BOOK REVIEW: “The Art of Choosing” by Dr. Sheena Iyengar

In a magazine interview, Catherine Zeta-Jones, the Welsh actress and wife of Michael Douglas, describes one of her daily chores, which involve making choices. 

“It is,” she said, “deciding whether to buy that beautiful little dress she had found while shopping in California, knowing full well that the shoes that she needed to go with it were in one of her homes in the Caribbean or in Europe.”  

Pity the rich and famous!

We have more choices today than we have ever had in history and yet making countless decisions each day may be a burden rather than a pleasure.  In this excellent book, which brings in scientific research and personal examples, Dr. Sheena Iyengar, Professor at Columbia University, describes just why some of these choices are so difficult. 

 

BOOK REVIEW: “The Art of the Sale” by Philip Delves Broughton (2013)

Philip Delves Broughton made quite a name for himself by writing a book, which was highly critical of Harvard Business School and the MBA system in general.  During his time at HBS, he was surprised that sales was not part of the curriculum.  He expected it to be very present in MBA programs and yet found that, in general, they looked down upon such mercantile procedures. 

AACSB Annual Meeting (ICAM 2013): Lead by Choice: Lessons for the B-School (Sheena Iyengar, Columbia Business School)

“I am always looking for cool pictures.” said Sheena Iyengar at the end of her excellent presentation on how to “Lead by Choice”. The quote was all the more remarkable in that the director of the Global Leadership Matrix (GLeaM) at Columbia Business School is totally blind. The objective of the talk was to highlight “what effective leaders need to know about choice” and how you can choose your way to success. Indeed, there is so much information available that it has become imperative today to know how to choose.

BOOK REVIEW: “Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation” by Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger (1991)

In the past decade, there’s been a great deal of talk about how the education industry is going to be revolutionized, and that we can do away with classrooms and universities altogether.  There is nothing new about this.  However, the revolution that has been predicted some many times has never really come. People learn efficiently because they are together, because they can have a discussion about their ideas, because they are with a professor who can adapt to their learning style. This book gives some background ideas to this debate and to why the bricks and mortar university is not quite dead yet.  

AACSB Associate Deans Conference: Leadership Skills and Strategies (David Logan: CultureSync & USC Marshall School of Business)

   

At the AACSB Associate Deans Conference 2012 David Logan, Senior Partner, CultureSync and Lecturer, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, gave a highly entertaining talk about dealing with ‘tribes’ in organizations. The title of the talk was “Leadership Skills and Strategies: Techniques and Tools on Leveraging Group Dynamics” and it gave some useful advice on how we can teach groups to develop a more positive attitude to their work.

AACSB Associate Deans Conference 2012: Millennials Incorporated: Our Student Cohort

Millennials Incorporated: Our Student Cohort

      

At the AACSB Associate Deans Conference in Houston, Texas, Andrea Hershatter, Senior Associate Dean at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University gave a wonderful presentation about the Millennial Generation. It was such a rich, entertaining and well researched talk, that it really would be difficult to do it justice in a short blog. (And no, I’m not her agent!) This short article sets out some of the main ideas, but if you get the chance I highly recommend that you go and see her speak.

 

AACSB Associate Deans Conference: Executive Education: Developing Non-Degree Education for the Future (Brent Smith)

Standard 14 of the proposed new criteria for AASCB Accreditation deals with the provision of Executive Education. Given the importance of this activity in many business schools today, it is useful to look at some of the best practices in the industry.

At the AACSB Associate Deans Conference, Brent Smith, Associate Dean, Executive Education and Associate Professor, Management and Psychology, Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University, set out some of the issues at his own university.

According to Mr. Smith the market is increasingly crowded and it is therefore vital that business schools fully understand their competitive positioning as well as the role of executive education as vehicle to advance the overall strategy of the school.

BOOK REVIEW: “SuperFreakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (2009)

Freakonomics was a wonderfully refreshing book that gave a clear insight into some of the idiosyncrasies of human behavior. As any film critic will know, writing a good sequel is a very difficult task indeed. Unfortunately, this seems to have been the case for the two authors of this book. 

BOOK REVIEW: “The Halo Effect” by Phil Rosenzweig (2009)

The Halo Effect gives an excellent insight in to how we make judgments about people, organizations and strategy. It is a must read for any manager or strategy student.

 

BOOK REVIEW: “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell (2007)

The subtitle to this book is “The Power of Thinking without Thinking.” Having read it, you have to wonder just how much thinking really went in to putting the thing together.

This is the worst type of “business” book; a collection (jumble) of stories and anecdotes that try to pass themselves off as having some foundation in science.  

Read it, blink and you will have already forgotten the contents.