Our guest speaker and facilitator for the first class, Foundations of Leadership is Linda Oubre.  Linda was appointed Dean of the College of Business at San Francisco State University in July 2012.   Her goals for the College include expanding connections with the business community, attracting more students and raising revenue.

Previously, Linda served as Executive Director of Corporate Relations and Business Development for the UC Davis Graduate School of Management.  She was also the School’s first Chief Diversity Officer.  She was responsible for developing and implementing strategies to grow the school’s visibility and financial resources in the Bay Area.

Additionally, Linda has more than two decades of corporate development and operating experience. Prior to UC Davis, Linda served as President and CEO of LSO Ventures, a new venture investment and consulting firm.  Oubre was Co-founder, Director, and President-COO of BriteSmile, Inc., responsible for the launch and on-going management of the world’s first “one-hour teeth whitening spas.” Before the founding of BriteSmile, she served as President of Tri Com Ventures where she specialized in new venture planning and start-ups. Linda was General Manager of new Business Development for the Los Angeles Times, Director of Operations for Walt Disney Publishing, and Manager of Planning for both the Times Mirror Company and Walt Disney’s Consumer Products and Retail Division.

Linda has extensive teaching experience having served as the Executive-in-Residence and Adjunct Professor at UC Davis GSM, where she taught an MBA course titled “Leadership in New Ventures.” She has been a visiting instructor in the entrepreneurship program at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, a guest instructor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and an instructor in Leadership and Corporate Strategy at San Diego State University’s College of Business.  Linda also served in a post-graduate appointment as Assistant Director of MBA Admissions at the Harvard Business School.

A native of Los Angeles, and a first-generation college graduate, Linda earned her BA, cum laude, in Economics from UCLA in 1980, and her MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1984.   She and her husband Nate currently reside in Oakland, where Nate is an executive for Kaiser.  They have two adult sons, Nathaniel, a graduate of Loyola Marymount and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Alexander, a recent transfer from Loyola Marymount to San Francisco State’s Music Business certificate program.