will cover three topics and run in one hour increments. Please RSVP by September 28th, 2016 by clicking here.

“Finding a Career You’ll Love” from 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm, Kravis 102

Learn from seasoned leaders on what it takes to find your dream career. Receive insights and advice from KLI Advisory Board Members and Kravis Fellows about how they discovered the work they love.

“21st Century Skills for Your Success” from 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm, Kravis 102

Discover the change agent skills you’ll need to kick start your early career through a presentation by Scott Sherman, Senior Director of Co-Curricular Programming at KLI.

“Lessons on Leadership from Entrepreneurs” from 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm, Kravis 103

Want to join a startup? Want to be an entrepreneur? Learn what it takes to lead in these exciting and challenging environments in a stimulating discussion with KLI Advisory Board Members and Kravis Fellows who themselves have succeeded as entrepreneurs.

Posted August 30, 2016 

The Kravis Leadership Institute welcomes two new Advisory Board Members, Michael Barr ’93 and Brandon Lee ’92. Please join us in welcoming our newest members who will be joining our current Advisory Board. To learn more about their background and work, you can view their biographies below.

Michael Barr ’93

Partner, Sterling Investment Partners

Mike is a Partner at Sterling Investment Partners, a middle market private equity firm with a 25 year track record of investing in and building companies across a number of market sectors.  Mike joined Sterling in 2001 as an associate and over 15 years at Sterling has developed experience across all facets of private equity investing including sourcing opportunities, negotiating and structuring both buy-side and sell-side transactions, and working with management teams after Sterling’s initial investment to help drive strategy and growth.  Mike currently serves on the Board of Directors of several Sterling portfolio companies.  Prior to joining Sterling Investment Partners, Mike was a senior auditor at Arthur Andersen and an associate in Corporate Finance at Lehman Brothers.  In between Lehman Brothers and Sterling, Mike was VP, Finance of Wellsteads, a start up focused on an innovative business model combining technology with retail food delivery.

Mike graduated Claremont McKenna in 1993 with a BA in Economics and Accounting, and received an MBA in 1998 from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.  Mike lives in CT with his wife Susan and three children.

 

Brandon Lee ’92

Co-Founder and Chief Strategist, Yip Yip, Inc. and Ghost Post Media, LLC

Brandon Lee is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategist of Yip Yip, Inc. and Ghost Post Media, LLC. Yip Yip is an enterprise corporate-to-local content publishing platform that provides an invaluable solution for organizations like franchises and distributed sales teams. With Yip Yip, a central marketing team can simultaneously create, brand, and publish digital content for an unlimited number of local entities.

Ghost Post Media is a content creation company that develops and publishes content for corporations and all their local branches in industries like real estate, mortgage, insurance, animal health, and others.  Ghost Post Media helps clients cultivate their online community by providing them with professional, engaging content and a consistent social media presence.

Brandon has been developing effective content marketing systems for corporations and their local, small business owners for over 20 years. Prior to founding Yip Yip and Ghost Post Media, Brandon created Digital Lizard, Inc., a full-service digital print and fulfillment provider specializing in private-label and custom online ordering systems.

Prior to starting Digital Lizard, Brandon founded By Design Publishing, Inc., where he developed a complete online and offline marketing solution for sales representatives in the home services industries like real estate agents, insurance agents, mortgage lenders, and other small businesses. By Design produced and fulfilled systematic, customized marketing systems that centered around personalized magazine titles including Home By Design magazine, Your Home & LIfestyle, and Life By Design.

Prior to By Design Publishing, Brandon was a Co-Founder of DVM Reminder, where he helped create and launch HealthyPet Magazine, a personalized pet vaccination and appointment reminder program.  The DVM Reminder program was sold to Veterinary Centers of America in 2000.

One of Brandon’s proudest accomplishments is that his friends and business partners, Steve Swayne, ‘92 and Nathan Reese, have been part of his executive teams in all three of these companies, and they are both active members with Yip Yip, Inc. and Ghost Post Media, LLC.

Brandon earned his MA in Organizational Development from Southwest Texas University and his BA in Psychology and Literature from Claremont McKenna College. He is a certified Speaker, Trainer, and Coach with the John Maxwell Team and the Co-Founder of 99 Powerful Questions, a publishing company that helps business leaders build their personal brands and grow their revenues with book marketing systems. He currently serves on the Advisory Board at Discovery High School’s Clyde Strickland Entrepreneurship Program in Lawrenceville, GA.  He is also an entrepreneurial mentor at Providence Christian Academy in Lilburn, Georgia, where his children attend school. He and his wife, Meghan, have five children and live in Peachtree Corners, Georgia.

Posted August 16, 2016 

August 2016 the Kravis Leadership Institute welcomed Scott Sherman onto the leadership team!

Over the last decade, Scott has taught courses on social entrepreneurship and social innovation at numerous universities, including Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. His curricula and workshops have been used at more than 50 campuses across the United States from Harvard to Stanford to UCLA. His programs have also been delivered in dozens of nations around the world from Europe to Latin America, and from Africa to Asia.

In 2005, he co-founded an award-winning social enterprise, the Transformative Action Institute (TAI). The mission of TAI is to train the next generation of social entrepreneurs, innovators, and change makers for the 21st century. That same year, he won the international Echoing Green competition which recognized him as one of the world’s “best emerging social entrepreneurs.” Scott has also won awards from Ashoka U for excellence and innovation in teaching social entrepreneurship. In 2016, his social enterprise was part of the inaugural class inducted into Ashoka U’s Hall of Fame. He is currently writing a book summarizing his research, How We Win: The Science of Making the World a Better Place. Scott earned his undergraduate and law degrees from U.C. Berkeley, as well as his Ph.D. in environmental studies from the University of Michigan.

By Linnea Uyeno ’20

Entrepreneur Arjun Dutt ’07 remembers a time when the startup world was still in its garage phase. “Google was new on the scene and Facebook hadn’t been invented yet. The idea of a tech start-up was not that big of a thing outside of Silicon Valley,” said Dutt.

Upon graduation, he decided to work at a small tech startup – but not one in the Silicon Valley tech bubble – instead he chose to go to Chicago, a city not known as a destination for tech entrepreneurs at the time. His classmates thought he was making a big mistake leaving the west coast – little did they know that 10 years later, Chicago would become one of the biggest tech startup hubs in the country. In fact, in 2014, the “small startup” that Dutt joined, Fieldglass, sold to SAP for over $1B, making it the first unicorn exit in Chicago, and kicking off a wave similar successful exits for tech companies in the Midwest.

People thought it was strange that a psychology major like Dutt would find himself working at a tech company. However, Dutt wants to dispel the myth that you need to have a technical background to work at tech startups.

“Developers and computer scientists are only a small percentage of the company. Many non-technical roles exist. Especially in a start-up environment, there are one thousand things that need to get done with as few people as possible. The liberal arts education [at CMC] taught me to think in a number of different ways. It taught me how to think on my feet and think strategically. That is something that is valuable in a tech company.”

At Fieldglass, Dutt likes to joke that he literally started from the bottom and worked his way up. During the summer of his junior year, he started at Fieldglass as an intern. When he came back to work there full time, he started in an entry-level position answering help desk calls. From the outside, this post seems trivial, but it was actually one of the best ways for Dutt to learn the business, the technology and how to interface with the most important stakeholder of any product company – the end user.

“One month into the job, I had a very intimate understanding of our product, and because I was putting myself into our user’s shoes, I could start communicating gaps in our software to the product teams. Answering calls was the best thing I could have done to learn the business because I was talking directly to our customers.”

Impressed with ability to identify with the customer, and with his intimate knowledge of the business, his boss paid attention when Dutt went to him and explained that their customers would be better served by more dedicated attention and ongoing relationship management. While the role did not exist at the time, his boss saw the value in the idea. He decided to promote Dutt to be the first customer success manager in the organization, and gave him the responsibility for shaping the direction of the new department.

“It was my first taste of entrepreneurship. I was given the responsibility to build a business and build this role. That stuck with me for the rest of my career.”

At a startup, he believes that it is easier to become a leader earlier on in your career because there is so much to do and not enough people to do it.

“In a large organization, they already have thought about everything that needs to be done. They already have multiple layers of bureaucracy and managers, so it is much harder to be entrepreneurial.”

So what does it take to rise up quickly in a startup?

“You have got to work hard and smart. If you do your work well, and you do it with passion and pride, then you get noticed by people above you. They will say ‘Hey, you are doing awesome work; let me know if you need something.’ Develop a relationship with people above you. Then it is just a matter of raising your hand and saying something. [Your superiors] will actually stop and listen.”

In fact, Dutt raised his hand a lot. He was not afraid to have his ideas rejected.

“Ongoing account relationship was not my first idea [that I had proposed to my superiors]. I had six others before that. I got a lot of no’s before I finally got that one yes. They were all relatively good ideas, so [my bosses] said, “Even if we are not going to do that [idea], keep them coming.” I kept them coming, and I kept pushing, and eventually I hit on that one idea.”

Dutt did not stop with that one idea. He kept pushing, and in his nine years at Fieldglass, Dutt created four more roles and departments that did not exist before. In 2010, he helped set up Fieldglass’ European operations. Then two years later, he built the Business Intelligence and Analytics group there. By the time he left Fieldglass in 2015, he was one of their top strategists: due to his intimate knowledge of the product, the industry, and an uncanny knack of relating to and solving his customers’ business problems.

Even now, Dutt is not afraid to fail.

“I am at my second startup, and I chose to take on responsibility for a marketing department. I had never done marketing nor built the skill set for it, so I like to think I fail on a regular basis. Every Sunday, I sit down and create a new work plan. I look back at the previous week and identify everything I didn’t accomplish. Then I redo it. I am constantly evolving how I approach my job. I believe that if you get very comfortable doing something, then the next thing you do should be something different. You should always be pushing your comfort level.”

Entrepreneurs must have this “bounce-back” and “reach higher” attitude. Dutt is always looking for new ways to push himself.

“The next few companies I work at may succeed or fail, but I am going to keep trying and having that entrepreneurial spirit. I’m going to keep wanting to create new things. If it doesn’t work, I am not going to give up. I’m just going to say ‘Okay that didn’t work, now for the next one.’