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Best business schools according to the FT

The Financial Times (FT) publishes its ranking of global MBA programs every year. Its ranking attempts to “assess the effect of the MBA on … subsequent career progression and salary growth.” Consequently it draws its data from the schools themselves and from surveys of graduates at least three years after earning their MBA degree.

In building its rankings, FT analyzes “alumni salaries and career development; the diversity and international reach of the business school and its MBA program; and the research capabilities of each school.”

In comparison to the traditional rankings by Bloomberg BusinessWeek and U.S. News and World Report that focus on U.S. MBA programs only, the FT Global MBA Ranking includes international MBA programs as well as domestic U.S. schools together.

The top five business schools according to the FT global ranking and its three-year average rank are:

1. London Business School
2. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
3. Harvard Business School
4. Columbia Business School
5. Stanford University GSB

1. Know the sweet spot. VCs have types of companies and industries they tend to invest in, as do partners. If you do not match their investment criteria or fit into their area of expertise, you need to find another VC. No matter how good the idea. Do your homework, just as you would do before a sales call. Find out what they like to invest in and why.
2. Reach out and get connected. Your company’s ability to communicate with the outside world is directly related to a VCs willingness to fund you. Get the word out about your personal brand and the company’s efforts and manage the information about you from the start. This means more networking, attending conferences, engaging industry leaders, blogging, tweeting and generally be active in the social media world. Your ability to network and publicize your business is directly related to how well you will be able to sell your product. And remember, VCs view cold-calling as a sign of weakness. Emailing a partner directly with no introduction from a connected contact just screams “desperate.” Navigate to a strong, warm introduction every time.
3. Think like a risk manager. Every salesperson will tell you: sales 101 is getting inside the head of your target customer. For a VC, a funding decision revolves around minimizing risk and maximizing profit. Don’t make them uncover the risks. Feature them as part of your pitch and lay out your plan for managing the risks. Provide realistic assumptions—nothing kills a deal faster than when a VC rolls their eyes at the hockey stick charts that promise great profit margin than a monopoly like Microsoft! Project the image of a confident executor, not a dreamer.
4. Read the rest of this entry »

Framing

Framing is a technique often used in politics. A popular example of framing is inheritance taxes. Politicians who are opposed to inheritance taxes will call them death taxes. By using the word death instead of inheritance, all kinds of negative connotations come to mind.

Framing is quite subtle, but by using emotionally charged words, like death, you can easily persuade people to your point of view.

Mirroring

Mirroring someone is when you mimic their movements. The movement can be virtually anything, but some obvious ones are hand gestures, leaning forward or away, or various head and arm movements. We all do this unconsciously, and if you pay attention you’ll probably notice yourself doing it, I know I have.

How to mirror someone is self explanatory, but a few key things to remember are to be subtle about it and leave a delay between the other person’s movement and your mirroring, 2-4 seconds works best.

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From Entrepreneur.com

When sales slump due to a slow economy, a business owner’s first inclination is often to cut the marketing budget. After all, one has fixed costs and cash flow can be irregular. But marketing should be the last activity you eliminate or you risk an even faster downward spiral. Advertising your business and attracting new customers should be an ongoing process, and there are many things you can do that cost absolutely nothing. In these times money might be tight but the need for revenue is continuous, here are just a few suggestions.

Become the expert

Submit articles related to your business to the local paper, trade journals and professional organization’s newsletters. Choose a topic that reflects your expertise on the subject and make sure your business is mentioned. You might also find a website that may be interested in letting you host a guest column. Whenever you get published, make copies and send them to all your current and potential customers.

Be a great public speaker

Professional meeting planners are always looking for presenters and workshop leaders for conferences. Research contact names in the Directory of Meeting Planners or start with your local Chamber of Commerce or Rotary Club. If, like most people, you dread the thought of public speaking, join your local Toastmasters [http://www.toastmasters.org/] club; this is also a great way to meet potential customers. When you do get the opportunity to make a presentation, be sure to collect business cards for a drawing to win a book or other prize related to your business.

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Close to half of Europeans use the internet every day but one third have never used the web, according to a new report (PDF) published by the European Commission. The study, which took a deep dive into the digital landscape in Europe over the last five years, demonstrated that new technologies are spreading fast across the continent but deep divisions remain and that particularly the elder and unemployed remain largely unaware of the existence of websites such as TechCrunch and FAILblog.org.

The commission’s study showed that 56 percent of Europeans had become regular Internet users by 2008, a jump of one third since 2004. Forty three percent of those EU citizens currently use the web every day, while 75 percent use it regularly (”at least once a week”) compared to only 43 percent in 2005. Half of all households and more than 80 percent of businesses had a broadband connection last year and with 114 million subscribers the EU is in fact the largest world market for fixed broadband access.

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#10. On Management

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects.

And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

#9. On Hiring

Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview.

So, in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.

#8. On Firing

We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off.

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Eton College, Britain’s most prestigious public school, has been shut down for a week after a pupil tested positive for swine flu.

A 13-year-old boy at the boarding school in Windsor became ill yesterday afternoon and was confirmed to be infected with the H1N1 flu strain that has sparked fears of a global pandemic.

The unnamed pupil is said to have only mild illness and is recovering at home. However the school, founded in 1440 by Henry VI, will remain closed as a precaution until June 7.

Eton is the 15th school in England and Scotland that has been advised to shut its doors in order to control the spread of swine flu.

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Recently I was forwarded this YouTube clip in which Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein portray the “shock doctrine”, brought to fame by the latter. This doctrine has become a NYT best-seller, but has been highly criticized. It seems to be contradictive, unfounded, and, sometimes, naïve.

Anyway, what do you think?

Unas de las prácticas que van debilitando nuestra fe es la superstición. Hoy en día, más que en otros tiempos, esto se ha extendido a una gran cantidad de cristianos.

Entre las nuevas formas de superstición se ha extendido el “enviar cadenas” las cuales consisten en copiar y enviar un número determinado de cartas (e-mail) en las que se ofrecen una serie de beneficios y bendiciones que Dios concederá si se continua la “cadena”; por el contrario, el no continuar la cadena, advierte sobre una serie de calamidades que atraerá consigo sobre la persona que negligentemente no envíe las cartas (poniendo en ambos casos ejemplos de personas que se vieron favorecidas o desgraciadas según sea el caso).

Quienes inician o continúan con estas cadenas han olvidado que “Dios envió a su Hijo para salvar y no para condenar” y que nada, absolutamente nada, puede condicionar a Dios, quien es libre para darnos lo que él sabe que es bueno para nosotros. La fuerza del cristiano, en su petición a Dios, es un corazón puro y una oración humilde. Creer que una carta condicionará a Dios a darnos lo que le pedimos nos hacen ver como personas ignorantes creyentes en un Dios que no puede salvar y que no nos ama… por lo cual es pecado grave contra el primer mandamiento.

Pbro. Ernesto María Caro

I got a Twitter message from Al Gore saying he had recently posted an article in his blog about the Antarctic. Let me reproduce this post in blog villoslado. 

Previously, there was some uncertainty with regard to the rate of warming in areas of Antarctica outside of the Antarctic Peninsula and west Antarctic. In fact, some claimed that East Antarctica—the largest part of the frozen continent was actually cooling.

However, a report published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature by climatologists Eric J. Steig and Drew Shindell using satellite observations over the entire continent combined ”with evidence from more than 100 manned and unmanned weather stations both inland and along the continent’s coasts to determine climate trends for the past 50 years” came to a very clear conclusion.

The data they uncovered demonstrated that all of Antarctica — including East Antarctica has been warming since 1957. In addition, it made clear that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is warming more extensively and rapidly than we though.

Two new studies, one which has come out in Geophysical Research Letters in January and the other which was accepted by the journal Climate Dynamics in November 2008 reached essentially the same finding.

So it’s clear now that all seven continents are manifesting the impact of the global climate crisis. As a result, our sense of urgency must increase yet again as we work to build the political will necessary to solve this rapidly worsening planetary emergency. 

Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple leaves us with time to appreciate his finer moments, such as these from his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. An amazing and inspiring speech. 

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

I've seen many men wearing monogrammed shirts. They sometimes wear it on the pocket, on the collar, or on the cuff. Some consider my monogrammed shirts "rare" or "weird", since my initials are placed 4 to 5 inches above my trousers' waistline.