Business Ideas

By MELISSA KORN

Dominick Reuter for The Wall Street Journal

Reid McCann, above, says a bridge program put him on par with applicants who had undergraduate business degrees.

For a college student, Reid McCann had an enviable résumé: a statistics major at Harvard University, he played varsity football and won awards for his volunteerism. During summers and before starting college, he worked at Northwestern Mutual, Morgan Stanley

and other top financial firms.

But heading into summer-internship interviews with private-equity and consulting companies last year, the Dallas native was anxious about how he would stack up against students with business majors. So, he signed up for a four-week business boot camp, or so-called bridge program, run through Fullbridge Program to cram in finance lessons and prepare for corporate life.

Mr. McCann, now 22 years old and a senior, aced the interviews and landed a summer job at private-equity firm Audax Group in Boston, where he’ll start a full-time job after graduation this spring. The intense training in financial modeling put him on par with applicants who had business undergraduate degrees, he says, while the tips on keeping emails professional helped him throughout his summer internship.

Amid a brutal job market for graduates and growing concern that a liberal-arts education may not translate into real-world success, even accomplished students like Mr. McCann are desperate for any potential edge. Though schools have beefed up their career services in recent years, students still fear they lack the practical skills they’ll need after graduation, such as deciphering a balance sheet or leading colleagues on a project.

So-called bridge programs, which offer liberal-arts majors crash courses on business skills, war stories from executives and nuts-and-bolts tips to make it in the corporate world, have existed at a number top business schools for some years. The pricey programs—which often cost between $5,000 and $10,000 for a few weeks of training—boast faculty rosters similar to those that M.B.A.s might encounter. And with job jitters hitting new highs among college students, the market for such programs is heating up.

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Fullbridge, created by former Random House Inc. chief Peter Olson and his wife, iVillage.com founder Candice Carpenter Olson, started with training courses for new lawyers in 2011. Last winter, the Cambridge, Mass., education company began offering college students monthlong training sessions during school breaks, in subjects such as finance, presentation skills and “career visioning” exercises, with participants committing to eight-hour days, five days a week.

Participants spend their days in role-playing exercises, reading case studies and hashing out financial calculations. Instruction comes via live presentations and taped sessions from well-known professors, though much of the class time is spent with “coaches,” usually business students in their late 20s who facilitate the classes with one-on-one assistance.

The Fullbridge program costs $5,750 and another $1,450 for optional housing—hardly cheap, but for many, just part of the parental costs for test preparation, tutoring and college tuition.

Fullbridge is also teaming up with schools, which have been under pressure to prove the return on parents’ tuition investments. In January, the company ran a program at Bowdoin College, and is now in talks with other schools, according to Trish Jackson, executive director of college and foundation partnerships.

“The idea that colleges are going to prepare everybody for all experiences in life…overstates what you can do in four years,” says Bowdoin’s president, Barry Mills. Thirty-six students participated in the Brunswick, Me., school’s winter session. It cost an additional $4,500, but the school, which didn’t receive any revenue for hosting the program, provided financial support to “a substantial number” of participants.

Mr. Mills says Bowdoin students can find jobs without the aid of a bridge program—three quarters from the class of 2011 had jobs, while another 21% were in grad school—but notes the business world is different from the academic realm, and so it makes sense to have experts from each address those needs accordingly.

Some schools offer these programs to their students at no additional charge. Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt., launched its four-week business primer, MiddCORE, in 2008. (CORE stands for creativity, opportunity, risk and entrepreneurship.)

That program, which is scheduled during the school’s January academic term, includes coursework in financial literacy, collaboration and crisis management, among other topics. The most recent session enrolled 48 students.

MiddCORE has more than tripled enrollment in the past three years, and this summer, it is opening the program to outside students, charging $9,500 for a session at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nev.

It is difficult to measure the benefits of these programs, as many who sign up would be strong job candidates in their own right. But the camps can polish some skills and, if nothing else, give students a boost of confidence before they enter the working world.

Chelsie Dias, a 20-year-old Smith College junior, participated in a Fullbridge session in January. She found out about the program by accident—she misread the information-session notice as “Fulbright,” the international fellowship program—but was won over.

An art history major who hopes to work in art conservation after graduation, Ms. Dias says the program strengthened her soft skills, such as delivering constructive criticism. And she expects the finance lessons to give her an edge over other art experts: “I can look at a balance sheet. I can look a cash-flow statement and know what’s going on,” she says.

Investors are getting interested in business boot camps, too. Fullbridge netted $12 million in early-round funding from such backers as TomorrowVentures LLC, the investment vehicle of Google Inc.

Chairman Eric Schmidt, and it expects to draw another $10 million by year-end, Ms. Olson says.

Write to Melissa Korn at melissa.korn@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared March 7, 2013, on page B7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Business of Boot Camps.

Breaking News From WSJ.com’s Developments Blog

The former head of Sam Zell‘s Equity International is launching a new private-equity shop and consulting business, following his departure from Mr. Zell’s firm last year that surprised many in the real-estate industry.

Gary Garrabrant was chief executive of Equity International, which buys real-estate-related companies in emerging markets. He co-founded the firm with Mr. Zell in 1999, and the two worked together for more than two decades. But they had a falling out last summer over the size and strategy of the company and Mr. Garrabrant’s compensation, say people familiar with the matter.

Now Mr. Garrabrant aims to raise $100 million for a new private-equity firm, known as Jaguar Partners, which plans to invest in emerging-market companies. His partner on the venture is Thomas McDonald, Equity International’s former chief strategic officer who left the same time as Mr. Garrabrant.

Jaguar intends to look beyond real estate, investing in retail, health care, consumer finance, entertainment and other companies growing alongside a deepening middle class. Mr. Garrabrant believes many of these industries offer more opportunity than property investments in the developing world, say people familiar with his plan.

Mr. Garrabrant expects to begin discussions with institutional investors in the fall. Parts of a noncompete agreement he negotiated when he left Equity International will expire Sept. 1, say people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Garrbrant and Mr. McDonald are also running a consulting firm called MG Advisory Group, say people briefed on the business. The firm advises U.S. companies looking to establish or expand their business in emerging markets.

Since the top departures, Mr. Zell has told Equity International investors he is spending more time on the firm, which raised about $2.1 billion through five funds to invest in places like Mexico, Brazil and Eastern Europe. He brought in Thomas Heneghan, a longtime Zell employee, to take over as chief executive in February. Mr. Zell, 71 years old, remains chairman of the firm.

—Craig Karmin

REITs Set to Sail

In recent months, businesses that don’t look like real-estate businesses at first glance—like owners of casinos and billboards—have petitioned government regulators to become real-estate investment trusts in a search for tax savings. Now, companies owning only boat marinas may join the club.

The Internal Revenue Service recently approved a request by an undisclosed apartment REIT to count the boat slips attached to its multifamily rentals as real estate. In the new ruling, the IRS reasoned that the REIT’s lease agreements with tenants renting slips at the docks matched those used in real-estate deals. That includes requiring a security deposit, monthly rent payments and a landlord’s right to repossess the boat slip upon a rent default. The tax regulator made a similar ruling on boat slips in the 1990s.

In theory, this means a REIT could be set up owning only marinas, experts say. The REIT structure is a big draw because companies generally pay no corporate taxes as long as they pay their taxable income out as dividends. “It makes sense because this property has a rental-income stream,” says Paul Adornato, a REIT analyst at BMO Capital Markets. Property owners are “searching for ways to participate in the REIT industry by seeing if their properties can fit the mold,” he says.

—A.D. Pruitt

A version of this article appeared May 1, 2013, on page C6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Plots & Ploys.

By NANCY DEWOLF SMITH

“Manhunt” brings to television for the first time a riveting story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden that ended with his death on the night of May 1-2, 2011, when U.S. Special Forces raided his hideout in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Yet the raid is not the focus here.

What makes this documentary so fascinating are the narratives by many of the CIA analysts, operatives and others who worked in the shadows over almost two decades to lay the groundwork for identifying Islamic radicals and tracking terrorists. In interviews, and accompanied by often chilling archival film footage, they describe the passion, the anger, the regrets and the fearful determination that were their only companions in what may be the loneliest profession on earth.

“Manhunt” was directed by Greg Barker and is based on Peter Bergen’s 2012 book, “Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.” Fortunately for us, the film reaches back much further than 10 years, to a time in the early-to-mid-1990s when the CIA first assembled a team of analysts, chiefly women, that would be known as Alec Station.

The Soviet war against Afghanistan had ended, leaving at loose ends thousands of Arabs and other Muslims from outside the region who had been trained to fight in Afghanistan. Many, as we know now (though the film doesn’t say, Afghans were in fact warning Washington about this even in the 1980s) had been radicalized and prepped to become future warriors in a world-wide Islamic revolution.

It became the job of Alec Station to ascertain what they were up to. Early on the name of the Saudi financier Osama bin Laden came up, along with the first hints of an emerging force we now know as al Qaeda. Like the fictional analyst Connie Sachs in the Cold War thriller “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” some women of Alec Station were dressed down by superiors for obsessiveness—in this case for an alleged fixation on bin Laden.

But the women knew that passion and attention to detail were what their mission required. They shared bottles of Tums as they watched disturbingly violent Islamist videos on the Web, and patiently collected and cataloged names, places and intelligence tidbits whose relevance might not be known and useful until years later.

On the other side of the coin were the operatives, whose talent was spotting potential informants and spies in foreign countries, and developing these assets into reliable sources of information. Coming from the CIA’s Jose Rodriquez and former FBI agent Ali Soufan, for example, the descriptions of vital tradecraft—how to conduct an interrogation, how to build trust—would be mesmerizing even if the stakes weren’t still so high.

The CIA’s Marty Martin also knew how to undermine the propaganda value of a rabid terrorist like 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed—by releasing a picture of him not in what Mr. Martin calls KSM’s “Arab yuppie” dress but in a dirty T-shirt that made him look like a low-level gangster after a long night.

In one sense, “Manhunt” functions as exoneration of CIA employees who were accused of, or felt blamed for, a failure to predict the 9/11 attacks in sufficient detail. Their regret and sorrow is palpable here. So is their frustration. In the words of one former analyst: “People say: ‘Why didn’t you connect the dots?’♠Well—because the whole page was black.”

Soon after 9/11, President George W. Bush asked the CIA for a war plan and the result was “The World Wide Attack Matrix.” The goal was to “disrupt and dismantle” al Qaeda. The list of strategies ranged from drone strikes to “coercive interrogation.” The balance of opinion offered here is that most people, including captives, became “compliant” or useful without the induced sensation of suffocation known as waterboarding.

For some, a moment of moral reckoning came after the introduction of a new approach called targeting. Some analysts were sent into the field to track a specific individual, following a trail of phone calls, plane tickets and informational crumbs about wives, habits and the like until a picture of the target emerged.

Then-analyst Nada Bakos (who likely is part of the amalgam that created the character of Maya in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”) went to Iraq. Her subject was the head of al Qaeda there, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom she describes as “pathological” and a “monster.” As part of her brief, however, Ms. Bakos had to go on raids with special U.S. military teams. She says she felt this was crossing a line for an analyst. We can surmise that it was also shattering to see brutal and sometimes lethal consequences of her work in intelligence gathering.

While Ms. Bakos and some others came to moral terms with their work as a result of soul searching, not everyone was always given to rumination. After 9/11, says Mr. Martin, ” We did things more aggressive. My job was to kill al Qaeda. Get with us—or get out of the way.”

As for bin Laden, an apt epitaph comes from the Saudi journalist Mustafa Ansari, who had access to the fugitive’s family. “Bin Laden’s ideology revolved around death and jihad,” Mr. Ansari says, but the ultimate sacrifice was always for others to make, not him. “He used to say that death for his causes was a beautiful thing. But he never sought death himself. He hung onto life for as long as he could. He did everything possible to stay alive.”

The Big C: Hereafter

Monday, 10 p.m., on Showtime

The fourth and final season of Showtime’s “The Big C” is moving, sad, comforting and even beautiful as the story of fictional melanoma patient Cathy Jamison (Laura Linney) comes to an end. You don’t have to have seen the earlier seasons to appreciate the way—over four hourlong episodes—Cathy and her family and friends take their places for the last time. The kookiness and sometimes pratfalling humor of earlier seasons here gives way to a more gentle and natural way of being for almost everyone involved.

It was never easy to watch a show about a wife and mother diagnosed with terminal cancer. Some of the best scenes could have been maudlin with less deft writing and acting. The scene where Cathy and teenage son Adam (Gabriel Basso) open her birthday presents to him for the years ahead is almost joyful, and not only because of Ms. Linney’s and Mr. Basso’s shining presence.

But “The Big C” was always a way to celebrate the fact that, in the midst of impending death, we are always in life.

—N. deW. S.

A version of this article appeared April 26, 2013, on page D6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Osama’s Real Hunters.

By TESS GERRITSEN

MY MOTHER FLEW home to China in checked baggage.

Mom and I often talked about the trip we’d someday take together to the “city of eternal spring” where she was born. In Kunming, she said, the fruits are sweeter, the mountains look like Chinese paintings and the weather is always perfect. I promised that I would go with her when my life was less hectic, but the years inexorably slipped past and suddenly, it was too late.

As she lay dying, I made the promise one last time. Yes, Mom. We’ll go to China.

Nine months after her death, I fulfilled my vow. Worried that the TSA would confiscate her cremated remains from my carry-on, I packed the urn containing my mother’s ashes into a suitcase filled with gifts for my Chinese relatives and entrusted the lot to United Airlines.

At baggage claim, my family and I were met by dozens of excited relations I’d never met before. Both my parents were Chinese, but I couldn’t understand a word these relatives were saying—growing up in California, I was so determined to be American that I refused to attend Chinese language school, and I didn’t pick it up from my parents’ conversations. But my half-Caucasian son, Adam, has embraced his Chinese roots. He translated for everyone, flipping between English and Mandarin while I stood there nodding and smiling—and berating myself for having become just another clueless foreigner.

Outside the airport, Kunming looked nothing like the quaint town my mother had described. Instead I found an eight-lane freeway jammed with cars and a skyline studded with blocky high-rises. I’d long suspected that my mother had wildly embellished her stories of China, and I wondered what else had been an exaggeration.

But in the days that followed, we ventured beyond the modern city, into Yunnan Province. The Stone Forest, a set of towering rock formations, truly looked like a work of art. The ancient towns of Dali and Lijiang, the glacier surrounded by green hills on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, the markets with their sweet, sweet peaches—all were as wondrous as she had promised. This was the China she had wanted me to see, a land that was not merely the fantasy of an aging woman. My mother’s China was real.

On the day of the funeral, my relatives drove us out of the city in a caravan of cars, to a neighborhood of dirt roads and crumbling buildings. I was bewildered when someone handed me a black umbrella. Adam explained that we were taking my mother’s ashes to visit her parents, but that she had to make the journey in shadow. Adam carried the urn; I held up the umbrella. We climbed a half mile up a dirt track, past stray dogs and chickens, and waded into a cornfield. Unprepared for this hike, I slipped and slid in my sandals; my feet were coated in mud by the time we arrived at my grandparents’ tomb.

“I imagined my mother’s spirit, merrily puffing away in the afterlife.”

My Chinese relatives reached into the many bags they had carried up the hill, pulled out gardening gloves and hedge clippers with which to clear away the weeds, and set my mother beside the tomb so she could visit. They burned incense, planted colorful paper flags to ward away evil spirits and laid out fruits, cakes and cookies for the dead to enjoy. I was startled to see them place two cigarettes beside my mother’s urn. Her smoking was a habit I long deplored, and I almost blurted out: “Take those away, they’re bad for her!” Then I imagined my mother’s spirit, merrily puffing away in the afterlife.

After the visit, we carried the urn back down the hill. Another hour’s drive took us into cool and forested mountains, to the serene Buddhist mausoleum where the ashes would be entombed. In China, the dead are not forgotten—my relatives cheerfully pointed out all the niches of deceased friends and family, as if gesturing at the homes of the living.

Buddhist monks led the ceremony, and although I claim no religion, I found myself dutifully bowing and chanting words that I did not understand. It was my brother’s duty to clean our mother’s eternal home, so he wiped down the niche and placed the urn inside.

It was my duty, as firstborn, to close the door and lock it.

I hesitated. My hand caressed my mother’s urn. I thought of the turbulent journey that had been her life. How she had escaped war-torn China, leaving behind everyone she knew and loved, and never again saw her parents. How she had struggled as an immigrant in America, endured an unhappy marriage to my father and nursed a lifetime of regrets. She was back where she was born. Home at last.

I was sobbing as I locked the door.

There was one final ritual to perform. Before you leave a cemetery, someone must call out your name and say: “We are going home.” You must answer: “Yes, I am going home now,” so the spirits know you are departing. The relatives queued up, waiting for their names to be called, and one by one they left.

At last it was my turn. My son called my name and said, “We’re going home.”

But it was to my mother that I spoke when I answered: “I am going home now.” To my own home, in America.

—Ms. Gerritsen is a retired physician and the author of more than a dozen thrillers, including the recently published “Last to Die,” part of the Rizzoli & Isles series.

A version of this article appeared April 20, 2013, on page D8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Journeying to the Land of the Eternal Ones.