Monthly Archive for September, 2011

2012 Management Conference – Accommodation Now Available

Published on September 30, 2011 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Hotel Blake, South Loop, Printer’s Row
500 S. Dearborn Street
Chicago, IL 60605
USA

Phone: +1 (312) 986-1234
Website: http://www.hotelblake.com

The Hotel Blake is located conveniently close to our conference venue – less than a 5 minute walk away. The Hotel Blake has extended to us a special rate of USD 139.00 per night (+tax) for a room that will accommodate one or two people. This rate will be offered, subject to availability, for bookings received before 4 June 2012. Book early to ensure the special rate. Please contact Hotel Blake directly at +1 (312) 986-1234 and ask for the Common Ground Publishing group rate. Please quote the reservation code “Common Ground Publishing” when calling to make your reservation. Reservations and payment will be handled directly with the Hotel Blake. Reservations can be made through the following link:

http://www.wyndham.com/groupevents2011/ordhb_mgmtconfcommon/main.wnt

For more information on the 2012 Management Conference please visit our web-site.

Libertarians With Antlers

Published on September 30, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From John Whitfield, Slate.com

Charles Darwin, not Adam Smith, will one day be considered the father of economics, says Cornell University professor and New York Times columnist Robert H. Frank in his new book, The Darwin Economy. He argues that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection gives a better description of how markets work, and fail, than Smith’s theory of the invisible hand.

This insight reverses two centuries of intellectual traffic. Thomas Malthus’ ideas shaped Darwin’s, and many of the tools of modern evolutionary biology, such as game theory, are borrowed from economics. It leads Frank to many excellent suggestions for improving society by means of a fairer and more efficient tax system that takes the laws of biology into account.

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School of the Dark Arts

Published on September 22, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

Wilfried Vanhonacker explains that it was one of the more difficult admissions decisions he has had to make. The dean of Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, perhaps Russia’s only internationally recognised business school, was considering two candidates for his executive MBA programme. Background checks had shown that they were both members of large crime families.

He initially recoiled. “My natural reaction was to think about the headlines in the New York Times or Economist,” he says. “But it rather made the point: if you want to prepare executives to function in Russia, this is the reality.” And so both were accepted. The dean says that they will bring an interesting perspective to the class, although, at least half jokingly, he worries about the first time he has to give either a bad grade.

Skolkovo celebrated its fifth anniversary over the weekend with a flying visit from Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president and chairman of the school’s advisory board. In that time it has moved three times, only settling this year into its permanent home in an enterprise zone just outside the capital.

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What Monkeys Can Teach You About Money

Published on September 7, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Allen St. James, mental_floss

It’s a little bigger than a quarter and about twice as thick, but because it’s made of aluminum, it weighs roughly the same. It’s flat and smooth, except for what seem to be a few tiny bite marks around the perimeter. To you, it might look like a washer without a hole. To Felix, an alpha male capuchin monkey, and his friends at Yale University, it’s money.

“When one of the monkeys grabs a token, he’s going to hold onto it as though he really values it,” explains Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale. “And the other monkeys might try to take it away from him. Just like they would with a piece of food. Just as you might want to do when you see a person flaunting cash.”

During the past seven years, Santos and Yale economist Keith Chen have conducted a series of cutting-edge experiments in which Felix and seven other monkeys trade these discs for food much like we toss a $20 bill to a cashier at Taco Bell. And in doing so, these monkeys became the first nonhumans to use, well, money.

“It sounds like the setup to a bad joke,” says Chen. “A monkey walks into a room and finds a pile of coins, and he’s got to decide how much he wants to spend on apples, how much on oranges, and how much on pineapples.”

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The Daughter also Rises: Women are Storming Emerging-World Boardrooms

Published on September 1, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

Zhang Yin (also known by her Cantonese name, Cheung Yan) was the eldest of eight children of a lowly Red Army officer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for “capitalist offences”. Today she is one of the world’s richest self-made women, with an estimated fortune of $1.6 billion. In the early 1980s, as a dogsbody in a paper mill, she noted that the waste paper her superiors so casually discarded was actually worth something. She has been capitalising on her insight ever since. Nine Dragons Paper, which she founded with her husband in 1995, is now one of the world’s largest paper recyclers.

The emerging world is home to many businesswomen like Ms Zhang. Seven of the 14 women identified on Forbes magazine’s list of self-made billionaires are Chinese. Many firms in emerging markets do a better job of promoting women than their Western rivals, some surveys suggest. In China, 32% of senior managers are female, compared with 23% in America and 19% in Britain. In India, 11% of chief executives of large companies are female, compared with 3% of Fortune 500 bosses in America and 3% of FTSE 100 bosses in Britain. Turkey and Brazil come third and joint fourth (behind Finland and Norway) in the World Economic Forum’s ranking of countries by the proportion of CEOs who are women. In Brazil, 11% of chief executives and 30% of senior executives are women.

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