MBA News Bites
Stacy Blackman’s Weekly Roundup of B-School Intelligence
Executive MBA programs trying to attract more women — Less than 20% of participants in executive MBA programs are women, and Cornell, Wharton and Columbia want to boost those numbers, the Wall Street Journal reports. London Business School and Madrid’s IESE even have tuition dollars set aside to target women for scholarships. But it’s a tough row to hoe, with many female executives shouldering a second full-time job: raising kids.
MIT Sloan and Russian counterpart focus on innovation and entrepreneurship — A collaboration between Sloan and the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO launches this fall with the goal of strengthening capacity at the Russian school while exposing MIT faculty and students to new and exciting global developments and challenges. “The difference between emerging markets and developed countries is shrinking, and we all need to figure out the implications for management practice,” says MIT professor Simon Johnson, who will play an active role in the joint effort.
Mind your manners…some etiquette for MBAs — Financial Times profiles a workshop in business etiquette and networking offered at Northeastern College of Business Administration and sponsored by IBM. Seems MBA students everywhere experience angst over which fork to use for salad, how to pass the salt and the correct way to pass the bread basket. Choosing a roll and tossing it to your high-powered tablemate is frowned upon, it seems.
Gloom and doom projections for newly minted MBAs — If the class of 2008 thought they had it bad, it’s nothing compared to what faces graduates this spring, BusinessWeek reports. All signs point to fewer companies hiring MBAs this year, with salaries slashed or –best case– frozen in the technology, finance and manufacturing sectors.
Sydney Finkelstein, Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, has a new book out this month. “Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You” came about as Finkelstein and his co-authors looked at 83 cases of high-profile acts of poor judgement in political, business and military settings. The author says decisions are the lifeblood of action for organizations and individuals, and there is much to be learned from others’ mistakes.
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