Wii's Success

A reporter explores the success behind Nintendo's Wii in an April 30th article in Newsfactor entitled, "A Perfect Storm for the Nintendo Wii." Ted Pollak, president of EE Fund Management, an investment-management firm specializing in the videogame industry, identifies a few of the reasons of it's success including the fact that it does not require HD technology and the buzz among consumers.

To read the full story, go here:
http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/aperfect.htm

Marketing Gone Overboard?

In an April 30th story in InformationWeek.com entitled, “Sony Apologizes For Decapitated Goat In 'God of War' Launch,” by Antone Gonsalves, the reporter discusses the negative publicity that Sony has received after throwing a launch party for one of their new games that involved a decapitated goat. Marketing Professor Gloria Barczak believes that they got carried away. "You sometimes wonder how companies can be so stupid," Barczak said. "But companies are run by people, and people sometimes make dumb mistakes."

To read the full story, go here:
http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/sonyapologizes.htm

Online Shoppers Research Getting Help

In an April 23rd article in Advertising Age entitled, "Helping Consumers With Their Online Shopping Research," the reporter explains the roll that WebCollage plays in helping consumers be better prepared in their product purchases through content integration.

To read the full story, go here:
http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/helpingconsumers.htm

Important Interpersonal Skills

In an April 17th article in Fortune entitled, "The trouble with MBAs," the reporter discusses how MBA schools are dealing with students lacking interpersonal skills. The schools are listening to companies requests for students with more interpersonal skills. Ken Barnett, a vice president at State Street Corp. (Charts) who works with both B-school interns and freshly minted MBAs says, "MBA students we employ don't need to come in being finance gurus. What's much more important is that they know how to analyze issues and communicate recommendations."

To read the full story, go here:
http://www.paradigmshiftpr.com/thetrouble.htm

Survey: Less than 20% of execs think MBA prepares for real-life management challenges

In a recently released survey of international business executives conducted by Egon Zehnder International, only 20% of the executives surveyed said that an MBA prepares people to deal with the real-life challenges that a manager must face. Less than 20% of the international executives surveyed also agreed with the statement that “during an MBA, you are trained to deal with the real challenges faced by a manager.”

Corporate concerns about the power of an MBA are not new. As you may know, various studies highlight the growing dissatisfaction among corporations worldwide with the skills business schools are teaching to MBA students. For example, according to surveys conducted a few years ago by The Association of Graduate Recruiters (in the UK), employers continue to seek – and continue to find scarce – the personal skills that will make MBA graduates valuable employees. These surveys go on to point out that what employers seek most from new graduates are enthusiasm, self-motivation, interpersonal skills, team-working, and good oral communication – and that these skills are more important than specialist knowledge.

Earlier this year, Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration formally announced an overhaul of its full-time MBA program. The news here is that the school is focusing on working and partnering with the businesses that hire their MBAs in ways that most business schools do not. Moreover, a central tenant of this transformed MBA is a heightened focus on developing these personal skills through a unique combination of skills assessment and implementation of a personal development portfolio.

“Personal assessment is all the rage at business schools right now,” says Brendan Bannister, professor and head of the human resources group at the College of Business Administration at Northeastern University. Prof. Bannister was also in charge of the skills design team that spent two years planning the changes at Northeastern. “While things like our online personal development portfolio or learning teams are not unique in and of themselves, no other MBA program offers the combination of components aimed at both identifying and improving these critical personal skills.”

For those who think classes in leadership and communication sound like fluff, administrators warn that soft skills are actually hard work. "They involve our own emotions and other people in a way that technical skills do not," says Bruce Clark, the faculty coordinator for the M.B.A. program at Northeastern, recently revamped with the help of more than 20 employers to incorporate eight soft skills.

Last year, Northeastern University College of Business Administration (CBA) conducted over two-dozen in-depth interviews with Global 500 companies. “We had to push them to go beyond the platitudes, and to tell us what they really wanted, and where business schools were failing them,” said Thomas Moore, dean of CBA. “Very few universities take the time to identify corporate partners and work with them to understand exactly what skills-sets they want in the MBAs they hire. Based on corporate feedback, students will supplement a rigorous MBA curriculum with management intensives and skills modules to develop abilities in communications, interpersonal effectiveness, project management, and ethics.”

An example of one of the executives Dean Moore met with was Ken Barnet, a Vice President at State Street who has worked with MBA students as interns as well as with newly-graduated MBA students. Dean Moore met one-on-one with Mr. Barnet, soliciting his input on what worked — and didn’t work — in standard MBA programs. Specifically, Barnet was asked to identify those skill sets that employers find most valuable and determine how the MBA program could more effectively fulfill employer needs. In January of 2006, Barnet also participated in a focus group with the College of Business Administration’s faculty in an effort to answer those questions.
“When Dean Moore came to my office to meet with me one-on-one, it made me feel like Northeastern was treating me as a valued customer – and I really liked that,” Mr. Barnet said. “He truly wanted to know what skills sets Northeastern MBA grads could develop to help them better add value when they came to State Street.”

Mr. Barnet also noted that he sits on the finance career advisory board, which meets to provide a sounding board to the finance faculty as they work to revise the curriculum.

“After meeting with the faculty, it was clear to me as they presented their new curriculum that they had listened to what we said during the focus group,” Mr. Barnet noted. “For example, Northeastern is offering focused skills classes on business analysis and project management – not just focused on textbook learning and theory, but on practical skills development.”

After talking with their corporate partners, the most frequently cited skills of effective managers (and leaders) were as follows:

· Verbal communication
· Managing time and stress
· Managing individual decisions
· Dealing with complexity and ambiguity
· Project Management
· Business Analysis
· Recognizing, defining and solving problems
· Motivating and influencing others
· Delegating
· Setting goals and articulating a vision
· Self-awareness
· Team building
· Managing conflict
· Leading positive change
To identify, assess and strengthen these skills sets of their students, CBA has created a skills program that goes across all the students’ course work, consisting of four key components:

1. Skills intensives
2. Learning teams, led by corporate coaches
3. Personal development portfolios
4. Corporate residencies

Role of gender identity in business owner satisfaction

According to Kim Eddleston, a Ph.D. and Assistant Professor, Riesman Research Professor and Tarica-Edwards Fellowship, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group at the College of Business Administration at Northeastern University, female entrepreneurs are often criticized and classified as being “less successful” then their male counterparts for not growing their businesses as fast or aggressively. Yet her research recently published in The Journal of Business Venturing found that despite earning less and owning businesses that grow more slowly than male entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurs are just as happy as men. Why? Because they measure success differently. Below are some excerpts from her published research, entitled “The role of gender identity in explaining sex differences between business owners’ career satisfier preferences:”

“Although women-owned businesses tend to be smaller, slower growing, and less profitable than those owned by men, research suggests that women business owners are as satisfied with their entrepreneurial careers as men. Women business owners may be satisfied with their entrepreneurial careers, despite achieving relatively less business success in objective terms, because they value different sources of career satisfaction than men. While men are often depicted as prizing status-based career satisfiers derived from financial success and business growth women are depicted as placing greater emphasis on socioemotional career satisfiers derived from interpersonal relations with employees and customers and the pursuit of social goals, Prof. Eddleston writes.

“Male business owners prefer satisfiers associated with status attainment to a greater extent and satisfiers associated with employee relationships and making a contribution to society to a lesser extent than female business owners. The masculinity dimension of gender identity completely mediates the relationship between business owner sex and preferences for status-based satisfiers. In addition, the femininity dimension of gender identity completely mediates the relationship between sex and preferences for employee relationship satisfiers, partially mediates the relationship between sex and preferences for contribution to society satisfiers, and significantly predicts preferences for customer relationship satisfiers. These findings suggest why some women emphasize status-based satisfiers and why some men emphasize socioemotional satisfiers: Gender identity is a better predictor of business owners' career satisfier preferences than their biological sex,” Prof. Eddleston continues.

Below is Dr. Eddleston’s bio.

Kimberly Eddleston, Assistant Professor, Riesman Research Professor and Tarica-Edwards Fellowship, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group. Professor Eddleston received her PhD in Management from the University of Connecticut and her graduate degree from Cornell University and Groupe Essec (IMHI). Her research has appeared in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Executive, Academy of Management Perspectives, Human Resource Management Review, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, and Journal of Applied Psychology. Professor Eddleston has recently been selected as a Family Owned Business Institute Research Scholar by the Family Owned Business Institute of the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University.