Wharton | Seattle Online Marketing, Communications, Strategy

Crazy Love, a page-turning must read

August 8, 2009 By Joe Hage Leave a Comment

I just read “Crazy Love” by Leslie Morgan Steiner.

My friend, Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of "Crazy Love"

I went to business school with her.

I loved the book and am fiercely proud of her. What a brave story to tell.

I’ve never read a 325-page book so quickly. 24 hours? Unheard of.

In it, Leslie recounts her personal experience with her domestic violence at the hand of her ex-husband. It gives a courageous voice to those who have none, perhaps out of love, perhaps out of fear.

Watch her read a short segment of the book here.

And buy your copy of Crazy Love here.

WG’92 cohort news

May 25, 2009 By Joe Hage Leave a Comment

As it will appear in the Fall 2009 issue of the Wharton Alumni Magazine.

Oh, I’m glad you’re reading this. That means you’re still here. Meltdowns, bailouts, financial losses, and we’re all still here. That’s a celebration in itself, methinks.

Are you on Facebook yet? A few dozen of us belong to a WG’92 group. Reconnect with us at http://budurl.com/WG92.

The biggest news came in the littlest package. Keith Alexander’s first child, James Robert Alexander was born March 18 at 9 pounds, 2 ounces. Mother, father, and child all doing well.

Melissa Scott (formerly Schlakman) got in touch. She wakes every morning with Mitch Scott (formerly Vaccarino) at her side. S’been that way for 17 years now. When she’s not raising eight-year-old Dylan (His current fascination is derivatives of the word “butt.”) and five-year-old Talli (Her best friend is “God,” really!), Melissa works for Booz Allen Hamilton.

Fellow Cohort J’er Paolo Mallorino lives in Reggio nell’Emilia, Italy. He’s the CFO of Lombardini, a division of the Kohler Company. The avid skier has great fun taking his young son and daughter on the slopes.

I don’t think I’d connected with Vito Quaglia for years. Through the magic of Facebook, Vito gave me an update. He’s a divisional CFO for Honeywell. He lives happily in Minneapolis with his wife and 14- and 11-year-old daughters.

Father of triplets Steven Hill connected with me on Twitter. You can find him at http://twitter.com/Hill10003 (his ZIP code). Pressure him to change his disturbing avatar.

Gautam Chand

Gautam Chand lives in Mumbia, India. It’s been ten years now since he founded Instanex Group, an investment management, index products, and insurance brokerage. Check out his impressive Web site at http://instanex.com. Importantly, he shaved his mustache. He replied, “Got a few white hairs and had to shave it off. Now, I cannot imagine why I didn’t do that earlier.”

Anyone know where I can phind Phaethon Blackburn? I think he’s phunny.

Drop me a line at joe@joehageonline.com to be included in the next update!

Big words: good or bad?

November 16, 2008 By Joe Hage 12 Comments

I have a rich vocabulary and I like using it. Is that so bad?

According to one of my closest Wharton buddies, yes. “As soon as you pass the SAT exam, you should get rid of those words. First, you sound arrogant. Second, when use words people don’t know, you make them uncomfortable.”

I brought a departmental meeting to a halt once when I congratulated a team member for keeping our website project on schedule. I said it was a “Herculean effort.” Years and years ago I was ridiculed for the torrid sales for Jell-O Cheesecake Snacks. And I have a detractor who hates when things are “amiss.”

“No one talks that way,” he says.

Another time I used the word didactic. Truth is, I knew didactic was big when I said it. But as I began, “I’m not trying to be didactic here,” I couldn’t think of a lesser synonym.

T. Hardy challenged me. “If Joe Hage is that smart, he can think of another way to say it.” The best I could come up with was pedantic, but I don’t think that helped my case very much.

Days later, I had another didactic moment. I began, “I’m not trying to be …” and I stopped. I tried to think of an inoffensive synonym.

It seemed like a long time.

Then I gave up and said, “I’m not trying to be all teacher-y here….”

I’m pretty sure no one was offended.

Except me.

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WG’92 Cohort J news

November 1, 2008 By Joe Hage Leave a Comment

As it will appear in the Spring 2009 issue of the Wharton Alumni Magazine.

I don’t know about you, but turning to the class of WG’92 is the first thing I look at in the Magazine. Cheers to Debbie Crouse. She’s been our cohort correspondent for three years and it’s a lot of work. Debbie, the mother of two and Group Manager at Intuit, needed a hand. I’ll help for a while.

I’ll start with a Joe Hage update. I live just outside Seattle. Beth and I celebrated 10 years of marriage this year, and we have two great boys: Zachary (6) and Lucas (4). Zach is a beautiful, quick, and sensitive little boy. Luke is my brother-in-law Gerry with a cheeky, get-in-trouble-but-too-cute-to-punish demeanor. I work as Director of Marketing Communications for Cardiac Science [Nasdaq: CSCX], makers of noninvasive cardiac equipment like ECG machines and defibrillators (AEDs). I love it. And I keep a blog at http://joehageonline.com for fun.

T. Hardy Jackson lives in San Francisco and has “added value” as a consultant to Visa for years now. He’s become this real estate mogul on the side and his properties are in Seattle, so I get to see him every few months or so.

Dr. Ron Leopold visited a few months back. Almost lost to Zachary in checkers. He’s this published author and big muckety-muck at Met Life now. They pay him to entertain corporate prospects about the strategic significance of employee benefits. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Abbie, 13-year-old son Max, and two dogs, Speck and one who preferred to remain anonymous.

Rich Caligaris (an independent consultant), Dave Williams (at Google) and I invested in Kadoink, where fellow WG’92 Scott Cahill is co-founder and CEO. Kadoink is “a powerful mobile engagement platform that transforms the mobile phone into an interactive and revenue-producing communication channel.” After an early-2007 angel round, Kadoink closed a Series A with Sutter Hill Ventures and is gonna make us rich (fingers crossed).

Beth and I caught up with Matt Savage (a managing director at Rothschild) and his wife Beth in NYC and saw the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County. Definitely see the show if it comes to town: it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. My Follies friend WG’93 David Richards is the general manager for the show and the upcoming national tour, so you’ll be helping a fellow Whartonite with your patronage.

Married more than 20 years now, Yuichi Hiromoto has a 15-year-old tennis-loving son and an 11-year-old cartoon-loving daughter. O-Hiromoto-san is the president and CEO of Mitsubishi Corp – UBS Realty Inc., a joint venture that manages the Japan Retail Fund (Ticker: 8953) and the Industrial and Infrastructure Fund (Ticker: 3249). You can enjoy a Bloomberg interview of Yuichi here. If you poke around the Web, you can also find a pictures of him (hair graying executively) surrounded by characters my computer doesn’t understand.

White Mountains [NYSE: WTM], which owns Esurance, acquired Rob Slingerland‘s Answer Financial Network. He’s happy about the acquisition and says things are going well under new management.

By the time this goes to press, Peter Smith should be a new dad! He got married two years ago, started a new job (I didn’t catch where), and is buying a new home. Good friend and fellow cohorter Paul Kirincich left Netflix this summer after six years with the company. He’s now the CFO of a Burlingame, CA retiree health insurance company. He’s got 11 happily married years, two sons (ages 5 and 2), and a beautiful home in Menlo Park, CA.

Good to catch up. Drop me a line at joe@joehageonline.com to be included in the next update!

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