Stacy Blackman’s B-School Buzz
Each week, we bring you news from the front lines with business school bloggers sounding off on life in the trenches.
Grayson Leverenz weighs in on sports chat during interviews on the MBA in the USA blog. Seems international MBAs are baffled by how people commonly use sports to develop rapport with an interviewee. When Leverenz recently asked an Indian student what was the biggest surprise about doing an MBA in the United States, the student replied, “People love sports in India, too”¦but we don’t talk about them during interviews.”
On his Random Rantings blog, LBS strategy professor Freek Vermeulen poses the question: Managers and leaders, are they different? The bottom line, he believes, is that no single leader type fits every scenario; different companies at different times need people with different skill sets.
David Booth joined students for lunch on campus last week, which for To MBA or Not to MBA (Chicago Booth) brought up the question of not whether markets are perfectly efficient, but, she says, whether the amount of money to be made from inefficiencies is worth the cost. “While in any given period, someone can be the ‘rare orangutan’ (as Booth so lovingly put it), but can they be the rare orangutan consistently?”
Inside HBS shares the sting of being unwanted this week as he recovers from his first two internship rejection letters. He says, “I think I underestimated the psychological impact of receiving ‘sorry, you’re not good enough’ letters from an employer every day for the next month.”
Marc shares an update from Singapore as he settles into life at INSEAD‘s Asian campus for the next four months. Unlike his arrival at the Fontainebleau campus in France, he loves how easy it has been to get around speaking English in this Westernized bit of Asia.
As he enters the 7th quarter of his business education at Darden, Square Method realizes that perhaps too much time has been spent focusing on the little things of the MBA program, and more time could be spent focusing on the bigger picture as well. A new goal: finding a way to use his MBA skills and technical abilities to make the world a more beautiful place. Or at least keep the world from getting more ugly.
After “pimping himself out” to investment backs and consulting firms during milkround, N.A.S. (London Business School) recalled a grim assignment during a course on Understanding General Management which asked students to write their own eulogy. The exercise offered some perspective to see whether one’s life and career goals are on track, and so at the urging of friends, he has posted his life’s summary here.
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