Leadership

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

Will medical costs in the United States swamp our ability to pay? Can information technology continue to get faster, lighter, and more effective? Will global trade go on increasing and generating wealth? Asking if a system is sustainable forces one to project far into the future — and then to look back at the present from that vantage.

Much of the public anger over the economic crisis has been directed at the CEOs of companies receiving public funds. Ultimately though, CEOs of public corporations are answerable to shareholders. Robert A.G. Monks talks about the role of shareholders in the crisis as well as the effectiveness of policy and regulatory frameworks governing corporations.

The Dubai International Financial Center was established in 2004 as a “gateway” to the capital of the oil-producing countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Yale SOM’s Ira Millstein and Jonathan Koppell spoke with a group of experienced investors in the region about the DIFC and the role of capital in the GCC.

Sensing a broad change in the capital markets in recent years, the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance set out to better understand what was happening. Jonathan Koppell describes what he and his colleagues learned from a series of discussions with investors, directors, managers, and regulators around the globe.

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.