Marriott School alum Ted Izatt was ranked the No. 1 all-American fixed-income analyst for the energy industry by Institutional Investor magazine’s 2007 rankings.

The ranking highlights Izatt’s significant relationships within the oil and gas industry as well as his ability to see beyond finances to truly understand the management of companies he represents.

Institutional Investor releases yearly rankings of fixed-income analysts for various industries in the United States. These are determined by survey responses of 1,425 portfolio managers and buy-side analysts of more than 480 firms. For six of the last seven years, the magazine has ranked Izatt the No. 1 analyst in his industry.

“I always try to stay focused on the importance of the capital markets when I make investment recommendations, and the recognition that my peers have given me indicates that I’m succeeding in that endeavor,” Izatt says. “I have a great deal of respect for my global client base because they manage pensions, insurance, and other assets for people throughout the world. They play an important role in the stability of our financial institutions and that impacts all of us on a personal level.”

Izatt was senior managing director of Bear Stearns’ fixed-income research department; he did not join JP Morgan in the recent merger with Bear Stearns. Before joining Bear Stearns in 2004, Izatt was a senior vice president for Lehman Brothers, where he was responsible for coverage of oil and gas on a global basis.

Izatt holds both an MBA degree and a BA degree in journalism from BYU. He also served on the Marriott School Alumni Board for three years and is the former chair of the Houston Region BYU Alumni Association.




When Paul Gustavson meets with BYU head football coach Bronco Mendenhall, they talk strategy. But it’s not the Xs and Os kind of strategy; it’s more of a “let’s create a competitive advantage through organizational design” kind of strategy.

Gustavson is an authority on organizational architecture and an expert in forming high-performance work systems who has been consulting organizations like NASA, Exxon, and AT&T for decades. So when he saw the once-prestigious BYU football program struggling on and off the field after the LaVell Edwards era ended, he called Athletic Director Tom Holmoe to offer his help. The day after he became head coach in 2005, Mendenhall took Holmoe’s reference and called Gustavson.

Gustavson didn’t charge anything for the hundreds of hours of consulting that followed; he saw it as giving back to a program that had blessed his life. In 1972 he was the first returned missionary to become a walk-on for the football team under LaVell Edwards.

“I’ll be forever grateful for that,” says Gustavson, who played center and special teams for two seasons. “I watched how LaVell took a team and made a difference with his leadership style.” He says the work ethic LaVell showed in making the football team helped him overcome a mediocre GPA and get accepted into the master of organizational behavior program at BYU. He graduated with the degree in 1975, which catapulted him into the career he had always wanted. Growing up, Gustavson saw how his parents’ work affected them when they weren’t in the office, both for good and bad.

“I wanted to create great places for people to work—make their jobs more enjoyable,” he says. “If you can bring the best out of people when they are at an organization, they are able to contribute more.”

Gustavson, now a member of the Marriott School’s OBHR advisory board, went to work inside companies for nine years, including Zilog, where he worked on developing a new semiconductor plant. They did something completely different, shifting responsibilities and reducing steps—it was a revelation for productivity and employee morale.

“Just by organizing people differently, we had a 253 percent performance improvement. In an industry with fifty-five percent turnover, we averaged only six percent,” he says.

With a success story to share and the support of his wife, Kris Anne, Gustavson founded Organization Planning & Design, Inc., in 1984. “It was an opportunity to work with a number of organizations interested in work innovation.”

He has been crisscrossing the globe ever since, consulting with major companies, start-ups, and government organizations from Scotland to Japan, developing leaders and helping clients understand what it takes to be successful.

“The best companies choose an area where they are going to separate themselves from the pack,” he says.

That applies to the gridiron, too. Gustavson says organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they do; when you don’t like the results—change. It’s one of the principles he has been teaching Coach Mendenhall, and Cougar football fans have seen the results: back-to-back conference championships.




The art along his office walls is not merely décor, nor is it for conversation. The pieces Steevun Lemon has chosen—of the many he could, since art is his business—carry meaning.

Take the intricately detailed “sketch” of Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot at the last supper opposite his desk. Christ looks intently at Judas, who is too busy eating to notice. Lemon describes Christ’s demeanor as without malice, despite knowing what is going to happen.

“In business, sometimes you feel you have been taken advantage of,” he says, comparing the piece to work. “No matter if you feel you have been treated unfairly, you can’t let anger creep in or frustration get the best of you. If you do, in the end, it only hurts you.”

Keeping a long-term perspective helped Lemon, director of Repartee Galleries, manage the stressful ups and downs of the art industry. It also helped him discover it was where he needed to be.

He is passionate about art, but it took some years before he realized he should go into it. He earned an MBA from the Marriott School in 1998 and went to work building software as a project manager. He then became vice president of sales at a data systems corporation. Sales were good, but the travel kept him away from his young family.

On a trip to Florence, Italy, an epiphanous encounter with Michelangelo’s sculpture of David changed his career and life.

“It was almost as if it had fallen out of heaven,” Lemon says. “I just sat and watched it, and for maybe the first time in years, I was able to stop and ask myself the questions I didn’t want to.”

Lemon realized he wasn’t happy, so he left his job. He took a large cut in salary to join Repartee, where they devised a makeshift office in the hallway for him, but he received a bonus in the form of time at home.

Lemon describes the art business with words like “volatile” and “unpredictable.” It’s changing; so Repartee, which now has four retail locations in Utah, is experimenting with new ways to connect to the market, using more video and technology in the galleries. They also show the process their artists go through, start to finish, on the internet.

“Art isn’t like another product,” he says. “The creation reveals the creator—the brush doesn’t lie. I tell artists to paint what they feel, and we’ll do our best to market it.”

Lemon says he is increasingly grateful to be where he is despite the industry’s challenges. He believes in art; he says it makes you stop and ponder. Michelangelo’s David made him stop and make a decision that once seemed like a sacrifice, but doesn’t anymore.

“I think what we do here makes a difference, and that’s what I was looking for,” he says.




The twenty-six-plus miles that form the modern marathon originate from the Greek legend of a messenger who was sent that distance from the city of Marathon to Athens and subsequently died of exhaustion. As legend would dictate, the race is supposed to be tough.

Shawna Rasmussen, an eleven-time marathoner who runs fifty miles weekly, enjoys a completed race much in the same way she relishes helping clients achieve peak performance in business. “I love it when someone says, ‘You can’t do that; you can’t run Boston; you can’t be it all or have it all,’” says Rasmussen, who turned forty and qualified for and ran the prestigious Boston Marathon this year.

“You learn a lot of things about life by marathoning,” she says. “All it takes is hard work. It’s baby step, baby step. First you go three miles, and then you go four, then five. You just slowly achieve those goals. I think that applies to a lot of things in life.”

The persistence with which Rasmussen approaches athletics has been an asset in her business. She started on her own in 1994, consulting her only client, a surgeon, with tax prep and working one day a week. She had just given birth to the oldest of her three daughters and quit her full-time job as a city accountant. During the next few years, she slowly added clients and work days; now she has to turn people away every month.

But Rasmussen is not using her accounting degree from the Marriott School and her MBA from the University of Utah to simply prepare taxes. She works with every client all year long, looking at tax strategy as a function of business organization and planning, not after-the-fact paperwork. “It’s looking at how to structure everything so that it maximizes tax benefits rather than ‘Here’s my mess—do the best that you can,’” she says. It’s a service many small companies need, but few get. Her unique approach has put her expertise in high demand, allowing her to be extra selective with her clientele, whom she refers to as “the cream” and calls them her best friends.

Ever since her first accounting class at BYU, she has loved the field. “I would have rather gone to that class than go to the movies,” she says. But without a business background and everything so new, she had to work harder than most of her peers. Of course, she probably wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“You get so much back from working hard,” she says. “When you work hard for a client, you get so much back from them and the satisfaction you did your best and provided a good service.”

Published by the Marriott School at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Copyright 2012 by Brigham Young University. All rights reserved. All communications should be sent to Marriott Alumni Magazine, 490 Tanner Building, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602. Email: marriottmag@byu.edu. Telephone: (801) 422-5083. Fax: (801) 422-0501. The views expressed are those of the various authors and not necessarily the Marriott School. Change your mailing address here.