While English has long been the de facto language of international business, more multinational companies are now mandating that employees communicate only in English.
Start-ups often keep the "beta test phase" label on their products for a time after the official launch to stress that the product is not finished so much as ready for the next batch of improvements.
What does it take to be a great teacher of business?
A Washington state couple comes forward to claim their share of the $380 million Mega Millions jackpot.
Manonamission.blogspot.com has a great collection of corporate mission statements. I recently used its search function to find examples of companies that prominently and publicly state something close to "people are our most important asset."
When Janet Stark finally gets around to building her own website, the admissions consultant will run it with the headline, "I've been accepted to Harvard Business School over 50 times!" Her students are a bit less open.
"Do you want to know who gets into Harvard Business School and how it works?"
This year, despite the recession and record-high unemployment, Americans appear to be getting into the holiday spirit by starting to shop again.
Rod Kramer thought it was going to be just another dinner at the Stanford Executive Program last summer.
Ever since Joseph decoded Pharaoh's dream about fat cows and thin ones and delivered his policy response - save in the fat years to survive in the lean times - consumers have followed that model.
"CDOs squared? What the hell were we thinking? These things were way too complicated!" J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon exclaimed at a Harvard Business School summit in mid-October.
Question: I have a pretty vanilla investment portfolio and an advisor who tells me to stay the course every time I call him while freaking out about the market. This money is my nest egg. I invest conservatively with mutual funds not individual stocks/ bonds. In other words, should I stay the course or freak out and sell?
Faced with soaring production costs, food companies are resorting to the age-old practice of earning more by selling us less
What a difference a year makes for private equity.
Does Harvard Business School have a future? Its storied past will get extra attention when the school turns 100 years old on April 8. But in a fast-changing global economy, the world's iconic business school faces new threats of the type that confront all established institutions.
Americans don't understand debt, which may be one reason that they have too much of it, according to a survey released Tuesday.
Thirty years before Jerome Kohlberg started a little buyout shop with Bear Stearns protégés Henry Kravis and George Roberts, he was a U.S. Navy officer returning from World War II. Thanks to the GI Bill, he went to Swarthmore College and Harvard Business School for free.
Three years ago, a couple of economists rankled the music industry when they released a report that ran counter to all common sense by concluding that swapping music for free on the Internet did not hurt sales of compact discs.
If you want a job in private equity, you're not alone.
There's a hole in higher education that you probably haven't heard about.
Business is business.
After two entrepreneurial brothers invented a bottle opener for arthritis sufferers, the big retailers came calling.
This January, sneaker history repeated itself. Nike announced that it was replacing CEO William Perez, whom it had hired from S.C. Johnson & Son just 13 months earlier, with 27-year company veteran...
Clay Shirky can be counted among the lucky few who not only appear to have mastered the wired world (and the wireless one) but also get paid to decode it for the rest of us. He teaches graduate cou...
1) Like professors and therapists, financial advisers list their credentials after their names. Three of these are legit. Which isn't?
Making stuff for babies is big business, and increasingly, so is making the actual babies. In The Baby Business, set for a Valentine's Day release by Harvard Business School Press, HBS professor De...
Warren Buffett, 74
THERE SEEMS to be an unwritten rule that any discussion of innovation must begin with the example of 3M and how a free-spirited soul there accidentally concocted the Post-it note. That story, hashe...
THE HARVARD BUSINESS School class of '79, which gathered recently for its 25th reunion and invited FORTUNE along, is as star-studded as B-school classes come. It has eBay's Meg Whitman, Enron's Jef...
Dropping out of school to start a business became as much a dot-com-era cliché as trying to become the next Bill Gates. Now, thanks to economic uncertainty, dropping back into school to launch a co...
The seven semifinalists that vied with our winners should make a mark. Besides the four profiled here, they include Carnegie Mellon's ClearCount, which has found a way to keep surgical sponges from...
STANDING BEFORE A SMALL LECTURE hall in Chicago filled with nonstudents in September, Harvard Business School professor David Thomas drew laughter when he welcomed "one of the smallest groups in th...
Disruption lessons
Ann Fudge is a Harvard Business School alum, General Electric board member, wife, mother, grandmother, globetrotter, public service advocate, former star executive at Kraft Foods, and--following a ...
By and large, Americans are optimists. We like to believe that anything is possible. Conquering polio, traveling to the moon, and creating the World Wide Web are but a few notable examples of the t...
If there's one thing the collapse of the stock market bubble has taught us, it's that investment-banking analysts were hopelessly conflicted scoundrels, charlatans, and scalawags who happily publi...
Beyond gurus
The word out of Cambridge, Mass., is that this year's graduating students at Harvard Business School have a yen above all to work in the hedge fund industry--and to some people already knee-deep in...
Ever wish you could read your customer's mind? Gerald Zaltman, a marketing professor at the Harvard Business School, uses brain scans, psychotherapy-like interviews, and his patented Zaltman Metaph...
Name: Jean-Francois Manzoni Title: Coauthor Book: The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome (Harvard Business School Press, October 2002)
Women own nearly a third of the nation's privately held firms, and scores of them sit at the highest corporate levels. Given those figures, we went out and tried to see whether there was any real r...
I just finished reading Robert Reid's Year One, the story of his first year at Harvard Business School back in the high-flying 1990s. It's supposed to give readers an inside look at what he learned...
Read any new business books lately? You're probably not sure, especially given the latest trend in publishing. Taking their cues from a sequel-obsessed Hollywood, publishers are increasingly repris...
Everyone knows that an education is a superb investment. However, while most people put money into their own schooling, or a child's, a new company called My Rich Uncle is hooking up top students w...
Last winter Stanford's new e-commerce elective was the hottest thing on the business school's campus, with 28 students using their single "silver bullet" to secure one of the 66 available spots. Th...
George W. Bush, America's first President with an MBA (Harvard, '75), is settling into the White House. The nation itself thus joins the ranks of some 40% of its 100 largest companies, which are al...
You probably thought a programming class in Java and a Stanford MBA would open the door to any executive suite in corporate America. Try again. You might want to ditch the Teva sandals for scarves ...
"For years companies would come to me and say, 'You're doing on-site child care. Tell me how you do it.' I'd say, 'Well, we did it.' They said, 'What about the liability?' And I would say, 'Why don...
Here's a little story that tells you something about John Kotter, Harvard Business School professor, award-winning author, consultant, speaker: We're having breakfast at some nice hotel. I study th...
So I thought I was figuring out this Web auction thing, and then it turned out I wasn't. And I'm in excellent company.
author and title
'Injustices in the workplace abound--but are they all the result of discrimination?" asks a reader named Elizabeth, who incidentally knows bias when she sees it: Way back in 1969, a bank officer in...
You're the team leader on a crucial new-product design project that's running weeks behind schedule. Your people are tired, tense, and out of ideas, and as the deadline looms, everyone's getting mo...
Beth Terrana is on her third fund at Fidelity, and she's batting three for three. At Fidelity Growth & Income, from 1985 to 1990, she produced a 15.7% annualized return, vs. 11.9% for the S&P 500. ...
In their dark blazers and floppy bow ties, the 189 women of Harvard Business School's class of 1983 peered from the pages of The Annual Report, the institution's appropriately titled yearbook. Wear...
Here are the trailblazers: the 34 women from the Harvard Business School class of 1973. And oh, do they have tales to tell. There's Kathy Glover, who pursued a business career because she "never wa...
The moment I heard some of our editors planning to rank America's most powerful businesswomen, I knew life was about to get more difficult for me. Around here, such projects bring all kinds of what...
My name is Dave, and I'm a digital moonlighter. I'm on the wagon, but that could be because I have no choice; the job I have now eats up every waking moment and invades my dreams. At my old job, wh...
As business psychologists we've recently finished a 12-year study of the career paths of over 650 business professionals at all levels and in a wide variety of functions, industries, and organizati...
After a number of failed attempts, a new generation of multimedia training programs has finally arrived and is changing the way companies use computers to get managers up to speed. Among the most n...
I'm a dinosaur. I've been working for this same company since probably before you were born--it was 40 years last D-day. There aren't many like me anymore. Not in these days of choppy career surfin...
You don't need a Harvard MBA to figure out that many of today's best opportunities for growth lie overseas. But when it comes to developing a global work force, most managers feel lost. What does i...
Jack Reichert, the CEO of Brunswick, says most avid boaters trade up three feet every three years. And we thought that was just the size of their fish stories. . .If you're a harried management per...
It's every investor's nightmare: After weeks of research and heart-to-heart talks with yourself, you swallow your apprehensions and plunk your money into an aggressive stock fund. The next day the ...
It's New Year's resolution time. You're back in the office, a little apprehensive about tough times but all the more dedicated to honing your organizational skills for the year ahead. And there, st...
As in the past, this year's Harvard B-school students will hunker down to read case studies of such business icons as Apple's CEO John Sculley, Reebok's Paul Fireman, and Ruth Owades. Ruth who? Owa...
THOUGH he has filled an entire book with his wisdom, Fidelity's Peter Lynch offered some ''points that have made a difference to me'' when he was the keynote speaker at the Harvard Business School ...
First Reebok came out of nowhere by turning athletic shoes into fashion items. Then L.A. Gear took off with sneakers for Valley Girls. Now the hot brand is British Knights, featuring flashy designs...
Once you listened to your Walkman to escape from the world. But the world has a way of catching up with you. With about 40 audio publishers putting words on tape, you can listen to everything from ...
If the consensus among economists is correct and the economy is cooling down, you should get rid of any junk bonds you own as well as any funds that hold such issues. Typically, when the economy st...
Nobody has ever accused the Harvard Business School of being an ivory tower, a refuge for woolly-minded scholars out of touch with real life. No, this is a worldly institution and a great worldly s...
MANAGING/Cover Story
DON PINCHBECK, 47, general manager for Epson in Britain, attacking the | European Community's plan to impose anti-dumping duties on Japanese components put together in Europe: ''I hope the EC lawma...
One out of four women graduates of Harvard Business School's class of 1976 quit the managerial work force, many because of low pay and poor corporate child care policies (FORTUNE, August 18). A new...
Perhaps a $100-million SEC penalty -- the biggest ever -- doesn't make arbitrager Ivan Boesky the all-time biggest crook. Yet a special contempt attaches to an insider trader who had strutted round...
AN ENTIRE generation of the most sought-after graduates of the top U.S. business schools is getting snookered by a handful of investment banking firms temporarily overburdened with profit. In unpre...
ASA JONISHI, 65, director of Japan's Kyocera Corp., world's largest maker of ceramic packages for integrated circuits, on business education: ''Theories taught in management schools are often usele...
BETWEEN overseeing FORTUNE's Managing section and writing our Office Hours column, editor Walter Kiechel had to skip the tenth reunion of his Harvard MBA class of '76. But the rockets he got back f...
FORGET restructuring, making acquisitions, and avoiding takeover -- the biggest challenge for executives at most U.S. companies in the next few years will be managing businesses that compete in mar...
THE TALK is scary enough to turn baby-boom executives gray before their time. Consider this, from management guru Peter Drucker: ''Most of the baby-boomers have gone as far as they will go in manag...
Just try to imagine what a corporation devoid of office gossip would be like. Formal reports with all the spiciness of, say, a quarterly earnings statement march methodically up and down the ranks....


