This week, we bring you the view from the front lines with business school applicants, students and professors sounding off on life in the trenches.

Lessons from the MBA journey — Ahembeea spent some time reflecting on the MBA application process last week and offers four lessons learned as well as what he’d do differently if the chance arose.

The power and importance of blogging – With test prep and application deadlines looming, Mission MBA wondered some time ago whether starting an applicant blog was really a good idea. “Well, as I look back,” he says, “It has been one of the best steps I have taken along the apping journey.”

Performance measurement of a different sort – Maybe MBA (Chicago Booth) takes issue with a grading system that tries to quantify almost imperceptible differences in an above-average group. “If you have a group of hard-working people who all did a damn good job, what’s the matter with splitting the pie and calling it a day?” she argues.

The “G20 freak circus is in town” — The Ruminator (LBS) brings his usual scathing commentary to the hullabaloo surrounding the G20 summit in London. “Protest-antics aside,” he says, “The G20 itself seems a bit of an unhappy and artificial construct of a family.”

INSEAD is like  middle school — Rant & Ramble at INSEAD says her classmates typically reconnect with their childhoods by “drinking enough vodka to kill a bear, hooking up with their groupmate, showing midriff in class,wearing hot pants, costume parties, getting obsessed with a classmate to the point of stalking them.”

A curious restatement of the credit problem — On the Socializing Finance blog, Martha Poon, a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Organizational Innovation, takes issue with a statement made in the New York Times recently that the problem today is getting qualified people to borrow money.

Debate on blame rages on — Stanford professor and business guru Bob Sutton offers his two cents on the ongoing debate at the Harvard Business Review website of whether business schools are to blame for the current financial meltdown.

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We are now on Facebook – please join the Stacy Blackman Consulting group, or become a friend of Stacy Blackman. I am posting news about MBA related events, job listings, and of course MBA news.

I am on Twitter too…click to follow me on Twitter! www.twitter.com/stacyblackman

For a concise, thoughtful guide that will help you navigate the MBA admissions process with greater success, order our NEW book, The MBA Application Roadmap.

This week, we bring you news from the front lines with business school applicants, students and professors sounding off on life in the trenches.

How to choose a b-school — Alex Tzukerman discusses the way he came to his decision of where to apply and provides some personal insight–and a ven diagram–on how to make this important decision. The trick, he says, is finding the nexus of b-schools that can take you where you want to go, ones you are passionate about, and ones to which you have a good chance of getting in.

Beijing, Part 1 – Paragon 2 Pieces has a post describing her experience on the 2009 McCombs Global Connections trip to China and finds several contrasts between Shanghai and the capital city.

Old dogs/new tricks — Mandy Lozano responds to the recent NY Times piece, “Is it Time to Retrain Business Schools?”. The issue is not as glaring at Darden as at other schools farther north, she says, “But at any rate, we are always challenging ourselves and others to re-define what value creation and stakeholder theory and responsibility mean. Viva la case method.”

Going dancing with Wake Forest — After receiving the news that both UNC and Georgetown have waitlisted him again, Omne has decided to end the ‘will they/won’t they’ cycle of torture and enjoy the love coming from Wake Forest. “I feel wanted,”‘ he says, and “Being wanted is a better feeling than being accepted.”

It’s like pulling a rabbit from a hat –D.G. has come to the conclusion that getting admitted into business school is akin to the old “pull a rabbit out of a hat” trick. Here, he offers five admissions tips to help applicants figure out what the b-school trick might be.

Watching the boss’s every move — Stanford professor and management guru Bob Sutton taught at an executive program last week on the ins and outs of being a good boss in a bad economy.  One lesson Sutton learned: when people are living in fear, they watch their bosses moves very closely.

Round 2 decisions at Chicago Booth — Rose Martinelli, associate dean for student recruitment and admissions, updated The Rose Report with an explanation of what being on the waitlist really means and offered some consoling words for applicants who have been denied this time around.

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We are now on Facebook – please join the Stacy Blackman Consulting group, or become a friend of Stacy Blackman. I am posting news about MBA related events, job listings, and of course MBA news.

I am on Twitter too…click to follow me on Twitter! www.twitter.com/stacyblackman

For a concise, thoughtful guide that will help you navigate the MBA admissions process with greater success, order our NEW book, The MBA Application Roadmap.

This week, we take a look at what business school professors are blogging about outside the classroom.

Three lessons from the Bernie Madoff scandal — Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, sees many lessons, both useful and non-useful, coming on the heels of the Madoff scandal. The urge to over-diversify, search for more bad apples and define “acceptable” levels of cheating are just some of the negative downstream consequences of the Madoff fiasco, Ariely writes.

The dangers of selection bias — In his latest post, London Business School professor of strategic and international management Freek Vermeulen raises the issue of selection bias, using the firing patterns against World War II military aircraft as an example. When selection bias occurs, we only see a selection of the outcomes and therefore draw false conclusions, Vermeulen says, and this happens in the business world all the time.

VCs deeply afraid of missing the next Google — David Hornik, who teaches intellectual property and business at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, says the best reason to continue to invest in search is that search engines are getting worse by the day. In this entry, Hornik discusses Aardvark, whose founders want to inject human knowledge and relationships into the search process.

Two sides of Health IT –Andrew McAfee, associate professor in the technology and operations management area at Harvard Business School, takes issue with a recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Dr. Anne Armstrong-Coben, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia. The physician writes that the computerization of healthcare depersonalizes medicine–and McAfee disagrees wholeheartedly.

The future of financial economics — Robert Salomon, assistant professor of management at NYU’s Stern School of Business, has been talking to academics across several disciplines to determine what the future of the field of financial economics should/will/might look like. As he sees it, the field of financial economics should be more inclusive when it comes to behavioral approaches to human behavior (whether from economics or psychology) and behavioral views of the firm.

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We are now on Facebook – please join the Stacy Blackman Consulting group, or become a friend of Stacy Blackman. I am posting news about MBA related events, job listings, and of course MBA news.

I am on Twitter too…click to follow me on Twitter! www.twitter.com/stacyblackman

For a concise, thoughtful guide that will help you navigate the MBA admissions process with greater success, order our NEW book, The MBA Application Roadmap.

This week, we take a look at what business school professors are blogging about outside the classroom.

The more things change, the more they stay the same — Technology management professor Andrew Hargadon of UC Davis Graduate School of Management wrote about lies and statistics last week, calling statistics the weapon of choice these days in everything from science to stimulus plans. On the bright side, the NYT sports section reported that the average free-throw percentage in college and professional basketball has remained essentially unchanged for the last 50 years.

What does workspace mean these days? — That is the question asked by management professor Terri Griffith of Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. We show off our offices to job candidates, Griffith says, but do we show off our technical space? After all, nice as the view might be outside your corner office window, the vast majority of your time is likely focused on the smallish patch of glass you’re currently staring at.

Businesses and the Icarus paradox — London Business School‘s associate professor of strategic and international management Freek Vermeulen draws a poetic parallel between overconfident businesses and the Greek figure Icarus, whose downfall came when he flew too close to the sun. As Vermeulen points out, highly successful companies often become blind to the dangers that other developments pose to them, which eventually leads to their downfall.

Small decisions can have major impact — Tom Davenport, who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, says that many companies don’t realize that microdecisions — small decisions made many times by many workers at the customer interface — can have a major impact on the business. How they are made can be the difference between sloppy and effective execution, and between profit and loss.

Overcoming the saving slump — Annamaria Lusardi, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, offers some advice from her new book on how to increase the effectiveness of financial education and saving programs. Lusardi says, “My aim in editing this book is to illuminate the issues facing so many Americans in regards to saving and retirement planning and to evaluate the existing programs and products that have been designed to facilitate saving.”

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We are now on Facebook – please join the Stacy Blackman Consulting group, or become a friend of Stacy Blackman. I am posting news about MBA related events, job listings, and of course MBA news.

I am on Twitter too…click to follow me on Twitter! www.twitter.com/stacyblackman

For a concise, thoughtful guide that will help you navigate the MBA admissions process with greater success, order our NEW book, The MBA Application Roadmap.