DeansTalk - business management education

NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2012

NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2012, 14th - 16th February, Mumbai

World Leadership Survey of Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®)

World Leadership Survey

What keeps leaders across the globe up at night? What issues are most important to their business? CCL is currently conducting a groundbreaking World Leadership Survey with leaders like yourself from around the globe participating.

This survey provides information on trends in leadership wherever it happens, as well as issues that leaders have to deal with every day such as what employees want in their leaders, trust and ethics in effective organizations, employee engagement and retention, generational differences, and attitudes about work. The survey is administered online in 15 different languages and will provide greater insight and a more personal perspective on leadership practices from every corner of the world.

It will take about 20 minutes. To thank you for helping us, you will receive a free CCL Guidebook when you finish the survey. Thank you for helping us gather knowledge you can put to work!

Click here to participate in the survey: https://surveys.clearpicture.com/ccl/

QuickView Leadership Series

• The Innovation Equation for Leaders: People + Context = Innovation
  CCL research shows why creative people and a workplace that fosters innovation must both be present for innovation to thrive. (PDF 1.7 MB)
• Motivated by the Organization's Mission or Their Career?
  Our research examines how leaders in public and private institutions can motivate and retain valued employees through complexity and change. (PDF 2.3 MB)
• Focus on Africa: Employee Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility
  Special report on attitudes about corporate social responsibility among African employees. (PDF, 2.6 MB)
• Focus on Africa: Workplace Attitudes
  Special report on workplace attitudes among African employees. (PDF, 3.6 MB)
• Annual Report on Workplace Attitudes
  Despite everything that has been going on in the economy, executives, managers, and professional employees are pretty positive, but there are warning signs about the future. (PDF, 2.2 MB)
• Building Trust in the Workplace: A Key to Retaining Women
  What organizations need to know about trust today, and how to improve it. (PDF, 1.2 MB)
• Employee Engagement: Has It Been a Bull Market?
  How the economy has affected employee engagement, and what organizations need to worry about now. (PDF, 1.4 MB)
• Employee Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility
  How employee perceptions of corporate social responsibility really affect employee loyalty. (PDF, 3.3 MB)

Professor/Director Liz Mellon, book "Inside the Leader’s Mind: Five Ways to Think Like a Leader"

The Thinkers 50 interview

Amazon, "Inside the Leader’s Mind: Five Ways to Think Like a Leader", FT Press; 1 edition (June 30, 2011), 232 pages

Elizabeth Mellon has been Executive Director of Duke Corporate Education, a global learning and development corporation, since 2004. Previously she spent twelve years in the Department of Trade and Industry before taking a MBA and PhD at LBS. At LBS she was Professor of Organizational Behaviour and also served as Director of the Senior Executive Programme, the London Business School's flagship program for senior executives. During the same period, she also taught on, and directed, the School's Global Consortium Programme.

Deputy Dean of degree programs at INSEAD, Peter Zemsky - The Personal Journey of an Effective Leader

Forbes February 10,2012, Matt Symonds, Contributor, Chief editor of MBA50.com

...

So where can business schools make a difference in leadership development?

In this interview with Peter Zemsky, Deputy Dean of degree programs at INSEAD, he talks about how business education can help MBA students to become better leaders, in an environment designed to test them, push them, stress them, and expose them to different perspectives on the personal journey to leadership.

He also tackles the debate about whether business school research really matters, and shares his thoughts on management as an art or a science.

LeadProgram.org - enabling youth of diverse backgrounds

www.leadprogram.org

Lead Global

2012 Program Dates

• Univ. of Virginia/Darden Dates TBD
• DUKE/The Fuqua School June 16-July 6
• Stanford University June 29-July 21
• Univ. of Michigan/Ross School July 8-27
• Northwestern/The Kellogg School Dates TBD
• Dartmouth College/Tuck Dates TBD
• UPENN/Wharton School July 1-28
• Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign July 8-27

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi: video of Rajmohan Gandhi at Brown University

Via @BrownUniversity, RT by @SantiagoIniguez

YouTube Brownuniversity 03/12/2009
Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of one of the 20th century's most revered and peaceful activists, speaks about the links between Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Hard Knocks - a decade of NFL training camps

HBO´s Hard Knocks

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us - Daniel Pink

www.danpink.com/drive

Daniel H. Pink is an American author and journalist. From 1995 to 1997, he worked for Vice President Al Gore in the capacity of chief speechwriter, and before that as an aide to Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.^[1]

Drive, #1 New York Times bestseller

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money--the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink in Drive. In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction--at work, at school, and at home--is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does-and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation--autonomy, mastery, and purpose--and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.

Top Companies for Leaders 2011 FORTUNE - Study Results

Top Companies for Leaders 2011 Study Results

Read the FORTUNE article on the study

View the list of winners

It's been two years since Fortune last published this list, which we produce in association with Aon Hewitt Consulting. Aon Hewitt, in partnership with RBL Group, started by surveying HR executives at 478 companies worldwide about their leadership development programs. Aon Hewitt then interviewed executives at 182 global finalists, drilling into their leadership strategy, succession planning, techniques for identifying high-potential junior employees, and much more. A panel of distinguished judges, including authors, academics, and journalists, then gathered to select the regional and global winners.

Reinhold Messner interview, probably the best climber ever.

Reinhold Messner (Wikipedia)

Interview (2006) with Carlos Barrabés

.@Edurne_Pasaban, first woman to climb World's 14 8000m+ peaks to teach coaching at IE Business School

Via @SantiagoIniguez

@Edurne_Pasaban

Edurne Pasaban (Wikipedia, EN)

www.edurnepasaban.com/quien_es/  (English flag for English)

7/10/2010 News of the coaching in Expansión (in Spanish)

Why MBA Programs Don't Produce Leaders - Forbes

Leadership Article of Forbes, 10/04/2011

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), over 150,000 students graduate with their MBA in the United States every year. That’s a whopping 25% of all Master’s recipients (compared to Computer & Information Science at only 3%).

Business Schools Have An Identity Crisis

A Change In Image, Not Substance

What Continues To Plague MBA Programs

Leaders Aren’t Created In A Classroom

Pension funds, economies of scale? + the empathy gap

Something for the weekend, Financial Times, September 16, 2011.

Debate - The role of business schools in advancing sustainability - The Guardian

• How can business schools teach complex sustainability issues to the leaders of tomorrow?
• This was the topic up for discussion in our recent live chat. Read a summary of the debate here (September 6, 2011)

To read the full discussion, please click here (July 27, 2011).

MIT Unravels the Secrets Behind Collective Intelligence – Hint: IQ Not So Important

Singularity Hub, August 26, 2011.

When it comes to a successful group, the easiest way to ensure victory may be placing women on the team. MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence seeks to understand how humans get better (or worse) at solving problems as they work together. They studied hundreds of people working in small groups and found that they could determine a “C factor”, a key statistic that would predict if a group could perform well in a variety of tasks.

... Surprisingly, many common sense variables like group cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction simply didn’t seem to matter much. Instead, MIT determined that groups with a high C factor were mostly defined by:

• the high average social sensitivity of group members
• a high rate of sharing who gets to communicate
• more females

Daniel Goleman: 'Leaders Must Position Their Employees Somewhere between Boredom and Stress'

On Wikpedia

Goleman received his Ph.D. from Harvard, where he has also been a visiting lecturer. ... He is a co-chairman of The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, based in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University...

---

Uni>ersia Knowledge Wharton, August 18, 2011

With his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, author, psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman sparked widespread interest in the role that our emotions play in thought, decision making and individual success. The book became an international bestseller and Goleman has subsequently earned two Pulitzer Prize nominations and landed on the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change's list of the ten most outstanding intellectuals in the world...

...“Using the framework of emotional intelligence, companies can calculate with greater precision the chances that any individual will succeed than if they only evaluated his or her intellectual coefficient," Goleman noted, adding that the most academically successful student in a high school or college graduating class may have “wound up having inferior success at work compared with [someone] who was just an average student. The difference between the two is that the average student has been able not only to control his own emotions, but also positively influence groups of other workers. Everyone wants to work with him.”...

Steve Jobs: A Biography

On Amazon

From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In Steve Jobs: A Biography, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs’ professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs’ family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, Steve Jobs is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

Hardcover: 448 pages

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 6, 2012)

Dean R. Glenn Hubbard of the Columbia Business School - WSJ - on Disclosure, Leading, Ethics

Article of the Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2011.

R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Business School, wants his students to make connections—and not just through networking.

He blames the recent financial crisis on a failure by leaders to successfully see the big picture, focusing instead on their area of expertise. Not connecting the dots, he says, was disastrous.

In Mr. Hubbard's view, business schools must prepare students with a broader education in order to thwart an economic meltdown. To that end, Columbia is deliberately weaving topics such as decision-making and ethics into classes across all disciplines...

...

Excerpts:

WSJ: You've taken some heat for how the movie "Inside Job" portrayed your, and professors', disclosures [including dollars earned] of outside activities. Has Columbia changed its approach to any of this?

Mr. Hubbard: Despite what you might have seen in "Inside Job," we have a lot of disclosure. We just tightened it as a faculty, a project we've worked on since 2009. I've always disclosed what I do, my sources of income and relationships, that's how he knew what to ask me. We've now moved to a system where all faculty will do that. Basically, faculty résumés will [show] outside activities just like they [show] publications and teaching.

WSJ: What was the expectation before?

Mr. Hubbard: I've always done it [made disclosures] because I'm a dean. But the faculty did not have to do that. The faculty were always supposed to report if they received money to support research, that's just a matter of professional ethics...

President Amy Gutmann of the University of Pennsylvania, interview with The New York Times

New York Times, June 18, 2011

...those two things are really important about leadership, to have courage and to be farsighted in your vision, not to be just reacting to the next small challenge...

Forbes Leadership Highlights of the Week - Frederick E. Allen

Leadership view blog, May 24, 2011.

We wanted to get out this week, with all that beautiful spring weather out there, but we found ourselves inside watching others get out instead...

Tuck hosts leadership conference: 40 of the US´s most esteemed executives in cable technology and operations

The Dartmouth.com, May 2, 2011

Tuck School of Business and the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers partnered for the first time to host 40 of the nation’s most esteemed executives in cable technology and operations, according to M. Eric Johnson, a science of administration professor and director of the Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies at Tuck. The week-long leadership insitute, which took place between April 26 and April 30, was designed to help participants manage changes in their industry and to reinforce business, leadership and critical thinking skills necessary to remain competitive in an increasingly technological world, according to the Institute’s online brochure...Participants were also exposed to a variety of guest speakers such as Glenn Britt ’71, chairman and chief executive officer of Time Warner Cable Inc.

...“The key thing to understand about the cable industry is that you need to follow the changes in technology,” he said. “The industry is so fiercely competitive that without learning this innovative strategy and financial accounting it’s hard to succeed.”

The World’s Best Companies for Leadership - Frederick E. Allen - Forbes Leadership View

Post of January 25, 2011

What businesses most expect their employees to lead, and best prepare their employees to lead? It’s very, very hard to say, of course, but the management consultancy Hay Group tries. It just released its ranking of the world’s 20 “best companies for leadership.” The champion: General Electric.

Hay Group polled 3,769 individuals and 1,827 organizations worldwide...

Recovering from information overload - McKinsey

McKinsey Quarterly, January 2011

Always-on, multitasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy.

...

A body of scientific evidence demonstrates fairly conclusively that multitasking makes human beings less productive, less creative, and less able to make good decisions. If we want to be effective leaders, we need to stop.

15 Inspiring Biographies for Aspiring Leaders

Post of bschool.com, January 5th, 2011.

From Homeless to MBA - video

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

CEOs' First Jobs

Via Forbes.com, 10/26/2007

Macy's, Xerox, McDonalds, Keynote Systems and Sun Microsystems.

Professors make great executives - FT

Opening paragraphs of an article of Financial Times, by Della Bradshaw, October 29, 2007.

Companies that employ former professors at executive level perform better than their corporate peers, according to the latest research from two professors at DePaul University, in Chicago. The research flies in the face of the growing perception that business school professors live in ivory towers and have very little connection with the practice of business.

The research, by professors Bin Jiang and Patrick Murphy, investigated the success of some 215 companies which employed business academics, all with doctoral degrees, as executive managers. These companies did significantly better than nearly identical companies with no former academics in their top ranks...

Leadership

"Qualities need for Leadership" - Paul Danos,

"Views on Teaching Leadership" - Paul Danos

"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other" - Santiago Iniguez

"Can leadership be taught at our schools?" - Santiago Iniguez

"My views on Leadership" - Della Bradshaw

"Shared Leadership" - Jose Luis Alvarez

"Sick and tired (of leadership ...)" - Fernando Bartolomé

"Leadership" - Wikipedia

"Dean of Tuck School Takes the Long View" -Wall Street Journal interview

Dean of Tuck School Takes the Long View, October 9, 2007, Wall Street Journal.

In His Fourth Term, Danos Puts Focus On Small Seminars.

The turnover rate for deans has been accelerating at many business schools, but Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, is clearly in no hurry to replace Paul Danos, the dean of its Tuck School of Business, the oldest graduate business school. This year, Dartmouth reappointed the 65-year-old Dr. Danos to a fourth four-year term, which will make him one of the longest-serving business-school deans. Ron Alsop interviewed him recently about his plans for Tuck, the value of faculty research, and the changing world of B-school deans. (free subscription paragraph)

To see the full article with the answers to the questions below you need to be a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal.

WSJ: What are your primary goals during your fourth term?

Dr. Danos: I am staying to see..

WSJ: How many additional professors will you need for the smaller classes and seminars?

WSJ: There has been much criticism of business schools for focusing on research with little direct relevance to the business world. Do you believe that's a fair complaint?

WSJ: From your perspective, how has the dean's job changed through the years?

WSJ: Many deans have told me they tire of all the fund-raising pressure. Has fund raising been a growing part of your job, and does it distract you from academic matters?

WSJ: More schools seem to be hiring business executives as deans these days. Do they face different challenges than academics like yourself?

WSJ: Would you consider staying for a fifth term, surpassing the 18-year tenure of one of your predecessors at Tuck? Or have you thought about retirement and life after Tuck?

The article finishes with:

"Many of these converstaions can be accessed at www.deanstalk.net, an international dean's blog."

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?

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.

Some Tips On Doing Business In China

"Everything is possible in China and everything is difficult" recently said Jack Perkowski, Chairman & CEO, ASIMCO (China’s Leading Auto Parts Manufacturer).

In 2005 he was named as one of China 's top ten managers, taking third place in the ranking put together by Hewitt Associates and the 21 st Century Business Herald.

One of Time´s article mentioning him "Mr.China hits the road".

A Washington Speakers description of a speech he gave for them

Book recommended by him: China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World

---

Although over a year since this article in the Industy Week, it summarises a lot of his current ideas of doing business in China.

March 27, 2006 -- At the National Manufacturing Week conference held last week in Chicago, Jack Perkowski, CEO, ASIMCO Technologies spoke on "China: Opportunities and Challenges."

Here are some excerpts from his comments:

Advice On Doing Business In China:

• China is not something you want to delegate. Find the most senior person you can to go to China and figure it out. You want the decision makers on the ground -- people who are there, not just flying in for a week, who can negotiate and make decisions. It's a different market than the U.S. -- things work differently. Don't let the people in the U.S. second-guess your senior person in China on what needs to be done. Put someone there with credibility who can make decisions.
• Localize your management team. Pull in people who are mainland Chinese, who understand the area and have management experience.

Major Differences In Doing Business In China:

• Chinese look at money differently than Americans -- you want managers that have the same cost perspective as customers.
• The legal system is very different. If you have a problem, the U.S. manager will pull out the contract and call a lawyer to force the solution. A Chinese manager doesn't go near the contract but starts thinking about who they're going to talk to, to fix the problem.
• It's a myth that the Chinese can copy but they can't create. In 2001, China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) , which sparked the auto industry. They went from 2 million vehicles to 6 million vehicles in 3-4 years. They are now the third largest auto market in the world and by 202 will be the same size as the U.S. Eventually they will be the biggest.

Building A Chinese Management Team

• Is it possible to build a great Chinese management team? Absolutely, but it's not easy.
  The Chinese are very entrepreneurial -- there are no capital markets or legal system to restrain them.
  I went out and looked for people that were "new China." Mainland Chinese, open-minded with management training who had worked for a multinational.
  I added all the modern management tools like Six Sigma, etc. But you can't start with that -- you've go to get the right people.

A Take on the Global Job Hunt

Via Business Week, May 16, 2007

The head of the Instituto de Empresa career center talks about the European job market and how the Spanish school helps students in the job search

Guillaume Delacour has been the director of the Career Management Center at Instituto de Empresa (IE Business School) for more than three years. The Madrid-based school also has programs in Shanghai and Mexico. More than 300 full-time MBA students at IE have access to career assistance from representatives in New York, Latin America, India, and China who know the local markets and help students and alumni get jobs in those countries.

In the first six months of the 13-month MBA program, students focus on finding a career path and learning how to market themselves. In the second part of the year, from June to December, students search for jobs and contact companies.

In 2006, the graduating class earned average starting salaries above $92,000 and signing bonuses topping $15,700. Also, 96% of graduates had jobs three months after graduation. Delacour spoke to BusinessWeek.com reporter Janie Ho and offered tips for those on the global job hunt.

See link at the top for their conversation.

"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.

US 100 Best Corporate Citizens 2007 ?

Environmental responsibility. Corporate governance and ethics. Fairness toward employees. Accountability to local communities. Providing responsible products and service to customers. Maintaining a healthy rate of return for investors.

Those are just some of the challenges of responsible business in the 21st century, challenges that are being met head-on by the 100 companies listed. These are the 100 Best Corporate Citizens for 2007—companies that are proving that good corporate citizenship and good business go hand in hand.

Welcome to the 100 Best Corporate Citizens page. For the past eight years, Business Ethics Magazine (and now The CRO) has been working with KLD Research & Analytics to rank and recognize publicly listed U.S. companies that excel at serving a variety of stakeholders.

The 100 Best Corporate Citizens list is regarded as the third most influential corporate ranking, behind Fortune magazine’s “Most Admired Companies” and “100 Best Companies to Work For,” according to a PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller CEO Survey.

Now in its eighth year, the 100 Best Corporate Citizens list was developed by Business Ethics magazine, with statistical analysis designed by Sandra Waddock and Samuel Graves of Boston College. This is the first year the list has been published in CRO magazine, which salutes the 100 Best companies for their leadership roles in corporate citizenship.See the full list now (453KB )

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.

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."

Women in MBAs and Business

Excerpt from article of Financial Times "Stepping stones to top careers" , March 4, 2007

...What is clear is that there is no simple answer as to why women are increasingly turning to MBAs, even if the increase is still only a trickle rather than a deluge. Students’ previous educational experiences, social pressures and attitudes of employers all play their part...

...What most schools do agree on, though, is that recruiters are increasingly interested in recruiting women graduates. “The holy grail is a woman with an MBA,” says a recruiter for one City of London bank...

...That said, there is still a substantial salary gap between earnings for male and female alumni. A survey conducted by the Financial Times in the autumn of 2006 of those who graduated in 2003 showed that men earned higher salaries in every sector. In finance and banking and in consulting, for example, men earned an average of $130,000. Women, by comparison, earned an average of $117,000 in finance and banking and $119,000 in consulting.*

The most constantly cited reason for the lack of women on MBAs is that the programme requires participants to have several years’ work experience and this puts them in their late 20s when they apply, when they are likely to have strong personal demands, such as starting a family...

Global Focus - Peter Lorange and IMD’s roots of success

In January 2007 EFMD launched a new business magazine 'Global Focus'. The new magazine is a modern replacement for the Forum magazine and in the same vein provides you with in-depth updates on the international management development community and features topical reports and insight from leading experts.

• Global Focus Volume 1, Issue 1

Taken from the Global Focus (sent to BizDeansTalk by EFMD).

Peter Lorange, Dean of IMD, will step down in Spring 2008.

When I arrived in 1993, the institute already had a very strongly business-oriented culture. For example, in contrast to other academic institutions IMD has never had tenure, there is no hierarchy of titles, there are no academic departments and the institute bases all its research on actual business issues,” says Prof Lorange, reflecting on 13 years in charge.

”There have been several shifts in the management development landscape in general and at IMD in particular during that time. Today we see that customers are more and more interested in tailored in-company programmes – we call them partnership programmes. Currently the balance at IMD is 50/50 for open and partnership. We are quite happy with this and foresee that it will stay this way, as the two formats have their own benefits both for the companies as well as for IMD.

” Companies, he says, seem to be less interested in training in functional skills such as finance or marketing programmes. Compared to a decade ago, today almost all IMD’s programmes coer interdisciplinary topics such as leadership, board issues, change, innovation or managing the value chain.

“We do not talk about teaching anymore,” he comments. “We feel that both the practitioner and the academic learn when they engage in a programme, of whatever type. IMD’s faculty bring in their latest research findings and participants respond with their own experience-based reflections. This leads to a rich exchange of viewpoints.”

The school’s origins go back to two institutes created by international companies – IMI, founded by Alcan Aluminium in Geneva in 1946, and IMEDE, founded in Lausanne in 1957 by Nestlé. In 1990 the two institutes merged to create IMD, based on the old IMEDE campus in Lausanne. And Lorange emphasises that for him Lausanne is and will be the only IMD campus.

“We provide a global meeting place in a wonderful setting by Lac Leman (Lake Geneva),” he says. “Here, executives from all over the world come together to discuss their business dilemmas. Creating satellite campuses would only compromise on the great diversity you will find here.”

As to the future, Lorange does not foresee anything dramatically different for IMD or for himself.

“I think IMD will keep building on its strengths,” he says. “We just received a SFR. 15 million donation from the AP Møller and Chastine McKinney Møller Foundation for the construction of a new centre for executive learning, which will completed in June 2008 and will mean IMD will be even better positioned to meet the growing demand for programmes. And as for myself, I will simply keep doing my research [on internally generated growth] and will stay in touch with real-life business issues as a board member of several international corporations.”

An IMD search committee expects to be able to announce news on the appointment of a new president by early 2008.

B-schools get back to basics

Excerpts from an article of The Boston Globe, March 11, 2007.

Related posts. BizDeansTalk:  "Dean MIT Sloan - Where's The "B" In B-Schools?" (23 November 2006)
                     BizDeansTalk: "Sloan School dean to step down" (19 October 2006)

Worried they're losing relevance, top programs refocus on the practical.

CAMBRIDGE -- As he prepares to retire as dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management this spring, Richard Schmalensee is throwing out a challenge to fellow business school leaders and his yet-to-be-named successor: Come down from the ivory tower.

Schmalensee has been listening to a rising chorus of critics who worry B-schools have grown overly academic and removed from the actual workings of business. Speaking to faculty, staffers, and alumni gathered in the Hotel@MIT for a Sloan retreat last month, he outlined several initiatives -- some already begun, others planned for later this year -- to bring the real world of commerce into the classroom.

...Sloan's moves are part of a larger reassessment of business education, sparked in part by critics like Henry Mintzberg at McGill University, Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford University, and Warren Bennis at the University of Southern California, all professors of business themselves. While their critiques vary, each questions the relevance of the current MBA curriculums and scientific research focus to the problems graduates will be called upon to solve when they enter business...

...Harvard, like Sloan and other schools, has brought business leaders into the classroom in the quest for relevancy. It has enlisted more than a dozen former senior executives, such as Raymond V. Gilmartin from Merck & Co. and Stephen Kaufman from Arrow Electronics, as professors of management practice or senior lecturers...

Books - Get Ahead or, if You Must, Bounce Back

The New York Times, Money, Off The Shelf  Three books reviewed:

1.StrengthsFinder 2.0”: ...But the problem with taking the path of most resistance is multilayered: It is difficult, it can keep you from succeeding at your true calling, and it is extremely unlikely — despite what the folklore tells us — to lead to great success.

That, in a nutshell, is the argument of Tom Rath...

2. “Me, Inc.” : ...It is not enough to decide to get better, even if you know exactly how to do so. You need to track — with hard data — exactly how you are doing...

3.Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters” (Harvard Business School Press)

a) Facing up to failures, b) Recruiting others to help them climb back, c) Rebuilding their image, d) Working to regain trust and credibility by proving they are still capable executives, e) Rediscovering their “historic mission.”

...And for anyone else who has ever been fired, it is nice to know that F. Scott Fitzgerald got it wrong. Apparently, there are second acts in American (business) lives. And that seems to be true even if you make the wrong career choice the first time around.

Innovation - Forbes Top Ten Disrupters Of 2006

The Panel

"Our panelists were Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business; Tom Stemberg, founder of Staples (nasdaq: SPLS - news - people ) and a venture partner at Highland Capital; Forbes.com columnist Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, author of The Innovator's Dilemma and founder of the consulting firm Innosight; Scott Anthony, a managing director at Innosight and co-author, with Christensen, of Seeing What's Next; and Arlyn Tobias Gajilan, the Leadership editor at Forbes.com."

Their Top Ten.  1. You Tube, 2. Private Equity, 3. Supersized Philantrophy ...

The exclusive club of leadership

Article of LA Times taken from Financial Times about a recently published book : "Paths to Power, How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership"

  Where do leaders come from? How are they formed and trained? How do they rise to positions of power?

These are significant questions as business leadership becomes an increasingly scarce resource. With some observers suggesting that business is facing a deficit of leadership, any book that sheds light on the processes of leadership development is welcome.

In "Paths to Power," three Harvard Business School academics describe how American business leaders have risen to prominence.

They studied a thousand leaders, ranging from figures such as James Stillman, president of National City Bank (now Citigroup Inc.) in the 19th century, to contemporaries such as Michael Dell, chairman and founder of personal computer maker Dell Inc.

This book describes the backgrounds of such leaders — refreshingly, many are less well-known figures — and how factors such as birthplace, gender, race, class, religion and education helped them to positions of power.

The various factors are treated in separate chapters, which show how the comparative importance of each factor has changed...

German higher education -

"How private universities could help to improve public ones" from The Economist, December 13, 2006

HERE are many rich Germans. In 2003 private assets are estimated to have been worth €5 trillion ($5.6 trillion), half of which belongs to the richest tenth of the population. But with money comes stinginess, especially when it comes to giving to higher education. America devotes twice as much of its income to universities and colleges as Germany (2.6% of GDP, against 1.1%) mainly because of higher private spending—and bigger donations.

Next year's figures should be less embarrassing. In November Klaus Jacobs, a German-born billionaire living abroad, announced that he would donate €200m to the International University Bremen (IUB)—the biggest such gift ever. It saved the IUB, Germany's only fully fledged private and international university (with 30 programmes and 1,000 students from 86 countries) from bankruptcy. It may also soften the country's still rigid approach to higher education.

...That is why Mr Jacobs's donation matters. For the first time, Germany will have a private university worth the name and with a solid financial footing (if it keeps up its academic performance, that is: Mr Jacobs has promised to donate €15m annually over the next five years and another €125m in 2011 to boost the endowment, but only if things go well). If it works, other rich Germans may be tempted into investing in higher education too...

Patrick Harker to quit as dean of Wharton

Article of Financial Times, by Della Bradshaw, December 4, 2006

Patrick Harker, dean of the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, is to quit the school next July to become president of the University of Delaware. Prof Harker was made interim dean at Wharton in 1999 and confirmed as dean in 2000.

During his tenure as dean, Prof Harker created Wharton West, the school’s San Francisco-based campus, and forged an alliance with Insead, which has proven particularly popular with MBA students. He oversaw the launch of both Knowledge@Wharton and Wharton School Publishing. He also led Wharton to complete the largest fund-raising campaign in its history....

American students explore the world in study abroad

Article by CNN, November 13, 2006

American college students are becoming more adventuresome as they study abroad, showing less interest in English-speaking destinations such as Great Britain and Australia and more in such alternatives as China, India, Argentina and Brazil.

Britain remained the most popular study destination last year, according to annual figures due for release Monday by the Institute of International Education, followed by Italy, Spain and France. American college students are becoming more adventuresome as they study abroad, showing less interest in English-speaking destinations such as Great Britain and Australia and more in such alternatives as China, India, Argentina and Brazil.

Britain remained the most popular study destination last year, according to annual figures due for release Monday by the Institute of International Education, followed by Italy, Spain and France.