Tom Peters has given managers some tips on how to carry themselves during a recession.

“Banish gloomy from your personal demeanor,” he suggests, before adding that a sunny demeanour “is pretty stupid, too: who do you think you’re kidding?”.

A determined look – “gettin’ on with gettin’ on” – is best, he concludes. Inevitably, there is a garish PowerPoint slideshow.

Elsewhere:

• An alternative guide to managing in hard times;
• Obama as marketing case study;
• Why people mistrust products that do more than one thing – and how to neutralise that fear;
• Notable bankruptcies of 2008;
• How to justify paying top managers too much;
• Why installing a bar in your office is a good thing.

The Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog is showcasing an academic paper that explores how politically connected companies in the US fared in the days after the 2000 presidential election.

The researchers found that the result boosted shares in S&P 500 businesses whose board had a ”pure” connection to the victorious Republicans (that, for example, contained one or more former Republican members of Congress, and no such Democrats). Shares in large companies whose boards leaned to the losing Democrats suffered.

Of course, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the opposite will be true when US markets open today. But investors might find it useful to look up a few director biographies all the same.

Turmoil in the financial and property markets has left buyers and sellers eyeing each other warily. Negotiating amid such systemic mistrust is far from easy.

Tim Cullen, head of the negotiation programme at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, says there are strategies that can help, however.

In a new FT Management podcast, he says good negotiators develop a full understanding of the other side’s agenda to identify areas where compromise might be acceptable.

In a downturn, he says it can be advisable for buyer and seller to break with convention by negotiating directly instead of through intermediaries.

Contingency agreements – linking payments to future variables such as interest rates, for instance – can be another useful tool for negotiators in uncertain times, he adds.

Previous podcasts include the Kellogg School of Management on “analysis paralysis” in marketing and Stanford Graduate School of Business on controlling emotions in a downturn.

All are available for free download through iTunes and can also be found by scrolling down the list of shows on the FT podcast player.

Last week the FT celebrated 10 years of publishing influential MBA league tables at a grand party in Mayfair, central London. The room was packed with distinguished business school heads and only slightly less distinguished FT staff. I was there too.

It had not escaped many guests’ attention that earlier that week the front page of the FT had featured the words “Blame it on Harvard” in bold type right at the top of the page, followed by the rhetorical question: “Is the MBA culture responsible for the financial crisis?”

(The article these words referred to was in fact reasonably positive towards the Harvard MBA.)

A week later colleagues produced a substantial special report on business education, with lots of important detail on the current (healthy) demand for the MBA qualification. It does not appear to have gone out of fashion just yet.

There seems to be quite a serious outbreak of cognitive dissonance going on here. The MBA continues to be pilloried by all sorts of clever and important people - Henry Mintzberg, Tom Peters. Some business leaders are dubious about their MBA-toting recruits. The media remains sceptical. And yet all over the world people are still lining up to get hold of one.

Why?

All managers will have come across employees who believe their achievements deserve more credit than they merit. They are also likely to have worked with someone who thinks their every mistake is logged by superiors with dreadful efficiency.

The science of psychology is well aware of these traits. In fact, both can be linked to a phenomenon known as “the spotlight effect” explains Nick Epley, a professor of behavioural science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Prof Epley says the tendencies to claim too much credit or to fear that the world notices all our imperfections, however small, are both reflections of a basic psychological failing.

Because we are always conscious of our own thoughts, we wrongly think that others are paying us as much attention as we are ourselves. As a consequence, we expect too much praise in the workplace - or too much blame.

This phenomenon has been illustrated by an experiment in which people were told to don Barry Manilow T-shirts. Afterwards, they massively overestimated the extent to which others noticed their questionable fashion statement.

The spotlight effect is just one of the psychological insights that Prof Epley applies to management in three video lectures for FT Business School.

In ‘Making unbiased decisions’, he shows how managers unconsciously distort or omit vital information when choosing what to do. In ‘Mind reading at work’, he explains why it is so difficult to intuit what bosses, colleagues and underlings are thinking. Finally, in ‘Motivating staff’, he says cash is overrated as a way of firing up employees.

Previous FT Business School video lectures include Iese’s Pankaj Ghemawat on the limits of globalisation and their impact on corporate strategy, as well as Insead’s Herminia Ibarra on moving up to a leadership role – or moving out to a new career.

 As the Age of Debt draws to a close, New York and London have lost their all-conquering swagger. With Wall Street and the City reeling, the idea of a ”NyLon” global hegemony based on financial services seems a touch dated.

But the ideal of transatlantic twinning isn’t dead yet. The FT’s annual ranking of Executive MBAs has awarded top place to the joint programme offered by Columbia Business School and London Business School.

The top five Executive MBA courses:

• Columbia/LBS;
• Kellogg/Hong Kong UST Business School;
• Trium (HEC Paris/LSE/NYU Stern);
• Wharton;
• IE Business School.

For full details, read the FT special report and interactive rankings. A panel of experts will also answer questions about Executive MBAs on Wednesday, between 14.00 and 15.00 GMT, on FT.com.

Buyouts do better in US states that vote Republican. That’s the conclusion of research by HEC’s Oliver Gottshalg and NYU’s Aviad Pe’er.

Republican views are better aligned with buyout value-creation strategies (such as outsourcing labor, shutting down less efficient units, lower commitment to social responsibility, and deunionization) than Democratic views are.

I’ll file it next to ”Foxes Report Feeling Less Hungry When Hen Houses Left Open”.

Elsewhere:

• The ever-readable Freek Vermeulen on how the human mind is influenced by the way issues are framed – and the knock-on effects on corporate strategy;
• Hairshirtism embraced by Silicon Valley managers – surely it is only a matter of time before a start-up describes itself as “pre-redundancy” rather than “pre-revenue”?

In recruiting Joel Podolny, the dean of Yale School of Management, has Steve Jobs just raised the bar for in-house management training?

Prof Podolny is to be dean of something called “Apple University”. He’ll be replaced by Sharon Oster at Yale.

So what is Apple University? Prof Podolny can’t talk about it. The Apple PR person hasn’t been blabbing either.

Yale Daily News reckons it knows, saying Prof Podolny’s role will “focus on executive education within the company”.

If so, it would be quite a coup for Apple’s personnel department.