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 Marketing Strategy Unplugged by David Black  MBAs with a Mission by Brook Raflo Thinking inside the Box by Nicholas Shreiber, Guest Columnist |
High returns  Mike Mufson '88MBA Senior VP & Senior Portfolio Manager Specialty Growth Equity Group Putnam Investments His dream job may be to play in the NBA, however, at age thirty-six, Mike Mufson's playing days are numbered. But given his credentials, he could manage any NBA player's money. Senior vice president and senior portfolio manager in the Specialty Growth Equity Group at Putnam Investments, Mufson '88MBA co-manages the OTC Emerging Growth Fund. With $12.5 billion in assets and returns of more than 135 percent in the last year, the fund is performing in the top 16 percent of a grouping of similar funds, according to the Lipper Ranking. Mufson likes tech stocks, shies away from retail stocks, and notes that gross profit margins are one of the best gauges of a company's viability. "A high gross profit margin lets you know that a company is able to charge more for a product than its competitors," he says. Mufson favors companies with proprietary products-that is, superior products with few, if any, competitors. And he likes companies with high barriers to entry-companies, for example, that require millions of dollars for infrastructure, thus ensuring fewer competitors. At Goizueta, Mufson's favorite classes were "Options and Futures" and "Corporate Finance," but he says he is "jealous" of today's classes. "The advancement of the program, the additions to the faculty-the school is just in a different phase than when I was there." For him, business school was about building a strong foundation "that would be important no matter what. There's a tendency in basic classes to assume that this won't be important, but you've got to know the building blocks." And the learning doesn't stop once you graduate. "If you're not learning a lot, you're in the wrong job," Mufson says. He cautions against taking a job based on pay. "Choose something you like and will learn from," he says, "and the financial rewards will come." He practices what he preaches. Of his first job out of Goizueta, Mufson says, "I had to be the analyst of my own career, and I concluded itwasn't the best place to be." He left that job and has been with Putnam ever since. He puts in ten-hour days (and admits to taking work home), but Mufson does what he can to balance his life. When he's not traveling to research companies, the Little League and soccer coach makes a point of getting home in time for dinner with his family. Allison Sherriffs 
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