From Matthew Reiez, Times Higher Education
Mission statements form a major part of how many institutions present themselves to the world - and, at least in theory, how they see themselves.
Although the precise terms differ, it is now common for universities to make the effort to define their basic purpose (mission), major longer-term aspirations (vision) and underlying values. There is fun to be had in comparing the self-descriptions that appear in their corporate advertising (see quiz, page 40). Yet mission statements present a far more considered picture, often based on extensive consultation and debate. What is the point of them, and can they justify their cost, especially at times of financial constraint?
Universities are willing to invest considerable amounts of money in getting their mission statements right, as the example of the University of Nottingham indicates (see box, below). Certainly, words that genuinely inspire people are worth paying for. The Conservative Party must have handed Saatchi & Saatchi a small fortune for the phrase “Labour isn’t working”, but it is generally agreed to have played a major role in helping the Tories win the 1979 election. Given the sums universities must spend on developing declarations of their missions, one would hope that the results read like the products of top-class copywriters. So are they genuinely inspirational, banal or positively leaden?
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From Omar Malik, Times Higher Education
Philosophers have long pondered the big question: why is life such a bugger? Lesser orders have similarly wondered why life is just one damn thing after another. Why do things always go wrong? The answer is short and simple: the laws of nature.
Some like to believe that we are the highest form of life, blessed with free will. Maybe. But as far as nature is concerned, we are just another of her countless products and, like the rest of them, serve sentence under her laws.
Francis Bacon said that we cannot command nature except by obeying her; sadly, he omitted to say that to obey her, we must first understand her. In macro terms that is surprisingly easy: all we have to do is identify her laws. The micro task of combating them is much more difficult, well beyond the scope of libraries of regulations, however vast.
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From Times Higher Education,
In a chilly economic climate, business schools’ ability to deliver research with real-world relevance is essential. Tracey Hudson asks whether they can find the right academics to deliver those goals
“Because of this shortage, many business schools are adopting a model of education that de-emphasises the role of research professors and substitutes others who are not primarily researcher-teachers. Until PhD programmes increase in number and output, this worldwide trend will continue,” he says.
One of the biggest challenges faced by higher education institutions around the globe is the continuing shortage not of academics, but of the right kind of academics. And nowhere is the challenge greater than in one of the fastest-growing areas of the academic world - the international business school community.
According to Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, “there is a continuing shortage of PhD-trained professors, which is causing cost escalation for the very best”.
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Please continue to check the Management Newsletter for news and information about the 2011 Management Conference. We will announce the dates and location soon.
To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Management Conference in Montreal, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!
Join our Management Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.
For information on sharing photos with Flickr, please read more here.
Nuzhat Jafri became the first executive director of the Office of the Fairness Commissioner in September 2007.
She has wide leadership experience in both public and private sectors. She directed diversity initiatives at Scotiabank and previously at the Bank of Montreal, where she delivered awardwinning leading-edge programs. In the Ontario government, Ms. Jafri developed a cultural policy framework at the Ministry of Culture. She oversaw the passage of amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act and the development and implementation of key regulations. Earlier, she was a director at the former Employment Equity Commission. Most recently, Ms. Jafri was the manager of Global Experience Ontario, the information and referral centre for internationally trained persons at the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.
The Office of the Fairness Commissioner is an independent agency of the government of Ontario. Its goal is to make sure that people are treated fairly when they apply to become licensed professionals in one of Ontario’s regulated professions, no matter where they were trained. This goal is widely supported in Ontario, and reflects the principles and core values of its people. www.fairnesscommissioner.ca
Today the Management Newsletter will be re-launched – marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Management Community. The newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.
It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Management Community.
If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to theorganisation.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.
If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at support@ theorganisation.com.
The 2010 Management Conference will be held at HEC Montreal in Montreal Canada from 26-28 July.
Plenary Speakers
- Nuzhat Jafri, Executive Director, Office of the Fairness Commissioner
- Mildred Schwartz, Professor, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
- Emma Stenstrom, Professor, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden
- Frank Habermann, Managing Director, Becota, The Berlin Consulting & Management Association, Berlin, Germany
- Alain Senteni, Dean, School of e-Education, Hamdan Bin Mohammed e-University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/#ppt. To submit a proposal, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Management Conference, see: http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/register/.
Themes
http://theorganisation.com/ideas/themes/
Conference Dinner & Tours
http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/activities-and-extras/
Accommodation
http://theorganisation.com/conference-2010/accommodation/
From Amartya Sen, NewStateman
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith’s first book, was published in early 1759. Smith, then a young professor at the University of Glasgow, had some understandable anxiety about the public reception of the book, which was based on his quite progressive lectures. On 12 April, Smith heard from his friend David Hume in London about how the book was doing. If Smith was, Hume told him, prepared for “the worst”, then he must now be given “the melancholy news” that unfortunately “the public seem disposed to applaud [your book] extremely”. “It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises.” This light-hearted intimation of the early success of Smith’s first book was followed by serious critical acclaim for what is one of the truly outstanding books in the intellectual history of the world.
After its immediate success, Moral Sentiments went into something of an eclipse from the beginning of the 19th century, and Smith was increasingly seen almost exclusively as the author of his second book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which, published in 1776, transformed the subject of economics. The neglect of Moral Sentiments, which lasted through the 19th and 20th centuries, has had two rather unfortunate effects.
To Read More…
From Drake Bennett, Boston.com
Two weeks after it went on sale, the iPad is still the toast of the tech world, with its image gracing magazine covers, market analysts speculating about whether it will transform the worlds of publishing and entertainment, and consumers buying the gadget at a healthy clip. This at a cost of at least $500 each, at a time when Americans are still cautious about large nonessential purchases, and for a device that remains difficult to succinctly describe, much less figure out the purpose of.
It’s early yet, but it looks like another success for a company that, more than any other consumer brand, is synonymous with the new. Apple has forged a unique and lucrative reputation for creating irresistible, intuitive objects of techno-desire, shaping along the way how we work, communicate, and procrastinate, and the look and feel of the electronic gadgetry that increasingly fills our lives.
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From John Dickerson, Slate
Risk has taken a beating recently, thanks to the financial crisis. Risk is supposed to be about choice and consequence. You take a chance and you win or you lose. But then banks and insurance companies found ways to pervert this. They devised ever more esoteric ways to pass risk on to others, so there was, in fact, no risk to them at all. In this distortion, insurance techniques, created to limit risk, exposed millions to it. The laws of probability, originally devised to solve a moral dilemma—how to equitably distribute winnings in a game of chance—wound up inequitably distributing losses to people who didn’t even know they were at the table. The architects of these gambles left their jobs with enormous bonuses, and companies that helped cripple the financial system were repaid by the government bailout. They took a chance, and lost—but they still won.
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From David Bolchover, The Economist
In these times, the overpaid fat-cat in the corner office makes a barn door of a target. Particularly in the financial services sector, where even at those companies bailed out by the taxpayer, senior executives have been quick to return to obscene bonuses, often coupled with poor performance. To add insult, such behaviour is justified by the alleged need to “let the markets decide” or to ensure that talent is “justly rewarded”.
Typically, sanctimoniousness at the top comes with a veiled threat to pack up and head abroad if the government even thinks about reining them in. Understandable, then, that many feel fury at such a sense of entitlement and enrichment, and that sensible discussion tends to evaporate in a flare of mass indignation.
Understandable but ultimately unsustainable. Such populist anger risks taking down innocent entrepreneurs and financial firms as the blunt instrument of regulation is wielded. More reasoned debate about the issue of excessive executive pay is needed. This is David Bolchover’s ambition in his highly readable and punchy polemic.
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From Virginia Postrel, The New York Times
Sheena Iyengar is the psychologist responsible for the famous jam experiment. You may have heard about it: At a luxury food store in Menlo Park, researchers set up a table offering samples of jam. Sometimes, there were six different flavors to choose from. At other times, there were 24. (In both cases, popular flavors like strawberry were left out.) Shoppers were more likely to stop by the table with more flavors. But after the taste test, those who chose from the smaller number were 10 times more likely to actually buy jam: 30 percent versus 3 percent. Having too many options, it seems, made it harder to settle on a single selection.
Wherever she goes, people tell Iyengar about her own experiment. The head of Fidelity Research explained it to her, as did a McKinsey & Company executive and a random woman sitting next to her on a plane. A colleague told her he had heard Rush Limbaugh denounce it on the radio. That rant was probably a reaction to Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice” (2004), who often cites the jam study in antimarket polemics lamenting the abundance of consumer choice. In Schwartz’s ideal world, stores wouldn’t offer such ridiculous, brain-taxing plenitude. Who needs two dozen types of jam?
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From The Economist
It is
hard to overstate the importance of Toyota in Japan’s business psyche. The company has long been regarded as the pinnacle of Japanese innovation, manufacturing quality and industrial strength—particularly since it overtook General Motors in 2008 to become the world’s biggest carmaker. Its “lean” manufacturing techniques and culture of continuous improvement were the envy of the business world. Companies sent delegations to tour Toyota’s factories in the hope that some of its magic would rub off on them. Within Japan the firm was considered the nation’s industrial champion, as the sun seemed to set on other giants such as Sony and Hitachi.
But within a few weeks all this has changed. Problems with “unintended acceleration” of its cars, which the firm has only belatedly taken seriously, have triggered an escalating crisis and the recall of a whopping 8m vehicles. Toyota’s woes were compounded on February 9th when it said it would also recall 440,000 hybrid vehicles, including the celebrated Prius, to fix a problem with their brakes. The firm’s reputation for quality, on which the business was built, is shattered. Its market capitalisation has dropped by an amount roughly equal to the entire value of Ford. But the greatest damage has been done by its misreading and mishandling of the crisis.
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From The Economist
• London Business School has topped the first of the year’s important global MBA rankings. It has taken the top spot outright in the Financial Times list of the top 100 full-time programmes, after sharing the honour with Pennsylvania’s Wharton School last year.
• Two business-school heads are on the move. Arnoud De Meyer, the director of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, is stepping down to become president of the Singapore Management University. Professor De Meyer had previously helped INSEAD set up its Singapore campus. Meanwhile, Ted Snyder, who confirmed he was leaving Chicago’s Booth School in December, is to take up the reins at Yale School of Management.
• No surprise that 2009 wasn’t a good one for the MBA job market. The MBA Career Services Council has just released the results of its autumn survey, which show that 79% of business schools saw a decline in on-campus recruitment last year. Traditional sectors such as financial services and consulting were hit particularly hard. But the CSC did note signs of recovery, with some areas—including energy, government and healthcare—seeing increased activity.
To Read More….
From The Economist
Henry Hazlitt, one of the great popularisers of free-market thinking, once said that good ideas have to be relearned in every generation. This is certainly true of good ideas about business. A generation ago Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did an excellent job of making the case in favour of business. Today it looks as though the case needs to be made all over again.
It is hardly surprising that business has fallen from grace in recent years. The credit crunch almost plunged the world into depression. The new century began with the implosion of Enron and other prominent firms. Some bosses pay themselves like princes while preaching austerity to their workers. Business titans who once graced the covers of magazines have been hauled before congressional committees or carted off to prison.
Business people have been at pains to point out that it is unfair to judge all of their kind by the misdeeds of a few. The credit crunch was the handiwork of bankers (who lent too much money) and policymakers (who fooled themselves into thinking that they had abolished boom and bust). Corporate criminals like WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers and Tyco’s Denis Kozlowski were imprisoned for their crimes. Avaricious bosses like Angelo Mozilo, who pocketed more than $550m during his inglorious reign at Countrywide, are exceptions. The average American boss is actually paid less today than he was in 2000.
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From, Matt Pressman Vanity Fair.
AOL went from pioneering powerhouse to laughed-at laggard when changing technologies made their business model of charging people for e-mail accounts and Internet access obsolete. So now
they are remaking the company with an entirely different strategy: selling ads against original content produced by an army of well-paid professional journalists. Unfortunately, that’s the same business model that has driven America’s newspapers to the brink of ruin.
When most people think of AOL, they think of it as the e-mail provider for people who aren’t with it enough to switch to a free service such as Gmail. But while the bulk of AOL’s revenue still comes from its old-school subscribers, the company’s future is in the content business (with a sideline in social networking). In advance of its long-awaited split from Time Warner, which will occur next month, AOL has been on a hiring-and-acquisition spree. It now owns upward of 75 niche blogs and news sites, including DailyFinance.com, Engadget.com, and Fanhouse.com, staffed in large part by reporters who used to work in print. C.E.O. Tim Armstrong said at a conference last month that AOL employs more than 3,000 journalists.
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