MIT Sloan Experts

MBA job trends: Students’ career interests continue to diversify — Susan Kline

mitsloanexperts — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:05:42 +0000

While many graduating MBA students are still heading to traditional sectors like finance, consulting and technology, one of the biggest trends among top business schools is an increase in the diversity of students’ career interests. Perhaps it’s related to fallout from the financial crisis or even a generational trend, but more and more students are pursuing positions in a broader array of areas. At MIT Sloan, about 60% of our MBA graduates in the past few years have gone to those traditional areas. Among our other MBA students, we are indeed seeing this trend toward diverse interests. Strong areas of focus for that group include: entrepreneurship; sustainability; energy; social enterprise; health care; operations and supply chain management; and entertainment, media and sports. This diversification of student interests also is apparent within traditional areas. In the finance sector, we’ve seen more attention on areas like private wealth management, asset management and … Read More »

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Don’t blame Apple — Charles Kane

mitsloanexperts — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:24:24 +0000

From MarketWatch The media spotlight has recently been on Apple Inc. AAPL +0.52% for shifting profits overseas to avoid U.S. taxes. In its international tax strategy, though, Apple is no different from other American technology companies, which (like Apple) began moving manufacturing overseas starting in the early 1980s. Initially, U.S. technology firms that went abroad during this period were drawn by the lower labor, sourcing, and procurement costs. They also found they could eliminate exchange-rate risk by producing and selling in the same currency. But these companies soon discovered another important advantage of being global: favorable taxation. Read the full post at MarketWatch. Charles Kane is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

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Think speculators cause high oil prices? Don’t bet on it — Christopher Knittel and Robert Pindyck

mitsloanexperts — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:39:02 +0000

From WBUR Cognoscenti Americans are spending more money at the pump than ever before. According to a recent estimate by the Energy Department, the average U.S. household spent nearly $3,000 on gasoline last year. Earlier this month, the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecast that the price for regular gasoline will average $3.63 a gallon this summer — a slight decline from last summer, not far from the record levels set in 2008. Why do oil prices remain so stubbornly high? According to some in Washington, the blame lies with “speculators” — investors who buy and sell oil futures contracts to bet on the price of oil. As they see it, these scheming speculators — which may be individuals, but can also be mutual funds, hedge funds, or other investment institutions — inject billions of dollars into commodity exchanges in pursuit of a limited number of barrels, which in turn drives up … Read More »

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What Facebook got right with its IPO — Howard Anderson

mitsloanexperts — Thu, 30 May 2013 14:08:09 +0000

From MarketWatch CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (MarketWatch) — A year after the Facebook IPO the media bellyaching about all the things the social media company did wrong is relentless. “Facebook, One Year Later: What Really Happened in the Biggest IPO Flop Ever,” reads a headline in The Atlantic. “Missed out on the Facebook IPO and couldn’t be happier,” reads another on CNNMoney. And from Forbes: “Facebook Year One: Fighting Back from an IPO Flop.” Read the full post at MarketWatch. Howard Anderson is the Bill Porter (1967) Distinguished Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School. He was the founder of the Yankee Group and co-founder of Battery Ventures.

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Going Outside of Comfort Zones to Bridge Silos — Ray Reagans

mitsloanexperts — Tue, 28 May 2013 19:53:22 +0000

Silos are fairly common things in large organizations. While bridging those silos can lead to innovation and increased productivity, making those connections can be a tough thing to do. It’s easier to develop networks within the familiar silos than reach out to people in disparate areas. And even if you do decide to reach out to new people, who do you select and from how many departments? It’s not like you can say you will have strong ties only with people who matter because you don’t know who those people will be and, even if you do know, there will be so many of them that you still will have to make choices. In research focused on this issue, I studied the knowledge transfer relationships among several hundred scientists and found that when it comes to creating the right network for facilitating knowledge transfer, not all networks are equal. It’s … Read More »

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Don’t be a zombie organization — Steven Spear

mitsloanexperts — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:03:49 +0000

From Huffington Post Zombies are all the entertainment rage. They’re terrifying, but only if there is a mass of them in pursuit. Mindless, they keep coming despite the flame-thrower and Gatling gun fired at them. They are easy targets once they reveal themselves. Facing them are our human heroes. Outnumbered, they nevertheless prevail because they are agile and constantly learning. They adapt as they assess situations—seeing problems, developing new schemes—solving problems, to clobber the zombie hoards. It’s not just TV that has plodding zombies massed against agile, adaptive people. Organizations also display either zombie or agile hero qualities. In zombie organizations, engineers, doctors, nurses, mechanics or managers encounter problems like missing information, missing documentation, unclear assignments, missing materials or even missing colleagues. Yet, not really seeing them as abnormalities, they don’t solve them, unrelenting when something is amiss, not pausing to investigate and develop solutions. Read the full post and … Read More »

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What Is the True Cost of Government-Backed Credit? — Deborah Lucas

mitsloanexperts — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:33:35 +0000

From The Huffington Post The U.S. government is arguably the largest financial institution in the world. If you add the outstanding stock of government loans, loan guarantees, pension insurance, deposit insurance and the guarantees made by federal entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you get to about $18 trillion of government-backed credit. Through those activities, the government has a first-order effect on the allocation of capital and risk in the economy. The question of what those commitments cost the public is important; accurate cost assessments are necessary for informed decisions by policymakers, effective program management, and meaningful public oversight. My research and that of others has shown that if one takes a financial economics approach to answering that question — one that is consistent with the methods used by private financial institutions to evaluate such costs — it leads to significantly higher estimates than the approach currently used … Read More »

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Why an MBA is conducive to launching a startup — Max Faingezicht

mitsloanexperts — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:11:48 +0000

Why an MBA is conducive to launching a startup A lot of discussion in the media recently has focused on whether or not entrepreneurs should spend valuable time and money pursuing an MBA degree versus gaining experience on the front lines of a startup. Some commentators such as Vivek Wadhwa even insist that an MBA subtracts from a candidate’s value. Shortly after earning an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management, I co-founded a startup called ThriveHive (http://thrivehive.com ), which offers a guided marketing solution for small business owners. I met my co-founder Adam Blake, a fellow Sloan MBA candidate, in an entrepreneurial-focused course at the School. While neither of us believes an MBA can transform someone into an entrepreneur, earning an MBA provides a great framework for tackling the uncertainties that inevitably occur at a startup. Here’s why: Tools for Thriving amongst ‘Structured Chaos’ A startup is a completely … Read More »

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Your Business Is Never Too Small For A Cyber Attack, Here’s How To Protect Yourself — George Westerman

mitsloanexperts — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:39:04 +0000

From Forbes A few years ago I was working with a small consulting firm, and one of our up and coming salespeople left for a competitor. No big deal. It happens. But several months later, the management team noticed a disturbing trend. The company kept losing bids for new business to this very same competitor. It had happened four times in a row when finally we realized that we’d forgotten to turn off the former employee’s network access. He had been logging into our network, stealing our information, and then undercutting us. As cybercrime reporting goes, this may be small potatoes. But it wasn’t small to this company. It illustrates a problem that plagues many small and medium-size businesses: When it comes to Internet security, a lot of people aren’t paying attention. They think they’re too small to be the target of a cyber threat. They’re wrong. According to a … Read More »

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Making good = profitable — Managing Sustainable Businesses–Thomas Kochan

mitsloanexperts — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:42:38 +0000

From off-shoring good jobs to the great and growing income divide, finance-driven decision-making has long been at the core of many of our economic problems. It’s not that financial analysts and operatives are necessarily evil or uncaring – rather, they believe they have a fiduciary responsibility to generate maximum returns for their funds, even when the results have worker and society-unfriendly consequences. Changing this mindset has proven a tough nut to crack even for union pension fund managers, who are aware of the social consequences of investment decisions. But there are glimmers of hope and interest. On June 7, for example, some of the nation’s largest institutional investors and the biggest single pension fund investor – the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CALpers) — will hold a conference to explore ways to transform socially and environmentally sustainable investment criteria from a perceived liability to an asset. CALpers has a commitment to … Read More »

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