MIT’s Unique Team Building Tool, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Music Making as an Effective Teaming Tool – MIT Sloan Newsroom
The MIT Sloan School of Management recently hosted an Innovation Period workshop entitled “Music Making as Effective Teaming Tool,” which focused on leadership training through music. The workshop was developed in conjunction with New York nonprofit Found Sound Nation, which uses “collaborative sound-making as a tool to help enhance communities and build bonds.”
MIT Leadership Center Associate Director Abby Berenson explains, “Through music-making, they create a sense of community and a sense of teams, and through teams, this leadership practice. That’s really at the heart of what we try to bring for any of the SIP workshops we do.”
Sloan MBA student Faye Cheng added, “Being able to experience failure in a low-risk setting gave [me] new insight into how it can open up new avenues for creativity and innovation. It didn’t have to be a perfect sound, it was just ‘Let’s try things out and layer them on.’ In real life, it can be more daunting to fail in that way or make a decision and have to undo it later.”
You can read the full article here and listen to the students’ songs below.
How Companies Can Identify Racial and Gender Bias in Their Customer Service – Harvard Business Review
The Harvard Business Review recently published an article by HBS Organizational Behavior Ph.D. candidate Alexandra C. Feldberg and UVA Darden assistant professor of marketing Tami Kim in which they explore the prevalence of racial and gender bias within customer service.
As part of their ongoing research, Feldberg and Kim “audited 6,000 hotels in the U.S. by sending email inquiries from fictitious email accounts that signaled senders’ race and gender. By systematically examining replies to these inquiries, we observed that frontline employees were less responsive to nonwhite customers and objectively less helpful and friendly. In other words, compared to white customers, black and Asian customers received worse quality service.”
They offered four effective strategies that large companies can implement to combat racial and gender bias:
- “Develop anticipatory service protocols.” In other words: “standardize scripts and develop rules.”
- “Develop channels for employee feedback” to accommodate any new customer service issues.
- “Emphasize not just “best” service,” which the researchers argue can be “onerous and subject to interpretation,” but “equal” service.
- “Diversify employees’ experiences … through hiring and employee rotations.”
You can read the full article here.
Real World Statistics with Professor Ed Vieira – Simmons Blog
The Simmons School of Management blog recently re-published an interview with associate professor Edward T. Viera, Jr., whose 2017 textbook on applied statistics raised a number of interesting questions related to how big data and statistics can be utilized in the health care industry, for instance.
Professor Viera explains, “Statistics allows us to analyze complex problems and provide reliable results, which humans cannot as easily do. Statistics offers the tools to “objectively” analyze a situation so that we can make reliable, data-driven, informed decision … with unprecedented precision.”
He adds, “Through the use of health care analytics, which deploys advanced software and hardware technologies, we can monitor and adjust our research or treatment based on the collection of data in real time.”
Check out the complete interview with Professor Viera here.
MIT Breaks Down Starbucks Response to Recent PR Nightmare, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
What Starbucks Got Wrong—and Right—After Philadelphia Arrests – MIT Sloan Newsroom
Following Starbucks’ PR nightmare this past April in which an employee at a Philadelphia Starbucks had two African American patrons arrested after while they waited to conduct a business meeting, Starbucks announced it will host an afternoon of racial bias training for 175,000 employees across 8,000 of its locations.
MIT Sloan senior lecturer Roberta Pittore commended the coffee giant on the sincere response it made following the initial clumsy attempt to address the controversy in a generalized statement.
Regardless of the potential impacts a single afternoon of racial bias training might have on its employees, Pittore believes that “something is better than nothing, more is better than less, and sooner is better than later. I think what it does achieve from Starbucks’ point of view is that it changes the discussion from ‘What did our employee do that was offensive,’ to ‘How can we learn and how can we change?’”
You can read professor Pittore’s entire take on the incident and the Starbucks response here.
Two Northeastern Students Created an App to Revolutionize the School Bus Industry – D’Amore-McKim Blog
The Best Buy-sponsored E-Fest recently awarded $40,000 to BusRight, an app current D’Amore-McKim School of Business students Keith Corso, ’21, and Evan Eddleston, ’22, co-founded to “revolutionize the school bus industry.”
BusRight is designed to “track school bus passengers, current location, calculate optimal travel routes, curb carbon emissions, reduce transportation costs for bus companies, and improve quality of life for passengers, parents, and bus drivers.” According to the article, many school administrators and bus company officials have expressed interest in using the app.
Eddleston writes, “Bus drivers are home earlier, students are home earlier, and parents know where their kids are. It’s a much more efficient system than the one in place today.”
You can read more about BusRight here.
“Be Unreasonable” – Sawyer Business Blog
The keynote speaker at the Sawyer Business School 2018 commencement was Boston Foundation president and CEO Paul S. Grogan who received an honorary doctorate and shared some refreshing words of wisdom drawn from a lifetime of devotion to the betterment of communities.
“Powerful interests conspire to keep things the way they are. They’re fiercely resistant to change because they benefit from the status quo. [There is a] need for courageous public servants who can stand up to pressure and citizen activists who can reshape public opinion in their communities.”
Boston Foundation president and CEO Paul S. Grogan, speaking at this month’s Sawyer Business School commencement / Photo via suffolk.edu
Grogan advised graduates to think beyond the material success their prestigious degree will help them attain. “I implore you to volunteer, to vote, to donate to charity … but moreover to be an active citizen and fight for your fellow neighbors who don’t enjoy the full promise of an American life.”
You can read more highlights from Grogan’s lecture here and watch his speech in its entirety below.
MIT Talks to Costco CEO About Success, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week, including a visit from the Costco CEO at MIT.
How Costco’s Obsession with Culture Drove Success – MIT Sloan Newsroom
Costco CEO James Sinegal, along with renowned Costco butcher Todd Miner, stopped by professor MIT Sloan Zeynep Ton’s “Management of Services: Concepts, Design, and Delivery” class earlier this month to discuss how Costco’s employee-focused culture was “critical to its success.”
In Ton’s 2014 book, “The Good Jobs Strategy,” she analyzed four “operational choices” that she believes Costco’s culture encapsulates—and are responsible for its status as a “wholesale giant.
- Offer less
- Standardize and empower
- Cross-train
- Operate with slack.
Sinegal explained that the key to Costco’s success is a culture that promotes “passion, integrity, ownership, and motivation in his employees and [ensures] that the customer can trust that they are always getting the best deal by shopping with Costco.”
He also highlighted the company’s well-known high-pay for its employees; among the best in the U.S. for retail workers.
“No one was going to be able to say we’re making money off the backs of our employees, because we were going to pay the highest wages in all of retail,” Costco CEO James Sinegal said.
Click here to get more insights from the Costco CEO.
The Evolution of Conflict Resolution – D’Amore-McKim Blog
Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim School of Business assistant professor Christoph Riedel recently published new research that offers insights into the social and biological evolution of how humans resolve conflict.
In “Conflict and Convention in Dynamic Networks,” Riedel researched how “dynamic networks allow individuals to resolve conflicts by managing their network connections rather than changing their strategy.”
His team applied computer simulations to common situations like when a single appetizer remains between a host and a guest. Riedel writes:
“Host-guest norms or ‘paradoxical behavior’ account for the vast majority of our simulated final state solutions—in other words, the host gives the guest the last appetizer. The opposite solution where the host takes the appetizer for himself, called ownership norms or ‘bourgeois behavior,’ is quite rare. This is especially interesting in the context of human biological behavior because in the animal kingdom, territoriality or ownership norms are ubiquitous.”
You can read more about Professor Riedel’s research here.
How Companies Can Use the Data They Collect to Further the Public Good – Harvard Business Review
HBS professors Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim, and Michael Luca published a marketing piece in which they implored companies that collect data to recognize the possibility of “re-purposing their data for the public good,” which can allow companies to “do well by doing good.”
“[There is] broader potential for data from online platforms to improve our understanding of all of America. Just as Yelp can shed light on local economic changes, Zillow could inform our understanding of housing markets, LinkedIn could provide insight about labor markets, and Glassdoor could teach us about the quality of employment options in an area.”
You can check out the full article here.
MIT Examines the Appeal of Lying, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
When the ‘Lying Demagogue’ is the Authentic Candidate – MIT Sloan Newsroom
One of the major questions in the post-Trump U.S. public discourse is how voters could possibly support a political figure that so brazenly bends the truth at every possible turn. In a new paper published in February’s American Sociological Review, MIT Sloan School of Management professor and deputy dean Ezra Zuckerman Sivan attempts to rationalize the appeal of a lying demagogue:
“When a candidate asserts an obvious untruth especially as part of a general attack on establishment norms, his anti-establishment listeners will pick up on his underlying message that the establishment is illegitimate and, therefore, that candidate will have an ‘authentic’ appeal despite the falsehoods and norm-breaking.”
Read more about Zuckerman Sivan’s research here.
What Most People Get Wrong About Men and Women – Harvard Business Review
The ongoing pay gap dialogue has inspired both men and women to step up and pressure the organizations that employ them to commit more aggressively to gender parity. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, HBS researchers Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely explore the harmful rhetoric that drives many of these well-meaning initiatives and offer a four-step alternative approach for people to:
1) Question the narrative
2) Generate a plausible alternative explanation
3) Change the context and assess the results
4) Promote continual learning.
“The solution to women’s lagged advancement is not to fix women or their managers but to fix the conditions that undermine women and reinforce gender stereotypes. By taking an inquisitive, evidence-based approach to understanding behavior, companies can not only address gender disparities but also cultivate a learning orientation and a culture that gives all employees the opportunity to reach their full potential.”
“When people are less embedded, they are also less aware of opportunities for stretch assignments and promotions, and their supervisors may be in the dark about their ambitions. But when women fail to “lean in” and seek growth opportunities, it is easy to assume that they lack the confidence to do so—not that they lack pertinent information.” – Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely
You can check out the full article here.
Unity in Diversity: The Babson Latin American Forum – Babson Blog
The Babson College F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business recently hosted its Latin American Forum, which featured esteemed guest speaker and Open English founder Andres Moreno, whose online platform teaches English, and Santa Teresa rum CEO Alberto Vollmer.
Moreno and Vollmer both used their lectures as an opportunity to examine how entrepreneurship can co-exist with social impact. Vollmer discussed the Alcatraz Rugby Project, a recognized program of social reintegration for young people with behavioral problems. Moreno chose to focus on how his delivers the best product and service to its consumers.
You read a more in-depth survey of the Babson Latin American Forum here.
Harvard Faculty Discuss Recent Chinese Tariffs, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
Trade War or War of Words? – Harvard Business School Blog
Following the Trump administration’s recent announcement of 25 percent tariffs on 1,000 Chinese exports, Bill Kirby and Willy Shih, Harvard Business School faculty experts on China, took to the HBS blog to “trade theories on the best path forward for the world’s two largest economies.”
Both experts point to economic shifts in the 1980s, which, not incidentally, was the decade in which Donald Trump started to become a household name. Kirby notes that the major trade distinctions between the United States and Japan, specifically regarding the auto-manufacturing industry, set a precedent. In that, the United States began to firmly invest in Japanese car companies like Honda and Toyota, building their own domestic manufacturing plants. Kirby suspects, however, that the Trump administration may not be as open to that kind of investment. “If Chinese companies wanted to improve access to American markets by investing in the US, would the administration be open to it?” he asks. “They ought to be, in my view. But my suspicion is that that’s not the outcome that this administration is looking for. They’re looking for a miraculous recovery of American-based manufacturing exporting to a Chinese market, not a particularly good match.”
Shih, staying on the topic of the ’80s, offers a different opinion, saying; “I think the real issue is industrial policy on the Chinese side competing with a lack of industrial policy on the U.S. side and the consequences of that. Going back to the mid-1980s, the Chinese government has been mapping a pathway for the country to become a modern country (just as the Koreans, Taiwanese, and the Japanese did before, except on a much larger scale). The Chinese have identified core capabilities that they want to see inside the country, and they’ve been methodically working on that over the last 30-plus years. I’d argue the positive trade balance with the US reflects the progress they’ve made.”
You can read the full conversation between Kirby and Shih here.
An Easy Internship Trick from Kayla Humel ’18 – Simmons Blog
Current Simmons School of Management student body president Kayla Humel, ’18, wrote candidly about the impact of the Student Government Association (SGA) on her recent internship at Puma and future career plans.
“First and foremost, [SGA has taught me] the power of good communication. When the e-board is communicating with one another, event planning is exponentially easier. When SGA is communicating with organizations, processes like budgets occur seamlessly. Good communication is crucial to success in any organization.”
Humel threw her hat in the presidential race because she “saw opportunities to improve processes between SGA and the other organizations on campus. I knew that SGA could create change on campus and I wanted to play a major part in that.”
You ca check out more about her Simmons experience here and watch an interview with Humel about her internship below.
Wield Polarization to Build Positive Change – MIT Sloan Newsroom
MIT Sloan School of Management sustainability initiative director Jason Jay used his recent TEDx talk as an opportunity to share some strategic advice on how to more effectively spark difficult conversations. “The voltage feels so high that we simply avoid conversations out of fear of getting shocked. But I like to think about that polarization as a kind of energy.”
- Draw a contrast between what others might expect you to do and what you’re really trying to do.
- Clarify the values underlying your positions, and do the same with the people you’re talking to.
- Make it clear that you aren’t meeting simply to bargain over these values, but to embrace tension and find new ideas.”
You can check out Jay’s TEDx talk at Hofstra University below and learn more about his work here.
What are the Best Real Estate MBAs in Boston?
Despite episodic waves of unrest, real estate is a worthy investment. More importantly, real estate is a cornerstone of the world economy. The importance of understanding the intricacies and nuances of this complex field cannot be overstated.
In Forbes, Yolanda Barnes, who runs Savills World Research, said, “real estate is the pre-eminent asset class which will be most impacted by global monetary conditions and investment activity and which, in turn, has the power to most impact national and international economies.” For the B-school-bound, becoming fluent in real estate’s many facets can provide a valuable edge in nearly every area of business.
Below, we’ve laid out the best Boston real estate MBA options for those looking for careers in the industry.
Harvard Business School
It would be remiss to talk about business education in Boston without mentioning Harvard Business School. HBS is easily one of the most reputable business schools in the world. Forbes places the university in its top three “Best Business Schools.” For those pursuing real estate, Harvard MBA’s have access to the Harvard Business School Real Estate Club, which provides its members with opportunities for supplemental real estate education, training, and extensive networking. Harvard also hosts an annual Real Estate Weekend, wherein students can buy tickets to attend development workshops and fireside chats with industry experts.
F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business – Babson College
At Babson College’s F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, MBA students can pursue the finance concentration, which offers several courses in real estate. Students can rake courses like Real Estate Financial Modeling, Real Estate Fundamentals, or Real Estate Development. According to recent Olin graduate employment statistics, 10 percent of the 2017 MBA class landed jobs in real estate. This number may not seem overwhelming, but it dwarfs the percentage seen in many MBA programs (usually about two to three percent).
Sloan School of Management – MIT
MIT’s Sloan School of Management offers an MBA that incorporates real estate education. Though the school also offers an MS in real estate development (MSRED) for those more focused on earning a degree in real estate than an MBA, the MBA finance track offers a different set of advantages. This track zooms in on the finance-related areas of real estate, such as investment, urban economics, and housing economics. The MBA real estate courses zero in on the financial component of the industry and the core MBA courses also help students build a broad foundation in business. MBA students pursuing a certificate in finance can take courses like Real Estate Finance and Investment and Real Estate Capital Markets.
