2017 was a year of monumental change for the world’s business schools. From Trump’s election and its impact on international applications to U.S. schools to renewed concern over the viability of two-year MBA programs, the B-school market became more competitive and more roiled than ever. With the opening of new modern buildings at Northwestern Kellogg and Cornell Tech in New York City, the arm’s race for the best facilities heated up yet again. GMAT scores continued to climb. The University of Iowa killed its full-time residential MBA program, while the University of Wisconsin tried to walk away from its two-year MBA but failed, costing the dean her job.
White supremacists invalded Charlottesville and shocked a progressive community and a nation, with significant consequences for a great business school at UVA Darden. The deans of three major schools—Kellogg, Berkeley Haas and NYU Stern—decided to toss in the towel. And then there were two big surprises: Wharton’s remarkable ascenion in MBA rankings and a data breach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Management that revealed the school had been lying about its scholarship aid policies for years. Poets&Quants reviews ten stories that defined a year in transition.
New research suggests Trump’s election could drive international MBAs to other shores
When 2017 began with a new U.S. President in office, B-school deans and admission officials feared that all the anti-immigration rhetoric he spouted and inspired would drive away international applicants. That turned out to be true at many business schools, especially those in the second-tier. The most common question admission officials were getting on their tours of international locales was “Would I be welcome at your school?”
For years, growth in international applicants for U.S. MBA programs had offset a decline in domestic candidates. This year that was no longer true, causing some schools to rethink their commitments to the two-year, full-time residential MBA program. One school after another found that the international candidates in their applicant pools had fallen by double-digits. At Georgetown’s McDonough School, for example, international candidates fell to just 32% of the applicant pool from 43% a year earlier. At Cornell’s Johnson School, the international applicant pool fell to 57% of the total number of applicants, down from 61% in 2015-2016.
Many schools outside Poets&Quants’ Top 25 reported even greater declines in international applicant pools. At Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School, international applicants fell to 49% of the pool, down from 62%. At the University of Southern California’s Marshall School, international candidates made up 46% of the past year’s pool, down from 51%.
The U.S.’ loss was Canada and Europe’s gain. Many international applicants who would otherwise have applied to U.S. MBA programs tossed their apps to what they perceived to be more welcoming campuses in Canada and Europe. Toronto’s Rotman School of Management was a major beneficiary, with MBA applications up by 27%.
The Graduate Management Admission Council says younger test takers and the ability to preview and cancel low test scores are responsible for the rise of average scores in recent years
By all accounts, the Graduate Management Admission Test is no easier today than it was five or 10 years ago. Yet in recent years score averages for elite business schools have been on the rise — including some dramatic examples recently reported by Poets&Quants. The puzzle has drawn enough speculation that the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the GMAT, released a report in June to address the issue.
In The Fallacy of Score Increases and the Impact of Score Preview, GMAC analyzed GMAT scores for citizens of eight countries that account for about 80% of GMAT exams taken each year since 2011 (the United States, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, China, India, and South Korea). Rebecca Loades, report author and director of innovation and next generation systems at GMAC, concludes that GMAT scores are actually stable, remaining consistent or growing by a statistically insignificant amount. But she added that given trends and persistent perceptions, the report — five months in the making — may be the first of an annual series.
Despite the organization’s claims to the contrary, you can’t dispute the evidence. At nearly all the leading business schools, average GMAT scores for the latest entering class broke new records. At nearly every Top 10 U.S. school is reporting higher average GMAT scores for the past year with only a couple of exceptions: Wharton which maintained its already high 730 average and 740 median, and MIT Sloan which slipped a mere two points to 722. The largest jump for a Top 10 player goes to UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. At Haas, the incoming MBA class sports a record high 725 average, an eight-point rise from the previous year’s 717. At Kellogg, the school’s new 732 average allowed Kellogg to leap frog Wharton with the second highest reported GMATs of any prestige business school in the world with the sole exception of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
On one level, it was an agonizing decision to shut down the full-time MBA program at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business. On another, it was a no-brainer.
When Dean Sarah Gardial announced her decision in August, she knew the incoming class would total just 54 students. The program had been in the red for years on a $3.5 million budget. With state appropriations falling and budgets tight, it no longer made sense to pour resources into the tiny program. Earlier this year, no less, Tippie’s U.S. News’ MBA ranking plunged 19 spots ito 64th from 45th. It was the proverbial perfect storm.
“We’re seeing clear shifts in what students and businesses need,” Tippie Dean Sarah Gardial said at the time. “Both are expressing preferences for non-career-disrupting options for the MBA, while others are increasingly drawn to the focused education provided by master’s programs in specific subjects.”
As a business school in the Big Ten, Iowa’s decision has been something of a wakeup call to many in the MBA market. In the aftermath of that decision, however, Dean Gardial has gotten a surprising reaction from some rival deans. They’ve quietly conceded they have been grappling with the same issue and that her decision may help them deal with the political consequences from alumni, students, and faculty of ending their own money-losing MBA programs.
Months after the University of Iowa announced that it would shutdown its two-year MBA program, a new dean at the University’s of Wisconsin Business School attempted to do the same thing. But Dean Anne Massey, in the job as dean for little more than 50 work days, was forced to back down and ultimately to resign her job after a backlash from alumni and students. The story behind her failed leadership of the school is a fascinating tale of the heavy politics in academia.
Dean Massey admitted that she had moved too fast, without building consensus for the change among the school’s shocked students and alumni. “We have heard from our community of students, alumni, and friends; therefore, we are going to stop further discussion of the one-year suspension of the full-time MBA,” she said in a statement. “We moved too quickly without the broad consultation and discussion that our stakeholders can and should expect.”
Ultimately, though, her deanship had been wounded, and the announcement in December that she would step down at year-end indicated she never recovered the confidence of the students or staff after the misstep. The embarrassing reversal will, no doubt, give other deans pause when considering whether to end their flagship MBA programs.
Little more than a year ago at a crowded town hall meeting on the Wharton campus, Dean Geoffrey Garrett found himself addressing the concerns of Wharton MBA students who peppered him with questions on a number of thorny issues. Among all their worries, one especially loomed large: The school’s deteriorating performance in rankings.
Ever since Aussie Dean Garrett’s arrival in July of 2014, the school has lost ground in every major ranking with only one exception: the Financial Times where it eked out a one-place gain. Even more disturbing for Whartonites, Chicago Booth has outranked the school on six of the past eight Poets&Quants’ lists, giving rise to conversations that a new Big Three has emerged with Harvard, Stanford and Booth in that category. Last year, the Poets&Quants’ composite ranking saw Wharton tied for fourth place with Kellogg.
Just 13 months after that October session with students, Garrett has delivered the goods. For the first time ever, Wharton claimed the top spot in Poets&Quants’ composite ranking in 2017, narrowly dislodging Harvard Business School which lost the No. 1 honor for only the second time in eight years. The only other time HBS failed to win top honors was in 2014 when Stanford’s Graduate School of Business nudged it aside. Wharton accomplished the feat by moving up a combined 21 places in all five of the most influential rankings used by Poets&Quants to construct its annual list of the best full-time MBA programs in the U.S.
To celebrate the building’s lakefront location, Kellogg’s new 415,000 square foot Global Hub pays pays homage to the environment in two ways – the curved exterior walls reflect the wave movement on the lake, while the glass reflects the blues of the water as well as the sky.
2017 was yet another year when the arm’s race for new modern business school facilities heated up yet again. Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management debuted a stunning new 415,000 square foot Global Hub on the shores of Lake Michigan. Kellogg’s $250 million marvel on the lake has transformed the school with an expansive interior that is a mix of sweeping sight lines, wide corridors, and natural light. The building’s exterior boasts curves galore, with each floor lined differently to reflect the wave patterns rushing off Lake Michigan.
UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business opened the doors to the $60 million Connie & Kevin Chou Hall, a new six-story structure that is entirely devoted to Haas students. There’s not a single faculty or staff office in the 80,000-square-foot building, but rather 850 new classroom seats in eight tiered classrooms and four flat flexible classrooms. There are 28 student meeting rooms, a top floor convening space capable of hosting 300 people, and finally a cafe with an outdoor terrace that will soon serve sustainable, locally sourced food (this is Northern California, after all).
And Cornell University’s launched Cornell Tech on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. Built on a two-mile-long strip of land in the East River, Cornell Tech represents New York’s attempt to compete with Silicon Valley and become a global leader in technology and innovation. The campus was built from scratch on an island that once housed a prison, a lunatic asylum and a women’s workhouse that at one time hosted Mae West. A major beneficiary of the ambitious project is Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, which has some 20,000 square feet of space in The Bridge, the building meant to connect academia and industry for startups and job creation. The business school space includes two tiered classrooms, eight breakout rooms, and work space for mor ethan 20 faculty and staff.
Stanford University Graduate School of Business – Ethan Baron photo
As scandals go, this was a big one. In late November, Stanford Graduate School of Business publicly admitted that it misled thousands of applicants and donors about the way it distributes fellowship aid and financial assistance to its MBA students. The disclosure came to light as a result of a computer breach that exposed 14 terabytes of highly confidential student data detailing the most recent 5,120 financial aid applications from 2,288 students, spanning a seven-year period from 2008-2009 to 2015-2016.
The information was unearthed by a current MBA student, Adam Allcock, in February of this year from a shared network directory accessible to any student, faculty member or staffer of the business school. In the same month, on Feb. 23, the student reported the breach to Jack Edwards, director of financial aid, and the records were removed within an hour of his meeting with Edwards.
Allcock, however, says he spent 1,500 hours analyzing the data and compiling an 88-page report on it. His conclusion: “The GSB secretly ranks students as to how valuable (or replaceable) they were seen, and awarded financial aid on that basis. Not only has the GSB also been systematically discriminating by gender, international status and more while lying to their faces for the last 10 to ~25 years.”
Darden School Dean Scott Beardsley saw the white supremacist rally on the campus of the University of Virginia up close — participants marched right past his home’s front window. “Hate like that has no place in a university,” he says. “That’s not what our community is all about.” NPR photo
When deadly violence unfolded in the sleepy, college town of Charlottesville in August, some 20 first-year MBAs—all incoming students of color at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business—gathered together. It was supposed to be little more than a get together at the student housing complex.
But after the city was beseiged by hundreds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, the meet-and-greet would become a place for an outpouring of emotion, the most poignant moment of that hellish day for Martin Davidson, a long-time leadership professor at Darden and the school’s chief diversity officer.
When he walked into the room, the professor could literally feel the anguish and pain. “These students were terrorized, fearful and deeply distraught,” recalled Davidson. “This was their very first weekend in Charlottesville. Now they were questioning coming here in the first place. They were full out scared to death.”
Even though the protesters came in from out of town and even though it was a random event in a place known for its progressive values, the incident is having a predictable impact on early applications to both the wider university and its business school.
For international students, who have little understanding of American politics and protests, it has been enough to scare off many who might have had the highly ranked Darden on their target lists. For underrepresented minorities and Jews in the U.S., the torchlight procession and racist chants on the university’s grounds—meant to evoke marches of Hitler Youth—may well be hard to erase. One thing is certain: Darden Dean Scott Beardsley is doing everything possible to put the protest behind the school.
2017 saw deans of three major business schools announce they were stepping down: Haas’ Rich Lyons (top left), Stern’s Peter Henry (bottom left), and Kellogg’s Sally Blount
Business school dean turnover is nothing new. The average tenure of a business school dean tends to be just five years. It’s a tough and often under-appreciated job. But it is also rare when the deans of three schools, often in the Top Ten of rankings, all decide to leave in the same year. 2017 saw step-down announcements from Peter Henry at NYU Stern, Sally Blount at Kellogg, and Rich Lyons at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Many other deans also tossed in the towel, from Boston University’s Ken Freeman to Wisconsin’s Anne Massey (see above).
The dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business, the youngest ever in the history of Stern, left as a result of the political climate. “I do not make this decision lightly,” Peter Henry, 47, said in a letter released in February,, “but given the current trends affecting the national and global economy, I feel compelled to re-engage now with policy and re-commit, full-time, to scholarship and my lifelong interest in the linked fortunes of advanced and developing economies.”
Across the country, at Berkeley’s Haas, Dean Lyons announced he would step down at the end of June of 2018 after an 11-year run as dean. “Haas is in a good place for the next dean to carry our school forward — it’s exactly the right time for this transition,” said Lyons in June. The guitar-strumming dean who returned to Haas from Goldman Sachs where he had been the chief learning officer has led major changes at the school. He oversaw an overhaul of the MBA curriculum, crafted a set of guiding principles for the school’s culture, launched Berkeley’s own Executive MBA program as well as a novel joint undergrad program with the university’s engineering school, and raised subsantial funds for a new $60 million building on the Haas campus. In fact, Lyons reeled in eight of the school’s ten largest gifts in its history.
Of all the resignations, perhaps the biggest one was at Kellogg. The first and only woman to lead one of the famed M7 business schools, Blount has clearly made her mark on the school where she once arrived as a young graduate student in organizational behavior some 29 years ago. She successfully completed Kellogg’s first-ever major capital campaign, raising $365 million, including a doubling of contributions to the school’s annual fund which exceeded $10 million for the first time. She was directly involved in every significant detail of Kellogg’s new $250 million Global Hub on Lake Michigan which officially opened in mid-March. But she concluded it was time to leave in July in Rhode Island at one of Blount’s silent retreats, a multi-day period of quiet reflection that she has taken for the past decade. The 56-year-old Blount intends to take a one-year sabbatical to travel, write and ponder her “final chapters in education.”
Duff McDonald (left), author of The Golden Passport, and HBS Dean Nitin Nohria
Harvard Business School has had many critics throughout the years. But perhaps the harshest and most serious has been Duff McDonald, a veteran journalist and author, whose book on HBS was the most critical ever written about the school and business education in general. The slam even prompted a rare public response from Dean Nitin Nohria who said, “In many ways I think the book doesn’t give justice to the many ways in which Harvard Business School is trying — and not just today, but has always tried since the beginning of its history — to remind its graduates that as business leaders they have a deep and important relationship with society, and that the health of society is something that is their responsibility.”
From the very beginning, the Harvard Business School treated McDonald as a barbarian at the gate. McDonald first approached the school about cooperating with him on a book in late February of 2013. But the guardians of HBS’ history, myths and truths quickly slammed the door shut, preventing access to all administrators, staff and faculty, even the school’s own historical archives.
The school, says McDonald, rebuffed at least a half dozen requests for cooperation, though the author was able to visit the Harvard Business School campus on four occasions. More than three years later, McDonald’s The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite was published by Harper Business in April.. As the lengthy title suggested, HBS stakeholders didn’t enjoy what they read in the book’s formidable 672 pages. McDonald’s conclusion is that the Harvard Business School has abysmally failed the goal of its founders who sought “the multiplication of men who will handle their current business problems in socially constructive ways.” While HBS graduates tend to be very good at whatever they do, McDonald claims, that is rarely the doing of good.
Ever notice how sales isn’t part of the MBA core curriculum? Just look at the foundational courses of any leading business school. You’ll find finance, leadership, operations, strategy, and economics among the required courses. That doesn’t count marketing, where you’ll absorb pricing, analytics, research methods, and product development – basically anything that’s far removed from a real live customer! While the experiential capstone or global immersion may hone teamwork and presentation skills, they don’t actually teach the foundational principle of business: You actually have to persuade someone to fork over their hard-won dollars so you can survive.
Why is sales relegated to an elective in most leading MBA programs? For all the student talk about pushing their boundaries, sales is all too scary because it is all too human says Craig Wortmann, the head of the Kellogg Sales Institute at Northwestern University in a 2014 column with Inc. “It is human nature to avoid uncomfortable situation,” he explains. “Unfortunately, the selling process is chock full of them: making an approach, starting a conversation, qualifying, proposing, asking for things. Throughout my course, students realize that they – like most people – are constantly, unconsciously, avoid asking directly for what they want.”
STORYTELLING CENTRAL TO SALES
It goes far beyond that. Fact is, sales exposes every one of your weaknesses eventually. Lack patience? Guess what, the sales process can run months and years; it often involves players with very different agendas who’ll scuttle deals at the last possible moment. Consider yourself a great orator? Well, pitching takes 10% of your time. The rest is listening and guiding, judiciously sprinkling in a smidgen of your knowledge to slowly guide your prospects to their epiphanies. A product may be a commodity, but sales is an art where the main goal is to sell your company’s biggest differentiator: You. Here, your self-awareness is your greatest virtue – and your ego is your biggest risk.
It’s a dirty job that everyone must eventually master because everything is sales. On January 1st, Wortmann can help with his MOOC, Sales Strategies: Mastering the Selling Process. Think of it as a slightly different take on the traditional sales course. Sure, you’ll learn insightful qualifying questions and strategies for overcoming objections, and closing. In fact, Wortmann will be sharing an expansive sales toolkit exclusively to students who take this course. However, he will also introduce his class to several successful strategies that stray outside the traditional sales canon.
The first is storytelling. One of the biggest turnoffs, says Wortmann, is when sales reps just spew out facts and figures and features and benefits. It simply overwhelms prospects and muddies the value proposition. Instead, he encourages students to develop succinct and image-driven narratives that show products as integral parts of the action.
“Stories take this factual, disparate information and give it context, color and meaning,” Wortmann notes in a Huffington Post interview. “If you give me a story, I am able to see so much more than when you primarily give me the facts, the details. Don’t sell me a computer with only its features. Tell me that Joe bought this laptop because it is light-weight, faster and cheaper and hence, Joe could take it along on his African safari and use it to make movies of his kids. Help me feel what it’s like to use that product. Now, I can “see and feel” it and not just understand it from an intellectual level.”
WHO YOU SELL TO MATTERS AS MUCH AS WHAT YOU SELL
Another unique course wrinkle is the concept of entrepreneurial selling. According to Wortmann, traditional selling assumes an organization markets a standard solution to a specific niche. However, he says, a startup is a work-in-progress, where entrepreneurs are often tinkering with models and features with limited resources and little room for error. As a result, entrepreneurial selling places as much emphasis on who is being sold to as what is being sold.
“An entrepreneur needs to be incredibly disciplined around the first part of your sales cycle,” he says. “You have to know if a customer can be good business for you, otherwise you could put yourself out of business. IBM won’t suffer if a salesperson has 14 meetings with the wrong client, but you will!”
Indeed, strategy lies at the heart of Wortmann’s course. Behind the bells-and-whistles, sales is a means of maximizing time by quickly identifying real targets and devoting resources and relationship capital to the best opportunities. “Without revenue, all your problems will crush you,” he adds in a 2015 interview with Medium. “With revenue, you can afford to have many other problems, and be able to take the time to solve them correctly and intelligently. If you’re not making money, you don’t have a business, you have an expensive hobby.”
HOW TO STAND UP TO ETHICAL PRESSURES
Sales headlines the January docket, a month of impressive releases in marketing, finance, management and entrepreneurship. Want to make the world a better place? You don’t have to join the Peace Corps or Teach for America. Instead, you can apply your MBA skills to social investing, a topic examined in Wharton’s Business Strategies for Social Impact. Gearing up for a blowout new year in marketing? Start with Darden’s Marketing Analytics, to get a grasp of the effectiveness of your campaigns and the value of your brand. Similarly, Emory University returns with Forecasting Models for Marketing Decisions and IE Business School unleashes Channel Management and Retailing – both starting on January 1st.
Looking to assume a leadership role in 2018? There are several courses that can boost your profile. On January 8th, Kellogg opens up another section of Scaling Operations: Linking Strategy and Execution, a big picture look at how to leverage the supply chain to cut costs and boost competitive advantage. If you’re looking to tap into your inner Jeff Bezos or Sheryl Sandberg, there is HEC’s Leading Organizations. If you want to make an impact on your company’s bottom line, Corporate Strategy starts on January 1st too. Two weeks later, the University of Virginia launches Ethical Leadership Through Giving Voice to Values, a four week exercise on effectively responding when employers or clients pressure you to act against your conscience.
To learn more about these courses — and many more — click on the links below.
MARKETING
Sales Strategies: Mastering the Selling Process / January 1 / University of Chicago (Booth)
Marketing Analytics / January 1 / University of Virginia (Darden)
Channel Management and Retailing / January 1 / IE Business School
Forecasting Models for Marketing Decisions / January 1 / Emory University (Goizueta)
Anticipating Your Next Battle, in Business and Beyond / January 1 / HEC Paris
MANAGEMENT AND OPERATIONS
Ethical Leadership Through Giving Voice to Values / January 15 / University of Virginia (Darden)
Scaling Operations: Linking Strategy and Execution / January 8 / Northwestern (Kellogg)
Leading Organizations / January 1 / HEC Paris
Critical Perspectives on Management / January 1 / IE Business School
Supply Chain Dynamics / January 2 / MIT
Corporate Strategy / January 1 / University of Illinois
Conversations That Inspire: Coaching Learning, Leadership and Change / January 1 / Case Western Reserve
FINANCE
Decision-Making and Scenarios / January 1 / Wharton School
Financial Analysis for Decision Making: Funding your Business / Self-Paced / Babson College
Understanding Financial Statements: Company Performance / January 1 / University of Illinois
Financial Accounting Made Fun: Eliminating Your Fears / Self-Paced / Babson College
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Business Strategies for Social Impact / January 1 / Wharton
Unleashing the Impact of Your Social Enterprise / January 1 / Copenhagen Business School
Credentials: In 2017, Worthmann joined Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management as the founder and executive director of the Kellogg Sales Institute. Before that, he spent nine years with the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he received its 2012 Faculty Excellence Award. Outside class, Wortmann authored What’s Your Story, which illustrates how sales professionals can use storytelling to build rapport, credibility, and urgency. His Booth course on “Entrepreneurial Selling” was once named one of the top ten college courses by Inc., where he is also a columnist. A Kellogg MBA, Wortmann was previously a successful entrepreneur and leading sales rep at IBM.
Graded: Students must complete all assignments to pass the course.
Description: Every interaction is a sale. When you meet strangers, do they leave with the impression that you’re engaging and honorable? If not, you’ve failed to close the sale. At home, can you convince your children to finish their homework or complete a chore…without threatening? If so, you’ve made a sale. In essence, sales comes down to persuading someone to take action that they would normally avoid. It isn’t manipulation, but persuasion that results in a win-win for both parties. It is an exercise in partnership over power and learning over lecturing.
Using lectures, readings, and exercises, Wortmann will show readers how to “acquire and delight customers, use selling skills in different contexts, tell powerful stories, manage the entrepreneurial selling process.” Covering both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets, the course is designed to teach students how to sell themselves as much as a solution. In addition, Wortmann will also share trademark tools including a prospecting script, a list of consultative questions, and sample introductory emails and proposals to help guide students through the sales process.
Review: “Craig is spot on the topic of grooming us into the sales process. He makes it look is obvious that these are very basic and crucial steps in making sales. After spending 25+ years in technology profession, I was never introduced to a structured way of sales, that I got here first hand. I am really thankful to Craig and Coursera to have this high quality and high impact material available to global students.” For additional reviews, click here.
Grades: To earn a passing mark, students must complete all graded assignments.
Instructor: Rajkumar Venkatesan
Credentials: A member of Poets&Quants’ top “40 Under 40” professors, Venkatesan teaches the core marketing MBA course to first-year MBAs at Darden (along with and several executive education courses). His research focuses on customer relationship management, marketing metrics, and marketing analytics. A prolific researcher, his work has appeared in outlets like the Harvard Business Review and the Journal of Marketing Research.
Description: Decisions are driven by data. These days, the best models yield the best result. In this course, according to Venkatesan, students will gain “the tools to measure brand and customer assets, perform regression analysis, and design experiments as a way to evaluate and optimize marketing campaigns.” Over five weeks, the course will cover resource allocation, metrics for measuring brand assets, customer lifetime value, and regression basics. It will also feature marketing cases for companies like Snapple, IBM and Netflix to show how marketing analytics were used to develop campaigns and the results they produced.
Review: “This course is really very in depth and is a good mix of solid theory and real world application. I think it’s a must for anyone in advertising, sales or marketing.” For additional reviews, click here.
Credentials: A practitioner and an academic, Aranzabal joined IE Business School as an associate professor in 2015. Before moving to teaching, she held several roles in the retail sector, including a decade as a partner in a retail consulting firms, along with working in marketing, international development, franchising, and general management for several organizations. An MBA from the Wharton School, Aranzabal also has experience as a retail consultant at McKinsey and a senior association in M&A for Goldman Sachs.
Graded: Students can choose to explore course videos, discussions, and ungraded assignments for free, but they won’t be able to submit graded assignments, earn a certificate, or complete a specialization without paying a $79 fee.
Description: Distribution is a difference maker. It enables firms to cut costs, reach new markets, and better scale operations. Unlocking this advantage and maximizing distribution’s benefits requires strategy. In this course, Aranzabal will cover distribution from a variety of strategic vantage points, including “company profile, portfolio structure and price positioning, go-to-market policy, trade and retail marketing, [supply chains], e-commerce and global retail management.” In particular, the course will examine how information technology, such as CRM and merchandise and reallocation systems, can strengthen and streamline operations and drive long-term strategic planning.
Review: No reviews.
Additional Background: This course is the third part of a “Marketing Mix Implementation” specialization, a four course series that includes a capstone project. To learn more about these courses and register for them, click here.
Credentials: Schweidel is an associate professor of marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, where he is also co-director of the Emory Marketing Analytics Center. His research focuses on both using social media to gather market intelligence and applying customer behavior models to better measure customer value.
Graded: To earn a passing mark, students must complete all graded assignments.
Description: It’s ironic: the more information we have, the harder it is to predict the future and make decisions. In this course, students will learn how to make more inclusive and accurate forecasting through Excel. Notably, students “will develop an understanding of the basic components of a forecasting model, how to build their own forecasting models, and how to evaluate the performance of forecasting models.”
Review: No reviews.
Additional Notes: This course is the third part of Emory’s “Foundations of Marketing Analytics” specialization, which covers areas like surveying and managing uncertainty. To learn more about these courses and register for them,click here.
Anticipating Your Next Battle, in Business and Beyond
Credentials: Ghez is the academic director of the Center for Geopolitics at HEC Paris, where he also teaches managerial economics in the executive MBA program. His research focuses on European and Middle Eastern foreign policy and international economics.
Graded: To earn a passing mark, students must complete all graded assignments.
Description: There is a saying that those who fail to prepare are condemned to fight the last battle. Too often, professionals are consumed by their day-to-day tasks, focusing on their strengths and what worked in the past, unaware that expectations are changing. In other words, they’re stuck in the past, the last battle, and don’t anticipate what the market will soon require. This is a course about transformation, developing a “long-term consistent strategy and vision” to ensure students are consistently “reinventing” themselves as uncertainty and complexity increase and expectations evolve. This course doesn’t just cover how to make a personal change. In addition, it will place students in the role of CEO to establish a vision and build a strategy to achieve organizational change.
Review: “All in all this was a very good course. Jeremy Ghez is a bright and inspiring teacher. The content of the course was extremely interesting and well put together. I would have certainly enjoyed to have some sections of the course expanded, which was my only disappointment. I thought the assignments were very well handled.” For additional reviews, click here.
Credentials: Gentile teaches at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Over her career, she has been ranked among the top thought leaders by organizations like ComplianceWeek and Ethisphere. Gentile is also the author of Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right, an award-winning book that has been featured in the Financial Times and the Harvard Business Review. Before joining the faculty at Darden, she taught at Babson College and Harvard Business School.
Graded: Students must pass all required assignments to pass.
Description: Many people believe ethical lapses stem from a lack of character. For Gentile, the real issue is a lack of courage. For her, ethics aren’t a matter of knowing right-from-wrong, but knowing how to act under pressure when requests contradict their value systems. This focus on action is what distinguishes this course. Borrowing methods, exercises, and scripts from her book, Gentile focuses on how to manage ethical dilemmas that protects the company and employee without deepening divisions. Notably, the course provides frameworks for answering these questions: “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?” Even more, the course includes coaching so students can rehearse how they would respond in ways that would enable them to express their values without reprisal and re-focus discussions on building a consensus that better navigates ethical uncertainties.
Review: “I truly feel like this course expanded my capacity to think about ethical conflicts, big and small, that can arise in any workplace. I feel that I now possess the tools necessary to effectively and respectively handle each situation and bring light to my own values in the workplace.” For additional reviews, click here.
Scaling Operations: Linking Strategy and Execution
School: Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
Credentials: A member of Poets&Quants’ Top 40 Professors Under the Age of 40, Allon is a professor managerial economics and decision science at Kellogg, where he teaches courses in operations management, operations strategy, scaling operations in the full-time program (and strategic decision-making and supply chain management in the executive MBA program). A decorated teacher, Allon was named the 2014 Alumni Professor of the Year at Kellogg (after earning the school’s Outstanding Professor of the Year in 2009). In addition, Allon is a recognized researcher and author, whose peer-reviewed work has been published in Management Science, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Operations Research. He holds a Ph.D. in management science from Columbia Business School.
At Kellogg, Van Mieghem teaches operations management in the full-time and part-time MBA program sand operations management, supply chain management, and new product innovation in the executive MBA program. A former senior associate dean and chair of the managerial economics and decision sciences department, he is currently the academic director for the executive MBA program. Like Allon, Van Mieghem is a distinguished researcher, with over 40 academic papers published, including one piece he co-wrote earning the best paper award from the Management and Service Operations Society. He holds a Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Graded: Students can receive a verified certificate for successfully completing the course for $49.
Description: Operations is becoming the new marketing, with firms differentiating themselves through speed, cost containment, and partnerships. In this course, students will learn how to turn operations into a strategic advantage, helping them maximize their existing processes, capabilities, and investments to drive strategy, increase market share, and establish new markets. In addition, they’ll be exposed to new operational trends, financial models, and analytical tools and to expand their competencies, better leverage their suppliers, and better benchmark their progress. Each week, students will be exposed to a major case study, which will be supplemented by lectures and discussions. They will also receive real company data, so they can better understand how course tools can impact real operations – including their own. Students will be evaluated through quizzes, homework and a final project or exam.
Review: No reviews.
Additional Note: The authors have also co-authored a textbook on this topic called Operations Strategy: Principles and Practice.
Graded: Students can choose to explore course videos, discussions, and ungraded assignments for free, but they won’t be able to submit graded assignments, earn a certificate, or complete a specialization without paying a $79 fee.
Instructor: Valerie Gauthier
Credentials: Gauthier is an associate professor at HEC Paris. A graduate of the Stanford Graduate Business School’s executive program who also holds a Ph.D, in comparative literature, Gauthier’s research focuses on leadership, business communication, cross-cultural management, and intuitive intelligence. She is the author of Leading With Sense:The Intuitive Power of Savoir-Relier, which was published in 2014 by Stanford University Press.
Description: Leadership – You know it when you see it, right? Is it charisma, vision, toughness, or know-how? Is it the ability to chart a direction and convince people to enthusiastically follow? In this course – the third in a series from HEC Paris – students will apply the self-awareness, communication, and problem-solving techniques learned in the previous two courses. In particular, according to Gauthier, they will “apply the 4 steps of The Savoir-Relier protocol to your group: 1. defining the group identity by working on the group self-awareness, 2. creating quality relationships within the group, 3. working on resilience for the group to then be able to overcome difficult situation and 4. Making the organization grow by creating sense and meaning.”
A hands on, case-driven course, Leading Organizations will show students “how the genuine, generous and generative characteristics apply to the development of successful organizations. For example, you will apply the Relational Circuit to recruit effectively, or the Self-Portrait and Conversation exercises to create team cohesion and resilience to overcome crises and interpersonal conflicts. You will be able to form trustworthy relationships in spite of diverging or different views, and you will grow respect in your environment where sense will be a driver for you and your surroundings.”
Review: No reviews.
Additional Note: This course is the last of a three part specialization called “Inspirational Leadership: Leading with Sense.” To learn more about this specialization and register for it, click here.
Credentials: Strom-Olsen is the director of studies at IE’s school of arts and humanities. A Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University, he also teaches in IE’s international relations and business schools. In fact, this course – which challenges students to question traditional management frameworks and organizational structures – is among the most popular courses at the IE Business School. In his spare time, Strom-Olsen is a musician who holds a master’s degree in advanced composition.
Graded: Students will earn a verified certificate for completing this course.
Description: Should incentives maximize short-term output or reinforce long-term goals? Why does culture unify teams in some cases and blind employees to opportunities and misconduct in others? Such questions have confounded management thinkers for decades. In this course, Strom-Olsen challenges students to continuously ask questions, all the way down to “what is an organization?” and “what is leadership?” Drawing on disciplines that include history, economics, psychology and theology, this course fosters discussions how managers should view their role, establish priorities, make and execute decisions, and measure success. Driven by case studies that range from the rise of Roman commerce to the fall of Nokia, Strom-Olsen confronts the aspirations, practices, pressures, structures, and fallacies that drive growth or stymie innovation. Student will learn through video lectures, online exercises, and PowerPoints, with content reinforced through homework assignments.
Review: “This course is very useful for anyone in management profession. The traditional concepts which are usually taught in the MBA Classrooms are looked upon in this course through a prism of criticality and an attempt is made to find out how rational a decision can be evaluated in practicality. Topics such as shareholder value, rise and fall of nokia, efficiencies in the roman markets even though there was no advanced technology to facilitate flow of information and dissection of housing bubble have been thought provoking and really a good learning experience.” For additional reviews, click here.
Credentials: Dr. Caplice teaches logistics and supply management at MIT, ranked #1 (graduate) and #2 (undergraduate) in this field. He oversees the MIT Freight Lab, which researches ways to improve the design and management of freight transportation. He also manages the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and MIT’s Global SCALE Network. Caplice, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas, also serves as the chief scientist for Chainalytics, a supply chain consulting firm.
Sheffi previously headed MIT’s engineering systems division and has founded five different companies. Goentzel is the founder and director of MIT’s Humanitarian Response Lab, which is part of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Rice is the deputy director of this center, along with teaching supply chain management and finance courses at the school.
Graded: After completing the course, students can receive an instructor-signed certificate for $150.
Description: This is the fourth in a five course series that builds on Supply Chain Design, which examined the connections and interactions between various points in the chain. In this course, students will look at variables that can disrupt internal chains, along with chains between producers, distributors, and consumers. Notably, it will look at points where supply chains risk disruption through case studies and simulations.
Review: No reviews.
Additional Background: This course is part of the MITx MicroMasters Credential in Supply Chain Management. To learn about this certification,click here.
Credentials: Mahoney is a professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the University, along with serving as the Caterpillar Chair of Business at the school. He teaches students ranging from undergrads to Ph.D.s in classes that include Strategic Management and Economics of the Organization. Illinois students have given Mahoney an overall “Excellent” score for his teaching for 24 consecutive years beginning in 1992. He holds a Ph.D. in Business Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Graded: Students can choose to explore course videos, discussions, and ungraded assignments for free, but they won’t be able to submit graded assignments, earn a certificate, or complete a specialization without paying a $79 fee.
Description: Michael Porter points out that “Strategy is about making choices [and] trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” And ‘choices’ are the key. Strategy inherently involves focus and limits, with variables like market expectations, channel distribution, costs, revenue and margins, and customer acquisition and retention all vying for emphasis. A good strategy balances such factors, while providing clarity on what organizational objectives are – and how to achieve them. This course helps students understand how to not only create value, but present it to the marketplace. In particular, students will “understand how corporations create, capture, and sustain competitive advantage; analyze business situations and create a coherent corporate strategy; and understand the fit between corporate strategy and organization structure to improve economic performance.”
Review: No reviews.
Additional Background: This is the sixth of a seven course specialization from the University of Illinois called “Strategic Leadership and Management.” It includes courses on organizational design, business and corporate strategy, and applying leadership techniques. To learn more about this specialization and register for it,click here.
Conversations That Inspire: Coaching Learning, Leadership and Change
Grades: Students will receive a signed Statement of Accomplishment for successfully completing the course.
Instructors: Richard Boyatzis, PhD; Melvin Smith, PhD; Ellen VanOosten, PhD
Credentials: Boyatzis teaches leadership, change management, emotional and social intelligence, and coaching at Case Western Reserve University. A highly-regarded author, Boyatzis was ranked as the ninth-most influential thinker in a survey by HR Magazine. A pioneer in Intentional Change Theory (ICT), Boyatzis also co-authored the international best-seller Primal Leadership with Daniel Goleman and Annie McKee. He has taught at the university for 27 years and has earned the school’s Distinguished University Professor Award and the John Diekhoff Award for Graduate Student Teaching. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard.
Smith serves as the faculty director of executive of executive education at Case Western Reserve University, where he also teaches courses in the department of organizational behavior. His interests center on leadership and emotional intelligence. Before entering academia, he spent nearly two decades in Fortune 500 leadership, including sales and marketing leadership roles at HJ Heinz and the Pepsi Bottling Group. He holds a Ph.D. from the University’s Katz Graduate School of Business.
VanOosten is the Director of the Coaching Research Lab, along with being an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior there. Her research interests include executive development, experiential learning and emotional intelligence. Outside of the classroom, she is an executive coach whose clients include Fifth Third Bank and Sherwin Williams. She earned her Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve in 2012.
Description: Many times, coaching is treated as a pat on the back or a kick in the pants. In fact, “coaching for compliance” is a term for the latter, where coaches push their charges in a certain direction as a means of “fixing” their reports. It doesn’t work, argue the instructors in this course. Instead, they recommend “coaching with compassion,” where “the person is brought into the positive emotional attractor by initially discussing their dreams, values, and invoking hope, mindfulness, compassion and even playfulness.” So how do you do that? Drawing on decades of research, the instructors will share frameworks and techniques for tying their employees’ dreams with the larger mission. In particular, the course will examine the five points for fostering sustained change; how neuroscience shapes reaction and retention; and examples of Positive (PEA) and Negative Emotional Attractors (NEA).
During this five-week course, students will learn the content through videos and readings, along with writing their thoughts in a personal learning journal and participating in online discussions. Students will also be required conduct two personal coaching sessions, with write ups of the sessions reviewed and graded by peers.
Review: “This class has been one of the best courses I have taken so far online and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who has an interest in psychology, self-discovery, and theories of change.. While the title of the course may come off as a bunch of buzz word ideas, the content of the course is highly focused on developing an understanding of self in relation to a particular leadership theory. After developing a sense of self, the student is encouraged to explore where they want to be going, how they can achieve that, how it looks within organization, and how to make sustained change on that level. Dr. Boyatzis provides very clear and concise lectures during the course with assignments that are invaluable to the course as a whole.” For additional review, click here.
Additional Note: This course is part of a five-part specialization called “Inspired Leadership.” To learn more about this specialization and register for it, click here.
Instructors: Richard Lambert and Robert W. Holthausen
Credentials: Lambert teaches Problems in Financial Accounting at Wharton, where he has earned the WEMBA Core Teaching Award five times since 2007. A long-time researcher whose interests include performance measurement and financial incentives, Lambert’s recent work has been pushed by ContemporaryAccounting Research, Review of Finance, and the Journal of Accounting and Economics.
Holthausen chairs the accounting department at Wharton, along with serving as academic director for Wharton’s Mergers and Acquisitions program. He teaches courses in corporate valuation and empirical research in accounting. During his quarter century at Wharton, Holthausen has collected several undergraduate teaching awards and has authored the book, Corporate Valuation: Theory, Evidence and Practice. Before entering academia in 1973, Holthausen worked as an auditor and financial analyst for two Fortune 500 firms.
Graded: Students can choose to explore course videos, discussions, and ungraded assignments for free, but they won’t be able to submit graded assignments, earn a certificate, or complete a specialization without paying a $119 fee.
Description: For many, accounting is a means to measure credits and debits or a set of processes for producing the annual financial statement. As markets become increasingly competitive and operations grow more complex, organizations rely on quantitative analysis to predict behavior and identify cost savings and opportunities. In this course, Wharton will introduce students to common mathematical and statistical models, such as regression analysis and cost-volume profit analysis. Along with learning step-by-step processes for building these models, students will understand how to measure risk, calculate probabilities, and weigh alternatives.
Review: No reviews.
Additional Background: This is the final course in Wharton’s brand new “Business and Financial Modeling” specialization. Other courses in the series will cover spreadsheets, modeling risk and realities, and decision-making. To learn more about this specialization and register for it, click here
Financial Analysis for Decision Making: Funding Your Business
Credentials: Dr. Potter is both an Associate Dean and the Faculty Director of Blending Learning for the MBA program at Babson College. With a background in finance, he teaches courses in entrepreneurial finance, corporate strategy, and financial management. In 2016, Dr. Potter was awarded the Thomas Kennedy Award for Excellence at Babson College. The year before, he was named the school’s Faculty Director of the Year. His most recent research has been published in the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Index Investing.
Graded: Students who complete all requirements can purchase a verified certificate for $49.
Description: The idea was the easy part. Now come the hard questions. Who do you target? How should you scale? Most important: how do you pay for it? You have plenty of options. You can take out a small business loan, tap family and friends, crowdfund, add a partner, or pitch to a VC. That doesn’t even count bootstrapping or dipping into your assets or savings. Of course, the biggest question is how much money do you need to fulfill your ambitions…and how much cash reserves should you hold for worse case scenarios? In this course, students will answer these questions. In particular, students will learn the best sources for securing funding based on their particular situations, along with loan terms and costs that can hamper them on.
According to Potter, the course is designed to “take the mystery out of financial analysis,” along with providing tools to help students “value and evaluate ideas to determine the appropriate benefits and costs in order to screen them correctly,” and learn how to value a business and the securities [they] can use to potentially fund your organization.”
Review: No reviews.
Understanding Financial Statements: Company Performance
Credentials: Since 2004, Jackson has taught accounting courses at the University of Illinois to graduate and undergraduate students. Holding a Ph.D. in accounting psychology from the University of Texas, Jackson is renowned as a top teacher, with students ranking him “Excellent” on average from 2005-2014. Before entering academia, Jackson held senior and leadership positions at Ernst & Young, Baker Hughes, and KPMG Peat Marwick. His most recent work has been published by The Accounting Reviewand Contemporary Accounting Research.
Graded: Students can choose to explore course videos, discussions, and ungraded assignments for free, but they won’t be able to submit graded assignments, earn a certificate, or complete a specialization without paying a $79 fee.
Description: Revenues and expenses. Profit and loss. These are the yin and yang of business. To truly understand your organization’s health, you need to be fluent in how to read a profit-and-loss statement. Building off the previous “Company Position” course – which focused on the fundamentals of interpreting balance sheets – “Company Performance” examines income statements. In particular, it covers how it drives decision-making. During the course, students will be exposed to the basic components of an income statement – including how the data is derived and what each component means (and how they interrelate with each other). As part of the course, students will also review and evaluate statements from real companies.
Review: “I would have hated this course but the mentor Mr. Jackson just did the course so well, he should be the one making all the courses that you have under this module. I learned a lot from him and I am able to directly relate his reasoning, his real life considerations to the business I am handling right now, and more than understanding the concepts, I am now inspired to learn more!” For additional reviews, click here.
Additional Background: This course is the second part of a “Fundamentals of Accounting” specialization, a five course series that covers strategy assessment and control, decision making and measurement, and company positioning in financial statements. To learn more about these courses and register for them, click here.
Financial Accounting Made Fun: Eliminating Your Fears
Credentials: At Babson, Wilson teaches courses in advanced accounting, financial reporting, and measuring financial performance. In addition, he serves as the executive director of Babson’s blended learning MBA program, which has locations in San Francisco and Wellesley. Before joining Babson in 2010, he spent nearly two decades at Duke University, where he also served as the executive director of executive programs at the Fuqua School of Business.
Graded: Students who successfully complete the course can purchase a signed verified certificate for $49.
Description: Ask any business student which class they dread and accounting is certain to top the list. Let’s face it: The content is pretty dry. Even more, it is like learning a new language, with a mind-numbing array of terms and applications — all accompanied by a whole set of complicated, if not contradictory, rules. Alas, accounting and finance are the dialects spoken in the board room. If you don’t learn it, you won’t get far in your career.
That’s why Wilson takes a practical approach to teaching accounting, making the content alive and relevant through stories and applications, all brought together in the context of launching a business. According to Wilson, students will cover the following:
“This course introduces you to the form, content and definitions included in the primary financial statements: income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. You will learn how to use this information to make key operating decisions, such as how to balance growth with cash constraints. You will learn how to use ratios to diagnose a company’s financial health and apply these concepts and tools to evaluate a company of your own choosing.”
Review: No reviews.
Additional Note: This is the first in a six course specialization from Babson College called “Business Principles and Entrepreneurial Thought,” which includes courses on data analytics, marketing fundamentals, and financial analysis. To learn more about these courses and register for them, click here.
Instructors: Katherine Klein and Christopher Geczy
Credentials: Klein is the Vice Dean of the Wharton Social Impact Initiative. A teacher at the program since 2004, she has taught MBA courses in knowledge management, performance management, and institutional transformation. Her research interests include social networking, teamwork, innovation implementation, and leadership.
Geczy has taught at Wharton for over 20 years and currently serves as the Academic Director for both the Jacobs Levy Equity Management Center for Quantitative Financial Research and the Wharton Wealth Management Initiative. He currently teaches graduate courses in impact investing and investment management at the school.
Graded: Students must successfully complete all assignments to get through the course.
Description: Not every investment is designed to maximize return. In impact investing, the goal is to promote initiatives that further social and environmental causes. Such investments are often made in emerging markets and cover life-and-death areas like agriculture, energy, healthcare, housing, and education. As a result, enterprise success is often measured differently in such ventures. So how can investors push social good and evaluate performance beyond beating market rate?
In this course, students will learn far more than financial fundamentals and strategic planning. It is also a leadership course, with cases and exercises designed to help students “cultivate purpose and inspires change, measure societal impact through evidence-based models, and invest in ventures effectively and meaningfully.”
Review: No reviews.
Additional Notes: This course is the fourth part of Wharton’s “Strategies for a Better World” specialization, which covers areas like corruption and social entrepreneurship. To learn more about this specialization and register for it, click here.
Credentials: A faculty member since 2005, Hockerts focuses his research on sustainability and environmental entrepreneurship. His work has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics and the International Review of Entrepreneurship among other outlets.
Graded: To earn a passing mark, students must complete all graded assignments.
Description: In business, you measure your performance through a profit-and-loss statement. How do you measure when your mission involves serving a community? Is success based on the attainment of certain benchmarks? What about the impact on intangibles like confidence and level of engagement? In this course, learners will develop a top-to-bottom business plan that enables them to assess the return on their investment in their mission. As part of writing this business plan, students will also develop a value proposition along with a methodology for scaling their operation and a strategy for financing it.
Review: No reviews.
Additional Notes: This is the third of three courses in the school’s “Social Entrepreneurship” specialization. To learn more about this specialization and register for it,click here.
Here are some additional courses starting in January that may interest you (To learn more about the courses or register for them, click on the links below):
Meet Annie & Piper: A Student And Dog’s Life At HBS
News from Harvard Business School
“Before attending HBS, Annie Fulton studied Architecture at the University of Arkansas and worked for a building materials company. It was important to Annie that she become more involved with the decision-making process of what is built and how it is built, so she decided to attend HBS to pivot into a more fulfilling career in the building industry. Annie graduated in 2017, and has since started a career in strategy with Clark Construction, one of the largest commercial general contractors in the country.
“Fortunately, attending Harvard Business School did not prevent Annie from being with her dog, Piper. We caught up with Annie to learn more about her and Piper’s experience at HBS.”
News from Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
“Americans would likely be surprised to see a traditional cigarette ad during their favorite television show. After all, they have been banned on TV and radio since the 1970s.
“Yet their modern equivalents exist.
“Ads for electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are not technically included in this ban, and have been allowed in all types of media since the product’s introduction to the U.S. in 2007.
“Such ads have ignited controversy over whether they should be regulated in the same way as traditional cigarette ads. Although the electronic products are generally considered less harmful than their conventional counterparts, they still carry health risks. For example, e-cigarettes typically contain the addictive substance nicotine, and some studies have found that the devices may expose users to carcinogenic chemicals. But, even if assumed to be safer than conventional cigarettes, some people worry that e-cigarette ads could end up encouraging consumers to smoke more traditional cigarettes as well.”
How A Fast-Growing Startup Built Its Sales Team For Long-Term Success
News from HBS
“It’s common for leaders of sales teams to focus almost exclusively on short-term tactics and current operations while failing to think and act in a way that supports the longer-term needs of their businesses — and it’s hard to fault them. Sales teams must meet the immediate needs of their customers, respond issue by issue and account by account, and meet quarterly goals. As one sales manager noted, ‘In this job, if you don’t survive the short term, you don’t need to worry about the long term.’
“The biggest problem with a short-term approach is that managers develop blind spots around crucial processes such as recruiting, hiring, and training and development.”
Corporate Heaven: The ‘Authentizotic’ Organization
News from INSEAD
“The CEO of Wickrott Corporation was known as a suspicious control freak. Symptomatic of his leadership style were the numerous ‘internal consultants’ hired to keep him informed of the goings-on in the organisation. Staff described their work environment as a cutthroat, Darwinian ‘soup.’ Information was power; secrecy was the norm; transparency and teamwork were conspicuous by their absence. To add to the company’s paranoid culture, the CEO demanded pre-signed resignation letters from all of his senior executives so that he could fire them on the spot if he felt that they had transgressed. At meetings, he frequently subjected them to abusive, even profane tirades. During these humiliating sessions, he made it quite clear that the firm owed every bit of its success to him alone.
“At the Upling Corporation, by contrast, great efforts were made to ensure that every staff member was aligned behind the firm’s values, mission and vision. Senior executives emphasised the importance of a coaching-oriented, people-centric culture. Employees were proud of the organisation as it offered mutual support, promoted trust and provided them with meaning. Pay was decent and the benefits were excellent. Senior management encouraged people to speak up, come up with new ideas and take risks. In particular, entrepreneurial activities were advocated. Work-life balance was taken seriously, and the company strived to be a good corporate citizen for the community and the world at large.”
Cam Cooper (MAcc’15) didn’t know what career he wanted until he found accounting. Now the newly promoted Senior Associate serves as a recruiting coordinator for EY
Coming Full Circle: Young Master Of Accountancy Alum Now Helps Recruit For EY
News from Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management
“Cam Cooper (MAcc’15) came to Bethany College to play football and major in economics. Through his coursework, he developed an interest in accounting and decided that he wanted to pursue a career in the field after graduation. A summer internship at a regional accounting firm before his senior year confirmed his interest.
“’I got exposed to the audit track through that internship, and I thought that it was something I could see myself doing and that it was a good place to start my career, (given) the opportunities and experiences you get early on,’ he said.
“There was only one problem: Cooper wasn’t an accounting major, so he didn’t have the academic grounding he needed to enter the field. He looked at Master-level Accounting programs to give him the knowledge he needed and decided that Vanderbilt was the perfect fit.”
Measuring The Impact Of Dodd-Frank On Household Leverage
News from Northwestern Kellogg
“In the wake of the Great Recession, even noneconomists became familiar with the phenomenon commonly blamed for causing it: ‘household leverage.’
“Dramatized in the 2015 film The Big Short, this bit of jargon describes the relationship between a homeowner’s debt and the resources they have available to pay it back. If the former conspicuously outweighs the latter, the household is ‘highly leveraged.’
“This does not necessarily mean that household leverage always translates into missed payments, defaults, and foreclosures. But in 2007 and 2008, a cascade of those very effects helped overwhelm the global financial system.”
“I feel very happy today. The most fabulous gift that I have in my life is to be with my family,” Francisco Rodriguez said at a December 22 press conference in Bellingham Hill Park in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Photo by Anne Trafton/MIT News Office
MIT Custodian Francisco Rodriguez Released From Detention
News from MIT Sloan School of Management
“After being held in detention for more than five months by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), MIT custodian and father of four Francisco Rodriguez will be spending Christmas at home with his family.
“While in detention, Rodriguez missed the birth of his son and spent his own birthday away from his family. On Friday, Rodriguez thanked all of the supporters who worked for his release and said that his faith in God helped to sustain him throughout his detention.
“’I feel very happy today. The most fabulous gift that I have in my life is to be with my family,’ Rodriguez said at a press conference today at Bellingham Hill Park in Chelsea, Massachusetts. ‘It’s a miracle. Miracles can happen any time. It’s fantastic to be home and to be free.’”
How This Professor Goes The Extra Mile To Build Connections Inside And Outside The Classroom
News from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
“Prof. Kartik Hosanagar is always looking for new ways to connect with his students. Hosanagar, the John C. Hower Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, is known for his sense of humor and his outstanding dance skills.
“’One thing I generally try to do is not forget that I was once a student and hold on to a little bit of that,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I go in on day one pretending to be another student, and say “I heard the professor isn’t any good.” Then when I start teaching, they have this look.’
“’I play some pranks — it’s a good way to connect. It’s important to break the ice.’”
Employees’ Idle Time Costs $100B Per Year, Study Says
News from University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business
“Scrooges, take note.
“Companies in the U.S. shell out more than $100 billion in wages a year for time that employees are in between tasks or not actually working, according to a study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.
“The study, using a national survey across a variety of occupational categories, found that 78.1% of employees have idle time at work, with 21.7% of employees experiencing idle time daily.”
