Leadership

Are there leaders in everyday life? A long body of literature argues that a small number of individuals have an outsize influence on what the rest of us buy, wear, and consume. But marketing professionals and scholars have been debating how to make use of these opinion leaders.

Combat leadership involves making countless decisions, with limited information, shifting variables, and extreme time constraints. Colonel Rich Morales ’99 and soldiers from his battalion describe their 15-month deployment in Iraq.

Yale SOM alumni weigh in on the question "Who needs leaders?"

In a country with some 76 million people and only 138 hospitals, Ethiopia is looking to make the most of limited resources by working with Yale and the Clinton Foundation to train hospital administrators.

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

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.

Should managers be trained to follow mechanistic organizational rules or to make decisions based on holistic understanding of the situations they face? Peter Bearman describes an often overlooked aspect of professionalism—discretion—and what it means for management.

Charley Ellis suggests that, in order to become true professionals, managers will have to become "servant-leaders."

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a leading critic of business education, arguing that business schools frequently fall short of other professional schools.