MBAs, Media & the Middle East.

Is Capitalism Moral?

In its March / April issue, The American Interest published excerpts from a John Templeton Foundation event in London that asked the question “Does the free market corrode moral character?” to some leading scholars.

Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA.

Seth has a proposition for those of you “stuck in a dead end job in publishing, or if you made a not-so-great choice in getting your career started, or if you thought Wall Street would be a different place, or if you just got laid off, or if you’re not crazy about fretting away the next six months waiting to get fired and you’re not quite ready to start your own gig”.

November 4th 2008.

Brand new history today. It’s good to have the United Stated in the world.

Unemployment Vs Grad School Chart on NYTimes.

The New York Times Economix Blog asks – Where Ex- and Would-Be Wall Streeters Might Be Headed. There’s a cool chart illustrating the relation correlation between graduate enrollment and unemployment.

Globality.

The Economist’s recent special report on Globalization discusses the decreasing uni-polarity (or Americanized) nature of global business. BCG have coined a new term – Globality – to describe it which will no doubt enter common business parlance soon as Ghosn’s frugal engineering already has.

Middle East MBA Information Sessions.

A list of upcoming MBA sessions in the region

Fooled by Randomness [Nassim Nicholas Taleb]

nassim nicholas taleb, the improbable best selling author of the black swan believes that success is illusionary (at times it seems he believes everything is illusionary – it’s all random, all luck!). his main thesis is that luck is often behind what we normally perceive to be success and that humans are hard-wired to under-estimate the role that randomness plays via various biases.

China Shakes The World. James Kynge.

James Kynge, former china bureau chief of best newspaper in the world (The Financial Times), won the FT / Goldman Sachs business book of the year award in 1996 with ‘china shakes the world’ which is a superb, concise introduction to how and why china is shaping our world.
the first half tells the condensed history of china’s post-cultural revolution rise and illuminates its leading position during much of the last six thousand years.
the book starts off recounting the mysterious disappearance of manhole covers all over the world (with plenty of reports of unsuspecting pedestrians falling into the suddenly-there holes from Mongolia to Montreal) as a signal of when the direction of the world – China relationship switched: the view of China flipped from how the outside world was changing China to how China was affecting the rest of the world. China’s voracious appetite for almost every conceivable resource including the scrap metal that those manholes were destined to become was just one signal that the causal direction was switching.
James has plenty of engaging first-hand accounts from his two decades living in china through which it often seems we are witnessing China’s economic transformation unfold through his eyes.

Some of the major themes / ideas that run throughout include:

* businesses everywhere are finding it harder to compete (manufacturers in particular), the sustainability of europe’s welfare state model is in question as the industrial base there is hollowed out.
* china out-competes and out-capitalizes everyone, especially America.
* Chinese possess the impressive combo of intelligence and second-to-none work ethic.
* china through lowering the cost of goods and its insatiable appetite for us treasuries (in part to manage its currency) has fueled the low-iinterest rate driven housing boom and general drive for yield that has resulted in the current sub-prime, credit-crunch, free-fall dollar mess we’re in.
* 400 million people have been lifted above the poverty line over the last 28 years of above 9.5% economic growth.

MBA 'Class of 2010'

I was accepted to the Columbia Business School today (May 7 2008) and I am thrilled. I figured I’d kick-start this blog with the good news. The plan here is to share my MBA experience as well as random bits + pieces on the worlds of media, tech and culture. MBA blogs have been super [...]