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Academic view: Learning how to trust
Can MBA students be taught how to be trustworthy? In a guest article two business-school professors, Graham Dietz and Nicole Gillespie, argue that they can
IDEALLY we shouldn't have to teach students how to be trustworthy. We might expect most to consider it the right thing to be in and of itself. Even for those less virtuous, there is a sound business case; research has shown that trusted leaders inspire teams to create more value, while employees who feel trusted reciprocate with superior performance.
However, high-profile affairs such as phone-tapping at News International, corporate scandals at Olympus and Siemens, or the shenanigans over British MPs’ expenses, suggest that not everybody ranks trust and trustworthiness as a work priority. Indeed, some care little for it, seeing it as naive or unreliable. Some even seek to thrive on wilful mistrust.
In one's company, two's a crowd
by B.R.
IN THE American version of "The Office", a TV mockumentary about the daily grind of work, Oscar Nunez, one of the show's characters, comes out with this gem:
“It doesn't take a genius to know that every organisation thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead, name a country that doesn't have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes?”
I was reminded of this while reading about Fishbowl, an American software firm, in the Harvard Business Review. It employs a pair of managers for each position in the company. Everyone, explain the firm’s two bosses in the (inevitably) jointly-authored piece, “thought we were crazy”. While everyone else was busy cutting out management tranches and getting rid of extraneous staff, Fishbowl was doubling up on every one of its management positions, at “not inconsequential cost”.
Bottom of the pyramid selling
Apr 19th 2012, 15:47 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
“IS THERE anything more prestigious than business?” What would sound tin-eared from the mouth of Mitt Romney reads very differently when attributed to a woman of long-standing poverty, discussing her newly found self-respect. The quotation comes from a recent paper by a trio of female researchers from Oxford University's Saïd Business School—Catherine Dolan, who lectures in marketing and corporate social responsibility; Mary Johnstone-Louis, a doctoral candidate; and Linda Scott, of the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The researchers studied a sales programme that employs Bangladeshi women at the proverbial bottom of the pyramid, run by the Bangladesh arm of CARE, an NGO. Its Rural Sales Programme (RSP) focuses on women who are destitute due to abandonment by their family or the deaths of their husbands. CARE calls the women aparajitas (a Sanskrit term meaning “she who cannot be defeated”) and offers them jobs selling household goods, such as soap, household goods, even saris. Begun in 2005, RSP now employs more than 2,400 women across Bangladesh and has partnerships with companies such as Unilever, Danone and Bic.
There is an accompanying case study and teaching notes, which some might find particularly fruitful. They show a variety of issues that cropped up in establishing the programme. Even though CARE Bangladesh had years of experience in the area, and the sales model had already been locally pioneered by Grameen Bank’s “phone ladies”, RSP got off to a clunky start. An economic-development expert for CARE at first thought that shoes would be the ideal item to sell and found a partner in BATA, a footwear manufacturer. But the shoes proved heavy to carry, limiting the women’s ability to reach customers, and several of them were humiliated to have to touch men’s feet to fit the sandals. Fortunately RSP’s developers uncovered this mismatch between good intentions and local circumstances and tried new products.
Go forth and implement
April 17th 2012, 17:45 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
On April 17th the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), which administers the GMAT, announced the that it had awarded $7.1m in grants from its Management Education for Tomorrow (MET) Fund. The awards went to 12 proposed new ventures in three different categories: social responsibility, technology, and (American) veterans’ education. Among the winning ideas was a programme matching MBA students as mentors to poor children, from the S.P. Jain Institute in Mumbai; a multi-school collaboration to produce an executive MBA for social responsibility in Africa; and an online cloud-based effort by Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management to help faculty share ideas.
This is the second round of MET Fund awards, after The first phase asked schools to come up with ideas to improving management education.That phase of the program attracted more than 650 ideas from more than 60 countries that were then reduced to 20 winning ideas. Each of the twelve programmes receiving money in the second round was chosen to implement one or more of these ideas, which range from developing alternative-reality business training to reworking the admissions process to teaching students about telecommuting.
First past the post
Apr 13th 2012, 13:30 by M.S. | PARIS
PERHAPS it’s because the Olympic torch is about to start wending its way across Britain (albeit for most of the way in the back of a truck), but there seems to have been an increasing interest in teaching the business aspects of sport recently. EMLYON business school in France, for example, begins its new MSc in Sports and Outdoor Industry Management this autumn, and across Britain and America, schools such as Liverpool, Coventry, George Washington in D.C. and Drexel in Philadelphia are all offering sports-oriented Masters or MBA programmes.
Clearly business schools are well placed to offer tips on finance and management to sporting enterprises. But some business-school professors wonder whether it also works the other way around: can sportsmen teach anything to the next generation of corporate leaders?
Competent? Prove it
Mar 13th 2012, 12:34 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
Thomas Hout, a Harvard Business Review blogger and lecturer at Tufts University in Boston, recently argued that MBAs, like would-be lawyers and doctors, need a wide-ranging competency test after finishing their coursework. He bases this on a conviction that the MBA programme, at least in the United States, is becoming shorter, less demanding, and less competently taught:
Even at top-tier schools, first-year students spend fewer hours in class than in the past, as field trips, student consulting projects, international excursions, CEO visits, club events, and more crowd the calendar. It's great to see students get their shoes dusty with real-world forays, but I fear they are losing the ability to read a balance sheet...
The MBA degree has slipped in quality. Many professors point out they cannot give the same exams they did 20 years ago because the students could not pass them. Adding to the problem is the perverse, mutually reinforcing dynamic of students seeking high grades and professors wanting better teaching evaluations. Too many students are distracted and disengaged.
Would you like a blag for that?
Mar 6th 2012, 12:58 by B.R.
In an article in the business section this week, we talk to Tamira King, a marketing professor at Cranfield School of Management. She has studied the growing problem of "de-shopping", whereby shoppers buy something for a special occasion (such as a dress, or even a high-definition television) and then return it to the store the next day for a refund. Read the full article here.
Of love and power
Mar 2nd 2012, 15:53 by B.R.
WHY do people seek power? It is a big question without a single answer. Some may covet the fear or respect of others. Others yearn for riches. Some surely seek it for its own sake (“In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it,” wrote Tolstoy). Some may even see it as a vehicle to pursue a worthy cause.
To all these ends, the powerful may be successful. Those who seek power because they wish to be loved, however, are doomed to failure. That is the conclusion of research to be published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology carried out by three business-school professors, Ena Inesi, Deborah Gruenfeld and Adam Galinsky. This is because, say the researchers, once someone has gained power, they automatically become suspicious when people are nice to them. They will cynically assume (often with good reason, presumably) that when someone does them a favour it is because they are after something back in return. Such a lack of trust prevents them from building relationships.
Nerves of steel
Feb 17th 2012, 16:10 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
THE President is deeply suspicious of business: one longtime friend observes that he “did not consider successful businessmen as the best brains or the most enjoyable company ... and ... did not like to have them around in the evening”. He attacked his predecessor for being too friendly to established business interests, risking America’s economic performance in the process. Later, forced into a confrontation with his opponents, he failed to appreciate that the negotiator across the table was determined not to give in and that compromise would be impossible.
While this might fit Barack Obama, it actually applies to John F. Kennedy facing down U.S. Steel in the spring of 1962, as recently recounted by James Hoopes, a business historian at Babson College. (His most recent book examines the interplay of government and corporations since the 1930s.) Kennedy feared inflation; Roger Blough, then the president of U.S. Steel, wanted to implement a price increase of $6 per ton to make up for previous wage gains. Thus when the United Steelworkers union's contract expired, Kennedy personally intervened to conduct negotiations.
I just trawled to say I love you
Feb 14th 2012, 16:45 by B.R.
IT'S Valentine's Day, and as befits an event that is now little about love and much about marketing, university PR departments have got themselves all excited. A quick trawl of the Twitter feeds reveals, with crushing inevitability, a tidal wave of love-related guff coming from respected academic institutions. What could be more romantic? So, to save you the trouble of searching yourself, here’s a brief roundup of flimflam.
London Business School tells us that, contrary to what us men have been led to believe, women aren’t all money-obsessed. If you are about to propose to your girlfriend it’s fine to skimp on the ring, apparently.
Continuing the theme of easily-impressed women, Columbia Business School’s Ray Fisman has been analysing a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper suggesting that if a man wants to woo a prospect on an online dating site, all he has to give her is a virtual rose (which to cynics might appear to be nothing more than a tacky badge) and she will overlook the dodgy photo and lack of a job and fall straight into his arms.
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