Drive Time

Barry Ripley switched careers from engineering to finance, and as an Anderson FEMBA secured a prestigious internship in investment banking (twice!). While he was a student, he also led a FEMBA Anderson Career Team with stellar results, helped to bring microfinance to farmers in the Andes and learned to love speaking up in class.

Professor Corinne Bendersky teaches FEMBAs in the Leadership Foundations and Organizational Behaviors courses and is faculty chair of the Human Resources Roundtable (HARRT). She studies female firefighters, who typically make up no more than 4% of their field, and what they can teach us about diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. In this podcast, Bendersky discusses developing one’s own self-awareness to become a leader who consciously constructs a context for accurate evaluation that allows others to live up to their untapped potential.

Born in New Delhi, India, Akshay Grover moved 8,000 miles to attend UCLA Anderson. He earned his engineering degree in Dubai, and an internship with Siemens got him to California. Here he worked on a sustainability project for San Bernardino County that resulted in more than $400,000 in energy and cost savings for America’s largest county (covering some 20,000 square miles). This project caught the attention of Time Magazine’s “American Genius” segment, for which Akshay and his team were interviewed.

Featuring:

Akshay Grover (’18), General Manager, Siemens

John Wooden Global Leadership Fellow Sana Rahim says her native Laramie, Wyoming, “was a totally random place to grow up” for a Muslim of Pakistani heritage. She knew from an early age she wanted to achieve a global perspective, whatever her career path — which has included working in Turkey with victims of domestic violence, diversity and inclusion consulting, and five years with logistics and supply chain giant McMaster-Carr. As a UCLA Anderson student, she founded Emerge Consulting, a management practice with a social justice mission that builds the capacity of nonprofit organizations.

What’s it like to come to the United States with no undergraduate degree, earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech, publish more than 45 peer-reviewed articles, pivot to brewing beer and then embark on your MBA? With credit for contributing to prize-winning research by two Nobel laureates, alumnus Diego Benitez founded Progress Brewing in South El Monte, California, in 2012. The former academic, now a successful full-time businessman, said as an Anderson student, “FEMBA is one of the best decisions of my life.”

Alumnus Brian Thomas recalls the journey of Clutter, a full-service moving, storage and logistics company that started as an idea he had as a FEMBA student. Brian went from driving the truck and making pick-ups himself to expanding Clutter into a nationwide business with $300 million in funding. He pays tribute to Anderson faculty, his fellow students and the FEMBA program for helping to drive his entrepreneurial success.