News: Schools and Programs

[Grinch]

Financial Times 4 mars 2007
Tailor-made degrees for the smart set.
by Deborah Gardiner

Thunderbird School of Global Management is usually deserted during Arizona's brutally hot summer. But last June, executives of LG Electronics in Seoul travelled there to wrap up a one-year, in-house custom programme, the first MBA that Thunderbird had run for a corporation.

For a year, managers of LGE, one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers, contended with their normal workloads while writing business plans and studying marketing and finance.
"Our company wants to be number one globally," says one. "This is worth it to us."

Thunderbird is one of several business schools carving out a niche in customising business degrees for companies.

University of Indianapolis business school graduated its second group of 24 MBA students from Rolls-Royce in May. The course teaches supply chain management and finance to improve the company's management of suppliers and vendors. The Robert H. Smith business school at the University of Maryland has two customised MBAs, including one for Otis Elevator in China.
The McCombs business school of the University of Texas at Austin has designed MBA programmes for Texas Instruments. And the Audencia management school in Nantes, France, provides a custom MBA for directors at Stryker Corporation, the medical equipment supplier.

For business schools, particularly in the US, the customised programme is a way to diversify. Since the September 11 2001 attacks, international students who once made up the bulk of Thunderbird applicants have had difficulty getting visas.

The profits are good. The University of Indianapolis charges companies the same rate as ordinary students: $375 an hour.

The school's associate dean, Matt Will, says companies already have training and education centres. The facilities are in place, they just need the expertise, he says. Nor do groups seem concerned about the cost, because the benefits are "tremendous".

For the schools, there is the additional brand exposure. For students, it is a chance to learn from professors and peers and be paid to get an MBA. For the companies, it is a chance to become more global.

"This is the future of MBA programmes," says Mr Will.

LGE, which makes everything from vacuums to laptops, has more than 100 offices and 66,000 employees. Executives doing the custom MBA were hand-picked from different departments.
Thunderbird professors from the Glendale campus travelled to South Korea and taught at the LGE learning centre in Pyeongtaek-si, outside Seoul. Between classes, they mentored executives via an intranet. Students did the last four modules at the Glendale campus in two 31-day sessions.

As at conventional business schools, the workload puts pressure on students, and competition between them is intense. Students present weekly progress reports to their bosses, and before graduating must present a final project to top management.

No-Sang Kang, senior manager for the business planning group of LGE's PCP division, says he enjoys bringing work problems into the classroom and brainstorming with professors and students.

Others remarked on the virtue of working with other LGE executives, especially those who were working abroad. Mr Kang, for instance, works in Sweden.

But the workload can overwhelm. LGE students say they are often forced to work an 80-hour week to fit everything in. Both students and deans point out that the course's structure means students cannot mingle with MBA participants from other companies.

Mr Will from Indianapolis notes that students come from varying backgrounds. "Engineers might be bored from having to [study] statistics. You are merging a lot of different people with different backgrounds and at different levels."

Even so, schools are confident the trend will continue. The LGE contract extends until 2010, with a new cohort beginning each year. Audencia is working with several companies to expand its corporate MBA activity.

University of Indianapolis business school has begun a custom MBA with a health specialism at a big local hospital.

"Regardless of the industry, it's all about business and whether you can really make a profit doing what you are doing," says Mr Will.

[Grinch]

Best Business Books 2006
Library Journal 15 march 2007

The year's business reading identified new trends, reckoned with old challenges, offered counteropinions on hot topics, reinforced some old lessons, highlighted gains over losses, celebrated innovations that have potential for all, and observed the failures of these innovations to keep their promise. In short, it was a year of balancing equations—of balancing the books. A veritable definition of the state of today's business world, these are the best of the year.

In the titles below, you'll find entrepreneurs who describe both attaining financial success and giving back to the world. You'll find employees searching for pay equity and struggling to offset debt with savings, while those with cash to invest study the newly etched lines between the risky and the safe.

The books show the persistence of retail and brand giants but note the successes of small companies with intensely loyal customers. They find some business careerists opting out of the corporate race to shape personally fulfilling kaleidoscope careers instead.

The year saw some newly crafted equations, particularly in the economics of major business, reshaped by technology, the assured trendsetter. Most notably, Chris Anderson identified the power of online sellers to profit from the “long tail” of virtually infinite product categories and distribution over bricks-and-mortar businesses that depend on a few blockbusters for profit.

In the meantime, authors note that even as U.S. manufacturing shifts to developing countries, there are intangible costs when global ventures are not simply cyber but literal. These can be steep, even though a global balance is being sought through regulatory reforms, reductions in corruption, and increased transparency.

The power of the Internet and social networking is amply recognized as a means of marketing and increasing return on investment, yet the year also brought economic case studies undertaken in developing countries that requite such praise with assessments indicating that cyber access provides few benefits to struggling inhabitants compared with the advantages they acquire through mobile and radio technology. For them, the world does not seem to be so very “flat” after all.

The books listed here (with further titles at libraryjournal.com) balance lessons from the past with distinctly rendered maps of our future, where Wall Street shares status with developing nations, with cyberspace, and with the café around the corner.

A team of librarians and a business practitioner from around the country have chosen these titles as the best of 2006.

Business How-To

Bing, Stanley. Rome, Inc.: The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation. Atlas: Norton. 192p. ISBN 978-0-393-06026-3. $23.95.
An irreverent look at the history of Rome—as a multinational corporation. Bing extracts current business lessons from a host of notable Romans. Julius Caesar gets high marks as a CEO; Pompey's strengths were in the field. Imaginative, fun, and instructive.

Michelli, Joseph A. The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary. McGraw-Hill. 208p. ISBN 0-07-147784-5. $21.95. What are the secrets of Starbucks's success? Michelli analyzes its management and customer service techniques, interviewing actual managers, among others, to come up with five principles for business success. (LJ 9/1/06)

Morrison, Terri & Wayne A. Conaway.Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands: The Bestselling Guide to Doing Business in More Than 60 Countries. 2d ed. B. Adams Pub. Group. 592p. ISBN 978-1-59337-368-9. pap. $24.95.
The definitive reference for doing business around the world. A clear and comprehensible format, country by country, provides both general cultural orientations and specific business etiquette and local negotiation strategies. (1st ed. reviewed, LJ 1/95)

Economics

Steil, Benn & Robert E. Litan. Financial Statecraft: The Role of Financial Markets in American Foreign Policy. Yale Univ. 208p. ISBN 0-300-10975-X. $38. The aim of think-tankers Steil (Council on Foreign Relations) and Litan (Brookings Inst.) is to craft the classic text on financial statecraft, which targets capital flows, thus distinguishing it from economic statecraft, which focuses on trade. It can have immediate consequences and is little understood. This gap in our global knowledge base is well filled here.

Warsh, David. Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery. Norton. 426p. ISBN 978-0-393-05996-0. $27.95.
This tale of discovery traces the formation of the concept of knowledge as a means of production, first voiced in a 1980 paper by economist Paul Romer. That breakthrough has allowed economists to understand and account better for economic growth. Warsh (Boston Globe ) provides insights about our growing information society as he makes clear to lay readers the role of technical innovation (“knowledge”) in economic growth. (LJ 5/15/06)

Investing/Finance

Cramer, James J. with Cliff Mason. Jim Cramer's Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich. S. & S. 224p. ISBN 978-1-4165-3790-8. $25. Another Cramer book loaded with insights for the retail investor. Part companion to his Mad Money show and part continuation of Jim Cramer's Real Money , this offers newly formulated investment rules for lay investors to survive and thrive in the stock market. (LJ 1/07)

Drobny, Steven. Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets. Wiley. 384p. ISBN 978-0-471-79447-9. $29.95. Here readers get access to some rarely heard candid opinions from hedge fund insiders: how they got into the business and how they deal with the daily pressures of markets and putting billions of dollars at risk.

Solin, Daniel R. The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way To Reach Your Wealth Goals. Perigee: Putnam. 192p. ISBN 978-0-399-53283-2. $19.95. A bible for low-cost index investing. Well documented and clearly written, this hammers home the point that investment returns are overly diminished through investment industry costs. Switching to index funds will make most investors more money in the long run. (LJ 9/15/06)

[Grinch]

Stanford researchers aiming to give the internet an overhaul
Asian News International 15 mars 2007


Stanford researchers are launching a new program called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet, this month, for meeting human communication needs.

The point of the efforts is not that the Internet is broken-just that it has become ossified in the face of emerging security threats and novel applications.

''How should the Internet look in 15 years? We should be able to answer that question by saying we created exactly what we need, not just that we patched some more holes, made some new tweaks or came up with some more work-arounds. Let's invent the car instead of giving the same horse better hay'' said Nick McKeown, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who is leading the effort.

''The Internet was one of the truly great human achievements of the 20th century, but much more can be done if we rededicate ourselves to its redevelopment with the same creative spirit,'' says Stanford University President John Hennessy, also a professor of computer science and electrical engineering.

''Stanford can make a unique contribution because of the breadth and depth of world-class expertise in all aspects of global communications, networking, economics and security, and because of our longstanding collaboration with key innovators in industry,'' he added.

McKeown and his colleagues already have identified and begun working on four projects that constitute the initial research direction of the program. Some of these efforts are developing prototypes that may presage how a new Internet could work.

A prime example is a prototype 400-user wireless network in the Gates Computer Science Building called Ethane. Ethane embodies a more straightforward approach to designing a secure corporate network than the awkward administrative tricks corporate networks today rely on for security. Graduate student Martin Casado leads the project. He is joined by McKeown; Dan Boneh, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering; David Mazieres, an assistant professor of computer science; Mendel Rosenblum, an associate professor of computer science; and Scott Shenker, a professor of computer science at the University of California-Berkeley.

Normal corporate networks allow open communication by default, which makes implementing effective security and privacy rules an onerous task for network administrators. Much simpler is Ethane, which starts out prohibiting all communications. Administrators then simply open whatever channels are appropriate within an organization while security is retained by default.

''Ethane is a strict way of controlling who can talk to whom and over what path they can communicate,'' McKeown says.

A second project addresses the mismatch between the availability of wireless network capacity and the huge growth in the use of wireless devices to access the Internet. Electrical engineering Associate Professor Andrea Goldsmith and management science and engineering Assistant Professor Ramesh Johari are researching ways to give wireless devices (personal digital assistants, phones and other handheld devices) the flexibility to find and access pockets of unused spectrum when they need it.
'
'We are proposing a 'clean slate' redesign of wireless spectrum allocation, to ensure efficient utilization of scarce spectrum across both space and time in future wireless systems,'' said Johari, who holds a courtesy appointment in electrical engineering.

In another project, electrical engineering Professor (Research) Leonid Kazovsky and McKeown are working to overhaul the interaction between routers closer to the Internet's ''edge,'' where users connect to it, and those routers that govern the Internet's telecommunications backbone.

Called Lightflow, the project aims to replace big routers in the backbone with high-efficiency optical switches that would be more flexible and responsive to the demands of the routers at the edge. This would allow Internet service providers to get the bandwidth they need exactly when their users need it.

The optical switches are about 10 times cheaper, use 10 times less power and have 10 times the capacity of electronic routers, so using them could cut the cost and power consumption of communications while increasing capacity. But so far no one has been able to develop effective ways to make this happen, McKeown says. Much of the research will focus on developing effective protocols to make such an overhaul feasible.

''We will measure our success in the long term. 'We intend to look back in 15 years' time and see significant impact from our program,'' McKeown said.

[Grinch]

The 'miracle' 100 years on: A century ago tomorrow, Canada's first business school was given royal approval - despite having no money
The Gazette 13 march 2007

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/24/Hec-montreal.jpg
An act that sired Canada's first business school received royal assent. Everything was on track save for one crucial piece.

There was no money for the school.

A century later, despite its numerous international accolades, its string of brilliant directors and an enviable roster of star graduates, Hautes Etudes Commerciales Montreal's main challenge has not changed much.

"It's a bit of a miracle that we managed to get where we are," said Michel Patry, the school's current director, and former graduate and economics professor. "It's a miracle that all of us here, including McGill University and the Universite de Montreal, have stood where we are."

The miraculous calls for celebration, and Patry's week is crammed. Last night was the launch of the school's "biography" book and the unveiling of a commemorative postage stamp. Tomorrow, staff and alumni will celebrate the centennial and on Thursday, Patry will be a guest speaker for the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal.

And then there's an exhibition at the McCord Museum.

It makes for good musings how the school managed to remain an elite institution with talented staff despite its chronic underfunding.

If invention is the child of necessity, for HEC Montreal, this meant taking chances and being the first in many things: first in Canada to offer night courses, to create a distance-learning program, and to make laptops mandatory for students.

It was also the first in North America to have three major business school accreditations, the American AACSB International, the British AMBA and the European EQUIS.

It worked. HEC is listed in a bevy of of top rankings, such as the 10th best non-U.S. business school, according to Business Week, the 20th, according to Forbes, and the 96th worldwide in The Economist.

These distinctions help the school in its fundraising campaigns, mostly by appealing to alumni and the business community.

Star graduates aren't hard to come by for the school. Among them it counts Remi Marcoux, founder and chairman of Transcontinental Inc., Pierre Brunet, chairman of the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, and Yannis Mallat, the young CEO of the Montreal studio of video game powerhouse Ubisoft.

But getting here meant plowing through several periods of transformation, and Patry was there for its most recent change. Since his graduation in 1978, HEC sought to become a global school while remaining entrenched in Quebec society.

Its foreign ties went no farther than Belgium and France before the '70s. Today, the number of partner countries nears 30 and the school offers an MBA degree in English and an undergraduate B.Com in the three main languages of the Americas. As well, 30 per cent of its students come from outside Canada.

Patry credits a recent generation of Quebec corporate and cultural heavyweights for putting the province on the global map: giants like Bombardier, Cirque du Soleil, SNC Lavalin and the rising video game stars. These, in turn, shine the light back on Quebec's business training.

But a peculiar paradox arises when setting these success stories against Quebec's traditional mistrust of enterprise and the private sector.

When the school was founded, it was the first to be built outside the religious educational system, something that upset the city's archbishop and spurred local colleges to advise their graduates against applying.

"Even today, I still feel an ambivalence among francophones," Patry said. "But it's much less of a hurdle today.

"We've been hammering that nail for 100 years. We trained the first elite that could operate a business and we had an impact."

Training good managers is getting tougher each year.

The modern manager, Patry said, is a new breed of Renaissance man, someone with technical and refined skills, but also able to see the big picture with knowledge of economics and sociology.

"But this is what makes our job very exciting," he said.
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[Grinch]

The Most Prestigious University Degrees in the World
By Samuel Hui, Financial Correspondent

http://jobs.aol.com/article/onlinecampus/_a/the-most-prestigious-university-degrees/20070305140109990001

Aiming for the upper echelon of career and financial success? You might want to look at getting another degree -- something that will put your career over the edge.

For some, a prestigious degree is just another trophy for the case, but if you want to join the super-elite, one of these diplomas could propel you to the highest ranks of professional success.

If you are looking for a top-notch degree, here are the most prestigious and rewarding ones from around the world.

Note: All prices are in U.S. dollars.

MSc Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
London School of Economics
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Entrance requirements: A strong educational background in mathematics, statistics, economic theory and econometrics.

Acceptance rate: Less than 5 percent (15 out of 320 students in 2004).

Tuition: $30,500 a year.

Duration: Nine months full time. Famous alumni: Many famous alumni failed to achieve such lofty credentials as the MSc in econometrics, but several world leaders -- including former Indian president Shri KR Narayanan and former Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharett -- achieved a BSc in economics.

There are many top programs at this internationally renowned school, but the most academically challenging and respected program is arguably the MSc Econometrics and Mathematical Economics.

Many of the top academics and politicians around the world have graced this school, including such notable names as John F. Kennedy (former U.S. president), Pierre Elliott Trudeau (former Canadian prime minister), Jomo Kenyatta (first president of Kenya), George Soros (billionaire global financier), and Robert Mundell (winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences), to name but a few.

In fact, the school has 13 Nobel Prize winners among its former alumni and staff, and over 30 former or current heads of state or government.

Without a doubt, this small school is one of the top in the world in economics, and a degree from this institution is a useful stepping stone into the world of business and politics.

Bachelor of Technology
Indian Institute of Technology

Entrance requirements: High placement on IIT Joint Entrance Examination.

Acceptance rate: Less than 2 percent (approximately 5,500 admissions out of 300,000 applicants).

Tuition: $1,100 a year (including miscellaneous administrative expenses).

Duration: Four years.

Famous alumni: N.R. Narayana Murthy (cofounder and chairman of Infosys); Rajat Gupta (former managing director of McKinsey & Company); Vinod Khosla (cofounder of Sun Microsystems).

The Indian Institutes of Technology are a group of seven technology and engineering schools in India that have won worldwide recognition for the quality of the education they provide.

Graduates from these schools are often revered for their practical and in-depth knowledge, and a degree from IIT is often seen as a ticket to success. In fact, the excellence of these schools hasn't gone unnoticed, with many graduates being courted and cherry-picked for some rather lucrative jobs abroad.

In recent years, many graduates from Western universities have found it worthwhile to supplement their degrees with additional training from these universities. Among the more popular subjects are Extreme Programming and Pair Programming, both of which India has grown an expertise in.

MBA
Harvard Business School

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Entrance requirements:

An undergraduate degree from an accredited U.S. university or its equivalent.Average GMAT score in 2005: 707.Average GPA in 2005: 3.64.Work experience and accomplishments are considered.
Acceptance rate: 12% in 2005.

Tuition: $39,600 per year plus many extra fees.

Duration: Full-time 22-month program.

Famous alumni: Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. (chairman of The Carlyle Group and former CEO of IBM); Michael Bloomberg (founder of Bloomberg LP and New York City mayor); Nicholas F. Brady (former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury); George W. Bush (U.S. president).

Although some claim that Harvard has lost its place as the top MBA program in the world, nothing negative can be said about the prestige and earning power of its alumni.

Many of the top business theorists and acclaimed business minds in the world have had some connection with the school, whether as students or staff members. Whatever the case, graduates of Harvard Business School have access to one of the most diverse and international alumni networks, as well as a reputation that can open doors into most organizations, whether large or small.

LL.M. Law
University of Cambridge
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Entrance requirements: First-class law degree from a UK university or its overseas equivalent.

Acceptance rate: Approximately 125 students a year.

Tuition: $10,000 per year for domestic or EU students; $20,000 per year for international students.

Famous alumni: Hans Blix (former head of United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission).

Through the years, the University of Cambridge has been at the forefront of law education around the world. With common law forming a major part of the legal structure of many nations -- especially those with former ties to Britain -- a degree from this university forms a very attractive springboard for a successful career in law.

The University of Cambridge's School of Law has extensive contacts and relationships with a number of the world's leading law firms. If you want a successful career in law, you will find no better place to start than Cambridge.

M.D.
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
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Entrance requirements:

Very high academic scores in the 3.8 GPA range.Average MCAT scores: 11.4.Letters of recommendation from senior faculty or premedical committees.
Acceptance rate: 4%.

Tuition: $34,000.

Famous alumni: Peter Agre (winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Richard Axel (winner of Nobel Prize in Medicine), Herbert Spencer Gasser (winner of Nobel Prize in Physiology), Haldan Keffer Hartline (winner of Nobel Prize in Medicine).

The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is the world's foremost authority on medical research, and its hospital is one of the finest in the world.

Befitting its status as the top U.S. health institution, Johns Hopkins is the most important recipient of National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants and is associated with nearly 20 Nobel Prize laureates.

A look through the faculty and alumni of this fabled university reveals a who's who of medical achievement -- a testament to the influence and contributions of this institution's graduates in the field of medical research.