Sun Microsystems Executive Marcy Alstott spoke at the Ross School

  Listen online to Marcy Alstott present "It IS easy being green! — Leadership in an ECO-age"

  Listen to or download the presentation from Ross iTunes

When:  Thursday, October 11, 2007, 5pm - 6pm
Where:  Ross School of Business, Room K1320

"It IS easy being green! — Leadership in an ECO-age"

ANN ARBOR, Mich. —Marcy Alstott, Vice President of Operations for the Systems Group at Sun Microsystems, presented a talk entitled "It IS easy being green! — Leadership in an ECO-age” at 5:00 p.m. on October 11 in room K1320 of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.  This event was free and open to the public.

Abstract:
"The world has jumped on the global warming bandwagon. The news is splattered with reports about the changing weather patterns and the imminent economic and social impacts. Computers draw 4-5% of the total world power. What is a civic minded computer company like Sun to do? Sun is not following the green parade, we are leading it. Rather than wait for regulations or consumer pressure, Sun is taking a very aggressive stand with its products and policies. The leadership value of this initiative is threefold. First, we are attractive to our employees with policies that save money and time and provide flexible, productive working environments. Second, we are attractive to our customers. There is real money to be saved and we can prove it. Third, we are leading across communities. Our vision is to share. We are working across industries as a voice for IT, building communities, sharing best practices and open sourcing technologies to enable sustainable prosperity and lessen business impact on the environment. Is this altruistic or is it good business? Certainly Sun's precept is that ECO stands for ecology AND economics."

About Marcy Alstott
Marcy Alstott is Vice President of Operations for the Systems Group at Sun Microsystems, a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services. Her strategic charter is to develop a world class operations organization while meeting aggressive time to volume, cost, quality and availability goals.

Ms. Alstott began her career as a coop engineering student at General Motors Technical Center. After graduating from Purdue in 1979, she joined Hewlett Packard where she spent 15 years in several engineering and manufacturing positions of increasing responsibility. Ms. Alstott joined Chipcom Corporation, a rapidly growing networking startup company, in 1994. As Director of Manufacturing Engineering, she built a technical infrastructure, grew an organization and developed robust processes to allow the company to successfully ramp. Chipcom was acquired by 3Com in 1996. There Ms. Alstott led a cross-functional product development team to deliver several key switching products to market in record time.

Before joining Sun in 2003, Ms. Alstott served for 5 years as Vice President of Operations for Adept Technology, a global leader in flexible automation. In addition to manufacturing, information technology, facilities responsibilities, she also led the semiconductor business unit, newly formed to address automation needs in that industry segment.

In addition to her BS in Mechanical Engineering degree from Purdue, Ms. Alstott earned an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford in 1981 and an MBA from University of Santa Clara in 1986. Ms. Alstott is on Purdue's Engineering Advisory Council, an advisory board to the Dean. In 2007 Purdue elected her as Distinguished Engineering Alumna. She lives with her husband and 3 children in the Bay Area in California.

This event was presented by the Tauber Institute for Global Operations and sponsored by the Ford Motor Company.
Tauber Institute Media Contact: bakerpa@umich.edu