Friday, 30 December 2011
Thursday, 29 December 2011
MBA Journal: Early Morning Quiet
It’s 5 a.m., and I’m at my desk, drinking tea and reading cases. Well, technically, I’m writing a journal entry—but any other morning, this is where you’ll find me, bleary eyed but ready to go.
By 9 a.m., this early morning quiet will be gone. I’ll be at school, meeting with my team to debate and work through our assignments, followed by two or three classes, career club meetings, an informational interview or two squeezed in, and then usually a recruiting event to round out the evening. After all that: home, for more school-related work. Phew. I can’t remember who told me the toughest part of business school would be getting in, but I’d like to find him and have a few words.
Yes, I knew Duke’s Fuqua School of Business would be challenging, but I have always thought of myself as fairly resilient. Usually I can plan to do it all, and it all gets done. The past six weeks, however, have challenged that assumption: I really can’t do everything. Instead, I’m learning how to prioritize, shake off disappointments, celebrate small victories, and appreciate downtime, even if it is at 5 a.m. with a case study in hand.
Fuqua is on a six-week term schedule, meaning I finished six classes before the end of October, and I’m several weeks into my next four classes. The benefit of a term schedule is that I get to take almost twice as many classes than I would in a traditional semester program. Excellent. The drawback is I get to take twice as many finals. Much less excellent.
Fuqua’s core curriculum is intense. My first term was a quantitative sprint, including stats, econ, and accounting. First-year students complete almost all core classes in these two fall terms, which frees me up to take electives this spring. In the core, I’m learning things I didn’t know I didn’t know (you can actually calculate a learning curve), but I’m looking forward to homing in on my specific career interests in social entrepreneurship and strategy in the spring.
The classes themselves are great. Our first-year class is divided into six separate sections of about 70 students, and within those sections, we’re again divided into six- to seven-person teams, with whom we’ll work throughout the core. These small teams become the hub of the work done in the core curriculum and define much of your first-year experience. After hours of work together, my team has basically become an extension of my family. We’re quick to laugh, quick to argue, and no one bats an eye if I come to team meetings in sweatpants.
As I’ve mentioned, one of the major reasons I came to Fuqua was its outstanding focus on social entrepreneurship. Since arriving, I haven’t been disappointed; it seems that not a week goes by without a speaker, panel, or event aligning with my long-term career goals. In addition, I’m thrilled about all the opportunities to explore the intersection of business and the social sector outside the classroom. Through the Global Consulting Practicum, I’ll be consulting with a social enterprise venture in South Africa throughout the spring, and I’ve recently been selected to serve as a nonvoting board member of a local nonprofit organization through the Fuqua On Board program. These are the types of opportunities that helped define Fuqua to me in the application process, so it’s exciting to have been selected to participate.
In between journal entries, you can keep track of Susan’s business school adventures at the Business Schools Facebook page. Follow the Bloomberg Businessweek B-Schools team on Twitter.
Susan Shell is a first-year MBA student at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. During her life before business school, Shell managed strategic polling and focus group projects for nonprofits, public interest organizations, Democratic political campaigns, major corporations, and the media. Her goal, she says, is to use her MBA to make a difference in the world. As part of a choir she helped launched, Shell performed onstage for President Obama in 2009.Top B-School Stories of 2011
Degrees from top MBA programs like Wharton, above, retained their value in 2011, when placement rates returned to prerecession levels. At Wharton, 95 percent of MBAs had job offers three months after graduation, up from 87 percent in 2010, and the median starting salary increased to $120,000, an increase of $10,000.
By Alison Damast and Erin ZlomekFor business school students, 2011 was an eventful year, even if most major events represented the continuation of trends that have been developing for some time. The B-school job market continued its recovery, the cyclical nature of MBA admissions brought down applications to full-time programs, and both schools and students continued to struggle with financial problems that include higher tuition costs and reductions in state aid.
At the same time, students who might have considered careers in the B-school staples of consulting or investment banking began gravitating toward jobs in the nonprofit and education fields. Many more took matters into their own hands by launching startups.
What follows is a rundown of the 10 most important business school stories of 2011.
It’s no secret that earning an MBA will boost your salary and earning potential. It’s one of the main reasons people choose to pursue the degree. But how much is an MBA worth over the span of a 20-year career, and does school matter in terms of compensation? The answers are: an average of $2.4 million in base pay and bonuses—and yes, school matters. Based on data collected by PayScale, we discovered in June that grads from such top programs as Harvard, Chicago, and Wharton will make nearly $1 million more over the span of two decades than graduates of lesser-ranked programs will. Location and industry are the two main differentiating factors when it comes to pay, with schools that send the most grads into finance positions on Wall Street faring best. The top B-school for career earning: Harvard Business School, whose grads earned about $3.6 million over the 20-year period.
MBA Pay: The $3.6 Million Degree
Finance and consulting are no longer the careers synonymous with MBAs. Sure, both industries still grab large chunks of students, but their grip is lessening as jobs at start-ups, nonprofits, government agencies, and social-enterprise ventures rally in popularity. The shift is driven by students, says J. J. Cutler, who was Wharton’s deputy vice-dean for MBA admissions, financial aid, and career management when we spoke to him in April. “Part of this is a reaction to the financial crisis, part of it is a generational shift, part of it is that they are coming from much more diverse backgrounds,” he told us. Groupon, Zynga, and Teach For America are some of the employers attracting MBAs these days. And the student organization Net Impact reports that it has sent a stream of MBA talent to agencies such as the U.S. National Parks Service and the Chicago Public Schools system.
B-School Grads Snap Up Education Jobs
MBA Students Give Career Services a New Assignment
Philanthropy Gains Eager Followers in B-Schools
The past year may rank as one of the easiest in recent memory for getting into business programs, as many would-be applicants held off submitting applications because of lingering economic uncertainty. Two-year, full-time MBA programs were hit hardest, with two-thirds of them reporting decreases in applications for 2011, according to a survey published this fall by the Graduate Management Admission Council. The trend was seen at many of the nation’s leading MBA programs, with 21 of the top 30 full-time MBA programs reporting declines in application volume this year, compared with 2010, according to data collected by Bloomberg Businessweek. Applications sank at seven of the top 10 business schools, including Harvard and Chicago, but Stanford experienced the biggest dip in application volume—an 8 percent decline from 2010. Part-time and executive programs fared better; more than half reported that application volume was either up or flat, the GMAC report noted. Specialized master’s programs seem to have fared best, with a number of master’s programs in accounting, management, and finance reporting sizable increases in applications.
Wednesday, 28 December 2011
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Sunday, 25 December 2011
Saturday, 24 December 2011
Thursday, 22 December 2011
Making the Most of the Holiday Job Hunt
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
By Francesca Di MeglioForget the two front teeth. Some MBA students are singing, “All I want for Christmas is a job.” Second-year students have already completed on-campus recruiting, and those without offers must set off on an independent search. First-year students are gearing up for the internship recruiting that usually takes place beginning in January.
Although MBA students might be tempted to kick back and relax over the holiday break, they cannot afford such a luxury in this competitive job market, say career placement advisers. “The job search can take months,” says Cynthia Billington, associate director for MBA Career Education and Advising at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School. “Any time you stop the job search, it’s like starting over.”
In addition to feeling as though they have halted their search, students will fall behind the competition if they neglect to do anything over the break. “The biggest mistake students make is to just take three and a half weeks off,” says Jim Kranzusch, executive director of MBA Career Services at Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Management. “You have to be ready to go if you are a second-year without a job or a first-year anticipating on-campus recruiting for internships.”
Here are some tips on how MBA students who are asking Santa for work can maximize their efforts during the holidays:
While offices slow down during the holidays, they rarely shut down completely for more than a few days. Someone is always around. In fact, says business psychologist Stephen A. Laser, some people prefer to work when things are quieter. As a result, he adds, hiring managers are more likely to talk to you or take a look at your resume if you ask. “Often you can get through to them in a way you could not before the holidays,” he says.
Those who hire aren’t the only ones working during the holidays—and working isn’t all they’re doing. Alumni groups, professional organizations, and members of one’s network are hosting holiday parties and events that are ripe for networking. Find out about them, get on the guest list, and start schmoozing, says Billington. These events are a great way to get to know people in the student’s profession of choice, and they can be fun, she says.
Another tradition that can come in handy for those seeking work is the practice of sending holiday cards. Students can send greetings to everyone in their network with a brief update on where they stand in the job search and their hopes for the new year, followed by best wishes, suggests Jennifer E. Thomas, associate director of the Career Management Center at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.
Now that most students are on break from school, they can focus solely on the job hunt and prepare for the job application process. Second-year students who have not secured an offer should determine what went wrong in their interviews and practice for the next batch, says Kranzusch, who adds that first-years should prepare responses to the most commonly asked interview questions. All MBA students should take the time to update their resumes to reflect the projects, activities, and leadership experiences they picked up during the previous semester.
Resumes are not the only way to demonstrate accomplishments. Students should also work on better establishing their online presence in a professional manner, says Laser, the author of Out of Work and Over 40 (Xlibris, 2011), adding that virtual networking skills are more important than ever. Making sure LinkedIn profiles and online resumes are updated should also be a priority, Laser says. Resumes should be tailored to match the jobs they seek to fill, highlighting the skills mentioned in the job posts. Still, Laser warns that students should not handcuff themselves to their technology during the holiday break. “You can only do so much on the Internet,” says Laser. “The job hunt is still a face-to-face game.”
Foreign Enrollment Surges at U.S. B-Schools
A marketing course at USC’s Marshall School of Business, where a one-year international MBA program attracts a large number of Asian students.
By Alison DamastRenewed confidence and hopefulness is beginning to replace the hesitation and wariness that international applicants have felt the past few years when considering U.S. business schools. At the top 20 U.S. full-time MBA programs this fall, international enrollment is starting to inch back up to levels not seen since the economic downturn hit, according to data collected by Bloomberg Businessweek. Average international enrollment at those schools is now 33.4 percent, up from 30.2 percent at the height of the economic crisis, when visa and financing issues prevented many international applicants from enrolling.
“I don’t think the U.S. seems as unfriendly to international applicants anymore, which is great,” says Christine Sneva, director of admissions and financial aid at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, where international enrollment jumped from 22 percent in the 2009-10 school year to 34 percent this year. “It just seems like a certain level of optimism has returned for international students.”
It’s a shift in attitude that appears to be rippling throughout U.S. graduate business programs, according to a report released this fall by the Council of Graduate Schools, a Washington (D.C.) group that represents more than 500 universities. In the past few years, U.S. business schools have been facing increased competition for top foreign students from European, Canadian, and Asian schools, but the tide may be turning. This fall, the largest increase in total international graduate enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities occurred in business, which had a 6 percent gain following no growth in 2010, the report showed. That surge was the largest increase in enrollment in the graduate business school sector since 2007, says Nathan Bell, the council’s director of research and policy analysis. Graduate business enrollment for the 2011 incoming class grew even more, he notes, rising 9 percent, up from a 2 percent increase the year before.
One reason schools are seeing more foreign applicants could be that the student F-1 visa approval rate has gone up, thanks to a push by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the past two years to get more students to come study in the U.S., says David Ware, an immigration law attorney. In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2010, the most recent information available, 385,210 F-1 student visas were issued, up from 331,208 the previous year, a 16 percent increase, according to State Dept. data.
“I think we are beginning to win a lot of these students back. For many of them, their first choice was the U.S., and they were only going to the U.K. or Canada as a second choice,” Ware says. “Now that visas are more readily available, that definitely would have a relationship to the uptick.”
China, one of the top three countries sending graduate students to the U.S., is responsible for much of the surge in enrollment in U.S. graduate schools. Total first-time enrollment from China in all graduate programs was up 21 percent this year, its sixth consecutive year of double-digit increases, according to the Council of Graduate Schools report. Not surprisingly, 39 percent of two-year, full-time MBA programs in 2011 reported that China was their largest increasing source of foreign applicants, according to data from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), the Reston (Va.) group that administers the GMAT test for business-school applicants. Women from China, Taiwan, and Vietnam are driving much of the increase and currently outnumber men in East Asia taking the GMAT exam.
Many of these students are coming to the U.S. to get their MBAs, hoping to return to their home countries and fast-track their careers at a multinational company, says Shantanu Dutta, vice-dean for graduate programs at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. The school offers a one-year international MBA program in which 75 percent of the students hail from Asia, he says. “These countries are becoming wealthier, and more students than ever can now can afford to come to the U.S.,” Dutta says. “They are more confident about the economy back home, and there is a lot of high energy and enthusiasm.”
MBA Journal: B-School MythBuster
Having now spent two months at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, I’ve realized that the bulk of my expectations about business school life have been disproven by my experience. So I thought I would share a few of my initial misconceptions as well as provide some insight into the shift in my thinking.
Misconception No. 1: The touchy-feely stuff is a waste of time
While I consider group dynamics to be an important component of a team’s success, my experience has been that exercises designed solely for the purposes of team-building have typically tended toward the silly and redundant. Of course, given the value placed on these sorts of activities in the business world, I nonetheless expected them to be part of any full-time MBA program. Knowing they were merely a set of necessary hurdles I would have to overcome to receive my degree, I planned to grit my teeth and participate.
Still, there were limits to what I was willing to do, and climbing a utility pole was definitely out of the question … or so I thought. Being fully aware that a ropes course was pretty low on the danger scale did not make the idea of being suspended in the air any less terrifying. Yet, despite my resolve to avoid the “high elements” of the ropes course at all costs, I found myself by the end of the day literally climbing outside my comfort zone.
My teammates and I were all meant to cheer on one another, but given that I hardly knew the majority of the people in my group, I was not anticipating anyone challenging my decision to skip out on the day’s activities. I was wrong. My classmates were anxious for me to join them and refused to stop pestering me, until I finally agreed at least to get dressed in proper climbing gear and attempt the initial rung of the course.
Once I began to climb, I faltered on several occasions. Ultimately, I made it to the top rung. I was incredibly frightened, but as I listened to my classmates cheering for me at the top of their lungs, I felt the least I could do was respond to the exceptional level of encouragement I was receiving by attempting to be as strong as they seemed to believe I was.
In spite of the misgivings I had experienced going into the day, making it to the top of that utility pole meant something to me. It reminded me that I am braver than I give myself credit for and made me feel supported in such a way that I felt nearly invincible. Far from being pointless, the team-building exercise for which I had felt such disdain helped me enter the academic year more confident and closer to my classmates.
Misconception No. 2: I know what I want to do after business school.
When I applied to business school, I was sure I wanted to work in a brand consultancy after I earned my MBA. Then, after sending in my applications, I started learning about the stock market and even made some small investments. Wouldn’t you know? The financial markets turned out to be fascinating, and my future became newly illuminated. I needed to pursue a career in investment management.
Despite my legitimate talent for stock picking, it turned out that investment management required a really strong math background. While intuition and industry knowledge were both helpful, understanding the numbers seemed to be even more important. As there are very few investment management jobs for new MBA graduates, the likelihood that I, who had a liberal arts background, would score such an opportunity appeared to be quite low.
MBA Journal: Spanish Steps to the Future
Exactly a year ago, I struggled to find a free moment to sit down and reflect on my first semester at London Business School. Often, after a long day of classes and commitments, I found I wasn’t able to put pen to paper until the wee hours of the morning. I now find myself staring at a blank computer screen, trying to figure out how best to describe the stark contrast between then and now.
Nearly finished with the first term of my second year, I’m watching my time as an MBA student slip through my fingers. Gone are the endless days of back-to-back lectures, practical sessions, group meetings, speaker events, and presentations. Gone are the studying-induced sleep deprivation, the endless pages of reading, and the constant struggle to stay on top of it all.
That’s not to say that the second year is completely carefree; it’s just a different experience. I once said that the first year of business school was a lesson in opportunity costs—that there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. The second year then, seems to be a lesson in choices. With only a few remaining credits, which classes should I choose? How involved should I continue to be in the clubs? And, perhaps most importantly, what should I do with my life after graduation?
I have chosen to ruminate over these decisions from the beautiful Catalan city of Barcelona. No, I haven’t gone AWOL; I’ve gone IESE. Like nearly one-third of my classmates, I’ve chosen to take advantage of LBS’s international exchange program to spend a semester at a top-tier business school in another country. With 33 partner schools, ranging from Columbia and Wharton in the U.S., to CEIBS in China, to ISB in India, the international exchange program offers the opportunity to try the competition’s shoes on for size.
Applying to IESE for the exchange semester was an easy choice. With 80 percent international students, the school is known for its diversity, a quality I value immensely at LBS and one I wanted my education to maintain during my exchange. Furthermore, for a change of pace from LBS, I wanted to experience IESE’s teaching model, based entirely on the case method. I also applied and considered attending IESE as a full-time student; although I chose to matriculate at LBS full time, the exchange program was a perfect opportunity to get the best of both worlds. Furthermore, who can really complain about spending 100 days enjoying the beach, tapas, and the sun (something you don’t see much in London at this time of year)?
During my term here at IESE, I’ve been fortunate enough to get my choice of electives. A refreshingly new and interesting mix of courses (Marketing of Experiences, Innovation & the Media, Cross-Cultural Management, and Management in the Service Sector) have replaced the staid and stuffy core requirements of yesteryear (Corporate Finance, Financial Accounting, etc.). My schedule also allows me plenty of time to enjoy the city and culture of Barcelona and to think more deeply about my future. On Mondays, I have an eight-hour gap between classes. When I’m not catching up on reading, I can use that time to stroll through the city’s amazing neighborhoods or to jog along a trail up on the Tibidabo ridge, which offers 180-degree views of the city below. Gaudi and his architectural legacy have proven perfect conspirators for extended periods of rumination. It’s easy to get lost in the shapes and curves of the dozen or so “Easter eggs” he has hidden around this city.
Maybe the program is designed for this express purpose: Inundate students with a barrage of requirements, standards, and obligations in the first year. Then slowly remove pieces of the time-crunch puzzle, one by one, until you are left with a window of pensive reflection in the second year. What will I be doing this time next year?
Join the discussion on the Bloomberg Businessweek Business School Forum, visit us on Facebook, and follow @BWbschools on Twitter.A desire to create a more diverse network led Hensel, whose contacts are heavy with entrepreneurs and lack brand name appeal, to business school. Having worked as a senior marketing manager for the online travel company NileGuide.com before business school, Hensel says she would like to stay in online marketing in a more established company after graduation. To accomplish this, Hensel headed to London Business School (London Full-Time MBA Profile) in 2010.Business School Entrepreneurs
For years, business schools have been working as a silent partner in hundreds, if not thousands, of new business ventures dreamt up by students. Without the assistance of professors, administrators, alumni, and fellow students, most of the concepts would never have made it past the idea phase. What follows are profiles of some of those businesses, the individuals behind them, and what the schools did to help.
Photographer: Adam Friedberg/Getty Images
B-School Startups: Subletting with iCircl
By Sommer Saadi A fully furnished one-bedroom apartment in midtown Manhattan is available for rent for the week between Christmas and the New Year. It’s within walking distance of Times Square, stocked with a washer and dryer, and costs $200 a day—less than half the nightly rate at most hotels in that part of the city. You wouldn’t know about it unless you attend or have attended one of a few dozen universities.
That’s because the apartment is listed on iCircl.com, a website launched in April by Jaime Contreras and Tal Snir, two MIT Sloan MBA grads. The site is dedicated to easing the process of short-term leasing for college students and grads.
Much as in the early days of Facebook, only those with an e-mail address that includes an ‘.edu’ extension can register, create profiles, and post details on property listings that can be filtered by city and date listed. Members interested in subletting properties for a weekend, short break, or entire semester can reach out directly to hosts that post rental properties. Before asking or answering any questions, both property owner and interested renter know they have one thing in common: college attendance. “That key characteristic builds a certain level of trust,” co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Contreras explains. “That trust is crucial to the community we aim to build and is what makes this site different.”
As part of a second-year marketing course at Sloan, Contreras, 33, and Snir, 30, conducted surveys revealing that only 15 percent of respondents felt comfortable subletting their homes to strangers, while 75 percent said they felt comfortable subletting to someone they had something in common with … such as enrollment at a university. A certain level of confidence is crucial with short-term lending because leasers have to contemplate who they want around their belongings and who they want knowing they’ll be out of town, Snir says.
Contreras came up with the idea for iCircl last fall, as he was beginning his second year at MIT. A year earlier, he had started a small car rental service, using his own 2003 Toyota RAV4, and charging interested friends and colleagues $5 an hour or $40 a day to borrow it. After having succeeded with the car service, and having watched his friends travel a lot for job interviews and graduate school visits, he decided to try to connect the demand for safe, convenient, short-term apartment sublets with their supply.
Over coffee early in November, Contreras suggested the idea to friend and classmate Snir. “By that point I already had about 30 friends asking me to ask other friends if they needed a place or knew of a place to stay,” Contreras says. “There was clearly a market.” Snir loved the idea.
By February 2011, they had added two people to help develop the website. On Apr. 24 they launched the initial version, which was open to business students at seven top-tier programs, including Harvard Business School and Chicago Booth. To spread the word, the duo recruited a group of student ambassadors at each school. Costs were kept to a minimum so the operation could fund itself.
In one month iCircl accumulated nearly 2,000 registered users and more than 300 property listings, of which more than 33 percent secured a renter. Since then, Contreras and Snir have opened access to all students at 30 schools across the country.
Starting the company during their last semester at Sloan meant that Contreras and Snir were able to utilize classroom lessons and professors as they worked out details for the site. Associate professor of marketing Catherine Tucker provided crucial guidance as they conducted the research (helped by MIT undergrads who polled the masses) that proved their hypothesis about the importance of trust when building an online community.
B-School Deans: Big Hopes for 2012 and Beyond
Kellogg Dean Sally Blount says business schools must inspire students to think “deeply, creatively, and boldly” about global problems.
By Francesca Di MeglioEducators love a clean slate, free of chalk dust and open to new possibilities. That’s exactly what a new year brings, the opportunity to write your own destiny on that fresh blackboard. For the past two years, Bloomberg Businessweek has asked deans at top business schools about their resolutions for the year to come—for their schools, their students, and the world of management education. In 2012 they are aiming to produce more thoughtful and present leaders. Their goals go beyond the here and now; they are looking well into the future at the kinds of managers and businesspeople their schools will be producing. Ultimately they want better for the world, and constant improvement is what they say they need to achieve that.
For starters, some educators think traditional teaching methods can be stale and should be reconsidered. They want business schools to take more risks and produce graduates capable of confronting the world’s problems. “Looking ahead to 2012, it is critical for management education to inspire students, the next generation of business leaders, to think deeply, creatively, and boldly about solving the complex, large-scale problems facing our global society,” writes Sally Blount, dean of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, in an e-mail. “As educators, this means we must push boundaries in how we approach teaching and research. We must go beyond what has worked in the past to meet the current needs of this dynamic, vibrant planet of 7 billion people.”
Choosing a method of teaching is important. Determining what kinds of lessons you will teach is extra important. And the global financial crisis has put pressure on business schools to instill a greater sense of responsibility in their graduates. “Business leaders must master the ability to recognize the connections between their own actions and those of their organizations and industries in a global context,” writes Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, in an e-mail. “Now more than ever before, they must also take into account the social impact of their decisions. Management education will play a critical role in teaching the next generation of business leaders to ‘connect the dots’ in making informed decisions that encompass both cross-functional expertise and social responsibility.”
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, for example, is revamping its curriculum and will implement the changes in 2012. With increased focus on ethical and legal responsibility, oral and written communication, and self-analysis, the school is also going to provide recent graduates with ongoing executive education to encourage lifelong learning. The intent is to make sure the future is bright for individual students and business as a whole.
“The purpose of management education is to prepare the next generation of leaders. That means we have to focus not just on the needs of our students now, but also on their future needs,” writes Wharton’s dean, Thomas S. Robertson, in an e-mail. “Wharton’s new MBA curriculum design, which emphasizes continuous innovation, keeps this in mind. Our faculty and staff are hard at work to ensure that the implementation [of the curriculum] goes smoothly.”
To prepare students for the future, business schools need to consider what is happening in classrooms in the present. Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, says business schools must vow to improve on the delivery of core knowledge and skills, encourage principled leadership, provide students with access to great minds, and integrate global and social leadership ideas into their teaching. Specifically he calls for the following resolutions to address these issues: “continuously improve the rigor, breadth of coverage, and integration of the core; continuously create team involvement, feedback loops, and counseling to aid students in perfecting their own personal leadership plans; find ways for students to probe the knowledge creation and evaluation processes of the leading faculty thinkers and to create their own approach to knowledge evaluation; and create programs that inspire students to embrace the responsibilities that will be offered to them in their careers, to realize that they are best prepared to contribute to the lives of the diverse constituents in whose interest they will lead organizations.”
Friday, 9 December 2011
Kitchit: Take Home a Top Chef
Hilary Luros of Palo Alto used Kitchit to find chef Kirsten Goldberg, a veteran of New York's Babbo, for her dinner party in early December Gabriela Hasbun for Bloomberg Businessweek
By Douglas MacMillanStanford alumnus Christopher Kim wanted to go big for his tailgate party before the annual football game against archrival University of California at Berkeley in November. He hired a private chef, who arrived at Stanford’s campus on game day with baked beans, potato salad, corn bread, and a 56-pound pig he’d smoked for six hours the night before. The feast was a hit with the 52 Cardinal fans who showed up, each contributing about $25. “Most of the people didn’t go into the game,” says Kim. “The food was the attraction.”
Kim found the chef and placed the unusual order for a tailgate pig roast on Kitchit, a new website that connects picky diners and party planners with cooks. Visitors to the site choose from a selection of chefs in their area‚ ranging from freelance spice-rub specialists to master chefs at Michelin star-rated restaurants, and provide the location, date, number of guests, and how much they would like to pay. A chef who agrees to the details does the shopping and prep work and shows up ready to cook, serve, and clean. Kitchit takes a cut of 10 percent to 20 percent of the price.
The idea for Kitchit came from three Stanford students in 2010 as they entered their last year at school. “We wanted to help people with dinner parties in the home and take the pain out of finding what you are going to cook, how much time you have, and what the best sources for all these different ingredients are,” says Brendan Marshall, who, along with fellow MBA student Ian Ferguson and computer science grad student George Tang, explored creating a smart shopping-list website. Then it hit them: “Chefs have the answers to all these questions,” says Marshall. “We can bring chefs to these people.”
Kitchit opened for business this fall, offering more than 20 chefs in the San Francisco Bay area for personalized dinners, cocktail parties, and cooking lessons. The cost typically runs from $25 a person for large events with basic menus to as much as $200 a person for six-course meals including linens, flower arrangements, and wine pairings. Over the next year the company plans to expand to New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, and Boston
“Catering businesses are scattered around the Internet, and you have no idea if the service is going to be good or bad,” says Karla Gallardo, a happy customer in San Francisco who used Kitchit to host an Argentine-style asada dinner for her boyfriend’s birthday in November. The site let her browse the user reviews and background of the chef she chose, Danny Guerrini, and message him to make sure he could prepare the meal without using pork. “Everything is customized for you,” says Gallardo.
Chefs say Kitchit takes the extra work out of finding and coordinating with customers. “My least favorite part [of being a chef] is getting clients and talking yourself up,” says Kirsten Goldberg, a veteran of Mario Batali’s Babbo restaurant in New York. She’s booked nine Kitchit dinners and cooking lessons in the past two months, and Goldberg says the Web service has let her “just focus on the food and the cooking.” The site also handles billing and provides chefs with a calendar to keep track of engagements. Some chefs are such big fans that they’ve requested business cards and chef coats with Kitchit logos. “They really believe the platform has something for them in the long term,” says Kitchit’s Tang. “It’s not just a place for them to get business, it’s a place to do business.”
These are early days for the trio behind Kitchit. Ferguson and Marshall graduated in June and, with Tang, raised their first round of funding from investors including Crosslink Capital and 500 Startups in August. But the site is picking up steam. “We have gotten unsolicited requests from chefs in geographies you wouldn’t expect,” such as Louisville and Charlotte, says Ferguson. Will Kitchit accommodate bespoke meals in such far-flung locales? “Once we’re at scale, there’s no reason we couldn’t,” he says.
The bottom line: Kitchit plans to bring its chef-matching service to New York, Los Angeles, and other cities in 2012.
MacMillan is a reporter for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco.Thursday, 8 December 2011
Master's of Spin: PR Belongs in B-School
Not a week passes without headlines that excoriate some corporate executive for mishandling an operational crisis that has mushroomed into a public relations disaster. Despite impeccable credentials and accomplished careers, many chief executives find themselves looking foolish after responding obtusely to common and inevitable threats to their companies' reputations.
From Warren Buffet attempting to explain away insider trading at Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/A) to Tony Hayward, formerly of BP (BP), complaining about getting his life back, the litany of gaffes certainly changes public perceptions and corporate reputation—along with company valuations and career trajectories. Why then, aren't even the highest-ranked MBA programs doing better at preparing graduates for eventual responsibilities in reputation management?
An analysis of highly ranked MBA programs by the Public Relations Society of America showed that only 16 percent offer a single course in crisis and conflict management, strategic communications, public relations, or whatever label one chooses to describe management of a precious organizational asset: reputation. Even that course is likely to be an elective. So glaring is this omission that it's typical for MBA-holding executives to assume "reputation management" or "public relations" is the black art of spinning an alternative version of reality, as though that works in today's wide-open, relentlessly scrutinized, electron-speed information environment.
One can't blame organizational leaders for not understanding that the way they operate the business is inseparable from the way they communicate about the business, inside and outside the organization. They're not educated sufficiently to know these are inextricably linked leadership requirements: You can't have effective leadership without an effective communications strategy. The latter is based on authenticity and transparency because nothing else works.
The delusional separation that exists between what companies do and what they say is not examined in most MBA programs. Yet we wonder why so many company stakeholders—customers, shareowners, government officials, activist groups, community residents, employees, the news media, and so forth—don't trust businesses.
Trust in companies and their leaders has never been lower. Peter Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group (BX), noted: "What matters is what the public thinks and the public trust is what's really crashed." Yet the course content that would directly address building trust, including ethics and communications strategies, is commonly absent or marginalized in MBA programs.
Ignoring the worth of reputation management is an entrenched academic tradition at most business schools, despite compelling reasons for change. Why? "Reputation" and "communication" are the soft stuff, referred to derisively in an environment where spreadsheets rule and financial measures take precedence over less immediate, nonfinancial indicators such as trust, despite the obvious connection between the latter and sustainable financial performance.
Higher education's rigid organizational silos separate the variety of academic disciplines needed to deliver even a primer on the related topics of ethics, social responsibility, reputation management, public affairs, interpersonal dynamics and organizational behavior. Therefore, typical MBA graduates have paid scant or no attention to their future responsibilities in forging and defending organizational reputation.
Public Relations: Coming to a B-School Near You
Public relations is a topic that has long been a lonely stepchild in most MBA curricula, touched upon briefly, if at all, in soft-skills classes that teach writing and communication. That may soon change, thanks to a push by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), the largest industry group for public relations professions, which is trying to get business schools to take a more serious approach to teaching MBA students the art of corporate communication and reputation management.
It’s a skill that is sorely lacking, according to a new study the PRSA commissioned earlier this fall of senior U.S. business leaders. Of the 204 respondents, 98 percent said they believe that business schools need to incorporate instruction on these topics into the MBA curriculum, and 94 percent believe that top management needs additional training in core communication disciplines. Only 40 percent of the executives surveyed rated their recent MBA hires as “extremely strong” at responding to crisis and building and protecting company credibility.
One of the first efforts to encourage business schools to start thinking more about corporate reputation management and strategic communication will commence in the 2012-13 school year, when five business schools will participate in a pilot program spearheaded by the PRSA. Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business will be one of the five schools participating; the other four schools have not yet been named, the PRSA said. Paul Argenti, a Tuck professor and author of the textbook Corporate Communication, is developing the curriculum for the pilot, which can be adapted for full-semester, mini-semester, or seminar-format courses. The class will include lessons on communication strategy, media relations, international corporate responsibility, reputation management, and investor relations. In addition, students will be asked to participate in crisis communication simulation exercises and review case studies on the topic. The hope is that all the leading business schools will incorporate this class, in some format, into their curricula in the 2013-14 academic year, the PRSA said.
Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Alison Damast recently spoke with Argenti about his role in developing the new curriculum and why he believes it is important for MBA students to have a background in this area. Here is an edited transcript of their conversation:
What is the business school world’s current approach to teaching public relations and reputation management skills?
Most business schools have some basic communications training, maybe a writing or speaking class, but I think Tuck is the only school that has had a required class on this subject for 30 years. When I came to Tuck in 1981, I was hired to teach its first corporate communications class, so I put together a required course in communications and the school has been doing it ever since. We survey MBAs asking them which courses they think are the most important, and they say the corporate communications class is No. 1 or No. 2 in what they use on the job when they graduate. The course has included for many years writing, speaking, and corporate and cross-cultural communications. This year we’re adding a whole host of other topics, from negotiations to reputation management. For example, we’ll have a session where students learn to prepare for testimony before Congress, and a guy who teaches acting at the college will be doing a session on personal presence. The gut of the class is being able to think strategically about basic communication strategy. This area has become critical for business leaders, CEOs, functional heads, and other people, but they know so little about it and there is nowhere they can learn this material.
Why did you decide to get involved with the PRSA on this effort to promote better corporate communication skills among MBA students, and do you think this pilot will succeed?
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Barbie: Princess Charm School
Barbie stars as Blair Willows, a kind-hearted girl who is chosen to attend Princess Charm School, a magical, modern place that teaches dancing, how to have tea parties and proper princess manners. Blair loves her classes, as well as the helpful magical spirits and her new friends, Princesses Hadley and Delancy. But when royal teacher Dame Devin discovers that Blair looks a lot like the kingdom's missing princess, she turns Blair's world upside down to stop her from claiming the throne. Now, Blair, Hadley and Delancy must find an enchanted crown to prove Blair's true identity in this charming and magic princess story. Price:
School Daze
Barbie stars as Blair Willows, a kind-hearted girl who is chosen to attend Princess Charm School, a magical, modern place that teaches dancing, how to have tea parties and proper princess manners. Blair loves her classes, as well as the helpful magical spirits and her new friends, Princesses Hadley and Delancy. But when royal teacher Dame Devin discovers that Blair looks a lot like the kingdom's missing princess, she turns Blair's world upside down to stop her from claiming the throne. Now, Blair, Hadley and Delancy must find an enchanted crown to prove Blair's true identity in this charming and magic princess story. Price:
Tuesday, 6 December 2011
MBAs Lend Their Skills to Nonprofit Boards
By Alison Damast Ryan Bell first became passionate about helping young children while serving as a major in the army in Iraq, helping local Iraqis rebuild bombed-out schools, obtain textbooks, and get windows and electricity for their new buildings. When he arrived at Columbia Business School in the fall of 2010 for orientation, he wanted to continue his work with youth, a goal made attainable when he was accepted to Columbia’s Nonprofit Board Leadership Program, which pairs 30 MBA students each year with a local nonprofit board in the New York area.
Bell was assigned to serve on the board of Friends of the Children New York, an early intervention program in West Harlem that pairs at-risk children with mentors. In addition to attending board meetings, he assisted the board’s fundraising committee and quickly set about analyzing the nonprofit’s five-year strategic plan. By the end of his one-year term, he’d come up with a new evaluation system that helped the board use better metrics and comparative data for analyzing students’ progress, a change that ultimately resulted in the nonprofit getting $275,000 in additional funding, he says. For Bell, the experience has been a game changer, one that has cemented his desire to work with nonprofit boards in the future, he says.
“It was awesome, because I got inside access to how the organization works and was able to sit down with the decision makers and provide input,” says Bell, who is continuing his work with the organization as a member of Friends of the Children’s new junior board, which he co-founded with a Columbia alum. “I wasn’t an outsider, but I felt like a member of the team.”
Programs like the one Bell participated in, known as Board Fellows, are becoming increasingly common on business school campuses throughout the country. The initiatives are a way to get young people—a demographic that most nonprofit boards have trouble connecting with—involved with boards at an early stage in their careers. On average, only six percent of nonprofit boards have members under the age of 35, according to a 2008 Urban Institute study of nonprofits with annual expenses between $500,000 and $5 million.
That could change as more MBA students, whose average age hovers around 27 or 28, embrace the idea of working with a board while in school, says Liz Maw, executive director of Net Impact, a nonprofit for sustainability-minded student leaders and professionals. Net Impact launched a Board Fellows Initiative in 2007 to encourage more of its chapters to introduce programs that partner students with local nonprofits, and so far, MBA students seem to be up for the challenge, Maw says. In 2009, 30 MBA Net Impact chapters introduced Board Fellows programs, and in 2010, that number crept up to 49.
The increase comes as a growing number of MBA programs are placing an increased emphasis on corporate social responsibility in the curriculum. In 2011, for example, 79 percent of schools required students to take a course dedicated to business and society issues, according to the Aspen Institute’s most recent Grey Pinstripe Study, a biennial ranking of business schools. At the same time, students are looking to get more hands-on experience that allows them to work with organizations that advance social causes, Maw says. Board Fellows programs provide just that; almost all require students to do a project that utilizes their business skills and helps the board operate more effectively. For instance, fellows perform board effectiveness audits, examine the organization’s donor base and fund-raising efforts, and help them come up with marketing and social media plans.
“MBA programs have really been stepping up two different areas during the last two years, social impact course work and experiential projects,” Maw says. “If you put those two together, the board fellows program is a perfect match.”
Rx For Entrepreneurship Education
How should the U.S. educate future entrepreneurs and create exceptional educational programs? Answering this question will give us far more than improved educational tools. It could help make us again the preeminent world economy—and as a byproduct, solve our unemployment problems.
Roger Schank, a retired university professor and pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, wrote an allegory for what he called a “story-centered curriculum,” featuring a delightful, if somewhat irreverent, tale of a town plagued by a dragon. In it, the prestigious local university quickly puts together a graduate curriculum on dragon slaying, producing 20 graduates in the first class. Various distractions derail many of the graduates, but one team eventually encounters the dragon.
“Unfortunately,” Schank wrote, “they had never really tried to fight a dragon before, and the dragon was much faster and its flame much hotter than any of them had anticipated. The dragon chased one of the members of the team off of a cliff and then proceeded to melt first the weapons and then the body of a second team member. The last two team members had no idea how to engage in a battle between just the two of them and the dragon, so they negotiated a truce. They are now doing public relations for the dragon. What went wrong in the dragon-slaying curriculum that the faculty worked so hard to build? For one thing, there was no actual dragon slaying in it. Teaching actual dragon slaying can be very difficult because among other things, it requires access to an actual dragon.”
The dragon story is an apt analogy for the state of entrepreneurship in higher education today. Our dragon today is the reinvention of an economy of innovation, which then produces high-quality employment. Innovators—people who redirect resources from what they are currently doing to activities that produce higher value—are the people who create new jobs, new markets, and new industries. While colleges and universities have taken various approaches to teaching innovation and entrepreneurship, we propose the following programs, classes, and workshops, which we believe would greatly affect the training of all business students, not just those who are thinking about starting their own companies.
Turning Geeks Into Suits. Many times throughout the process of creating technology companies, people within a company have difficulty communicating the information to the business world or managing the company as a profitable venture. Successfully transferring and commercializing technology requires an understanding of business practices. What we’ve found is that one of the best ways to create new curricula is to produce programs that are tailored to technical groups. This approach would combine business courses and workshops that specifically teach business practices to engineering and science students, who are working on very specialized technical degrees. These classes and workshops could be taught in formats that offer students basic concepts, as well as minors in such areas as innovation and entrepreneurship.
Learning entrepreneurship from entrepreneurs. Many entrepreneurs complain about the lack of mentors as well as difficulty finding good advisers. Business programs could provide the perfect environment for entrepreneurs-in-training to meet seasoned pros. Classes and seminars in which students spend time with entrepreneurs, who discuss their business practices and experiences, could be a great resource for innovators. Similar programs could create additional opportunities to expand on the initial introductions so that experienced entrepreneurs could continue to act as mentors for new entrepreneurs.
Business skills in small doses. In the future, companies will require a workforce that understands how to manage technology and how to innovate within companies. New technologies and emerging industries give tantalizing glimpses of what our economy could look like. More important, they point the way to what today’s education needs to be. More business programs could offer short workshops and non-degree training programs that allow students who are not interested in obtaining degrees opportunities to learn more about business practices and to develop new skills. These workshops and training programs might be the perfect outlet for technical people such as engineers and scientists to learn more about the innovation life cycle and challenges of taking their ideas to market.
Perhaps the most effective way to create training and educational programs with long-term impact is to offer specific degree programs focused on innovation and entrepreneurship. The key is that such programs should be taught by teams that include faculty members who understand the subject matter and can convey the cognitive knowledge alongside experienced entrepreneurs.
We need experienced dragon slayers who are knowledgeable about different aspects of real dragon slaying. Entrepreneurship is truly as much about doing as it is about knowing. That is the element often missing in the ivory tower approach. It’s why products of academic programs are not as effective as they might be at producing the economy of the future.
Join the discussion on the Bloomberg Businessweek Business School Forum, visit us on Facebook, and follow @BWbschools on Twitter.Paul Bauer is a clinical professor of business information and analytics for the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Shadi Farhangrazi is an adjunct professor at Daniels and CEO and managing partner at Biotrends International.Monday, 5 December 2011
What Should We Teach Our Business Leaders?
Nitin Nohria: Business leaders often suffer from what I call “moral overconfidence,” or an inflated sense of their strength of character. So moral humility may be the most important thing we can teach them. Many people view “character” as an immutable trait formed during childhood and adolescence. I believe character development is similar to the development of knowledge or wisdom—it’s a lifelong process. The world isn’t neatly divided into good people and bad people. Most will behave well or poorly, depending on the context.
Experiments dating to the 1950s illustrate this. We discuss these at Harvard Business School in a required course called “Leadership and Corporate Accountability.” Nearly 60 percent of a group of Princeton divinity students, despite just having heard the parable of the Good Samaritan, declined to help an apparently injured man while walking across campus because they were asked to hurry to deliver a sermon—on the Good Samaritan parable. In a Yale experiment, nearly two-thirds of subjects acting as teachers administered excessive electric shock (or thought they were doing so) to actors playing students who made mistakes. At Stanford, students acting as jail guards quickly began to behave abusively toward a group of “prisoners.”
In each case, some did the right thing, even under pressure. But more people assume they’d be in this “good” group than really would be. When I teach about the Yale experiments, I ask students to raise their hands if they think they’d have stopped delivering shocks. At least two-thirds say they’d have had the courage to stop. In reality, the experiments suggest that only one-third would do so. Business leaders need to remember that most of us have too much confidence in our strength of character. B-schools can help by teaching them to remain vigilant about this hubris.
— Nohria is dean of Harvard Business School.
Carly Fiorina: Most businesses, most of the time, do what they’re supposed to do. They provide value to customers, create jobs, and are responsible members of their communities. Unfortunately, we also see spectacular failures in business responsibility. During the dot-com boom, intelligent people concluded that it was logical for companies to be worth hundreds of times projected earnings with little prospect for profitability. Enron executives were aided by lawyers, accountants, bankers, and analysts. The mortgage mess was created in no small measure by bankers and builders betting real estate prices would always go up and that it didn’t matter that people were borrowing money they could never repay.
Too many people simply set aside common sense, good judgment, and sound ethics. They could explain risk calculation models, but they either couldn’t see or ignored the fundamental risks they were taking. These people focused on the short-term opportunity to boost profit and stock prices without asking whether that opportunity might destroy long-term value by ruining companies and lives and undermining confidence in our economic system.
When I attended the Sloan School at MIT, one of the most valuable courses I took was called “Readings in Power and Responsibility.” We read literature, not business cases. These works were about power, not simply as an achievement but as an obligation to serve a greater good. We learned that the responsible exercise of power requires balancing constituents and considerations.
Business schools should teach that “going along to get along” can have disastrous consequences. They should teach CEOs to produce long-term, sustainable shareholder value by balancing the needs of customers, employees, communities, and financial backers.
— Fiorina is an ex-chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard and a former candidate for the U.S. Senate.
As More Students Pay, EMBA Programs Adapt
By Francesca Di Meglio Once upon a time, executive MBA students attended business school to enhance their skills and better perform for the companies that were paying their way. Today, fewer companies are sponsoring employees, which means more EMBA students are footing the bill themselves. As a result, according to top business schools, more are looking to make a career change, either during the program or after graduation. Business schools are hustling to make sense of this new demand and offer appropriate career help to these seasoned hires.
Calls for EMBA career programs began to pick up in volume about a decade ago, says UCLA Anderson School of Management EMBA career coach Susan Dearing. After the financial crisis took hold in 2008, the need for EMBA career help accelerated further. In recent years, Dearing has surveyed EMBA students about their needs, both as they enter the program and once they have graduated. Roughly 30 percent to 40 percent of each incoming EMBA class at Anderson is looking to make a career shift, she adds.
Every intake of students at IE Business School in Madrid marks an increase in the number interested in making a career leap, says Amber Wigmore Alvarez, director of career advising at IE’s Career Management Center. In fact, 56 percent of IE’s EMBA Class of 2010 changed industry or function within a year of graduating.
“Business school is a natural incubator,” says Mark Horney, director of Executive MBA Career Management at Columbia Business School in New York. “There is a broad trend of more EMBA students thinking about making some sort of transition, either in their current company or making a complete change elsewhere.”
Many business schools began by bringing in career coaches specifically to help EMBA students, whose needs differ from those of full-timers. They have more work experience—typically seven to 10 years, vs. about four for full-time MBAs—and they work full-time while attending EMBA programs. But business schools are still adjusting to their specialized career needs. Many recent graduates surveyed when Bloomberg Businessweek compiled its 2011 EMBA rankings complained about their schools’ inability to help them find jobs. “I did not get any real support from their career management recruitment office,” wrote a graduate of the EMBA program at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in a comment that was fairly typical, even among top programs. “Considering that this was a flagship program, I would have expected a lot more.”
For now, most business schools continue to provide EMBAs with career counseling services that stop short of actual recruiting, and many recent graduates are satisfied. For example, Lauren Samuel, a 2011 graduate of the Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management, welcomes the workshops, career counseling, resume review, and further help available to her after she graduates. Samuel was working for Lehman Brothers when Barclays (BARC:LN) acquired its U.S. operations in 2008. Barclays picked her up and she has since changed roles.
At University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, EMBA students can take advantage of career workshops and one-on-one counseling. The goal is to teach students the skills necessary to develop their careers now and into the future, says Joyce Mueller, director of the EMBA program at Ross. “We’re doing a lot to teach students how to interact with executive recruiters,” she says. Although the Ross school will continue to serve as a conduit for networking by EMBA students and potential employers while improving its career services, she adds that career placement is not a primary element of the strategy.
Still, alumni hope the programs evolve to offer more of a hand. “There was lots of education but not much matching students with open positions,” said Tom Thomas, a 2011 Ross graduate. “That’s what people will be looking for, moving forward.” He adds that how to make a career change was the No. 1 priority for many of his classmates, too.
MBA Programs Find Their Niche
The MBA has traditionally been known as a general management degree, but that’s starting to change as students look to get an edge in a more competitive job market. Increasingly, students are pushing aside the bread-and-butter MBA degree in favor of one with a unique specialization, like aviation or football. Some of the more recent programs to hit the management education world include a new Wine MBA introduced by Sonoma State University in California and an MBA degree with an energy focus offered by the University of Oklahoma’s Price College of Business. Even the funeral industry has gotten in on the trend: The University of Barcelona and the European Federation of Funeral Services introduced a two-year MBA designed for undertakers last year.
The shift comes as business schools are attempting to differentiate themselves in a crowded MBA marketplace, says Jan Williams, board chairman of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). The number of general business MBA programs worldwide has declined about 2 percent in the past five years, based on a controlled set of 419 surveyed schools, according to AACSB data. At the same time, the number of specialized MBA programs has risen 11 percent, from 92 to 102, based on the same controlled set of respondents. Williams calls the jump a “fairly dramatic increase.”
One reason niche programs are becoming more popular is they can help fast-track a student’s career in a specialized industry, Williams says. For example, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s College of Business sends many students to internships at Boeing, while the University of Nevada at Reno’s gaming management program has ties to casinos such as Foxwoods and Caesars. Niche programs also help expand a student’s understanding of an industry through classes and case studies that look at business problems from the perspective of that sector.
“Schools are trying ways to differentiate themselves, because there are hundreds of MBA programs out there,” says Williams, who is also dean of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s College of Business Administration, which offers several niche MBA programs, including one focusing on aerospace and defense. “If you can take some portion of your program that specializes in an area students can’t get anywhere else, you make your program more attractive.”
The following are some of the more innovative MBA specializations offered by schools in the U.S. and Europe. Click through to learn more about each program’s focus, curriculum, and placement trends.
Photo Illustration by Will Halsey, Photography by Getty Images.
The Best Business Schools of 2011
An executive MBA student at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business, No. 14 in this year's EMBA ranking
By Geoff GloecklerLamar Horne was on the standard career path for someone with corner-office ambitions: an undergraduate degree in business, two years in investment banking, another two in private equity. Since most of his colleagues at PNC Mezzanine Capital in Pittsburgh had MBAs, Horne figured that if he wanted to reach partner level, he’d need one, too. By last December he had been accepted at two full-time MBA programs.
But as the 28-year-old tried to choose a school, he questioned the wisdom of leaving a good job in an unstable employment market. So in August he started a part-time MBA at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, just a few miles from his office. It’ll take him about a year longer than a traditional MBA, but he won’t have to leave PNC in his quest to advance. “I didn’t want to gamble with going to a full-time program, come out in two years with an increased debt load, and then hope to find a job,” Horne says.
Before the economic downturn, fewer prospective MBAs sought the part-time option. Applicants didn’t mind leaving a job or taking on student loan debt because they knew it wouldn’t be hard to pay off, thanks to the salary bump and signing bonus they could expect upon graduation. Even as the downturn worsened, applications to full-time MBA programs continued to rise as many ambitious young people figured they could wait out the crisis in B-school.
Today, MBA grads are no longer assured of getting a job better than the one they leave. So it’s no surprise that part-time and executive MBA programs are thriving. While applications to full-time MBA programs are down at two-thirds of the 199 schools responding to a survey this summer by the Graduate Management Admission Council, more than 40 percent of part-time and executive programs have seen an increase.
Part-time programs generally target students with about five years of work experience who live within a 50-mile radius of the school, as classes are offered on weekday evenings. Executive MBA programs, or EMBAs, seek more experienced people, usually with at least eight years in management. EMBA courses tend to take place on alternating weekends and attract students from a wider geographic area. Part-time degrees can take three to six years, vs. two for most full-time and EMBA programs. As part of the 2011 Best Part-Time MBA and Best EMBA rankings, Bloomberg Businessweek surveyed 10,000-plus recent graduates from both types of programs at more than 100 B-schools.
With the increased demand for their offerings, part-time and executive MBA administrators are trying to differentiate their schools and meet the needs of students who are footing more of their tuition bill on their own. With classes on weeknights and weekends, part-timers often aren’t “truly engaged in the program or with the students who are moving through the program with them,” says Bill Burpitt, associate dean for graduate and executive programs at Elon University’s Love School of Business in North Carolina, Bloomberg Businessweek’s top-ranked part-time MBA program.
To counter this, Elon has sought to make its part-time offering as personal and engaging as a full-time MBA. Part-timers at Love start with an immersion course where they develop business goals, undergo a comprehensive evaluation, and take on a two-day, team-based business simulation to get better acquainted with their classmates. Throughout each semester, those sessions are followed up with a range of social events. “All MBA programs teach finance; they all teach marketing,” Burpitt says. “What makes us different is that we try to deliver great personal relationships.”
A decade ago, when employers were covering much of the part-time and EMBA tuition expenses, it would have been taboo for a student to request access to an MBA career office. Those who did sometimes needed a waiver signed by their employer. Today, nearly every program offers students career assistance in some form. For many, that means workshops and speakers focused on advancement with topics such as networking and resume writing.
B-Schools Examine the Business of Gift-Giving
By Francesca Di Meglio ‘Tis the season to be shopping. As a result, researchers at top business schools are sharing what they have learned about consumer behavior and marketing in the hope that consumers, retailers, and other businesspeople can get an edge this holiday season. Here is a rundown of some of the more interesting holiday-relevant business school research:
Beware online pals—and not for the reasons one might think, such as false identities or seedy behavior. Slated for publication in a 2012 issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, a recent study showed that online interactions on sites such as eBay can lead to risky financial decision-making. Researchers from Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Zurich in Switzerland tracked the lending behavior of 600 randomly selected lenders on Prosper.com, the largest U.S.-based peer-to-peer lending site, over 18 months. They found that those who participated in the site’s online communities lent their money to those who had poorer credit and were more likely to default.
In observing the behavior of 13,735 eBay Germany customers, some of whom were monitored before and after participating in the site’s community, researchers found that those who participated made riskier bids than those who didn’t. They put more than one bid on each item and spent more when they won. Back at the lab, researchers discovered that those in online communities are motivated by the belief that their virtual pals have their back.
“Based on this research, managers are advised to consider how riskier behaviors stemming from online community participation could possibly impact their customers adversely and what they might do to minimize potential negative outcomes,” writes Utpal M. Dholakia, professor of management at Jones, who was joined by three co-authors, UBC associate professors of marketing Rui (Juliet) Zhu and Xinlei (Jack) Chen and marketing professor Rene Algesheimer at Zurich. “Consumers should be made aware that they may fall prey to this effect.”
Make a list and check it twice—and stick to it—before heading to the store to pick up gifts this holiday season. People just about everywhere make unplanned purchases when they go shopping. That’s no secret. What was a secret until recently is that the motivation to make these unplanned purchases actually happens before you ever head to the store, according to research in the January 2011 edition of the Journal of Marketing.
Professors Daniel Corsten at IE Business School in Madrid, David Bell at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and George Knox at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business had shoppers in Europe fill out a questionnaire about why they were shopping and what they ended up purchasing. The team analyzed 18,000 purchases on 3,000 trips by 400 households. The responses revealed that 20 percent to 40 percent of purchases are unplanned.
“Much of what drives shoppers to make unplanned purchases happens before they ever set foot in the store,” writes Corsten. “For example, on shopping trips for the whole week or to re-stock the pantry, unplanned buying goes up a lot—about 40 to 60 percent. If we go to buy something for right now or to take advantage of a specific promotion, we don’t buy much unplanned.”
The research teaches a few lessons. First, marketers spend a lot of time on in-the-store promotion to spark unplanned purchases, but that strategy fails to take into account the motivation triggered before one even leaves for the store, adds Corsten. In addition, consumers should rid themselves of buyer’s remorse because the study showed that most people who make unplanned purchases do so because they have some extra money on reserve. Still, Corsten suggests that writing down exactly what you need to avoid unplanned purchases or renouncing one of the items you intended to buy in favor of an unplanned purchase might help you stay on budget.
The Complete Executive MBA Ranking
In this interactive graphic, each school in Bloomberg Businessweek‘s 2011 ranking of executive MBA programs appears as a blue bar on the charts. Each chart shows the schools’ positions relative to one another on items that range from tuition costs, student work experience, and the percentage of students who are top executives, all of which are self-reported by the schools. Type a school name into the search box to locate it on the charts, or click anywhere on a chart to find out which school is tops in that measure. Grad poll, director poll, and letter grades are based on Bloomberg Businessweek surveys.
Table: Top Executive MBA Programs of 2011
Special Report: Best Part-Time Business Schools 2011
Live Chat: Part-Time B-School Rankings
The 2011 lists of the best executive MBA, part-time MBA, and executive education programs in the custom and open enrollment categories featured a few surprises. For starters, after 20 years, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management fell from the top of the executive MBA list, making room for a new No. 1, University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. And while the No. 1 part-time MBA programs remained the same in five of the six geographic regions, there was a quite a shake-up among the schools just below the top spot.
During an online chat on Nov. 10, Bloomberg Businessweek editors Louis Lavelle (screen name: LouisBW) and Geoff Gloeckler (screen name: GeoffBW) counted down the top programs and then took questions from the public and Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Francesca Di Meglio (FrancescaBW) about methodology, individual programs, and those many surprises. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation:
ShellieK: I would like to know your methodology for EMBA rankings.
GeoffBW: The EMBA ranking is based on two measures: a survey of graduating students and a poll of EMBA directors. The student survey counts for 65 percent of the final ranking. Of that 65 percent, the current survey (2011) counts for 50 percent of the total. The two previous surveys (2009 and 2007) count for 25 percent each. The director’s poll is worth 35 percent of the total.
jekes: When will the full-time MBA rankings be announced?
GeoffBW: Next year. We do the full-time rankings in even-numbered years.
ShellieK: Can you please explain the methodology for the executive education rankings for both custom and open enrollment programs?
LouisBW: Our executive education ranking is based on a survey of companies that send students to executive education programs. The survey measures their satisfaction with the programs.
texman: What do you think accounts for the high volatility of the part-time rankings?
GeoffBW: There are a few reasons for the great deal of movement in the part-time ranking. First, this is a young ranking; this is only the third time we’ve done it. Because of that, we have had an inordinate number of new schools enter the field of consideration—10 this year. Also, seven more schools ended up “making the cut” to be ranked overall (76 vs. 69 in 2009). Third, and probably most important, we only use one year of data for this ranking. Our other rankings—full-time MBA, executive MBA, and undergraduate business—each use three years of student data. [One year of data] makes it easier for schools to make large jumps, as each survey and data point is worth more.
PBolstetter: Regarding the EMBA ranking, can you give us an idea as to what happened to Notre Dame?
GeoffBW: Notre Dame is ranked just outside the top 25 at 27.
texman: When will executive education ranks below the top 10 be released?
LouisBW: We’ll publish a list of the top 20 in both open and custom categories.
AnnaRz: When will the part-time MBA be announced?
GeoffBW: I can now tell you that North Carolina State is ranked 30th in part-time. Sorry I couldn’t tell you earlier.
asw169: Can you tell me the EMBA ranking for Penn State (Smeal)?
LouisBW: Smeal is in our unranked second tier.
LindseyK: Were there any changes to the part-time MBA methodology this year?
GeoffBW: There were not.
acyates: How do you define “part-time”?
LouisBW: Part-time programs are those that offer classes at night and on weekends and are designed primarily for working professionals.
RyanU: Will you rank EMBA below No. 25?
GeoffBW: Yes. Forty EMBA programs and 76 part-time programs are ranked online.
rkorossy: Can you please tell me the EMBA ranking for Pepperdine?
Part-Time MBA Programs: Drilling Down
As part of our 2011 part-time MBA ranking, Bloomberg Businessweek surveyed graduates, asking them dozens of questions about their programs. See how each school fared relative to others in the ranking on 12 key questions. Type a school name into the search box below, or click anywhere on a chart to find out which school is tops in that measure. The scores shown are the averages for survey respondents from each school; the highest theoretical score on any question is five.
Table: Top Part-Time MBA Programs of 2011
Special Report: Best Part-Time Business Schools 2011
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Citi's Rhodes Answers the 'Big Question'
How to Speak Like a Business School Grad
If you’re like most people, you don’t understand your doctor and your lawyer when they started babbling in professional jargon. The same is true for most non-MBAs. Bschool grads talk about “deliverables” and “best practices,” they “think outside the box” and “take 30,000-ft. views”--but do you really have any idea what they mean? Even some words that are recognizable take on completely different meaning, such as “lean” or “leverage.” Then there are the words, such as “actionable” and “monetize,” that could make a lexicographer’s toes curl. But if you never went to business school and want to know what the heck people in your next meeting are speaking about, this handy glossary will fill you in faster than you can say “Six Sigma”!
Click here to learn how to speak like a MBA.
Have any other MBA terms you’d like to define? Send an email to vwong70@bloomberg.net
Photographer: Justin Lewis/Getty Images
Dual Degrees: For MBAs, the Road Not Taken
By Erin Zlomek (Corrects headquarters location for Starz Media in 26th paragraph.)After a sex abuse scandal rippled through the Catholic Church, Boston College’s Carroll School of Management wanted to make a positive change. The school introduced a dual-degree program that coupled an MBA with a master’s in pastoral ministry. The goal was to promote transparency and human resource prowess at the highest ranks of religious institutions. Only one graduate has emerged from the program since it started in 2006. Even so, administrators consider it a success.
“It’s a small contribution and certainly not a far-reaching one,” says Thomas Groome, a professor of theology and religious education at the Jesuit university. “It is at least raising the conversation and alerting people to the need for good management.”
When it comes to rolling out dual-degree programs, business schools appear to be defying the laws of supply and demand. Dual MBA degree tracks have proliferated widely, giving rise to unexpected combinations such as the Boston College program, New York University’s MBA with a master of fine arts degree in film production, and Yale’s MBA pairing with a master’s in architecture.
Despite the explosive growth in dual tracks, very few students enroll in them. The greater number of options means more applicants must decide if they are best suited for a specialized dual degree, another masters degree program, or a regular MBA. Business schools, on the other hand, make the case that even though few MBA students enroll in dual-degree programs, the offerings provide additional educational options for students, help distinguish the school, and strengthen its ties with industry.
“For us, it’s not a strategy for growing but a strategy for increasing quality,” says Jeffrey Ringuest, Carroll’s associate dean for graduate programs.
The number of dual MBA degrees available has surged 54 percent over the past decade. Yet the portion of MBA students enrolled in dual-degree tracks has never risen above 1 percent, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, which started collecting dual-degree enrollment data in 2005. In fact, that percentage has shrunk, from about 0.9 percent of MBA students in 2005-06 to 0.7 percent in 2010-11.
When compared with regular MBAs, dual-degree candidates don’t always see a higher return on their investment, according to data collected by PayScale, which gathers information from online pay-comparison tools. While adding an MBA increases the earning power of a non-MBA degree, adding a non-MBA degree may not increase the earning power of an MBA. In fact, only dual MBAs with a masters in engineering or a JD (the Juris Doctor law degree) had higher median salaries ($105,000 and $104,000, respectively) when compared with regular MBAs ($82,000). Those who had an MBA and a master’s degree in public health had a median salary of $81,500, and those with a master’s in education, $64,100. The PayScale sample was based on graduates with a total of seven to nine years of work experience and was collected from November 2009 to 2011.
Since dual-degree programs typically take anywhere from an additional semester to an additional year to complete, the cost of such programs is higher, and the true return on investment may be even less than the salary figures would suggest.
“I think it is challenging, if not impossible, to make an economic case for getting both degrees,” says Andrew Allison, who graduated with a JD-MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2010. “That’s not the way I was thinking about it.”
Allison was working in New York City public schools when an interest in law drew him to graduate school in 2006. With analytic business skills becoming more critical for careers in many industries, Allison also decided to pursue an MBA. “I concluded that getting two degrees vs. getting one might not have a measureable impact on my earnings potential,” he says. “But it would have a measureable impact on my ability to make a contribution.”