Good morning and happy Friday!
Here are a few stories you may have missed from the week that was …
How Business Leaders Learn To Spot Global Trends And Avoid Fake News | Forbes
Forbes contributor Matt Symonds recently wrote about how business leaders, including business schools, need to be completely up-to-date in the ever-changing geopolitical landscape, which greatly affects them. Symonds writes of the recent Labour surge in the snap election in the UK, to last year’s Brexit vote and of course the election of President Donald Trump here in the U.S—three massive political events largely missed by the media class.
“It’s not so much about teaching Geopolitics 101, but instead teaching students how to use this knowledge to understand and anticipate global trends, which can be tricky,” Dr. Robert Falkner, Academic Director of the TRIUM Executive Global MBA program, at the London School of Economics, told Symonds. And there’s nothing to say that more rash political uncertainty isn’t on the immediate horizon.
Read more of Symonds story here …
Seattle’s First Female MBA Conference Held by Forte Foundation | The Daily
The vaunted Forté Foundation made its way to Seattle for the very first time on June 16 and 17, filling the Westin Seattle with more than 600 established business leaders, entrepreneurs and more. Officially hosted by a little-known Seattle enterprise called Amazon, the event was established to build a foundation for helping women achieve more successful careers.
“For college students, it’s all about being career ready,” said Mariska Morse, vice president of marketing and operations at Forte Foundation. “Sometimes in college, it’s like you don’t know what you don’t know. So, our job is to expose our audience with 80 thousand members of Forte to help them understand the different possibilities, [and] what are the career tracks out there.”
Bringing women into more successful career levels, Morse notes, is not simply about getting them into the traditional business fields, but in some not-so-traditional ones as well. “Business is not only about banking,” she said.
Read more about the recent Seattle Forte Foundation event here …
Temple Experts: Why MBA Grads Need Much More Than Technical Skills | Philadelphia Business Journal
With the number of business student graduates generally increasing, experts are beginning to believe that young employees need more unconventional training. In a recent piece with the Philadelphia Business Journal, contributing writers Lonni Romirowsky Gajer and Dennis Paris note that, “Hiring managers have expressed satisfaction with the technical skills MBA graduates bring to the table, but many agree that recent graduates are not meeting expectations when it comes to key personal-effectiveness and workplace competencies. Communication, interpersonal-teaming skills, and critical thinking—often referred to as soft skills—are a few areas that recruiters and human resource executives find lacking in “new to workforce” (NTWF) employees.”
Finding measured competence and oft-spoken soft skills are not easily identifiable, the two write, in the way that things like a GPA or GMAT scores may be. They then point to a joint effort with human resources, citing another recent Philadelphia Business Journal article from Charity Hughes, Ph.D., SPHR and President of Philadelphia’s Regional Chapter of the Society for Human Resources Management (Philly SHRM). She suggests, “clearly defined competency levels achieved with official graduate transcripts” as well as “a report-card system that enables employers to provide feedback to secondary and postsecondary schools on levels of competencies evidenced by new graduate employees.”
Read more from Gajer and Paris and how Fox Temple is helping prepare graduates for the workforce here …