Friday, April 17, 2009

Business Grads Looking Beyond Wall Street

An interesting article that concerns all of us!!! Where will we be looking for work when we complete our schooling? Unfortuately we can't be professional students forever!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/business/economy/18grads.html?ref=business


Friday, March 27, 2009

It's Time For Radical Change In Business Education

Leadership

Business schools are among those responsible for the lack of ethics that led to the current crisis--and they must refocus their curricula.
Ever since the Enron debacle, business schools across the nation have been trying to incorporate ethics into their programs more effectively at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, through a variety of improvements.
Well, we've now learned something: It hasn't worked. Today's economic crisis underscores the fact that although American business and business education have symbiotically thrived over the past century, their relationship is fundamentally flawed. Superficial improvements to business school programs, although genuinely well-meaning, are no longer enough. Radical change--in the form of reinventing, reframing and rebuilding the education of our future business leaders--is now necessary.
As we recognize our role in the deterioration of business institutions on Wall Street, on Main Street and in Detroit, we must ask ourselves: How could we have done a better job of preparing our students? And, more important: Where do we go from here?
Although we can't serve as parents, instilling foundational value systems into our young people through their coursework, we can broaden their perspectives and positively influence their behavior over the long term. Doing this within business curricula requires a highly integrated, creative and agile approach. It requires us to provide our students with a holistic understanding of ethics, corporate social responsibility and sustainability, within the context of global business and society.
Most American business curricula were built on an educational model that grew up in the 1950s. This model divides learning into disparate functional areas and, more recently, combines them with overarching soft skills like communication and teamwork. It's an approach that was acceptable in a U.S.-centric manufacturing economy, but it's no longer appropriate. The enormity of the challenges our young people now face--the financial crisis, intractable geopolitical and environmental problems, a knowledge-and-experience economy that changes every day and technology that changes every minute--obligate us to provide a very different educational experience.
As part of the new approach we've adopted at the Villanova School of Business in an effort to meet this obligation, we've reinvented the undergraduate curriculum. We have a new team-taught, year-long, flagship course, Business Dynamics, that teaches first-year students about the overarching purpose of business within society. The rationale is simple: Once students understand the big picture of business and its effect on the welfare of people worldwide--and they start to view every challenge and question in that context--they are on the right track. Then the functional knowledge they gain not only makes more sense, it serves a larger purpose. They begin to understand that they can't sell out the long-term public good for short-term profit.
There are three things to bear in mind when considering this entrepreneurial approach. First, there is no evidence yet to suggest that Villanova is doing this right, or that this is the particular avenue that other business schools should take. We introduced the new curriculum in the fall of 2008, and we will track our students' learning experiences and outcomes. We plan to openly share the good, the bad and the unknown as we proceed. But one thing is certain: It's a thoughtfully planned, dramatic change at a time when such change is needed. And we are optimistic.

by: James Danko, Forbes.com

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

From Ranks of Jobless, a Flood of Volunteers

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: March 15, 2009
Until November, Lisa Traina had a classic New York glamour job: organizing private parties in the Art Deco opulence of the Rainbow Room. Now she spends 10-hour shifts walking down gritty sidewalks trying to persuade homeless people to go to the Bowery Mission for food and shelter.

“I worked at the top of the world,” she said. “And the next day you’re working down on Broadway and saying to somebody, ‘Let me show you where you can get a bowl of soup for the night.’ ”

After being laid off, Ms. Traina, 50, enlisted in the growing army of the newly unemployed that have been marching into the offices of nonprofit organizations since the recession hit, looking to do some good, maybe network a little or simply fill the hours they used to be at the office.
They have searched for tasks on volunteernyc.org — which last month had 30 percent more visitors than in February 2008 — and forced New York Cares, an umbrella organization, to add extra new-volunteer orientations at a Whole Foods Market downtown that quickly booked solid an unheard-of three weeks in advance. In Philadelphia, Big Brothers Big Sisters has seen a 25 percent increase in inquiries from potential mentors over this time last year. And the Taproot Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that places skilled professionals in volunteer positions, had more people sign up on one day earlier this year than in an entire month a year ago.
Many who run nonprofits have marveled at the sudden flood of bankers, advertising copywriters, marketing managers, accountants and other professionals eager to lend their formidable but dormant skills. The Financial Clinic, which counsels the working poor on economic matters, recently dispatched an M.I.T.-educated ex-Wall Street type to help people in Chinatown prepare their tax returns.
“One person’s trash is another person’s treasure,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, a marketing manager for the nonprofit organization Learning Leaders.
But others grumbled that the current love affair with volunteerism, encouraged by President Obama’s nationwide call to public service, can be a mixed blessing. Smaller organizations, with staffs of fewer than 20 and no full-time volunteer coordinator, have struggled to absorb the influx, especially since many of them have simultaneously had to cut back on projects in the face of dwindling donations and government grants.
“Can you make them stop calling?” groused one nonprofit executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Everybody’s inspired by Obama,” he said, adding: “They also don’t have jobs.”
Lindsay Firestone, who manages pro bono projects for Taproot, said the organization had scaled back recruitment this year after attracting more volunteers than it could possibly accommodate. “It’s like a Greek tragedy,” she said. “We’re thrilled to have all of these volunteers. But now organizations are stuck not being able to take advantage of it because they don’t have adequate funding.”
Bertina Ceccarelli, a senior vice president at the United Way in New York — which partners with the mayor’s office to run the volunteernyc.org matching service — said the outpouring was similar to that after 9/11 — except that the new volunteers have more time to fill.
“It’s sad but true,” Ms. Ceccarelli said, “but the irony is that sometimes it’s almost more work to find something for a volunteer to do than to just turn them away.”
None of that has dimmed the volunteers’ enthusiasm.
Continuum Hospice Care, which assists New Yorkers at the end of their lives, has started a waiting list this year for volunteers. Allison Maughn, the interim president, said many of them were hoping that their unpaid work would eventually turn into a paid job, and have been raising their hands for the most menial tasks, like stuffing envelopes and data entry. “They’re even happy to sit at the reception desk and answer the phones,” she said in amazement.
New York Cares had double the number of volunteers this February as last, and a survey the group conducted showed that a third of them were unemployed. At one of two packed orientation sessions on Thursday, aspiring volunteers scribbled notes as they listened to Dennis Tseng, a cheerful 27-year-old, speak rapid-fire for nearly an hour about the nuts and bolts. The session, held adjacent to a cafe in Whole Foods, was so full that latecomers had to stand and lean against a wall.
“Right now, I could volunteer about five times a week,” said Emily Jimenez, 29, who lives on Staten Island and was laid off last month from the Milford Plaza hotel in Midtown. “If they’d want me to.”
Katherine Howie, an out-of-work lawyer, wrote “N/A currently” under employment information on the orientation forms. “I don’t mind making a commitment,” she said. “I’m happy to work with children, or sports, or recreation. I just want something to fill my time.”
Nini Duh, 29, was laid off from Lehman Brothers in September and now volunteers at any number of places — an elementary school, a finance workshop in Chinatown — nearly every day. It is a welcome change from her 100-hour weeks before her investment bank went bankrupt.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

News Analysis
‘Great Society’ Plan for the Middle Class

by: David E. Sanger

Opponents of President Obama’s proposal for a sweeping new government activism in the economy call it a return to a traditional tax-and-spend philosophy, a step back to the era of Lyndon B. Johnson.

It may also be a postmodern, post-Clinton form of liberalism.
Unlike the sweeping social programs of the 1960s, the Obama plan, with its talk of “green jobs” and energy efficiency savings, seems aimed more at a middle class that missed out on the boom than at the nation’s poorest, who would benefit to a significantly lesser extent. To be sure, there are some elements of Mr. Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget that are aimed at aiding the nation’s poorest — for example, turning Pell Grants for college into what amounts to a new entitlement program — but in his sales pitch, that has hardly been one of its biggest selling points.
Instead, the budget is advertised as a way of addressing the three issues that Mr. Obama talked about most often in his campaign: a far larger federal role in education, in providing near-universal health care and in energy policy. Its most expensive new provisions, like the $630 billion placed in reserve for the creation of a national health care fund and $250 billion set aside to bail out failing banks and fragile industries, are aimed a middle-class American workers who face the double threat of losing their jobs and their health insurance at one time.
And for the first time, an American president has moved to tax industries whose emissions trap greenhouse gases — a step that President George W. Bush argued would bring American industry to its knees.
Of course Johnson’s budgets were built when the nation was becoming increasingly aware of its crippling poverty rates, which was seen as one of the great social issues of the day, while Mr. Obama is responding to a sense that the middle class is falling behind the wealthiest Americans.
There is a boldness to the strategy — the kind of boldness that worked for Mr. Obama during the presidential campaign — that is breathtaking. He is gambling that the combination of his political capital and the urgency created by the economic crisis gives him a moment that may never come around again.
But along the way, he appears to have shed President Clinton’s fear of being labeled an old-fashioned liberal.
To deflect the criticism that he is returning to an era of big government, Mr. Obama is relying on new packaging. He is being highly specific about how taxes on the wealthy would be redirected to programs that resonate with those who were listening to his campaign promises.
“There are striking similarities to Johnson and Great Society,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian who has written extensively about Johnson’s promise of an end to poverty, a commitment made in a State of the Union address 45 years ago, and one that he was only able to deliver on in part.
“Obama’s rhetoric is not as grandiose,” Mr. Dallek said. But he sees risks as well — the risk that Mr. Obama could reinvent Johnson’s mistake. “Vietnam proved, in a few years, that you really can’t do guns and butter. And I worry that Afghanistan could be the parallel for Obama.”
If Johnson’s rallying cry was an end to poverty in the world’s richest nation, Mr. Obama’s is an end to the Reagan Revolution. With the proposed tax increases on couples making more than $250,000, Mr. Obama has declared that trickle-down economics — the theory that the entire country benefits as the nation’s richest amass and spend — was a fantasy. He denounced it in moral terms, declaring in his budget that “there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few.”
Emphasizing the focus on the middle class, that same budget noted that from 2000 to 2007, the heart of the Bush presidency, “median income among households headed by those under 65” fell by about $2,000.
Moreover, as Eugene Steurele, the vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, points out, even the long-term spending in Mr. Obama’s budget does not have a tremendous effect on projected deficits. “In the long term, it’s existing health care spending and Social Security that account for these huge deficits, and he hasn’t addressed that issue yet.”
By contrast with Mr. Obama, Mr. Clinton was far more cautious. He came to office only four years after Ronald Reagan left Washington, and the rise of the Republican “Contract with America” in the mid-1990s kept the Reagan philosophy alive.
Moreover, Mr. Clinton was, of course, more beholden to the wealthiest Democratic donors. Mr. Obama’s wildly successful campaign strategy of raising hundreds of millions of dollars over the Internet from small donations gives him more political running room. (It also raises the question of whether wealthy voters, who overwhelmingly supported him, will now begin to reconsider their support.)
What begins now is the hardest part of the battle for Mr. Obama, the program-by-program debates that end up transforming (and oftentimes bloating) a federal budget. It will be a battle Johnson himself, much more a creature of the Senate than Mr. Obama, would have relished.
But for the new president, legislative victory alone is not enough. Like Mr. Clinton, he will have to convince the markets, which have been singularly unimpressed by his stimulus package, that America can afford the changes he is making. He must persuade the Chinese, among others, to lend the money to pay for it. And he must convince Americans that he can bring back more activist government without bringing back the worst aspects of big government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/us/politics/28assess.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=business%20in%20society%20february%202009&st=cse

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Synergy and Canadian Geese



As the professor mentioned in class, Canadian Geese fly in their "V" formation for a particular reason: a flock of geese can move faster and maintain flight longer that any one goose flying alone using the synergy! Scientist discovered that geese will fly 71% further using the lifting power that each goose produces for the goose that flies behind it. 


By flying in "V " formation, the whole flock adds at least 71% greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own.

➤ People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.

Whenever a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front.

➤ If we have as much sense as a goose, we will stay in formation with those who are heading in the same as we are.

When the lead goose gets tired, he rotates back in the wing and another goose flies point.

➤ It pays to take turns doing hard jobs, with people or with flying geese.

These geese honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.

➤ We need to be careful what we say when we honk from behind.

Finally, when a goose gets sick, or is wounded by gunshot, and falls out, two geese fall out of formation and follow him down to help and protect him. They stay with him until he is either able to fly or until he is dead, and then they launch out on their own or with another formation until they catch up with their group.

➤ If we have the sense of a goose, we will stand by each other, protect one another and sometimes make new friends who seem to be going in our direction.

Synergy is best explained as, 'One plus one equals more than two'. Today's world requires a critical mass of transformational leaders who will commit to creating a synergy of energy within their circle of influence so new level of social, economic, organizational and spiritual success can be reached. Synergy helps you realise the value of others, and secondly, encourages you to find the right people. Synergy is a dynamic form of leverage. Avoid using it, and end up working four times as hard for half the results. Use it and watch the results expand exponentially!

I located all this information at: http://theleadership.wordpress.com/2006/06/10/synergy-why-do-geese-fly-in-a-v-formation/