by J.L.H.D. | ATLANTA
WHEN Marissa Mayer, pictured, chief executive of Yahoo, cancelled all telecommuting at the firm’s Silicon Valley office back in February, the move was criticised (by this newspaper, among others) as less than helpful to female employees. Flexible scheduling and working-from-home, it is often argued, give women more latitude to work while still devoting time to their families. (Your correspondent is writing this in the afternoon, having spent most of the morning tending to a 3-year-old with a fever and a 19-month-old without.)
Kristina Bourne and Pamela Forman, a pair of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, decided to cast a closer eye on flexible work in practice, to see if a group of working women setting their own schedules could achieve the mythical “work-life balance”. Their results, forthcoming in the Journal of Management Inquiry, might surprise Ms Mayer.
by J.L.H.D. | ATLANTA
AT THE New Yorker, Nicholas Thompson is wondering about the future of Stanford, upon reading that a group of students have withdrawn from the university to work for a startup called Clinkle. What's more, Stanford faculty have invested in the firm and Stanford's president, John Hennessy (pictured), is an advisor. "There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics," Mr Thompson writes. "The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty."
This is actually nothing new, as the New Yorker detailed last year in Ken Auletta's description of startup culture at Stanford. Even before Stanford faculty (Mr Hennessy foremost among them) were nurturing the ideas of the future founders of Yahoo!, Google, and Instagram, entrepreneurs throughout Silicon Valley had close ties to the university. According to AnnaLee Saxenian’s Regional Advantages, which recounts the growth of Silicon Valley, in the 1950s Stanford was recruiting companies to put research units at its industrial park, and those companies in turn were hiring professors as consultants.
by B.R.
THE latest survey of MBA recruitment trends has been released by the Careers Services Council. Its members, which are mainly business schools in America with a smattering of international institutions, reported mixed results for 2012. Despite an improving economy, around half of schools reported that on-campus recruiting was either down or unchanged compared with the previous year. Most schools (58%) reported that full-time job postings were up on the year before, however. Reporting on the opportunities for foreign students was inconclusive. Twenty-two percent of schools said that opportunities were improving, 22% that they were diminishing, and 55% that they were unchanged from 2011.
Consulting and technology seem to be the sectors showing the biggest increases in recruiting, as they were last year. But interest from pharmaceutical, media, energy and non-profit firms all seem to be waning. Fifty-three percent of the schools surveyed said that internship postings had increased compared with 2011, with just 13% reporting a decrease.
by Philip Delves Broughton
The Economist recently ran an online debate asking whether MBA students are bad for the economy. Below, we reproduce the views of Philip Delves Broughton, author of "What They Teach you at Harvard Business School", one of our guest contributors
AS OUR life expectancy increases, our window for productive work shrinks. When you visit companies these days, it's striking how few people over the age of 50 are left. Either you make it to the corporate suite and control your own hiring and the distribution of financial rewards, or you're out and on your own.
On Wall Street, it is typical to see managing directors and partners heading into retirement by their late 40s or early 50s. A few go on to lucrative second careers, but many are left to manage their winnings carefully for the rest of their lives. At the other end of the modern career, young people are expected to acquire more and more education before being considered ready for work.
Graduate degrees, including the MBA, have proliferated in subjects and fields where on-the-job learning used to be standard. Instead of being paid to learn, you must now pay to learn. So careers which used to stretch from college graduation at 21 to retirement at 65 are now compressed between graduate school graduation in your late 20s and early retirement in your early 50s. You now have two decades to maximise your lifetime earnings rather than four.
by J.L.H.D. | ATLANTA
EVEN in the best of times, the average new restaurant must overcome long odds to become successful, and these are not the best of times. The challenge is only increased for those looking to specialise in organic or locally-produced food which is often more expensive, since smaller producers cannot take advantage of economies of scale. British consumption of organic food fell by a fifth between 2008 and 2012. In America during that same time, the price of the healthiest foods has been rising faster than those of junk alternatives.
But there are still those willing to spend more money and effort seeking out healthier grub. Farmers’ markets, offering locally grown fruits and vegetables, are multiplying. There are nearly 8,000 across America, nearly double that of a decade ago. The hipper cities are encouraging the downtown food-truck movement, in which small-scale chefs can take advantage of low start-up costs and market their whereabouts via Twitter. San Francisco now has a two-day conference for its food-truck entrepreneurs, whose sponsors include Evernote, a technology firm producing mobile note-taking applications, and the National Peanut Board.
by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
A surprising amount of what Shlomo Ben-Hur, a professor of leadership and organisational behaviour at IMD, writes could have come from the last century. In 1997, Steve Hankin, a McKinsey consultant, coined the term “the war for talent”, which promised fierce competition for the most promising would-be managers. Fifteen years on, today's organisations, notes Mr Ben-Hur in his school’s research spotlight, are still hungry for talented workers. And, just as then, demographic trends, such as the ageing of Asian populations, will shrink the pool of younger workers in future while younger employees have expectations that their employers may have to adjust to meet.
There are two related problems to consider, says Mr Ben-Hur. One is that the “traditional talent deal” is no longer reliable: companies cannot invest in training for their more promising employees and expect to recoup the benefits for a decade. The other is that firms looking for talent tend to overvalue external candidates and undervalue internal ones. Taken together, the two trends make a sort of sense: an internal candidate may be ready to jump ship; one coming in from outside should be grateful for the job for a couple years at least. But imagining the most talented employees as fish only briefly caught makes it hard for companies to recognise, much less reward, their best performers.
by B.R.
Following our recent briefing looking at the effect of the depressed European job market on MBA applications, it is interesting to report that IESE in Spain has just released some fairly positive career statistics. Although unemployment in Spain is currently running at 25%, and some schools are reporting big falls in the number of applicants, IESE says that 30% of its graduates found employment in Spain—half of these foreigners. In all, 90% found jobs within three months of graduation, although this is down from 95% last year. Also interesting is what seems to be a continuing move away from financial services sector. The biggest hirer of IESE graduates this year were Amazon, McKinsey and Johnson & Johnson.
by B.R.
RUNNING a hedge fund isn’t child’s play. A skim through Simon Lack’s excellent book “The Hedge Fund Mirage” attests to that. Funds can appear a sure-fire way to rake in cash because the successful ones tend to get reported, in the hope of attracting more assets, while unsuccessful ones, particularly those in their death throes, are quietly buried. In fact, claims Mr Lack, hedge funds have perform worse than ultra-safe investments such as US Treasury Bills.
Some clever young bucks do make names for themselves. Michael Burry, the founder of Scion Capital, which would eventually become one of the few firms to make a killing out of the collapse of the sub-prime market, came to prominence soon after graduating from Vanderbilt’s medical school. It still took a decade of hard work for the fund to pay off so spectacularly.
by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
THE brand-new MBA students beginning their programmes this month are by and large aware of the sheer amount of information about them available online. They regularly tweet about their new courses, check into Foursquare from the library and connect with classmates on Facebook and LinkedIn. They, and their schools, are also aware of the potential for using all those little snippets of data to make money. Increasingly cheap computing storage allows for the accumulation of ever more “big data”; the question is how companies will be able to make use of it.
Jeanne Ross, who heads MIT’s Sloan Centre for Information Systems Research, recently sat for an interview with MIT Sloan Management Review. Successful use of big data, she noted, is hard to accomplish if you do not know what to look for and what it will look like when you find it. Her proposed solution is for any company focusing on analytics to appoint a “data dictator” who decides which analytics to use and to what purpose. Such a strategy is better than flailing around with dozens of different metrics; but it does mean a company’s analysis is only as good as its data dictator’s ability to pick and choose.
In this ask the expert, Tom O’Neil, a career consultant, explains how to craft a compelling curriculum vitae. Tom has also agreed to answer readers’ questions over the course of the week. So if you have anything you’d like to ask, leave your question in the comments section below before July 27th.
THE best starting point for writing a curriculum vitae is to think of yourself as a product. Your goal is to convince the buyer—whether that is an employer or a college admissions officer—that you are the best product for the position they have available. If you can grasp this concept early on, it will fundamentally change how you write your CV and give you the best chance of success.
Advertisement
Advertisement feature
Advertisement
Test your EQ
Take our weekly news quiz to stay on top of the headlines
Want more from The Economist?
Visit The Economist e-store and you’ll find a range of carefully selected products for business and pleasure, Economist books and diaries, and much more
Advertisement
