Faculty & Research

Despite the growing similarities among Microsoft, Google and Apple, each is a unique beast, says Michael Cusumano, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. They can be classified according to how they approach the cloud, how they make money and how openly they approach the development of intellectual property.

Sloan Deputy Dean Richard Locke says that logistics-based approach to factory violations is just one piece of a still larger problem; the demands global brands put on local factories must be addressed as well.

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo has been appointed to the Board of Overseers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Overseers act as goodwill ambassadors within the communities served by the medical center.

MIT Sloan's Yasheng Huang, Antoinette Schoar, and Roberto Rigobon are among featured commentators discussing the G-20 Summit in light of today's economy.

"The pressing global challenges we face require a new way of thinking, working, and leading that integrates disciplines often seen as separate," says MIT Sloan Prof. John Sterman.

MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Malone says that the home call-center field is poised for growth. "In many cases those workers can provide better and more cost-effective service than offshore call-center workers in low-wage countries," says Malone.

...That may not be enough to shift China's growth model, argues the iconoclastic scholar Yasheng Huang, professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. In a talk Monday to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China in Beijing, he argued that the emergence of a true Chinese consumer economy will require a much more serious re-think of the current focus on heavy investment and exports.

"A theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." If one applies Albert Einstein's words to a colourful basket of theses from leading US academics about the future of investing, it could look like this: Andrew Lo of MIT's Sloan School of Management provides the foundation of the theory. For one of America's current academic superstars, it is pretty clear how the future must look: "We need to solve investors' biggest problem - uncertain outcomes of risks and returns."

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Joseph Doyle writes, "Before promising to cut the fat out of Medicare, we need to be sure we don't hit the bone as well. Some spending is wasteful and some saves lives. We need better ways to measure which is which."

MIT Sloan Prof. Michael Cusumano was named among the top 50 most influential individuals in the worldwide technology and IT industries by Silicon.com.

MIT Sloan Prof. Ed Roberts is featured in a program on the state's role in leading the recovery out of the economic crisis.

In this interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "In a crisis, when everything is up for grabs and you don't know what's going on, the people who will take your phone calls in government are the people who are going to be standing in the oval office making the key decisions. That's the heart of the system, that's the heart of how you get your agenda through."

"The Europeans are losing out," says Simon Johnson, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. "The Europeans are the biggest losers of the economic crisis, even though the home of subprime madness was the U.S."

In this interview, MIT Sloan Assistant Prof. Ofer Sharone shares his advice on how to avoid self-blame during unemployment.

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson writes, "The IMF's ability to stabilize the global economy may hit a wall because of resentment among emerging economies. Developing nations have long complained about the extent to which the U.S. and Western Europe dominate the 186-member group - and about the austerity the fund traditionally imposes on borrowers."

Timothy Geithner's calendars show Geithner is too close to Wall Street, says Simon Johnson, a former chief economist with the IMF and professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. "Your worldview in the middle of a crisis depends on whom you talk to and what their perspective is, and you need a broad cross-section of opinions to truly understand what's happening," Johnson says.

In an article on dealing with a colleague's mistakes, Deborah Ancona, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and author of X Teams, warns that it's important to "be careful because you don't want to make anyone else see the problem if they haven't already."

In this interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Jiang Wang shares his insights on financial crisis recovery efforts. "From my point of view, the inflation is not nearly as serious as was anticipated. Total liquidity growth has been high, but luckily it did not lead to actual inflation."

MIT Sloan Prof. Paul Osterman says that the San Antonio Project and Capital IDEA, an Austin [job-training] program based on it, "are among the best, if not the very best, in the country. It's a proven model."

In his blog, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson writes, "At about this time after the near-collapse of its banking system, any democracy goes through a phase of soul-searching regarding its broader economic model."

A quote by MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson that suggests talking to the same people too often can skew a person's viewpoint is referenced. In it, Johnson says, "Your world view in the middle of a crisis depends on whom you talk to and what their perspective is, and you need a broad cross-section of opinions to truly understand what's happening."

A research study by MIT Sloan Assistant Prof. Matt Marx found that while most judges would throw out broad noncompetes, few cases reach the courtroom. "What's really driving behavior is this chilling effect of people assuming the agreement is valid and then kind of taking evasive action," he says.

A 1991 globalization speech by MIT Sloan Dean Emeritus Lester Thurow is referenced.

Entergy Corporation announced the election of MIT Sloan Prof. Stewart C. Myers, a renowned expert in the field of finance, to its board of directors.

The Federal Reserve won't have to identify companies that got loans from the central bank until a U.S. appeals court reviews a federal judge's disclosure order, according to a lawyer involved in the case...Asks MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson, "What would they freak out about now? In the depth of the crisis, maybe something like that would frighten people, but now? I don't think that there is anything that would upset people particularly."

In this interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says it's the structure of the financial sector that's to blame for the current crisis. He says the cause is rooted in the system of incentives and the ownership structure for banks like Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and UBS. Regulation is also a cause, according to Johnson. "It's a structural issue that has come about because of the way the U.S. economy and the financial sector has changed over the past 30 years."

MIT Sloan Assistant Prof. Matt Marx says his research on non-competes showed a significant number of employees were asked to sign non-compete agreements that lasted over three years.

Several elite business schools from around the country are making "tweaks" similar to those at HBS, with individual faculty members taking the lead. "Our approach has not been monolithic change from the top down. Tons of things are bubbling up in response to the crisis," says JoAnne Yates, deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, which is considering implementing a required ethics course.

A study co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo concluded that under certain conditions, all it takes to fan the flames [of a financial crisis] is for a critical mass of people to extract money from their homes in the form of home equity loans, sales and "cash-out" refinancing.

MIT Sloan Prof. Richard Schmalensee says it's hard to judge how much, if any, impact interchange fees have on the prices that are eventually charged to the consumer because so many factors go into pricing individual items.

The new energy minor at MIT is the product of two years of work by the MIT Energy Initiative's Education Task Force, co-chaired by Don Lessard, the Epoch Foundation Professor of International Management at MIT Sloan, who had a great deal of support from numerous faculty members and administrators to get the new curriculum approved and in place.

"The business of most companies is done by middle managers who run teams, execute plans, and serve as the company's main information channel," says MIT Sloan Prof. Paul Osterman.

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo writes, "The world has become more complex over the past 20 years, and we need to update our investment paradigm to incorporate these new complexities...To achieve true diversification, investors must now have a broader set of asset classes and risk exposures, long and short, in their portfolios."

The Real Business of IT, a new book co-authored by MIT Sloan's George Westerman, outlines the fundamental business concepts that a perspective CIO needs to master.

"I think this is all part of an effort Janice Loux to build a strong coalition with community groups, immigrant groups, and political leaders so there's a more united front," says Thomas A. Kochan, cochair of the Institute for Work and Employment Research at MIT.

MIT Sloan Prof. Jiang Wang will take on the role of dean at the new Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, which was established at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in April 2009. "Practical ability will be highlighted throughout the curriculum," Wang says.

"People don't focus enough on the price of housing in Shanghai," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson. "Seriously, I think the next wave of bubbles is coming in emerging markets and is probably coming in Asia."

It was announced that MIT Sloan Visiting Prof. Clifford Holderness would present a lecture at Concordia University on October 2 entitled, Do Differences in Legal Protections Explain Differences in Ownership Concentration?.

In his blog, Simon Johnson writes, "Economic and financial models have come in for a lot of criticism in the context of the global financial crisis, much of it deserved."

MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang writes, "China has made some progress in moving toward a consumer society and it needs to do so now since the consumption in the West has come down - even if G.D.P. has recovered somewhat."

In an online interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "Closing gaps in regulation is one of these things like apple pie and motherhood, of course we're in favor of closing gaps in regulations."

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo says radical compensation reform would be no easy feat given the complexities of most financial institutions and the politics surrounding this effort. "It will take more than bonus caps if we ever hope to create a more stable and robust financial system that will be free from the tyranny of bubbles, crashes, and credit cycles," says Lo.

Simon Johnson, who teaches at MIT, says G-20 leaders simply are not grappling with the biggest issues lingering from the global financial collapse. Instead, they are drafting plans to fix problems in the "medium run"-postponing difficult choices until a time when new developments will demand a different approach still. "The G-20 is dropping the ball," Johnson says. "Not only is the glass not half-full when it comes to global coordination on economic and financial policy, I'm saying there is no glass."

MIT professor Edward Roberts, a specialist in entrepreneurship, said in a Web seminar last month that foreign governments in the Boston area are sharply raising their visibility and involvement with students and small businesses.

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson writes, "Our financial system provides valuable services to the public, but it also poses serious risks. If we can't re-regulate more strongly to better protect public funds, the next crisis could be worse than the last one."

In this one-on-one interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson looks at how the finance industry has effectively captured the US government. Recovery, says Johnson, will fail unless the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform is broken. And, if a true depression is to be avoided, he says, we need to act quickly.

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Deborah Ancona writes, "We all contributed to the bubble, and perhaps change will come when we all take a closer look at the consequences of our own actions."

In this blog entry, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says he feels Wall Street has become much more prudent, at least for now. "Back-to-back financial crises are rare; people are more careful," he writes. "We're in something like 2004-2005 when it comes to risk. But we'll get back up there."

In an online Q and A, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "President Obama himself chose this approach, supporting bigger and more pro-bank CEO bailouts than the world has ever seen before. And yet not one of these CEOs could be bothered to show up for President Obama's speech. Arrogant bankers always mean trouble, and I've never before seen so much banker arrogance as was on display this week."

In his blog, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnsons writes, "The real news from Monday was not the substance of the [Obama] speech or the stony silence of the financial elite in the audience, but rather that not a single chief executive of a major American bank was in attendance."

In July, TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky told Congress that in a worst-case scenario, all of the federal government's support rolled together could ultimately cost $23.7 trillion. "I think that number is an important number," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson. "It tells you what the range of outcomes are, and what you should suspect with a median outcome."

Every organization needs a clearly articulated vision and purpose and it is the responsibility of leadership to provide it. MIT Sloan Prof. Deborah Ancona outlines a framework for leadership under uncertainty.

In a talk hosted by MIT Sloan, Lawrence Fish, former chairman and CEO of Citizens Financial, and MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson discuss banks that didn't fail, increasing consumer confidence without improving consumer protection, and the risks for both under-regulation and over-regulation of banks going forward.

Howard Anderson, who teaches entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management, says his father's experiences in the Depression influenced him when he started Yankee Group in 1970. Mr. Anderson didn't borrow money or seek venture investors, and he tried to always keep a year's worth of revenue in the bank. "Probably I could have grown faster taking more risk, but that risk was not in my DNA". Now, he sees students opting to take jobs with established companies rather than launching their own. In prior downturns, he says, there were a few bright spots in the economy to which potential entrepreneurs could gravitate. Today, "it's cut across pretty much every industry," he says.

MIT Sloan Prof. John Sterman says a key problem with global-warming policy is the time lag between today's emissions and the problems they cause, which can be decades down the road. The model attempts to get around that by allowing policy-makers to see the likely consequences of their decisions immediately. "It's not that the other models are flawed," Sterman says. "They are opaque to the policy-makers."

MIT Sloan's Michael Schrage urges one not to be deceived by Facebook, Twitter and other social media's ability to take information you find and post it for wider consumption on a "wall" or a "stream" or a blog.

MIT Sloan Prof. Edgar Schein will speak at Shingo Prize Conference with a focus on the "community of lean."

MIT Sloan Visiting Associate Professor Mark Ritson says, "low supply costs will ensure that Amazon will likely make more money per product on their line than from selling other suppliers' products."

MIT Sloan's Josh Ackerman is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder.

Ezra Zuckerman, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, spent three years studying actors' careers. He concluded that even though actors see typecasting as deadly, it is, in fact, a ticket to a solid career. Actors who get typecast early on get more work, more consistently.

"There's too much uncertainty out there," says Thomas Kochan, a labor economist at MIT's Sloan School of Management. "There's not going to be an upsurge in job openings for quite a while, not until employers feel confident the economy is really growing."

Cambridge-based Shareaholic, whose browser plugin helps users share what they find online via common social networking, social bookmarking, and news aggregator services, raised an undisclosed sum of angel financing. Participants in the deal included MIT Sloan Prof. Ed Roberts.

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo of MIT's Sloan School of Management points out that in the physical sciences three laws can explain 99% of behavior, whereas in finance 99 laws can explain at best 3% of behavior.

MIT Sloan's climate policy model is now being used by the United States Government: Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program. ...We don't want to go there," says Robert Corell, who collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do the analysis.

In his blog, MIT Simon Johnson asks, "If the G-20 fails to deliver, is it really possible that we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes with regard to building up vulnerabilities in our financial system?"

If Antarctica's ice melts, cities such as Hong Kong and Miami would be threatened, MIT climate scientist John Reilly says. Adds MIT climate expert Henry Jacoby, "Based on the amount of greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere, achieving the 3 1/2 degree goal will require huge efforts over the whole century. The kind of agreement that can be reached in Copenhagen can only get started on that task."

MIT Sloan Prof. Glen Urban, a member of the of the WPP and Google panel that is overseeing a three-year funding program for media research projects says, "I am confident that the quality of this round's submissions will compare favorably to the impressive projects funded in the first round. The combined learning from the studies in progress and those selected in this second round should prove influential."

Other economists are more skeptical about the substance of the G20 discussions. Simon Johnson, of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, says the framework would be "a pretty meaningless pledge with no teeth and no way of holding anyone to it - but it sounds good."

"The great advantage of the prize model is that it moves work away from the realm of the beauty contest to being performance-oriented," says MIT Sloan's Michael Schrage. "It's the results produced that matters."

MIT Sloan Deputy Dean Steve Eppinger will speak at the 11th International Design Structure Matrix Conference to be held Oct. 11-13 at the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research.

MIT Sloan Prof. Emeritus Richard D. Robinson passed away on September 5, 2009 in Gig Harbor, WA.

MIT Sloan Profs. Lester Thurow and Peter Senge were both named on Accenture's list of top 20 business gurus.

MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business, will be among the keynote speakers at TechWeb's Enterprise 2.0 Conference to be held in San Francisco on November 2-5.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson thinks Wall Street has become much more prudent, at least for now. "Back-to-back financial crises are rare; people are more careful," he said. "We're in something like 2004-2005 when it comes to risk. But we'll get back up there."

In this video interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "Artificially stimulating, subsidizing particular kinds of activity is not the way to have broad based prosperity in which lots of people share."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "We have not yet met our Ferdinand Pecora, a figure who can create the momentum required for strong new regulation."

MIT Sloan Prof Simon Johnson sums up the key elements of the financial crisis as "large inflows of foreign capital, torrid credit growth, excessive leverage, an asset price bubble, asset price collapse and financial catastrophe."

A research article co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Ernst Berndt assesses the net value of health care for patients with Type II diabetes.

Former MIT Sloan faculty member Marshall N. Carter, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Group, delivered a lecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's weekly dialogue series.

On the NPR affiliate WBUR's On Point program, Prof. Johnson said, "We've certainly seen change. We've seen more than marginal change, but it's mostly change in the wrong direction."

"They'll say, 'Look, you regulated us and held us to a higher standard, and now we're failing and it's your job to clean it up,'" MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson is quoted as saying. "It's the kind of regulation where government is on the hook when things go wrong."

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson writes, "Today, a year after the world came to the brink of financial meltdown and great pain was inflicted on millions of investors and workers, our leaders are lining us up to suffer the same horrible experiences again."

"We have lived through a tremendous crisis - and learned how close we came to a second Great Depression - yet nothing is now happening to prevent a repeat of something similar in the near future."

"The big banks now are more powerful than before," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson. "Their market share has grown and they have a lot of clout in Washington."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says that if major banks are allowed to keep making bets that are ultimately backed by taxpayer guarantees, they will return to the practices that led them to underwrite trillions of dollars in bad loans. "They will run up big risks, they will fail again, they will hit us for a big check"

Prof. Johnson stresses the importance of finding ways to "engage actively in global economic debate. Don't sit back and assume that anything can be left to the 'experts'."

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo's testimony prepared for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in November 2008 is referenced. In his testimony, Lo emphasized the need for 'better' regulation rather than more regulation.

In this blog entry, MIT Sloan researcher Michael Schrage writes, "Unlike mass tweeting, this one-to-one 'customized' communication strikes me as a superior business and personal practice. It forces me to be empathetic, anticipatory, and aware. It makes me more sensitive to individual perceptions and needs. And I get feedback telling me how aware and helpful I really am. I even create virtual histories of 'forwards' that I can audit, review, and rethink. Imagine if more managers developed these skills"

...Still, some think it is somewhat naive to expect governments not to cave in to rescue demands of an ailing firm, even if a tough wind-down regime were in place. Because of this, Simon Johnson of MIT thinks it might be best to address the "too-big" part of the problem and limit bank size. The problems at CIT Group, a medium-size firm, haven't destabilized the wider system, he notes.

"The basic principles of asset allocation need to be revised," says MIT finance professor Andrew Lo. He and other experts argue that since market volatility is rising, you must now own other assets -- such as hedge-fund-like investments -- in addition to stocks and bonds to manage risk. And you must be prepared to shift your mix tactically from time to time. "You need to be proactive and adjust as the market changes."

Molex Inc., an electronic components company, has appointed former MIT Sloan faculty member Anirudh Dhebar as a director.

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Tom Kochan writes, "Workers have good reasons to feel left out of stimulus efforts to date. Nearly 20 percent of the workforce is unemployed, unable to find a full time job, or has given up on looking for one."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson asks, "How did the financial system get so fragile that this could happen? What were the guys overseeing it doing?"

MIT Sloan Prof. Ed Roberts says, "Today we are seeing an increasing number of early-stage new enterprises, especially in the medical area, that have very clear double bottom-lines-they offer significant upside opportunities for investors while promising dramatic social returns to the country and the world."

Prof Charles Fine, from MIT's Sloan School of Management, warned that the small car advantage would not be sustainable and India should instead look at lightweight cars, which would also be more fuel efficient.

An earlier statement by MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson that finance has at least three serious inherent pathologies is referenced.

In his blog, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson writes, "We need finance, but finance as it currently operates in the United States has become a problem."

"The industry has gotten really organized since the crisis began to ease," says Simon Johnson, who is also a professor at MIT.

In this opinion piece, the author cites an excerpt by "one of my favorite thinkers, John Sterman, Director, MIT System Dynamics Group, Sloan School of Management, who lays out his own version of the global Ponzi scheme."

"You've got to get your leadership involved, you have to be consistent, you have to be simple and have everyone understand what you're trying to get accomplished," says MIT Sloan's Edgar Schein. "GM's challenge would be overcoming ingrained corporate attitudes."

A quote by MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Malone is referenced, which appeared in the Harvard Business Review. In it, he says "executives need to start reviewing the purpose of a business as maximizing the contribution of society subject to the constraints of producing a reasonable profit -- not the other way around."

"At a time when the recession has boosted estimates of short-term budget deficits, the idea that the government cannot afford reform seems plausible. But that argument has two fatal flaws."

Prof. Simon Johnson is quoted in a recent cover story in The Investment Professional about global politics shifting during the financial crisis.

Although ethics has always been a part of curriculum at MIT's Sloan School of Management, it may soon gain a larger presence. The school is testing what it calls an "ethics module" -- not an entire class, but a synthesis of the ethics taught in other business classes. The sessions are currently optional, but may soon become required, says Deputy Dean JoAnne Yates.

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo writes, "Recent neuroscientific research has shown that what we consider to be 'rational' behavior is the outcome of a balance among several brain functions, including emotion, logical deliberation and memory."

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Ed Roberts writes, "Estimates based on 2006 data revealed that living MIT alumni have founded or cofounded 25,800 companies that today employ 3.3 million people worldwide. The annual sales of these companies add up to about $2 trillion--the equivalent of the 11th-largest economy in the world."

"We live in a world where innovation now takes many forms, some of which are mediated by the network and depend fundamentally on access to information and freedom to operate. There are entirely novel forms of innovation, like the user-driven innovation studied by Eric Von Hippel at MIT.

MIT Sloan Prof. Mark Mortensen finds that firsthand experience in global collaborations is a crucial means of engendering trust from shared knowledge among coworkers.

In this editorial piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Emeritus Robert B. McKersie writes, "Barry Bluestone has put his finger on a major challenge that union leaders face: how to engage the big financial problems that municipalities face. However, he failed to complete the sentence: and not be voted out of office."

As Edgar H. Schein of the MIT Sloan School describes in his analysis of organizations as facilitators or inhibitors of organizational learning: "therein lies a problem because we are now talking about changing our mental models, our personal habits of perceiving, thinking and acting, and our relationships with others that are thoroughly embedded. We are talking about having to unlearn some things before new things can be learned."

Just months after an epic banking collapse forced Iceland into the arms of the I.M.F., Iceland is locked in a fierce debate over how to pay off its creditors without ceding too much of its vaunted independence. "When you impose austerity, it becomes very painful and comes at a cost," says MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson, a former I.M.F. economist. But many Icelanders are blaming the I.M.F. and in this case, he says, that is not warranted.

Edward B. Roberts of MIT's Sloan School compared MIT graduates who launched new technological companies with a control group of graduates who pursued other careers. The largest factor in predicting an entrepreneurial career in technology was an entrepreneurial father. Controlling for this factor, he discovered that Jews were five times more likely to start technological enterprises than other MIT graduates.

CEO Lloyd Blankfein's decision to hand over the full amount sought by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner reflects an effort by Goldman Sachs to defuse the public's anger at firms that took taxpayer money, says Simon Johnson, a finance professor at MIT Sloan.

In an excerpt from an MIT Sloan Management Review article by MIT Sloan's Glen Urban, John Hauser, and Michael Braun they write, "Now imagine a Web site that detects a visitor's cognitive style and morphs its look and feel to suit that style. A site like this will communicate well to many different people, and therefore create more sales. In fact, this process of Web site morphing is now possible. Web pages can modify to match customers' varying cognitive styles."

Growth in utilization rather than price, particularly since 1994, has been the primary driver of increased pharmaceutical spending, writes MIT Sloan Prof. Ernst Berndt in this research paper.

"My hunch is this recovery will be about consumers; businesses are going to continue hunkering down for a while," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

It wasn't clear that the Treasury wanted this to be a turning point, but that's the way it's worked out," says Simon Johnson, a former chief economist with the IMF, now a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Johnson says the markets took so kindly to CIT's quest for private-sector cash that the government "would feel pretty comfortable about" threatening bankruptcy for firms with less than $100 billion in assets.

In this interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Jeanne Ross says, "To date, for whatever reasons, few companies have built a foundation of digitized processes which facilitate agility throughout an organization."

The nation's biggest banks still enjoy federal support through borrowing or debt guarantees. So how far the government is willing to go with its hands-off policy is unclear. "The question is, does it only apply to the small- and medium-sized guys, or does it apply to everyone?" asks MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

Open source is based around the convenient fact that for 20 to 30 years, computing has happened on a user's local computer, says Benjamin Mako Hill, a senior researcher at MIT Sloan. One result is that open source philosophy and licenses are built around this highly individualistic use of software.

"I'm strongly suggesting that my students use the end-to-end business plan and financial forecasting development tool -- TheIdeaStartup platform -- for future development of their business plans in my New Enterprise course," says MIT Sloan Prof. Howard Anderson.

A look at recent cases and new research suggests that open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators. "There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best," says MIT's Prof. Thomas Malone. "That's not true. It's not magic."

MIT Sloan Assistant Professor Gustavo Manso says that in order to be creative, managers need to have space to fail and incentives need to be tailored to reward innovation.

Statistics reported by MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson in the May 2009 edition of The Atlantic -- that between 1948 and 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99% and 108% of the average for all domestic private industries -- are referenced.

"By protecting large institutions and not small ones, the 'too-big-to-fail problem' gets worse," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson. "We can expect to see that the big guys are going to keep getting bigger and the small guys are going to have to clean up their acts or go bankrupt."

Even with the recent uptick, flying on a commercial jet remains one of the safest forms of transportation: MIT professor Arnold Barnett calculates that the odds of a passenger dying on a large jet in the U.S. are about one in 20 million.

"A lot of people in both government and the nonprofit sector are recognizing that they need the help of MBAs," says MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Andrew Wolk. "MBA programs sometimes don't recognize that a new generation is emerging that cares equally about earning a living and how they do so."

MIT Sloan Prof. Emeritus Robert McKersie, 79, says he wants the genetic test for risk of Alzheimer's because his mother died of the disease. McKersie feels the test results might help him and his wife decide whether to stay in their house or consider moving to an assisted-living facility.

MIT Sloan Prof. Joseph Doyle studied the records of people in Wisconsin who were injured in severe automobile accidents and had no choice but to go to the hospital. He estimated that those who had no health insurance received 20 percent less care and had a death rate 37 percent higher than those with health insurance.

"It is too small to make a difference," says Simon Johnson, an economist with the MIT Sloan School of Management, adding that the failure of the program to restore banks' health would ultimately slow the economic recovery.

MIT Sloan Prof. Deborah Ancona says, "It seems impossible to even consider Sarah Palin a candidate for president. How could she move beyond the Katie Couric interview, the Alaska scandals and now last week's rambling speech announcing a midstream resignation? None of this displays leadership based on intellect, perseverance or strong moral conviction."

Cape Coral, Florida has $615.9 million in debt, a potential $40 million shortfall for the upcoming budget year and $14.2 million in reserves, which MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says won't prevent the city from borrowing. "But the issue is going to be what they pay for it, what the interest rates are."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson is quoted in a WSJ story about the popularity of financial news blogs.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson fears that hopes of an immediate recovery have been greatly exaggerated, and thinks there is still a lot of nastiness that has to work its way through the system.

In a paper co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Ernst Berndt he writes, "Immunization has been one of the great successes in global health."

The GeoRM summit drew perhaps 50 for the daylong event, which included the Technical Meeting Plenary by the MIT Sloan School's Michael Schrage.

A study co-authored by MIT Sloan Assistant Prof. Ewa Sletten found that more powerful countries and countries with high quality corporate governance systems are less likely to adopt the International Financial Reporting System.

It was announced that MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo will deliver a speech entitled "Kill all the Quants"?: Models vs. Mania in the Current Financial Crisis during the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics on July 8.

Main Street businesses can shop a virtual international bazaar of freelancers to recruit computer programmers in Russia, graphic designers in San Francisco or data analysts in India. "This is one more step in the path to leveling the playing field between small and large businesses," says Thomas Malone, a professor at MIT Sloan and author of The Future of Work.

Another potential downside of decoupling could be a tsunami of capital from developed markets washing over emerging economies and inflating values, says Simon Johnson, a former chief economist for the IMF who is now a professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

The [Boston] Globe has reported that the Times Co. has hired Goldman Sachs to handle potential bids for the newspaper. "Both parties recognized that they've got to put their best foot forward to get a buyer who can be successful," says MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan.

A new generation of online service marketplaces is giving small companies more opportunities than ever to find specialized expertise and affordable labor. MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Malone says, "A small-business person in a company of one can look to the world like a very large company and have access to all kinds of services -- and that's largely because of this kind of model."

After reviewing Obama's plan, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "There appears to be no mention that corporate governance within these large banks failed totally."

"The economy has become much more volatile, not just in the past year, but over the past 10 years," says MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson. "The ability to be agile in your infrastructure is what separates the winners from the losers ... cloud computing is one of the most important technologies that affect the ability to maintain that level of flexibility."

"Congress should carefully weigh any policies that could increase healthcare costs and reduce high-paying jobs, particularly during an economic downturn," says MIT Sloan Prof. Ernst Berndt.

In this interview, MIT Sloan's Peter Senge talks about, among other things, how his most recent book, The Necessary Revolution, details the way companies, often working collaboratively with NGOs, are embracing the challenges and opportunities around sustainability.

Iridium was a technologically visionary system of 66 satellites that promised -- and delivered -- telephone connectivity between any two points on the globe. "It was a triumph of technology over business," says Howard Anderson, founder of the Yankee Group, a technology research and consulting firm, and now a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Luckily, we have an academic here in Massachusetts who has dedicated the past few years to looking at the impact of noncompetes. Matt Marx, who recently joined the faculty of MIT's Sloan School of Management, has made three important findings about what noncompetes do.

"The Federal Reserve will keep interest rates very low for a long time. If you could borrow from the Fed, you have credit of a 1 percent interest rate, and there are many interesting investments around the world that offer some gains above that," says Simon Johnson, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says he isn't surprised that bond fund manager Bill Gross is such a virulent foe of nationalization. As Johnson points out, Pimco is a major bondholder in some of the biggest banks, so nationalization would hurt his portfolio.

MIT Sloan's Peter Senge says, "Even as conditions in the world change dramatically, most businesses, governments and other large organizations continue to take the same kinds of institutional actions that they always have."

According to MIT Sloan researchers Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross, as IT spending increases and virtually every business interaction becomes increasingly digitized, new levels of IT savvy will be required for all managers - both IT and non-IT -- to transform firms' technology into a strategic asset that boosts margins.

In an excerpt from an MIT Sloan Management Review interview with MIT Sloan's Andrew Lo he says, "Many corporations did a terrible job in assessing and managing their risk exposures, with some of the most sophisticated companies reporting tens of billions of dollars in losses in a single quarter."

MIT Sloan School professor Sugata Roychowdhury examines the accrual choices made by outsourcing firms with links to U.S. congressional candidates during the 2004 elections, and specifically test for income-decreasing discretionary accruals. Evidence is consistent with firms using earnings management to reduce both direct political costs and the costs associated with causing embarrassment to affiliated political candidates.

Farmers led China's first stage of market reform after 1978, a golden age for rural advancement that ended in about 1993, according to Prof. Yasheng Huang at MIT

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan writes, "One of the biggest failures of the current labor law is that even after a majority of employees vote for union representation, only 56 percent of them achieve a first contract after two years."

"Most of the president's economic policies make sense, and his fiscal stimulus push has helped stabilize financial markets," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson in this interview.

Using the term "sustainability" does not spur society on to an ultimately better solution. Rather, it is a "negative vision," says MIT Sloan's Peter Senge, founder of the Society for Organizational Learning.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says the move by the 10 banks seeking to repay federal bailout money does signal "a restoration of their ability to raise capital, which is a crucially important development in the financial recovery."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says that "a whole generation of policymakers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever banks said was true."

MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan says a potential sale could come at a greatly reduced price -- and could mean drastic cuts in the [Boston] Globe's work force.

MIT Sloan Prof. Roberto Rigobon is finalizing a new index which will change the way countries measure inflation and allow it to be done on a daily basis.

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Joe Hadzima says, "the commitment of IPVision to address core challenges to integrating intellectual property and business strategy is driven by customer executives and experts."

Labor and media experts say a protracted dispute could further damage the Boston Globe or increase the risk of its closure. "It has to be a major commitment to rebuild the organization and to work together," says MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan. "They need to reframe the negotiations, and they need to face reality."

MIT Sloan Research Scientist George Westerman says, "As businesses rethink their approach to risk management, many are realizing that IT Risk is a fundamental aspect of business risk."

Although the worst moment passed when the financial system completely froze last October, "there are many challenges ahead, principally in the real economy," says MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang.

Banks are raising account fees because of a "mix of market power and opportunism," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

MIT Sloan Prof. Rodrigo Verdi disputes the notion that the U.S. would be at a disadvantage if it did not adopt IFRS wholesale. "In countries like the U.S., there may be minimal room for improvement because U.S. GAAP is already considered a high-quality accounting regime."

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson writes, "That while we are likely done with a panic or 'free fall' phase, we have only just begun to deal with the deeper problems revealed by the global financial crisis."

In states that require stronger privacy safeguards for medical records than is prescribed by the Federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the adoption of electronic medical records systems was 24 percent lower than in states without stronger privacy laws, according to a study co-authored by MIT Sloan Assistant Prof. Catherine Tucker.

In this in-depth profile, MIT Sloan Prof. Deborah Ancona reveals that when she first started out as an academic at a different institution, a male faculty member took her aside and told her that the purple pumps she had on 'were not tenure track shoes'. "Everyone has a purple shoe story," says Ancona. "Success at an organization is not always judged by what's in the manual -- there's an unwritten culture, unwritten rules."

MIT Sloan's Peter Senge was listed at No. 35 among the Fast Company's 100 most creative people in business.

In an interview on Blog Talk Radio, MIT Sloan Prof. Ed Schein shares ideas for offering, giving and receiving help that deepens business and personal relationships.

A research paper published by MIT Sloan Prof. Gustavo Manso suggests that a mix of long-term incentives and golden parachutes will best spark creativity and innovation. He writes, "In a controlled laboratory experiment, we provide evidence that the combination of tolerance for failure and reward for long-term success is effective in motivating innovation."

In this interview, MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson says, "The paradox of thrift is the idea that you try -- everyone tries to increase their savings, so desired savings goes up, thrift being savings, but the act of trying to save pulls down the entire economy, gives you a big recession or maybe even a depression, and total savings don't go up. Maybe they even go down. So everyone trying to save leads to a big slowdown and less savings. That's a paradox."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says that although he thinks the economy is bottoming out, the main question is if the shape of the recovery is a "V-shape" or an "L-shape."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson discusses the stimulus plan. "The math around the precise jobs saved is fuzzy and very much open to criticism, but the big picture is the overall financial system is stabilizing", he says.

In this commentary, a credit card study performed by MIT Sloan Profs. Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester are cited.

"A number of U.S. companies have looked with trepidation on the situation in Finland and at the magnitude of the investment there," says Paul L. Joskow, a professor of economics at MIT, and a co-author of an influential report on the future of nuclear power in 2003. "The rollout of new nuclear reactors will be a good deal slower than a lot of people were assuming."

MIT Sloan's Peter Senge believes systems theory provides the type of discipline and toolset needed to encourage people to see "interrelationships rather than things, to see patterns of change rather than static 'snapshots.'"

Banks are raising account fees because of a "mix of market power and opportunism," says Simon Johnson, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund who teaches at MIT Sloan. "They are supposed to act in the interest of shareholders, so they're gouging consumers."

In an opinion piece by MIT Sloan Assistant Prof. Gustavo Manso, he asserts that a growing body of research in economics and finance shows the best way to encourage innovation is by tolerating early failure while rewarding long-term success.

"People look back now and say they overdid it; they should have raised rates earlier," MIT economist Simon Johnson says. "This is kind of a rerun. They could make mistakes on both sides."

The new dean of Stanford's Graduate School of Business is former MIT Sloan faculty member Garth Saloner, an economist, popular teacher, and a leader in management education.

MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang argues that slowing rural income growth, not high savings rates, was the main reason consumption had fallen as a percentage of GDP in the past two decades. "The theory is that Chinese save too much ... My view is that the problem is slow income growth, especially among the rural population," Huang says.

All large players, from mutual, hedge and pension funds to banks and insurance companies, should have to pay a levy in proportion to the extent to which they heighten risk in the overall system in order to prevent further financial crises, says MIT Sloan Professor Andrew Lo.

The field of System Dynamics, a discipline founded by MIT Sloan Prof. Emeritus Jay Forrester in 1956, provides insight into modern day economic problems. As abstract as the title is, the concept is simple: when you introduce an artificial construct into a natural system, the system tends to reject it.

MIT Sloan Prof. Eric Von Hippel has studied how users create new products or modify existing products to make them work in novel ways. He refutes the common perception that innovation comes from a formalized product development process managed by a company.

MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Malone suggests that CIOs will become Chief Organizational Officers. That prompted Jeanne Ross, director of the MIT Sloan's Center for Information Systems Research, to say that the CIO title should be redubbed Strategy Execution Officer, not to be confused with another SEO (search engine optimization.

MIT Sloan Prof. Paul Osterman says he's been working with the Industrial Areas Foundation in the Southwest for about 15 years. "The reason I do that is because when it comes to labor market issues...economic justice, when it comes to thinking about how to fix the economy and how to improve the lives of people, there is literally no other network, no other organization in this country with a better set of ideas, a better set of models."

At SAP's annual user conference, MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson participated in a roundtable discussion for industry analysts and press in an attempt to deliver some clarity to the age-old conflict between CFO and CIO.

Change could eliminate current incentives for employers to delay and stall negotiations and will dramatically reduce the delay, frustration and animosity generated by the company-dominated system. MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan says, "The process could be set up to allow for a neutral arbitrator, an employer-chosen arbitrator and a union-chosen arbitrator."

In this opinion piece MIT Sloan Prof. Arnold Barnett writes, "There are various proposals to alter or abolish the Electoral College, perhaps the most conspicuous being a scheme to move to a national popular vote through an agreement among states."

A research paper published by MIT Sloan Prof. Gustavo Manso describes a business experiment -- involving that entrepreneurial archetype, the lemonade stand -- suggesting that a mix of long-term incentives and golden parachutes will best spark creativity and innovation

"In previous research we have found a correlation between the investment in technology and improved performance," says MIT Sloan's Erik Brynjolfsson. "The higher the investment in technology, the higher the performance in terms of productivity metrics."

MIT Sloan Prof. Eric von Hippel co-surveyed 216 members of Outdoorseiten.net, a community of 8,300 German, Austrian and Swiss hikers about their brand preferences, and found that people were very interested in buying hiking products that displayed their clubs' logos.

A study of first-contract negotiations co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas A. Kochan found that even after a majority of workers voted for a union, they actually reached a contractual agreement with management only 56 percent of the time.

Some economists, including MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson, say our financial system would be healthier if we jettisoned massive banks, instead relying on a network of regional banks and community banks

"The broad lesson for the IT shop is to look beyond the IT shop and not just focus on cutting costs there. You need to reach out and touch the other parts of the organization," says Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School of Management.

It was announced that MIT Sloan Assistant Prof. Tavneet Suri would participate as a discussant in a finance and development workshop on May 20 at the University of Chicago.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson believes that, in the context of low income countries having been severely affected by the global economic downturn, the G20 summit, by contributing to the stabilization of the world's financial system, has had a "positive effect."

When a state has health privacy laws in place, it reduces the likelihood a hospital will adopt an electronic medical record system by 20 to 30 percent, according to a study by MIT Sloan Prof. Catherine Tucker. "What we found is that when we were talking to hospitals, a lot of the costs came because these state laws are very different and so it meant that a vendor couldn't sell a standardized solution," she says.

You gain two types of knowledge when you spend time in another place," says MIT Sloan Prof. Mark Mortensen. "If, for example, you spend some time in Tokyo you learn about the customs, the way people work, their way of thinking. But there is also what we call reflected knowledge -- you also learn how the way they see you, the way your home office comes across."

MIT Sloan Visiting Associate Prof. Alan MacCormack will be among experts travelling to Malaysia in July to conduct courses and practical workshops on soft skills and management skills.

In an opinion piece, Simon Johnson writes, "The biggest risk now is that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury try to re-leverage our way out of a Japanese-style prolonged recession by flooding the economy with cheap credit -- like they did in 2002, but to an even greater degree."

In recent research papers, MIT Sloan Assistant Prof. Gustavo Manso asserts that, among businesses on experimentation for innovation, incentives that don't penalize failure and promote long-term success lead to more innovative business strategies than fixed-wage or pay-for-performance incentives. MIT Sloan Assistant Professor Pierre Azoulay served as a co-author on one of the papers.

"Regulators' whole strategy is 'wait and see,' to buy time for the economy to recover. It's just stall tactics," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

MIT Sloan Visiting Professor Irving Wladawsky-Berger was cited as an affiliate of Mercator XXI, a professional services firm helping clients engage the global economy.

A white paper released by MIT Sloan Prof. Ernst Berndt and Mark Trusheim of MIT shows that eliminating FDA's preemption protection would decrease patients' access to life-enhancing medical devices, increase health care costs and reduce medical device industry employment.

Michael Siegel, a professor at MIT Sloan, says he thought small rural hospitals in western Massachusetts "could very much benefit from an open-source system, but they're not."

"What needs to happen is a lot more coordination of these privacy laws so hospitals don't have to deal with these patchwork systems," says Catherine Tucker, assistant professor of marketing at MIT Sloan.

"Banks that are too big to fail must now be considered too big to exist," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

In Shanghai GDP has grown dramatically compared with the national average, but household income is not growing relative to GDP. MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang believes that a high savings rate is not the problem: low income growth is to blame.

Attrition among minorities has not been formally quantified, but anecdotal evidence from workforce specialists indicates that it is a chronic problem. This troubling trend can be mitigated through education, says MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan. "Adults don't change attitudes, but they can learn to be more effective workers with the right skills sets."

Most experts don't think a swine-flu outbreak by itself would eliminate many U.S. jobs or severely worsen the economy. MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson envisions only a "small hit" to economic activity in the United States -- just a few tenths of 1 percentage point.

Matthew Marx, who will be joining the MIT Sloan faculty in 2009-2010, was among the winners of the 2009 Harvard Business School Doctoral Program Wyss Awards for Excellence in Doctoral Research.

In this blog posting, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson writes, "By choosing instead forbearance and 'earn out' through high profits, the Treasury has made it much easier for financial interests to oppose re-regulation of any kind. Presumably this means we'll end up -- again -- with less regulation than is prudent or fair."

A presentation in which Eric Von Hippel showcased a number of interesting innovations that his team has uncovered in urban slums throughout the developing world is referenced.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson writes that banks will continue to receive a great deal of financial support in the form of credit from the Federal Reserve and debt guarantees from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This is good for bank stockholders, but not necessarily helpful for the economic recovery.

MIT Sloan School professor Thomas Malone addresses the mental models that impede management progress, the role of collective intelligence in solving climate problems, and his view of how wrong people are about what business is for.

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang writes, "Shanghai trails Hong Kong in financial talent, but arguably this is the least important gap. The most significant ingredient in the making of a successful capital market is a vibrant entrepreneurial base. After all, a capital market exists to serve the needs of entrepreneurs, not the other way around."

MIT Sloan Professors Simon Johnson and Kristin Forbes were named economic advisers for 2009 and 2010 by the Congressional Budget Office.

Named for computer engineer Jay Wright Forrester, a professor at MIT Sloan and the founder of an analytical process known as System Dynamics, the Forrester Effect uses feedback to analyze supply-chain disturbances.

In this opinion piece, MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo writes that financial engineering is no more responsible for the crisis than aerospace engineering was responsible for the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986. In both cases, incorrect human judgments involving inappropriate uses of technology led to disaster.

In this opinion piece co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson, he writes that "Bernanke has become the country's economist in chief, the banker for the United States and perhaps the world, and has employed every weapon in the Federal Reserve's arsenal."

One of the most important causes of the current financial crisis is the fact that accounting -- the language in which banks and other corporations communicate, strategise, and plan -- is inherently backward-looking, writes MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo in this opinion piece.

"There was hope with Cerberus, that they would add managerial skill, and turn Chrysler around," Antoinette Schoar, a professor at MIT, told The Times. "It's difficult to say whether the private equity firm did a good enough job, or, were they just caught in this?"

MIT Sloan Assistant Prof. Gustavo Manso and a collaborator wrote, "In a controlled experiment, we provide evidence that the combination of tolerance for failure and reward for long-term success is effective in motivating innovation."

During this one-on-one interview with Bill Moyers, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "The government has a broader set of public policy initiatives. One of them is save the banks. Others are help consumers and some auto companies."

A new study by MIT Sloan Prof. Rodrigo Verdi found evidence suggesting that some companies opportunistically select their peers to justify higher CEO compensation.

"The crisis hits China's private sector really hard because China's private sector accounts for a larger share of China's manufactured exports," says Yasheng Huang, an MIT professor who wrote about the rising power of SOEs in his 2008 book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics.

The U.S. could use its antitrust laws to dictate the right size for banks, says Simon Johnson, now a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management in the May issue of The Atlantic magazine.

Most experts don't think a swine-flu outbreak by itself would eliminate many U.S. jobs or severely worsen the economy. MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson envisions only a "small hit" to economic activity in the United States -- just a few tenths of 1 percentage point.

The Godfather is a management book, writes MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Howard Anderson. "It puts Peter Drucker to shame; it makes Good to Great about as relevant as Mr. Rogers"

The Fed asked banks not to reveal their results during quarterly earnings announcements earlier this month. Regulators worry investors might punish banks without good news to announce. "Mostly, it was a buying-time strategy," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

In a congressional hearing this week, MIT economist Simon Johnson argued that Europe may have a weaker economic recovery than the United States because its bank assets are more concentrated in very large firms.

In this interview, MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson says, "The point is you don't throw banks into Chapter 11 because that is destructive. But you manage a bankruptcy process -- it's not nationalization, it's a government-run receivership.

Mike Grandinetti, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, is slated to speak at the Indus Entrepreneur TiECON East conference on May 21-22, 2009. This year's theme is `Sustainable Innovation.'

A recent study by MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas A. Kochan found that among those who garnered enough support for a union election, only one in five attempts actually saw a union contract from their employer.

Deflation is not just a Spanish concern. "It doesn't mean it will spread here to the U.S., but we need to look closely at Spain and other places to understand the dynamic," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson, "It's like the front line of a new virus outbreak."

MIT Sloan Prof. Howard Anderson says, "If I were a Sun customer, I was starting to get nervous about Sun. I was worried about their viability. I'm not worried about that anymore. I know that Oracle is going to be there."

Converting preferred stock into common stock could show lawmakers how far regulators will go to buy time for financial firms that need more capital, according to MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson. "In some ways, it's an appeal for money. The stress test is going to say they need capital. ... So at some level, they're communicating with Congress."

Studies by the MIT Sloan School's Erik Brynjolfsson and others show that organizations across a range of industries were able to take advantage of new IT capabilities only after making substantial changes.

"The strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown, and that's been characteristic of this crisis from the beginning," says MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo. "The traumatic events of 2008 will lead to potential damaging behavior on the part of investors unless they are aware of the hyperstimulated emotional state they're in."

A research study co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan found that only one in five cases that filed a National Labor Relations Board election petition ultimately reached a first contract between workers and management.

It was announced that Robert Faletra, CEO of Everything Channel, would speak at the third annual MIT Sloan Sales Conference on Friday, April 17 and participate on a CEO Roundtable moderated by MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Peter Kurzina.

According to MIT Professor Thomas Kochan, arbitrators make decisions that reflect what is occurring in comparable jurisdictions, and there is a widely shared norm among arbitrators that contract innovations arebest left to the parties to negotiate on their own.

A study co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Catherine Tucker suggests that there's a tradeoff between achieving fast adoption of electronic medical records and strong health-care privacy. "What we found was that privacy laws are getting in the way of hospitals trying to exchange information with each other," Tucker says.

"There is a clear correlation between economic distress and social distress," said Paul Osterman, professor of Human Resources and Management at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. "Underemployment is not good news for families."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson points out that a key gauge of investor confidence -- the market for credit default swaps -- shows that some investors have been making big bets that the risk is growing that struggling banks like Citigroup and Bank of America will collapse.

It was announced that remarks from MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson would be featured at the Smart Globalization conference, hosted by the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, on April 23.

Research by MIT Sloan Visiting Scholar M. Shayne Gary found that the "boom and bust" dynamics experienced by many businesses are caused by decision errors and biases that can be avoided.

President Obama recently selected former MIT Sloan Associate Prof. Lael Brainard as undersecretary for international affairs in the Treasury Department.

"We and others are funding start-ups as slowly as possible, or not at all," says Howard Anderson, a founding partner of Battery Ventures and a senior lecturer at MIT.

In this interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson states that "The IMF was set up as part of a U.S.-run postwar system and those traditions last. So, the IMF would always be extremely reluctant to do anything that would seem like criticism of any current administration."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says that despite the banking collapse, financial leaders such as Warren Buffett have retained surprising control over the government. "There's this general presumption that Wall Street knows best. But they may not know best for the taxpayer," he says.

In addition to his hefty agenda at home, Obama "is trying to prevent the rest of the world from imploding," says Simon Johnson, a former International Monetary Fund economist who is now a professor at MIT Sloan.

Europeans and Americans don't always see eye to eye -- and how to solve the global financial crisis is no exception. "The Europeans think there's a danger of overdoing it," says Simon Johnson, a former International Monetary Fund chief economist, now a professor at MIT Sloan.

MIT Sloan Prof. Edgar Schein has described two principles for organizations that want to transform to a new business process: the "survival anxiety" or guilt must be greater than the "learning anxiety."

Simon Johnson, economist and professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, says he's in favor of FDIC-style takeover resolutions, "which is different from coming in and taking the situation as is and putting in a crony."

The Washington Post today launches "The Hearing," a blog that discusses the key economic policy questions being debated in Washington. Simon Johnson and James Kwak will write the blog.

Simon Johnson, as a professor at MIT, says that the BRIC coordination is both noteworthy and a good sign. "If the BRIC came together, they'd be stronger relative to the G7."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson questions whether leading financial institutions have enough capital to muddle through, or if, instead, their solvency problems are so serious that we will experience continuing reduction in lending (often known as deleveraging), a deeper recession and a slower recovery.

MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson argues that the U.S. should invoke anti-trust laws to break up Wall Street, whose power poses a material threat to the American economy.

A blog posting reads: In a fascinating piece in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, outlines what he sees as the alarming influence of Wall Street firms over the American economy. He expounds on his thesis in our interview, making several points.

Joint Economic (9:30 a.m.): Holds a hearing on "Too Big to Fail or Too Big to Save? Examining the Systemic Threats of Large Financial Institutions." Joseph Stiglitz, 2001 Nobel Prize recipient, professor at Columbia University and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Simon Johnson, professor of entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management; and Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, testify.

The International Monetary Fund's forecast is a "bottom up" aggregation of macroeconomic views on specific countries, put together in a mutually consistent manner by experienced economists, blogs MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

An article that cites MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson's piece in The Atlantic is listed as one of the top stories of the week.

Do such rallies indicate anything more than investors desperate to find good news anywhere? Or do they suggest a real return of confidence? The editors at the NYT asked MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson for his analysis.

The IBM collaboration with MIT Sloan tracked the electronic communications of over 7,000 volunteers for three years. The aim of the work was to put a dollar amount on the effect of those electronic and virtual relationships.

MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson expounds on his recent article in The Atlantic, explaining how Wall Street and Washington, D.C., have come together to form the "most advanced oligarchy" in the world, why the stress tests on the nation's biggest banks fall short, how he thinks nationalization will take place, and why we're most likely to suffer an "L" shaped recovery.

A January MIT Sloan Management Review interview with MIT Sloan Prof. John Sterman is posted. It reads, "The personal isn't always part of the conversation, but I really do believe that we can't have a sustainable society if people are constantly overworked, burned out, sleep deprived, and don't have time for friendships or relationships or community, for participating in civil society.

A working paper co-authored by MIT Prof. Stephen Ross on contrarian traders is referenced.

"In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again)," writes MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson in this opinion piece.

While many advisors suggest holding tight until the stock market recovers, MIT Sloan visiting professor Zvi Bodie says investors need to face some painful facts. "Stocks are risky," says Bodie, "To rely on them for what you really need is a bad idea."

In better times, generous paychecks and computational challenges attracted physicists and engineers to Wall Street, but some experts now blame them for the crash. Andrew Lo, a financial engineer at MIT, discusses why Wall Street needs these number crunchers more than ever.

Simon Johnson writes, "Even before the G20 summit begins, world leaders have decided not to address the major questions of the day: how to adjust monetary policy around the world, how to save Europe from itself (difficult but still doable), and how to break the political and economic power of major banks."

In this opinion piece, co-writer Simon Johnson asserts, "The problem in the market today is that the prices demanded by the banks are much higher than the prices that private buyers (hedge funds, private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds) are willing to pay."

In this opinion piece co-written by Simon Johnson, he says, "The argument that AIG's traders are the people that we must depend on to save the United States economy is as weak and self-serving as it was in Thailand, Korea or Indonesia. AIG is essentially advocating survival of the weakest. Thankfully, the American people are not buying it."

LFM Senior Lecturer, Steven Spear, discusses the prospects for General Motors Corp.'s restructuring plan.

MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson spars with host Stephen Colbert Simon Johnson while explaining why America's economy resembles an unstable, emerging market.

The median net worth of the average black family is 10 times less than that of the average white family, a 2006 National Urban League report found. Those reasons make good sense, says Zvi Bodie, a visiting professor at MIT.

In this interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says that things in Great Britain and Europe are very bad.

"[Obama's] obviously got a lot of charisma and it's his first big meeting. And I think people tend to be very polite in these situations but there could also be a level of awkwardness there," says Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist who is now a professor at MIT.

Many manufacturing companies turn to outsourcing to save labor costs, however cost-saving measures are available right on their factory floors, according to research by MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer John Carrier.

Given the inevitability that these countries will have a growing influence, the London summit meeting is likely to be remembered "as the last hurrah for the U.S. and Europe rescuing the world economy," says Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT.

MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson is slated to share his view on the global financial crisis in a conference call hosted by Wall Street Access.

"There is a clear correlation between economic distress and social distress," says MIT Sloan Prof. Paul Osterman. "Underemployment is not good news for families."

Visible Measures, Inc. has raised $10 million in a Series C round bringing its total venture investment to $29.3 million --- with a 2006 seed round from five angel investors, including MIT Entrepreneurship Center Chairman Edward Roberts.

Increasingly during the current financial crisis, reporters have been banking on Simon Johnson of MIT Sloan for analysis and advice.

Andrew Lo, head of the MIT's Financial Innovation Laboratory, has merged behavioral and efficient markets theory using Darwinian biology. In his 'adaptive markets hypothesis', markets behave efficiently during periods of calm.

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Ken Zolot says "I am delighted to be joining the Kauffman Foundation team as a senior fellow as we look out over the economic future and embark on a new approach for increasing both the number of new companies formed and the chances of success for these ventures."

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo says, "Financial crises are an unfortunate but necessary consequence of modern capitalism. Financial losses are a byproduct of innovation, but disruptions and dislocations are greatly magnified when risks have been incorrectly assessed and incorrectly assigned."

"The political reality has changed," says Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who is now at MIT. "The new bailout climate is troubling. It could make it difficult for the Obama team to sell its plan."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johns believes the TALF program could help revive the consumer credit market, but at this point, "most Wall Street bankers would rather be attacked by wild dogs than take part."

"If I were running a country, I wouldn't want the IMF in a headline unless it's something like, 'Poland tells the IMF to stuff it,' says Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist who is now a professor at MIT."

Research by two MIT economists, Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester, found that a group using credit cards offered much more for items--in one case, more than twice as much--despite the fact that the experiment was arranged so as to make paying in cash easy and convenient"

Global open innovation marketplace InnoCentive, Inc. appointed MIT Sloan's Eric von Hippel to its advisory board.

In this interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Emeritus Jay Forrester speaks about the intersection of sustainability and management.

If it acquired Sun, I.B.M. "would unify those warring groups and make for a stronger front against Microsoft," says MIT Sloan Prof. Michael A. Cusumano.

MIT Sloan Prof. Glen Urban plans to analyze Web users' surfing habits to determine their thinking styles -- such as whether they are most influenced by verbal or visual messages or if they are more holistic or analytical -- and how to tailor ads accordingly.

MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang argues that what visitors see when they visit Shanghai is a mirage. He says that far from being a free-market paradise, Shanghai is the creation of a controlling communist government.

At the moment, equities are moving too early, says Andrew Lo, professor of finance at MIT. "We are not yet seeing any glimmers of an economic recovery."

MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang's book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, is reviewed. The book relates the epic tale of rural Chinese entrepreneurship between 1980 and 1990, in which striving businessmen built firms of substantial scale in the poorest provinces.

There's widespread agreement among the world's biggest countries that the current global financial and economic crises require global solutions. But as leaders from twenty of those countries gathered to offer solutions, that may be about all they can agree on. "I think they're pretty disunified," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson. "But they don't obviously want to present that too publicly."

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo is sharing a five-year, $22 million BofA grant with the Center for Future Banking at MIT's Media Lab. BofA is supporting research on technological and quantitative themes, such as data mining and behavioral economics.

Because Bank of America has rescinded job offers it had made to students requiring H-1B sponsorship, some fear students who have traditionally studied in the US to get a job in North America may go elsewhere. "There might be an inclination for people from around the world to vote with their feet," says MIT Sloan Dean David Schmittlein.

"I'm worried about what happens when you see that a Greece or an Ireland that might need bailouts," says Simon Johnson, an MIT economics professor and former IMF chief economist. "Where is the money going to come from?"

In an interview, MIT Sloan Prof. Paul Osterman discusses his new book, The Truth About Middle Managers and the plight of middle managers in a down economy.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "This country is very good at producing great engineers and recruiting them from all around the world. I'm predicting a wave of entrepreneurship. It will kick in right away, but you won't see the full impact for five years."

Letting insolvent institutions linger results in a "massive destruction in value [of the banks and a] looting in these companies by management," says MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson.

A study co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Damon Centola found that Internet users gravitate to the same social cliques online that they occupy in the real world. On the bright side, Centola says, cliquishness can actually be good for the world.

If the nation makes the switch from oil to natural gas to run its vehicles, will it simply be trading one foreign-dependent fuel for another? The answer is, probably. But to what extent is very hard to say. "Welcome to uncertainty," says Gordon Kaufman, a professor emeritus and oil and gas expert at the MIT Sloan School.

The 30 or so students taking MIT Sloan Prof. Fiona Murray's Innovation Team (I-team) course divide into three- or four-person teams that analyze inventions' potential and recommend a means of bringing it to market.

According to a government-sponsored survey, only about 17 percent of the nation's physicians are using computerized patient records. "This is really not a technology problem," observes MIT Sloan Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson. "It's a matter of incentives and market failure."

In testimony before the House Financial Services Committee last fall, MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo called for establishing a permanent, independent government agency modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board to study failures in the financial markets.

Simon Johnson, an MIT professor and former IMF chief economist, has been particularly smart and scary on both upcoming policy decisions and wider structural problems that still need to be addressed in the economy.

According to a recent study by MIT Sloan Prof. Jared Curhan, money played a lesser role in job satisfaction and retention.

MIT Sloan Prof. John Sterman and Dr. Bob Corell presented the Climate-Rapid Overview and Decision Support Simulator (C-ROADS), a user-friendly, interactive computer model of the climate system, in an event hosted by the American Meteorological Society. Senator John Kerry provided the introduction and context.

A chart by Simon Johnson of MIT shows the price you have to pay if you want insurance against a company such as Citigroup who is defaulting on a bond you might own. The higher the price, the worse shape the market thinks that company is in.

MIT Sloan Prof. Lester Thurow defines the American middle class as the group with incomes lying between 75% and 125% of the median.

MIT Sloan Prof. Leigh Hafrey is among faculty from leading business schools who have visited IIPM as part of its global exposure initiative.

According to Yasheng Huang, an economist at MIT, explicitly state-controlled firms make up half the economy. That probably understates the true effect, because even private firms understand that their existence depends on their relations with the state.

Arnold Barnett, an MIT professor and expert in accident statistics, says the risk of dying on a flight has not changed markedly by the recent crashes. The odds of a passenger dying on a jet flight in developed nations is less than one in 20 million, he says.

In an interview with Bill Moyers, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says that the U.S. financial system reminds him more of the embattled emerging markets he encountered in his time with the International Monetary Fund than that of a developed nation.

MIT's Simon Johnson says, "What many Indians really need is access to the kinds of technology, capital, infrastructure, that would allow them to increase productivity ten times. They would still be considerably poorer than we are, but this would lift hundreds of millions out of poverty and save many children's lives."

MIT's Simon Johnson says, "I'd like to give people money. And if they choose to save it, or use it to reduce their credit card debt, that would be fine with me. Remember that we have a pretty serious 'balance sheet' problem in this economy."

Last year, private-equity firm Lone Star Funds bought up nearly $6.7 billion of Merrill Lynch's credit debt obligations at 22 cents on the dollar. Could that be the private model the Treasury Department wants others to duplicate? Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, offers his insights.

MIT's Simon Johnson thinks that if the government didn't overpay for the bad assets, the "Bad Banks" idea has some merit.

MIT economist Simon Johnson warns that we're in for an 'L-shaped' recession that could, if we're lucky, become a 'bathtub-shaped' recession.

By the time regulators get a handle on one investment class, a slew of new ones have been created. "This is a cycle that goes on and on--and will continue to get repeated," says MIT Sloan Prof. Peter Wysocki.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says that it's definitely tougher to get a loan these days. "If you think of there being three types of borrowers: Really creditworthy, medium creditworthy, and somewhat dubious."

In his new book, The Truth About Middle Managers, MIT Sloan Prof. Paul Osterman writes, "Middle managers are the glue that holds organizations together.

"Most Wall Streeters agree that a large number of such bonds--amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps trillions--are worth far less than their stated, or par, value. How much less is central to resolving the financial crisis. "It's an informational nightmare," says Andrew Lo, director of MIT's Laboratory for Financial Engineering.

Simon Johnson says, "The main Chinese concern is with exchange rate policy rather than voting weights."

The Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and other banking regulators say they can convert the government's stock in the banks from preferred shares to common shares. "I don't think this is the end solution. It is a very haphazard way of trying to deal with the problems and simply postponing the inevitable -- more bank failures and takeovers by the FDIC," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

According to MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson, "It's one big trans-Atlantic money market out there, and these banks lend money to each other all the time. Deutsche Bank and UBS and Goldman Sachs and Citi are all intertwined."

Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist at MIT, says: "We are seeing the consequences of the lack of IMF resources. Programs are probably undersized because the IMF is worried about running out of money."

A study by MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Mark Kritzman measuring the long-term impact of all expenses involved in investing in a mutual fund or hedge fund is referenced.

"It's a European issue, but the U.S. can show leadership," said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at MIT.

"Given the magnitude of market movements caused by hedge funds in 2007 and 2008, it is now known that hedge funds are no longer a little niche industry for sophisticated investors and have come of age," says MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson expects more students will become entrepreneurs, especially those with a "tech story," mirroring a trend seen in 2001.

Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, says many people might take a dim view of the TALF program because it provided government subsidies to investors like hedge funds.

According to the new study by Ed Roberts and Charles Eesley entitled, "Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT," if the active companies founded by MIT graduates formed an independent nation, their revenues would make that nation at least the seventeenth largest economy in the world.

"It's very difficult to imagine that the manufacturers or the unions will give up what they need to give up if they each think the government, ultimately, will bail them out," says MIT Sloan Prof. Michael Cusumano. "The bottom line is that we should have let them go bankrupt a few months ago, because it is the only way to avoid months and months of posturing."

"My general sense is that lately, TSA has been kind of sensible. Frequent travelers understand the routine, and it's not so bad now," says MIT Sloan Prof. Arnold Barnett. In fact, aviation security in the U.S. has improved enough "to be on par with Western Europe, and that's a significant advance," he says.

"Variety is good for consumers," says MIT management professor Michael Cusumano. "At this point, the more competition Microsoft and Intel have, the better it is for the rest of us."

Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, now a professor at MIT, says the G7 was "asleep at the wheel", adding: "[The meeting] was a great opportunity for this group of leading industrial countries to reassert its leadership in the global economy."

A study co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Pierre Azoulay found that the loss of a superstar scientist can be surprisingly hard on collaborators left behind, who often experience a significant and permanent loss of productivity.

Even though small businesses employ about half of the nation's work force, they will get little aid from Washington in the near future according to MIT Sloan Prof. Howard Anderson. "The small businessman who looks to rely on the government for help is the one who isn't going to make it out of the recession."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "When I talk to experts, after about two minutes they say, 'We should just nationalize'. That tells me that the consensus is moving in this direction, and we are all just afraid to say it."

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Peter Senge's book, The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, is cited.

Simon Johnson, an economist at MIT, estimates that the United States banks have a capital shortage of $500 billion. "In a more severe recession, it will take $1 trillion or so to properly capitalize the banks"

Investors have no faith in banks' own reporting of their financial health, says MIT Sloan Prof. Jeffrey Ng. "Even when banks report positive numbers, investors still have little confidence that these assets have any significant value."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says the term "depression" refers to a significant contraction that lasts around five years.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says that to be successful, the Obama administration's program needed to be simpler and more transparent than the stabilization measures taken by the Bush administration under the unpopular TARP program. "Unless you are transparent, you'll get a massive backlash against the scheme."

Edgar Schein, a professor of management at MIT, gained fame in the 1960s for his work on the concept of 'career anchors'. For Schein, people are generally motivated by eight anchors - priorities that define how they see themselves and their work.

President Obama unveiled his plan to prohibit firms getting emergency aid from paying top execs more than $500,000 annually in cash. "This plan doesn't look very meaningful," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson. "The issue at these companies is the lack of effective owners, and things like pay limits don't change that.

MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Malone, director of the CCI, says that applications like Wikipedia, Linux, and YouTube hint at the potential of collective intelligence. Malone believes similar developments could improve doctors' diagnoses and scientists' ability to address climate change.

"The advantage of customization is not as great as it used to be," says Donald Rosenfield, director of the MIT Leaders for Manufacturing program. "But the direct model still has some advantages."

In a live online chat, Simon Johnson of MIT says, "Nationalization means different things to different people, or different countries. In its pure form, it means government ownership and control, of a firm or bank."

"You're going to see a lot more rhetoric out of leaders against protectionism, but what really matters is their policies," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson. "And there are worrying signs right now that they may not be so serious about stopping protectionism."

"Many forget that it is a basic right in America for workers to unionize. It's easy to lose sight after years of Reagan and Bushes, where union activity has been all but considered un-American. "People need them more than ever," says Thomas Kochan, an MIT professor of work and employment relations and a strong union supporter who spoke at the meeting.

Effective IT governance translates into noticeably stronger earnings, says MIT Sloan Senior Research Scientist Peter Weill. Weill co-conducted a survey of CIOs of 256 U.S. and foreign companies and found that outfits whose boards made sure they had strong IT governance and exercised it generated profits 20% higher than those with similar business strategies but weak IT oversight.

"You're going to see a lot more rhetoric out of leaders against protectionism, but what really matters is their policies," said Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and a professor of economics at MIT.

Yasheng Huang, a professor at MIT, says corruption and a deeply flawed model of economic reform had led to a collapse in personal income growth and a wealth gap that could leave China looking like a Latin American economy.

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Peter Senge, says, "Failure to sustain significant change recurs again and again despite substantial resources committed to the change effort (many are bankrolled by top management), talented and committed people 'driving the change,' and high stakes."

MIT Sloan students competed in the 2008-2009 New England Research Investment Challenge on 2/10/09.

"They must disclose fully exactly what the government is buying, or insuring, or providing financing for," says Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

"Paul Osterman's 'The Truth About Middle Managers' paints a portrait of business as it is lived by the non-CEO class -- that is, the rest of us."

MIT Sloan Prof. Antoinette Schoar was awarded the Ewing Marion Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "If you clean up the banks' balance sheets and create some better banks to resume lending to the real economy, that's the heart of the strategy".

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo says, "So when you're making money, you're actually engaged in a kind of activity that generates a drug-induced stupor in much the same way that having a few drinks or being on cocaine would actually make you relax and be a lot less concerned about risk."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson describes his testimony to Senate Budget Committee on 1/29/09 in which he noted that the Senators expressed frustration that while substantial further amounts will most likely be needed to shore up the banking system, little has been done for the underlying issues in housing.

Former MIT Sloan faculty member Jeremy Stein will is slated to take a position with the Obama administration.

Popular applications such as Wikipedia, Linux and YouTube only scratch the surface of what is possible with collective intelligence, says Thomas Malone, director of the CCI and professor at the MIT Sloan.

In an opinion piece, MIT Sloan Simon Johnson says that the government has already essentially guaranteed the system's liabilities, bank assets at market value must be massively lower than liabilities and a severe global recession may yet turn into the Greatest Depression.

Simon Johnson is quoted in an NYT article about steps the Obama team can take to resolve the banking crisis.

MIT Sloan Dean Emeritus Lester Thurow predicted decades ago that in the 21st Century there was bound to be "historical shifts" in wealth away from nations whose source of wealth and power is natural resources and physical capital, to those who possess "brain power and imagination."

MIT Sloan Prof. Daniel Nyhart passed away on December 6 at the age of 77. A memorial service is planned for March 7 in the MIT chapel.

MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang says the modernist skyline of Shanghai's Pudong marks the moment when things started to go wrong. He argues that the economic crisis is exposing weaknesses in China's interventionist, top-down style of capitalism.

The hiring of former MIT Sloan economist Fischer Black is described as Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's most influential decision of his caree.

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo describes a confrontation in 2004 between the head of Lehman and its chief risk officer.

MIT Sloan Prof. Edgar Schein says: "We go through cycles. Every few years we rediscover formal planning, then we rediscover the importance of people, and then in another few years we discover cost control."

The U.K. government "is gambling that the global economy improves and they don't have to go all the way to nationalize, but that is the direction in which they are heading," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson believes it will take $1 trillion to really do the trick -- money, presumably, the government will get back once the banking system is healthy again, and private capital comes in to replace the government's capital. "It's not rocket science," Johnson says. "When you do a recap, you need overkill. But then, you also have to take the bad assets off the books."

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo, chairman and chief scientific officer of AlphaSimplex, says, "AlphaSimplex is excited to be working with Thomson Reuters in bringing the NewsScope Event Indices to market.

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo has demonstrated that if stock traders make a series of apparently good picks, the dopamine released into their brains creates a stupor that causes them to under perceive danger ahead.

"The government has got itself in a position where they have to do something, and they have to help close this deal, so they have to provide additional subsidy to Bank of America," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson.

A paper by MIT Sloan Prof. Kristin Forbes stating that foreigners are willing to invest in the United States because they have less developed financial markets at home is referenced.

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Peter Senge will kick off the 2009 Three Talks series of speaking forums by discussing how senior managers can make their organizations more adaptive to change.

"The better we can understand how fear and greed are represented in individuals and how they react to market circumstances, the more likely we are to be able to avoid crises of these sorts," says MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo.

A union contract study co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan is referenced. The study found that of 22,000 organizing campaigns between 1999 and 2004, only 38 percent of new unions get a contract within a year.

"The days of the PND as a separate device category are numbered," says Michael Davies, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan.

In a study published in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo contends that too often what passes for risk management at many financial companies is really risk measurement.

Without root-and-branch political reform, MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang argues in his new book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, China faces "monumental odds" in rebalancing an urban, state-driven economy where consumption has been sacrificed on the altar of investment.

MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang says, "Rural China represents a vast pool of entrepreneurial capabilities and substantial business opportunities."

MIT Sloan's Anjali Sastry says her favorite gadgets are Skype, a Nokia E71 with a built-in 3G modem and a Flip Mino camera for video blogging.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "We had a feeling that we had understood how bad it was... but now people fear the losses are going to be much greater than anticipated."

The MIT Sloan School of Management has begun supplying free teaching materials, including case studies and videos, through its latest website, MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR). Most business schools, including Sloan's local rival, Harvard, charge for their case studies and teaching packages.

MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang writes about the hype surrounding economic decoupling in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

In an opinion piece MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson lists five things that beyond Mr. Obama's control as he formulates an economic stimulus package.

Even as companies look for ways to slim down, they need to take care not to cut too deep warns MIT Sloan Prof. Paul Osterman.

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo says some investors may have been aware of the fraudulent investments of Bernard Madoff's Ponzie scheme, but still chose to participate.

MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang discusses how China's economic reforms will affect the country as the world heads into recession.

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo says he sees human psychology very much at work in the history of market of prices. "I view that as a very rich fossil record of the different kinds of individuals that have engaged in these kinds of market dynamics."

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson explains why countries may or may not create government-funded economic jump starts.

MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan says that Congress should be able help carry over the automakers in the short run, and help them restructure for the long run.

MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says trust could be a factor in some countries if the government was responsible both for running insurance programs and compiling the data that would trigger payouts.

"When we make money, the same reward circuitry [in the brain] gets stimulated as when you're on cocaine," says MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo.

According to a study co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Ernst Berndt, the growth, size and composition of prescription drug spending is likely to change dramatically in future years, raising significant healthcare policy implications.

"Hedge funds have become such a big factor in financial markets that in order to make sure your students' knowledge base is current, you really have to cover hedge funds somewhere in the curriculum," says MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew W. Lo.

In regards to the timing of President-elect Obama's proposed economic stimulus, MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson says, "I think in this case it is right. A lot of U.S. infrastructure is run down. Compared to other rich countries, the U.S. is lagging behind".

The growth, size and composition of prescription drug spending is likely to change dramatically in future years, raising significant healthcare policy implications, according to co-author Ernst Berndt, professor of applied economics, MIT Sloan.

"I guarantee that over the next couple of years you are going to see lots of papers on banking crises and financial blowups," says Andrew Lo, a financial economist at MIT's Sloan School.

MIT Sloan's Michael Cusumano believes that the U.S. automakers should file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

One of the few economists of note to advocate this policy out loud is Simon Johnson, who left the chief economist post at the International Monetary Fund earlier this year and is now a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Johnson believes that only a significant nominal inflation -- which will mean negative real interest rates -- will provide sufficient monetary stimulus to reflate the economy.

"Everyone wants to export their way out of this" recession, says MIT Sloan's Simon Johnson.

According to MIT Sloan Prof. Yasheng Huang, China has not seen a gradual transition from state control to capitalism over the last three decades. Instead, the real boom in entrepreneurship came in the 1980s when controls in rural areas were relaxed.

Online retailers who open a physical store during the holiday shopping season could see more than a 15% decrease in online sales, according to a study co-authored by MIT Sloan Prof. Duncan Simester.

The Fed is buying assets and the money for them is not coming from its balance sheet. "The Fed doesn't like to talk about this," says MIT Sloan Prof. Simon Johnson. "They think it will scare people."

MIT Sloan Prof. Tom Allen says, "The way people interact together is influenced by both organizational structure and space. If you bring the two together, then managers have a more effective way of structuring their interactions that leads to innovation."

MIT Sloan Associate Prof. Fiona Murray says PhD science students are often shy and introverted compared with the more confident MBAs. Most scientists have worked alone and so initially struggle with team work and the notion there are not always "right" answers in business.

The role of technology entrepreneurs in rebuilding the U.S. energy economy was the main theme at an Xconomy forum, which was moderated by MIT Sloan's Bill Aulet and included MIT Sloan Prof. Donald Lessard as a panelist.

MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan had a clear message for chastened automobile executives as they try to salvage their efforts to win support in Washington: Set "aggressive and achievable" targets to produce energy-efficient vehicles and lay out cost-saving plans that go well beyond further cuts and wages and benefits.

"Chrysler is in a different situation from the other two [automakers]," says MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan. "It doesn't have the resources to invest in research and development for hybrids and other fuel-efficient vehicles, and it's further behind the others. I think Chrysler has to find a merger partner."

A study conducted by MIT Sloan Prof. Emilio Castilla indicates that even when women and minorities receive the same starting salaries and performance ratings for doing the same job under the same supervisor, their merit increases are smaller than those awarded to their white male counterparts.

MIT Sloan Prof. John Sterman's systemic perspective of healthcare plans is referenced.