B-schools

Harvard Business School – 100 years old

October 12, 2008 10:29 pm by Stefan Stern

Greetings from the third floor of the magnificent Baker library at Harvard Business School on a glorious Sunday evening. The trees are in their autumn beauty, as WB Yeats might have said, had he been here.

I have come here to attend a three-day conference to mark HBS’s centennial. Jeff Immelt of GE is speaking tomorrow, as is eBay’s Meg Whitman and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The FT’s Niall Ferguson (he teaches at Harvard in his spare time) will be performing too.

Perhaps it’s the champagne, the trio of musicians providing delightful chamber music, or maybe it’s the late autumn sunshine. Whatever the reason, current market turmoil seems to have been temporarily forgotten by most people here.

On arrival I noticed two banners hanging up on the ivy-clad (really) walls. One read: “What is the future of market capitalism?” The other said: “What will globalization bring?” These banners reminded me a little of the ones you used to see up on the walls of buildings in eastern European capitals in the Soviet era, which said things like: “If we want to build socialism we are going to have to work for it.”

Perhaps we will find out over the next few days what sort of future market capitalism will have. We should get a slightly calmer and more coherent answer here than on Wall Street, in the City of London, or in the world’s other major markets.

I will try and keep you posted on the highlights of this historic event.

STOP PRESS (or blog equivalent – 00.30 BST, 19.30 local)

HBS Dean Jay Light has just challenged the carefree atmosphere with a serious opening address. The current financial crisis represents a collective failure of financiers, business leaders, politicians – we all have much to learn. But management education, and the MBA, are more not less relevant, and important.

Posted in B-schools | Permalink

Podcast: Kellogg on “analysis paralysis” in marketing

October 10, 2008 6:19 pm by Adam Jones

Marketers used to struggle to get all the information they wanted about their customers, says Tim Calkins, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Now, thanks to the internet and other advances, the opposite is true: many marketing departments have access to so many facts and figures that “analysis paralysis” has set in.

In a new FT Management podcast, Prof Calkins says the profession needs to become less preoccupied with gathering information and more concerned with translating insight into action – especially now that deteriorating economic conditions have made companies question all costs that do not have a clear payback.

He warns: “If all you do is know your customer really well, that doesn’t help you.”

Continue reading: “Podcast: Kellogg on “analysis paralysis” in marketing”

Posted in B-schools, Hard times, Marketing/sales, Podcasts | Permalink

Pick of the week

October 10, 2008 2:15 pm by Adam Jones

Why recruiters of Generation Y must also win over their target’s parents;
The difference between coaches, mentors and managers;
Mentoring for senior women in particular;
How company boards get “captured” by the senior management team;
The best way to react to a racist joke at work.

Posted in B-schools, Governance/CSR, Leadership, Managing others | Permalink

Pick of the week

October 3, 2008 9:53 am by Adam Jones

When he taught his macroeconomics students about the Great Depression, Insead’s Ilian Mihov used to declare that it would never happen again. Now he is not so sure.

Elsewhere:

CEOs can demand, US presidents must persuade – really?
How to be an outstanding chairman;
Motivational speaking is about story-telling;
The psychology behind non-executive directors’ silence;

Posted in B-schools, Career/skills, Governance/CSR, Hard times, Leadership | Permalink

Retailers should not skimp on staffing in downturn

October 2, 2008 2:39 pm by Adam Jones

With consumer spending under pressure in various major economies, retailers are particularly exposed right now. The tempation, as ever, will be to cut staffing. New research from Harvard Business School suggests that would be a bad idea.

Zeynep Ton, an assistant professor, studied one large retailer and found that there was a link between increased spending on staffing and increased profits. However, this wasn’t because of better customer service.

It was actually because extra payroll expenditure led to improvements in the fulfilment of some basic, behind-the-scenes tasks, such as ensuring that stock was on the sales floor and not the storeroom, returning unsold items and keeping display shelves tidy.

On a similar topic, one Wharton professor has criticised a new system for getting the most out of staff at the Ann Taylor clothing chain, saying the Darwinian software – which allocates prime shifts to the best sales people – was like “squeezing blood out of a turnip” .

Posted in B-schools, Hard times, Marketing/sales | Permalink

No need to panic, but keep it urgent

September 26, 2008 11:46 am by Stefan Stern

Review of A Sense of Urgency
John Kotter
Harvard Business Press
$22/£11.99

Back-to-back meetings, an exploding e-mail inbox, an ever-longer working day and almost permanent jet lag – this is the familiar world of today’s frenetically busy executive.But now a distinguished author says that what so many of us really lack is a sense of urgency. Is this guy for real?

He is. John Kotter, emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, has a clear and simple message.

What most of us think of as urgency, as busy-ness, is not actually making things any better. This false urgency is stressful, exhausting and unproductive.

True urgency may sometimes involve moving fast. But the most important aspects of true urgency are relentlessness, steadiness and the purposeful pursuit of a goal while “continuously purging irrelevant activities to provide time for the important and to prevent burn-out,” says Kotter.

The author is perhaps the business world’s favourite guru on the subject of change.

His book Leading Change (1996) has become a classic, with its eight-step programme for managing change effectively.

Step one in Kotter’s approach was to create a sense of urgency. Now, a decade after publishing his best-seller, he returns to consider this first step at greater length.

He has done so because he has become convinced that this sense of urgency is overwhelmingly the most important factor if change is going to be handled successfully.

Continue reading: “No need to panic, but keep it urgent”

Posted in B-schools, Leadership, Managing others | Permalink

Yale says Blair course is managerial as well as divine

September 25, 2008 11:34 am by Adam Jones

Tony Blair is helping to teach a course on Faith and Globalisation at Yale University. Organised by its schools of divinity and management, the course seems, on first glance, to be preoccupied with the divine rather than the managerial.

The accompanying website contains sections on “faith and violence”, “faith and reconciliation” and “faith and human rights” — but relatively little about faith and commerce.

However, Joel Podolny, dean of Yale’s management school, assured me that MBA students taking the course will receive practical guidance on how religion can affect corporate strategy, personnel management and leadership. After all, these can be big issues for business.

Continue reading: “Yale says Blair course is managerial as well as divine”

Posted in B-schools, Leadership, Managing others, Strategy/ops | Permalink

Buffett the HBS reject still leading by example

September 22, 2008 10:17 am by Adam Jones

The first part of the FT’s newspaper-only serialisation of The Snowball, the authorised biography of Warren Buffett, had a fascinating insight into his failure to get into Harvard Business School.

Having already developed a strong interest in stocks, the young investor was confident that he would get into HBS, even though he was only 19. However, the book says the school wanted leaders not prodigies and saw through his confidence to his “shaky inner core”.

Continue reading: “Buffett the HBS reject still leading by example”

Posted in B-schools, Leadership, Managing others | Permalink

Pick of the week

September 19, 2008 11:51 am by Adam Jones

The week of reckoning is almost over. For a cheery reminder of normality, watch the FT’s Richard Edgar prowling the aisles of the new Emirates A380 “super jumbo”. Marvel at the shower in first class! Quake before the endless prairie of economy class!

Elsewhere:

Tom Peters on the difference between customer loyalty and customer bribery;
Donald Trump insists he isn’t tremendously worried that “there will be more people looking for jobs than will be looking for apartments” in New York;
Freek Vermeulen rants about inflexible corporate strategies.

Posted in B-schools, Expat/travel, Hard times, Marketing/sales, Strategy/ops | Permalink

Finance hopefuls told: keep faith in elderly and Brics

September 18, 2008 7:15 pm by Adam Jones

Glenn Hubbard, Columbia Business School’s dean, has tried to cheer up those of his students who were hoping for a career in financial services. In a “town hall” meeting this week, he gave them three reasons for medium-term optimism about the industry:

1. The global phenomenon of an aging society puts pressure on the demand for a whole variety of financial products and services. This isn’t as well developed as it should be in the U.S. or the U.K., let alone in many emerging economies, and the number of return income vehicles, insurance products and so on will increase…

2. Many of the big emerging economies are improving their domestic demand, which will generate a huge demand for financial services as they exit from the state provision of services to the market…

3. The overwhelming forces of globalization and the demands for international finance. Anyone who says that the financial sector is going to shrink out of business has not been through these cycles before.

Past Columbia Business School graduates could seek their fortune with a short subway ride downtown. The dean’s second point suggests that they may now have to travel further afield.

Posted in B-schools, Hard times | Permalink