Haas School of Business

Back in Bleak: Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Likely to Vanish in 20 Years. Then What?

Ever get that feeling that you’re slowly sinking into a financial morass, a fiscal tar pit from which you’ll never emerge, no matter how or what you try? That the odds are so grim that your children and their children will end up in even worse shape than you? That the middle class is indeed moribund if not dead, that the rich are getting richer and the poor (including you) are getting poorer, and that the trend will only accelerate until you’re eking by on the dole—if there were a dole, that is. This isn’t the United Kingdom, after all.

Posted on January 25, 2016 - 4:47pm

Are Journalism Schools Just Whistling Past the Graveyard—or Resuscitating the News Biz?

The keynote speaker at the 2014 commencement of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism—an elite institution that prepares students for a profession in which the prospects are, let’s face it, a little touch-and-go at the moment— was a former small-time drug dealer and heavy-duty coke addict who had been in and out of rehab five times, a “fat thug” (in his own words) who’d been known to beat women and wave a gun around on occasion.

From the Winter 2015 Breaking News issue of California.

Startup Wants University Endowments to Lend Money so Homeowners Can Go Solar

A new startup founded by two UC Berkeley Haas Business School students aims to give homeowners going solar the leverage to affect more than just the environment.

Window Street Financial—which emerged last fall from an idea generated by Johnny Gannon and Ben Purvis—wants to give them the option of taking a solar loan made up of capital from the endowments of universities, nonprofits and foundations.

Posted on June 30, 2015 - 3:41pm

An Orgasm App? UC Berkeley-Nurtured Tech Team Launches its “Smart” Vibrator

Wave energy. A portable spirometer for kids with asthma. Tools to lower the carbon footprint. A robot-building kit. 

These are just a few examples of what UC Berkeley startups are developing at the Foundry, Cal’s technology incubator. But Liz Klinger and James Wang are working on something else entirely: a smart vibrator. 

Posted on March 18, 2015 - 12:50pm

Fear Factor: In Business and Life, It May Separate Smart Luck from Dumb Luck

Taking big risks might actually keep you from succeeding. 

John Morgan is haunted by the prospect of failure. However, he tells his classroom of aspiring entrepreneurs, this fear might not be as unhealthy as your “clinical psychologist will tell you.”

We may like to peg successful entrepreneurs as overconfident thrill seekers, but such thrill seekers “never appear in Forbes,” according to Morgan, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. That’s because, by and large, these individuals fail and never bounce back.

From the Winter 2014 Gender Assumptions issue of California.

Doing the Right Thing, or Not: What Makes People Less Likely to Be Selfish Jerks?

Some scientific studies come as revelations—biological investigations unlocking keys hidden within the human genome, statistical analyses that identify shocking trends between disparate data sets, and explorations of the cosmos that reveal truths about the very fabric of existence.

And then there are scientific studies that tell us what most of us probably knew all along.

Posted on July 15, 2014 - 1:36pm

Doomsday 1: An Asteroid Wiped Out the Dinosaurs—Will We Be Next?

Editors’ Note: The Summer 2014 issue of California magazine is called “This is the End.” Every day this week: a different catastrophic scenario.

It started with a flash.

At a few minutes past 9:00, one crystalline morning last February, a burst of light brighter than 30 suns illuminated Chelyabinsk, Russia, a southern industrial city known mostly for making tractors. Thanks to smartphones, surveillance cameras, and Russian auto-dash cams, we have a voluminous record of what happened next.

From the Summer 2014 Apocalypse issue of California.

Ambitious Plan for a Captive Readership: Berkeley MBA Students Advise Inmate Newspaper

It was an early fall day when the gates of San Quentin State Prison clanged shut behind the unusual team of consultants on its way to meet the equally unusual team of clients.

“I was apprehensive,” admits Laura Tilghman, an MBA student at UC Berkeley who had never stepped into a prison before. “It was such different circumstances and territory.”

The clients, most of them serving life sentences, didn’t know what to expect either. Why would students from one of the top business schools in the state want to visit inmates at the state’s oldest prison?

Posted on April 29, 2014 - 1:34pm

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