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The MIT Sloan Spotlight provides the latest news and features from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Read more from the MIT Sloan Spotlight, including archived articles >>
MIT Sloan welcomed nine new and seven visiting professors to campus over the fall. In their first few months, they've gotten to know the School and the community — and we've gotten to know a bit about them. They represent a variety of academic and cultural backgrounds, but share an excitement about becoming part of the energy and collaborative spirit that are so prevalent at MIT Sloan.
These 16 faculty members are teaching in the areas of behavioral and policy sciences, finance, strategy, operations research, and economics and management. In addition to their specific experience, they also bring personal philosophies about their teaching and their research.
For Harborne Stuart, a visiting professor from Columbia University teaching the core strategy course, teaching is a “fruitful collision” between teachers and the students who will be applying what they learn in their future careers. “For many teachers, there is too much of a disconnect between the research they do and what they teach,” says Stuart, but “our students are our proxy to the real world.”
Assistant Professor of Accounting Ewa Sletten also thinks about how teaching and research counterbalance one another. To her, teaching yields “immediate rewards,” while one must “wait for the returns” during the more drawn-out and methodical process of research.
In addition to the appeal of teaching and student interactions, many of the new faculty members were looking forward to collaborating with their colleagues at MIT Sloan and across the Institute.
“MIT has a very collegial feeling,” says Sletten. Her thoughts were echoed by Jorge Vera, a visiting professor from the Catholic University in Chile, who was drawn by the School's reputation for research. “This was a good opportunity to meet colleagues in my research area,” says Vera. “MIT Sloan gives so many opportunities to explore and opens so many new areas of knowledge.”
Like her fellow faculty newcomers, Pai-Ling Yin, a new assistant professor of strategy, is glad to find herself here. “[MIT] is a good fit for my interests. ... MIT is a good fit for my style.”
Photo: New Assistant Professor of Accounting Ewa Sletten says teaching and research counterbalance one another.
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Snow may still be covering the ground in Cambridge, but the MIT Sloan community is certainly not hibernating. The event-packed spring semester kicks off the first week in February — and things don't wind down until graduation in June.
First up is the 2nd Annual MIT Sloan Sports Business Conference on February 9. Building on the success of last year's event, this year's agenda features key decision makers from the 2007 professional football, baseball, hockey, and basketball champions in a session entitled, “Defending the title.” Other speakers include Bill James, senior baseball operations advisor for the Boston Red Sox; Rick Carlisle, former Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers coach; and Wycliffe Grousbeck, managing partner, governor, and CEO of the Boston Celtics.
Just as things start warming up on campus in late March, students scatter across the globe as part of the popular spring trips. Trip destinations this year include Korea, Brazil, and Ghana. In addition, the inaugural China Lab takes MBA students to China to partner with Chinese business students and small entrepreneurial ventures. The Lab aims to strengthen the participating firms while providing the MBAs with unique real-world experience.
In May, after almost a year's worth of polishing up their business plans, participants in the renowned MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition find out how ideas faired. In its 18-year history, the Competition has helped launch over 85 companies, including recent IPOs Akamai, net.Genesis, and C-Bridge Internet Solutions.
Then it's on to the Sloan Follies, graduation, or summer internships. For more on these and other spring activities, visit the MIT Sloan events calendar.
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Improving a country's economic condition is only one factor in stemming infectious diseases in developing countries, says Dr. Jim Yong Kim. Efforts must also include investments in prevention and treatment and region-specific implementation plans.
Kim spoke to the MIT Sloan community as part of the Dean's Innovative Leader Series. The series offers MIT Sloan students and the broader MIT community an opportunity to hear first-hand the practical, real-world experiences and perspectives of some of the most visible and successful global business leaders.
Currently chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, Kim has extensive experience working to improve health in developing countries, including a three-year appointment with the World Health Organization (WHO). He is a professor at both Harvard Medical School and Harvard's School of Public Health.
With ten million people dying needlessly each year from preventable and treatable diseases, Kim drew upon his work in battling tuberculosis and HIV to illustrate the challenges and opportunities in the field.
He said setting up general medical clinics have proved more effective than clinics targeting specific diseases because they yield the long-term benefit of improving the overall health of the local population. Moreover, he said patients shy away from disease-specific clinics in countries where there is a stigma associated with that disease.
Kim said logistical factors such as expensive pharmaceuticals and implementation bottlenecks hamper efforts, and the impact of social and cultural factors are hard to parse from country to country.
He called for a new discipline in medical education focused on the delivery of health care. Such a discipline, he said, would help providers understand the complexities of disease treatment and prevention on a global scale.
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It's not enough just to align your IT expenditures with business objectives, according to the latest MIT Sloan Management Review. You also have to contain the complexity of IT systems, applications, and other infrastructure.
In “Avoiding the Alignment Trap in IT,” authors David Shpilberg, Steve Berez, Rudy Puryear, and Sachin Shah note that for years “alignment” has been the mantra of executives seeking to maximize IT effectiveness. But amid this emphasis on alignment, a “set of Byzantine overlapping systems” can multiply and undercut company objectives.
“We've seen firsthand how IT organizations provide dedicated resources, such as application developers and data centers, to each business unit — in order to improve alignment,” the authors write. “They develop customized best-of-breed solutions designed to serve each business's unique needs. Meanwhile, they ignore the need for standardization and upgrading of legacy systems. They create a labyrinth of new complexity on top of the old, making system enhancements and infrastructure improvements ever more difficult to implement and leaving significant potential scale benefits untapped.”
The solution? Start by simplifying, write the authors.
“Any company's first step should be to focus relentlessly on reducing complexity rather than increasing it,” they write. “That sounds like an unexceptionable nostrum, except that the cheapest and quickest way to respond to individual demands for improvements from business units is almost always to do something that increases complexity. Reducing complexity means developing and implementing companywide standards.”
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Fortune comes to those who are prepared, Gideon Gartner told MIT Sloan students and faculty gathered for the first-ever Distinguished Entrepreneur Lecture Series.
Founder of three information technology and stock brokerage firms, Gartner, SB ’56, SM ’60, said he could never have predicted the path of his successful career, but each of his successes was built on a previous endeavor.
His experiences at IBM led to a new venture, which led to Wall Street, which led to Gartner Inc., and so forth. “Preconditions are the key; set up strong preconditions, and serendipity will come your way,” said Gartner.
Gartner, who is perhaps best known as the founder of the Gartner Group, an information technology research and advisory group, started his career in the computer business with IBM. Using what he learned there, he moved to Oppenheimer and Company.
In 1979 he took a risk and founded the Gartner Group, Inc. He went on to found two other companies: the Gartner Securities Corporation in 1984 and the Giga Information Group, which he formed in 1994, serving as chairman and CEO until 1999.
Gartner offered pointed advice to the would-be entrepreneurs in the audience.
“Imitate when necessary, but evolve and improve the ideas,” he said. “Always try to make things better and stand out from the crowd. If you are different, people will notice you.”
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