Friday News & Notes: Stanford Finance Jobs, Another Airline Fiasco and More
Good morning and happy Friday!
Here are a few stories you may have missed from the week that was …
Stanford MBA Best For Finance Jobs | Financial Times
A new study released from the Financial Times revealed that full-time MBA students from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in the finance industry are doing better than MBA graduates from virtually every other business school. The new report found that 27 percent of Stanford GSB alums work in finance and boast a resoundingly high annual salary of “$266,000” per year(!) That jump was a reported 104 percent increase from their pre-MBA salaries.
Following Stanford GSB in the ranking was Harvard Business School and the Judge Business School at Cambridge. Check out the brand new ranking here.
First United, Now Delta
Business leaders had a lot to learn from the previous unmitigated PR disaster from United Airlines. Luckily for them, however, it’s Delta Airlines’ turn. A recent video has surfaced from a red-eye flight from Maui, in which a customer and his family are less-than-politely asked to leave the flight which had been “mysteriously” overbooked. The customer in question swapped a ticket for his older son (who left on a different flight) so his younger son could have a his own seat on the flight, strapped in a safety seat. Tickets cannot be swapped in this regard, according to ticket regulations. The customer conceited, asking if his wife cold hold his toddler son, but that was not allowed either. Security, rather, told the customer in question that if he and his family did not comply that he would “go to jail” and his children would go into “foster care.” Gentle, subtle touch, Delta.
Management leaders of tomorrow should take note: phones are everywhere and if customers aren’t treated well, it’ll be known sooner than later.
“Working Retail, The Best Business School Around”
In his newest piece in the Chicago Tribune, ever-optimistic writer Jim Sollisch notes that the retail industry, especially for lower-level employees is going through a rough time. “The New York Times reports 89,000 brick-and-mortar retail workers have been laid off since October,” he says. “That’s more people than work in America’s entire coal industry.”
Sollisch argues that modern business students may be missing out on a crucial real-world experience with a slowly decaying in-person retail industry—one that helped his career. “Even so, I grieve for the high school kids who will never get to go to the best business schools in the world, and get paid minimum wage to attend, as I did at the Meyer Miller shoe store in Cleveland,” he continues. “Where will these kids learn transactional economics or how to close a deal? How will they find professors like the veteran shoe salesman who taught me, among other things, how to tell which customers were never going to buy, the power of incentives and the history of the America that existed in the decades before I was born?”
Sollisch, a traditionalist, continues, “I learned more about the business world that summer than I learned in my first 10 years in advertising. Practical lessons. Like you can’t sell someone something they don’t want.”
When Your Boss Hangs Over Your Neck, Your Work Suffers
Modern technical innovation has streamlined the workplace environment, but that doesn’t mean all good things are more efficient. A new study from David De Cremer and his colleagues at Harvard Business School found “rampant cc’ing leads workers and managers to squander precious time sorting through unnecessary messages. My research shows it can have another cost: reduced trust.”
“New Economics Can Save Us”
MBA students and graduates may be plenty familiar with the Kuznets Curve—an economic model formulated in the mid 1950s by famed economist Simon Kuznets. His work, which has since been adopted in various forms, found the inter-play of a nation’s income inequality was in direct relation to its growth. Simplified, his work implied that certain elements of society (in this case, economic inequality) had to get worse before it got better through virtuous growth. Similar to the laws of physics, the Kuznets Curve is often thought of as an economic law of motion, writes author and economist Kate Raworth in The Guardian. Rather than a curve-shaped pattern, Raworth argues that economics is significantly more intricate and not like physics at all.
“Regenerative economic design ensures that instead of using up Earth’s resources, we use them again and again and again, she writes. “We learn to work with, not against, the cyclical processes of life, including those for carbon, water and nutrients. Thanks to innovations in the circular economy and cradle-to-cradle design we can start turning last century’s degenerative economy into this century’s regenerative one.”
About the Author
Matthew Korman
Matthew Korman is a writer on MetroMBA. Since graduating from Rowan University with a degree in journalism and political science, Matthew has worked as a music industry writer and promoter, a data analyst, and with numerous academic institutions. His works have appeared in publications such as NPR and Sports Illustrated.
