DeansTalk - business management education

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.

Dean MIT Sloan - Where's The "B" In B-Schools?

Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management

Article Business Week, November, 2006

Richard Schmalensee is Professor of Economics and Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the John C Head III Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management

To our critics, including many successful managers, business schools have become little more than exercises in ticket punching for would-be consultants, taught by faculty who are more interested in impressing their academic colleagues than in confronting real-world business problems. Although overstated, this caricature has a grain of truth. In response, many business schools, including my own Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, are seeking to make our research and teaching more valuable to practicing managers. This is easier said than done...

...Even after faculty get lifetime tenure, if they veer from the traditional academic path, they will likely lose stature within the academy. Few have a strong enough ego not to care. At the core of management school criticism, then, is a fundamental mismatch: the academic system's current methods for hiring and rewarding professors don't necessarily attract or encourage the kind of practitioner-oriented faculty we need to make business-school research and MBA education much more attuned to meeting today's and tomorrow's management challenges.

Richard Schmalensee, John C Head III Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, will step down as dean next spring.

Blogmaster: See on this blog  "Abysses and Bridges between Business and Academia" and "No simple solutions to questions about faculty" Santiago Iniguez.

B-School Diversity on Campus

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Santiago’s post on cultural diversity in Canadian schools, combined with the Diversity conference that our students at Tuck hosted this past weekend, has prompted me to think about the responsibility a business school has for fostering diversity on campus. I know that Santiago posted some thoughts on how business schools must create "cosmopolitan managers" last month, so here are some thoughts of my own:

There is no question that top schools must educate a student body that represents a diverse cross-section of races, citizenships, religions, and geographic regions. But for most schools today, a continued commitment to diversity isn’t just about doing what’s right. The truth is that it is also a business imperative: today’s business education just isn’t world-class if it does not include exposure to a diverse faculty and student body.

Much of the learning and growing that takes place happens through personal interaction, as each student gains new insights from the personal experiences and perspectives of classmates and professors. Without diverse experiences to draw from, they would simply be unprepared for today’s increasingly cross-cultural business environment.

For Tuck, this means that our curriculum must expose them to not just Boston, but also Beijing, Bangalore and Sao Paulo. And diversity is more than skin color and country of origin: they also must be challenged by those with varying professional experiences, from consultants and investment bankers to photographers and football players.

Of course, an administration can place an important emphasis on continuing to grow our diversity, but the work of our students and faculty is where the action really is. Conferences and student-run clubs like the Gay/Straight Alliance, Hispanic-American Student Association, and professional groups like the African American Business Association and the Asian Business Club play a vital role, and a school must provide the infrastructure necessary for them to succeed.

The truth is that every member of a b-school community has a unique background and perspective to share, and in large part students are here to expose each other to their own diverse experiences. Being in such a diverse population is one of the great joys of an academic experience and smart students make extracting every ounce of that endless pool of knowledge a major part everyday life.

Henry Mintzberg vs. Jeanette Purcell CEO AMBA

On 6 November,  Jeanette Purcell, Chief Executive of the Association of MBAs, went  head-to-head with the well known MBA critic Professor Henry Mintzberg, at the high level London conference produced by “Benchmark”, attended by over 450 international delegates.

In Session 1, Mintzberg examined some “half truths of management”.  The first was “we live in great times of change” – but Mintzberg prefers to suggest that we only notice the things that change, not the many aspects of life that remain static, such as the enduring use of the humble button. 

Next was “things are becoming more global”.  Mintzberg argues that very few businesses are truly global.   He suggested that “worldly” is a better descriptor for many business activities.

Against the assertion that “management sits on top”, he argued that management should be involved at all levels and a concentric model for management should be adopted.

Finally “organisations need heroic leaders” – Mintzberg suggested that engaging managers would be more effective.

Not surprisingly Mintzberg also presented his well known challenge that MBA programmes do not develop managers.  Management can’t be taught, he claimed, but can only be learnt by experience.

Session 2 of the conference looked at the art, craft and science of managing. Mintzberg used a triangular model to examine the analytical, experimental and instinctive aspects of decision making, supporting a case for ‘emergent strategy’ created by a learning process in which many different aspects converge to give a coherent strategic direction. He suggested that the key to good strategic learning is to reflect on experience.

A lively and constructive panel debate followed led by Robin Oakley of CNN and including Jeanette Purcell, Jeremy Newman of BDO Stoy Hayward and Henry Mintzberg.  First it was acknowledged that much of the criticism that Mintzberg has levelled against the MBA is directed at US business schools where there is a tendency to allow younger less experienced students onto the MBA programme. However Mintzberg claimed that the top European MBA schools nevertheless favour the American teaching model.

Jeanette suggested to Professor Mintzberg that his criticism failed to take into account the significant evolution that has taken place in the MBA and that accredited MBA programmes require at least 3-5 years of experience.  The emphasis these days is on the application of experience and new knowledge and on learning through collaboration with other students. Robin Oakley added that MBAs need to be taught “business” alongside the acquisition of management skills and agreed that the key is to teach these skills without pretending that this is the same as practising management.

Jeanette observed that the MBA is designed to capitalise on the experience that students have and encourages those students to exchange and discuss practical issues.  At the same time, experience alone is an unreliable means of developing good managers – the MBA provides a structured learning environment to encourage the development of new knowledge and skills.  She said that the MBA has three key elements: to enhance experience and skills, to facilitate collaboration with peers and to increase knowledge.

Robin Oakley suggested that the MBA was all about “getting a better job, not doing a better job”.  Professor Mintzberg agreed that the MBA enables many to get a better job in another industry, but effective managers need to develop a deep understanding of context in order to be effective. He argued that studying cases is worthless and is no substitute for experience. Jeanette countered that Mintzberg exaggerates the mystical nature of management which, she suggests, is not that dissimilar to other professions.  She concluded that a good deal of management depends on knowledge and can be taught. The MBA is valued by employers because it represents proof of an individual’s experience, knowledge and skills in management.

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?

Time to stand up and blow your own trumpet

How to...get on an MBA course, September 5th, Times Online.

OBVIOUSLY you have leadership potential — both you and your mum know that. The next steps are to prove it, build on it and use it, by enrolling on an MBA course....

The Welch Way - Podcast

BusinessWeek's "The Welch Way" features Jack & Suzy Welch's answers to readers' questions about business, managing, and careers. Drawing on Jack's experience as the legendary former CEO of General Electric and Suzy's background as the former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review, the pair debate and discuss the issues addressed in their highly popular BusinessWeek column.

BizDeansTalk gets increasing Asian media attention

We would like to extend a warm welcome to our many new Asian readers.

In the recent edition of Asian Inc, an article entitled "This dean is a blogger" (PDF 124KB) (bottom-right in Country Focus: Spain) spoke of Santiago Iniguez (dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School) and BizDeansTalk.

Furthermore the China Economic Review recently spoke of Paul Danos  (dean of Tuck Business School) and BizDeansTalk in For Chinese MBAs in US, American-size paychecks

Joining the $100,000 club

Joining the $100,000 club, October 23, 2006, By Peter Walker for CNN

CNN) -- Taking an MBA at a top business school is a classic route to boosting your salary.

And now, according to a new survey, those who take the right MBA can demand a basic salary of $100,000 or more as soon as their studies are over.

The eye-catching figure comes in a major poll of MBA students and recruiters around the world for Business Week magazine.

Emotional Intelligence: Stars Have It, You Can, Too

Emotional Intelligence: Stars Have It, You Can, Too, October 23, 2006, Courant.com

When it comes to intelligence, it looks as if IQ isn't everything.

Far from it. Yes, book smarts may be important for getting your foot in the door. But if you want to be successful long-term, you'll want to have the kinds of social and emotional intelligence that Daniel Goleman spoke of during a recent evening at the Columbia Business School...

New era begins at Swiss universities

New era begins at Swiss universities, October 23, 2006, Swissinfo.

Thousands of new students will be starting university on Monday under the Bologna system : the first time that degrees have been totally harmonised in Switzerland.

A record number of students have registered for the new academic year with figures said to be up by two per cent on last year. But the Bologna reforms have not been welcomed by everyone....

Rankings of Executive MBA programmes

Interactive EMBA rankings 2006,
(see rankings by different categories) Today, October 23, 2006, Financial Times

Although the headline ranking figures show some changes in the data this year, what is equally significant is the pattern of clustering among the schools. Some 225 points separate the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania at the top, from the school ranked number 85. The top six business schools, from Wharton to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, form the top group of schools. The second group is headed by London Business School, which would need to increase its score by seven per cent overall in order to enter the top group.

Methodology: Response rate rises to 53%, Ursula Milton, Today, October 23

This is the sixth year that the Financial Times has published its ranking of Executive MBA programmes – part-time MBA degrees for working managers.

The ranking is compiled using data from two sets of surveys; one is completed by alumni who graduated from the respective programmes three years ago, in 2003, and the other by the business schools.

More than 8,000 alumni were contacted to participate in the 2006 ranking and over 4,000 completed the online questionnaire. The overall response rate was 53 per cent......

Sloan School dean to step down

Sloan School dean to step down, October 15, Financial Times

Richard Schmalensee, dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, is to step down at the end of the academic year. A faculty member since 1977, Prof Schmalensee will return to teaching and research. Since taking the helm in 1998, he has helped raise $220m and ...

Fortune's 50 most powerful women

All the top Fortune 50 in International Business

(furthermore to this: FORTUNE 50 Most Powerful Women in American Business)

1. Patricia F. Russo Lucent,  Bio on Lucent site

..is chairman and chief executive officer of Lucent Technologies. As one of the founding executives of the company, she helped launch Lucent in 1996 and has spent more than 20 years of her career managing some of Lucent's and AT&T's largest divisions and most critical corporate functions. As Lucent's CEO since January 2002, she has led the company through one of the most challenging periods in the telecom industry's history and helped return the company to sustained profitability

2.	Anne Lauvergeon	Areva
3.	Anne-Marie Idrac	SNCF
4.	Linda Cook	Royal Dutch Shell
5.	Marjorie Scardino	Pearson
6.	Xie Qihua	Baosteel Group
7.	Marina Berlusconi	Fininvest
8.	Nancy McKinstry	Wolters Kluwer
9.	Ana Patricia Botín	Banesto
10.	Mary Ma	Lenovo

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.

Jack Welch spreads business gospel

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - "Don't fall in love with your workers,"  October 16th. Copyright Associated Press.

Furthermore, there is a link in the article to "Classroom quotations from Jack Welch".

The MBA Cheaters – A question of values-based education?

David L. Dinwoodie

There is nothing like a candid comment (4th October)from one of my favourite MBA sparring partners, Della Bradshaw, to set a die hard MBA defender to the investigation trail.  Her comment that MBA programmes perhaps harbour the biggest cheaters due to the fact that they have a higher percentage of men than women sparked me to do a quick, informal, qualitative study amongst participants from the last several years.   

While there were few whistle blowers that would actually confirm flagrant cheating practices there was a very interesting general opinion that women on the MBA programmes were more demanding on themselves and others regarding the learning process and much less tolerant of unfair behaviour. In the opinion of those polled (students, administrators, programme assistants and professors), women participants were less focused on achieving a specific grade and thus less likely to cheat to improve their performance.  In general, it appeared that the women were less oriented to performance measured by grades while they highly valued learning outcomes which they perceived would impact their professional performance post-MBA.

This was a very informal study, however, it leads me to deep considerations regarding the values orientation of the institutions, programmes and professors that are charged with facilitating the MBA learning experience.  Traditional grading systems can offer participants important feedback regarding their acquired knowledge base but they do not necessarily orient participants to develop the competencies that will allow them to employ that knowledge successfully in the corporate world.  Institutions that over emphasize (i.e. over-value) the short-term grading performance in detriment of an integral personal and professional growth process may actually fan the flame of cheating.  They may also discourage the in-take of female participants that naturally gravitate towards programmes with different designs and orientations.

After years of interaction with male and female MBA participants I have not found them to be innately either more or less prone to cheating than members of society at large.  I believe the training institutions have an inherent responsibility to promote a values-based education that supports participants in acting responsibly while remaining absolutely clear and demanding regarding acceptable behaviour.  I am convinced that, by setting high expectations and standards of MBA participants and holding them accountable to the consequences of their behaviour, educators will bring out the best of extremely high potential future leaders – something that the corporate world is desperately in need of.

Demand for MBAs soars in London

Demand for MBAs soars in London, MBA4success

London has always been a mecca for the business world's most talented MBA graduates, and recent trends indicate that graduates feel that there are superb opportunities citing to colleagues that the 'streets are paved with gold'. London has always scored high in preference among MBA graduates. Particularly in finance, larger numbers are targeting the City with its fast-paced lifestyle and telephone number salaries. For example, starting salaries for recent graduates of London Business School going into finance have reported $102k + signing bonuses.

IMD president retires

IMD President retires, by Della Bradshaw, Financial Times, October 10, 2006

The doyen of European deans, Peter Lorange, is to retire as president of IMD, in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the end of next year. Prof Lorange has been president of IMD since July 1993.

...Prof Lorange is the third of Europe’s “top deans” to announce their retirement. This summer Insead’s Gabriel Hawawini was replaced by accountant Frank Brown and London Business School’s Laura Tyson has announced that she will be leaving by the end of the year. However, LBS has not yet to announce the name of its new dean

Top 25 European Businesswomen

The Financial Times and Financial Times Deutschland have announced their third annual ranking of the 25 most important businesswomen in Europe.

Ana Patricia Botin is number one for a second year running.

Ana Botin was previously mentioned in a previous post of BizDeansTalk

This representation of the top 25 requires Macromedia Flash Player 6 or higher

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Are MBAs a bunch of cheats?

Della Bradshaw, Business Education Editor, Financial Times.

Are MBAs all a bunch of cheats? It is one of the great questions of the year in business school circles and must certainly make uncomfortable reading for most business school deans. According to the recent report from the Academy of Management Learning and Education Journal, MBAs are the biggest cheats of all graduate students with 56 per cent of them admitting to cheating. (The mind boggles at what the real figure must be.) Financial Times, September 20, 2006

But perhaps just as disturbing is the attitude of some European business schools that it is only US and Canadian students that cheat, as these were the only ones surveyed. In a letter in the FT on Monday October 2 from Henley Management College, for example, the author Professor Susan Foreman writes: "Yet again the integrity of future business leaders in the US is being called into question."

Prof Foreman blames US business schools for admitting younger students to their programmes who are easily misled. She says older students - and Henley students are well into their thirties -"have the maturity to challenge unacceptable behaviour within, rather than copy it."

To be frank, I'm not sure that this argument holds water. According to the report, MBA students cheat more than doctors, lawyers or social scientists. All my information about US graduate schools suggests that these students will be younger than MBAs - and yet they cheat less.

Also, according to the author of the report, Donald McCabe, professor of management and international business at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, undergraduate students cheat more than graduate students and high school students are the worst of all.

So, why are MBAs the worst cheats of all? I have my own personal theory, based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Could it be that MBA programmes have more men and fewer women participants than other graduate programmes?

Perhaps this should be next focus for Prof McCabe's research

Roundtable - Thought Leadership on Digital Strategies

Professor Eric Johnson,  Director of the Center for Digital Strategies at Tuck, hosted the "Thought Leadership Roundtable on Digital Strategies" on September 26, 2006 in Prague, with CIOs and other executives at leading companies to discuss conducting business in emerging markets.

CIOs and other senior execs from Cargill, Ceská sporitelna, Cisco, DHL, Erste Bank, GM, Hasbro, Henkel, IBM, and Škoda Auto were joined by academics from Tuck and Michigan and partners from AT Kearney and Egon Zehnder for this roundtable.

Press Release                 Agenda                    Discussion Guide
PDF (97K)                 PDF (73K)            PDF(34K)

Continuing our series of faculty videos we hear from the same Eric Johnson, who discusses how companies can protect their customers data; current IT challenges for Fortune 500 companies; cross-border intellectual property issues. (2 minutes). As always, we’d love to include viewpoints from other schools and other perspectives as well, so feel free to respond either with a text comment or via GoogleVideo, YouTube, or a similar video platform.

New $300 million Russian business school

Work Starts on First Russian Business School September 26, 2006, The St. Petersburg Times.

President Vladimir Putin laid the foundation stone Thursday for a Moscow-area business school...

...Some of the country's best-known business leaders have agreed to help fund the $300 million project...

...as part of the two-year MBA program...

...Fourteen business leaders and companies, including Vardanyan and the country's richest man, Roman Abramovich, have agreed to donate up to $5 million each to the school...

...Construction of the school is expected to total $128 million, with another $100 million being plowed into an endowment. An additional $32 million will be spent on miscellaneous costs,..

OTHER SOURCES

Moscow’s new school looks west, Financial Times

Russian oligarchs open wallets to back biz school, Reuters India

Russian rarity: Birth of a real business school, International Herald Tribune

Oligarchs set up college for budding millionaires, The Times

The Fight Against Cheating

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

During a discussion with colleagues regarding the results of the study conducted by Donald McCabe, i.e. that management education students were the group who most admitted to cheating, some pointed out that MBA programmes are very demanding, sometimes beyond realistic expectations: how could you ask an MBA participant to work more than what is actually possible? In order to cope with these unrealistic demands, some students just cheat. Other colleagues referred to the prevalent culture at many business schools, which emphasizes performance at any cost, thus exacerbating the competition and prompting disloyalty among fellow students –in line with what Professor Sumantra Ghoshal stated in a posthumous article.

In their combat against cheating, business schools officials should not transfer the entire responsibility to students, but rather involve other school stakeholders, docents in particular. A whole set of measures should be displayed in order to make cheating really difficult or very risky, including the adoption of preventive measures along the publication of a list of condemned practices as well as the existence of effective bodies that decide and implement the sanctions.

Enactment of Honour Codes. The surveys released by the Center for Academic Integrity show that "cheating on campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2 lower than the level on campuses that do not have honor codes".

Involve students in the ethical governance bodies. Half of our ethics committee is made up of students making the agreed-on sanctions more legitimate in the eyes of students. At IE we see as key that the student knows the technical means we have at our disposal to prevent cheating (see "Technical Solutions" below). Nobody likes to have to tell a student that they have to leave the course, with the extreme financial discomfort that this would entail etc. We hope to dissuade rather then having to catch and punish students after the act. All this creates an environment where honesty and endeavour are the key elements that resonate; all resulting in a critical mass of fair play.

Empowering and improving the conscientiousness of faculty. According to CAI, faculty members are normally reluctant to take action against suspected cheaters. "In Assessment Project surveys involving almost 10,000 faculty in the last three years, 44% of those who were aware of student cheating in their course in the last three years, have never reported a student for cheating to the appropriate campus authority. Students suggest that cheating is higher in courses where it is well known that faculty members are likely to ignore cheating".

Balance the load of assignment to students.This may seem obvious but at times it might seem outrageous the workload that students are asked to do in some schools. In some cases this creates the sense of desperation necessary for some students to cross the line.

Technical Solutions. My school uses a Web based application called Turnitin to verify that our students are not plagiarising when handing in written assignments etc. Use of this tool sends a strong message that we take seriously the protection of the honest competively-minded student and this has a spill-over effect in the approach to other tasks, such as exams and presentations etc.

Indeed it is in the interest of all the top schools to use this tool to prevent inter-school plagiarism as the tool is constantly becoming more efficient with the many updates to the databases that it references, which include the students’ own assignments. On uploading a given assignment, the most popular academic databases are cross-checked, along with news and information sources, as to the level of originality of the work. The results can be surprising and reveal the most sophisticated cheats, who use, for example, paraphrasing. The disuassion effect can be enhanced by providing students with example reports on the originality of sample works.

Cheating and Personal Happiness

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Last week, a report on cheating surveying 5,300 graduate students in the US and Canada, conducted by Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at New Jersey's Rutgers University and President of CAI (Centre for Academic Integrity), was widely released in different media, including the Financial Times and CNN.

The report, which will be published in the September issue of the Academy of Management Learning and Education, reveals that 56% of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, as compared to 54% of graduate engineering students, 50% of physical science students, 49% of medical and health-care students, 45% of law students, 43% of liberal arts students and 39% of social science and humanities students. Previous reports published by CAI are likely if not more alarming: the results of a 2005 survey of 50,000 undergraduates on more than 60 US campuses showed that on most campuses, 70% of students admit to some cheating. This diagnosis may be aggravated since, as McCabe said, it's likely that more students cheat than admit to it.

Do more students cheat nowadays than, say, four decades ago? It is debatable, although some analysts explain that some facts such as the easy access to almost infinite sources on the Web and the flourishing of virtual communities of cheaters have contributed to make the phenomenon rampant.

In my opinion, given the magnitude of the problem, two extreme reactions should be avoided. The first one is to despise the phenomenon, or even more perversely, to justify, for example, that cheating is a form of innovation or that there are diverse degrees of cheating, some acceptable. The second is to embark in a sensational crusade that may harm some pillars that sustain education and prestigious institutions, thus affecting also negatively those students that comply with the rules.

In this and a subsequent post I will deal with some of the possible approaches that schools can undertake to combat cheating, taking into account that, although eradicating the phenomenon may be almost impossible –in an analogous way as to prevent all people from lying of being disloyal to their partners- it is somehow achievable a state of being where cheating becomes really difficult or very risky.

To start with, there is a need of clarifying a conceptual issue. Normally, cheating is considered a reproachable behaviour because, as the Oxford Dictionary explains, cheating is "to act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage". However, the first person who looses out is the cheater: first, by potentially exposing one’s personal reputation to be affected, sometimes for life; and second, and more importantly from a personal point of view, for relinquishing all the benefits that brings the learning process. The expression "You are only fooling yourself" springs to mind. We all know the intellectual satisfaction that results from understanding, memorising, rationalising and discussing theories, ideas and concepts. Those who take the shortcut and skip the wonders of learning are giving up a decisive part of personal development that is directly linked –I believe, in line with many philosophers- with happiness.

Student’s Opinions about the Bologna Process (Report)

Santiago Iniguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Information about the evolution and stakeholder’s reactions to the Bologna Process is currently scarce and fragmented. The implementation of the process –the adoption of the necessary legislative measures to standardise higher education across Europe into the two degree level system (bachelor and master)- is delegated to the each member state. This makes even further difficult the access to aggregated information. It should thus be very welcome the interesting report "The Bologna Process: Students Plans and Perceptions"( 24 pages, 1MB), jointly published by EFMD and Trendence, the first of the series "EFMD Research Report Series". The survey tests the waters with the university students of over 30 European countries about their attitudes and expectations regarding the creation of the single Higher Education Area in the continent.

Let me highlight three of the findings summarised in the report. First, that overall reputation is the decisive factor in student’s decision as to which institution they will choose for studying abroad. Second, only half of the students surveyed were willing to continue into the masters’ level immediately after finishing their first degrees. This proportion is consistent with what happens, for example, in the UK, where the percentage of bachelors who enter the job market after graduation is even higher (estimated at 60%). Third, the language is the key factor considered for choosing a particular country where to study.

MOBILITY SCHOLARSHIPS (page 19) -(51% don't know of any such scholarship)

There are some findings that are, somehow, counterintuitive. For example, despite that the overall reputation of a school is considered a determinant factor in choosing an institution, 51% of the students surveyed have no interest in reports or rankings, which are instrumental in the projection of reputation. An interesting piece of information is that 25% of the surveyed students plan to work, gaining experience, after their first degrees and then later study for a masters’ qualification –this segment being the ideal target for MBA programmes.

Interestingly, the five preferred European countries where to study, both for students already studying abroad or for students currently studying at their home countries is the same and I enclose it below:

- United Kingdom 

- Spain

- France

- Germany

- Italy