Monthly Archive for April, 2011

Do Secretaries Have a Future?

Published on April 29, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Lynn Peril, The New York Times

The 1950s and ’60s brought many new things to American offices, including the Xerox machine, word processing and — perhaps less famously — the first National Secretaries Day, in 1952. Secretaries of that era envisioned a rosy future, and many saw their jobs as a ticket to a better life.

In 1961, the trade magazine Today’s Secretary predicted that, 50 years hence, the “secretary of the future” would start her workday at noon and take monthlong vacations thanks to the “electronic computer.” According to another optimistic assessment, secretaries (transported through office hallways “via trackless plastic bubble”) would be in ever-higher demand because of what was vaguely referred to as “business expansion.”

But nearly 60 years later, on the date now promoted as Administrative Professionals Day, we’re living through the end of a recession in which around two million administrative and clerical workers lost their jobs after bosses discovered they could handle their calendars and travel arrangements online and rendered their assistants expendable. Clearly, while the secretary hasn’t joined the office boy and the iceman in the elephant’s graveyard of outmoded occupations, technological advancements haven’t panned out quite the way those midcentury futurists imagined. There are satisfactions to the job, to be sure, but for many secretaries, it remains often taxing, sometimes humiliating and increasingly precarious.

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Management Journal, Volume 10, Number 9 available

Published on April 29, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

management_front

The ninth issue of Volume 10 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.

Volume 10, Number 9 contains:

    Contesting Abundance: Shared for the Common Good or Monopolized for Private Profit?

    Published on April 28, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

    From Reality Sandwich

    It is hardly news by now that digital technologies have made available an abundance of information and knowledge on the Internet and the Web.

    New technologies have created a global digital infrastructure, which, in turn, has become the basis for a new information economy, whose most obvious feature is the abundance of free or low-cost information and knowledge. With few exceptions, I have usually found a needed piece of information, skill or knowhow — if it is public knowledge — on Wikipedia, YouTube, a blog, a Web site, or a mailing list somewhere. The Internet search results below illustrate the extent of the abundance (search done on Feb. 28, 2011; Oct. 2010 hits are in parentheses). The first few hundred hits are usually more than enough for most purposes.

    To Read More…

    Leading Questions

    Published on April 27, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

    By Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education

    Business schools have to cater to the needs of students who embark on MBA degrees to accelerate their careers and get a quick return on the time and money invested. But some institutions also hope to nurture the leaders who will enable business, and society, to meet tomorrow’s major challenges. So how can they reconcile these divergent goals, helping some talented young people into bigger and better jobs in major corporations while encouraging others to strike out on their own and develop bold new thinking?

    One way of trying to square the circle is to build into their programmes events such as HEC Paris’ annual Visions of Leadership week.

    École des Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) was founded in 1881 and has been located on a campus at Jouy-en-Josas near Versailles since the 1960s. It incorporates one of France’s highly competitive grandes écoles, traditionally used to train the country’s administrative, commercial and political elite, and is regularly ranked as the best business school in Europe by the Financial Times. Valerie Gauthier, now associate professor in the Visions of Leadership Centre, was associate dean of the MBA programme from 2002 to 2010.

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    Cutting Out the Core

    Published on April 25, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

    From The Economist

    Dipak Jain, who has recently taken over as dean of INSEAD after a long reign at the helm of the Kellogg School of Management, is an energetic thinker about the future of business education. He is also not afraid of airing the odd radical idea. During a wide ranging discussion at The Economist‘s office recently, he advanced an interesting thought. There would come a time, he said, when the core component of an MBA—those courses at the beginning of a programme in which one learns the basic principles and techniques of management—would be delivered online, before a student steps onto campus. (I hasten to add that there was no implication that such a scheme is imminent at INSEAD.)

    It struck me as an interesting concept. There has been huge debate over whether the core of an MBA has become commoditised. You won’t get Harvard, for example, to admit that what is taught at the beginning of its programme varies little from other schools. Nonetheless, all of the top programmes go out of their way to convince us that what really sets them apart (and, by implication, justifies the mammoth fees) is what happens after the core.

    Already many schools—including Harvard and Wharton, although there are numerous examples—are cutting the time they spend teaching core subjects. Instead they are allowing students the option to specialise with more elective courses, or to focus on a school’s pet theme, such as leadership or ethics.

    To Read More…

    The Two-Tiered Justice System: An Illustration

    Published on April 20, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

    From Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

    Of all the topics on which I’ve focused, I’ve likely written most about America’s two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system. That full-scale destruction of the rule of law is also the topic of my forthcoming book. But The New York Times this morning has a long article so perfectly illustrating what I mean by “two-tiered justice system” — and the way in which it obliterates the core covenant of the American Founding: equality before the law — that it’s impossible for me not to highlight it.

    The article’s headline tells most of the story: “In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” It asks: “why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?” And it recounts that not only have no high-level culprits been indicted (or even subjected to meaningful criminal investigations), but few have suffered any financial repercussions in the form of civil enforcements or other lawsuits. The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was “certainly illegal and clearly criminal” and that “a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud.”

    Despite that clarity and abundance of the evidence proving pervasive criminality, it’s entirely unsurprising that there have been no real criminal investigations or prosecutions. That’s because the overarching “principle” of our justice system is that criminal prosecutions are only for ordinary rabble, not for those who are most politically and financially empowered. We have thus created precisely the two-tiered justice system against which the Founders most stridently warned and which contemporary legal scholars all agree is the hallmark of a lawless political culture. Lest there be any doubt about that claim, just consider the following facts and events:

    To Read More…

    US Debt Clock: All the Relevant Statistics in Real-Time

    Published on April 15, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

    From Jess3,

    The US Debt Clock shows how the inverse of a visualization can be as compelling and engaging, as it simply lists a huge collection of rattling statistics related to the US debt in real-time without any graphical translation. Not sure if any useful insight can be made, however.

    The clock can be altered to show state-specific or country-specific debt-related statistics. Individual numbers can be clicked to reveal a more detailed explanation of the respective parameter.

    To Read More…

    I, Robot-Manager: Management Thinkers Need to Ponder More about Homo-Robo Relations

    Published on April 14, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

    From The Economist

    Robots have been the stuff of science fiction for so long that it is surprisingly hard to see them as the stuff of management fact. A Czech playwright, Karel Capek, gave them their name in 1920 (from the Slavonic word for “work”). An American writer, Isaac Asimov, confronted them with their most memorable dilemmas. Hollywood turned them into superheroes and supervillains. When some film critics drew up lists of Hollywood’s 50 greatest good guys and 50 greatest baddies, the only character to appear on both lists was a robot, the Terminator.

    It is time for management thinkers to catch up with science-fiction writers. Robots have been doing menial jobs on production lines since the 1960s. The world already has more than 1m industrial robots. There is now an acceleration in the rates at which they are becoming both cleverer and cheaper: an explosive combination. Robots are learning to interact with the world around them. Their ability to see things is getting ever closer to that of humans, as is their capacity to ingest information and act on it. Tomorrow’s robots will increasingly take on delicate, complex tasks. And instead of being imprisoned in cages to stop them colliding with people and machines, they will be free to wander.

    To Read More…

    MBA diary: Auditing an African Success

    Published on April 8, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

    From The Economist

    There we sat. Five students from four countries, excited to present our operational analysis and nervous to propose tweaks to the system we had spent two weeks auditing. The root cause of our nerves was that, like many things in Rwanda, Polyfam Clinique was already a success.

    Founded three years after the genocide of 1994, Dr Immaculee Mukatete established a private clinic in Kigali that provided both quality care and personable customer service. As Rwanda grew, so Polyfam had grown with it, to include three full-time doctors, two dentists and six part-time physicians. As MBA students, we had been sent to Polyfam to correct the medical-records indexing system, recently transferred from paper to computer. The new system was playing up, and doctors did not have accurate medical records about their patients. Computer glitches also meant the system was becoming overloaded.

    I am not the timid kind. But this was different. The night before I couldn’t sleep. Over two weeks we had worked tirelessly to understand the operations at the clinic, and in doing so listened to the stories and ideas of everyone we could. Hearing the hope that Rwandans have for the future of their country, it was impossible not to feel personally involved in the outcome.

    This sense of being drawn into Rwanda’s future came in two distinct waves. First, there was the amount of energy the team put into our project. In December, we prepared for our trip by researching Rwanda, the health-care system and various medical-records systems. When we got to Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, we immersed ourselves in the project. Breakfast through dinner we discussed the clinic’s operations and debated strategies for improvement. This was no student jolly; it was a work assignment. We skipped unrelated site visits as we became obsessed with solving the clinic’s problems. As a result of this effort, I felt a responsibility for providing a quality service.

    To Read More…

    The Lessons of Globalisation

    Published on April 6, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

    From The Economist

    The more people search, the more business schools they find. A month ago, AACSB, an accreditation agency, estimated that there were 12,600 institutes conferring Bachelor’s or Master’s degrees in management. Since then a few more have been unearthed. The latest figure, says Bob Bruner, dean of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Management, is more than 13,000. Like distant galaxies, there are likely to be plenty more as yet undiscovered.

    Mr Bruner is one of the authors of an AACSB study on the state of business schools. He reckons that less than 10% of those 13,000 schools are accredited, making them of uncertain quality. This, he says, should be of concern to anyone who cares about management.

    The biggest problem, according to the report, is that MBA programmes still don’t place enough emphasis on globalisation. This is an issue for the top tier schools and the fly-by-nights alike, says Mr Bruner.

    But is this really true? Many of the backstreet business schools in developing parts of the world cater for poor students, eager to learn skills that will help them run small, local businesses. Surely their time and money are better spent learning how to do business locally? What is the point of them poring over case studies of investment banks’ acquisition strategies for the Chinese market?

    It is an argument that doesn’t sway Mr Bruner. “Globalisation is a disruptive force; managers need to prepare for it,” he says. “And the rate of globalisation is only going to increase. When [current students] are middle aged, they could be confronting a much larger challenge.”

    To Read More…