Since my post last week on the dilemma facing corporate sponsors of this year’s Beijing Olympics, John Quelch, the eminent Harvard Business School marketing professor, has weighed in on the issue with an article published on the Harvard Business website. Notably, he says marketers are waiting to see if there will  be more unrest in Tibet before finalising spending plans for Olympics-related advertising:

Marketers are not overcommitting funds to Olympics-related brand advertising and promotions and the normal Olympics year advertising boost may be less than expected. Instead of long-term preset media advertising buys, many companies are planning short-term promotional bursts that they can activate as late as July and August if all appears to be in place for a successful, trouble-free Games.

Otherwise, he says Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker that is a first-time global sponsor of the games, has much more at stake than veteran backers such as Visa. Long-time Western sponsors may be pragmatically two-faced, he predicts, putting forward one message for the Chinese market that will tap into the country’s pride at hosting the games, and another, more neutral message for the rest of the world. To my untrained eye, that doesn’t necessarily look like a shift in strategy, just a reflection of the fact that sponsors might have different goals in different markets.

An association with the Olympics used to be something that companies boasted about. Following protests by campaigners critical of China’s behaviour in Tibet and Sudan, exposure to this year’s games has the potential to be a public relations millstone, however.

In today’s FT, for instance, Neville Isdell, the chairman and chief executive of Coca-Cola, lays out his defence of the soft drink maker’s involvement in the Beijing Olympics. Without addressing the recent unrest in Tibet, he says Coke has for two years been “actively engaged” in Darfur, the war-torn province of Sudan.

China has been criticised for its ties to the Sudanese government, whose forces and allied militia have been held responsible for killings and other atrocities in Darfur. Mr Isdell claims it is wrong - and fruitless - to extend that criticism to those seeking to profit from the Beijing games. “Criticism of Olympic sponsors from well-intentioned people will not stop the violence in Darfur,” he declares, preferring to highlight Coke’s work in backing clean water projects in Sudan.

Professors at Wharton have been analysing the dilemma facing Olympic sponsors on the business school’s website. Witold Henisz, a professor who studies political risk management, says:

Corporations that want to sponsor the Games have to navigate the political undercurrents… but they can only do something that will not offend China. That’s a very delicate balance to strike, and it requires enormous diplomatic skill.

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The new McKinsey Quarterly has an excellent interview with Brad Bird, the Oscar-winning Pixar director responsible for The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Among other things, Mr Bird describes how he persuaded Pixar’s animators to strike a balance between perfectionism and expediency.

There are purists in computer graphics who are brilliant but don’t have the urgency about budgets and scheduling that responsible filmmakers do. I had to shake the purist out of them—essentially frighten them into realizing I was ready to use quick and dirty “cheats” to get something on screen if they took too long to achieve it in the computer.

He describes the value of having what he calls “black sheep” in a team: frustrated but committed individuals who want to do things differently but haven’t had the chance to prove their theories. He also praises Pixar for offering staff optional classes that foster a well-rounded workforce.

If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system.

His peeves include “passive-aggressive people… who don’t show their colours in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away”.

Earlier this month, I asked readers for their experiences of professional networking websites. Having used these responses to shape my questioning of bosses at LinkedIn and Xing, two huge players in this field, I’ve come to the conclusion that such sites can benefit users in two major ways - as long as they avoid two big pitfalls.

Below is a summary of these pros and cons, with input from Lars Hinrichs, the founder and chief executive of Xing, and Kevin Eyres, the European managing director of LinkedIn (as Mr Eyres is based in London, I was also able to conduct a 9-minute audio interview with him). It’s a long post but please bear with me!

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Ever since his Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has been viewed as one of the world’s most persuasive public speakers. So when his new climate change lecture was premiered on Ted, a website dedicated to “inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers”, earlier this week, I decided to pick it apart to see how it worked.

Like many people, I was impressed by An Inconvenient Truth. I’d even stood in line to hear Mr Gore speak in New York last May (this was deeply hypocritical, given that I had jetted in from Paris for an emission-heavy long weekend in Manhattan - unless getting him to sign a DVD counted as a carbon offset).

It was my hope that a close analysis of his new slideshow might be useful to public speakers in the business world. Having viewed it three times - and watched An Inconvenient Truth yet again for context - I think I have been able to identify four key elements to the performance. But after studying his verbal and visual tricks in detail, I’m not sure I’d queue to see him again.

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When Jérôme Kerviel was named as the alleged rogue trader at Société Générale, journalists immediately trawled social networking websites in search of facts about his career and personal life.  But in spite of the risk of such (perfectly legitimate) intrusion, hordes of business people are still willing to lay out details of their lives on sites such as LinkedIn, Xing and Facebook. Why?

Given that these are predominantly smart, forward-thinking people, I can only assume that the benefits of membership outweigh the privacy risks. Over the next week or so, I’d like to try to quantify and analyse some of these benefits. I’m particularly intrigued by the potential for conflict between the trend for ‘Brand Me’ self-promotion and the ‘keep your head down’ discretion expected by more traditional employers.

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Harvard Business School, the creator of the MBA, celebrates its 100th birthday tomorrow. To mark the occasion, Della Bradshaw, the FT’s business education editor, has produced an authoritative analysis of the MBA’s contribution to business in its first century of existence. While the report card is mixed, there is little doubt that it remains a qualification that can seriously boost one’s salary, while at least 30 of the top 100 global companies are run by MBAs.

One of the most intriguing suggestions in the piece is that HBS graduates no longer out-earn peers at six other top US institutions, such as Stanford and Wharton (see table). A decade ago they did, according to data collected over that period by the FT, which also suggest that leading European schools such as LBS have been catching up. Jay Light, HBS dean, says he is sceptical of the numbers, adding that recruiters still lay siege to his school. But he is perfectly willing to admit that the Harvard MBA is unlikely to guarantee success in one high-octane career choice: politics.

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Michael Skapinker says in his latest column that the visit of Nicolas Sarkozy to the UK has been a marketing coup for Emirates. The airline’s name adorns Arsenal’s football stadium, used as one of the venues for the Franco-British love-in last week. This meant that Emirates, which paid more than £100m for the “naming rights” to the ground, was frequently mentioned in the press.

The thinking behind naming rights is that people encounter the brand in a positive context, creating a rosy glow of familiarity that translates into higher sales. But are the purchasing patterns of consumers really influenced by the myriad things that they see as they go about their daily lives?

They can be, according to new research by Jonah Berger, an assistant professor at Wharton business school, and Grainne Fitzsimons, of  Canada’s University of Waterloo. However, I’m not convinced that their findings add much to the marketer’s arsenal.

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Tom Glocer, chief executive of Reuters, clearly takes his blog very seriously. For instance, it contains an endearingly pedantic list of his favourite musicians, including Mahler, Grateful Dead, Kanye West and “Kool & the Gang (early)”.

The precision of that final entry marks him down as a man who wants to be thoroughly understood, who wants his staff to know that while the deep funk of 1973’s Jungle Boogie might get him on to the dance floor at the Christmas party, the post-disco pap of 1984’s Cherish will leave him frozen to his chair in horror.

Flippancy aside, the ability to convey to the world exactly what you are about is a great skill for a manager to have - and it looks like Ron Sandler, the new chairman of Northern Rock, might also have the knack.

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If history is a reliable guide to the future, McKinsey says corporate earnings in the US might fall by as much as 40 per cent from their 2007 levels, even though “few companies as yet anticipate such a blow to their earnings and general economic health”.

It bases this exceptionally bleak claim - contained in an article posted on its McKinsey Quarterly website - on an analysis of the historic relationship between corporate earnings and GDP, plus return on equity trends.

The consultancy provided some advice for executives to accompany its warning.

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