BizDeansTalk - business management education blog

The HBR debate - How To Fix Business Schools - Jay O. Light is the Dean of Harvard Business School

Jay O. Light is the Dean of Harvard Business School

This following post is taken from the "How To Fix Business Schools" blog.

want to thank everyone who has contributed to this thoughtful and vigorous discussion in the finest traditions of the Harvard Business Review. The forum succeeded as promised in sparking an open and fresh dialogue among experts, practitioners, students and readers. It will undoubtedly influence thinking here at Harvard Business School and among all those who participated. I hope it will also be a precursor to many other forums of this type on pressing business and economic issues of our time.

As many contributors have noted, this has been a period of reflection and considerable introspection for business schools. Over the past two years, as we planned and then marked our Centennial in 2008, HBS considered important questions about the future of market capitalism and the future of management education. We never imagined they would come together in such dramatic fashion as we witnessed the financial crisis, a global recession as deep and painful as any since the early decades of the last century, with fundamental questions about the role and responsibility of business schools in the mix.

I recognize merits of both sides of the debate over the extent of business schools' culpability. Ultimately I share the view of Steve Kerr, Andrew Likierman and my colleague Carl Kester: business schools must share some of the blame, but there is plenty to go around. Yes, there are lessons to be learned and things we have to do differently. As I have argued before, there were imbalances both on campuses and in the economy during an extended period of growth, where people became less focused on systemic risks and more focused on the upside and on making money. I agree that we need to move that focus back toward the center.

But to suggest that business schools and the MBA are the root cause of the global financial crisis is simplistic nonsense that ignores the obvious reality of the many complex and interrelated factors that underlie the problem.

This debate, and others like it that have played out in the media and on campuses around the world, helps to illustrate the wide range of challenges and opportunities at hand for business schools. To truly make the most of the reflection we must move from dialogue to action. At HBS, we are making changes in the way we teach risk management (without stifling the focus on innovation and entrepreneurialism), reconsidering the oversight responsibilities of directors, and revisiting the kinds of incentives provided by executive compensation packages. We will respond to the expanding interests of our students who are planning careers not only in traditional business settings, but in healthcare and science-based enterprises as well as non-profit and other social enterprises. And as we have seen all too clearly in the past year, we will need to equip our graduates to operate at the increasingly connected interface of business and government on a global basis.

I believe that business schools can and will be part of the solution. We will need to adapt to meet new economic realities and the wide-ranging ambitions of our students. But we should also recognize that the core of our teaching here at HBS will be more important than ever before. We will help students see the big picture and anticipate the impact of their decisions as well as offer them a deeper understanding of the financial crisis through the daily classroom interactions that are the signature of the case method - with an emphasis on framing the issues and asking the right questions as opposed to simply giving the right answer. We will continue to do research that is close to practice to get to the heart of what caused the crisis. And we will recommit ourselves to teaching the principles of sound judgment, values and ethics, and leadership.

I am grateful for the positive discussion that has emerged from this forum; energized by the evident passion for leadership education; and committed, with you, to ensuring that business schools, and Harvard Business School in particular, play our role in shaping the future of management education to meet the needs of a new century.

Slim pickings for newly minted MBAs, but...

Click here for the article of CNN Money, April 13, 2009.

(breakingviews.com) -- It's already April, and business students would normally be weighing which investment bank's job offer to take. But this year's crop of MBAs faces bleak prospects - for the same reason it's hard to place new asset-backed debt. A shrinking and cautious finance industry means lots of already seasoned assets - including people - are available at cheap prices.
...

There is a bright side. The number of students wanting to work on Wall Street reached historic highs before the bubble burst. Just shy of half of Harvard's MBA crop last year went into finance.

The hotter areas now, according to the universities, are venture stage businesses, the energy sector and overseas firms. Even in these areas, acceptances are down perhaps by a quarter. Regardless, this is probably a better use of talent. Finance, after all, should be an accessory for rather than the engine of wealth creation.

At least, that is, until the next time. MBA classes have a history of piling into expanding bubbles. The few that land banking jobs today will face less competition. When markets rebound, they will be well placed to profit handsomely. A new crop of young and ambitious students with short memories will notice - and a new race to Wall Street could be on.

The Party's Over: The Coming B-School Shakeout - Edward A. Snyder is the dean of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Click here for the article of BusinessWeek, April 2, 2009.

Globalization has fueled the good times for business schools. Since the 1980s, billions of people have joined the world's market-oriented economies, and massive improvements in the well-being of diverse societies have spiked demand to learn how to market products, become entrepreneurs, and lead organizations. When properly done, an MBA education provides deep insights into how organizations work and the nature of competition.

For business schools themselves, the good times have meant more money—tuition increases have exceeded inflation for each of the past 27 years. More students have gained entry into management education through a somewhat odd mix of schools, ranging from high-end universities deciding that they couldn't do without a business school to stand-alone entrants in hot spots around the world. The number of new business schools is so staggering that accreditation agencies have only a rough handle on the 10,000 schools now operating throughout the world.

Will the good times come to a screeching halt for management education? Yes. Partly because...

Driven by an ambition to be their own boss

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

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

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

Paul Danos yesterday on "Great Debate" of Reuters - A middle ground in the banking crisis

Click here for the article of Paul Danos on Reuters, March 11, 2009

"Paul Danos is the dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. The views expressed are his own" (Reuters Great Debate)

A major question in the government response to the banking crisis is choosing between the “evils” of nationalization of banks that would however provide stability, versus the “benefits” of saving of the private banks that would innovate and compete in a market system.

As the dean of the Tuck School of Business I’m privileged to speak with a wide range of economists, bankers, Wall Street executives and our own students, and what I’m interested in is finding an answer somewhere in the middle ground:

* First decide what major businesses absolutely need in banking services and then set up a ‘facility’ to assure that that those prime banking services will be available. This facility would initially be owned by the government but with an explicit goal of going to full private ownership as soon as feasible.

* Make that facility a separate legal entity from private banks.

* Let the private banks operate these “franchised” facility under close scrutiny.

* Have a process by which the private banks ultimately benefit from the operations of the ‘facility’ by having them acquire an increasing ownership in them.

* Though managed by private banks after absorption, the facilities would remain legally separate.

The trick is to be able to absorb the facility into the private banks after the crisis and not along the way destroy the private banking system as we know it, which means that the private banks must seen as benefiting from the scheme. To the extent that the facility does well, the banks would benefit in that they would have the ultimate ownership; and if the facility does poorly the government would have to absorb the losses, at least in the initial stages.

If the government did set up an initial $200 billion facility it could then be leveraged to say $2 trillion in loans. The “good” facility would be available to all companies for a limited list of transactions for the duration of the crisis, with say a minimum of five years. We could then let the markets settle the bad assets issues in the private banks. Some would fail and some would survive.

After the absorption of the facility the resulting private banks would have two parts, one highly regulated that would provide on-going assurances to the business community, and one relatively unregulated that would allow innovation and society would glean whatever benefits we are supposed to get from that kind of activity.

The government would over time get compensated by the investments made by the payment for the ownership of the facilities.

The 2009 Horizon Report - emerging technologies in Education

2009 Horizon Report website

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

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

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

Humboldtian Faculty and Mavens - Santiago Iniguez

www.SantiagoIniguez.com, Dean of IE Business School 

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.SantiagoIniguez.com, Dean of IE Business School 

Discussing Social Responsibility in Shanghai - Santiago Iniguez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top 20 slide show

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Deans convene in China to discuss the future of management education

Click here for the original Press Release from the Tuck website. September 12, 2008

CONTACT:  Kim Keating, 603-646-2733

Download Shanghai Roundtable Synopsis.pdf, 588 KB

HANOVER, N.H.—Deans from top international business schools recently gathered to discuss the current and future state of management education in China. The event was the latest in a series of roundtables held around the world and organized and moderated by Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and Santiago Iñiguez, dean of Instituto de Empressa. The assembly was hosted by Deans Weijiong Zhang and Rolf Cremer of CEIBS in Shanghai. Other deans in attendance were Leonard K. Cheng of HKUST Business School, Yu-Sheng Zheng of Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, and Xiongwen Lu of Fudan University.

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

Deans from more than 25 schools around the world, senior faculty members, business education reporters, education consultants, and professional development executives from top corporations have joined together for the five roundtable sessions held to date.

At the most recent roundtable in Shanghai, the deans spoke about a wide range of topics, including the demand for more faculty and PhD training, government regulations and funding of Chinese business schools, and student work experience prior to starting MBA programs.

During previous roundtables, the deans discussed the unique traits of each region's business education system, compared them with other international models, and discussed the impact of globalization on business schools. For example, in Germany the discussion focused on the Bologna Accord, which has established a model and standards for higher education in Europe. And in Brazil participants discussed how Brazilian schools differ from the U.S. and European models in their standards, curriculum, and degree of focus on faculty research.

Specific experiences and issues ranged from one region to the next, but all five discussions reported that globalization is influencing the curriculum and strategy of today's business schools. Particularly in Europe and China, deans reported that international political entities and NGOs are affecting business education through standards and accreditation. They also noted that market forces are bringing schools closer to corporate partners and highlighting the importance of faculty research. As prospective students consider schools across country borders, top schools must show that their faculty can compete not just within their region but also with schools from around the globe.

This roundtable series is one piece of Tuck's sustained international outreach in recent years, which includes initiatives for Europe, Latin America, and India as well as the Tuck Ambassador Program with representatives in 25 countries.

For more information on all roundtable discussions and conversation on business education, please visit www.deanstalk.net.

Founded in 1900, Tuck is the first graduate school of management in the country and consistently ranks among the top business schools worldwide. Tuck remains distinctive among the world's great business schools by combining human scale with global reach, rigorous coursework with experiences requiring teamwork, and valued traditions with innovation.

The Job Hunt Goes Mid-Market

Click here for the article of the Business Week, August 10, 2008.

...Boutique investment firms and middle-market banks, which typically handle transactions below $1 billion, are finding themselves in an enviable position this summer. As the big financial firms tighten the number of internships and job offers they are giving to MBA students, smaller firms that often get overlooked by MBAs during the job hunt are suddenly in demand. In response, many are increasing their hiring quotas and becoming increasingly selective about candidates they do decide to hire...

Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart

Click here for article of the New York Times

In his 12 years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, Barack Obama was both popular and enigmatic.

CHICAGO — The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship.

At a formal institution, Barack Obama was a loose presence, joking with students about their romantic prospects, using first names, referring to case law one moment and “The Godfather” the next. He was also an enigmatic one, often leaving fellow faculty members guessing about his precise views.

Mr. Obama, now the junior senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, spent 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. Most aspiring politicians do not dwell in the halls of academia, and few promising young legal thinkers toil in state legislatures. Mr. Obama planted a foot in each, splitting his weeks between an elite law school and the far less rarefied atmosphere of the Illinois Senate...

Business Schools Try Palm Scans To Finger Cheats

Click here for the article of the Wall Street Journal

In a sign of increasing concern about cheating, the nation's top business schools will soon require a high-tech identity check for standardized admissions tests.

Aspiring corporate executives taking the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, will have to undergo a "palm vein" scan, which takes an infrared picture of the blood coursing through their hands. The image -- which resembles a highway interchange in a major city -- is unique to every individual. The scans are used widely in Japan among users of automated teller machines but only recently have appeared in the U.S.

Yesterday Chronicle of H.Ed - Academic Ranking of World Universities, published annually by Shanghai Jiao Tong University online

Click here for the article of The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 7, 2008

The Academic Ranking of World Universities, published annually by China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University, has been posted online.

American institutions continue to dominate the top echelons of the influential list: 54 percent of the top 100 universities are in the United States, according to an analysis, with Harvard retaining the top spot, followed by Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.

The only three non-American universities in the top 20 are the University of Cambridge, at number four, the University of Oxford, at number 10, and Tokyo University, in the 19th spot.

Chinese universities continue to be outperformed by other Asian institutions in regional powerhouses like Japan, but have improved their showing since last year and now occupy 18 spots in the Top 100 Asia Pacific Universities.

The list is not due to be published officially until August 15, but the new compilation has already generated a flurry of headlines in France, where the highest-ranking institution, Université de Paris VI (Pierre et Marie Curie), comes in three places down from last year at number 42.

Education minister Valerie Pecresse used the relatively weak showing of French institutions to underscore the need for reforms championed by the government.

The French Senate last month “proposed developing a new European university ranking system to counter the powerful Shanghai world ranking, which is said to favor English-language institutions.”—Aisha Labi

Interview Questions from Left Field

Click here for the article from Business Week, June 22, 2008

Potential employers enjoy asking MBA applicants some off-the-wall questions. Here's how to not get rattled

It wasn't long into the meeting, however, before Borden was faced with a question unlike any other he had ever encountered in an interview: "If you could have any superpower, what would it be?"...

Big Paycheck or Service? Students Are Put to Test

Click here for the article of The New York Times, June 23, 2008.

A prominent education professor at Harvard has begun leading “reflection” seminars at three highly selective colleges, which he hopes will push undergraduates to think more deeply about the connection between their educations and aspirations.

The professor, Howard Gardner, hopes the seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

...I don’t think I would have applied if it wasn’t almost an automatic option,” said Neil Sawhney, 21, a recent graduate who turned down a management consulting job for a paralegal job, and plans to go to law school. “It’s hard to overstate how much everyone is doing it.” ...

A New Round of MBA Student Attitude Research - Aspen Insitute

Click here for reports and webpage of "Where Will They Lead? 2008" Aspen Institute

Aspen Institute's Center for Business Education has just released two research reports on MBA student attitudes about the role of business in society:    

The first surveyed 1943 students at 15 leading business schools in the U.S. , Canada and the U.K. Where Will They Lead? 2008 MBA Student Attitudes about Business & Society was released in April 2008.

 

The second surveyed 748 students attending leading business schools in China. Where Will They Lead? China 2008 MBA Student Attitudes about Business & Society was released in June, 2008.

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

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

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

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

Shanghai Daily.com - Roundtable of CEIBS faculty

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popular recent EDUCAUSE publications

Popular EDUCAUSE publications for the last 3 months.

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

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

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

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

Reading List for the Poolside MBA

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

• View Slide Show

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

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

Internet Gives M.B.A. Schools Global Reach

Article of Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2008

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

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

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

Article of Wall Street Journal

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

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

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

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

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

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

US Presidential Candidates Have Little Opportunity to Talk About Education

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

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

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

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

Hits and Misses - critique of Google Generation academia

Click here for Times Higher Education, 5 June 2008

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

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

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

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

UK university lectures on iTunes

Click here for article of BBC News, 3 June 2008

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

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

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

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

Business school deans discuss globalization's impact on education

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

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

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

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

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