Review highlights of recent news coverage of Georgia Tech College of Management's people and programs.

December 2007-February 2008

• Value Add: As trends in globalization and technology give employers access to new labor markets, companies will have more trouble finding individuals with values compatible to the firm than finding people with the skills do the job, wrote organizational behavior professor Nathan Bennett in an article in Forbes. He also recently co-authored another article in the Wall Street Journal on how more chief operating officers should build stronger relationships with corporate boards of directors.

• Long-term Benefits: Finance professor Narayanan Jayaraman shared his perspective on Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo in an online Forbes article. “I believe this merger makes strategic sense for both companies, even though the integration could be challenging,” says Jayaraman, who was also quoted in Reuters article on the deal.

• Getting Ahead: In a Computerworld article on ways for IT professionals to boost their careers, IT management clinical professor Michael Cummins suggested re-engineering processes. “We’ve seen movement to business processes and workflow analysis as you try to show how systems can help re-engineer how you do the work to make it more efficient,” Cummins says. IT management assistant professor Eric Overby appeared in another Computerworld article about exciting technologies coming in the future.

• Made in America: Since stagnating in the late 1990s, American manufacturing sales have rebounded, hitting a record $5 trillion in 2006, reported Popular Mechanics recently. The article quoted operations management professor Vinod Singhal, who said, “People talk about a doomsday scenario for manufacturing, but that’s not the case. The best U.S. manufacturers have become more competitive, no doubt about it.”

• Academic Impact: Thomson Scientific’s new ScienceWatch.com site spotlights Georgia Tech for achieving the highest percent increase in total citations in the field of business and economics. The site includes commentary from a number of College of Management faculty members on their frequently cited research studies.

• Herky Jerky: According to research by accounting professor Charles Mulford, the effects of a proposed accounting standards change could be enough to “render the income statement useless,” reported CFO magazine. If approved, the change would require companies to run plan assets through their income statements, leading to volatility in profits. Mulford also commented in a BusinessWeek story about Sears’ cash flow in a Bloomberg article about General Electric’s accounting policies and procedures.

• International Experience: MBA students in Georgia Tech’s MBA Global Consultancy Project are conducting marketing analyses for companies in Denmark, Costa Rica, and Japan this semester, reported Global Atlanta. Three student groups will visit these countries over spring break. MBA student Brad Roller said in the article that the course will provide the international experience he needs before starting at Accenture after graduation.

• Good Deal: Strategic management assistant professor Matt Higgins was featured in two articles in The Deal, a business publication on mergers and acquisitions and IPOs aimed at corporate and technology dealmakers, their advisors, and investors. In a Q&A article, he discussed his findings that drug-industry acquirers tend to avoid “the winner’s curse” more than buyers in other industries. He was also quoted in an article about the pharmaceutical firm Bayhill Therapeutics’ application for an IPO.

• Watching What You Eat: At the new Dutch Restaurant of the Future, cameras track every move customers make in order to enhance the study of consumer behavior, reported ABCNews.com. The story quoted marketing assistant professor Koert van Ittersum, who said, “The beauty of observation is that you actually see what happens naturally.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also quoted van Ittersum in a story on the recent spike in local hotel construction spurred by new attractions.

• Workplace Sabotage: Organizational behavior professor Nathan Bennett’s research on Munchausen at Work syndrome (how pathological workers deliberately create havoc in the workplace to get credit for solving it) has continued to gain coverage since he published an article on the phenomenon in the Harvard Business Review. Most recently, Atlanta Magazine wrote about it.

• Flight Pattern: Marketing professor emeritus Fred Allvine appeared on WAGA (Fox 5) News discussing the likelihood of a merger between Delta and Northwest airlines.

• Fear Factor: U.S. News & World Report online covered research by assistant marketing professor Nancy Wong and PhD student Tracy King showing that women with breast cancer often opt for more aggressive treatments than their doctors’ advise out of fear. Their study, which appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, showed that women tend toward mastectomies, even though statistically they’re often not more effective than less aggressive treatments.

• Global Reach: For an article on how states and countries can effectively market their signature products worldwide, Global Atlanta turned to Francis Ulgado, associate professor of marketing and faculty research director of the Georgia Tech Center for International Business Education and Research. “You can use (international) marketing to even carve out a niche for you in a seemingly impossible market with intense competition,” Ulgado said.