Sonnet and Ian McKinnon understand the transformative effect that a powerful speaker can have on a student. As college students, they both received great mentoring through lecturers at their respective schools. (Sonnet’s entire business perspective was changed by a single lecture that Douglas Brown, a “fantastic local businessman and leader” who is now the dean of the Anderson School of Management, gave.) To help offer that experience to UNM students, the McKinnons have recently endowed the Sonnet and Ian McKinnon Distinguished CEO Lecture Series at Anderson.

The free lectures will help students synthesize what they are learning in the classroom and gain insight into the business world, which can pay off significantly after graduation. “We are so happy to build this lecture series with Dean Brown and the Anderson School with the intention of finding great speakers to stimulate new thinking,” Sonnet said. “Business is such an important part of general education.”

Ian presented the inaugural lecture on April 1. In “Investment Applications of Behavioral Finance: Where Psychology and Economics Meet,” he discussed ways to use behavioral finance, a field of study that integrates psychology and finance, to understand how investors make decisions.

“He taught us that we rarely think outside of the box,” said Sonnet. “If we want to be good investors, we need to have better ideas than the rest of the investors buying a specific stock. As we all know, this is a real challenge.”

Both Sonnet and Ian are Albuquerque natives. Ian holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a managing partner of Ziff Brothers Investments (ZBI) in New York City as well as the president of ZBI Equities, ZBI’s public equity investment fund. Sonnet formed a manufacturing company with her father after graduation, building wine and beer tanks and brewing systems for commercial beer producers worldwide. After she and Ian had their first child in 2000, Sonnet became a stay-at-home mom. She has mentored children who need support to be the first in their families to attend college, and was elected to the UNMF Board of Directors in 2006.

“UNM offers a great education,” Sonnet said. “We are very lucky to have a state university that offers top-ranked programs in science, business, engineering, medicine, architecture and more. I believe all schools [within UNM] could benefit from bringing in outside speakers to expose students to new ideas and to non-textbook, real-life experiences.”