Knowledge at Wharton

Try applying traditional metrics like cost and return on investment to find the value of diversity and you are likely to come up empty handed according to a panel of African-American executives at Wharton’s 33rd Annual Whitney M. Young Memorial Conference. Still they noted diversity has a growing importance in the workplace and minority workers need to focus on their own development in such critic...

For many the 2008 Beijing Olympics are seen as a ”coming-out” party for the world’s most populous nation. China is investing billions of dollars in sports venues such as the Bird’s Nest in Beijing the modernist national stadium currently under construction; subway-line extensions and other infrastructure improvements to make the games a world-class spectacle. But some wonder whether air pollution...

Alexandra Robbins’ study of contemporary American high school culture entitled The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids is based on a visit to the high school she attended more than a decade ago and which she says has now changed for the worse. These days Whitman High School in Bethesda Md. promotes a ”competitive frenzy” that the author argues has taken root in high schools across the c...

Reliance Gateway Net VSNL Scandent and GHCL aren’t exactly household names in the U.S. but they may be signs of bigger things to come. These are only a few of the growing number of Indian businesses that have acquired U.S. firms in the past few years. And the U.S. merger-and-acquisition activity is just part of a bigger picture. Indian companies -- usually quietly but sometimes with media fanfare...

In 1998 Microsoft executive John Wood decided to take a rare and hard-won vacation. He started out trekking in Nepal and ended up establishing a foundation Room to Read that has created nearly 3 000 libraries in the developing world and stocked them with more than one million books. His experiences are chronicled in a recently-published book that offers his corporate-based perspective on how to ra...

When it comes to price wars Wharton marketing professor Z. John Zhang can’t help but notice that companies in the West and companies in China are quite literally worlds apart. In the West Zhang says the outbreak of a price war is viewed as the failure of managerial rationality. In China the outbreak of a price war is considered a legitimate and effective business strategy. In a recent paper Zhang...

Amazon plans to sell computing power like a utility company sells electricity. Google is building a suite of productivity software programs connected to the web to take on Microsoft. And Yahoo has launched or acquired so many properties that they run the risk of competing with each other. Such efforts could represent new growth areas and smart diversification moves. Or they could prove to be costl...

Fortune 500 companies claim to be ”entrepreneurial ” as do charities and government agencies. Members of many Washington think tanks dub themselves ”policy entrepreneurs.” Even children who mow lawns and run lemonade stands get the ”entrepreneur” label. But as the term has come into wide use its meaning has gradually eroded leaving open the question of who entrepreneurs really are and what disting...

”Black Friday” -- the day after Thanksgiving that signals the start of the holiday shopping season in the U.S. -- was particularly charged this year marked by midnight store openings and brawls over scarce sale items. Despite the hoopla retailers are expected to post only modest gains this month according to Wharton faculty and retail analysts. A key problem they note is that shoppers continue to...

Although far from a done deal US Airways’ hostile bid to acquire bankrupt Delta Air Lines would result in a strong combined company and would be a feather in the cap of the chief executive of US Airways. But it would also be a mixed blessing for passengers resulting in more flight choices but most likely higher fares as well according to faculty members at Wharton and industry analysts who also no...

Africa’s political leaders are taking major steps to build a better foundation for investment one of its most influential business leaders told the recent 14th annual Wharton Africa Business Forum. Mamphela Ramphele a former managing director of the World Bank said that the continent ”has made historic efforts to affirm good governance build strong institutions and fight corruption.” Hosted on Aca...

After conquering the advertising frontier in cyberspace Google Yahoo and eBay are now turning to traditional media for future growth by brokering ad sales for offline media like radio television and print. The Internet players’ foray into offline advertising could drive down rates but advertisers and media companies may not completely abandon the current system of relationship-based sales for Inte...

Michael J. Critelli isn’t one of the business world’s high-profile CEOs. But his tenure at Pitney Bowes has lasted over 10 years more than twice the average survival rate for Fortune 500 company heads. And those two facts he noted during a recent Wharton Leadership Lecture are probably not unrelated. ”I have deliberately downplayed my role as a leader ” he said in describing how he helped take the...

Emerging real estate markets in India and China along with recovering property industries in Germany and Japan are among the top destinations for global real estate investors according to panelists at the Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center’s fall meeting. During a session titled ”Global Hot Spots -- How to Think about Hot Foreign Markets ” Wharton real estate professor Peter Linneman...

Wharton marketing professor Josh Eliashberg has a message for Hollywood: Get geeky. The use of statistical analysis and computer models he says can help managers in the movie industry understand why ratings on a given film will vary from country to country. Even more radically they can lead to the better evaluation of scripts. And using these sorts of techniques he insists won’t dim the magic of t...

If a traveling salesman has to visit a set number of cities in a set number of days what is the shortest route he can take to cover all his stops and then return home?  And does the answer to this question relate in any way to the manner in which a shopper navigates her way through a grocery store? In a new paper Wharton marketing professors Peter S. Fader and Eric T. Bradlow and doctoral student...

Graeme Wood is director of acquisition integration at Cisco the leading worldwide supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet headquartered in San Jose Calif. Since In this role he has overseen the integration of 30 Cisco acquisitions -- the most notable of which is Scientific Atlanta. The $7 billion deal completed earlier this year allows Cisco to offer an end-to-end...

As the polls had widely anticipated Democrats defeated the Republicans in Congress and also gained control of the Senate by a narrow margin in the U.S. mid-term elections in early November. As attention now turns to the Presidential elections of 2008 President George W. Bush will need to find ways to increase bi-partisan cooperation with Democrats like Nancy Pelosi who is poised to become the firs...

Church pastors last year had a chance to win a free trip to London and $1 000 cash -- if they mentioned Disney’s film ”The Chronicles of Narnia” in their sermons. Chrysler hoping to target affluent African Americans with its new luxury SUV is sponsoring a Patti LaBelle gospel music tour through African-American megachurches nationwide. Advertising has begun to seep into churches according to relig...

To drive home the subject of his speech at the recent third annual Wharton Marketing conference Michael Polk president of Unilever United States flashed up a definition straight from the dictionary: ’Innovation: a new idea or method; a change in something established.’ Polk who manages such brands as Dove Axe Slim-Fast Country Crock Wishbone and Q-Tips said innovation not invention lies at the hea...

Contrary to rumors about its imminent ”death” following the transfer of power from the British Hong Kong has emerged as the financial intermediary through which foreign investors seek to invest tens of billions of dollars into mainland China. Meanwhile once-booming Shanghai’s star is starting to fade. What happened? According to Wharton faculty and other experts while Hong Kong was crafting a stra...

High definition televisions are expected to be hot sellers this holiday season but consumers are likely to have a tough time sorting out the newest generation video discs and the players that go with them. The culprit: Two competing high definition DVD formats -- Blu-ray and HD-DVD -- and no sign of a clear winner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The recent elections have made Business Roundtable chairman Harold (Terry) McGraw III hopeful that a less partisan political atmosphere can lead to real progress in addressing America’s economic challenges. In a Wharton Leadership Series talk two days after the November 7 elections McGraw who is chairman president and CEO of The McGraw-Hill Companies called for measures to lower trade barriers imp...

One of the biggest complaints employees have according to Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade is that ”they are not sufficiently recognized by their organizations for the work they do .... When employees don’t feel that the organization respects and values them they tend to experience higher levels of burnout.” Barsade and doctoral student Lakshmi Ramarajan look at the role of respect in a...

In mid-October the Chicago Board of Trade agreed to be purchased by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for about $8 billion topping a wave of exchange mergers in the U.S. and Europe. Two factors drove the deal: the enormous growth in the use of futures options and other derivatives to hedge risks and speculate and the need for economies of scale to compete with exchanges that have grown through merge...