Management in Practice

Legendary investor Martin Whitman describes the factors that push markets toward efficiency — and how inefficiency presents opportunities for investors.

Markets bend to forces on the immense scale of macroeconomics. But they’re also nudged, poked, and even redirected by the individuals who work in them. In a 20-plus-year career, Teresa Barger has hit nearly every financial sector and every continent.

A loan might allow you to buy a bike to commute to a new job or to nurse your business through an unexpected setback. But billions of people around the world have little or no access to financial markets. Microfinance is one potential solution to this dilemma.

A market is a place (virtual or tangible) where buyers and sellers meet. Markets exist everywhere people do. But each market has its particular customs, as simple as a handshake or as intricate as a 40-page contract.

Steve LaVoie founded Arrowstream to improve supply-chain management in the restaurant business. He discovered that the benefits of trust in markets have been overlooked, in part because of an overemphasis on individual actors as opposed to relationships. He also learned that building and maintaining trust is hard work.

Joseph S. Fichera proposes an innovative way to make corporate directors more independent and effective by providing them with better information.

The airwaves are a precious commodity. More than 200 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S. alone chat and bat text messages across the wireless spectrum. When Reed Hundt was chairman of the FCC, he implemented the first auctions of this resource, opening the way for industry development and raising revenue for the government. Hundt recently talked with Professor Barry Nalebuff, describing what he learned about auction markets and how he might use an auction to save the environment. Of course, they spoke via cell phone.

According to John Rice and Fred Smagorinsky '87, management is competing with traditional professions like law and medicine for talented minority students—and losing. Rice and Smagorinsky are trying to change that.

Ideas become actions when they're pressed into service in a particular context. So are ideals tempered by real experience. We wondered how the idea of management as a profession (and the ideal of management as a profession) would play out at the level of daily life.

So, we sought out a group of graduates of the school. They've all gone to a management school and are managers by that definition at least, but they practice their craft (or profession) in different industries, locales, and roles. Each provides one view on the many-faceted world of management.

First we asked the participants to chronicle a day out of their work lives, breaking the overarching issue of what constitutes management down to a manageable but still rich unit of analysis. Then we set them loose to discuss the notion of management as a profession.