Wharton Directors Dig into MBA Class of 2021 Profile
The Wharton School’s Director of Admissions Blair Mannix and Director of Student Life Eddie Banks-Crosson recently shared deeper insights into the class profile of the new MBA Class of 2021. To begin, the latest group of candidates is closer to gender parity than ever before. This year, 47 percent of students identify as women. Banks-Crosson said, “If we’re talking about diversity and inclusion, women matter, and I think that women are saying globally, that, ‘We matter,’ and so, we should be leading that charge, and I think that’s what that feels like within this class.” And gender parity is only one piece of the Wharton 2021 MBA class puzzle.
Continue reading…Friday News – USC Marshall Announces New Dean, HBS Receives Gift for Dual Degree, and More
Let’s take a look at some of the biggest stories from this week, including the newest USC Marshall dean.
Geoffrey Garrett Named New Dean of USC Marshall School of Business – USC Marshall News
The USC Marshall School of Business announced its newest dean, Geoffrey Garrett, formerly of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Garrett, an economist and political theorist, begins his tenure in 2020.
President Wanda M. Austin says of Garrett’s appointment, “He has a demonstrated track record in global business theory and practice, which aligns with our mission to create the leaders of the future … Marshall School of Business has found a tremendous leader in Geoffrey Garrett.”
Geoffrey Garrett is set to begin his USC Marshall dean tenure next year.
Along with serving as Wharton’s dean, Garrett is also the Reliance Professor of Management and Enterprise, and he formerly taught political science there. Prior to his positions at Wharton, he served as dean of the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales. His appointment at Marshall will not be the first position he has held at USC, however. He also taught communications, international relations, law and business in 2005.
Garrett says, “My first year will be all about listening and learning … I think I have a pretty good appreciation for the world of business and education and for what USC Marshall has achieved. But the DNA of the school is its people, and I have so much to learn from them and about them.”
Read here for more about the newest USC Marshall dean.
HBS and SEAS Announce Gift of Financial Aid to Support Joint Degree Program Students – Harvard SEAS News
A generous gift from two alumni has contributed to the growth of the MS/MBA joint degree program at Harvard University. Denise Dupré and Mark Nunnelly, both 1984 MBA graduates, have given the needed support for a financial aid program for students who are pursuing the dual degree. The MS/MBA program launched in 2018, and it has served to unite HBS and the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
Twenty-nine students are enrolled in the MS/MBA’s inaugural program, whose curriculum focuses in equal part on technology, design, and business and management principles.
Nitin Nohria, Harvard Business School Dean, says:
“This generous gift will support future leaders who will bridge the worlds of business and engineering, spurring innovation and the commercialization of new discoveries to address many of society’s most exciting opportunities … The expansion of SEAS to [the Allston campus] is a catalyst for collaboration that will propel and transform teaching and research at Harvard for decades to come.”
The expansion of Allston was a major catalyst for Dupré and Nunnelly’s gift. “We’ve both been enormous fans of the possibilities in Allston for many years,” says Nunnelly. “It’s so incredibly important to the future of Harvard, the city of Boston, and the entire state of Massachusetts.”
For more on the MS/MBA and the Allston expansion, read here.
Calculating New Ideas – Fox School of Business Idea Marketplace
A statistician and associate professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business has made great strides in data science with a pair of new developments that will likely be game changers in healthcare and education.
Zhigen Zhao, along with his colleagues, have discovered a way to calculate health risks by studying interactions between human genes. The team developed an algorithm which will analyze 20,000 genes at a time (twice the number of previous methods), which may help doctor’s to determine a patient’s risk for such things as Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and obesity.
“Our method only takes two-tenths of a second to finish this kind of calculation,” Zhao says. “People’s health can depend on a specific combination of their genes.”
Another breakthrough algorithm Zhao and his team created will help to bridge the divide in standardized test scores between advantaged and disadvantaged students. With the new tool, the team parsed the test results collected from various schools to create a more thorough picture of who was doing well on which tests.
“The main idea for this method is to incorporate school district information to get a new threshold … The standard method, which doesn’t include this information, can be either overly conservative or overly liberal.”
Read here for more on Zhigen Zhao and his team’s work.
Career Changer’s Investment in Master’s Program Has Big Payoff – Rutgers Business School News
Julie Mitchell, a graduate of the Rutgers Business School Online Master of Science in Supply Chain Management program, managed to launch a new and more profitable career even amidst the daily challenges of family and work.
Mitchell is Senior Procurement Agent in Supply Chain Management for Boeing, where she manages every aspect of equipment delivery to create 737 galleys. She has been with Boeing for five years, and in that time her salary has increased by 83 percent. “The degree catapulted me into a senior procurement agent position,” she says. “There are people who have waited 10 years for that to happen.”
Julie Mitchell, Rutgers online Maser of Science in Supply Chain Management alum / Photo via business.rutgers.edu
After a decade plus long career of managing a dental practice, Mitchell decided to take a job at Boeing where she discovered her talent for managing billing, logistics, and operations. Several experiences led her to further hone in on her natural ability for ‘disruption management,’ and from there she earned her degree.
“I like to be challenged and I like fixing problems. A 737 has 400,000 parts, including nuts and bolts. It can be like working on a puzzle. The most rewarding thing is delivering something to a customer that they’re happy with.”
For more on the online Master of Science in Supply Chain Management at Rutgers, read here.
MBA Jobs: Business Development Manager
One fact of life in any business, large or small, is that a strategic vision for future growth is a necessity. Equally important is translating that vision into a workable plan, which is the primary focus of the Business Development Manager. The combination of lead generation, targeting the most profitable markets, and perhaps most importantly, making and keeping healthy client relationship are the hallmarks of this role. An MBA with this specialty affords a host of opportunities for jobs in an impressive array of industries. Here, we will take a look at some of the profession’s required skills, along with salary ranges, specialty programs, and a brief summary of some current job opportunities.
Business Development (BD), briefly, is the creation and management of new leads and relationships in order to achieve sales targets. Strong communication skills are an obvious foundation in any career, but in BD it is imperative that one can express ideas to a wide variety of audiences at all levels of business. Acquiring new clients requires the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, as opposed to just delivering a sales pitch. Other necessary BD skills include
- Negotiation
- Data analysis
- Accounting and forecasting
Business Development Manager Salary
According to Glassdoor data, the average salary for a Business Development Manager in the U.S. is $77,444 per year, regardless of degree. Typically, the salary range is from $40,000 to $135,000.
An important aspect of a BD to consider are the long and unpredictable hours. According to one Indeed.com user describing the role:
“If you are not the type of person who is willing to work for and undetermined amount of hours … this is not the job for you.” On the other hand, the long hours often result in large payoffs, including bonuses for top performers.
Another BD notes, “My current position primarily entails hunting new prospects … I learn [a lot] by dealing with various business model scenarios.”
Getting Started
A bachelor’s degree that includes studies in finance, sales, marketing, business administration, or economics is a great place to begin for a future in business development. Studies in these areas, along with organizational and consumer behavior, supplement the “numbers” side of a well rounded education, as a large part of the BD profession involves predicting the movements of trends, markets, and individuals.
University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business
An MBA with a focus in strategy sets one apart from other applicants. Many of these degrees have an international focus. Berkeley Haas, for instance, offers the International Business Development program for MBAs. With the guidance of mentors, students work with globally based clients to help them achieve strategic development goals.
Few business schools effectively combine strategy and international business education quite like the Berkeley Haas School of Business.
University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School of Business
The University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School of Business offers the Two Year MBA with a focus in strategy. This focus trains students for “helping a corporation design a path to growth and profitability amidst competition and constant change. The strategic planner’s role consists of helping the organization to gather, analyze, and organize information.”
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School
The Wharton School’s MBA focus in strategic management is geared toward students with sights set on consulting and/or emerging market business developments. Students choose from a selection of courses, such as Strategy and Competitive Advantage, Strategic Implementation, Entrepreneurship Innovation, and Change & Entrepreneurship.
Duke University Fuqua School of Business
Fuqua School of Business at Duke offers the strategy focus as well, with the goal of training MBAs to gain insight on the question: “Why do some firms consistently outperform others?” This concentration requires students to choose from both advanced strategy and advanced analytical courses.
Pace University Lubin School of Business
The Lubin School of Business at Pace University’s MBA with a focus in strategic management provides a well rounded approach to training future managers, with special focus in areas of Strategic Thinking, Long and Short Term Planning, and Research.
Current Business Development Manager Openings
Among the companies currently hiring for a Business Development Manager are Amazon in New York City, Glaxo Smith Kline in Upper Providence, PA, and Verizon in New York City and New Jersey. Other firms looking for Business Development Management positions are KPMG, Microsoft, and American Express.
Beyond the ‘Big Four’: What are the Other Major Consulting Firms You Should Know?
Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, and E&Y: Together these firms make up the “Big Four”—the four biggest professional services firms in the world. The companies offer auditing, assurance services, management consulting, corporate finance, legal services and more. It’s no surprise, that many of these companies are also ideal destinations for many MBAs. Continue reading…
Wharton Talks Marketing Lessons Learned from Payless Publicity Stunt
What would you do and what would you think if you paid hundreds of dollars for shoes that sell for less than $20? That’s the dilemma that faced a select group of social media influencers who were invited to a private launch party for Italian shoe designer Bruno Palessi. What they found out later was that the hundreds of dollars they thought they spent on fancy footwear was just a ruse by Payless ShoeSource.
It was all part of a marketing ploy by Payless to highlight their new shoes and inexpensive designs. The question that’s on everyone’s minds now is, “Did the stunt work?” According to Wharton Marketing Professor Barbara Kahn and Lehigh University Assistant Marketing Professor Ludovica Cesareo, it was an elaborate ploy that paid off big time.
In the most recent Knowledge@Wharton radio show podcast on Sirius XM, the professors discussed what marketers could learn from the success of Payless.
Plan Ahead
A prank like the one Payless pulled off takes lots of planning of every single detail. The marketing team had to make sure nothing was missed if they were going to dupe their influencers, and they got it right.
“They did an incredible execution,” Kahn said. “The location they picked, the way the store was set up, the way they filmed it, the way they highlighted the shoes themselves while hiding the original brand and [adding] this very clean black-and-white logo. They did a fantastic job, from Payless’s perspective.”
Perception Frames Reality
The Payless shoes that the influencers were presented were no different than you’d find in any of their other stores, but by changing their location, packaging, and environmental clues, they made the influencers think that what they were getting was luxury. Payless proved that fancy packaging and clouding the judgment of a consumer can impact how they evaluate quality. The reality is that shoe quality won’t be revealed until weeks of wearing them.
Social Media is Powerful
Payless utilized the power of social media to get their stunt out to a huge audience and generate buzz. They realized that social media influencers could be just as powerful if not more powerful than retail marketers, fashion journalists, and designers in getting the word out to consumers. Social media is also why the prank worked so well. “They made something surprising and emotional, and therefore it’s much more likely to be posted,” Kahn said.
Publicity is Priceless
Payless has had poor publicity for a while now, but the stunt helped to turn things around and garner the company good press that they’d severely lacked in recent months.
“There are two things you want to get” from this kind of stunt, Kahn said. “The first thing is to build [positive brand] awareness. Payless has been in the news for very bad reasons recently — a lot of stores are closing down; it’s facing bankruptcy. It’s all been negative press. This is really turning the press around.”
Don’t Expect Long-Term Change
However, in the end, both Kahn and Cesareo don’t think that the stunt will impact Payless stores in the long term. While it might help bring in young customers who may not have shopped there before, Payless stores are still cluttered and unappealing compared to the fake store, so the long-term customer experience won’t impact sales.
Still, both Kahn and Cesareo agree that Payless got a lot of “bang for their buck” with the stunt.
This Wharton marketing article has been edited and republished from its original source, Clear Admit.
Top 10 Schools that Specialize in Healthcare Management
Healthcare Management MBAs are becoming a popular track for students who want to enter a growing industry that’s ripe with innovation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, medical and health care managers, also called healthcare executives or healthcare administrators, are responsible for planning, directing, and coordinating medical and health services. They manage entire medical facilities, departments at nonprofits, and medical practices for physicians.
BLS reports that employment of health care management personnel is projected to grow 20 percent from 2016 to 2026, which is much faster than the average for nearly all other industries. This is partially because the Baby Boomer working class is aging into retirement, thus increasing more demand for healthcare services. The average pay for health care management professionals is an estimated $98,350 per year ($47.29 per hour).
While some health care managers have a bachelor’s degree, master’s degrees also are common in the field. If you’re a prospective MBA hoping to enter the health care field following graduation, are you aware of all the specialized healthcare management majors, courses and programs offered at business school across the nation? Many of the country’s top business schools have put together special options for students looking to get an in-depth look at one of the largest and fastest growing sectors in the US economy. Let’s take a look at the best of the best. Continue reading…
