We learned that Richmond was again included among the top 20 part-time MBA programs when BusinessWeek unveiled its rankings last night. The Richmond MBA moved from fourth to third in the mid-Atlantic region and was the only program in Virginia to make the top 50.
At #17 nationally, Richmond is a few spots ahead of Ohio State, USC, Texas and NYU. Our faculty earned a well-deserved A+ for its teaching quality and student respondents gave the same grade when asked about the caliber of their classmates.
The full rankings table can be found here — http://bwnt.businessweek.com/bschools/ptmba_rankings_2009/.
John B. Adams, CEO of The Martin Agency, spoke at a recent business school breakfast. He shared some powerful insights on new realities for marketers. Here are three themes:
1. Integrated marketing must evolve into unified marketing. At first, this sounded like merely a fresher buzzword, but the point is that agency functions should become more collaborative, just as marketing messages are blending more closely with the media that contain them.
2. All advertising is becoming direct-response advertising. Consumers are researching and making decisions in less predictable processes, due in large part to interactive media. For example, a consumer may consult friends’ opinions, and several user-generated reviews online. He may be ready to make a purchase decision before engaging with a single ad. This means that image advertising is less valued, and every marketing communication needs a behavior-changing call to action.
3. The nature of storytelling is changing – from a single story for a brand to multiple stories.
My overall takeaway: Interactive media gives consumers abundant choice for how they consume marketing communications, and for how they select products and services. It’s all done on the consumers’ terms.
The challenge for marketers – or any provider of a product or service – is to gain deep insight into the target consumer, offer truly helpful, relevant products, and tell compelling, helpful stories that amplify the product.
Wait a second…shouldn’t that have been the challenge all along?
In my Board of Directors and Corporate Governance class, taught by adjunct professor Jack Harsh, we have had a number of conversations about executive compensation and some of our guest speakers have even weighed in on the subject. Our most recent guest speaker, Bob Sledd (former CEO of Performance Food Groups), believes that most CEOs are fairly compensated and do not make anywhere near the amount of money that news outlets claim (well, those on Wall Street do). Executive compensation is clearly a hot topic given the government’s involvement with bailing out a number of large firms as well as the disparity we hear between Company X making huge layoffs this year yet still giving top executives hefty bonuses or other forms of compensation. Professor Harsh believes that this year will be a record year for compensation even if we (the general public) don’t agree with the reasons why. Professor Harsh encouraged us to not think about executive pay in an absolute value but rather focusing on that compensation is tied to the company’s strategic goals and timeframe for meeting such goals, not for (legally) manipulating their books so that their stock price goes up without actually accomplishing any exemplary results.
In light of the media focus on the subject, I found two interesting articles on CNN Money that I encourage you to check out - the 5 Most Overpaid CEOs and the Ten Highest Paid Executives. Do they really deserve what they’re getting?
As of late yesterday, Google and Microsoft had each announced separate deals with Twitter to include tweets in search results. While the details of each deal were undisclosed, this appears to be the first real source of income for a company that has subsisted entirely on venture capital since its 2006 inception, topping up at $155 million (figures in left sidebar) as of September this year.
UPDATE:
CEO Evan Williams spoke to Fortune this week about why income and cash flow are not presently the focus at Twitter.
I have heard from more than a dozen business leaders and many of our alumni since my guest column on businesses partnering with business schools was published at RichmondBizSense.com last Friday. A number of individuals have encouraged me to post the link here so that our MBA students and prospective students might have a chance to view it.
The link to BizSense is here: http://bit.ly/3CXFZP
I welcome your comments.
