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Picture Credits: Dow Jones & Company and Jonathan Becker

May 4, 2009 Posted by ej | Career, Fashion, Leadership, People, Politics, Shopping | Business, Business School, Career, Fashion, Harvard MBA, Leadership, Politics, Shopping, Women | Leave a Comment

Business Grads Looking Beyond Wall Street

“For the past decade, a job at an investment bank has been coveted. Now the implosion of Wall Street has not only shaken a generation’s ambitions, it has also unleashed them.”

See Steven Greenhouse’s New York Times article below for additional detail and to find out where today’s Business School Grads are looking for jobs.

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Business Grads Looking Beyond Wall Street

Daniel Miller, Nanxi Ling, center, and Jessica Levy are graduating from Wharton this spring. Many in the class of '09 are discouraged about job prospects.

Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — Riana Paige, an undergraduate senior at the Wharton School of Business, had a high-paying internship at JPMorgan Chase last summer and was disappointed when she did not receive an offer for a full-time job after graduation. Now she is pursuing a job teaching in Dubai, or working for a wine importer.

Click to see New York Times (Video): Life After Wharton

Daniel Miller, a Wharton senior who interned last summer at a boutique private equity firm in Manhattan, became so discouraged by his search for jobs in finance that he began thinking about becoming a rabbi.

Jessica Levy, also a senior at Wharton, the nation’s most prestigious undergraduate business program, was stunned when her supervisor at UBS told her that although she had done a terrific job as an intern, the bank could not offer her a job after graduation. Her dreams of investment banking quashed, she recently took the Foreign Service exam and is vying for a job at the State Department.

“A lot of my peers, we’re exploring things that we used to not even think of as an option,” Ms. Levy said. “A finance major who was minoring in music was suddenly looking into opening a jazz club. All of a sudden, I saw that a lot of Wharton people were interesting.”

For the last decade, a job at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley or another investment bank has been considered the most coveted prize for many of the nation’s best and brightest college students. But the implosion of Wall Street — the vaporization of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the general humbling of investment banks — has not only shaken a generation’s ambitions, but also unleashed them. More . . .

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Picture Credit: Laura Pedrick for The New York Times

April 28, 2009 Posted by ej | Career, Economy | Business, Business School, Career, Economy, Employment, Leadership, Money, Wall Street, Women | Leave a Comment

College Women Are Running on Empty

College Women Are Running on Empty

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Maureen Downey, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This is the time of year when high schools and colleges crank out press releases about their outstanding students. The releases often describe young women, who along with being at the top of their class, are student government president, captain of the volleyball team, a national yodeling champion, volunteer tutor and the local Sweet Potato Queen.

When I glance at their accomplishments, I wonder how these young women can juggle all these roles and remain healthy and sane.

It may be that they can’t.

I’ve had a startling number of conversations with neighbors, friends and college administrators about the stress that female college students face today. Along with eating disorders, many young women are grappling with what used to be called a bad case of the blues. They can’t get out of bed. They can’t focus on their studies.

An admissions director told me that the rise in mental-health problems among female college students has become a recurrent topic in informal conversations with peers. Something, she says, seems to be happening to young women.

And the research bears her out. More . . .

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Picture Credit: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

April 7, 2009 Posted by ej | Education, Work-Life Balance | Business, Business School, Education, Fitness, Health, Women, Work-Life Balance | Leave a Comment

Harvard MBA’s: Masters of the Apocalypse?

If his fellow Harvard MBAs are all so clever, how come so many are now in disgrace?

Philip Delves Broughton, The Times Online (UK)

If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today’s guillotine fodder, he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA. The Masters of Business Administration, that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in.

From Royal Bank of Scotland to Merrill Lynch, from HBOS to Lehman Brothers, the Masters of Disaster have their fingerprints on every recent financial fiasco.

I write as the holder of an MBA from Harvard Business School – once regarded as a golden ticket to riches, but these days more like scarlet letters of shame. We MBAs are haunted by the thought that the tag really stands for Mediocre But Arrogant, Mighty Big Attitude, Me Before Anyone and Management By Accident. For today’s purposes, perhaps it should be Masters of the Business Apocalypse.

Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O’Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there’s George W Bush, Hank Paul-son, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: “To educate leaders who make a difference in the world.”

It just wasn’t the difference the school had hoped for.

Business schools have shown a remarkable ability to miss the economic catastrophes unfolding before their eyes.

In the late 1990s, their faculties rushed to write paeans to Enron, the firm of the future, the new economic paradigm. The admiration was mutual: Enron was stuffed with Harvard Business School alumni, from Jeff Skilling, the chief executive, down. When Enron, rotten to the core, collapsed, the old case studies were thrust in a closet and removed from the syllabus, and new ones were promptly written about the ethical and accounting issues posed by Enron’s misadventures.

Much the same appears to have happened with Royal Bank of Scotland.

When I was a student at Harvard Business School, between 2004 and 2006, I recall a distinguished professor of organisational behaviour, Joel Podolny, telling us More . . .

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