DeansTalk - business management education

It's Time to Act on the Jobs Crisis - Prof. Thomas A. Kochan, Sloan bschool (MIT)

HBR blog network, March 16, 2012

...

Business schools have a special opportunity and responsibility to lead and facilitate the dialogues needed to achieve a Jobs Compact. Let's put to work what we teach MBAs about how to frame, facilitate, and "get to yes" in complex, multi-party negotiations by helping national and regional business, labor, and education leaders translate these options into actions that create good jobs and competitive enterprises. And let's put our advice to work by teaching all our MBAs and executives how to build sustainable organizations that work for investors, employees, and the economy. (To see what we're doing at the MIT Sloan School, follow this link.)

No individual firm can do this acting alone — power comes through strong industry and regional networks. Business leaders need to work together and with other industry and regional stakeholders to share knowledge, mobilize the resources and build the ecosystems they need to compete on the basis of innovation, high productivity, and good wages...

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center on American Competitiveness.

(Link above refers to this among others)

Toward a New Grand Bargain:
Collaborative Approaches to Labor-Management Reform in Massachusetts
Barry Bluestone, Thomas A. Kochan

Download PDF (44 pages) Learn more >>

In the face of continuing fiscal crisis, the governors of some states including Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Jersey have taken to attacking public sector unions using new legislation to undermine the collective bargaining rights of state and municipal employees. The reaction has been widespread protest and a growing rift between political leaders and civil servants. We believe this painful struggle can not only be avoided in Massachusetts, but that the continuing fiscal crisis facing the Commonwealth and its municipalities can provide the motivation for forging a fundamental change in public sector labor relations that not only could lead to more efficient and effective government service, but in the case our teachers’ unions, could play a critical role in improving public education and closing the achievement gap.

Learn more >>

Prof. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford - Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't (Book)

YouTube, Organizational Behavior Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer spoke about the role power plays and how sometimes hard work doesn't necessarily equal success. Book, On Amazon: "Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't"

Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs (Columbia University) - A World Bank for a New World + CEPR

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a professor at Columbia University, Director of its Earth Institute, and a special adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. His work focuses on economic development and international aid, was he was Director of the UN Millennium Project from 2002 to 2006. His books include The End of Poverty and Common Wealth.

(Previously on DeansTalk: February 2009, August 2011)

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Project Syndicate, A World Bank for a New World, 24 February, 2012

NEW YORK – The world is at a crossroads. Either the global community will join together to fight poverty, resource depletion, and climate change, or it will face a generation of resource wars, political instability, and environmental ruin.

The World Bank, if properly led, can play a key role in averting these threats and the risks that they imply. The global stakes are thus very high this spring as the Bank’s 187 member countries choose a new president to succeed Robert Zoellick, whose term ends in July...

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CEPR (Wikipedia) is the leading European research network in economics, and brings together 700 economists who produce applied theory and empirical work on a wide ...

CEPR Co-Director Welcomes Jeffrey Sachs' Reform Candidacy for World Bank President, March 1, 2012

Professor Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia bschool, "Brain-Drain Panic Returns — This Time to Africa"

Jagdish Bhagwati is a Chazen Advisor, Professor of Economics and Law at Columbia University, and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He recently edited, with Gordon Hanson, Skilled Migration Today.

(DeansTalk, 27 December, "In Defense of Globalization", book)

February 07, 2012

While developed countries are angst-ridden over mostly illegal immigration by unskilled workers from developing countries, a different set of concerns has surfaced in Africa, in particular, over the legal outflow of highly skilled people to developed countries. This outflow is supposedly a new and damaging “brain drain,” with rich countries actively luring away needed skills from poor countries.

This fear is misplaced...

The Solution

First, stop crying over the fact that the diaspora is not returning home. Instead, nurture the loyalty of professionals settling abroad, so that they assist their home countries in a variety of ways...

...

...when development has taken off, and conditions have improved sufficiently to attract people back to their homelands, the hugely increased diaspora would indeed return, as they have done in India, South Korea, and China.

Professor Dirk Vandewalle of Tuck, talks Arab future

The Dartmouth, Tuesday, February 14, 2012

While the Middle East will remain volatile for some time and reform movements are “far from done,” there is reason to be optimistic about the region’s future, government professor Dirk Vandewalle said in a lecture titled “The Middle East a Year Later: Business as Usual?” on Monday in Raether Hall at the Tuck School of Business.

Vandewalle’s lecture focused on the progress made by North African and Middle Eastern countries since the beginning of last year’s popular uprisings. As one of the world’s leading experts on Libya, Vandewalle gave his perspective on current events in the Middle East with a theme of “reasonable optimism.”

...

Vandewalle said he believes Syria will involve itself in the Middle Eastern situation within the next few weeks as a result of international pressure.

United Nations intervention over the past year has been in accordance with the Responsibility to Protect policy, adopted by the U.N. in 2005, which gives the international community the right to protect civilians of a sovereign state when the state does not or cannot do so, he said.

...

The lecture was co-sponsored by the Center for International Business and Tuck News.

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"mini-elective" course called "Doing Business in the Arab Gulf States."

"Building a better business school" - Financial Times

Financial Times, February 13, 2012

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According to Erik Schlie, who runs (Associate Dean of ) MBA programmes at Spain’s IE business school, learning from the mistakes of the past is essential.

The IE programmes encourage participants to “look at certain scandals of the past” in order for them to develop a “broader sense of responsibilities”. Ethics and corporate social responsibility are on the agenda everywhere, with an emphasis on reflective practise.

“I ask participants at the very beginning of the programme: ‘what kind of manager, what kind of person, do you want to be?’,” says Prof Schlie.

For many, this has meant a shift away from the traditional MBA path of a career in the not-so-sustainable financial services industry.

For the current generation, “there is more to care about than getting your next investment banking job,” says Prof Schlie, noting that more and more of his students are seeking careers in not-for-profits and social enterprises

...

At IE, Prof Schlie runs “change modules”, where students work with real businesses to help them improve their performance.

One of this year’s exercises is to help a Brazilian business, a beauty salon company catering for “base of the pyramid” consumers who live on less than $2-$3 a day. This example is emblematic of another theme in the business education of the future – globalisation.

“The future is more blended, more global,” notes Prof Schlie. Indeed, as well as offering international experience, most good MBA courses include a placement abroad.

Professor Valérie Gauthier - Ten Questions - FT

Financial Times, February 7, 2012

Valérie Gauthier is a visiting professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, which she joined last year. Before this appointment she worked for 22 years at HEC Paris where her most recent roles were associate professor and visions of leadership chair professor.

Prof Gauthier has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Paris III, Sorbonne and she has also completed an executive education programme in strategy and organisation at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 2010 she was selected as one of the visionaries for education by Forbes...

1. What does it mean to be a professor?

For me it means that I am at the crossroads of different populations and that I have a responsibility to bridge the gaps of knowledge, be it academic or simply that of the human self.

...

9. What inspires you?
The poets are my greatest source of inspiration. Poets breathe life into words and are the most receptive and sensitive to the world’s graces and disgraces. They are capable of intensity, vision and insights like no other. Poems are like miracles for those who don’t believe in miracles.

Stanford GSB Finance Expert: Federal Interpretation of Volcker Rule Would Lead to Constraints on U.S. Economic Growth and Recovery

January 17, 2012

Stanford Finance Expert: Federal Interpretation of Volcker Rule Would Lead to Constraints on U.S. Economic Growth and Recovery

Finance professor Darrell Duffie of the Stanford Graduate School of Business proposes alternative capital requirements for banks to eliminate potential unintended consequences of financial reform.

Dean Santiago Íñiguez - "New thinking" - FT

Article of the Financial Times, 30 January, 2012

It is almost obligatory for business schools to trumpet their love of ­innovation, but Spain’s IE has a better claim than many for trying fresh approaches to business education.

Established in 1973 in Madrid, and now ranked as one of Europe’s leading schools, IE was among the first to offer an executive MBA 20 years ago, and later spearheaded a move into online education.

The school’s international reputation now helps it attract about 2,000 students from more than 90 countries each year, and it has built an alumni network of more than 40,000 with links to 25 offices spread from India to Chile.

“When we ask our students why they chose IE, they often say it is entrepreneurialism first, and diversity second,” says Santiago Íñiguez de Onzoño, the dean. “We have one of the highest-diversity environments, not just in terms of the numbers of passports, but in terms of gender, culture and different visions of the world.”

These aims are well demonstrated by IE University’s cross-disciplinary ­approach to teaching law, architecture and business and by the combined executive MBA ­programme with Brown University in the US, which sees students take courses in social sciences, literature and philosophy...

uValue - The Corporate Valuation App

uValue (uValue Mobile, iOS 4.0+, Jan 20, 2012) is a corporate valuation app for the iPad (now also available in its fully functional form for the iPhone and iPod Touch). The app helps you value businesses using conceptually rigorous, yet practical, widely-used tools. You can value firms using  the ‘weighted average cost of capital’ (WACC, or 'cost of capital') approach, the ‘adjusted present value’ (APV) approach, the ‘dividend growth model’ (DGM), or real option valuation (ROV) techniques. The app also includes a set of handy calculators to value bonds, annuities and perpetuities, as well as to calculate the cost of capital, to forecast exchange rates, to lever/unlever betas, and so forth.

Aswath Damodaran is a professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business, New York University.

Anant Sundaram is a professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Professor Raghuram Rajan, U. Chicago bschool, video, on Risks to the Global Economy

Wikipedia Raghuram Rajan

27 January 2012

YouTube: Project Syndicate contributor and former IMF chief economist discusses risks to the global economy, and steps industrial countries can take to spur long-term growth. Read the article discussed, "A Crisis in Two Narratives," at http://bit.ly/yf15RL.

Professor Mauro Guillen of Wharton bschool - The remaking of Europe needed

Faculty page

Op Eds

Korea Times | 9 January 2012 | On the remaking of Europe

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The global economy needs a renewed commitment to free trade. It also needs the emerging economies to develop their domestic consumption markets faster, allowing their citizens to buy goods and services more freely.

Professor Thomas J. Sargent, of Economics, New York University - "United States then, Europe now"

Thomas J. Sargent delivered his Nobel Prize Lecture on 8 December 2011 at Aula Magna, Stockholm University. He was introduced by Professor Per Krusell, Chairman of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee. slides PDF.

 

YouTube, at 16mins30

Professor of Economics, David Blanchflower of Dartmouth (Tuck) on U.S. Economy, EU Crisis - video

Jan. 6, 2012 (Bloomberg) -- David Blanchflower, a professor at Dartmouth College and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor, talks about the U.S. economy, labor market ( wages) and Europe's sovereign debt crisis. He speaks with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance Midday." (Source: Bloomberg)

The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives - features Professor Sydney Finkelstein of Tuck

2 January, 2012, Forbes by Eric Jackson

Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, published “Why Smart Executives Fail” 8 years ago.

In it, he shared some of his research on what over 50 former high-flying companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – did to become complete failures. It turns out that the senior executives at the companies all had 7 Habits in common. Finkelstein calls them the Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives.

These traits can be found in the leaders of current failures like Research In Motion (RIMM), but they should be early-warning signs (cautionary tales) to currently unbeatable firms like Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Amazon.com (AMZN).  Here are the habits (PDF Ivey Business Journal), as Finkelstein described in a 2004 article:

Habit # 1:  They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment

Habit #2:  They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests

Habit #3:  They think they have all the answers

Habit #4:  They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them

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IE Businesss School Professor Fernandez Says Spain's De Guindos Is Focused on Growth

Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) on Washington Post -- Fernando Fernandez, a professor at IE Business School, discusses the challenges facing Luis de Guindos, Spain's new minister for economy and competition. He speaks from Madrid with Owen Thomas on Bloomberg Television's "On the Move." (Bloomberg)

"In Defense of Globalization", book by professor Jagdish Bhagwati (Columbia University)

On Amazon

Jagdish Bhagwati Wikipedia

Reviews (PDF, 7 pages)

In Defense of Globalization is an important contribution to an often incoherent debate. As we expect from Mr.Bhagwati, it is cogently argued and well written. It sets out a persuasive case in favour of globalization. And because of Mr. Bhagwati’s impeccable credentials, there is a better chance his book will be given a fair hearing than might be the case with some other authors. Put simply, Mr. Bhagwati has “street cred.”
Anne Krueger, The Financial Times

 

Why globalisation works—and how to make it work better, The Economist, Apr 29th 2004

"An outstandingly effective book.... Until further notice In Defense of Globalization becomes the standard general-interest reference, the intelligent layman's handbook, on global economic integration."

...As you might expect, given the thrust of the author's previous academic and policy work, Mr Bhagwati regards liberal trade—the principal driver of globalisation—as essential to raising the incomes and improving the longer-term development prospects of the world's poor.

IE Professor Lucy P. Marcus, conference "Future proofing the board" 2011, Thinkers50 Future Thinker Award

Which thinker has emerged over the last two years with the potential to change the world of theory and practice?  The answer to this question posed by Thinkers50 is Lucy P. Marcus, the Anglo-American board chair and non-executive director who challenges conventional wisdom both inside and out of the boardroom.

9 Dec EVENT: Future proofing the board was the topic of a dynamic debate hosted by IE Business School in London last Tuesday night. IE Dean Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño used the opening line of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities to aptly set the scene “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”.

Chaired by Professor Lucy Marcus, IE brought together a panel of opinion leaders to discuss the evolving role of the board and how boardroom agendas must adapt to our changing times.

Professor Marcus opened the discussion with reference to her belief that the role of modern corporate boards is the juxtaposition of traditional roles and strategic ‘stargazing’. Traditionally boards focus on finance, corporate governance, compliance, corporate risk, etc. Stargazing is where a board focuses on the organization’s strategy - is it robust, resilient and, as the panel put it, capable of responding to Donald Rumsfeld’s “known and unknown unknowns”?

300house.com - Professor Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck bschool - Inclusive Growth Is The Way Forward

www.300house.com

Faculty page of Professor Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck School of Business

Thinkers 50, 2011 Ranking: #3 and Winner: 2011 Breakthrough Idea Award

Businessworld, 03 Dec 2011

The next 50 years will be defined by two important trends - both favouring India. The world's population is about 7 billion, of which 5 billion are poor. Companies typically target the 2 billion rich. Over the next 50 years, the projection is that we will have 12 billion people, of which 10 billion will be poor. So, the biggest opportunity for corporations is to convert the poor into a consuming base, so that they become an even bigger opportunity over the next 50 years.

However, you need innovation to serve the poor. I recently wrote a piece on a $300 house for the poor. Once you construct a home, it becomes a reservoir for other products. Apple, for instance, does not sell a single iPhone to the poor. If you could make an iPhone for $5, there is a $25-billion market. Even for a giant like Apple, that's a big revenue opportunity.

The second big trend is sustainability. This planet cannot be sustained if the 5-billion poor turn into consumers...

Thinkers50 - Professors Vijay Govindarajan, Herminia Ibarra, Rita McGrath and Linda Hill - Studiotalk.tv

http://www.studiotalk.tv/show/business-leaders-live

Vijay Govindarajan, Herminia Ibarra, Rita McGrath and Linda Hill were live online on Tuesday 15th November.

The world’s leading business brains are gathering in London for the Thinkers50 Summit, a world-class management conference and awards celebrating the best and brightest global management thinkers...

Many of these pivotal ideas have been published by the Harvard Business Review Group and four of these leading thinkers are joining us in a special live webTV show to discuss how their ideas are impacting the business world are:

• Vijay Govindarajan, shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award for ‘ The $300 House’ – an idea he put forward in a 2010 blog that set off a campaign to re-invent housing for the world’s poorest people. Vijay coined the term ‘reverse innovation’ and his long-awaited new book on the subject publishes next year. VG is Professor at the Tuck School for Business, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

• Herminia Ibarra is shortlisted for the prestigious Thinkers50 Leadership award. The Cuban-born INSEAD professor made an impact with her 2003 book, Working Identity.  Now, her research asks: Are you a collaborative leader?

• Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath is an expert on strategic business growth in uncertain environments. Shortlisted for the T50 Strategy Award she is regarded as someone a CEO of a major corporation should turn to for practical and imaginative strategic advice. Her latest book is Discovery Driven Growth (with Ian MacMillan) which promises a breakthrough process to reduce risk and seize opportunities. DiscoveryDrivenGrowth.com

• Linda Hill is the author, with Kent Lineback of Thinkers50-shortlisted business book Being the Boss. She is also shortlisted in her own right for the T50 Leadership Award. Linda is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and her current research looks at leadership for innovation.

Can Italy Be Saved? - Michael Spence, Nobel laureate economics, Professor Economics, NYU Stern bschool

2011-11-21 Project Syndicate 

Via @ProSyn

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Dean, Emeritus, at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

Book - Theory of the Firm for Strategic Management - Manuel Becerra Professor IE Business School

Cambridge University Press

Strategic decisions deal with the long-term direction of the firm and its main activities, usually the responsibility of the top managers in an organization. Because the firm is the critical unit of analysis in strategy, we need to define what firms are, how they create value, and what their organizational boundaries are in order to understand their overall performance. However, this must be done in a manner that is most useful for strategic analysis and decision making. In other words, we need a theory of the firm for business strategy. Theory of the Firm for Strategic Management integrates and expands key existing theories, like transaction costs economics and the resource-based view, to develop a value-based theory of the firm. This provides a framework to show how firms can create value for customers and, at the same time, capture economic profits for their owners through business, corporate, international, and social strategies...

Who cares for society? - Filipe Santos, INSEAD’s Assoc Professor of Social Entrepreneurship

--- by Nicholas Bray --- Last updated: October 27, 2011

...“Social enterprises generate a process of innovation in society by addressing problems that are neglected by the other institutions in our society, mainly the governments and markets and to some extent the social charity sector”...

...But social entrepreneurship shouldn’t just be written off as a comfortable add-on to the activities of established profit-oriented companies. It’s a strategy for value creation in its own right and a phenomenon that is increasingly becoming a focus of academic research...

...“Regulatory frameworks tend to keep things apart and regulate separately (things) that actually social entrepreneurs blend,”...

Professor David Daokui Li (Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management) and Professor Yu Yongding

Professor Yu Yongding on Project Syndicate.

Yu Yongding, currently President of the China Society of World Economics, is a former member of the monetary policy committee of the Peoples' Bank of China and former Director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of World Economics and Politics.

 

 

Professor David Daokui Li on Wikipedia

David Daokui Li (Chinese: 李稻葵; pinyin: Lǐ Dàokúi) is a Chinese economist economist and the Director of the Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE) at the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management and is the Mansfield Freeman Professor of Economics. He currently teaches courses on economic transition, corporate finance, international economics, and China's economy....He is a member of the 1985 inaugural class of the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management (Tsinghua SEM)..

Li Daokui is a part of a trio to replace Fan Gang, as academic members to the central bank’s monetary policy committee (PBOC Monetary Policy Committee)...

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"China could play key role in EU rescue", Financial Times, October 27, 2011.

“It is in China’s long-term and intrinsic interest to help Europe because they are our biggest trading partner but the chief concern of the Chinese government is how to explain this decision to our own people,” said Professor Li.

“Any mis-steps in helping Europe could cause problems with domestic public opinion – the Chinese people will watch very carefully what their own government does,” Prof Yu said. “European leaders also must have a clear plan of what to do and they must show China they have the political will as well as the support of their own people; if we see protests and chaos all the time, then China won’t have confidence in Europe’s political ability.

Prof McClelland - "a moral force" - a tribute by Peter Moizer, dean of Leeds University Business School

Financial Times, October 24, 2011

...When he was asked earlier this year why he had worked so tirelessly to develop management education and to make a difference to business and society, Prof McClelland said simply that he had been fortunate enough to make a contribution...

...As founding director of Manchester Business School (MBS), Prof McClelland laid the foundations from which the school grew into the renowned establishment it is today, and of which I am proud to be an alumnus. As founding editor of the Journal of Management Studies (JMS), he established a title that, 50 years later, remains among the best in the world...

www.journalofmanagementstudies.com

’Flat’ World Will Take Time to Smooth Out: Professor Pankaj Ghemawat

Businessweek, October 24, 2011.

...No matter how you slice the numbers, the bulk of the flow of goods and services is domestic, not international, and will remain so for the foreseeable future...

...Understanding that the world is much less integrated than many believe, and that distances and differences still matter, provides breathing room to consider more calmly whether to continue pushing forward with globalization.

The simple answer is: We should...

...The world is not flat.

Solving the Health Care Cost Crisis - HBR - Porter & Kaplan - "optimism"

Costs vs. Outcomes "has never happened in healthcare"

HBR October 10, 2011

Michael Porter and Robert S. Kaplan, Harvard Business School professors and authors of the HBR article How to Solve the Cost Crisis in Health Care, explain why providers must start with proper measurement.

Professor Tom Byers of Stanford University - "Difference Between an Idea and an Opportunity"

udemy.com, Lecture 1 of 9

Tom Byers, professor at Stanford University and founder and a faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), stresses that "Entrepreneurs are not born, they are made". He discusses a framework that elaborates the difference between an idea and an opportunity.

Professor David Connell of Cambridge Judge Business School - Innovation funding myths: Why British gov and the EU should take a lead from the US re procurement based innovation

Via @CambridgeJBS, 13 September, 2011

Research by Cambridge Judge Business School's Centre for Business Research (CBR) explodes three major myths that have underpinned innovation policy thinking in the UK and elsewhere for decades and identifies the importance of 'lead customers' in the innovation process. CBR Senior Research Associate David Connell explains why the American Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programme is the model to follow...

Small Business Innovation Research (or SBIR) program on Wikipedia

is a United States Government program, coordinated by the Small Business Administration, in which 2.5% of the total extramural research budgets of all federal agencies with extramural research budgets in excess of $100 million are reserved for contracts or grants to small businesses. In 2010, that represented over $1Billion in research funds. Over half the awards are to firms with fewer than 25 people and a third to firms of fewer than 10. A fifth are minority or women-owned businesses. A quarter of the companies in FY10 were first-time winners

Book - Professor Lynda Gratton, London Business School - The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here

The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here

Paperback: 384 pages, HarperCollins UK (July 15, 2011)

Lynda Gratton is a professor at London Business School and the author of Hot Spots and Living Strategy. She has been hailed by the Times as one of the top 20 business thinkers in the world today, esteemed by the Economist for "leading the world's top 200 business minds to predict the future of work," and the Financial Times called her the business thinker most likely to make a real difference over the next decade.

Description: Lynda Gratton's groundbreaking book looks at the five forces that will fundamentally change the way we work in the next 10 to 15 years: globalization, society, demography, technology, and energy. It remains to be seen whether this will be a bad thing or a good thing. The invaluable advice that Lynda imparts, however, is that there are three key shifts that individuals can make to prepare themselves in this fast-moving world.

FT Soapbox - (Bschool) Financial models create a false sense of security

www.ft.com/soapbox

Financial models create a false sense of security, September 5, 2011

....Given the tremendous changes in financial systems, these theories must be scrutinised and then abandoned as models for the future. As business schools and institutions continue to preach these principles, they perpetuate a fundamentally flawed system of thinking. Now more than ever, it is as important to teach the flaws as it is to teach the basis that presents them.

Didier Cossin is professor of finance and governance at IMD, director of the IMD Global Board Center and programme director for High Performance Boards

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MBAs must learn to love the SME market

The current limitations of the job market means that business schools need to embrace a wider audience

• It really does pay to change jobs

Schools must adapt to the new Arab spirit

Western business schools can play an important role in helping to bring a more accountable, professional and responsible business culture to the region

• Gaddafi regime collapsing

Universities must embrace cultural change

While freedom of teaching and research must be defended, bridges for mutual transfers of knowledge and best practices have to be built

Good leaders have more than the right skills

Business schools must look at their actions not through the lens of their knowledge, but through that of the student experience

Bigger is better mantra can reap dividends

French schools can no longer rest on their laurels: if the ‘grandes écoles’ system is to survive and thrive it must adapt and make a virtue of its size

Leadership depends on keeping it real

In an ever more shifting world, having a baseline of values and beliefs will be crucial

...

Professor/Assoc Dean Matthew J. Slaughter of Tuck: The crucial connection between potholes and U.S. jobs

Read more: Article of www.Star-Telegram.com

...America's decaying infrastructure costs the typical American worker hundreds of hours in lost productivity. It also costs companies time and efficiency in moving their products around -- and also out of -- the country...

...Congress must pass comprehensive infrastructure legislation now to support America's competitiveness. In particular, Congress must ensure that sufficient funds are dedicated to this urgent issue. Americans stuck in Labor Day traffic understand this challenge of building infrastructure to build jobs...

Professors of Wharton propose ideas: "Labor Day 2011: Not Everyone Will Be Celebrating"

KnowledgeToday, September 2, 2012.

...Acknowledging the importance of jumpstarting the economy and getting people back to work, President Obama plans to lay out a jobs agenda in a speech to Congress on Thursday.

KnowledgeToday asked several Wharton professors to each propose one idea for getting people back to work.

Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources and professor of management: “The most successful government policy for encouraging jobs is hiring subsidies — programs where the government gives employers some kind of subsidy for each new hire they make, usually in the form of a tax break of some kind. There has been extensive research on these programs, especially in Europe where they have been popular, and they work better than anything else at promoting new jobs. They have been tried in various forms in the U.S., mainly to help disadvantaged workers get into the labor market, but they were also used after the 1991 recession to promote hiring. While the results have not been spectacular, they are better than any other option under consideration.”

Mauro Guillén, director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute and professor of management: “There are two types of unemployment — long-term and short-term. It is impossible to design effective policies that do not distinguish between the two...

Professor Robert J. Shiller of Economics at Yale - Reuters TV: "new" "bigger" "balanced budget stimulus"

Robert J. Shiller (Wikipedia entry): currently serves as the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University and is a Fellow at the Yale International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management

Yale's Shiller says new U.S. stimulus needed to create jobs, Thomson Reuters: Reuters Insider

Professor Gregg Fairbrothers (Tuck) - Book: "From Idea to Success"

Tuck News, August 23, 2011

Professor Gregg Fairbrothers, Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at the Tuck School of Business and Director of the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network (DEN) has published his first book, From Idea to Success, The Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Guide for Start-Ups with Dartmouth College graduate, Tessa Winter ’09. The book offers instruction and advice from hundreds of experienced entrepreneurs who have successfully launched businesses...

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (July 19, 2011)

“A guide that sets first-time entrepreneurs’ feet in the right direction.”
Geoffrey Moore, author, Crossing the Chasm (previously on DeansTalk)

Most Popular Profs at Top Business Schools - Businessweek - 1. Aswath Damodaran(Finance) of Stern

Louis Lavelle on August 12, 2011, (@louislavelle)

The most popular business school professors are good teachers, plain and simple. They’re not rock stars, CEOs or celebrity researchers. Their names may not look familiar. But they’ve earned a place in the hearts and minds of their students by bringing to life accounting, finance and management, learning their names and helping them find jobs. Their students come first and it shows.

To determine which professors at the Top 30 U.S. full-time MBA programs were most popular, Bloomberg Businessweek used surveys sent to 2010 graduates asking them to identify their two favorites. Professors were ranked in order of absolute popularity. In all, the responses of 3,732 students were used to calculate this ranking; only schools that had more than 60 student responses were counted. At least one in every five survey respondents from each of the schools listed wrote down these names chosen for our top ten list as their favorite professor—pretty amazing considering they had hundreds of faculty members to choose from. Read on after the jump for the list.

1. Aswath Damodaran
Finance professor at New York University Stern School of Business

A seven-time recipient of Stern's "Professor of the Year" award, Damodaran practices open-source teaching, posting almost all his class materials on his blog. He's also one of the few business school professors to have inspired a tribute video on Youtube; the video spoofs pop star Justin Bieber's Never Say Never movie trailer. In the 89-second clip, the handiwork of a student, Damodaran proclaims "I want to be the Lady Gaga of finance." He has more than 4,000 followers on Twitter.

2. Gautam Ahuja
Strategy professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business 

Ahuja ran a stoneware distribution business and designed educational board games while an undergraduate in his native India before enrolling at Ross in 1991 for his Ph.D., his MA and his MBA. He never left. The corporate strategy professor stresses the importance of integrity and generosity in his lectures - values he says were handed down from his mother and grandmother. Ahuja also oversees the school's chapter of Net Impact, a national organization dedicated to using the power of business to improve society and the environment.

3. Jim Nolen
Distinguished senior lecturer in corporate finance and entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business

Nolen has been on the faculty at his alma mater since 1980. In that time he has built up legions of fans. Former students describe him as a world-class storyteller (complete with a Texas accent) who brings his own experience as a small-business consultant to bear in lectures. Nolen's skills extend beyond the classroom: He "places more students than career services," says one former student, Q Beck.

4...

Professor Margaret Neale of Stanford GSB - Negotiation Strategy: Six Common Pitfalls to Avoid

stanfordknowledgebase August  8th, 2011

Whether you’re negotiating for your firm or for your position in it, you’ll do better if you avoid some common pitfalls.

Successful bargaining means looking for positives in every possible circumstance. “If I can trade off issues that I care about more and you care about less, then we’ve been able to create value in a transaction,” says Margaret Neale, professor of organizational behavior and director of two Stanford Business School executive education programs in negotiation. “That’s the silver lining.”

Sometimes negotiators fall into traps and leave resources on the table because they can’t see that silver lining. Some common pitfalls are:...

Assoc. Professor Alva Taylor of Tuck - "Different Roads to Innovation"

Tuck August 2011

For a brief moment during a recent day of volatile trading on Wall Street, Apple overtook Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company on the stock market. This was quite an accomplishment, considering Exxon’s giant global footprint in energy exploration, extraction and sales, and that Apple nearly went out of business in the mid-1990s. The turnaround that delivered Apple to the pinnacle of the technology business began in 1997, when Steven P. Jobs became CEO of the company he co-founded but was ousted from in 1985. How did the company’s ascendance come about?...

Associate Professor Nicholas Bloom of Stanford on the economy

Stanford News, August 10, 2011.

"Nobody knows what is going to happen next," says Nicholas Bloom.  One thing is sure:  "When people are uncertain about the future they wait and do nothing" – and that will lead to recession.

Professor Christina Romer(Berkeley) and Assoc. Dean Mathew Slaughter(Tuck) - calming market jitters (PBS video+transcript)

PBS Newshour, August 10, 2011

JUDY WOODRUFF: Today's plunge marked the fourth time in just over a week where the Dow Jones industrials have dropped by triple digits. Market volatility is at again near record levels.

We look at this and the larger picture with two people who have worked closely on economic policy. Christina Romer was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Obama until September 2010. She's a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. And Matthew Slaughter served on President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers from 2005 to 2007. He's now associate dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. And we thank you both for being with us.

Christina Romer, to you first.

The scary roller-coaster ride on the stock market continued again today. How do you explain it?

CHRISTINA ROMER, University of California at Berkley: Well, I think, obviously, one of the things about the stock market is it's very hard to explain the ups and downs...

Professors John Beshears(Stanford)+ Katherine Milkman(Wharton): When They Are Wrong, Analysts May Dig in Their Heels

Stanford GSB News, August 2011

Beshears and Katherine L. Milkman of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania looked at how so-called "escalation bias" affects analysts' forecasts. Their paper, "Do Sell-Side Stock Analysts Exhibit Escalation of Commitment?" (PDF, 39 pages) was published in March by the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

...

Beshears and Milkman studied the Institutional Brokers' Estimate System I/B/E/S database with more than 6,200 analysts' quarterly forecasts on about 3,500 companies over more than 18 years, from 1990 to 2008.

...

Among their specific findings:

• As analysts got more and more extreme, or "out-of-consensus," they became less and less responsive to the new earnings information when revising their full-year forecasts. 
• Stubbornness hurts forecasting accuracy. Revised full-year forecasts from extreme incorrect analysts were further off the mark from actual earnings than they would have been had the analysts' updating behavior been like the behavior of analysts who started at the consensus point.
• Analysts are punished for stubbornness. The more extreme, incorrect, and stubborn an analyst was, the less likely that he or she would rank among Institutional Investor magazine's "All-American" list of top analysts. 

Professor Nouriel Roubini of Stern(NYU) business school proposes solutions in the Financial Times + Goldman Sachs forecast

Financial Times: Last three paragraphs, of an online article of this evening, which will appear tomorrow in print.

...misguided decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the US...

...So can we avoid another severe recession? It might simply be mission impossible. The best bet is for those countries that have not lost market access – the US, UK, Japan, and Germany – to introduce new short-term fiscal stimulus while committing to medium-term fiscal austerity. The US downgrade will hasten demands for fiscal reduction, but America in particular should commit to look for significant cuts in the medium term, not an immediate fiscal drag that will worsen growth and deficits.

Most western central banks should also introduce further QE, even though its effect will be limited. The European Central Bank should not just stop rate hiking: it should cut rates to zero and make big purchases of government bonds to prevent Italy or Spain losing market access – the outcome of which would be a truly major crisis, requiring doubling (or tripling) of bail-out resources, or debt workouts and a eurozone break-up.

Finally, since this is a crisis of solvency as well as liquidity, orderly debt restructuring must begin. This means across the board reduction on the mortgage debt for the roughly half of America’s households that are underwater, and bail-ins for creditors of banks in distress. Greek-style coercive maturity extensions, at risk free rates, must also come for Portugal and Ireland, with Italy and Spain to follow if they lose market access. Another recession may not be preventable. But policy can stop a second depression. That is reason enough for swift and targeted action.

The writer is chairman of Roubini Global Economics, professor at the Stern School, NYU and co-author of Crisis Economics.

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Economics team at Goldman Sachs now say: "We now see a one-in-three risk of renewed recession".

Professor and entrepreneur William Sahlman of HBS - "Failure is not an option. It's a necessity"

big think, August 5, 2011

...A recent, large-scale study by William Sahlman, an advisor at several large venture capital firms and a Harvard Business School professor of Entrepreneurial Management, reveals that the failure rate of professional venture firms over the past 15 years has been around 60%, up from 35% in the 1980s.

Sahlman has written numerous articles on topics including entrepreneurial management, venture capital and private equity, deal structuring, and the role of entrepreneurship in the global economy. He has published over 150 case studies on entrepreneurial ventures around the world.

Sahlman is Senior Associate Dean for External Relations at Harvard University.

He was co-chair of the Entrepreneurial Management, Senior Associate Dean, Director of Publishing Activities, and chairman of the board for Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

Professor Raghuram Rajan of Finance at Chicago Booth GSB - "Washington and the Art of the Possible"

2011-08-04 www.project-syndicate.org

...In the meantime, US politicians might have done just about enough to convince debt markets that America’s credit is still good. For that, Americans – and others around the world – should stop pillorying them and give them their due credit.

Raghuram Rajan, a former chief economist of the IMF, is Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and author of Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, the Financial Times Business Book of the Year.

(previously mentioned on DeansTalk: 5/2/2011, 15/2/2009)

Profesor Simon Johnson of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan - "The stock market panic: Why now?"

CBS News, August 5, 2011  (also on the blog he set-up The Baseline Scenario)

...None of the current policy stances in the United States, Japan, or Europe is sustainable...

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MIT bio
Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management, a position he has held since 2004.

IMF bio
Economic Counsellor and Director, Research Department, IMF (March 2007-August 2008)

Simon Johnson was Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department (Chief Economist) at the IMF from March 2007-August 2008. Mr. Johnson was on leave from the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he was the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship. Mr. Johnson is an expert on the financial sector and economic crises. Over the past 20 years he has worked on crisis prevention and mitigation, as well as economic growth issues in advanced, emerging market, and developing countries. His work focuses on how policymakers can limit the impact of negative shocks and manage the risks faced by their countries. His PhD is in economics from MIT, while his MA is from the University of Manchester and his BA is from the University of Oxford.

Professor Luigi Zingales of Entrepreneurship & Finance at Chicago Booth GSB - "The Perverse Politics of Financial Crisis"

2011-07-25, www.project-syndicate.org

...if, for any reason, a country does end up in the danger zone, only two responses make economic sense. Either officials recognize immediately the inevitability of default and waste no resources trying to prevent it, or they believe that a default can be avoided and deploy all the resources at their disposal as fast as possible. As in many wars, a staged escalation in a financial crisis often leads to the worst possible outcome: a defeat with large losses....

Luigi Zingales is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and co-author, with Raghuram G. Rajan, of Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists (www.savingcapitalism.com).

Professor Jack M. Guttentag of Wharton (finance emeritus) - "Debt Default’s Game of Chicken"

Article of Wharton Today, July 29, 2011.

In a blog posted this week, Jack M. Guttentag, professor of finance emeritus at Wharton, warned of the consequences — both immediate and long-term — of a debt default by the federal government. Asked by Knowledge@Wharton what continues to be the single biggest obstacle to agreement on a plan to increase the debt ceiling, he responded — “an ideological gridlock between different political forces that may be playing a game of chicken to see which one is going to blink first to prevent a catastrophe. To put the country through this horror in the expectation that someone will blink and everything will come out all right is just unbelievably irresponsible.”...

“If a default had the horrendous consequences you describe, and these induce Congress and the Administration to agree finally on an increase in the debt ceiling, how long would it take financial markets to return to normal?”

Markets would never return to a state where U.S. Government obligations are viewed as riskless. We will pay for this loss of grace forever...

Professor Matt Slaughter of Tuck - "America is tempting a financial crisis of unknowable proportions"

Up Against the Debt Ceiling, July 2011.

If the United States defaults on the federal government’s debt, the consequences would be catastrophic. That was the central message in Tuck professor Matt Slaughter’s testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on July 7.

 

"A great divide holds back the relevance of economists" - The Great Debate (Reuters)

Reuters invited leading economists to reply to Mark Thoma’s Op-Ed (July 26, 2011) on the “great divide” in economics and will be publishing the responses. Here are responses from Ashwin Parameswaran, James Hamilton, Dean Baker, Lawrence Summers, and a recap of Paul Krugman’s.

"Economists Heal thyself", July 27, 2011, Response of Dean Roger Martin of Rotman business school (Toronto)

Professor Amrou Awaysheh (IE Business School) in the Financial Times

Article of the Financial Times, July 21, 2011.

Prof Awaysheh’s research focuses on how firms attempt to manage socially responsible practices in their operations and supply chains. He teaches operations management on the MBA programme at the school as well as an elective on corporate social responsibility.

He defines for the Financial Times: operations management, socially responsible practice, supply chain distance, supply chain power, supply chain transparency...