UC Davis Launches Online MBA, Author Sam Walker Speaks at Fisher, and More
Let’s take a look at some of the biggest stories from this week, including the a new Online MBA at UC Davis.
UC Davis Graduate School of Management to Offer Online MBA – UC Davis News
The University of California, Davis Graduate School of Management recently announced its new Online MBA, the first of its kind across the school’s ten campuses. Now accepting applications, MBA@Davis will welcome its inaugural class on September 30, 2019.
The online MBA will offer opportunities for working professionals and other students to earn their degree at their own pace with virtual meetings and interactive courses. Faculty and lecturers from the traditional full and part-time programs will lead classes, each of which will have a live weekly session.
A culminating residential session will allow students to experience campus life, along with the chance to connect with one another and their professors. Members of the startup community and executives from Fortune 500 companies will also visit for networking and mentoring opportunities. The duration of the program will be two years, and four cohorts will start each September.
The online MBA will open the top 50 ranked UC Davis degree to students worldwide. For more on the new Online MBA at UC Davis, click here.
Simple, Not Easy: Talking Leadership with Bestselling Author Sam Walker – Fisher Newsroom
Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business recently welcomed Wall Street Journal columnist and author Sam Walker to the school’s Leading Through Excellence summit last month.
Walker’s book, The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership, which explores the essential qualities of successful leaders, has been voted one of the year’s best business books by the New York Times and CNBC. Walker focuses upon the commonalities between great sports teams and great project teams, in particular how their coaches, captains and managers led them to success.
Sam Walker, author of the celebrated The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership / Photo via fisher.osu.edu
As the book’s website notes, “The seventeen most dominant teams in sports history had one thing in common: Each employed the same type of captain—a singular leader with an unconventional set of skills and tendencies.” Members of the so-called “Captain Class”, according to Walker, all possess the qualities of courage to stand apart from the crowd, doggedness, and emotional control.
Walker says that another quality of captains is that while natural talent is helpful in advancing through the ranks of leadership, it is not vital.
“We’re all realizing that management … is really the key to everything, and so many challenges can be addressed by building better teams and being smarter about how you promote,” Walker says.
For more on the book and Sam Walker, click here.
Adtalem Global Education and Northeastern University Form Strategic Partnership – Northeastern University News
Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business has announced a new partnership with Adtalem, a leader in financial services education.
D’Amore-McKim and Adtalem will work to provide training on a global scale, beginning with the Certificate in AI for Financial Services. With this, managers and team leaders will be at the forefront of their organizations’ adoption of AI, and they will also be able to gauge their companies’ readiness for adoption.
Designed to be completed in eight-to-ten hours over two-to-four weeks, the course will begin this summer. Lisa Wardell, President and CEO of Adtalem, says, “We are pleased to partner with Northeastern University as a major thought leader consistently at the forefront of AI, and to expand this partnership into other academic areas and industries.”
The banking and financial services industries are particularly well served by the use of AI, with such applications as improving the accuracy of credit scoring, algorithmic stock trading, and fraud detection. “Breakthrough technologies, including artificial intelligence, offer the promise of higher productivity, enhanced efficiencies, and economic growth,” says Raj Echambadi, the D’Amore-McKim Dunton Family Dean at Northeastern University of the new certificate.
For more on the AI for Financial Services certificate, contact AIFinancialServices@adtalem.com.
Cryptocurrencies in the Classroom – Lebow College of Business News
Drexel University’s Lebow College of Business has become a leader in education on FinTech with help from the school’s TD Bank Endowed Professor of Finance Michelle Lowry. The school’s course, entitled Cryptocurrency and FinTech, was introduced this quarter with positive feedback from students and guest lecturers.
“It’s important for students to have the knowledge of what is going on in the [cryptocurrency] space, but also to have the academic framework so they can understand the bigger picture … In order to understand Bitcoin, you need a bit of historical perspective about what money is,” says Lowry.
In order to understand Bitcoin, you need a bit of historical perspective about what money is,” Lebow Professor Michelle Lowry says.
Lowry welcomed Chris Carroll, Associate Teaching Professor of information science in Drexel’s College of Computing and Informatics along with Edwin Handschuh, co-founder and CEO of 1Konto, a broker/dealer startup focused on cryptocurrency exchanges to speak to students.
Handschuh says, “A lot of top-tier, leading-edge schools are approaching this topic… I’m glad to see Drexel is one of them.”
For more on the course and other Lebow curriculum offerings, click here.
Women in Business Conference Focuses on Personal Branding, Inclusion – Lehigh College of Business and Economics News
The Lehigh University College of Business and Economics recently hosted its annual Women in Business Conference, welcoming various experts on personal branding, workplace assertiveness, and ways in which to make oneself valuable as a new hire.
Maria Chrin ’87, managing partner of Circle Wealth Management; Dipti Gulati ’90, Senior Audit Partner at Deloitte; and Hayward Bell ’78G, retired Chief Diversity Officer at Raytheon, all served as panelists for the Personal Branding discussion. Adjunct professor Jacquelyn Febbo served as moderator.
Gulati offered some advice to students regarding how to handle conflict in the workplace: be prepared with facts to make your point, but do so calmly. “Being prepared is important … I want disagreements, I want people to challenge. It’s the only way we can get better.”
Magda Yrizarry, Chief Talent and Diversity officer at Verizon, delivered the keynote speech. On the topic of inclusion, she says, “Diversity is counting heads. Inclusion is making those heads count.”
You can read more about the recent conference here.
Northeastern’s New MBA Offering, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
When Your Moon Shots Don’t Take Off – Harvard Business Review
Many scholars seek to understand how we can move away from incremental thinking to what Google calls “10x thinking”—ideas that lead to “10-fold improvements rather than the more typical 10 percent ones.”
In a recent edition of Harvard Business Review, INSEAD Assistant Professor of Strategy Nathan Furr and Brigham Young’s Jeffrey H. Dyer say the real limit to “10x” ideas are biases that distort our perceptions and prevent us from seeing possibilities.
The duo present tactics and tools to challenge our instincts to avoid risk and choose the path of least resistance with the ultimate goal of breaking through to the realm of innovative possibilities.
Furr and Beesley describe how cell phones, earbuds, credit cards, self-driving cars, and atomic power were all inspired by science fiction. “Science fiction can provide a kind of rigorous optimism. There’s no magic; science fiction just provides the inspiration and then you make a rigorous plan and go for it.”
You can read more about the research over at HBR.
New MBA x Computer Science Degree Addresses Market Demand for Tech-Savvy Leaders – D’Amore-McKim School of Business News
“Breakthrough technologies, robotics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and blockchain promise higher productivity, enhanced efficiencies, and economic growth,” says Raj Echambadi, Dunton Family Dean at Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim School of Business.
Future business leaders need leadership frameworks but also hard technical skills to have a deeper understanding of how technology will impact the future of business. To meet this growing demand, D’Amore-McKim now offers a new full-time MBA degree concept: MBA x Computer Science.
On the new concentration at Northeastern/D’Amore-McKim, the school writes, “Students in the MBA x Computer Science track will choose one concentration in business and one concentration in computer science thanks to a partnership with Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer and Information Sciences, and they will also complete a corporate residency–a distinctive component of the Northeastern MBA program that is the hallmark of graduate experiential learning.”
“Business and technology are now intertwined, and to master a skill set in both areas will set our students apart and set them up for success,” says D’Amore-McKim Associate Dean of Graduate Programs Kate Klepper.
Dean Echambadi explains:
“These technologies are changing the way we live, learn, produce, and consume content, as well as how employees and enterprises work across all industries. Advanced business education is a critical component in helping people and industries navigate challenges with digital convergence and turn them into opportunities.”
Read the full D’Amore-McKim School of Business News article here.
Social Media Advertising Can Boost Fake News—Or Beat It – MIT Sloan Ideas Made to Matter
According to new research from MIT Sloan Economist Catherine Tucker and Occidental College’s Lesley Chiou, Ph.D. ’05, restricting or redirecting advertising on social media could be part of a solution to the problem of fake news.
After Facebook released a new advertising system that blocks ads from pages that repeatedly share fake news, researchers found a 75 percent reduction in the amount of fake news being shared on the platform.
Tucker and Chiou caution that the solution is far more complex than just advertising, however.
“The actions of platforms such as Facebook in regulating advertising do seem to have had an effect on the volume of fake news. However, our paper also emphasizes that in just focusing on ads and fake news, we are missing the bigger picture, which is the organic spread of misinformation by users themselves,” Tucker says in a recent interview wit MIT.
“The popularity of fake news may occur in the absence of advertising, as users share articles with others in their social network, but working to stamp out misinformation in those posts runs into its own set of problems,” Tucker adds.
“Trying to regulate that seems to get us into very problematic First Amendment territory.”
You can read more about Tucker and Chiou’s research here.
DMSB Keynote Speaker Encourages MBAs, New Startups, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
Life is Like a Venture Investment, Biotech Entrepreneur Tells Business Graduates – D’Amore-McKim Blog
The Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim School of Business selected biotech entrepreneur Dr. Gerald Chan as the keynote speaker at the DMSB graduation ceremony last month.
Dr. Chan, whose private investment firm Morningside Group funds “life sciences startups that are working to discover new ways to treat disease,” implored the assembled crowd at Matthews Arena to “live a life that makes themselves and their loved ones proud” even if “life can be at times so scary and at other times so exhilarating.”
Dr. Chan shared a personal anecdote about his father’s refusal to accept a job at casino on ethical grounds: “Had he accepted that offer, our family would have become financially richer. But because he acted on his ethical principles against his own economic interest, my family can stand tall today.”
D’Amore-McKim School of Business graduates, during last month’s ceremony / Photo via damore-mckim.northeastern.edu
You can read the full article here for a complete overview of the ceremony.
Winning Paper Shows Network Effects Fuel Business Value and Upend Strategy – Questrom School of Business Blog
BU Questrom School of Business‘ Marshall Van Alstyne recently co-authored new research that finds that “platform businesses” that depend on high numbers of users like Microsoft, Apple, Uber, Google, and Amazon scale much faster by moving value creation from “internal production to external orchestration.”
In “Platform Ecosystems: How Developers Invert the Firm,” Van Alstyne and his co-authors conclude that this approach will reverberate through “every part of a business, from marketing to operations to human resources.”
“Instead of a firm doing all its own marketing, consumers can add value through viral marketing. Instead of AirBnB incurring operating costs of a hotel stay, ecosystem partners bear those costs.”
“Instead of hiring employees inside the firm, platforms rely on freelancers outside the firm. In each of these instances, the value-creating activity shifts from inside to outside the firm. This shift affects all of the traditional business functions. It also has profound implications for fair division of wealth in society.”
You can read the full article here and the complete paper here.
25 MIT Startups To Watch – MIT Sloan Newsroom
On Saturday, September 8, Bill Aulet, Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship told the crowd at the MIT Kresge Auditorium, “We’re not just going to be doing another dating app.”
“We’re going to be doing things like addressing inclusion in society, making a more informed citizen throughout the world, cybersecurity, mental health, urbanization, improving ed-tech, improving health care. These are significant problems that the brightest people in the world should be working on, and those people are MIT students.”
The ambitions Aulet spoke about were created from the 25 startups built within the MIT delta v accelerator, which you can check out here.
HBS Announces 2018 Goldsmith Fellows, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
Hope in the Face of Climate Change Catastrophe – MIT Newsroom
The MIT Sloan Podcast “Data Made to Matter” hosted Professor John Sterman who used the platform to discuss the simulator he and his Climate Interactive colleagues put together to benefit both the general public and policymakers.
“We’re finding new mechanisms that can lead to potential tipping points and the possibility of runaway climate change. So that’s a little discouraging. It’s getting worse and worse,” Sterman says.
“But on the economic and technology side the news is getting better every day, every day it’s getting cheaper to deploy wind, solar, efficiency. Every day we find out that it’s getting easier to do these things. Every day we find out more and more people understand that the climate is changing.”
You can read the full article here.
Harvard Business School Announces 2018 Goldsmith Fellows – Harvard Business School Blog
HBS unveiled this year’s Horace W. Goldsmith Fellowships, which put $10,000 toward the tuition of 7-10 incoming students from the nonprofit and public sectors that “demonstrate a strong commitment to continued career paths in these areas.”
Here is a complete list of the 2018 Goldsmith Fellows:
- Rishabh Agarwal, a former financial analyst and principal at charter school network Success Academy.
- Mollie Breen, a former Applied Research Mathmatician at the NSA.
- Kaushal Jain, who “oversaw malaria supply chain planning for multiple countries in Asia, Southern Africa, and Mesoamerica” as part of the Clinton Health Access Initiative
- Micah MacFarlane, cofounder of the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s global tuberculosis program, Asian Development Bank specialist, and principal at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
- Pratik Matai, who previously led “due diligence and capacity building” for Dasra, India’s “leading strategic philanthropy foundation.”
- Peggy Ochola, founder of PACE, which “serves students in under-resourced schools in informal settlements and rural areas in Nairobi.”
- Sophia Richter, former Assistant VP of Strategy at the NYC Economic Development Corporation.
- Emily Schlichting, whose past experience includes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; and Blue Cross Blue Shield Nebraska.
- Viria Vichit-Vadakan, Chief Strategy Officer at Learn Corporation.
- Mandy Zhang, former COO for the Social Innovation Hub, a Beijing social enterprise incubator.
You can read more about the Harvard Goldsmith Fellows here.
Israel, the Startup Nation – D’Amore-McKim Blog
D’Amore-McKim recently profiled the 20 cross-disciplinary students that took part in the second annual “Dialogue of Civilizations: Entrepreneurship and Global Consulting in Israel” program, which combined historical sightseeing with “big business and young startup visits [for] students to experience the many facets of Israel.”
In a recent D’Amore-McKim Blog entry, DMSB Associate Professor of Marketing and Trip Leader Amir Grinstein says;
“Students got fantastic exposure to the booming Israeli ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as to the Israeli culture, history and social fabric. They made life long experiences and friendships. Especially of value were their ties with Israeli students from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev who partnered with us on this program.”
Of the experience, Manting Hong, (’21) writes, “The entrepreneurial spirit in the startup Nation is very unique. How Israelis view entrepreneurship, startup projects, and how they start a project are different. Bravery, perspective, close collaborations, open-mindedness, and crazy, are probably words that I would describe the startup culture there.”
D’Amore-McKim undergrads on their recent trip / Photo via http://www.damore-mckim.northeastern.edu
Hong adds, “And I do believe these are five factors that increase the possibility of successfully launch a business. The way of looking at each project in an “ecosystem” way is something that enhanced my business mindset the most, and I’m bringing it back to my startup. With all experiences in Israel, I believe it will help me to grow my startup in the following months.”
You can read the full article here.
Fighting Fake News, Working Mothers, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
Lazy Thinking, Not Political Bias, Drives Fake News – MIT Sloan Newsroom
MIT Sloan Associate Professor David Rand and the University of Regina’s Gordon Pennycook recently published a new study that illuminates what actually perpetuates fake news—a “lack of analytical thinking.”
Professor Rand writes, “Our study suggests that falling for fake news is a symptom of cognitive laziness rather than motivated reasoning or self-deception. That is, contrary to popular belief, it is not the case that people are thinking too much about the wrong things. Rather, a little thinking might go a long way to fix the problem of fake news.”
In a study that surveyed “3,446 participants to rate the accuracy of headlines from actual news stories from Facebook,” the duo found that “people who engage in more analytic thinking, as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test, are better at discerning true from false—regardless of identified motivations or political biases.”
You can read more about the research here.
What’s Your Carbon Footprint? You Probably Have No Idea. – D’Amore-McKim Blog
In a recently published study, D’Amore-McKim Professor Amir Grinstein surveyed 1,000 people to “guess the amount of CO2 emitted from burning one gallon of gasoline and the amount of calories in one gallon of whole milk.”
The goal was to “examine people’s knowledge of their own carbon footprint and how they can better educate themselves about the real impact they have on the environment.”
Grinstein believes that in order to change the public’s understanding of its own carbon footprints, they must have a “better understanding of how CO2 emissions play a role in everyday life allows people to decide if they’re willing to step up and change.”
Check out the full article here.
Kids of Working Moms Grow Into Happy Adults – Working Knowledge
New research from Harvard Business School Professor Kathleen McGinn found that, despite the narrative, working mothers often lead to happier and more successful children.
McGinn, the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, says, “People still have this belief that when moms are employed, it’s somehow detrimental to their children. So our finding that maternal employment doesn’t affect kids’ happiness in adulthood is really important.”
The preliminary results of McGinn’s work were originally published three years ago, specifically regarding the career success of daughters of working mothers, in contrast to stay-at-home mothers.. When the story reached The New York Times, however, there was some obvious blow-back. McGinn recalls:
“Many decried the research as another installment of the ‘mommy wars.’ But the most common response was from mothers who suffered guilt, self-doubt, and disapproval from others. They found our preliminary results to be welcome news.”
However, McGinn’s research, which was conducted alongside Mayra Ruiz Castro of Kingston University in the UK, and Elizabeth Long Lingo of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, found that the careers of sons of working mothers were not generally effected. Rather, their attitudes were different in contrast to stay-at-home-mothers.
“Sons are influenced in other ways when their moms work. The sons of employed mothers hold significantly more egalitarian gender attitudes—even more so than the daughters of stay-at-home moms, a finding that surprised McGinn because it shows that the influence of maternal employment may even outweigh well-documented sex differences when it comes to shaping people’s mindsets about appropriate roles for men and women.”
You can read more of the ground-breaking research here.
Cryptocurrency Volatility, a Vacation App, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
Digital Tulips: High Risks, High Rewards in ICOs – Carroll School News
Boston University Carroll School of Management Assistant Professor of Finance Leonard Kostovetsky and Ph.D. candidate Hugo Benedetti (’19) recently co-authored a draft paper that explores how the high returns associated with Bitcoin, for instance, are in part a byproduct of the uncertainty that surrounds cryptocurrency. But as crypto becomes clearer, the researchers note that “that effect might be declining.”
The Social Science Research Network published the duo’s paper, entitled “Digital Tulips? Returns to Investors in Initial Coin Offerings,” which finds that “startups set a low, low price at the initial coin offering (ICO) stage to compensate for the volatility. In effect, it’s an uncertainty discount that keeps the price down, which drives up the returns.”
You can check out the full article on the official BC website.
People Aren’t Using Their Vacation Time. These Alumni Want to Fix That – D’Amore-McKim News
Treehoppr, “an online platform that tracks accrued time off,” was founded by Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim grads Kevin Corliss, DMSB (’16), Douglas Franklin, DMSB/E (’16), and Christopher Kenyon, CCIS (’17), in response to the “uniquely American” reality of how few working professionals take advantage of “paid time off.”
Treehoppr, an app created by a trio of D’Amore-McKim alumni, hopes to solve the uniquely American issue of not taking time off of work.
In an interview with their alma mater, Corliss says, “We want to help people eliminate these barriers to travel. What are the things you always hear when you ask people about traveling? They don’t have the time, the money, or the know-how when it comes to a foreign country. We want to help people solve all those issues.”
Dive into the trio’s story here.
The Gourmet MBA – Suffolk Experience
Suffolk University recently published a profile on current Sawyer Business School MBA Danielle Health (’19), whose @BostonBehavior Instagram profile demonstrates her knack for monetizing that very 21st century ritual of the meal snapshot—one she’s parlayed into a full-time job at social media management company Metter Media.
Health explains that she generally approaches the manager of “each restaurant she wants to visit as a one-time business partner.” She explains that her Instagram affords restaurants quite “a lot of visibility for a pretty minimal investment.”
She continues:
“Bigger food bloggers might have 100,000 followers. But that doesn’t matter if the people aren’t in Boston. About 90 percent of my followers are local to the Boston area, and most are my age. So I can deliver a really targeted and high-value group to a restaurant that I put on my feed.”
Check out the full profile here.
