Each and every Wednesday for the past year — come rain or snow or computer viruses — I’ve shared my discussions with business school professors from the nation’s top MBA programs with BNET readers. Here are the highlights from the last six months. You can also check out the “greatest hits” from the first six months of Back to B-School.
Renowned innovation authority Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School weighed in on the healthcare debate currently raging on Capitol Hill and all over the US. Christensen also laid out the reasons he felt Massachusetts’s health-case reforms were a failure.
Stanford’s Jim Lattin passed laong to readers some of the wisdom they would need to leverage the piles of marketing data they have access to. He also described how he educates MBAs on the single most important skill that many will overlook in top MBA programs: sales.
Daniel Diermeier of Kellogg emphasizes the importance of corporate responsibility for firms around the world, especially during this era of activist bloggers and socially conscious consumers. Emphasizing proactive communications, Diermeier preaches to executives and current students how to maintain corporate reputation over the long term and how to deal with short-term corporate crises that might arise.
UCLA-Anderson’s Francis Longstaff told us about the Masters in Financial Engineering the school had developed, as well as its emphasis on ethics training for financial professionals. He also laid out his thoughts on the stampede of regulators coming at the financial sector from all directions these days.
Donald Sull of the London Business School told us plain and simple: you might soon find yourself in heated competition with world-beating companies from emerging markets like China, India, Brazil and Mexico. And it’s not just cheaper costs that set these companies apart; they have developed unique capabilities and incredibly impressive strategies in order to emerge from their challenging home markets.
UCLA-Anderson’s George Abe discussed a couple of under-appreciated challenges that face new entrepreneurs: nailing the critical details like start-up term sheets and identifying and managing the multitude of risks of a new venture.
American B-schools have scrambled to upgrade their business ethics offerings in the wake of last year’s financial scandals. Stanford’s Neil Malhotra described the ethics courses the GSB is bringing to its students and emphasized that future generations of business leaders should view ethics as integrally linked to corporate strategy, not a side issue. Malhotra also discussed the increasing desire of students to gain greater exposure to the “non-market strategies” employed by companies in dealing with governments, interest groups and other organizations operating outside of the world of the supply and demand curves.
Darden’s Michael Lenox is the executive director of the school’s unique innovation think tank, the Batten Institute. Drawing on his research, he discussed the importance of developing an innovation machine that regularly seeks out and leverages outside technologies and know-how. We also talked about what type of approach would produce the greenest corporate America: self-regulation or government mandates? All-in-all, Lenox lauded the companies he said were viewing environmentalism as a strategic opportunity, not a compliance headache.
J.D. Schramm of the Stanford GSB educates his students on the importance of thinking about personal communications in a strategic way throughout their careers. He told us about the keys to intercultural communications and the lessons from political speeches we can apply in business communications.
