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Copyright: © 2013 The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
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 critical areas as mentoring and balancing corporate identity with activism.
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Your mother probably told you that it pays to be nice but that may not necessarily be true when it comes to corporate philanthropy. Wharton finance professor Vinay B. Nair and Columbia University’s Raymond Fisman and Geoffrey Heal looked at whether being charitable -- such as donating money to medical research or to organizations that promote economic self-sufficiency -- helps a company’s financial picture. The answer: It all depends on the type of industry.
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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 will crash China’s Olympic party and focus world attention on deepening environmental problems that threaten the country’s economic growth.
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”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 procrastinate on holiday purchases despite highly visible early-season marketing promotions. The one area where sales are moving at a brisk pace: online retail.
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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 distinguishes their ventures from conventional ones. The recent 2006 Wharton Entrepreneurship Conference invited a group of well entrepreneurs to debate the issue.
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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 costly distractions. The big question: Should a company stay focused on its core competencies or should it diversify to keep up with or attempt to surpass its peers?
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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 and Dongsheng Zhou a marketing professor at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai analyze two price wars that took place in China in the mid-1990s.
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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 raise money market the product leverage relationships and ultimately maximize results.
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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 -- have been on a buying spree in continental Europe Great Britain and Asia in attempts to become key players in global markets.
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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 note that the overture could lead to further consolidation in the industry.
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