Jaime Nack, 40, knows how to stay cool. While she now runs two businesses, consults with Fortune 500 companies, and works with Al Gore’s nonprofit Climate Reality Project, she stays true to an early love: reggae.
An expert on sustainability, Nack has long had a love for the Jamaica-rooted music. While in college at UCLA, she negotiated touring contracts with record company executives on behalf of Jamaican musician clients in her free time. Charged with expanding the campus’ annual jazz and reggae weekend, she grew attendance to 30,000 from 5,000 people, all before turning 22.
“I was always drawn to music that has a positive message,” said Nack.
Today, her Santa Monica companies – One Drop Interactive and Three Squares Inc. – are managed in a way that’s consistent with the healthy ethos she promotes for clients. Employees who live within a two-mile radius from the office are encouraged to bike or walk to work, and the office is dog friendly. Most importantly, the cool sounds of reggae stream through the office speakers.
“We try to make our office environment as comfortable as possible for our employees,” said Nack.
Her work at UCLA has lived on, too. The annual festival will celebrate its 30th year when it takes place at the end of the month.
“The music and the culture helped fuel me through college,” she said. “It’s a really neat feeling to go and see what the current students are doing.”
Tough Talks
Chris Voss has a secret history that might surprise his Marshall School of Business students at USC.
Voss, 58, helped negotiate 150 high-profile ransom and kidnapping cases when he worked for 24 years as a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit.
“I was involved in dealing with Muslim terrorists in the Philippines, al-Qaida terrorists in the Middle East, but the worst negotiation was with my ex-wife’s attorney,” Voss said.
A few years ago, Voss decided to apply his negotiating skills to solving conflicts in the business world. He took a negotiating class at Harvard University and later became a lecturer there. Now, he teaches business students at USC.
“Students at MBA programs are rising corporate stars and they’re involved in a lot of complicated negotiations,” said Voss, who just co-authored a book called “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It” with Tahl Raz. “Negotiation is about figuring out what the better deal is and doing it in a very fearless manner.”
Staff reporters Kristin Marguerite Doidge and Olga Grigoryants contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Jonathan Diamond. He can be reached at [email protected].
