Toronto Playoff Success Is Good For Business, and More – Toronto News
Playoff Fever for Leafs, Raptors Fans – CityNews Toronto
With the NBA and NHL playoffs about to begin, Schulich School of Business sports marketing professor Nitish Bissonauth talked about the underlying financial positives of repeated playoff appearances. Which is pretty good news for the Toronto Raptors and Maple Leafs.
Watch the video below, via CityNews Toronto.
Golf and Tennis Executive Raises His Game After Earning MBA – The Globe & Mail
David Main, the general manager at the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club, has held senior management positions at various Ontario golf and tennis clubs for the past 10 years. He credits his MBA education from Western University Canada’s Ivey Business School with giving him the tools he needed to thrive in this field. Due to Main’s use of his MBA education to pursue a career in the golf and tennis industry, The Globe And Mail featured him in its most recent addition to a series on graduates utilizing their MBAs in non-traditional fields.
“Mr. Main says he started his MBA at 34 and was part of a small group of students at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., who were about 10 years older than the rest of the class. He felt comfortable enough in the room – and more comfortable than the year prior, when he took a few undergrad business classes to brush up on basic concepts alongside 18 and 19-year-olds—until he said what he did for a living.”
“‘I was the oddball,’ he admits. ‘We’re going around the room and introducing ourselves. And there were people in finance at TD [Toronto-Dominion Bank], working at KPMG, working with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and I was like, ‘I’m a golf professional.'”
Read more about David Main’s trajectory here.
The Global Housing Crisis – CityLab
Richard Florida, the Rotman School of Management professor and director of cities, along with Benjamin Schneider, recently wrote with CityLab about how the housing crisis has moved beyond a regional issue into a truly global one.
“The global housing crisis reflects a fundamental paradox of contemporary capitalism. Cities around the world are more economically powerful and essential than ever. This creates tremendous demand for their land, leading to escalating housing costs and competition.
Meanwhile, housing has been financialized and turned into an investment vehicle, which has caused an oversupply of luxury housing and a lack of affordable housing in many cities across the world. The global housing crisis is defined by a chronic shortage of housing for the least advantaged, and in many cases, for the working and middle classes as well.”
The two also noted that the perceptions of the world’s most expensive cities to live is a bit misguided. “The world’s most unaffordable housing markets are not New York, London, and Los Angeles, or even San Francisco, but Hong Kong, Sydney, Vancouver, and Melbourne,” they write. “London, Toronto, and Brisbane are also high up the list. Housing is also terribly unaffordable in Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Moscow, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Geneva, Rome, Milan, and Barcelona, according to other studies.”
A sweeping view of Villa 31, Buenos Aires / Photo via Natacha Pisarenko/AP
You can read more from Florida and Schneider here.
Rotman Prof Talks Theranos Fraud, and More – Toronto News
People affiliated with Toronto‘s finest business schools have been making the news. Below, we’ve laid out some of this week’s highlights.
How Board Diversity Might Have Prevented the Theranos Fiasco – The Globe & Mail
Andras Tilcsik, Canada Research Chair in strategy, organizations, and society at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management coauthored an opinion piece in The Globe & Mail with Chris Clearfield, Principal at System Logic. The article addressed the fraud charges lodged against Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Holmes, who was listed as one of Forbes’ “Youngest Self-Made Billionaires” has been charged with “massive” fraud involving upwards of $700 million USD. Holmes has agreed to cede control of her company, which was boating more innovated methods of blood-testing to potential investors.
Tilcsik and Clearfield argue that Holmes’s mistakes might have been prevented had a systemic problem in businesses been addressed at Theranos: board diversity. All but two Theranos board members were white men over 60. According to the article, “… lab experiments show that while homogeneous groups do less well on complex tasks, they report feeling more confident about their decisions.”
Holmes’ equity stake in Theranos, the notorious blood-testing startup she founded, has been reduced to virtually nothing after being charged with large-scale fraud from the SEC.
Learn more about the importance of board diversity here.
YouTube Star Choreographs a Career Blending Bollywood and Business – The Globe & Mail
Shareen Ladha, graduate of York University’s Schulich School of Business, used her MBA to guide her in an unconventional career goal. She wanted to build success producing and dancing in Bollywood-esq videos on YouTube, achieving massive momentum when she did a Bollywood-style remix of Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.” The video quickly went viral, and now Ladha balances making YouTube videos with her career as a senior strategist with McCann.
“Through my MBA, I decided that this was the thing that made me unique and it was proof I could bring a creative aspect to strategy and consulting,” Ladha said in a recent profile with the Globe & Mail.
“It started getting woven into my daily life and daily conversations I would have with people. All my social media accounts were public, so if they ever looked me up or were friends with me, they’d know about it. There was such a positive response.”
You can read more about the YouTube star here.
Ivey Students Learn the Three Gs of Good Investing – News@Ivey
Multi-billion dollar Brazilian investment firm 3G Capital Management recently let students at the Ivey Business School at Western University Canada in on a simple secret: the three Gs to successful investing are “good business, good management, and good price.”
3G managing partner Pavel Begun spoke with professor George Athanassakos and his value investing class last month, further explaining what each of those three Gs (get it?) meant:
Good Business:
“’We define good business as one that is competitively entrenched, generates high return of invested capital and is in solid financial shape.’” Specifically, 3G looks at businesses that are industry leaders and show industry longevity in order to predict their future value. They also look to businesses that generate with ROEs, or return on equity, of 15 per cent and above. Finally, they look at the debt payback period of business to ensure it is no greater than three to five years, helping to determine their financial shape.”
To read the rest of the advice gifted from Begun, click here.
What Toronto MBA Can You Earn in the Least Amount of Time? – MetroMBA
Several of the most well-regarded business schools in Toronto offer MBA programs that do not take the typical two-years that a traditional full-time degree often requires.
For instance, the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University has an accelerated program that takes just eight months to complete. Alanna Shaffer further explains:
“By exempting students from the required first year MBA courses, students can earn their degree quickly while also cutting their overall tuition expenses in half and accelerating their path to employment. The program is designed for students who have earned their undergraduate business degree in the last ten years, and have at least one year of professional experience. Students may start the program in either September or January.”
Check up on the rest of the fastest MBA programs in Toronto here.
Ted Rogers Dean Advocates Closing the Gender Gap by Engaging Men
Dr. Stephen Murphy, dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, recently shared his thoughts on the gender gap in business with The Globe and Mail, following a visit from Catalyst Canada.
In October, Tanya van Biesen, Executive Director of Catalyst Canada, recently visited the Ted Rogers School of Management to discuss gender inequality with current MBA students. Founded in 1962, Catalyst Canada has been working for more than fifty years to build welcoming workplaces for women by providing the necessary research, tools, and solutions to create leadership roles for women. “Gender inequality is not a women’s issue, it’s society’s issue,” van Biesen told Ryerson MBA students.
Dean Murphy agrees. “The gender gap is everyone’s problem,” he told The Globe and Mail, noting that only 68 of 142 countries increased their gender gap score throughout the past year, while 74 countries actually moved backwards. According to Murphy, a crucial part in reducing the gender gap lies in not just engaging women—but also men.
In Canada, women hold just 19 percent of S&P 500 board seats. Yet despite constant evidence revealing the benefits of gender and racial diversity in the workplace, 27 percent of directors in a recent survey (97 percent of whom were men) said there was an unnecessary amount of attention placed on gender diversity.
While many organizations and initiatives, such as HeForShe, exist to try to close this gap, dean Murphy emphasizes how important it is for men within a company to also see the importance of reducing the gender gap. At companies like PwC—which was able to increase the number of women in their global leadership team from 8 percent to 47 percent—training involves a discussion of the implicit biases that may lead to gender discrimination.
“Educating leaders on implicit and explicit bias is key to cracking the diversity nut,” Murphy said.
You can read the rest of his article in The Globe & Mail here.
Rotman MBA Receives Forté Foundation Award
Alex Walker Turner, a 2017 MBA graduate from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, has received the Edie Hunt Inspiration Award from the Forté Foundation. The award recognized her achievements in advancing women into business leadership positions as well as her significant contributions to her school and community. Continue reading…
Urbanization And Populism Clash, Says Ted Rogers Faculty
There’s a wide gap between rural dwellers and city folks, explains Dr. Kim Bates, Director of MBA Programs at the Ted Rogers School of Management, and Dr. Steven Murphy, Dean of the School. This gap is apparent in the results of the U.S. elections, where “Trump supporters are those who have been left behind by globalization and digitization,” and are stranded in small communities where they cannot get gainful employment, states The Globe and Mail article. According to this populist politics narrative, universities pollute the minds of the young, filling them with new ideas that leave the past behind, and business schools play a major role in this. Continue reading…
Friday Morning News & Notes: Stanford Success, Philly Job Growth And More
Good morning and happy Friday!
Here are a few stories you may have missed from the week that was …
