Career Smarts
by Walter Sonyi, Jr.
They're still lecturing. Still assigning enough readings to choke a
mother hippo. And for what? Well, that's simple: to arm their business
students with as many tools and as much insight as they possibly can.
But what if a professor could impart just one solitary nugget of information,
a single gem that anyone can carry with them into the business world?
What would it be? Here, 10 of the world's top B-school professors impart
their best chunk of portable, battle-tested wisdom.
Build personal leverage
"I tell my students to start saving their 'go-to-hell-money' the
day they start working. That's so one day, they'll have a card to play.
In many careers, there comes a time that to save your sanity or for
ethical reasons or what-have-you, you may have to say to your employer,
'we do it my way, or I walk.' The leverage to do that comes from having
something in the bank. No money, no leverage, and you find that you're
a hostage."
-Denise M. Rousseau, professor of organizational behavior and public
policy, co-director, Center for the Changing Employment Relationship,
Carnegie Mellon; Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Organizational Behavior.
________________________________________
Put people first
"I try to emphasize to my students that the only thing which differentiates
leaders from nonleaders is that leaders have followers. A leader cannot
be effective except through his or her followers. The successful leader
will care for those followers so that they don't wind up following someone
else. When there's a problem, the good leader will think of people first,
and then the 'hard' stuff, the nuts and bolts, the systems and processes,
second."
-Elizabeth Mellon, academic director, Duke Corporate Education,
Duke University; formerly director of Senior Executive Programme and
teaching fellow, London Business School ________________________________________
Look into others' heads
"People make decisions, so understanding the psychology of the
decision-makers is very important. When you read forecasts in a proposed
deal, who wrote them? What incentives did they have in presenting the
numbers they did? In writing financial contracts with entrepreneurs,
what are terms you can use that play to the entrepreneur's concerns,
while maintaining value in the transaction?"
-R. Glenn Hubbard, professor of finance and economics, academic
director of the Eugene M. Lang Center for Entrepreneurship, Columbia
Business School; chairman, Council of Economic Advisers, The White House
________________________________________
Bargain effectively
"Negotiation is an art form, but there are also skills that must
be mastered. Among those:
1. Never
walk into a negotiation cold. Do your homework. Know not only your own
interests and strengths, but-perhaps even more importantly-those of
the other party.
2. Open the negotiation aggressively. It's the only chance you've got
to state your desires. If you don't ask for it, you won't get it.
3. Close the negotiation softly. Make sure the other side thinks it
got itself a great deal. You want the deal to close. You also want to
leave the door open for the next."
-Sherwood Frey, professor of business administration, The Darden
School, University of Virginia; winner, Friend of the Students Award,
2000; Morton Leadership Award, 1998; Outstanding Faculty Award, 1995
________________________________________
Know thy enemy
"The heart of what I teach in Competitive Strategy is that the
value of any organizational decision is highly dependent on what the
other players in the market are likely to do. The value of a faster
chip created by Intel depends on investments made in the complementary
software and hardware markets. The response of customers to American
Airlines' recent decision to expand room in the coach section clearly
depends on whether or not other airlines match. We see here that the
actions of other agents can either reinforce or attenuate the power
of one's original action. I hope my students take away from this class
an ability to anticipate and to think analytically about competitors'
and other players' possible responses."
-Sharon Oster, professor of management and entrepreneurship, Yale
School of Management; winner, Teaching Award in Excellence
________________________________________
Give them a home
"Successful marketing-:in any business-often hinges on reducing
a customer's angst. That's one reason that chains like McDonald's can
so well. The customer always knows what to expect; there are few if
any surprises. When customers become travelers, separated from familiar
surroundings, angst increases exponentially. That's why hospitality
marketing, my specialty, focuses so much on providing comfort. As I
try to drive home to my students, if one is to succeed in the hospitality
business, more so than any other business, it is absolutely necessary
to recognize and identify the customer's angst, and to do everything
possible to alleviate it. Hotel companies such as Marriott and Starwood
recognize this, and that is what has made them so successful."
-Sandro Formica, assistant professor of marketing, Cornell School
of Hotel Management-ESSEC Business School, Cergy-Pointoise, France
________________________________________
Keep your eye on the ball
"The single most important thing for any businessperson to remember
is that you go nowhere unless you have customers willing to buy your
products. End of story. But many can't remember this simple truth. Just
look at the entire dot-com fiasco. The big collapse came because everybody
got so psyched up by the technology but forgot to ask, 'Are we creating
customer value?' It's fine to have a lively, colorful website that sells
jewelry for dogs-but is that what people really want?"
-Dominique Hanssens, professor of marketing, Anderson School, UCLA;
winner, Best Instructor Award
________________________________________
Go with the gut
"I hope my students retain the theories and analyses that I teach,
certainly, but I would also hope that they would never be bound by those
analyses or enslaved by those theories. In the end, analysis can bring
a businessperson 30 to 40 percent, at most 50 percent toward making
a decision. The rest has to come from the gut. Good decisions are born
of common sense and intuition."
-Vijay Mahajan, professor of marketing, McCombs School, UT Austin;
the American Marketing Association instituted in 2000 the Vijay Mahajan
Award for Career Contributions to Marketing Strategy
________________________________________
Fly high
"What I would like students to remember from my course Leading
& Managing are the three fundamental rules that they must practice-without
exception. First, leaders must demonstrate unquestioned integrity, or
people will simply not be willing to follow them. Second, leaders must
communicate high expectations and provide people with the confidence
and resources necessary to meet these expectations. Third, leaders must
promote learning. Without learning, it is impossible to continue to
meet high expectations without sacrificing integrity."
-James W. Dean, Jr., Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Scholar and
associate dean, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina
________________________________________
Be tough
"The key to long-term business success is resilience-that is,
the ability at both the personal and the organizational level to adapt
and to deal with adversity. Successful managers are those who can bounce
back from failure, and those who can help create resilient organizational
systems and resilient subordinates. When people feel threatened and
anxious, they are fragile. Strong executives make people feel secure
and by so doing create an organization that can bend without breaking."
-Batia Wiesenfeld, assistant professor of management and organizational
behavior, Stern School, New York University
________________________________________
Staff Review by: Joseph (Joe) Kran, Lawrence (Larry) Maglin, Walter Sonyi, Jr. and Rick Spann
|
