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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 Management Review is listed among the sponsors of Opportunity Green (OG), a sustainability forum facilitating the exchange of responsible information, ideas and new business models being held on November 7 and 8 at UCLA's Anderson School of Management.

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.

Stephen D. Immerman, who holds an MIT Sloan Executive Education Management certificate, has been named president of Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA. Immerman is also the former MIT Senior Associate Dean for Student Life.

Now in its seventh year, the 2009 MIT Sloan CFO Summit will take place November 19 and bring together more than 500 CFOs and senior financial executives from around the world.

Oliver E. Williamson, a 1955 graduate of MIT Sloan who went on to do pioneering research on the internal organization of businesses, was a recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for economics.

MIT Sloan alumnus Frank Reynolds was awarded $435,678 by a federal court jury because the University of Pennsylvania dropped the name "Wharton" from his degree program.

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.

MIT Sloan has a highly structured interview process, and it is designed to extract particular details from applicants, such as their ability to nurture talent. If the interviewer gets through the interview and you have not revealed those facts, he will be unimpressed, states MIT Sloan Director of MBA Admissions Rod Garcia.

...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."

Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey McCormick announced the engagement of their daughter Meagan Schmitt McCormick to MIT Sloan student Thomas Horace Martin Jr.

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."

MIT is planning to launch a student-led online publication focused on entrepreneurship by the end of the year, a leader of the effort tells Xconomy. The fledgling publication will be called the MIT Entrepreneurship Review (MITER) and will aim to serve as a resource for entrepreneurs and to raise the already high profile of the prestigious school in the business world. The publication is being organized much like a law review, seeking student editors, based on merit, to provide editorial content, says Eduard Viladesau, a graduate student at MIT Sloan School of Management, who is one of the founders of MITER.

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.

MIT Sloan student Leland Cheung decided to run for the Cambridge City Council after reading about the incumbents and deciding that the students of Cambridge-who comprise one fourth of the total population-did not have a voice in local government. "The mindset of the city toward the students shouldn't be 'They're only here for four years,' but rather 'We only have four years to convince them to stay'."

Neopart LLC has announced the hiring of MIT Sloan alumnus Ray Melleady as vice president of parts management services.

The MIT Sloan Management Review has released a comprehensive survey of sustainability practices and trends in business including interviews, case studies, and insights into how businesses world-wide view the growing field.

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.

In this interview, MIT Sloan alumnus Deep Joshi says, "The concept of professionals working in villages to promote livelihoods was pretty audacious in the eighties. In those days you only had a few people who thought that way, like Bunker Roy and Anil Sadgopal."

In this Q and A, MIT Sloan alumnus John Krafcik, chief executive of Hyundai Motor America, discussed the auto industry, Hyundai's performance, and its foray into new segments.

MIT Sloan alumnus K. Stuart Peskin, CFA, has joined Invesco's Institutional Sales and Client Service team as managing director for client service.

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.

TCS Chief S. Ramadorai stepped down as the company's CEO and managing director. Ramadorai attended the MIT Sloan Executive Development Program.

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 announced the creation of the Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSH), a research center established at MIT in collaboration with the Portland Cement Association and Ready Mixed Concrete Research and Education Foundation. Researchers from MIT Sloan are expected to participate in the CSH's research activities.

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.

However deeply computers may have embedded themselves into modern life, there are still millions of people for whom they remain a challenge. For these Americans, finding a new job during a time of high unemployment can be especially difficult. No one knows how many they are, because there is almost no credible research to assess Americans' overall computer skills. Economists at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who highlighted the lack of data, lamented recently that researchers have, at best, "only cloudy information on technology use" and "levels and kinds of job skill requirements."

"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.

The heart of the Legatum Center is its fellows, who must already be enrolled in a graduate program at MIT to be eligible for a fellowship. Many are earning MBA degrees at the Sloan School of Management.

A study by MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group of more than 1,500 corporate executives worldwide found that more than 70 per cent believe their company has not developed a clear business case for addressing sustainability. However, the research also points out that for those companies that have integrated a strategy of sustainability, there are substantial rewards.

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."

While throwing together a few thousand geniuses would breed innovation at any university, the growth of the startup success rate at MIT is due, in part, to the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Found in 1990 by entrepreneur and investor Edward Roberts, the center nurtures potential corporate superstars. It brings together money-minded students at the university's Sloan School of Management and the brains in the science labs. "MIT is a phenomenal hotbed of entrepreneurship," says Matt DeBergalis, a 2000 graduate who co-founded the online political action committee ActBlue in 2004.

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.

"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 a speech at the University of Texas, MIT Sloan alumnus Clay Johnson, former U.S. Office of Management and Budget deputy director, shared his past experiences and offered his audience tips on becoming successful public sector professionals.

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."

Rose and Sky announced that MIT Sloan alumnus Michael Baer has been appointed to the Rose and Sky Europe Fund's board.

Hudson Library and Historical Society had announced it would host MIT Sloan alumnus Ray Leach, CEO of JumpStart Inc., on Sept. 29 as part of its fall 2009 Entrepreneurship Series.

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."

Chrysalis Ventures announced that MIT Sloan alumna Elizabeth Rounsavall was promoted to director of research and analytics.

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.

MIT Sloan alumna Laurie Baird, director of technology partnerships for Turner Broadcasting Systems Inc., is among the 2009 Women of the Year Technology finalists.

MIT Sloan alumnus Morrie Eisenberg has been named VP of Corporate Development at vAuto, a provider of used-car inventory management systems for the nation's franchised and independent car dealers.

Jessica Mazonson, an MIT Sloan MBA was a recipient of the prestigious Siebel Scholarship.

MIT Sloan alumna Samantha Joseph of Hingham was slated to join 179 of the world's top female skydivers in an attempt to set a women's world record in formation skydiving to raise money for breast cancer research.

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."

A 3-D digital ear-canal scanner that promises to improve on the way hearing aids are currently made is being commercialized with the help of MIT's i-Teams program, which pairs Sloan School of Management experts with technical brainiacs.

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.

MIT Sloan School of Management was the first business school to allow MBA applicants to submit either their GRE or GMAT score as part of their application. Rod Garcia director of MBA admissions at MIT Sloan, says the goal was to expand the school's applicant pool to include non-traditional applicants, such as students who majored in humanities and social sciences.

"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."

Charles Gammal , an MIT Sloan MBA was a recipient of the prestigious Siebel Scholarship.

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.

MIT Sloan alumnus Gray Adams married Hilary Anne Cosgrave in Kelowna, British Columbia on September 13.

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.

Donald R. Lehmann was honored with the Seventh Annual Buck Weaver Award for Marketing, which was presented by MIT Sloan School of Management and General Motors Corp. Established in 2003, the award recognizes individuals who have made important contributions to the advancement of theory and practice in marketing science.

The collaboration between the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and MIT Sloan is referenced.

Unpredictable markets and ongoing turmoil require CFOs to learn how to thrive in the new world order, the theme of this year's MIT Sloan CFO Summit on November 19.

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."

When a bridge over a river collapses, the engineers who built the bridge have to take responsibility. But typically, critics call for improvement and smarter, better-trained engineers - not fewer of them. The same pattern seems to apply to financial engineers. At MIT, the Sloan School of Management is starting a one-year master's in finance this fall because the field has become too complex to be adequately covered as part of a traditional MBA program, and because of student demand. The new finance program, MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo noted, had 179 applicants for 25 places.

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."

In an opinion piece, MIT Sloan alumnus Saad Fazil writes, "The pace of innovation in voice applications has not caught up with pace of advancements in software applications. But it could."

A group of 19 students from MIT Sloan visited Costa Rica last week to learn more about the country's culture, people, and business institutions (Spanish language only).

The MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship Development program is described as leveraging MIT's culture of high-tech entrepreneurship to help entrepreneurs, corporate venturing executives, and others involved in entrepreneurial environments learn what they need to develop ideas into successful businesses, and how to increase entrepreneurial opportunities in their corporations, institutions, and regions.

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.

MIT Sloan alumnus Robert Thirsk writes about his experiences aboard the International Space Station. "I haven't driven a car in three months, and yet I've traveled 70 million kilometers. I've watched 16 sunrises and sunsets in a single day. I've sipped coffee out of a bag through a straw, and squeezed macaroni and cheese from a package into my mouth."

Seo Jung-don, president of Sungkyunkwan University, stated that a key pillar in the growth of that university should lie in promoting its global MBA program in collaboration with MIT Sloan.

Second-year MBA Carter Dunn writes, "In India, only about 10 percent of people are covered by insurance and as a result almost all medical expenses are borne out of pocket. What this means is that there are powerful market forces driving the down the cost of care in India. This is in direct contrast to the US."

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."

After a courageous battle against cancer, at the age of 85, MIT Sloan alumnus Harry Winters Buchanan III passed away on August 28 in Bethlehem, PA.

Former MIT Sloan graduate student Beverly Kay's book, Love 'Em Or Lose 'Em - Getting Good People to Stay, is reviewed.

"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."

MIT Sloan alumnus David Edery, co-author of Changing the Game: How Video Games are Transforming the Future of Business, was appointed by SMERC Games to the company's advisory board and will serve as an executive consultant in charge of independent game development.

"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."