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Copyright: © 2013 The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
When the AARP recently announced its seventh annual ”Best Employers for Workers over 50” awards the winners didn’t get there by offering the traditional fringe benefit trio of health life and disability insurance. Instead the AARP recognized companies for providing workers over 50 with ”forward-looking” benefits packages that include for example alternative work schedules and lifelong learning and career training opportunities. But are companies interested in offering jobs or job security to older workers? And why aren’t these workers following the retirement path their parents did?
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Former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca once noted ”You can have brilliant ideas; but if you can’t get them across your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” In their new book The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor G. Richard Shell and management consultant Mario Moussa provide a systematic approach to the problem Iacocca identified. Using relationship-based emotionally intelligent persuasion to secure both individual and organizational buy-in everyone from CEOs and entrepreneurs to team leaders and mid-level managers can sell their ideas -- a skill that everyone needs to learn if they want to be effective in their organizations the authors say.
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It is a scene millions of Americans have been in -- sitting next to a real estate agent at closing to sign the papers for a new home. Often the buyer has spent months with the agent. And to hear agents tell it they are indispensable guides through the hazardous home-buying terrain. How is it then that millions of borrowers took on toxic subprime mortgages that could cost them their homes? Why did their agents not warn them off? While much criticism has been leveled at subprime lenders and mortgage brokers some experts say that real estate agents have managed to escape their share of blame for the subprime mess.
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”He who takes medicine and neglects to diet wastes the skills of his doctors.” This proverb highlights the findings of a new study by Wharton marketing professor Lisa Bolton and two colleagues that explores how consumers in China choose between traditional Chinese remedies and Western medicine when seeking treatment. According to the study Chinese consumers tend to prefer traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) but will opt for Western medicine in particular situations such as when they are hoping to quickly alleviate their symptoms. While the study has implications for marketers of Western medicine and TCM alike the researchers found that remedy choices also have broader consequences for consumer health and well being.
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It is perhaps the core question in the ongoing debate over corporate governance: Does the corporation exist for the benefit of shareholders or does it have other equally important stakeholders such as employees customers and suppliers? A new study by Wharton finance professor Franklin Allen and two colleagues does not claim to provide a definitive answer but it does show the various benefits of the stakeholder approach. It also demonstrates that the issue is not as settled as some researchers and business people in the United States United Kingdom and other shareholder-oriented nations might think.
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After a terrible August when the U.S. stock market appeared to be headed for the pits October 1 saw a massive rally that sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average soaring above 14 000. The following day however stocks began to fall again mainly due to a sharp drop in home sales. In short Wall Street still seems to be sending out mixed signals. What will be the long-term effects of the Fed’s decision to cut interest rates? Will the U.S. economy move past the sub-prime mortgage mess? How will these developments affect the European market? Knowledge at Wharton spoke with Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel and Jacob Wallenberg chairman of the board of Investor AB and vice chairman of Sweden-based SEB.
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Online retailers may be shooting themselves in the tail -- the long tail that is according to Kartik Hosanagar Wharton professor of operations and information management and Dan Fleder a Wharton doctoral candidate in new research on the ”recommenders” that many of these retailers use on their websites. Recommenders -- perhaps the best known is Amazon’s -- tend to drive consumers to concentrate their purchases among popular items rather than allow them to explore and buy whatever piques their curiosity the two scholars suggest in a working paper titled ”Blockbuster Culture’s Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity.”
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The 57 members of AHRMIO the Association for Human Resources Management in International Organizations range from the UN UNICEF and OECD to the World Health Organization the World Bank and the International Labour Organization. Mary Jane Peters executive director and Roger Eggleston president emeritus were at Wharton recently for the group’s 7th annual conference. They talked with Knowledge at Wharton about their successes -- such as the introduction of paternity leave and policies regarding sexual harassment -- as well as their major challenges starting with the lack of qualified young people to carry out the missions of AHRMIO’s member organizations.
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When the Internet was young pioneering online job recruitment firm Monster.com rocked the way people look for work. Now Monster itself has hit a rocky patch marked by the resignation of three top officers a major security breach and the rise of new competitors including Craigslist. According to Wharton faculty and analysts Monster is confronting the ”middle age” that all veteran firms of the Internet’s early days must face. The company remains a force in employment advertising they say but as it settles into maturity Monster must find new ways to protect its established markets and expand overseas.
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Forget what you learned about markets in your introductory economics class. In a new book titled The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want Wharton professor Joel Waldfogel challenges the conventional thinking that markets will provide adequately if left to their own devices. His book makes the case that while markets do a good job of offering products that a majority of people desire they can fall short in meeting the needs of consumers with less prevalent preferences. Potentially left by the wayside are African Americans Hispanics people with unusual medical conditions and residents of remote areas among others.
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