Showing posts with label MBA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MBA. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Why choose London Business School?
London Business School is consistently ranked as one of the top business schools in the world, and is committed to becoming the pre-eminent global business school.
Monday, January 26, 2009
MBA: The top ten business schools
The top ten business schools, according to the Financial Times, are headed by London Business School and Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, ahead of Harvard Business School in the US.
=1. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
The world's first collegiate business school, founded in 1881. Ranked top by the FT every year. Has a staff member for every 17 students. Alumni include Warren Buffett, Donald Trump and Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco.
=1. London Business School
Established in 1964. Alumni include The Hon Wong Kan Seng, the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, Sir John Sunderland, the chairman of Cadbury Schweppes and David Davis MP.
3. Harvard Business School
Founded in 1908, located across the Charles River from the main Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Alumni include George W. Bush, Michael Bloomberg and Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JP Morgan Chase.
4. Columbia Business School
Established in 1916 in New York City. Alumni include Warren Buffett, Alexander Haig and Wolfgang Bernhard, the chairman of Volkswagen.
5. Insead
Founded in 1957, has a campus in Fontainebleau and Singapore. Alumni include Lindsay Owen-Jones, the chairman of L'Oréal, Helen Alexander, the chief executive of The Economist Group and Philip Hampton the chairman of J Sainsbury.
=6. Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Established in 1925 in California. Faculty contains three Nobel Prize winners. Alumni include Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Sir Howard Davies, the director of the London School of Economics and John F. Kennedy (who dropped out).
=6. IE Business School, Madrid
Founded in 1973. Alumni include Richard Alden, the chief executive of ONO and vice-president of Cable Europe, Claudio Aguirre, a former chairman and chief executive of Merrill Lynch and Magda Salarich, the chief executive of Santander Consumer Finance.
8. China Europe International Business School
Established in 1994 in Shanghai. The first exclusively Asian-based school to reach the top ten.
9. MIT Sloan School
Founded 1914 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Executive programme shaped by Alfred P. Sloan Jr, a former chairman of General Motors. Alumni include Kofi Annan, Benjamin Netanyahu and Magdalena Barreiro, a former finance minister of Ecuador.
10. New York University Stern School
Established 1900 in Greenwich Village. Students are nicknamed "Sternies." Alumni include Friedrich Hayek, Alan Greenspan and Niall Ferguson.
(Telegraph.co.uk)
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Management: Leaders and responsibility
By Stefan Stern
January 23 2008
Harvard Business School celebrates its centenary this year. We can look forward to a series of grand events, much back-slapping and frequent blowing of its own trumpet. But how energetically will the great school salute the achievements of perhaps its most famous alumnus of all, George W. Bush (class of ’75)? It seems unlikely that the outgoing US president will be claimed as a poster boy for the Master of Business Administration (MBA) qualification any time soon.
Maybe this Bush administration merely represents an embarrassing hiccup in the otherwise increasingly deep and intimate relationship between commerce and elected leaders. The worlds of politics and business inevitably overlap, and collide. What President Dwight D. Eisenhower once labelled the “military-industrial complex”, we might rebrand as “politico-commercial”.
Even in this era of (more or less) free markets, trade takes place within the constraints of man-made regulation. Some politicians may remain uninterested in the business of wealth creation, and some business people may be left cold by the idiosyncrasies of democratic politics – but each side has to deal with the other.
The smartest actively seek cross-fertilisation. When JP Morgan, the US investment bank, snapped up the newly available former British prime minister Tony Blair earlier this month – to serve as an adviser for an estimated $5m a year – some of the sceptical noises that greeted the news were inspired by simple professional jealousy. Mr Blair had already turned down several offers from commercial organisations, his friends maintained. But he does plan to accept a few more. The ex-prime minister’s access to key figures and his understanding of how geo-political trends are likely to develop make him a highly valuable commodity.
Indeed, Mr Blair had long been attracted by the qualities, as he saw them, of successful business leaders. When he wanted to convince the sceptical British electorate in 1996 that his Labour party could be trusted to form a competent government, he turned to his growing body of friends in the business community for inspiration. Encouraged in particular by his contacts with BP, the oil company – a relationship that grew increasingly important as his time in office went on – Mr Blair conceived a series of “performance commitments” that he made to the British people. These commitments, five of them, were printed on a credit-card sized “pledge card”, and carried by Labour party candidates.
This was state-of-the-art performance management introduced to the scruffy world of party politics. The message was: do not bother reading our unwieldy, old-fashioned manifesto. Focus on these modest, practical and business-like proposals instead. Vote Labour – or your money back. And in the course of his 10 years in office, Mr Blair continued to seek the insights and experience of business leaders to lead enquiries, policy groups and task forces.
George Bush too, when he entered the White House in 2001, appeared determined to make the most of business expertise. His administration has been packed with former corporate executives. His vice-president, Dick Cheney, had been chief executive at Halliburton, the engineering and services company. His first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, had been CEO of Alcoa, the aluminium company, while Mr O’Neill’s successor, John Snow, had been CEO of CSX, a transport business. Mr Snow’s successor, Hank Paulson, was CEO of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. President Bush’s first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had been CEO of the pharmaceutical company GD Searle between 1977 and 1985 – before it was bought by Monsanto. Not for nothing was this known as “the CEO administration”.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s key adviser, spoke with admiration of his boss’s business-like administrative skills. Gone was the chaos and aimless late-night chat of the Bill Clinton administration. In the Bush era, meetings would start and end on time. Ties would be worn. President Bush is said to be a great believer in Peter Drucker’s now rather dated idea of “management by objectives”, or MBO. “I had read Peter Drucker, but I’d never seen Drucker until I saw Bush in action,” Mr Rove once said in an interview with Atlantic Monthly, the political magazine. President Bush has also revealed how business school influenced his approach to the job. “Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world,” he wrote in his 1999 book A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House.
In October 2002, before his early departure from the administration, Mr O’Neill visited Harvard Business School. He told the assembled students that much was expected of them. “The world is desperate for the application of what you’re learning here,” he said. “Not only do you have the talent and the tools – you have the obligation.”
Today, the worlds of business and politics look towards each other with greater intensity than ever. The theme for this year’s meeting at Davos is “The Power of Collaborative Innovation”. Business and political leaders will look to learn from each other. One session at Davos exemplifies this. It is called: “Rebuilding Brand America: Five Suggestions for the Future President.”
And yet both parties to this collaborative conversation should take care. Critics – perhaps we should properly say cynics – will be closely watching what they do. As Professor Henry Mintzberg (no friend of MBA orthodoxy) of Montreal’s McGill Univeristy has said: “Davos: where the people who spend 51 weeks a year creating all our problems take another week to see if they can fix them.”
If that sounds harsh, remember these words from President Eisenhower when he gave his farewell address on January 17, 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought ... The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Stefan Stern is the FT’s Management columnist
January 23 2008
Harvard Business School celebrates its centenary this year. We can look forward to a series of grand events, much back-slapping and frequent blowing of its own trumpet. But how energetically will the great school salute the achievements of perhaps its most famous alumnus of all, George W. Bush (class of ’75)? It seems unlikely that the outgoing US president will be claimed as a poster boy for the Master of Business Administration (MBA) qualification any time soon.
Maybe this Bush administration merely represents an embarrassing hiccup in the otherwise increasingly deep and intimate relationship between commerce and elected leaders. The worlds of politics and business inevitably overlap, and collide. What President Dwight D. Eisenhower once labelled the “military-industrial complex”, we might rebrand as “politico-commercial”.
Even in this era of (more or less) free markets, trade takes place within the constraints of man-made regulation. Some politicians may remain uninterested in the business of wealth creation, and some business people may be left cold by the idiosyncrasies of democratic politics – but each side has to deal with the other.
The smartest actively seek cross-fertilisation. When JP Morgan, the US investment bank, snapped up the newly available former British prime minister Tony Blair earlier this month – to serve as an adviser for an estimated $5m a year – some of the sceptical noises that greeted the news were inspired by simple professional jealousy. Mr Blair had already turned down several offers from commercial organisations, his friends maintained. But he does plan to accept a few more. The ex-prime minister’s access to key figures and his understanding of how geo-political trends are likely to develop make him a highly valuable commodity.
Indeed, Mr Blair had long been attracted by the qualities, as he saw them, of successful business leaders. When he wanted to convince the sceptical British electorate in 1996 that his Labour party could be trusted to form a competent government, he turned to his growing body of friends in the business community for inspiration. Encouraged in particular by his contacts with BP, the oil company – a relationship that grew increasingly important as his time in office went on – Mr Blair conceived a series of “performance commitments” that he made to the British people. These commitments, five of them, were printed on a credit-card sized “pledge card”, and carried by Labour party candidates.
This was state-of-the-art performance management introduced to the scruffy world of party politics. The message was: do not bother reading our unwieldy, old-fashioned manifesto. Focus on these modest, practical and business-like proposals instead. Vote Labour – or your money back. And in the course of his 10 years in office, Mr Blair continued to seek the insights and experience of business leaders to lead enquiries, policy groups and task forces.
George Bush too, when he entered the White House in 2001, appeared determined to make the most of business expertise. His administration has been packed with former corporate executives. His vice-president, Dick Cheney, had been chief executive at Halliburton, the engineering and services company. His first treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, had been CEO of Alcoa, the aluminium company, while Mr O’Neill’s successor, John Snow, had been CEO of CSX, a transport business. Mr Snow’s successor, Hank Paulson, was CEO of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank. President Bush’s first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had been CEO of the pharmaceutical company GD Searle between 1977 and 1985 – before it was bought by Monsanto. Not for nothing was this known as “the CEO administration”.
Karl Rove, President Bush’s key adviser, spoke with admiration of his boss’s business-like administrative skills. Gone was the chaos and aimless late-night chat of the Bill Clinton administration. In the Bush era, meetings would start and end on time. Ties would be worn. President Bush is said to be a great believer in Peter Drucker’s now rather dated idea of “management by objectives”, or MBO. “I had read Peter Drucker, but I’d never seen Drucker until I saw Bush in action,” Mr Rove once said in an interview with Atlantic Monthly, the political magazine. President Bush has also revealed how business school influenced his approach to the job. “Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world,” he wrote in his 1999 book A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House.
In October 2002, before his early departure from the administration, Mr O’Neill visited Harvard Business School. He told the assembled students that much was expected of them. “The world is desperate for the application of what you’re learning here,” he said. “Not only do you have the talent and the tools – you have the obligation.”
Today, the worlds of business and politics look towards each other with greater intensity than ever. The theme for this year’s meeting at Davos is “The Power of Collaborative Innovation”. Business and political leaders will look to learn from each other. One session at Davos exemplifies this. It is called: “Rebuilding Brand America: Five Suggestions for the Future President.”
And yet both parties to this collaborative conversation should take care. Critics – perhaps we should properly say cynics – will be closely watching what they do. As Professor Henry Mintzberg (no friend of MBA orthodoxy) of Montreal’s McGill Univeristy has said: “Davos: where the people who spend 51 weeks a year creating all our problems take another week to see if they can fix them.”
If that sounds harsh, remember these words from President Eisenhower when he gave his farewell address on January 17, 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought ... The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Stefan Stern is the FT’s Management columnist
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Redefining the MBA - Facing criticism, business schools bring in new leaders to review mission, find relevance
By Robert Weisman October 14, 2007 (Boston)
Autumn in the Boston area means leaves turning, students returning and, this year, the leaders at business schools churning. A new crop of educators, including a high-profile power broker and pair of Bay State natives coming home from Philadelphia and Silicon Valley, are working to re-brand their schools and reshape business education in an increasingly competitive market.
While demand for master's degrees in business administration has picked up among corporate recruiters after a lull following the Internet boom, business schools have been scrambling to rethink their missions and recast their images in response to critics questioning their ivory-tower aloofness and single-minded focus on maximizing shareholder value.
Their approaches vary, from bringing students into the workplace to customizing MBA programs to training global teams in corporate responsibility, but all struggle to remain relevant at a time of rapid economic change. "Schools are trying to redefine what business leaders need to know," said Rakesh Khurana, associate professor in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School.
Gloria C. Larson, who held top administrative jobs in the state and federal governments, has sounded at times like a candidate wooing voters with pledges of a "real world partnership" in her first weeks as president of Bentley College, a one-time accounting school that now boasts MBA and PhD degrees in its business portfolio.
"Bentley's six high-tech learning labs let you 'test drive' the concepts you learn in your classroom," Larson told 1,000 visiting high school seniors at the school's Waltham campus last month.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, David C. Schmittlein officially moves into the dean's office at the Sloan School of Management tomorrow. But in meetings with students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, Schmittlein, a Northampton native who was deputy dean at the elite Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been stressing the need to boost "experiential learning" with businesses. "Sloan is going to be at the leading edge of a more honest approach to management education," he promised.
And newly installed dean Bruce R. Magid at Brandeis University's International Business School is championing "cross-cultural fluency" as his goal at the Waltham school, where two thirds of students come from abroad. Magid, raised in Sharon, is a former overseas Bank of America executive who founded the graduate business school at San Jose State University. He insisted he's not fazed by taking his place alongside heavyweights like Sloan and Harvard Business School in one of the nation's most crowded markets for management education.
"Having worked in global financial services, I'm used to competition," he said. "We're fortunate to be in the Boston area, but we want to be one of the world's top global-focused business schools."
Ethics also figures prominently in the plans, and the talking points, of the three business educators. Noting that its Center for Business Ethics marked its 30th anniversary this year, Larson said Bentley is moving toward a "holistic" approach to preparing its students for the business world. "You have to be thinking smarter, moving faster, and also being the best global citizen you can be," she said. The arrival of Larson, Schmittlein, and Magid hastens a leadership turnover at Greater Boston business schools after a long period of stability. Jay O. Light took the reins at Harvard Business School last year. Andrew Boynton became dean of Boston College's Carroll School of Management in 2005, and Thomas Moore dean of Northeastern University's College of Business Administration in 2004.
Autumn in the Boston area means leaves turning, students returning and, this year, the leaders at business schools churning. A new crop of educators, including a high-profile power broker and pair of Bay State natives coming home from Philadelphia and Silicon Valley, are working to re-brand their schools and reshape business education in an increasingly competitive market.
While demand for master's degrees in business administration has picked up among corporate recruiters after a lull following the Internet boom, business schools have been scrambling to rethink their missions and recast their images in response to critics questioning their ivory-tower aloofness and single-minded focus on maximizing shareholder value.
Their approaches vary, from bringing students into the workplace to customizing MBA programs to training global teams in corporate responsibility, but all struggle to remain relevant at a time of rapid economic change. "Schools are trying to redefine what business leaders need to know," said Rakesh Khurana, associate professor in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School.
Gloria C. Larson, who held top administrative jobs in the state and federal governments, has sounded at times like a candidate wooing voters with pledges of a "real world partnership" in her first weeks as president of Bentley College, a one-time accounting school that now boasts MBA and PhD degrees in its business portfolio.
"Bentley's six high-tech learning labs let you 'test drive' the concepts you learn in your classroom," Larson told 1,000 visiting high school seniors at the school's Waltham campus last month.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, David C. Schmittlein officially moves into the dean's office at the Sloan School of Management tomorrow. But in meetings with students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, Schmittlein, a Northampton native who was deputy dean at the elite Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been stressing the need to boost "experiential learning" with businesses. "Sloan is going to be at the leading edge of a more honest approach to management education," he promised.
And newly installed dean Bruce R. Magid at Brandeis University's International Business School is championing "cross-cultural fluency" as his goal at the Waltham school, where two thirds of students come from abroad. Magid, raised in Sharon, is a former overseas Bank of America executive who founded the graduate business school at San Jose State University. He insisted he's not fazed by taking his place alongside heavyweights like Sloan and Harvard Business School in one of the nation's most crowded markets for management education.
"Having worked in global financial services, I'm used to competition," he said. "We're fortunate to be in the Boston area, but we want to be one of the world's top global-focused business schools."
Ethics also figures prominently in the plans, and the talking points, of the three business educators. Noting that its Center for Business Ethics marked its 30th anniversary this year, Larson said Bentley is moving toward a "holistic" approach to preparing its students for the business world. "You have to be thinking smarter, moving faster, and also being the best global citizen you can be," she said. The arrival of Larson, Schmittlein, and Magid hastens a leadership turnover at Greater Boston business schools after a long period of stability. Jay O. Light took the reins at Harvard Business School last year. Andrew Boynton became dean of Boston College's Carroll School of Management in 2005, and Thomas Moore dean of Northeastern University's College of Business Administration in 2004.
Business-oriented Babson College in Wellesley, which emphasizes entrepreneurship, is expected to name a new president some time next year. Bentley, meanwhile, is interviewing candidates to be the new dean of business under Larson.
The changes at the top have been accompanied by a reassessment and, in some cases, a tweaking of what marketers call the business schools' "brands" at a time when all are vying for students, faculty members, recruiters, and relevancy. Northeastern, for example, has sought to differentiate itself with an emphasis on practical studies like supply chain management. BC has been building its business program around ethical values, while Harvard has been pushing to extend its leadership brand into emerging fields like healthcare.
But business schools are under scrutiny as never before, and some of their toughest critiques are coming from within. In a new book, "From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Education," Harvard's Khurana argues the schools have failed to define leadership in the context of the public good and enshrined maximizing shareholder value as their highest ideal.
Other critics, like Warren Bennis and James O'Toole at the University of Southern California, have warned that business schools have grown overly academic and theoretical, far removed from the actual day-to-day operations of business and management.
Such critiques have clearly struck a chord. Schmittlein, who has been involved in the debate over the mission of business schools for nearly three decades, believes schools should move away from a cookie-cutter approach. He envisions Sloan developing a broader portfolio of programs tailored toward students on different paths, from going into investment management to joining family businesses.
"Why haven't MBA programs been more honest about where students are and where they want to go?" Schmittlein asked rhetorically. "What would be really radical would be organizing MBA programs around activities that students want to pursue."
Larson, who had extensive dealings with movers and shakers in her most recent job at the Boston law firm Foley Hoag, plans to form a "kitchen cabinet" of business leaders to advise her on Bentley's curricula. "It's a crowded marketplace," she said. "There's a spotlight on this next generation. The marketplace is demanding a very different skill set than it needed even 10 years ago. They're demanding high levels of foreign language literacy, cultural literacy, and economic literacy."
And at Brandeis, educators will be focusing on a new "seamless bottom line," in Magid's words. "You want people to come out of here who are excellent managers, are engaged in their communities, and are taking a long-term perspective about our planet," he said.
The changes at the top have been accompanied by a reassessment and, in some cases, a tweaking of what marketers call the business schools' "brands" at a time when all are vying for students, faculty members, recruiters, and relevancy. Northeastern, for example, has sought to differentiate itself with an emphasis on practical studies like supply chain management. BC has been building its business program around ethical values, while Harvard has been pushing to extend its leadership brand into emerging fields like healthcare.
But business schools are under scrutiny as never before, and some of their toughest critiques are coming from within. In a new book, "From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Education," Harvard's Khurana argues the schools have failed to define leadership in the context of the public good and enshrined maximizing shareholder value as their highest ideal.
Other critics, like Warren Bennis and James O'Toole at the University of Southern California, have warned that business schools have grown overly academic and theoretical, far removed from the actual day-to-day operations of business and management.
Such critiques have clearly struck a chord. Schmittlein, who has been involved in the debate over the mission of business schools for nearly three decades, believes schools should move away from a cookie-cutter approach. He envisions Sloan developing a broader portfolio of programs tailored toward students on different paths, from going into investment management to joining family businesses.
"Why haven't MBA programs been more honest about where students are and where they want to go?" Schmittlein asked rhetorically. "What would be really radical would be organizing MBA programs around activities that students want to pursue."
Larson, who had extensive dealings with movers and shakers in her most recent job at the Boston law firm Foley Hoag, plans to form a "kitchen cabinet" of business leaders to advise her on Bentley's curricula. "It's a crowded marketplace," she said. "There's a spotlight on this next generation. The marketplace is demanding a very different skill set than it needed even 10 years ago. They're demanding high levels of foreign language literacy, cultural literacy, and economic literacy."
And at Brandeis, educators will be focusing on a new "seamless bottom line," in Magid's words. "You want people to come out of here who are excellent managers, are engaged in their communities, and are taking a long-term perspective about our planet," he said.
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