BizDeansTalk - business management education blog

50 of the Most Dependable Web Resources for University Students

50 of the Most Dependable Web Resources for University Students, Educhoices, May 2008.

"Knowing where to turn for facts, handy web apps and other types of resources can make student life a lot easier. Read on for a list of 50 of the most useful and dependable online resources for college and university students.

Research Resources

The Internet is a great place to find information and check facts--if you know where to go. Here are 25 web resources that are known for being consistent, accurate and reliable.

1. Library of Congress - The nation's oldest federal cultural institution is also the largest library in the world. Some of the resources you will find here include historical documents, manuscripts, artwork, maps, photos, letters and film.

2. U.S. Census Bureau - The American FactFinder from the U.S. Census Bureau is an incredibly useful tool--particularly if you are looking for population, housing, economic, and geographic data.

3. CIA Library - The Central Intelligence Agency has a library, an online directory of Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments, maps and a World Fact Book that offers information on countries all over the world.

4. STAT-USA - Part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, STAT-USA is an authoritative guide to business, trade, and economic information. You have to pay to use the service from home, but you can access it for free at any Federal Depository Library. etc".

10,000 Women.org - Goldman Sachs to assist in their business-ed

Webpage of Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. plans to spend $100 million over the next five years to bring business education to 10,000 women around the world.

"Expanding the entrepreneurial talent and managerial pool in developing and emerging economies – especially among women – is one of the most important means to reducing inequality and ensuring more shared economic growth.

Launched by Goldman Sachs, 10,000 Women is a significant new initiative that will:

• Increase the number of underserved women receiving a business and management education
• Improve the quality and capacity of business and management education around the world

Learn more at 10000women.org

Press release: Goldman Sachs Launches 10,000 Women Initiative [PDF, 132 KB]

10,000 Women Fact Sheet [PDF, 216 KB]

10,000 Women Key Biographies [PDF, 51 KB]

Global Economic Research: Women Hold up Half the Sky

Corporate Engagement at Goldman Sachs [PDF, 112 KB]"

The Gay and Lesbian Guide to College Life (College Admissions Guides) (Paperback)

How to choose your course as MBA's change with the times

Click here for the article of The Independent, 12 June 2008.

MBAs started a century ago – but the providers have learned to stay up to date. Midge Gillies reports

...The MBA has changed from something that most employers hadn't heard of to a qualification that many demand of their high-flying managers. MBAs used to be destined for jobs in consulting, banking, finance and a select group of international companies. Now MBAs are keen to work in public sector and not-for-profit jobs or as entrepreneurs...

AcademyOne, Inc. promoting US student mobility

Website

AcademyOne is simplifying student mobility and curriculum alignment between higher education institutions balancing pro-active and re-active methods.

www.collegetransfer.net supports students, institutions and state agencies improving coordination, outreach, guidance, recruiting, assessment and student success by bridging policies, practices and processes.

Carrots, Sticks and Transfer - Bologna Process vs. US

Click here for the article of Inside Higher Ed, June 23rd 2008.

Before becoming a DC think tank person, I worked for the Indiana Senate, advising the chair of the State Budget Committee. Much of this job consisted of listening to people ask my boss for money.

...The United States is an unusually large nation populated by a restless citizenry prone to moving from place to place. Our higher education system is also unusually diverse and decentralized, with thousands of public and private institutions retaining the academic freedom to decide what kind of course credits they’ll accept from whom. As a result, the basic logistic challenges of managing student transfer are considerable. It’s hard for a given college to evaluate credits from a huge number of courses, departments, and institutions nationwide...

The result — a chaotic, inefficient transfer “system” that’s hardly a system at all — makes life very difficult for students who attend multiple institutions, as more and more do. What’s worse, many students don’t find out how many courses will be accepted for credit until after they transfer, so they can’t take ease of transfer into account when they decide where to go....

...The flawed U.S. transfer non-system has also persisted because, historically, it was still better than what students experienced elsewhere. But that, too, is changing. As the Institute for Higher Education’s Clifford Adelman found in his recent report on the Bologna Process, universities in Europe are poised to leapfrog the United States in ease of transfer, based on a process of deep, concurrent analysis of academic goals, degree qualifications and credit systems that goes far beyond what a harried registrar’s office in a U.S. institution could hope to accomplish one transcript at a time...

(MBA) Programs' green effort grows - WSJ

Click here for the article of The Wall Street Journal, May 30, 208.

Last June, Instituto de Empresa Business School launched EcologIE, an effort to reduce the school's carbon footprint. The Madrid campus started small, distributing recycling bins throughout buildings. But its aims, like those of many efforts under way at schools across Europe, are big: changing the mindset of future business leaders.

The activity is part of a burgeoning movement in which green is becoming much more than just the color of the U.S. dollar at many business schools. Environmentalism has become a buzzword, as M.B.A. programs across Europe introduce environmental elective courses, integrate sustainability issues into core offerings, support research projects on global-warming topics and try to make their campuses more energy efficient.

Will this embracing of the green agenda by business schools mean much in the overall scheme of things? To get a better understanding of the activity unfolding at campuses world-wide, we talked with Thomas Reid, international M.B.A. program adviser and director of Instituto de Empresa's new initiative. Here are edited excerpts:

For the answers click on above link.

The Wall Street Journal: Nearly a year after Instituto de Empresa launched its EcologIE initiative, what practical changes have been made and what is ahead?

Mr. Reid: In conjunction with the city of Madrid, we ....

WSJ: How does this newest effort fit into the school's broader approach to the environment?

WSJ: Some critics say business schools have been slow to embrace sustainability in course work and to assess how their own campuses could be greener. Is this criticism fair?

WSJ: Given the depth of pollution in booming economies like China and the gas-guzzling sport-utility-vehicle culture of the U.S., are campus efforts enough to make a difference to the world's potential ecological problems?

WSJ: How did this effort begin?

Shanghai Daily.com - Roundtable of CEIBS faculty

Click here for article of Shanghai Daily.com, 2008-6-18.

A THREE-HOUR deans' roundtable titled "The Future of Business Manage-ment Education in China and Around the World" was held at the China Europe International Business School Shanghai campus recently.

Hosted and moderated by Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, the graduate school of management founded in 1900, these roundtables are part of Tuck's sustained international outreach program.

The frank discussion featured five deans from CEIBS in Shanghai, the Institute Empress in Spain, Fudan Management School, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Business School.

"Globalization is changing business education just as surely as it has changed international business. We'd like to know how education is developing in the world and explore places that we want to learn about," Danos said.

"There is no government control on what education will become. No American model is going to be the majority model globally. It is necessary that new models are adapted. That's why I initiated the event."

Popular recent EDUCAUSE publications

Popular EDUCAUSE publications for the last 3 months.

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time - Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey David Sachs (born November 5, 1954, in Detroit, Michigan) is an American economist known for his work as an economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa.

He is currently a professor on the faculty at the School of International and Public Affairs and director of the Earth Institute, both at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Director of the UN Millennium Project.

He proposed "shock therapy" (though he himself dislikes the term) as a solution to the economic crises of Bolivia, Poland, and Russia. He is also known for his work with international agencies on problems of poverty reduction, debt cancellation, and disease control — especially HIV/AIDS, for the developing world. He advocated distribution of free insecticide-treated bed nets to combat malaria. He is the only academic to have been repeatedly ranked among the world's most influential people by Time magazine

AACSB - BizSchoolJobs - Career Connections

BizSchoolJobs

Video of Harvard's Porter - The Five Competitive Forces that Shape Strategy

Me And My MBA: A £2bn turnover in 10 years (Peter Cullum)

Click here for the article of The Independent, 12 June 2008.

Back in the Seventies, the insurance industry was very conservative, recalls the insurance mogul Peter Cullum, 57. As a 24 year-old, he had the audacity to challenge the received wisdom of the business world.                                 

After 20 years spent working his way to the top of the mainstream insurance industry, resuscitating ailing companies en route, he decided it was time to do things his way. Towergate Partnership Ltd, which he founded in 1997 with some equally enterprising industry colleagues, has mushroomed into one of the UK's major providers of specialist insurance. In doing so, Cullum has amassed a personal fortune estimated at £1.7bn, putting him at number 40 in the Sunday Times Rich List.

Having gone straight into insurance from school in his home city of Norwich, ("I could have joined Norwich Union but somehow that would have been too easy"), he decided that he needed to boost his business skills and enrolled on a Masters course at what is now Cass Business School in the City of London...

A look at the job market for MBAs - Business Week

Andy Chan, director of Stanford's Career Center, offers insights into the MBA job market.

Reading List for the Poolside MBA

Business Page-Turners
A look at some of the books B-school professors recommend for MBA summer reading,
Article By Francesca DiMeglio, June 2, 2008

• View Slide Show

School is out, the sun is shining, and the temptation to forget about structured finance and pick up a trashy novel for beach reading is overwhelming. But those who are determined to get ahead of the MBA pack and beat out the competition for jobs in the increasingly competitive business world know that getting through an ambitious summer reading list is an assignment worth accepting.

The best thing about a summer reading list is that you can customize it to meet your interests as though you're your own professor. Also, you can complete it at your own pace, whether you're reading on a chaise poolside or waiting for the bus you take to your internship. And you don't have to do it on your own. You can start with suggestions from some professors at top American business schools, who recently shared their suggested summer reading lists with BusinessWeek.com. Another good source is BusinessWeek's list of best-selling business books.

Internet Gives M.B.A. Schools Global Reach

Article of Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2008

When Duong Pham, a human-resources manager in Hanoi at a technology company, began researching M.B.A. programs on the Internet three months ago, she came across the "MBA Networking" group on Facebook, which connected her to thousands of current business-school students, alumni and prospective students. She fired off all sorts of questions, ranging from how easy it was to get part-time jobs at various campuses to whether Virginia, the site of a student massacre last year, was a safe place to study...

...Such social-networking sites are "a great place to do research. You can get very useful personal advice and opinions from a lot of people," says Ms. Pham, 26 years old. She hopes to apply to business school later this year.

Mercer's 2008 Quality of Living survey - Europe dominates + in FT "The Monocle Quality of Life Index"

1. Mercer's 2008 Quality of Living survey, Last updated: 10 June 2008

Click here for RANKINGS TABLES - "Top 50 cities: Quality of living" + "Top 50 cities: Personal safety"

Top 5 cities - Overall

• Zurich, Switzerland (1st)
• Vienna, Austria (tied for 2nd)
• Geneva, Switzerland (tied for 2nd )
• Vancouver, Canada (4th)
• Auckland, New Zealand (5th)

To encourage employment mobility and keep abreast of the competition, you need reliable information to help you calculate fair, consistent expatriate allowances. Based on 39 factors within ten categories, Mercer’s Quality of Living Reports contain all the key elements you need to calculate hardship allowances for transfers to more than 350 cities worldwide.

“Hardship allowance” refers to premium compensation paid to expatriates who experience – or should expect to experience – a significant deterioration in living conditions in their new host location.

Our reports are based on annual responses to a questionnaire developed by international Mercer professionals, working closely with major multinational companies and other experts in the field.

2. "A league table of liveable cities"  Financial Times, June 13 2008, Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle

The Monocle Quality of Life Index:

1. Copenhagen: out in front by virtue of its scale, a good airport, all those bike paths and handsome locals.

2. Munich: almost a winner, but it should have committed to building the Transrapid airport rail link.

3. Tokyo: the worlds best big city by far...

 

Asia is Hot Destination For European M.B.A.s

Article of Wall Street Journal

Opportunities Shrink In Western Centers; 'Where the Action Is'

LONDON -- Ankur Mehrotra returned from a trip to Hong Kong and Singapore that he helped organize for his fellow London Business School students this spring break with more than just jet lag: He got a banking sales job in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

And many of the 15 master in finance students who made the trek with him were similarly successful, coming home with either interviews or strong contacts to follow up on, he said.

They aren't alone. With Western economies sagging, many European business schools say they are seeing a jump in the number of M.B.A.s and other students looking East for opportunities.

...The difficulties of getting U.S. work visas are also prompting students who might have sought to go to the U.S. to try Asia instead, Mr. Mercado said.

"Our more globally minded students are increasingly frustrated at the difficulties of breaking through the legal and regulatory barriers of getting work in the U.S.," he said. "They understand the Eastward shift in terms of dynamism in the global economy, vibrancy, growth, advancement."

Mendeley beta: Manage, Share and Discover Academic Knowledge and Research

Mendeley is for researchers, academics & students

If you deal with academic knowledge, then Mendeley will make your life easier. It’s a combination of desktop software and website which helps you manage, share and discover both content and contacts in research. It’s easy to use, and it's free.

For the latest news, development updates and a look at our start-up life visit our blog.

• Automatic extraction of metadata (authors, title, journal etc.) from academic papers into a library database. Saves you a lot of manual typing!

• Manage your papers as easily as mp3s: Superfast full-text search across all your papers, citation style formatting etc. Coming soon: Microsoft Word integration, OCR (image-to-text conversion, so you can full-text search all your scanned PDFs), and more good stuff.
• Share and synchronize your library with others, back it up online and access it from everywhere. See when your colleagues have new publications, are attending the same conferences, or are traveling to places near you. Coming soon.
• Receive reading recommendations based on your interests, see statistics about up-and-coming topics in your academic discipline, track the readership of your own publications, and get detailed insights about your library database. Coming soon.

US Presidential Candidates Have Little Opportunity to Talk About Education

Click here for article of US News and Report, May 8, 2008.

...Losing step. Frustration over how education has been crowded out of the presidential debate is barely contained among the nation's leading education experts...

"Education is a big issue, but I don't hear much about it, because everyone is going after the 'gotcha' of the day," says former Secretary of State Colin Powell, founder of America's Promise, which is working to draw attention to high school dropout rates.

...Two thirds of all new U.S. jobs require advanced training, and many U.S. companies insist they can't find enough skilled employees to fill openings without hiring foreign workers. For example, while there are nearly 100,000 new jobs annually in computer science, there has been a dramatic decline in tech graduates. As a result, the United States provides 65,000 temporary work visas each year to help make up the shortfall...

Hits and Misses - critique of Google Generation academia

Click here for Times Higher Education, 5 June 2008

Does the Google generation, which has grown up with a deluge of data just clicks away, lack the independence of thought and critical rigour needed for higher study? Matthew Reisz investigates

...illustrates the immense gulf between the world of old-time scholarship and the assumptions made - or often said to be made - by today's "Google generation", where everything is about instant gratification and "facts at one's fingertips", and information that lies more than three clicks away simply doesn't exist. Many are now concerned that this generation gap presents a fundamental challenge to some of the things that universities have long stood for, and that universities are either unable or failing to bridge it.

...So is it not just a particular generation but the whole academic world that has been Googlised? There seems to be some evidence for this. "With Google Scholar and Google Library under way," Library Journal reported in 2006, "Google strengthened its claim as the ubiquitous front door to the web and all of its content... 72 per cent of scholars surveyed for a report on self-archiving confessed to using Google to find scholarly literature on the web. Journal publishers of all sizes and importance are shaping their business plans around this phenomenon, sharing metadata with Google and other web crawlers in hopes of drawing users to content behind their tollgates."...

....None of this suggests a very sophisticated level of searching skills among the students of tomorrow. But that is only the half of it. Uncritical reliance on search engines may be a reasonable way of accessing information, despite their many limitations, but it is of no help for the core educational goal of learning to assess such information. The Ciber paper expressed concerns about whether students' "having 'facts at their fingertips' and a surfeit of information is at the expense of creative and independent thinking".

UK university lectures on iTunes

Click here for article of BBC News, 3 June 2008

University College London, the Open University and Trinity College Dublin are putting lectures onto iTunes.

Educational content is already available in the United States through the non-charging "iTunes U" section of the music downloading service.

But European universities are now joining, providing video and audio material for students to use on iPods or computers.

The service will include recordings of lectures from leading academics...

Business school deans discuss globalization's impact on education

Press release of Media-Newswire.com - June 5, 2008

HANOVER, N.H.-Deans from business schools in Eastern Europe, Spain, and the United States recently gathered to discuss the differences in international models of business education and the impact of globalization on their industry. The event was the latest in a series of roundtables held around the globe and organized and moderated by Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and Santiago Iñiguez, dean of Instituto de Empressa Business School. This latest assembly was hosted by Dean Paul Garrison of the Central European University Business School in Budapest.

"Globalization is changing business education just as surely as it has changed international business," says Danos. "These roundtable discussions have been a valuable tool for comparing regional business school models and ensuring that our MBA programs reflect the realities of the modern marketplace."

Deans from more than 20 schools around the world, senior faculty members, business education reporters, education consultants, and professional development executives from top corporations have joined together for the four roundtable sessions held to date...

Erasmus Mundus scholarships: 450 teaching staff / 2,000 new Master's students

Click here for EUROPA press release, 5 June 2008.

More than 2,000 students and 450 teaching staff from outside Europe have been selected to receive an Erasmus Mundus scholarship for the academic year 2008/09. These scholarships will allow them to study in Europe for one or two years and obtain a Master's degree from one of the 103 top-quality Erasmus Mundus Masters Courses offered by consortia of European higher education institutions.

In 2008, a total number of 17 new partnerships of Erasmus Mundus Masters Consortia with higher education institutions in non-European countries were selected. Altogether, they encompass 62 universities from 28 different third countries. These 17 partnerships foresee an outgoing mobility of an estimated 477 European students and 192 European scholars over the next two years. The partnerships allow European higher education institutions, scholars and students to strengthen their ties with other higher education environments in the world...

The second phase of Erasmus Mundus (2009-13) is expected to start in 2009 with a planned total budget of 950 million euros. Its main new features are the inclusion of joint doctoral programmes, increased scholarships for European students and an intensified structural cooperation with third-country higher education institutions. In addition, the new proposal integrates a mobility scheme for all levels of higher education.

One of the characteristic features of the Erasmus Mundus programme is that student grantees follow their courses in at least two universities located in different European countries. This gives them the additional opportunity to learn about European cultures, languages and academic systems.

On 6-7 June 2008 the University for Foreigners of Perugia, in Italy, will host the 4^th Erasmus Mundus Student Seminar and the 4^th General Assembly of the Erasmus Mundus Student and Alumni Association (EMA - www.em-a.eu). About 200 participants are expected including representatives from the European institutions, Italian, Slovenian and French national authorities, Erasmus Mundus course coordinators, national contact points and, of course, more than a hundred students and alumni from the entire world.

For more information on Erasmus Mundus:

http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/mundus/index_en.html

MBA Channel - MBA photo contest

website

80+ Open Courseware Collections to Help You Be a Better Leader - Job profiles

The Manager's Handbook: 80+ Open Courseware Collections to Help You Be a Better Leader  -by Job Profiles

Published on Tuesday June 3rd , 2008

By Jessica Merritt

Although becoming a leader may seem simple, the fact is that there's a lot of consideration that goes into management. You not only have to stay on top of your team, but make sure that you're fostering communication, growth and productivity. Here, we'll take a look at a number of high quality courses that will show you how to take care of these issues and more.

Introduction

Get started with learning about management and leadership through these courses.

1. Successful Management Techniques and Strategies: Check out this lecture to find out about techniques and strategies that you can implement in your work as a manager.
2. Fundamentals of Management: This presentation offers lots of great information on management, efficiency, and leadership.
3. Defying Gravity: In this course, you'll see how some leaders make the impossible possible.
4. Designing and Leading the Entrepreneurial Organization: Learn how to put together a great team and organization through this course.
5. Effective Leadership: Learn how to become a better leader with this presentation.
6. Practical Leadership: Check out this course to see how individual students work to achieve improvements in their leadership.
7. Leadership Mashups: Innovation: In this presentation, you'll learn how to improve yourself as a leader through mashups.
8. ....
9. ....

News from the (b)schools, May 2008 - The Economist

News from the schools, May 2008 - The Economist - May 31st 2008

Kai Peters of Ashridge Business School on Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Dean's column, Financial Times, May 12, 2008.

When the world wide web goes down, my whole day comes to a grinding halt. I cannot work, I cannot play, and all that is left is for me to do something upright and worthy, like going for a walk or, heaven forbid, talking to people...

...Then on Christmas day, 1990, the world changed. Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at Cern, the European particle physics lab in Geneva, launched the first successful client-server communication via the internet and the world wide web was born. What Sir Tim managed to do was to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit and, by adding web browsers, servers and editors to the mix, made it possible for Cern to launch the first ever website in August 1991.

...In fact, Sir Tim has maintained his commitment to an open technology community, which has given impetus to the open source movement that continues to grow in importance...

..Sir Tim changed the rules of the game by inventing the web. Suddenly, it was possible to communicate with people all over the world. Electronic brochures turned into virtual retailers and one-way communication turned into social networks so people did not have to go for a walk or talk anymore...

ExpoManagement Madrid - 4th and 5th June

Website

The 2008 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards - Submissions

EFMD website description

The closing date for receipt of applications is 1 October 2008. For any queries regarding the Awards, please contact Ruth Heppenstall by e-mail at rheppenstall@emeraldinsight.com or by telephone at +44 (0)1274 777700.

International recognition and cash awards for the best doctoral research.

Emerald and the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) seek to celebrate excellence in research by sponsoring the 2008 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards.

Submissions are now being accepted for research papers in the following subject categories:

1. Marketing Strategy
   Sponsored by European Journal of Marketing
   Editors: Gordon Greenley and Nick Lee
   
   
2. Leadership and Organization Development
   Sponsored by Leadership & Organization Development Journal
   Editor: Marie McHugh. etc. etc.