Wharton Joins Forces With INSEAD
MBA students may soon take courses in Fontainebleau France and Singapore, and corporations will be able to sign up for new, custom executive education programs offered in the U.S. and abroad, thanks to a recently announced alliance between Wharton and INSEAD.
Wharton and INSEAD recently joined forces to provide global management education to postgraduate candidates and executives at four campuses: Wharton’s U.S. campuses in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and those of INSEAD in Fontainebleau France and Singapore. INSEAD is widely regarded as the top non-U.S. business school.
The deans of Wharton and INSEAD cited the demands of fast-paced, multi-national companies for superior global education as the driver behind their decision to partner. “We are creating a model for delivering business education in a global environment that is changing profoundly, with technology-enabled learning as a critical component,” says Wharton dean Patrick T. Harker. “It is an opportunity for our respective faculty and students to have greater access to the world, and in turn, the world will have greater access to the offerings of the two schools.”
“Tomorrow’s market leaders in management education must have global reach and be part of a global and life-long business education and knowledge network,” says Gabriel Hawawini, dean of INSEAD. “INSEAD and Wharton share a common vision of the opportunities available in business education.”
The INSEAD/Wharton alliance will offer global customized executive education and open enrollment programs at its four dedicated campuses in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Initially, a modular general management program for high-potential managers will be offered at all four sites. The two schools also will develop several new courses based on the combined strength of their faculty and will co-brand some existing courses. MBA students from both schools can enroll in courses at any of the four campus locations.
Wharton professor John Kimberly will manage the partnership as executive director. Kimberly is the Henry Bower Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Wharton and holds the Novartis Chair in Healthcare Management at INSEAD. He also holds appointments as professor in Wharton’s Management and Health Care Systems Departments and has spent the last two years at INSEAD as a visiting professor.
Hubert Gatignon will serve as research director for the Center for Global Research and Development. Gatignon is the Claude Janssen Chaired Professor of Management at INSEAD and is also INSEAD’s dean of faculty. Prior to joining INSEAD, Gatignon was a professor of marketing at Wharton. As part of the alliance, the dean of each school will join the governance board for the partner school.
Mitchell Named to Bush Commission
Professor Olivia Mitchell has been appointed to President George W. Bush’s 16-member, bipartisan commission on Social Security. The commission, created in May, is charged with devising a plan for workers to invest retirement dollars in the stock market – the most sweeping change Social Security has faced since its inception 66 years ago.
The publication ranks 100 MBA programs according to 20 criteria, including diversity of faculty and students, research, alumni salaries, and alumni career progression.
Mitchell, the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor of Insurance and Risk Management, is internationally known for her research on global social security and pension reform. She is the co-author of Prospects for Social Security Reform, published in 1999 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, as well as numerous scholarly articles on the economics of pensions, annuities, and retirement wealth, among other subjects.
Infosys CEO Speaks to Graduates
Narayana N.R. Murthy, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Infosys Technologies Limited, spoke at MBA commencement ceremonies on May 20. Murthy, a member of Wharton’s Asian Executive Board, founded Infosys in 1981 with six partners and $250. He has since built the company into a global software and consulting powerhouse, providing e-strategy consulting and solutions, large application development and enterprise integration services for global corporations.
Murthy served as managing director of Infosys until February 1999, the same year that Infosys became the first Indian company to list on the Nasdaq. Under his leadership, Infosys pioneered the employee stock-option scheme and was also voted the best employer in India by a Hewitt study.
According to a profile in Business 2.0 magazine, Murthy has emerged as one of India’s most respected citizens. He has also been described as a social visionary who speaks openly about the social welfare of his country. Mr. Murthy was featured in the Asiaweek Power 50 – a list of Asia’s most powerful people. Business Week named him one of the Top Entrepreneurs of the Year in 1999, and also chose him as one of “The Stars of Asia” for three consecutive years: 1998, 1999 and 2000.
And the Winner Is…
Biotech and software ventures pushed aside dot-com mania at Wharton’s third annual Business Plan Competition.
ProtoCell, a biotechnology company that is developing a drug discovery tool to determine the function of thousands of proteins, was the grand-prize winner of the nine-month long competition, which culminated on April 30. The winning team was awarded $25,000.
ProtoCell’s drug discovery tool, called the Protein eXpression Chip, is about a year away from entering a $14 billion market, team members say. The chip will allow scientists to understand the function of each protein encoded by each gene. Company revenue will be driven by chip sales, diagnostic applications and intellectual property ownership.
Sponsored by Wharton’s Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program, the Business Plan Competition attracts hundreds of students from across Penn, as well as the attention of entrepreneurs, investment bankers and venture capitalists. Competition finalists showcase their business plans to a panel of six judges during intense, timed presentations before an audience of hundreds. ProtoCell was one of eight finalist teams – dubbed the Great Eight – culled from a selection process that began last fall. Though last year’s finalists were heavily weighted toward the Internet – seven of last year’s eight were e-commerce or Internet- based concepts – this year, none of the final teams was a ‘pure’ dot-com venture.
The second place winner, Designware, took home $15,000. Designware provides software tools and support services that streamline and automate product development processes. Genoma, a company that uses genomic technology and proprietary software to analyze a patient’s genetic history and make health and wellness recommendations, received the $10,000 third prize. Lead sponsors of the 2000-2001 competition include Enron, CIBC and CommerceNet. For more information on the competition, visit the Wharton Business Plan Competition site at www.wharton.bpc.com.
New MBA Director Named
Marguerite Bishop, assistant professor of accounting, has been named director of the MBA program. In this capacity, Bishop will have overall responsibility for managing the delivery and design of the MBA program.
Bishop joined Wharton in 1997 as an accounting professor. Before that, she taught at New Yor k University and Northwestern University. She holds a PhD from Northwestern in accounting and information systems and a bachelor of business administration degree from Texas Christian University.
Faculty Lauded for Teaching Excellence
This spring, undergraduate and graduate students recognized several Wharton faculty for their outstanding teaching. Among the most prestigious honors given each year is the The David W. Hauck Award for Outstanding Teaching, awarded to recipients for their ability to lead, stimulate and challenge students, their knowledge of the latest research in their field and their commitment to educational leadership.
Robert A. Stine, associate professor of statistics, received this year’s David Hauck Outstanding Teaching Award for Tenured Faculty. Stine also received an Award for Excellence in Teaching Among the Standing Faculty this year. Andrew Metrick, assistant professor of finance, won the David Hauck Outstanding Teaching Award for untenured faculty. Metrick was also the recipient of an Award for Excellence in Teaching Among the Standing Faculty this year.
Thomas Donaldson, Mark D. Winkelman Professor of Legal Studies, received The Marc & Sheri Rapaport Core Teaching Award, created to recognize teaching excellence in the undergraduate core based on course evaluation ratings. Donaldson is also the recipient of this year’s Award for Excellence in Teaching Among the Standing Faculty.
Other undergraduate teaching awards went to Jamshed Ghandhi(finance), Lorin Hitt (operations and information management), William S. Laufer (legal studies), Philip M. Nichols (legal studies), Madhav V. Rajan (accounting), and Jeremy J. Siegel(finance).
On the graduate level, The Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award, awarded for teaching quality and commitment to students, went to Robert P. Inman, Miller-Sherrerd Professor and professor of finance, public policy and management, and real estate.
Nine professors also won graduate-level Excellence in Teaching Awards, given on the basis of student evaluations. The professor with the highest rating also receives the Class of 1884 Award. This year, Philip Berger, associate professor of accounting, won the Class of 1984 Award. Other Excellence in Teaching Award winners were: Franklin Allen (finance), Michael Brandt (finance), Stuart Diamond (legal studies), Thomas J. Donaldson (legal studies), Michael Gibbons (finance), William S. Laufer (legal studies), Andrew Metrick (finance), and William C. Tyson (legal studies).
Book Tackles Work/Family Dilemma
You get a voicemail from your 13-year-old daughter begging you to attend her weekly lacrosse game. But the game, of course, is at 3 in the afternoon on a Wednesday. With deadlines on several projects looming, you wince at the prospect of leaving the office so early. But how can you say no to your daughter’s request?
For many professionals, such work/family conflicts are a daily, and often irreconcilable, dilemma.
In their new book, Work and Family: Allies or Enemies, Wharton professor Stewart Friedman and co-author Jeffrey Greenhaus surveyed more than 800 business school graduates – including hundreds of Wharton alums – about how their dual roles affected their careers and families. Their findings? People who throw all of their energies into their careers at the expense of their families tend to be far less satisfied with their lives than those who focus on both.
In the book, Friedman and Greenhaus say that despite what most people think, time constraints are not the real issue. The more “subtle but pervasive problem is the psychological interference of work with family and family with work. This reduces family satisfaction and satisfaction with personal growth, and diminishes parental performance. Kids rarely miss picking up on the psychological absence of a mom or dad who’s with them but whose mind is elsewhere.”
Friedman argues that work and family can be allies and that companies stand to benefit from employees with balanced lives. But corporate responsibility to families must go beyond providing child-care facilities and benefits, he says. Work needs to be designed so parents can be available – behaviorally and psychologically – for their children.
The Son of a Philadelphia Cigar Maker, Professor Ed Shils On Giving Back
Visiting Ed Shils in his Center City Philadelphia high-rise office, you can tell he’s a macher, which is Yiddish for a guy of influence. There are photos of Shils with former astronaut and airline exec Frank Borman and banker Walter Wriston and former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker. There are degrees, earned and honorary, flanking the windows that have a gorgeous panorama of the Philadelphia skyline and the Delaware River.
But along with being a macher, you can also tell that Shils is a mentsch, which is Yiddish for a respected man. At 87, he has young people coming to him for advice, which he dispenses freely and for free. Some of those young people vie to work for him in his consulting business and more than 100 of them take his courses in leadership every year at Wharton.
And now, 65 years after his first Penn degree – his first of six at the University – Shils recently endowed the Edward B. Shils and Shirley R. Shils Term Professorship in Entrepreneurial Management at Wharton.
“I wanted to give back something to the school that got me started,” says Shils, outfitted in suspenders and a fashionable blue suit, ready for the train to Washington and a meeting at the National Institutes of Health later that day for one of his clients, the Dental Manufacturers of America. “It taught me to keep busy and stay close to young people and ideas. I never have stopped doing that.”
The son of a cigar maker from 18th and Marvine Streets in Philadelphia, Shils came to Penn from Simon Gratz High School in 1933, the worst year of the Depression. He was a baseball star there, but had to give up the sporting dream when he started floundering in school.
“A professor said, ‘Shils, you’re either going to get an A or flunk my course’,” says Shils. “I knew he meant I had good ideas but wasn’t applying myself. It was time to drop baseball and get serious about school.”
He got three Penn degrees during the Depression – adding an MA and a PhD in Political Science to the Wharton undergrad degree – and after some time in the Army and in research came back to Wharton as a teacher and administrator full-time in 1955. He chaired the Industry Department from 1960-63 with legendary professor George Taylor and was the chairman of the Management Department from 1968-76.
But Shils considers his real baby the Wharton Entrepreneurial Center (today named the Sol C.Snider Center), which he founded in 1973. Having his own consulting business for years while teaching, he was frustrated that Wharton was teaching straight business practices, but not showing students how to be innovative and entrepreneurial. He got seed money from friends in the business world and used the Center to bring in speakers and teachers who proved, he says,that doing well, even in the corporate world, means being different than the norm.
“You have to allow people the latitude to fail,” says Shils. “You have to hire people with a tolerance for ambiguity. You don’t just have rules. You have people who interpret the rules for success. Jack Welch, Ted Turner, all these men we admire had that tolerance for ambiguity. They formed borderless cultures within the corporate world.”
Shelf after shelf in Shils’ office is lined with the studies he has done on a consulting basis ver the years. In 1983, he did the first study for Philadelphia showing that it was imperative to build new stadiums for the Eagles and Phillies to keep the teams, and their substantial income flow, in the city. Other studies helped create Philadelphia Community College, kept the textile manufacturers alive in Philadelphia long after they left other cities, promoted the building of the Pennsylvania Convention Center and showed the value of negotiating school board contracts without contentiousness.
But if there was one turning point in his life, Shils indicated it was when he decided to go back to law school at the age of 68. Though colleagues his age were retiring, he knew he had far more to offer.
“I suppose it was a mixture of pride and showing people I could do it,” says Shils. He started out part-time, just to see if he would like it, but he soon went into the full-time program, jousting with professors half his age and students even younger than that. “It was great. The professor would go right down the line. He’d call on some scared young guy and then go to me, an emeritus professor. It was exhilarating.”
Shils took the Pennsylvania bar (“That’s a long time to sit and write for an old guy,” he kids) and then went back to Penn for two advanced legal degrees, the LLM in 1990 and the SJD in 1997. In addition to his new bequest, Shils has also created a professorship in the law school in arbitration and alternative dispute resolution.
“They tell me six Penn degrees is a record,” he says. “But my wife may break it.” Shirley Shils has a BA in religious studies and Mideast politics and an MS in social gerontology. Ed Shils has a number of honorary degrees as well, among them those from Philadelphia University and Tel Aviv University.
What seems to energize Shils more than anything are his duties as advisor to management students at Wharton. “I don’t just tell them about classes, but about business and life,” he says. “And they help me. I may start the day with a headache, but some young person comes in and we talk and it’s all better. You can’t beat that.Keeping young is what it’s about.”
