DeansTalk - business management education

IE Faculty: Adjunct and visiting professors from around the world

vdcav.en.blogs.ie.edu

VENTURE DAYS AT IE

venturedays.ticketea.com

Download PROGRAM-VENTURE DAYS (PDF, 24 pages)

"There is more to business than analytics" - Dean of Programs, David Bach, IE Business School in the Financial Times

Article of the Financial Times, April 25, 2011.

“Frame a challenging problem, then get out of the way!”

Flights of fancy help replicate real business dilemmas - Financial Times

Article of Rebecca Knight, April 25 2011

Imagine you are an analyst at an international investment bank whose job it is to predict the daily price of a barrel of oil. What happens if members of Opec, the oil cartel, refuse to sell oil to allies of Israel or if extreme weather conditions hit Europe?

These are the “hypothetical events” of the World Oil Prices Game, a management flight simulator developed by IE Business School in Madrid. The simulator, an interactive model that reproduces real-life business conditions, aims to help students forecast supply and demand in the world petroleum market.

“We’ve always tried hard to put reality into the teaching, but it’s hard to do that with just words,” says Gayle Allard, professor of economic environment and country analysis at IE, who created the simulator in collaboration with professional oil traders. “In a case study, you can talk about possible outcomes and discuss them, but with simulators students can see events unfold before their eyes.”...

HRH The Prince of Wales visits IE Business School today and meets entrepreneurs

Dean Santiago Iñiguez of IE Business School - BusinessWeek - Business School Rx: Humanities

Business Week, February 14, 2011

The dean of IE Business School says the study of humanities—critical thinking, foreign cultures, even modern art—helps create better managers.

We live in a brave new world where business schools face the challenge of preparing not just good financial engineers or accomplished management technicians, but also global citizens. Thus education delivered at business schools can and should be a personal transformation process. And this implies a constant state of learning...

Graça Machel supports IE Business School's commitment to African women entrepreneurs

Press Release: Nelson Mandela´s wife and former minister of Mozambique Graça Machel to host the finals of IE's Training and Mentoring Program for Women-Led business in her capacity as President of the Foundation for Community Development.

SEE THE PARTICIPANTS' PROFILES IN THE FOLLOWING LINK:

Download

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IE is an international institution dedicated to educating business leaders through programs based on core values of global focus, entrepreneurial spirit and a humanistic approach.

IE's 500-strong, international faculty teaches a student body composed of more than 80 nationalities in Undergraduate (IE University), Master, and Doctorate degrees, and Executive Education programs. Alumni, now numbering over 37,000, hold management positions in some 100 countries worldwide.

http://mediacampus.ie.edu

A look back at some of the highlights of 2010 for staff and students of IE

 

 

BusinessBecause - IE Business School News

www.businessbecause.com/ie-business-school.htm

Driven by an ambition to be their own boss

Click here for the article of The Times, March 25, 2009

Entrepreneurship has become the second most popular specialisation at leading business schools after finance, according to the latest Top MBA Applicant Survey. Some 27 per cent of MBA applicants would like to run their own businesses after graduating.

Many business schools offer electives on the subject, while there are a wealth of initiatives to encourage any student with a bright idea to test it out and carry it through. In America, Stanford, Wharton and Harvard are leaders in the field. In Europe, IE Instituto de Empresa, Insead and London Business School are investing in promoting start-ups and linking students with venture capitalists...

The 2009 Horizon Report - emerging technologies in Education

2009 Horizon Report website

(via SlashMobs January 24th, 2009 and The Higher Chronicle January 22th, 2009)

The annual Horizon Report (367KB) describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project, a long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organization 

Executive Summary
Technologies to Watch
Key Trends
Critical Challenges
The Horizon Project
One Year or Less: Mobiles
One Year or Less: Cloud Computing
Two to Three Years: Geo-Everything
Two to Three Years: The Personal Web
Four to Five Years: Semantic-Aware Applications
Four to Five Years: Smart Objects
Methodology
2009 Horizon Project Advisory Board 

Humboldtian Faculty and Mavens - Santiago Iniguez

www.SantiagoIniguez.com, Dean of IE Business School 

When I ask my colleagues about the main challenges our schools face today many point at the attraction, development and retention of good faculty as one of the most serious. Indeed, today schools compete to attract those scholars who combine the best credentials in research with solid teaching skills and who also interface with the top management of respected companies. I have sometimes refer to these well-rounded academics as “kangaroos”, as opposed to “gurus”, because the former are able to jump from research to class to consultancy in large corporations, performing excellently in the three facets.  Let me now further elaborate on this multifaceted type of academics by opposing two models of faculty, which I will name “Humboldtian Faculty” and “Mavens”.

“Humboldtian Faculty” was moulded at the eponymous institution in Berlin in the early Nineteenth Century and has inspired the model of academic prevalent at all Western universities in the past two hundred years. Wilhelm Von Humboldt believed that, in order to make a significant leap in the sciences and in the humanities, the career of academics should become specialised –until then, university professors may teach different discipline- and universities should be organised in schools and departments. A number of consequences for the academic profession followed over the decades and I summarise some of these features in the chart included below.

The Humboldtian Faculty model has rendered many positive results. Knowledge has experienced an unprecedented advance across the board. At the same time, a significant number of education analysts and scholars have warned about some undesirable effects of the model such as the “silos syndrome” derived from an extreme specialisation and lack of integration of both academics, teachings and research at large.

In addition, the demands from stakeholders, the formidable impact of technologies in the learning process and the origination and distribution of knowledge are transforming the role and the ideal profile of scholars. I believe that the concept of “Maven”, widely popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “The Tipping Point”, can adequately illustrate what is expected from business schools’ professors today. Mavens are active gatherers of new trends, ideas and data and have the key skills of identifying which of them may transform the world.

Furthermore, they exercise the necessary influence to have these ideas diffused through other major opinion makers in society –whom Gladwell calls “connectors” and “vendors”.  I include a number of characteristics of faculty as Mavens in the chart below. I hope this idea contributes to a constructive debate on how to better shape the academic profession and adapt it to current changes and demands. I do not believe that I am proposing a revolutionary change, but rather an evolutionary but significant adjustment of the role that faculty play in the modern learning process.

Humboldtian Faculty	Mavens
Specialised,  academic pedigree	Mixed academic backgrounds
Masters of the learning process	Learning Orchestrators
Guardians of Knowledge	Catalysts of Knowledge

www.SantiagoIniguez.com, Dean of IE Business School 

Discussing Social Responsibility in Shanghai - Santiago Iniguez

www.SantiagoIniguez.com, Dean of IE Business School 
Click here to download the Conference presentation  (4.9 MB)

Every other year, the vibrant city of Shanghai becomes the venue of several major management education conferences arranged sequentially in one week.  These conferences -organised, respectively, by Antai Business School, EFMD, AACSB and APBS - congregate a good sizeable number of scholars, business school officers and corporate managers, particularly from China and South East Asia.

This year, the Antai Conference –the first of the weekly intense networking events- focused on the social responsibility of business schools and I was invited to speak at the opening session. Normally, when I address issues related to business ethics or social responsibility I try to avoid the overselling of my school. I believe that if I would speak profusely about the different initiatives related to social responsibility at IE Business School I could be compared to those individuals who show off when practicing charitable deeds. In this respect I find pertinent the popular quote from the Gospels that says “when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do”.

Indeed, social responsibility initiatives should not be merchandised as communication or marketing tools by business school representatives. What is decisive is that those initiatives permeate the curriculum and the experience that students learn and live. Actually, students themselves should be the ones who testify if their schools and professors have influenced positively their views and lives. After all, educating is about moulding better persons, good citizens, promoting good habits and behaviour, isn´t it? If the MBA is a transformational experience, and participants learn new knowledge and acquire new skills, they should also be encouraged to improve their ethical attitudes and their business deontology. For those who may be still sceptical about the teaching and the learning of business ethics at business schools, or those who may hold the Freudian thesis that individual ethics is formed in early childhood and unchangeable afterwards, I recommend the classical and stimulating book “Can Ethics Be Taught”.

When I am asked summarily about what is the social responsibility of business schools, like I was at this Shanghai conference, I respond with a simple statement: It is nothing less than preparing leaders, managers & entrepreneurs who transform the world. Interestingly, Francis Estrada, Dean of the Asia Institute of Management in Manila, who made a very interesting presentation after mine, formulated a very similar statement.

My presentation, which you will find in the PDF attached- covered three main challenges that business schools managers have to face if they aim at achieving their social responsibility goals. First, choosing the strategic group that better suits their schools in the global context. Second, the role of business schools in the new knowledge value chain. And thirdly, the ideal profile of the faculty in order to achieve the intended results in the learning process. Many thoughts delivered at the Shanghai conference have been previously shared with the readers of this blog and I thank them for their valuable comments.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lightening of a fire”, a favourite and evocative quote from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats You may disagree with me, but I hope you will acknowledge the passion for education that I try to convey in my addresses.

Ranking of US Bschool websites - "Finding MBA Admissions Information"

Click here for the article of Business Week, "MBA Admissions Web Sites: Not All Are Equal", by Francesca Levy, September 22, 2008.

Top 20 slide show

Which business schools have the best admissions Web sites? We looked at the Web sites of BusinessWeek's top 20 business schools to determine which were a challenge to navigate and which flowed smoothly and intuitively. To do this, we selected five important pieces of information every prospective MBA student would likely be looking for: application deadlines, a list of application materials, the admissions director's name and contact information, financial aid information, and a description of the curriculum. Then we timed how long it takes to locate that information on each site.

Not surprisingly, results varied widely. Some sites slowed the user down with small or low-contrast typefaces. Others created delays by burying one piece of critical information, such as an admissions director's name, deep in the site. Most had sophisticated graphics and images, and attractive designs. But the schools that shone were the ones who created the simplest, most straightforward experience. After all, most visitors to a B-school Web site know what they're looking for and would rather find it quickly than be wowed by snazzy visuals. Our results follow, ranging from easiest to hardest to use.

Economist Intelligence Unit 2008 MBA rankings - released two days ago.

Click here for Economist Intelligence Unit 2008 MBA rankings, Friday 26, September 2008.

IMD - International Institute for Management Development	1
IESE Business School - University of Navarra	2
Chicago, University of  - Graduate School of Business	3
Stanford Graduate School of Business	4
Dartmouth College--Tuck School of Business	5
California at Berkeley, University of--Haas School of Business	6
Cambridge, University of - Judge Business School	7
New York University - Leonard N Stern School of Business	8
London Business School	9
IE Business School	10
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology -- School of Business and Management	11
Harvard Business School	12
Cranfield School of Management	13
Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School	14
York University - Schulich School of Business	15
Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management	16
Pennsylvania, University of - Wharton School	17
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT Sloan School of Management	18
INSEAD	19
Henley Business School	20
Columbia Business School	21

Click here to download 20th anniversary edition, 41 pages (PDF 1.62 MB)

 

(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?

Today's Financial Times Rankings 2008 - Executive Education

Today's Financial Times Rankings 2008 - Executive Education

Open Rankings

1.  Harvard Business School (U.S.A.)
2.  University of Virginia: Darden (U.S.A.)
3.  IMD (Switzerland)  and 3. Stanford University GSB (U.S.A.)   
5.  IE Business School (Spain)      
6.  Center for Creative Leadership (U.S.A. / Belgium / Singapore)   
7.  Iese Business School (Spain)
8.  Columbia Business School (U.S.A.)   
9.  UCLA: Anderson (U.S.A.)      
10. University of Western Ontario: Ivey (Canada / China)

Executive Education rankings 2008

Compare data for both open enrolment and customised executive education programmes.

Interactive custom rankings 2008

Interactive open rankings 2008

Download Custom table as PDF

Download Open table as PDF

Exec Ed 2008 special report

FT business education writers present analysis of the results, interviews, profiles and the latest campus news. Read

Archive

Custom interactive rankings 2007 As PDFs: 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003
Open interactive rankings 2007 As PDFs: 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003

Spanish school sets global vision - Della Bradshaw - Financial Times

Article of Della Bradshaw of the Financial Times, April 14th, 2008.

Italian explorer Christopher Columbus is reputed to have spent time in the ancient city of Segovia in Spain in the late 15th century, postulating that, since the world was spherical, one could discover trade routes to Asia by travelling west.

It is perhaps fitting then that IE, the Madrid-based business school, has chosen Segovia as the location to further its plans for global expansion.

...

IE Higher Education, as the new institution will be called, is looking to capture the global post-graduate and professional market, says Santiago Iniguez, who retains his job as dean of IE Business School but also becomes rector of IE Higher Education.

IE launches a new model of elite international university

Rector of IE University* Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño

IE launches a new model of elite international university - 20 million € investment over two years.

Segovia, April 10 2008 – Following the acquisition of a Spanish university by the IE Higher Education group in January of 2007, the rollout of IE University has now officially commenced.

The University project has been conceived to provide an academically rigorous but innovative approach to undergraduate and post graduate education, initially focused on disciplines that include architecture, humanities and liberal arts and communication. The institution will be developed around the core values of an international outlook, innovation at the heart of learning, and the utilization of new technologies, imbuing students with an entrepreneurial mindset and a humanitarian spirit.

Why a new model?

....

Financial Times Global MBA 2008 rankings

FT Business Education

View the interactive MBA 2008 rankings and read the special report
View PDF files:
Global MBA 2008
Top American schools
Top European schools
Top Asia-Pacific schools
Top Canadian schools
Top 10s in selected categories

Universia-Knowledge@Wharton - Dueling Age Groups in Today's Workforce

Dueling Age Groups in Today's Workforce; From Baby Boomers to Generations X and Y

If it is hard to get people from various generations to reach any agreement, it is even harder to do so within a corporation. Cristina Simón, professor at the Instituto de Empresa (IE) in Madrid, has identified and analyzed the four generations that currently make up the corporate work force. Her study is called, “Generation Y and the Labor Market: Models for HR Management.” Gayle Allard, another member of the IE staff, collaborated on the project along with Adecco, a company that supplies temporary workforce services.

In an interview with Universia-Knowledge@Wharton, Simón explains the differences between groups of workers, which she identifies as ‘traditional workers,’ ‘baby boomers,’ ‘generation X’ and ‘generation Y.’ She also suggests key steps for enabling a twenty-first century corporation to successfully overcome the generational duel that takes place between traditional workers and more recent arrivals.

Universia-Knowledge@Wharton: How many generations are currently employed by corporations, and what are their special characteristics?

Cristina Simón: Although there are differences from country to country, we can generally identify four generational groups that are currently active professionally:
    * Traditional workers (born before 1946

Apply for MBA Scholarships -

www.Topmba.com Scholarship Page.

Paying for the course is probably the scariest thought when considering an MBA. Leaving a job, moving country, leaving behind family and friends are manageable. But where will you find the $30-70,000 needed for your education?

When you visit one of the World MBA Tour Fairs, you will be considered for one of $1,100,000 exclusive scholarships offered only to the QS World MBA Tour participants in partnership with the World Grad School Tour.

Scholarships on offer this season include:

• Chicago Graduate School of Business Scholarship, worth $20,000
• The Wharton School Scholarship, worth US $30,000 (year 1 = $15k, year 2 = $15k)
• Rotman School of Management - 50% of full tuition (approx $35,000) for international applicants
• Politecnico di Milano Graduate Scholarships, estimated €500,000
• Cass Business School in London will offer 3 scholarships worth a total of $160,000 (£85,000 or €125,000)
• Ashridge Business School - £75K from an Ashridge 50th Anniversary bursary fund
• IE Instituto de Empresa Female Scholarship, worth €42,000
• QS Nyenrode Scholarship Entrepreneurial Manager Scholarship, worth €10,000
• Six QS Quacquarelli Symonds Scholarships, worth US $20,000
• QS World Grad School Tour Innovation Scholarship, worth $10,000
• ESMT - European School of Management and Technology Scholarships, worth a total of €80,000
• MIB School of Management (Trieste - Italy) Scholarship - up to 100% of the tuition fees (equivalent to €20,000)

To become eligible for a scholarship you need to visit one of the QS World MBA Tour fairs around the world. Please register now to ensure your place.

Santiago Iniguez - "Merit and Age" - Aspen Conference in Italy

www.SantiagoIniguez.com, Dean of IE Business School.

Some days ago I was invited to speak at the conference of The Aspen Institute Italy under the topic "Merit, Not Age as a Discriminating factor", jointly organized with the Agnelli Foundation at their headquarters in Torino, Italy. The conference was preceded on the eve by an interview in the Financial Times with Mr. John Elkann , Vice-Chairman of the Fiat Group, who in fact co-chaired the plenary sessions with Mr. Mario Monti, President of Bocconi University and former Commissioner of Competition of the European Union. 

When I was invited to contribute at the conference I believed that the main theme was the consequences of the ageing population phenomenon for European business. Consequently, my presentation dealt with some foreseeable measures, such as postponing the time of compulsory retirement, and some solutions from educational institutions, for example promoting entrepreneurship programs for the elderly people, since this segment of populations is experienced, skilled and in many cases have the resources to pilot new start-ups. Actually, Peter Drucker affirmed in one of his latest contributions that the fastest growing segment of future education will be programs for the mature and aged people.

However, upon discussion with my table neighbors at the starting dinner I realized that the crux of the conference centered on how to ease the access of young people to key positions at Italian institutions. Interestingly, gerontocracy is the prevalent regime at most Italian organizations, from business to politics and academia. This is largely due to traditions and culture, but is also caused by strict labor laws, lack of real internal competition and the dominant systems for selecting and promoting people at the top. Indeed, Italy has one of the highest average age ratios of leaders across the board although there are some other countries in the same cluster, like Japan.       

Back at my hotel, located in the superbly restored Centro Histórico Fiat, once the reference of futuristic architecture, I redid my presentation to cover some topics related to the net generation and include some suggestions for promoting the advance of young leaders to management (see presentation attached). My main proposal was to foster the implementation of the Bologna Process at Italian universities. I believe that if Italy opens up to the cross-border movement of students, faculty and knowledge, the benign winds of international competition  and global convergence will facilitate the access of young generations, Italian and foreign, to many of its institutions, thus promoting meritocracy over gerontocracy. "Non habete paura" and open your doors to true competition.

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The Times - The Thinkers (top) 50

 

Ranking	Name
1	CK PRAHALAD (3)
2	Bill GATES (2)
3	Alan GREENSPAN (35)
4	Michael PORTER (1)
5	Gary HAMEL (14)
6	Chan KIM & Renée MAUBORGNE (15)
7	Tom PETERS (4)
8	Jack WELCH (5)
9	Richard BRANSON (11)
10	Jim COLLINS (6)
11	Philip KOTLER (7)
12	Robert KAPLAN & David NORTON (22)
13	Kjell NORDSTRÖM & Jonas RIDDERSTRÅLE (9)
14	Charles HANDY (10)
15	Stephen COVEY (18)
16	Henry MINTZBERG (8)
17	Thomas A. STEWART (13)
18	Malcolm GLADWELL (31)
19	Lynda GRATTON (34)
20	Donald Trump (-)

Financial Times Executive MBA rankings 2007

Executive Education rankings 2007

Compare data for the top EMBAs as compiled in this ranking. Use our interactive table to sort the data and find the best programme.

Interactive EMBA ranking 2007 (22nd October, 2007)

Download as PDF (40 KB)

1. Kellogg/Hong Kong UST Business School China

2. Trium: HEC Paris/LSE/New York University: Stern France/UK/US

3. University of Pennsylvania: Wharton US

4. Columbia/London Business School US/U EMBA

5. IE Business School

FT and Business Week's take on recent Aspen Sustainability MBA rankings.

Financial Times article, "Stanford tops alternative ranking", October 11 2007.

..."The biennial survey run by the Aspen Institute looks at how well social and environmental issues are incorporated into the training of future business leaders."...

..."Aspen CBE sees its role as creating business leaders who combine social value with the vision and knowledge needed to integrate corporate profitability."

Business Week article, "Stanford Tops Sustainability Rankings", October 10, 2007.

..."Indeed, the outlook is bright this year for business-school students with an environmental leaning, says Rich Leimsider, director of New York's Aspen Institute Center for Business Education"...

..."the Aspen Institute's "alternative" ranking solely examines how MBA programs are integrating social and environmental topics into their core classes, electives, and academic research. The institute surveyed 111 institutions, 71 in the U.S. and 40 international schools, representing a total of 18 countries."...

Dean of IE interviewed by Valor Economico of Brazil - Escolas européias mudam de tática para bater os EUA, China e Índia

"European school change of tactics to beat the US, China and India" was the title of an article, in Portuguese, published yesterday by Valor Economico- one of Brazil's top newspapers focusing on economics. The article was an interview of Santiago Iniguez, dean of IE Business School by Stela Campos, de São Paulo.

Download the interview here! PDF(100KB).

Business Week - MBA Expo 2007

Via Business Week (click here to register)

At the BusinessWeek MBA Expo, you can talk with B-school insiders to learn how to match your goals with the program that’s right for you.

The live webinar begins at 11am ET Wednesday, October 3, followed by a Q&A session. Access the expo through January 4, 2008 to hear the archived webinar and Q&A, visit university booths, chat with representatives, and get all the B-school materials you need.

Participating Schools

• The Duke MBA
• IE Business School
• MIT-CTL Supply Chain Graduate Programs
• Penn State Smeal MBA
• Schulich School of Business, York University
• The University of Wales MBA at Robert Kennedy College

The Academia and The Agora

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

One of the readings I selected, again, for my Summer break this year is “Point to Point Navigation”, the second issue of Gore Vidal’s Memoirs. I always enjoyed his iconoclastic and refined writings, particularly “Palimpsest”, a work that exhales the spirit of his cosmopolitan life and intense experiences. The second instalment of Vidal’s self-biography does not fall short from its antecedent. In line with his innate irreverence, one of the favourite targets of Vidal’s essays and articles is, again, the deeply entrenched prejudices held by some academics, as shown in a passage taken from the first chapter: 

“Contrary to what many believe, literary fame has nothing to do with excellence or true glory or even with a writer’s position in the syllabus of a university’s English Department, itself as remote to the Agora as Academe’s shadowy walk. For any artist, fame is the extent to which the Agora finds interesting his latest work. If what he has written is known only to a few of other practitioners, or to enthusiasts (…) then the artist is not only not famous, he is irrelevant to his time, the only time he has”.

Let me refer to the two classic Greek words used by Vidal, Agora and Academia, which mean, respectively, the place for doing business and the place for educational activities. Interestingly, in ancient Athens the Agora and the Academia were located quite close to each other on one of the sides of the Acropolis. This proximity facilitated the interaction between academics and business people, as evidenced in many intellectual contributions of that time. It seems there was no separation between thinkers and managers but they rather belonged to the same genre: educators believed that their activity should deal with the problems of political and social life.

However, things changed dramatically in the Middle Ages, when monasteries became the exclusive loci for developing and transmitting knowledge, the true reservoirs of all existing knowledge. Monasteries, though, were closed places, separated from the rest of the community, and monks socialised only occasionally with their fellow citizens. This probably influenced the way knowledge was then conceived and developed, normally as a diverse activity from mundane practices and, at most, only linked to the reduced number of activities developed at the monastery’s pharmacy or garden. This resulted in a progressive separation between the generation and the application of knowledge, a gap that is reflected, for example, in the common principle adopted by many priors: “Ora et Labora” (Pray and Work), intended as a rule to counteract the isolation of monks, since they spent too much time at church but very little working the orchards.

Actually, monasteries were the predecessors of modern universities, and many aspects of the former traditions, practices and culture are still embedded in today’s higher education institutions. In fact, one of the recurrent criticisms addressed to some universities is their distance from the real world, the focus mainly on rigour but the disdain towards relevance. Is it time to bring the Agora and the Academia closer, in line with Vidal’s claim? I believe it is, and business schools can play a leading role here

Education for a Global Economy: Conference in Washington

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of IE Business School.

This weekend I will be attending the conference "Education for a Global Economy", organised by the Hechinger Institute of Columbia University.

The conference will take place in Washington and I will share a panel with Dean Paul Danos, of Tuck Business School , my coeditor in this blog. We will deal with issues related to the education of global leaders at business schools and current trends in management education. The conference will be attended by over 50 leading journalists, each representing a different entity of the US media.

Previous posts on this blog of Dean Santiago Iniguez, and of Dean Paul Danos.

Appointment of Diego del Alcazar, President IE Business School, as the next Chairman of Vocento

Madrid, July 31, 2007. Mr. Diego del Alcázar, Marquis of La Romana, Founder and President of IE Business School, will become the next Chairman of the Board of Vocento, the leading multimedia communications group in Spain’s general press market. The appointment was announced yesterday by the Board and will become effective on September 24 this year, when Mr. Santiago de Ybarra, the current Chairman, steps down.

Vocento is composed of over 120 different companies, including some of the most established brands in the Spanish media industry. The Group holds a 24,2% share of the general press’ total circulation in Spain, and is the publisher of ABC and twelve other regional newspapers. It is also the national leader in the publication of weekly supplements and specialised magazines. It is present in the audiovisual sector through radio stations (Punto Radio), television (Telecinco, Net TV and Fly Music), and the production and distribution of contents through the web. Vocento was recently listed on the Spanish stock market with a market capitalisation of 1,875 million euros.

Since he founded IE in 1973, at the age of 23, Del Alcazar, has been the driving force behind an institution that is consistently regarded as one of the leading management education centres in Europe and a catalyst of Spain’s contemporary business culture. He is often referred to as a leading entrepreneur, humanist and visionary in the field of education. Recently he was awarded the "Great Cross of Alfonso X the Wise" by Spain’s government, a distinction that recognises a prominent personal contribution in culture, education and research. Del Alcazar studied law, political science and management in Madrid and Paris. He has been the promoter of several successful companies in Spain and he currently serves as a member of the board or patron for different corporations and foundations.

Video - Santiago Iniguez talks with Dean Ali Dastmalchian, incoming chairman of the Canadian Federation of Business School Deans (CFBSD)

Video - Santiago Iniguez talked with Ali Dastmalchian, on 3rd July 2007, who is incoming chairman of the Canadian Federation of Business School Deans and Professor and Dean of the UVic Business School at University of Victoria.

Academic Asepsis

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of IE Business School.

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767-1835), founder of the eponymous Berlin-based University, is generally considered as one of the fathers of modern University and his ideas have inspired most higher education institutions in Europe and the Americas. One of the salient features of his legacy was the development of a sciences taxonomy and the consequent organisation of university departments according to a set of knowledge areas and disciplines. The main aim behind this major effort was to advance the progress of knowledge through the specialisation of academics. Since the compendium of human knowledge was, and still is, so vast, it was virtually impossible for academics to effectively develop research unless they focused on a given field of knowledge and dealt with their scientific peers.

The specialisation of academic knowledge and the consolidation of independent disciplines also resulted in the development of multiple degrees, according to the subjects studied by graduates at university. This changed the pattern existing before, when most university graduates shared a similar generalist degree, following common curricula, and most applied knowledge was learnt while practicing the profession.

Undoubtedly, the specialisation of academic knowledge and the generation of research through university departments have produced an unprecedented progress across the sciences, the humanities and the arts in the past two centuries. However, different factors affecting higher education in the last decades, including globalisation and the impact of new technologies, have led some analysts –particularly in management education- to point out at some of the negative consequences of the division and compartmentalization of knowledge. One of the more extended criticisms is encapsulated in the called “silos syndrome”, according to which university departments have become like silos where its academic members are detached from reality, partly because they are sharply separated from scholars from other disciplines. Putting it bluntly, finance professors only relate to other finance professors, they only attend finance congresses and only publish in finance journals, which are –obviously- read by their finance colleagues; of course, they are authorised to teach and research only in their field of specialisation, i.e. finance.

A further problem derived from this syndrome is what I refer sometimes to as “academic asepsis”: only those academics with the right pedigree and who belong to an identifiable academic group –sometimes called “school”- have the legitimacy of producing valuable research in their own field of knowledge. They are the authoritative sources of knowledge. Parvenus, such as practitioners lacking the conventional academic credentials, or those belonging to different disciplines, should be left out of the club, in order to guarantee the quality of the knowledge generated or taught.

Certainly, I am drawing a caricature of what reality actually is and, I believe, even at very compartmentalized universities academics understand the value of interdisciplinary initiatives such as co-teaching or co-publishing by different area professors. However, department-driven universities face the challenge of articulating an integrated vision of the world to their stakeholders, mainly their students, and of avoiding a narrow and irrelevant concept of research.

Do we need a 21st Century Von Humboldt?

Mercer HR Consulting - 2007 "Cost of living" and "Quality of Living" Rankings

Published 18th June 2007

Download top 50 rankings for cost of living (640 KB)

Summary of the Mercer 2007 Cost of Living report

Mercer Human Resource Consulting Worldwide Quality of Living Survey 2007 Top 50
				Base City: New York, USA (=100)
Rank 2007		Rank 2006		City		Country		Index 2007		Index 2006
1		1		ZURICH		Switzerland		108.1		108.2
2		2		GENEVA		Switzerland		108.0		108.1
3		3		VANCOUVER		Canada		107.7		107.7
3		4		VIENNA		Austria		107.7		107.5
5		5		AUCKLAND		New Zealand		107.3		107.3
5		6		DUSSELDORF		Germany		107.3		107.2
7		7		FRANKFURT		Germany		107.1		107.0
8		8		MUNICH		Germany		106.9		106.8
9		9		BERN		Switzerland		106.5		106.5
9		9		SYDNEY		Australia		106.5		106.5
11		11		COPENHAGEN		Denmark		106.2		106.2
12		12		WELLINGTON		New Zealand		105.8		105.8
13		13		AMSTERDAM		The Netherlands		105.7		105.7
14		14		BRUSSELS		Belgium		105.6		105.6
15		15		TORONTO		Canada		105.4		105.4
16		16		BERLIN		Germany		105.2		105.1
17		17		MELBOURNE		Australia		105.0		105.0
18		18		LUXEMBOURG		Luxembourg		104.8		104.8
18		18		OTTAWA		Canada		104.8		104.8
20		20		STOCKHOLM		Sweden		104.7		104.7
21		21		PERTH		Australia		104.5		104.5
22		22		MONTREAL		Canada		104.3		104.3
23		23		NURNBERG		Germany		104.2		104.1
24		25		CALGARY		Canada		103.6		103.6
24		26		HAMBURG		Germany		103.6		103.4
26		31		OSLO		Norway		103.5		102.8
27		24		DUBLIN		Ireland		103.3		103.8
27		27		HONOLULU, HI		United States		103.3		103.3
29		28		SAN FRANCISCO, CA		United States		103.2		103.2
30		29		ADELAIDE		Australia		103.1		103.1
30		29		HELSINKI		Finland		103.1		103.1
32		31		BRISBANE		Australia		102.8		102.8
33		33		PARIS		France		102.7		102.7
34		34		SINGAPORE		Singapore		102.5		102.5
35		35		TOKYO		Japan		102.3		102.3
36		37		LYON		France		101.9		101.6
36		36		BOSTON, MA		United States		101.9		101.9
38		37		YOKOHAMA		Japan		101.7		101.6
39		39		LONDON		United Kingdom		101.2		101.2
40		40		KOBE		Japan		101.0		101.0
41		44		BARCELONA		Spain		100.6		100.2
42		45		MADRID		Spain		100.5		100.1
42		51		OSAKA		Japan		100.5		99.6
44		41		WASHINGTON, DC		United States		100.4		100.4
44		41		CHICAGO, IL		United States		100.4		100.4
46		43		PORTLAND, OR		United States		100.3		100.3
47		53		LISBON		Portugal		100.1		98.9
48		46		NEW YORK CITY, NY		United States		100.0		100.0
49		51		MILAN		Italy		99.9		99.6
49		47		SEATTLE, WA		United States		99.9		99.9

Kangaroos to Ancient Greece: how IE sees the world

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of IE Business School.

Download Global_Focus_Issue_2 (200 KB)

"Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño is among Europe ’s most thoughtful and outspoken deans and a strong suporter of EFMD". INTERVIEW BY George Bickerstaffe (compiler and editor of Which MBA?)

 

IE has expanded rapidly in recent years, particularly in the number of faculty it has hired. Has that been a difficult process?

The job of business school faculty nowadays is very demanding. They need to combine both a solid research background with very good teaching and communication skills, and they must also be very knowledgeable about business and management practices.

So as well as what used to be called “gurus” – those able to frame brilliant and original ideas – what we now need are faculty who can combine many different abilities and skills. I call them “kangaroos” – people who can jump from one thing to another. They need to jump from academia to business, from business back to a classroom – and to be excellent in all those different facets. And these “kangaroos” are very scarce in the market and the leading business schools all find themselves competing for them.

In addition, PhD programmes do not always prepare their graduates to be able to cope with these challenges. They come out of PhD programmes with a very solid research background, very good research skills but most of the time they lack communication and teaching skills and they can be very distant from the real business world.

Does that mean you have to have your own faculty development programme?

Yes. We run a faculty development programme every year and that has three different tracks. We run a series of seminars on teaching methodology, which includes how to teach using the case method, how to improve your communication skills in class and generally how to improve the formats used in the classroom.

A second series of seminars relates to executive education. Given that the sort of relationships that professors have to develop in executive education programmes are very special they need to understand the real problems that executives and managers face. To
a large extent the professor becomes more of a coach, an advisor, rather than a teacher.

Another track is how to deal with the other stakeholders – such as the media and publishers for example – and especially how to translate the research they develop into an understandable language for the general public.

The main arena now for diffusing knowledge is the Internet. You cannot use the same language in these channels that is used in academic journals. You have to translate your ideas into a language that reaches a wider audience. The concept of authority in knowledge is changing. The authority and legitimacy of an idea is no longer given by, for example, a particular journal or an academic conference but rather by whether it gains acceptance and recognition by the wider Internet audience....

A Gathering of Deans - Video Business Week - Dean Santiago Iniguez

A Gathering of Deans

Dean Iniguez, Instituto de Empresa

May 29 - Dean Santiago Iniguez talks about the Bologna Accord, incorporating the humanities into B-school education, and a meeting in London this summer between top American and EU deans.

View with Windows Media/Flash

Original page of Business Week.

The Age of Real-time Information

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of IE Business School.

You may have read about the historical episode, which happened at the time of the Battle of Waterloo (18th June 1815), that contributed decisively to build up Rothschild Family’s financial empire. Rothschild had offices in different European capitals and acted as lender to important individuals and institutions, including the British Crown in its efforts to beat Napoleon. They had a potent information network, composed of messengers, carrier pigeons and regional offices, which earned them the reputation of being first with the news. When their informers reported "the scoop" of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Rothschild agents in London started to sell stocks, acting as if the French had won. Many other brokers, unaware of the British victory, replicated Rothschild’s initiative, causing the crash of stock prices. Shortly before news about the victory reached London, Rothschild started to buy stocks. As a result, the family amassed a huge fortune.

This episode epitomises the economic value of scoops and being first with the news. In the early 19th century, the elapsed time between the occurrence of events and their reporting could be many hours or even days. Nowadays, it may take just seconds. Perhaps a defining moment in the realisation (at least mine) of the power of blogs took place recently when Engadget (no.1 blog according to Technorati) inaccurately reported an Apple product-release delay causing Apple, in six minutes, to lose 4 billion dollars in stock market capitalisation. As you can see from Apple Inc price chart, (Zoom "1m") it quickly recovered.

Futhermore the web and multiple complementary devices, such as instant text messaging and “Twitter”, (Update: the personal view of the head of Ogilvy PR Interactive Marketing Team´s view of it (see his interesting comment to this post)) have amplified the sources of information and anyone can virtually report about events as they attend them, even providing live pictures or video (e.g. "London Bombing Pictures Mark New Role for Camera Phones"). In addition, the channels of distribution have become massive, cheap and universally accessible. We live in the age of real time information, conditions that changes the way managers understand business and the time and forms of decision making processes.

For example, how much time do you take to respond to an e-mail or a text message? When ordinary mail was the prevalent channel of business communication it took days or weeks to get answers to letters. Facsimile machines reduced response time to hours. Today, agile managers answer text messages in minutes. Moreover, courtesy demands that light messages are answered on the same day and that messages that require elaborated responses take no more than two days –unless they are urgent. My golden rule is that e-mails should be answered, at most, on the same week. In order to comply with this I regularly dedicate the needed time over weekends to get updated.

In an interesting post published in Harvard Business Online Tammy Erickson explains that the “use of technology is heavily centered in Gen Y today. About half of Y’s surveyed say they sent or received a text message over the phone within the past day, approximately double the proportion of those in Gen X. It’s something that will, however, grow in use and eventually enter the world of business”. I am sure you have heard mentions of the "Blackberry withdrawal", felt by "Crackberries" when they cannot access their email. There is even TwitterBerry,  used to write those previously mentioned Twitter updates on a Blackberry.

I am intrigued about further developments of instant messaging devices. For example, how can mobile telephones, which are truly ubiquitous, (and especially Wifi-enabled ones) be used effectively as an education tool?

Today, Google releases new off-line web apps capability

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of IE Business School.

Here is an initiative from Google that might usher in a new wave of offline web applications.

Linus Upson, engineering director at Google said: "It's been a long time since the web has gained new fundamental capabilities. I think it's been about 10 years".

ZDnet description of the release:  (ZDnet blogger "Game has changed") "Google engineers have enabled what internet surfers for years have yearned for — web applications that work offline."

The search giant on Wednesday launched Google Gears, a browser plug-in that will let people run web applications when they're connected to the internet or not.

The company released the source code for the Google Gears software in conjunction with Google Developer Day (Today), a day-long conference in 10 locations.

The goal of Google Gears is to create a single, standardised way to add offline capabilities to web applications, said Linus..."

Financial Times: "Google moves to take on Microsoft"
Techcrunch: "Google Gears Lets Developers Take Apps Offline"
GigaOM: "Google goes offline on purpose"

In Search of Kangaroos

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of IE Business School.

Traditionally, success as an academic has been tantamount to excellence in research, period. Universities have selected, promoted, tenured and rewarded scholars that comply with certain requirements related to research activity and output. Other facets of academic life such as teaching, the spreading of knowledge, education management or interacting with the world outside universities have been considered as activities mainly secondary for an academic career, sometimes even improper.

Nobody could reasonably deny the centripetal value that research should play in scholarly careers. At the same time, considering research as an end in itself, or the only pure academic activity, entails a myopic and incomplete version of the academic vocation, of what is really a full academic life. Revealingly, an article recently published in The New York Times tells that a Harvard team formed by nine prominent professors of the university and supported by its interim president, Derek Bok, is leading an effort to foster the culture of undergraduate teaching and learning: “the group has issued a report calling for sweeping institutional change, including continuing evaluation and assessment of teaching and learning, and a proposal that teaching be weighed equally with contributions to research in annual salary adjustments” says the mentioned article.

The need of complementing research with teaching and practical work becomes particularly relevant for business school academics. I have sometimes explained that management education requires a special sort of scholars, professionals that can combine many different facets, from a solid research background, to the ability of performing effectively in class and interfacing top managers. Business schools need not only “gurus”, wise sages who originate new thought, but rather “kangaroos”, i.e., academics able to jump from their research tasks to teaching, and from there to consultancy or an interview with a journalist. Kangaroos of this type are not born, but trained, and it normally requires a wide career span to exploit the necessary synergies between those different, apparently contradictory, activities.

It is commonly believed that the career of a business academic has several natural cycles or stages. The first one, the “post-doc” (after obtaining the PhD degree), a time of creativity, is intended to boost and capitalise the research skills acquired during the doctoral years. A second period of maturity comes when the scholar develops teaching skills and becomes a respected master in class by the students. The third stage, seniority, is achieved when the solid docent and researcher becomes the academic partner and advisor of managers, or even engages in management positions related to education. There are no time specifications for the fulfilment of each of those stages and the pace depends on the interests –personal and professional- of the incumbent.

The market of kangaroos is scarce and most business schools look for them. If you are one of them, do not hesitate to contact this blog.

"Englisch", "Spanglish" and other Linguae Francae

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of IE Business School.

Globalisation has fostered multiple interactions among members of different cultures to a stage never known before. Furthermore, it is forseeable that modern technologies, internet and the Web will intensify this communication to unimaginable extremes. It is very likely that in the near future you will have as many, or even more, friends in other continents than at home. The fact that your future friends may live in your antipodes will not pose any problem since you will have access to cheap, friendly and very advanced technologies that will recreate in a very vivid –even more intellectually intense- way current face -to-face conversations and relations.

This cosmopolitan on-line world will be geatly enhanced by the development of very sophisticated instant translation. Looking forward five years, Eric Schmidt (CEO Google) predicted simultaneous translation and truth prediction (the probability that a statement is true, sometimes difficult to judge in a foreign language). However even if this occurs, different cultures will still need to use a vehicular language, sometimes referred to as "lingua franca", that is, a language which is used by a relevant number of people worldwide and that serves as an instrument for effective communication. An illustrative historical example of vehicular languages is Latin, widely extended and imposed during the Roman Empire and, interestingly, the language used by academics in the middle ages.  Vehicular languages are different to vernacular languages, sometimes called "native tongue", and are used mainly or exclusively in a given country or region.

Today, English is the most widely used vehicular language and, in fact, the global working language par excellence. Its native speakers –if India is included- represent the greatest force worldwide, followed by Chinese and Spanish. The Web is probably the main acid test to anticipate which will be the prevalent vehicular languages of the future. Here, again, English keeps its supremacy and it seems it will become even most widely used, the "Esperanto" of our times.

English has also become the language of global education, as described in a recent article of The New York Times, "English as Language of Global Education", where I was quoted (article also appeared in the International Herald Tribune). There I referred to "working English", a vehicular language far from pure Oxonian English and used, effectively, by billions of humans: a mixture of each owns' vernacular expressions and accents with standard English. This has driven many people to talk about mixed languages such as "Spanglish" or "Englisch". Some believe that this jeopardises the integrity of the English language; others that it is English at its most sublime. What do you think?

The students of today, and the managers of tomorrow, should be able to communicate effectively in at least two vehicular languages, in addition to their own native one. Vehicular languages are the key to open other cultures. Indeed, a way to bring civilisations together, or create new ones.

"College blogs tell it like it is"

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of IE Business School.

Enrique Dans one of the leading bloggers in Spain (178th in World says BlogPulse) and who also happens to be a professor at IE Business School, started yesterday a much commented-on debate in his blog, in Spanish, commenting on an article of The Boston Globe: "College blogs tell it like it is". He shares his perspective gained from a extensive experience of blogging and of academia, i.e. principally the need for openness and freedom of speech. He says "Censure is always counterproductive" and that over the years he has never pressured a student to create a blog using the school's own blogging platform. Juan Freire, Professor at the University of Corunna, had written earlier about this article in his blog.

Here are perhaps the more interesting lines from the Boston Globe article:

.."Most schools choose their bloggers carefully. Some are  campus tour guides, some come recommended by faculty"...

..."Blogs by school officials are more common, but the undergrad uate  blogs appear to be catching up"...

... "has become one of the hottest trends in college admissions"...

..."One-quarter of all college admissions offices offer blogs written by students or admissions personnel, according to a forthcoming study from the National Association for College Admission Counseling"...

Back To The Big Eight Again

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. (Published on Forbes 13th April)

When I was a full-time professor of accounting in the 1970s and 1980s, the industry was dominated by the "Big Eight" accounting firms. After a series of mergers and the 2002 Arthur Anderson collapse, we are now down to the "Big Four." And that's really a big danger.

Anyone who understands the implications of our legal system and who witnessed the end of Arthur Anderson knows that the "Big Four" could easily become the "Big Three" in a similar manner, but the truth is that such a shift would be much more damaging to our economy than most people might think. In fact, the dangers posed by this threat might just be serious enough to warrant a thoughtful attempt by policymakers to come up with a solution before a crisis hits.

Today, the Big Four accounting firms (namely Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers) do almost all of the public firm audits for the entire world. The reality is that the fifth largest global accounting firm is much, much smaller than the Big Four, so it is very unlikely that it could rapidly grow to their size.

Each of these four firms works with several hundred publicly traded companies, not just as auditors but in other functions as well. Current rules generally prohibit the same firm from serving multiple functions for a single client (so, for example, a company can't have a significant consulting job being done by its auditor) and the result is that many companies get a second firm for consulting, and perhaps even a third to handle tax issues.

If, for some reason, a company needs to find a new auditor, it may have only one other feasible choice at that point. This environment means that it is already difficult for our largest companies to retain an accounting firm that is not in some way connected to, or overlapping with, or auditing their biggest competitor. If the Big Four were to become the Big Three, finding independent auditors would, of course, be even more challenging.

In addition to the difficulties associated with maintaining independent accounting firms, there is a second serious risk of consolidation, which is the economic cost of the disruption. The problem is deeply connected to our whole reporting structure, which requires that publicly traded firms put out annual and quarterly reports audited by an independent firm.

If one of the Big Four were to go under, roughly one fourth of all publicly traded firms would be in a serious bind when it comes to meeting regulatory requirements. When Arthur Anderson collapsed, it took the market some time to deploy all of the professionals who were employed there to the other large firms, and, of course, that impact would only be bigger if one of the four remaining firms fell. Just the disruption alone would probably cost billions of dollars, in addition to the long-term structural problem.

The bottom line is that a Big Three scenario simply may not be viable in terms of our overall economy.

So, could it happen?

Given our legal system today, there is simply no way to make the Big Four accounting firms immune to collapse. Any firm can be sued for almost anything, and most firms simply don't have either the insurance or the capital to cover a billion-dollar judgment. The size of the lawsuit can be completely unrelated to the size of the original job, so an audit generating $10 million in fees could possibly produce a $2 billion lawsuit. Even in the case of Arthur Anderson, Enron was only a fraction of its total billing--certainly not big enough to lose the company over.

The Arthur Anderson case also demonstrated that a single felony indictment can start a devastating chain reaction. By law, if a firm is indicted, it can't audit governments or companies who have governmental clients. At the same time, many other clients will be scared off by the ensuing publicity. The result is a death spiral where the firm finds itself losing clients but not gaining any new ones. Arthur Anderson's conviction was ultimately overturned, but only after the firm had utterly collapsed.

This is a fundamentally risky business. That risk, combined with the potential economic cost of another Big Firm collapse, should give policymakers pause. If we're going to maintain the private system of audits the way it is now, then it seems the SEC needs to do something to create more viable firms. One approach would be to move toward a rational five-year plan designed to take us from four firms to eight firms. The largest firms could be motivated to divide into independent units, and new regulation could encourage this shift (for example, by limiting the overall percentage of any one industry that can be audited by a single firm). Other approaches could involve encouraging smaller firms to grow.

Ultimately, there is no one actor who benefits from this shift, except society as a whole. And that's why the SEC exists: to help protect our overall markets. Finding a way to spread risk across a larger number of big global accounting firms could avoid billions of dollars of economic disruption, and is at least worth a careful look.

The Academia and The Agora

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

One of the readings I selected for my Easter break this year is “Point to Point Navigation”, the second issue of Gore Vidal’s Memoirs. I always enjoyed his iconoclastic and refined writings, particularly “Palimpsest”, a work that exhales the spirit of his cosmopolitan life and intense experiences. The second instalment of Vidal’s self-biography does not fall short from its antecedent. In line with his innate irreverence, one of the favourite targets of Vidal’s essays and articles is, again, the deeply entrenched prejudices held by some academics, as shown in a passage taken from the first chapter: 

“Contrary to what many believe, literary fame has nothing to do with excellence or true glory or even with a writer’s position in the syllabus of a university’s English Department, itself as remote to the Agora as Academe’s shadowy walk. For any artist, fame is the extent to which the Agora finds interesting his latest work. If what he has written is known only to a few of other practitioners, or to enthusiasts (…) then the artist is not only not famous, he is irrelevant to his time, the only time he has”.

Let me refer to the two classic Greek words used by Vidal, Agora and Academia, which mean, respectively, the place for doing business and the place for educational activities. Interestingly, in ancient Athens the Agora and the Academia were located quite close to each other on one of the sides of the Acropolis. This proximity facilitated the interaction between academics and business people, as evidenced in many intellectual contributions of that time. It seems there was no separation between thinkers and managers but they rather belonged to the same genre: educators believed that their activity should deal with the problems of political and social life.

However, things changed dramatically in the Middle Ages, when monasteries became the exclusive loci for developing and transmitting knowledge, the true reservoirs of all existing knowledge. Monasteries, though, were closed places, separated from the rest of the community, and monks socialised only occasionally with their fellow citizens. This probably influenced the way knowledge was then conceived and developed, normally as a diverse activity from mundane practices and, at most, only linked to the reduced number of activities developed at the monastery’s pharmacy or garden. This resulted in a progressive separation between the generation and the application of knowledge, a gap that is reflected, for example, in the common principle adopted by many priors: “Ora et Labora” (Pray and Work), intended as a rule to counteract the isolation of monks, since they spent too much time at church but very little working the orchards.

Actually, monasteries were the predecessors of modern universities, and many aspects of the former traditions, practices and culture are still embedded in today’s higher education institutions. In fact, one of the recurrent criticisms addressed to some universities is their distance from the real world, the focus mainly on rigour but the disdain towards relevance. Is it time to bring the Agora and the Academia closer, in line with Vidal’s claim? I believe it is, and business schools can play a leading role here.       

Paul Danos - Deregulation Democrats?

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

If you took a quick look at the results of November's election and began anticipating an increasingly burdensome regulatory environment for business and finance, you could probably be forgiven. After all, most politicians have traditionally divided roughly on party lines when it comes to issues like legal and regulatory policy, and the Democrats swept the table in 2006.

But three powerful pendulums are at work in the American economy, and it is a safe bet that the politicians will be more intent on preventing further erosion in our capital markets' competitive advantage than on sticking with traditional party lines.

The first pendulum is the legal environment, and this is the heaviest of the three (meaning it is slow moving and has a very, very long stroke). Discussions over legal reforms have been ongoing for years, and there have been plenty of arguments about the burdens of our legal structure. There is no question that large firms can be deeply vulnerable if even a small portion of their activities are called into question, and the generally litigious nature of our society demonstrates that the legal pendulum is near an apex--and not likely to change anytime soon. Ultimately, this pendulum is generally less influenced by what happens in Washington and more affected by the cumulative weight of decades of case law. It is rarely affected in any significant way by administrative changes.

The second pendulum, made up of financial and regulatory issues, operates on a shorter stroke and has seen a new burst of activity that started with Enron and the resulting Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. This is an area where the politicians can have an immediate impact when they want to, and it is a pendulum that is also near its apex. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission set the gold standard as the best regulatory body in the world. Over the course of 60-plus years, it created an orderly market that was the envy of the world.

But the pendulum has continued swinging in the same direction, and today I believe most people think Sarbanes-Oxley and some other recent developments, combined with the legal arena, are creating an oppressive regulatory regime where there are simply too many easy ways to get sued, lose your reputation, get a serious political black eye or get stuck with significant fines.

The third pendulum is the availability of viable alternatives to our country's public markets--specifically, privatization and foreign capital markets. Market conditions such as the availability of cash and the booming debt markets are allowing leveraged buyouts with less and less equity, and as a result we've seen significant growth in fund size, deal size and frequency of privatization.

In the public markets, we've also seen a steady rise in the ratio of IPOs taking place overseas, compared with here in the U.S. Overseas capital markets in places like Singapore, Shanghai and parts of Europe are now big enough, sophisticated enough and have the sufficient legal structure to attract the business that America used to dominate. And, of course, these markets know that it is in their interest to have more liberal regulatory and legal environments than we do, because it significantly enhances their appeal.

Each of the three pendulums--the legal environment, regulatory regime and the alternatives to our public markets--is at or close to an apex. The result is that some pain is going to come at a very high level, in the big numbers such as how much traffic goes through our markets as compared with the rest of the world. Now, with globalization, it is inevitable that we will lose some of our edge in a world where other countries are rich and can pick and choose which of our laws to duplicate. But the combined weight of these three pendulums is speeding up this process when we should be slowing it down instead.

This isn't going to go unnoticed by the politicians, and the realities of politics at the local level will dominate where people land on this. The pressure created by the eroding competitive advantage of the American capital markets will be felt first in places like New York City and Chicago, and its impact will quickly translate into policies being advocated by the officials who represent them (by and large, Democrats). Already, there is talk of revisiting Sarbanes-Oxley, revisiting some kind of tort reform and other proposals. Politicians that you'd never expect, like U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., or New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, are talking about potential approaches to deregulation, because they understand that they ultimately need to protect their constituents.

No one can predict the extent of these coming pressures or how far the pendulums will swing, but if the rate of privatization continues to grow and/or the non-U.S. financial markets continue to take a larger share, we could see major changes in our public markets. When the impacts of these forces are more clearly felt, one clear path that might be taken is to aggressively cut unproductive financial regulations and to reform parts of the legal system.

So don't be entirely surprised if a coalition emerges made up of some liberal Democrats as well as some conservative Republicans, intent on making our financial and business environment more competitive by removing some of these burdens.

Danos marks fourth term leading Tuck

Via The Dartmouth. March 28th, 2007.

College President James Wright reappointed Paul Danos as dean of the Tuck School of Business, according to statements released Monday. The reappointment, which was contingent on a review process that included input from several campus entities, marks Danos' fourth consecutive term as head of Tuck.

"We are lucky that he was willing to continue to serve," Wright said. "I was involved in recruiting him in 1995. I was very pleased with the appointment -- he had taken an exceptional program and made it one of the best in the world."

The review process revolved around letters sent to administrators, faculty, students and members of the Board of Overseers at Tuck asking for an assessment of the dean. Some senior administrators at the College were also included.

"[Provost Barry Scherr] and I viewed all of the responses sent," Wright said. "We were eager to see [Danos] continue."

Danos' reappointment, extending his 12 year incumbency as dean, "exceeds the normal term," according to Wright.

Scherr said that Danos' long term is warranted because he "is extremely good at what he does."

"He really has been able to have the school build on its strengths over the years," Scherr said. "It has been moving up the national rankings quite consistently. The MBA program has stayed extremely strong, with he and his colleagues thinking constantly about the curriculum and updating what they are doing. He has recruited first-rate faculty and made the school extremely popular for students, strengthening the student body."

Most Tuck faculty members are pleased with Wright's decision to reappoint Danos, according to Andrew Bernard, professor of international economics and senior associate director of the Center for International Business.

"It is much better to have him in charge than anyone else I can think of -- I don't know anyone who is either surprised or disappointed," Bernard said.

This sentiment was echoed by some Tuck alumni.

"In my mind, Paul Danos is hands-down the best business school dean in the world, and his appointment to a fourth term is roundly welcomed by the overseers," William F. Achtmeyer Tu'81, chairman of Tuck's Board of Overseers said in a statement. "As our school continues in its second century, we look forward to supporting Paul as he cements Tuck's position at the very top of MBA programs around the world."

Danos said he is "honored" to be the dean and to be able to continue to support the various programs of the Tuck School.

"We have a lot of initiatives that we are planning and they are all aimed at giving our students the best possible leadership education," he said. "Tuck competes with the other great MBA programs. We are continuously monitoring our program and improving it so that we remain at the top. It is a tough task in a heavily competitive market."

As a result, Danos hopes to focus on faculty excellence in his coming term.

"The most important asset we have at Tuck is a great faculty," he said. "It is important to make sure that we have the very best faculty and to make sure they are accessible to students."

In addition, he pledges to further Tuck's global image.

"Tuck is a very international place," Danos said. "A significant percentage of faculty and students are non-U.S. born and almost all of the students go into global firms. Even though we are in the Upper Valley and are relatively small, we have to reach the world. We have made great progress but we have to continue."

Santiago Iniguez is interviewed by Prépa-HEC.org

Santiago Iniguez (IE Business School) is interviewed by Prépa-HEC.org

Prepa HEC is one of the leading independent websites about French Business Schools (Ecoles Supérieures de Commerce) and their competitive exams, providing news, advice, data and analysis. In their forum there are 110,192 messages published, with 5266 members registered. It was created in 1999 by a student.

In the Actualités section the most recent five texts of BizDeansTalk have been automatically published (at the end of the page) for the last few months.

Professional Experience vs. Potential Talent in MBAs

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Traditionally, the MBA has been regarded as a post work-experience programme, meaning that its participants should have some relevant professional-experience as an entry requirement. Since it is debatable what should be understood as “relevant experience”, the easiest way to agree on a threshold is to take the length of the applicant’s working years. For example, EQUIS (European Quality Link) Guidelines on MBA programmes establish that the previous professional experience of MBA candidates should normally be at least two years. AMBA (The Association of MBAs) has a more sophisticated system since, though it requires an average two-year professional experience in a given MBA class, it allows a significant percentage of participants with less or even no experience (up to 15%).

The requirement of working experience for those who apply to an MBA programme is based on the supposition that, since MBA programmes have very interactive methodologies –e.g., case studies, role-playing- a substantial part of the learning has as its main source, fellow participants. It is often said that, when using interactive learning methods, the role of the professor resembles that of an orchestra conductor or facilitator of sessions, rather than the lecturer role typical of traditional classes.

Recently, however, the requirement of previous professional experience is under question. Many b-schools –including some of the top ranked by the Financial Times - have wondered whether professional experience could be waived if the MBA candidate has some other significant talents or in order to increase the class’ diversity, for example in terms of gender or international participants. In addition, a further vector of diversity is age itself: doesn´t it enchance the learning experience to have participants with different levels of professional experience, even belonging to different generations, in order to replicate what actually happens at work in real life? A very interesting post on this issue was published last week in this blog.

Indeed, the more diverse an MBA class is, the more enriching is the learning experience. True, sameness of participants–in terms of culture, business knowledge, experience, views of the world and age- may provide a tranquil setting that makes participants feel comfortable and achieve learning objectives in a very orderly way. However, the objective of MBA is to prepare its students to lead companies in a complex and diverse world and thus experience should prevail over the mere accumulation of knowledge.

MBA programmes are living educational offerings, and their entry requirements should change according to the evolution of circumstances. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the traditional view on the values of professional experience and allow more room for young, talented, participants with high potential.

Diversity and Cultural Lightness in Canada

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

 

Montreal is a crucible of cultures and a showcase of diversity, a city rich in educational offerings, home of some of the best universities in North America. At the end of my  visit, on occasion of the Canadian’s business schools’ conference (CFBSD), I would like to share some impressions from my different meetings with faculty, alumni of my school and friends, but I will start with some forceful and illustrative quotes from “Towards a Canada of Light” (Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto 2006), a lucid book by Bruce W. Powe, professor of English at York University and recognised Canadian author. He explains that his book is his personal "homage to Canada, a perpetually unfinished book for a country that refuses to make sense to anyone: an evolving book (different in every appearance) to evoke the counter –country that can’t and won’t freeze into one mask" (p. 8).

The cultural frictions existing in Canada contribute, in Powe’s opinion, to generate the particular mosaic identity of the country, in a similar way as to how electricity results from the reaction between contrarian poles, to project a bearable lightness of spirit that comprises many complementary visions, as opposed to other communities where there is identity of political and cultural credos –in fact, Powe traces parallelisms mainly between Canada and the US. In Canada, he explains, "the flashpoints of friction often appear between Quebec and the rest of the country, between the old nation-state with its own borderlines and the new open state process (…) between evolutionary Canada and the revolutionary American empire. What do I mean by evolutionary? A culture and civilisation in perpetual, mostly peaceful metamorphosis" (p. 27). In fact, the cultural mosaic portrayed by Powe is a common phenomenon in Europe, and even inside some European countries. Belgium, Great Britain, Italy and Spain are just some countries where different languages and traditions –even nations, according to some- coexist in a peaceful but dialectic way, projecting an electrifying cultural radiance. The recognition of this diversity is at the basis of most European institutions and a source of both attraction and conflict, but the balance is positive.

The impact of cultural differences in management education did also arise at the meeting of Canadian deans that I just attended. However, CFBSD is one of the most cohesive association of business schools that I know. Beyond diversity, there is a common agenda and a shared spirit in most major issues. Interestingly, my impression is that there are probably more similar features between Canadian and European business schools than with US based institutions. Those similarities include aspects related to income structure, governance, faculty profile and programme portfolio, among others (incidentally, many Canadian universities have a "full-service" programme offerings, from undergraduate to executive education programmes). At the same time, Canadian business schools vary significantly among them, being mainly concentrated in three major locations: Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Overall, the performance of Canadian management education centres in recent years is remarkable, given the increasing attraction of foreign students to the country and the relevant position of some of its leading schools in different international rankings.

Chapeau for the diversity and the attractiveness of Quebec’s educational offerings in management education! As Powe says in his referred book, "Quebec and Canada need each other because Quebec provides flashes of challenge, a current of passion, while Canada provides fields, a larger frame for that passion" (p.28)

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My visit to the Canadian Dean’s Conference in Montreal

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

I read in today’s edition of The Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading newspaper, an article by Virginia Galt on "feedforward", a concept launched by Marshall Goldsmith, a California-based executive coach, intended as an alternative practice to the classical "feedback". The philosophy of this new practice is that it is better to focus on doing things better in the future than in talking about the past. "In theory, constructive feedback is supposed to focus on the performance, not on the person. In practice, however, almost all feedback is taken personally, no matter how it is delivered. The beauty of feedforward is that it cannot be construed as criticism because it focuses on something that has not yet happened". Indeed, an interesting contribution which is actually in line what some scholars are already teaching, like Fernando Bartolome, professor of organisational behaviour at my school and previous contributor to this blog.

I am currently in Montreal, attending at HEC Montreal the autumn conference of the Canadian Federation of Business School’s Deans (CFBSD) . I have been kindly invited by Tim Daus to talk about the  Bologna Process and its potential implications in Canadian management education. Interestingly, after the first day of meetings my impression is that the main topics raised by participants at the conference are very similar to those discussed at other similar regional conventions, evidence that management education is becoming irreversibly global. Those topics include the increasing competition for market share and potential funds, the scarcity of management professors, the nature of research at b-schools and the need to reinvent our programmes in order to develop –using Dan Muzyka’s expression- "involved managers and not rock stars".

I increasingly see myself, in this type of events, encouraging my colleagues to experiment and assume risks in their activities. I believe that in an increasingly global and competitive management education industry there is a peremptory need to differentiate each school’s educational offerings, something achievable in many different ways. Globalisation is not about standardisation only: it is about amplifying the range of alternative offers too. Business schools should devote more time to "feedforward", and less to feedback and to the analysis of the past.

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B-School’s Supply Chains

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

In an interesting article published yesterday, November 8, in Financial Times, Dave Barnes echoes the widespread expression coined by Thomas Friedman that "the world is flat" and adds that today "nations –like companies- are becoming more specialized and assuming certain areas of expertise". The formation of distinctive competitive advantages in different countries –e.g. manufacturing in China or call centers in India-, explains Barnes, has driven companies "to outsource parts of their operations to appropriate countries. This increased collaboration –with technology as a catalyst- means that instead of companies competing against companies, by 2010 supply chains will be competing against supply chains".

Technologies have been also a key factor in the globalization of management education, and higher education more generically, along with the internationalization of most business school’s stakeholders and –allow me to use this term- the "glocalisation" of management knowledge and business needs. In fact, I was wondering if Barnes’ reasoning could be also applied, mutatis mutandis, to management education. Is our industry moving towards the creation of major supply chains that could exploit scale and compete on a global basis?

A fact supporting this hypothesis is the proliferation of multi-alliances among business schools and of partnerships with companies of related industries –such as conference brokers and consultancies, to name just two. These latter industries do also experience similar globalization forces and need to compete on a worldwide scale, something that prompts complicity and agreement quickly and easily. Indeed, it is plausible to believe that in coming years we will attend the generation of "management supply chains" that will comprise different organizations –educational and others, for and non-for profit, local and multinational, which combine their activities for the provision of a sophisticated range of services to companies and managers. Since some activities of this supply chains may have multifarious sources –for example, management knowledge can flourish beyond academia, in consultancies or publishing houses- it may make sense that the partners of one of this supply chains distribute their tasks according to their comparative capacities and cost.

A further question raised by Barnes’ article is whether some countries will become specialized in terms of specific academic areas, in a similar fashion to what happens in other industries. We already see this in the creation of recognized clusters: for example, the gravitational force of New York and London’s stock exchanges attract a big number of financial services’ companies and, in parallel, schools specialized in finance. Another example may be the concentration of a significant number of education providers in some particular segment. Some years ago, for example, Financial Times’ survey on Executive MBAs concluded that there were four clear hubs in this field on a global scale: Chicago, London, Madrid and New York, given the concentration of highly ranked schools in those cities.

Interestingly, the globalization of management education generates two concurrent and apparently opposed processes. On the one hand, it promotes the standardization of programmes, contents and business schools’ models. On the other hand, it causes the emergence of many new varieties, formats and specializations. A clear evidence of this is the language of delivery of MBA programmes: although English is increasingly the "lingua franca" of management education, prospective participants may apply to MBA programmes delivered in Welsh or Basque, a singular opportunity that did not exist years ago. Does language diversity represent a potential source of differentiation for b-schools?

Management Education in Greece

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Last Thursday I gave a conference on the future of European management education at the University Club of Athens, following the kind invitation of the Kokkalis Foundation. It was an enjoyable event for me since I love Greece and I take every opportunity at hand to spend some time there. Athens, a vibrant and beautiful city of contrasts with an incomparable cultural legacy, has experienced a profound transformation on occasion of the last Olympic Games in 2004. Today is a true cosmopolitan enclave in Southeastern Europe attracting numerous tourists, business people and an increasing number of foreign university students.   

My visit was also a good opportunity to learn about the state of management education in Greece, ten years after Prof. Bryony Conway and I were commissioned by the British Council to develop a study about the opportunity and advisabilty of a Greek association of business schools, in line with what was a common phenomenon in other European countries. At that time, our recommendation was in the positive since we believed that a Greek association of b-schools would enhance the image of their members elsewhere in the continent and would also prompt networking opportunities. One decade after, and halfway through the implementation of the Bologna Accord, I believe that our recommendation has become even more compelling.

Curiously, currently in Greece only public universities are allowed to grant degree programmes with official validity. This status may change in the medium term, but it will require a change in the Constitution, a slow process not exempt from difficulties given the contested interests of many different stakeholders. This situation also contributes to widen the separation between public and private educational institutions, and nurtures an insane debate about whether education, generally considered a public good, is only the domain of public universities, a debate fortunately overcome in many other places.

Indeed, Greece has both public and private management schools that may become truly international players. Among the latter I would like to mention AIM-Athens Information Management and ALBA (Athens Laboratory of Business Administration), which already have strong partnerships with leading institutions worldwide, enjoy close connections with their corporate environment and increasingly attract participants from abroad. I am sure they will enjoy the support of their relevant stakehoiders.