Business News

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A new course in electronic commerce at Purdue University's Krannert Graduate School of Management is preparing students to do business in the 21st century.

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The University of Evansville in Indiana as being cited as a case study of how a university on the brink of disaster 10 years ago has turned itself into an academically and financially sound institution. Educational Securities, Inc., is using the University of Evansville's successful 10-year turnaround as the first document in its just-released Best Practices briefing series, designed to help other educational institutions overcome similar problems.

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Johns Hopkins sociologist John Holland has been working since the 1950s on the theory of career choices, why people choose the jobs they choose.

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Some good news is out this week for the fast food industry. A comparison of data on fast-food consumption and rising obesity has found a surprising wrinkle: There doesn't appear to be much of a link, at least in terms of large populations.

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Consumers can expect "unimagined innovation" as electric utility deregulation brings competitive suppliers to local distribution companies, Cornell University economist Richard E. Schuler is predicting. New technologies, materials and the packaging of all telecommunications and energy services in one super cable are possible outcomes of healthy competition among rival utility providers, he says.

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State Street Global Advisors (SSgA), the third largest investment manager in the country, has announced a strategic partnership with the Boston College Graduate School of Management. Graduate business and finance students will get career training, and SSgA can seek high-potential investment professionals through this partnership.

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Managers and professionals re-employed after losing their job often don't replace the expected income of their previous job with their new earnings. For women and older workers, the income losses were even greater.

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The wrong kind of shoes could spike that big deal you hope to close on the links this afternoon. Golfers wearing metal golf spikes are banned from 1,600 golf courses nationwide, according to Kelly Elbin, vice president of marketing for Softspikes, the leading manufacturer of alternative spikes.

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What do entrepreneurs do in running their own businesses? And how does this differ from what business managers do? These questions are answered in an ongoing study by Brooke Envick, professor in free enterprise at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas.

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Everybody says she would quit her job if she won the lottery. But you also hear stories about people who keep their jobs and enjoy their wealth on weekends. What's the reality? A recent survey of nearly 900 mangement professionals found that 39 percent would stop working completely if they had enough money, 35 percent would continue working--if they could change jobs--and only 26 percent would keep the jobs they have.

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(San Diego) -- For the second year, The College of Business Administration at San Diego State University has been named one of the "25 Best Business Schools for Entrepreneurs," according to the September issue of SUCCESS magazine.

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Small businesses are more likely than large employers to be guilty of discriminatory hiring practices where black job seekers are concerned, according to a study by a Michigan State University economist. The study of some 3,000 employers in four major U.S. cities indicates that small businesses are much less likely to hire blacks than are larger businesses.

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Wider acceptance of computer technology is revolutionizing the business of food manufacturing. A Purdue University professor says the results are safer, more consistent products that save money for companies and make consumers happy.

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Businesses are discovering hidden markets for their products through a new market research technique called Customer Case Research. The new technique borrows methods used by detectives and investigative reporters to discover what drives customer purchases, according to a Chicago marketing consultant and a DePaul University professor who have co-written a marketing journal article on CCR.

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The guidelines used to evaluate on-the-job injury prevention programs often use the weakest available measurement criteria, according to published research led or co-led by Dr. Craig Zwerling, University of Iowa associate professor of preventive medicine and environmental health.

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Secretary of Energy Federico PeÃ’a and senior executives from the Big Three automakers, the IBM Corporation and Northwest aluminum, transportation and electric utility companies will gather for a summit in Seattle later this month to discuss the development of technologies needed to create motor vehicles of the future, including cars that get 70 to 80 miles to the gallon.

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What started as an effort to make laboratory experiments more interesting and meaningful for undergraduate mechanical engineering students has blossomed into a productive partnership between Purdue University and a growing list of national industries. Students have worked on design problems with the Ford Motor Co., General Electric, General Motors, Michelin Tire Corp., Procter & Gamble, and Lockheed-Martin Missiles and Space.

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Robert Jarrow, professor of finance, economics and investment management at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, has been named the IAFE/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year by the International Association of Financial Engineers (IAFE). He was cited not only for his cutting edge research, but for his work as an educator.

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Parents can add credit cards to the list of grades, peer pressure and other things they worry about when their son or daughter leaves for college. A Purdue University professor says parents need to discuss credit management with their children before the students head off to school, even if the children don't have credit cards. She says chances are good they'll get one at school.

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Twenty-six Vietnamese senior executives are in the U.S. to experience capitalism in action, thanks to a partnership with the world's oldest graduate school of business. The program participants include senior level executives from both state-owned and private Vietnamese corporations. The Amos Tuck School of Business partnered with the Hanoi School of Business so Vietnamese executives can learn U.S. management styles and market-based business skills.

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A study done at the University of North Texas shows that a large percentage of bed and breakfast proprietors are unaware of current regulations, particularly those at the county and municipal level, where most of the regulations involving health, fire codes and zoning are enacted.

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Job hopping by Asian managers at rates of 15-18 percent a year costs U.S. multinational companies (MNCs) in the region time, money and key business contacts, according to a recently released study by management professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School.

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Cornell/Yale study finds Graduate Record Examination (GRE) fails to predict success or failure in graduate school for psychology and probably other fields as well.

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Employees often don't tell their supervisors about sexual harassment because they do not believe that justice will result, according to a study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School.

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Successful entrepreneurship in the technology field is the subject of a meeting to be held Sept. 18, 1997, at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. Expert speakers will be Jerry Yang, co-founder of YAHOO, the name of the widely successful computer product that facilitates searches on the Internet, and Robert Koski, an engineer and businessman who founded Sun Hydraulics Corp.

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What kinds of businesses offer the best service to their customers? Hotel and retail companies, according to a new international study conducted in part by a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hillπs Kenan-Flagler Business School.

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Calling the proposed tobacco settlement's advertising provisions "a mere inconvenience to the tobacco industry," the American Lung Association and a volunteer task force of advertising and marketing experts today issued recommendations for ways to end tobacco advertising and marketing to adolescents.

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In the supermarket business, margins are razor-thin compared to the profits enjoyed by other retailers. Stanford Business School Marketing and Management Science Professor Rajiv Lal went shopping to find out why the low price leaders who offer the cheapest daily prices do as well as they do.

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At a recent conference on "data mining" at the University of Illinois at Chicago, experts from around the world witnessed a first in the use of the next generation of network communications. The demonstration of data mining--the automatic search for patterns, asociations, and changes in large databases--is important because it showed data mining shows data mining can be done over a wide geographic area.

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"Most issues that relate to families also relate to family- owned businesses," says Doug Sprenkle, Purdue University professor of child development and family studies. When problems in the workplace involve the family relationships of the participants, standard business advice is of limited value, he says.

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Government social welfare programs have helped create a less secure labor environment for the typical American worker by inadvertently harming family values, according to a new study by two University of Notre Dame economists.

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Sales managers have low expectations when African-Americans apply for professional sales jobs, but according to a study conducted at the University of South Florida, that can have a paradoxical effect: interested, qualified African-Americans may be seen as even more qualified than equally-qualified Caucasians.

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Preparing for marriage is crucial, but a Purdue University expert on family budgeting suggests that the slogan "look before you leap" may be just as important when it comes to divorce.

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Dr. Sidney Harris has begun his duties as the new dean of the College of Business Administration at Georgia State University, effective July 15. The 47-year-old Atlanta native is the university's first African-American dean and represents only one of about 3 percent of African-American business school deans in the country.

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Dr. Michael L. Hergert has been appointed Dean of the College of Business Administration at San Diego State University effective July 1. The announcement was made by SDSU Vice President for Academic Affairs Ronald Hopkins.

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Universities nationwide are using new tools to prepare future executives for a complex business environment. It all happens in the computer lab, which simulates an entire firm's data flow.

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Goodyear and the U.S. Department of Energyís Sandia National Laboratories will work together to develop new and more efficient manufacturing processes.

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There is now a way to increase marketing sales by 239 percent, an amount which should have all sales executives and representatives paying attention. New research has unearthed a key to increased sales compliance, a key neither expensive nor time consuming...

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Working fathers involved in child care tend to do more of the low-stress, pre-arranged activities and less of the unpredictable situations such as staying home when a child suddenly gets sick, according to a University of Tulsa professor.

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Despite the world-wide investment of trillions of dollars (and other world currencies) in more than 20 years, technology still falls short of providing the information we most need and want, finds Thomas H. Davenport, director of the information management program at The University of Texas at Austin and a regular columnist for CIO magazine.

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Students at universities around the country are learning money management and investment skills by making real-life stock market investments with donated money.

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Donations of leftovers by restaurants to food pantries and other human service agencies are declining marketdly as restaurants become better managed, according to a study by Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration.

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Cornell University researchers have found that pay hikes, not promotions, are critical in retaining high-performing employees. Looking at more than 5,000 petroleum company employees showed that high salary growth proved critical in retaining high performers. promotions, on the other hand, had no effect on turnover of those high performers.

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Trade and environment experts from the United States and Japan today (July 2) issued a joint statement offering recommendations for better management of environmental issues by international organizations such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Recommendations included a more focused mandate for the WTO's Committee on Trade and Environment, and closer attention by policy makers to the idea of forming a global environmental organization that would operate in tandem with the WTO.

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In business, too much of a good thing can be hazardous to your health, says Stanford Business School's William Barnett, who took a close look at the volatile semiconductor industry to see why certain companies survive the industry's notorious shakeouts and others do not. He found that when a company introduces more than one product at a time, the firm benefits from its larger size, but also suffers a higher risk of failure. In other words, while growth is good, growing all at once is not.

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Entrepreneurs think differently than corporate managers when it comes to making business decisions -- and not in ways that seem favorable at first glance. A new study of 219 entrepreneurs and managers found that entrepreneurs were more likely to be overconfident about the correctness of their decisions and were more prone to make broad generalizations based on limited experience.

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Workaholics have a bad reputation as people whose obsession with work is often harmful to themselves and possibly even bad for their companies. But a new analysis of previous research suggests that there may be "good" workaholics: people who work a lot because they enjoy their jobs, have strong career identities and a desire for upward mobility.

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We're all supposed to learn from the success and failures of others. It's far less painful than making our own mistakes. But do corporations really learn from the experiences of other firms? Stanford Business School's Pamela Haunschild finds that they do.

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Innovation is always necessary if a firm is to become a leader in the high-technology area, say Stanford Business School's Evan Porteus and Glen Schmidt. But while the ability to innovate can get a firm to the top, it alone is unlikely to keep it there as new technologies and the generations of products that accompany them arise.

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The securities research analysts who advise your broker on the best stock market picks may not be trying to mislead you deliberately, but beware of their rosy attitudes.