Author Archive for audreyl

The Top Thirty

Published on October 23, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business takes first place in The Economist’s ninth annual ranking of full-time MBA programmes. The New Hampshire school has moved up from second position last year. Virtually all of its students—who went into a wide range of industries—found work within three months of graduating. Its MBAs could expect a basic salary of $107,000, a 65% increase on their pre-degree earnings. Tuck students also graded the quality of their alumni the best in the world—an important consideration given the often-repeated claim that who you meet on an MBA programme is just as important as what you learn.

Chicago drops to second, having come top last year, while the world’s most famous school, Harvard, also drops a place to fifth. Europe’s top programme is IMD, a Swiss school, which ranks third. Though INSEAD has campuses in both France and Singapore, no purely Asian school makes our top 30. Hong Kong University, at 36th, is the highest-placed. The China Europe International Business School is the only school from the mainland to make our top 100. The Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India’s sole representative, and the toughest business school in the world to get into (see article), is 78th.

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Trouble in the Middle

Published on October 21, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

In 2009, when the American economy was beset by recession, interest in MBA programmes hit a record high. No one was much surprised: applications to business schools often rise during the first years of a recession as people seek shelter from the storm. So perhaps no one should be surprised that in both succeeding years applications have fallen. That’s what prolonged doldrums do.

Yet, privately at least, some business schools are worried that a two-year decline, along with a level of applications from American students lower than it has been this century, is more than just a response to the economy. They fear that the established model of business education may be in trouble, if not for all schools, then definitely for mid-ranking American institutions offering a traditional two-year MBA. Two-thirds of schools which offer long, residential programmes saw applications drop in 2011.

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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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From Human Nature to Human Resources

Published on August 29, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Dan Morrell, Harvard Magazine

In 1990, just as professor of organizational behavior Paul Lawrence was preparing to retire from the Business School, he began to notice a new leadership model gaining traction among some of his colleagues. “Agency theory” argued that managers’ prime responsibility was to work in the best interest of shareholders, he says, and was widely embraced. Lawrence thought the theory ignored employees, customers, suppliers, neighbors, the environment—every other conceivable constituency—for the sake of shareholder profit. “To maximize just one of those didn’t make sense. ‘There’s more to human beings than just making money,’” he recalls thinking. “I had a kind of visceral reaction to this.”

Looking not only for a better leadership model, but a better theory of human behavior, he read books on religion, paleontology, and neuroscience; histories of societies from ancient to modern American, in chronological order; and the latest science digests. Above all, he read Darwin.

In The Descent of Man, Lawrence found what he was looking for: Darwin’s description of human evolutionary history can be used, he says, to explain almost every aspect of human behavior, from religious faith, to the subprime mortgage crisis and the bond market, to the corporate corruption of politics—even the rise of Hitler. He read and re-read his personal copy, now well-worn and heavily annotated. “I thought, ‘There it is.’ It became my chief reference point from then on.”

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Think Different

Published on August 11, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

Innovation is today’s equivalent of the Holy Grail. Rich-world governments see it as a way of staving off stagnation. Poor governments see it as a way of speeding up growth. And businesspeople everywhere see it as the key to survival.

Which makes Clay Christensen the closest thing we have to Sir Galahad. Fourteen years ago Mr Christensen, a knight of the Harvard Business School, revolutionised the study of the subject with “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, a book that popularised the term “disruptive innovation”. This month he publishes a new study, “The Innovator’s DNA”, co-written with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen, which tries to take us inside the minds of successful innovators. How do they go about their business? How do they differ from regular suits? And what can companies learn from their mental habits?

Mr Christensen and his colleagues list five habits of mind that characterise disruptive innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Innovators excel at connecting seemingly unconnected things. Marc Benioff got the idea for Salesforce.com by looking at enterprise software through the prism of online businesses such as Amazon and eBay. Why were software companies flogging cumbersome products in the form of CD-ROMs rather than as flexible services over the internet? Salesforce.com is now worth $19 billion.

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Still Lonely at the Top

Published on August 5, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

In François Ozon’s latest film, “Potiche”, Catherine Deneuve (pictured) plays a trophy wife, a potiche, who spends her days jogging in a scarlet jumpsuit, making breakfast for her cantankerous husband and writing poetry perched on a sofa. But then her husband, the boss of an umbrella factory, is taken hostage by striking workers. Ms Deneuve takes over the factory and charms the workers into returning to work. She jazzes up the products and generally proves that anything a man can do, a woman can do better.

The film was set in 1977, when the only women in a typical Western boardroom were serving the coffee. Times have changed. These days no one doubts that women can run companies: think of Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, Carol Bartz at Yahoo! or Ursula Burns at Xerox. Sheryl Sandberg, the number two at Facebook, is more widely applauded than her young male boss, Mark Zuckerberg.

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