David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group, the private equity investor, has defended his industry’s management style in an interview with Wharton business school’s private equity club:

The techniques that private equity developed have helped to make companies more efficient. They do make workers more motivated and they do produce the kind of returns that I think enable the system to move forward…. if you give a manager a large piece of a business, if you have people who are investing in the business, putting their own money at risk, and if you can operate in a private setting to a large extent, you can create value.

But does that add up to much without colossal slugs of debt? Michael Gordon, the global head of institutional investment at Fidelity International, says it hasn’t so far. In a recent article for the FT, he declared that the turbo-charged returns delivered by private equity investors before the credit markets seized up were almost exclusively the result of leverage, not the superior accountability or incentivisation of owner-managers. “Private equity as we have come to know it is all about debt - lock, stock and sinking barrel,” he claimed.

Students at Canada’s Richard Ivey School of Business will have an unusual guest speaker on Thursday: Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who served four years in prison after bringing down Barings Bank. Mr Leeson will aid the students in a case study analysing the bank’s collapse, while giving tips on the safeguards needed to prevent similar debacles. Afterwards, the students will take part in the “Ivey Ring Tradition Ceremony”, in which they pledge “to act ethically and honestly in all their activities”.

Ivey confirms that it is paying an undisclosed sum to Mr Leeson to come over. The website of the agency that represents him says his normal fee for an after dinner speech ranges from £6,000-£10,000 ($11,800-$19,700; €7,600-€12,700). To give a little perspective, Sir Geoff Hurst, England’s 1966 World Cup hero, costs £2,500-£5,000.

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Senior management teams are great at coming up with strategic priorities, to the extent that many are drowning in them. But while it is platitudinous to point out that the existence of too many goals confuses staff and leads to sketchy execution, the path to rectifying strategic overload is less obvious. Yet Peter Killing, a professor at IMD, the Swiss business school, says there is a clear method that bosses can use to define and approach their company’s “must-win battles”. You can listen to him detail these steps in a 16-minute audio interview here, or click on the rest of this post for a written summary.

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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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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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Why has AG Lafley been so successful at running Procter & Gamble?  According to Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Mr Lafley is a great example of the superior leader who doesn’t reduce management to a series of “either/or” choices. Instead, he has been able to blend two seemingly incompatible courses of action into a very effective strategy.

In his recent book, The Opposable Mind, Prof Martin tells how P&G was being pushed in two different directions when Mr Lafley became chief executive in the dark days of 2000. On the one hand, the maker of Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste faced pressure to cut costs in order to compete more aggressively with own-brand goods. Yet there was an opposing school of thought that said the path to salvation lay in going upmarket by using expensive innovations to differentiate P&G brands from the me-too products.

As Prof Martin tells it - and as an advisor to Mr Lafley he has had a privileged view of the turnround - part of the genius of the P&G boss was in finding a way to reconcile these two positions into a synthesised whole that managed to satisfy both constituencies. Costs were cut but there was also a new emphasis on design and on importing external ideas that helped P&G to charge higher prices. Prof Martin calls this have-cake-and-eat-it approach ”integrative thinking”.

In this 9-minute audio interview, I chat to Prof Martin to find out how managers can structure their own problem-solving in order to avoid simplistic binary oppositions.

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Peter Lorange has a double life. On the one hand he is a management theorist and the long-serving president of IMD, the Swiss business school. But he is also a successful businessman. When he popped into the FT yesterday, I was more interested in Lorange the doer rather than Lorange the thinker. I wanted to quiz him on the way he was handling his business affairs in order to get first-hand tips for managing in choppy economic conditions. The affable Norwegian’s responses were not what I expected at all.

For a start, it turned out that he sold his shipping business - which moves supplies to and from oil rigs - last year. With disarming candour, he says he has given half of the deal proceeds to UBS to be placed in relatively low-risk investments. The other half has been earmarked for opportunities chosen by him and family members. In contrast to his patiently-constructed shipping company, these are likely to be shorter-term investments that have a clear potential to be “flipped” after 2-4 years. “That requires new thinking for me,” he says, declaring that he has already had success buying shares during recent stock market dips.

I hadn’t been prepared for such a pillar of the management establishment to be so fervent about flipping. Maybe global economic uncertainty has made other approaches to capital allocation too risky at the moment: a clear path to payback outweighs everything else.

But Professor Lorange, who is due to stand down as IMD president at the start of April, has not entirely ditched his old ways. He is also trying to buy two ships that transport live salmon from farm to slaughterhouse, arguing that they occupy an attractive, highly-specialised niche in an industry he knows well.

As a postcript, Lorange the theorist has two pieces of general advice for those trying to manage and lead in a downturn. The first is to promote team unity by stressing the ”we, we, we” rather than the “me, me, me”. The second is to focus any job cuts on less-promising divisions rather than trying to spread them out in an even-handed way across the organisation.

Business school professors are often chided for being out of touch with the real world of management. They churn out unreadable research that is only of interest to a narrow community of academic peers - or so the argument runs - instead of addressing the day-to-day problems arising in the workplace. (For a summary of the prosecution case, see Michael Skapinker’s recent FT column on the matter, mildly entitled “Why business ignores the business schools“.)

There is a much truth in these criticisms but not all b-school profs have difficulty being accessible. Freek Vermeulen, a Dutch associate professor at London Business School  (pictured left), is a case in point.  Dr Vermeulen - whose first name, rather disappointingly, is pronounced “Frake” rather than “Freak” - has been blogging enthusiastically since the start of the year on his site, “Random Rantings“. It is lively and engaging stuff. Highlights have included lessons in innovation derived from an Asian contemporary dance troupe (if you want to be be innovative, forget about what you think the customer wants) and a homily about a plumber who spotted a niche in the market for artistically-shaped radiators (the moral being that it is not enough to get lucky - you also have to recognise and exploit what fate throws up). His research into how bad management ideas spread also fuelled a rant against management consultants (he describes them as pin-striped pigeons that transmit dodgy ideas like avian flu).

News of any other illuminating professorial blogs shall be gratefully received.