Book Reviews

One Nation, Under Mismanagement
by Gabby Hyman
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

Where Have All the Leaders Gone? by Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney; hardcover, 192 pp; Scribner, $25

That confident charmer you see on Chrysler television ads is done smiling. In fact, he’s sputtering with rage. He’s had it up to here with the Bush administration and has filled nearly 200 pages with his disgust with the media, Congress, and the voters who have given a carte blanche to erosion of personal freedoms, economic mismanagement, and a foreign policy akin to global insanity. “I’ve never been a Commander of Chief,” writes Lee Iacocca in Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, “but I’ve been a CEO.”

Iacocca renders a top-down analysis of this MBA-led Administration that he claims lacks the fundamental “C” qualities that make for successful leadership: courage, conviction, charisma, competency, and common sense. The book is a popular springtime read at MBA degree programs and leadership seminars, and it has ridden atop The New York Times Hardcover Business Book List this May.

It’s “A Hell of a Mess”

Iacocca pulls few punches. His literary style mirrors the management panache wielded to rescue Chrysler in the 1980s. Iacocca claims that Bush’s management of the country over the last six years has resulted in:

• “a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving
• the biggest deficit in the history of the country
• skyrocketing gas prices
• borders like sieves.
• the loss of the manufacturing edge to Asia
• schools in trouble
• and once-great companies getting slaughtered by health care costs.”

As for Congress, Iacocca wants it to know, “we didn’t elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity.”

People change. The man who had once reaped great profits from the creation of Chrysler’s minivans now wants us to adopt stringent fuel-economy standards. The 82-year-old Iacocca scoffs at Bush’s business training: “Thanks to our first MBA President, Social Security is on life support and we’ve run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq.”

About Lee Iacocca

Lido Anthony “Lee” Iacocca is primarily known for his monumental car designs for the Ford Motor Company and his revival of the Chrysler automobile brand in the 1980s. A graduate of Lehigh and Princeton, Iacocca was appointed by then-President Ronald Reagan as head of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation that raised money for the renovation of that historical landmark.

About the Author

Gabby Hyman has created online strategies and written content for Fortune 500 companies including eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Microsoft Encarta, Avaya, and Nissan UK.

Posted on September 19, 2007 at 11:45 AM

Change Your Mind, Get Rich
by Gabby Hyman
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, by T. Harv Eker, 224 pages, hardcover, HarperBusiness, $19.95.

Take one self-made millionaire who wants to share his savvy in the form of a self-help manual for would-be entrepreneurs and you’ve got T. Harv Eker, whose book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind has successfully surfed the rankings of the New York Times Hardcover Business Book List since it was published last year. Sage, guru, sideshow raconteur — they’re all titles heaped upon this “change your thinking” pundit to financiers and MBA students worldwide.

“You can always think in ways that will support you in your happiness instead of ways that don’t,” Eker writes in this self-paced program for those who need their brains washed of poor cognitive habits. “The book is to help people change their consciousness and waking thoughts about money.”

A root of poor thinking that shapes economic failures, Eker contends, is established in a “financial blueprint” we receive in messages from family, friends, economic advisers, and the media. If you’re enrolled in an MBA degree program, for example, it won’t help matters if your entrepreneurial thinking was imprinted early in a family that hoards pennies.

Putting a Positive Spin on All Things Financial

Eker’s theories certainly embrace an MBA-level audience and, by turns, have been criticized by some for elitism. To wit: the second half of the book contains “Wealth Files” that contend that people with a lot of money simply think differently than the middle class and poor.

The “files” recommend specific actions necessary for would-be millionaires to improve their chances by changing their “blueprint”. When the subconscious is reprogrammed, Eker believes, success naturally follows. Rich people believe they create their lives, he says, while poor people believe life just happens to them.

The book, now translated in 26 languages, has made its foray well beyond the board room and the MBA campus. In itself, the book’s success is a testament to Eker’s changed attitudes. A rich-quick millionaire who just as quickly lost his money, Eker turned his experiences and re-programming efforts into a personal development company. More than 500,000 devotees have signed up for his seminars.

About T. Harv Eker

Eker boasts of going from “zero to millionaire” in 2 ½ years. Born into a poor family, he started work at age 13, delivering papers and selling notions at the beach. After failing at more than a dozen business start-ups, Eker opened a retail fitness store that grew into a chain and was sold off to a Fortune 500 company in less than 3 years. He then lost his millions to poor investments.

About the author

Gabby Hyman has created online strategies and written content for Fortune 500 companies including eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Microsoft Encarta, Avaya, and Nissan UK.

Source(s)

The Millionaire Mind

Posted on August 21, 2007 at 11:07 AM

Advice to MBA Students: Expect the Unexpected
by Gabby Hyman
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, hardcover, 366 pages, Random House, $26.95.

When you least expect it, something potentially catastrophic to the economic status quo is going to happen. What will it be? Exactly what you never planned for. That’s the nugget of wisdom Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers to business leaders and MBA degree students alike in his latest book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

Being wise enough to predict global economic misfortunes won’t be sufficient, Taleb claims. The future is never guaranteed. But the unexpected is a certainly, and we need to be flexible enough to adjust to it, Taleb says. The title winged creature refers to the first observed black swan that, when discovered, destroyed humanity’s notion that all swans were white.

“It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge,” Taleb writes. He cites the unanticipated 1987 stock market crash and its equally unexpected recovery as examples of how MBA-trained business leaders focus solely on a best-guess for the future.

Our aggressive business outlook is a double-edged sword, writes Taleb in the book that has climbed to the third slot on June’s New York Times Hardcover Best Seller List. By focusing on all the minute details, business leaders miss the probability of significant large events.

In an interview with Wired, Taleb says we prosper despite our shortcomings. “People here aren’t afraid of failure,” he told the magazine. “They’re willing to trade the possibility of failure for the chance at a big upside. No other country is willing to do this. What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.”

If you’re in an MBA degree program, Taleb’s vision suggests that your success may have more to do with unexpected factors than in your best planning. “The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.”

About Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb was born in Lebanon in 1960, holds an MBA from Wharton, and a Ph.D. from the University of Paris. He serves as professor at the University of Massachusetts and as Founder of Empirica LLC, a corporation with interests in hedge funds and a research laboratory in London. At age 25, he became chief currency derivatives trader for Banque Indosuez.

Taleb is a former managing director and head trader at Union Bank of Switzerland, and author of two books in his field, Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options and Fooled by Randomness.

About the Author

Gabby Hyman has created online strategies and written content for Fortune 500 companies including eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Microsoft Encarta, Avaya, and Nissan UK.

Source(s)

Wired Magazine

Posted on July 16, 2007 at 2:31 PM

Investments and Money: Why Women Stumble
by Gabby Hyman
gabby.hyman@MBA-business-schools.com
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

Women & Money, Suze Orman; hardcover, 272 pp; Spiegel & Grau, $24.95.

It may be fear, shame or embarrassment, or it could be just poor financial sense, but when women mismanage money and won’t ask for help, it troubles Suze Orman. In her eighth book, Orman, who claims she is worth $25 million, has had enough. “Women can invest, save, and handle debt as well and skillfully as any man,” she says in Women & Money, which rode the top of the New York Times Hardcover Business Book List for April. “So why don’t they?”

Orman writes, “The shifting roles of women at home and at work have dramatically changed where and how money interacts with a woman’s life. Yet while women have established or expanded their roles and relationships, when it comes to navigating the financial ramifications of this new world, they are using old maps that don’t get them where they really want and need to go.”

Whether they’re marching their way through an MBA degree program, poring through the NASDAQ on a daily basis, or running a company, most women hold the same stumbling blocks, Orman says. They “treat themselves as a commodity whose price is set by others.”

To that end, Orman, who began her professional life by earning a degree in social work and tending tables in a bakery, prescribes a formula using eight common qualities all women can wield with power in harnessing personal wealth. The book outlines a five-month program Orman says can lift women over the “stumbling blocks” so they may establish lifelong financial security.

Qualities Shared by Women of Wealth

Women who master their fear and learn sound management, Orman writes, engender native qualities of harmony, balance, courage, generosity, happiness, wisdom, cleanliness, and beauty. Orman doesn’t believe in self-help or financial help books that present “laundry lists of seemingly insurmountable chores”.

Orman may not always be appreciated in board rooms and at MBA programs — but at least half the audience should take notice.

About Suze Orman

Suze Orman was born in Chicago and received her B.A. in social work from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom (1997), You’ve Earned It, Don’t Lose It : Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make When You Retire (1997), The Courage to Be Rich (1998), The Road to Wealth (2001), The Laws of Money, the Lessons of Life (2003), and The Money Book for the Young Fabulous and Broke (2005).

About the Author

Gabby Hyman has created online strategies and written content for Fortune 500 companies including eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Microsoft Encarta, Avaya, and Nissan UK.

Posted on May 27, 2007 at 5:38 PM

MBA Grads Can Feed Their Own Monsters
by Gabby Hyman
gabby.hyman@MBA-business-schools.com
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top, by Seth Mnookin, hardcover; Simon & Schuster, $26.

Despite its glorious World Series victory the previous fall, in the spring of 2005 the Boston Red Sox baseball organization was bottoming out on a full-fledged corporate meltdown. Its caustic, perfectionist CEO Larry Lucchino was in open warfare with the American League’s enfant terrible general manager Theo Epstein, who suddenly resigned. Was the team destined to an embarrassing corporate death spiral?

Early in the 2005 season, business journalist Seth Mnookin was granted unprecedented access to Lucchino and team owners John Henry and Tom Werner. Mnookin’s book about the soap opera that was averted by savvy corporate leadership debuted at the eighth slot on the March New York Times Business Book Bestseller’s List.

Books about the inner workings of corporate big-time sports are nothing new, witness the success of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. What was unique about Mnookin’s effort was his virtually unlimited free reign in consulting everyone in the Red Sox organization, from ownership to bench players. The next result: intimate examinations of how front-office business decisions are made and how they affect everyone in the organization.

Feeding the MBA Degree Student—and the Monster

It’s not surprising to see Mnookin’s debut sales success among business readers, which is why Feeding the Monster should have an equal share of devotees among the MBA set. Mnookin, former senior writer for Newsweek and current Vanity Fair contributing editor, previously traced the management squabbles and the Judith Miller scandal at The New York Times organization. His understanding how ownership issues affected overall performance of the Times organization from top to bottom sufficiently impressed principal Red Sox owner Henry into opening his front office and clubhouse to the writer.

So what’s in it for the MBA student? Mnookin’s lifelong devotion to the Red Sox team coupled with an uncustomary in-depth look at statistical and analytical business acumen adds up to a winner. Even non-baseball fans will find the scrutiny of how management righted a ship on its way to disaster more than invigorating.

About Seth Mnookin

Harvard grad Mnookin began his journalism career as a rock critic and Florida hard news reporter. His previous book, Hard News, became a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. He has written for The New Yorker, Slate, Salon, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, and Spin.

About the Author

Gabby Hyman has created online strategies and written content for Fortune 500 companies including eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Microsoft Encarta, Avaya, and Nissan UK.

Posted on April 17, 2007 at 11:15 AM

MBA Grads: Behave on Your Way to the Top
by Gabby Hyman
gabby.hyman@MBA-business-schools.com
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful, by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter, hardcover; 256 pages, by Hyperion, 2007.

All the MBA training in the world won’t take you to the top of your profession if you’re snide or smarmy with your co-workers, have poor communication skills, and won’t admit your mistakes, says CEO mentor Marshall Goldsmith. His sage advice for career executives, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful, has soared to fifth on January’s New York Times Business Book Bestseller’s List.

What sets Goldsmith’s tome apart from other guides to upper-echelon success is that it’s brutally frank and relatively free of big business platitudes and self-help mantras. Why throw away your MBA degree investment if your ability to assess your own strengths and shortcomings is weak? Can you admit mistakes to your fellows and guide others with a compassionate, generous hand? Goldsmith says that when it comes to scaling the C-level peaks it’s not so much about your business acumen; it’s about your own integrity.

MBA Savvy and Psychobabble

Top managers need not sugar coat messages to their subordinates, but Goldsmith contends that if they’re incapable of responding to feedback, can’t share credit with others, or are completely single minded about achieving their objectives, they’ll miss the big opportunity. Goldsmith’s book has very little psychobabble to it. Rather, it reveals that you’ll need all your MBA savvy to work the management landscape, along with an honest desire to change poor habits.

According to Goldsmith, it comes down to “transactional flaws” — simple things that you’re supposed to learn at home, not at an MBA degree program — such as saying “thank you,” or “how can I help” and so on. Your most-limiting behaviors are visited at home as well as in the boardroom, so ask your loved ones about your style. Apologizing for mistreatment of others is a skill very few executives will integrate into the professional lives.

In any MBA program, students set examples of charismatic leadership, goal-oriented focus, and cut-throat mentalities. These attributes may suffice in getting you into management but, Goldsmith warns, they won’t take you as far as skills in listening or accepting feedback and criticism with a degree of humility.

About Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter

Marshall Goldsmith is author of 23 books and co-founder of Marshall Goldsmith Partners, a team of top-level executive coaches. He has assisted more than 80 CEOs from in the world’s top corporations. He holds a Ph.D. and teaches executive education at Dartmouth’s Tuck School.

Mark Reiter has collaborated on thirteen previous books. He is a literary agent in Bronxville, New York.

About the Author

Gabby Hyman has created online strategies and written content for Fortune 500 companies including eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Microsoft Encarta, Avaya, and Nissan UK.

Posted on March 7, 2007 at 12:55 PM

A Book for MBAs Simply Mad About Money
by Gabby Hyman
gabby.hyman@MBA-business-schools.com
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

Jim Cramer’s Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich, by James J. Cramer, hardcover; 240 pages. Simon & Schuster, $25.

MBA students love him or hate him. There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground when it comes to Jim Cramer. Cramer’s Twenty-Five Rules of Investing include the statement “tips are for waiters,” yet the founder of The Street.com doesn’t seem to mind giving out investment tips for a living. With his latest book, Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich, Cramer once again proves you don’t have to be liked to reach the number-one slot on the NY Times Hardcover Business Best Sellers list.

The Man Who Makes MBAs Think—and Argue

Scratch any number of MBA degree holders or students in MBA programs and you’ll find a hefty share of Cramer enthusiasts—and detractors. Cramer achieved popular notoriety as the “booyah”-shouting host of “Mad Money,” a television show that encourages investing money left over from bill-paying and retirement deductions. The latest book expounds Cramer’s notion that “we live in a more dynamic, more economically integrated world, and that means it takes more effort to know all the facts you need to invest wisely.”

Cramer has no half notions that his mission in life is “helping everybody get rich.” To that end, he insists Mad Money is a book that will help middle-class investors navigate the tricky waters of due diligence on the stocks he recommends on his television show. Part-huckster, part genius, the man’s a completely self-aggrandizing and wildly prancing television personality. Still, Cramer’s booming voice blasts from television sets in many an MBA household.

Cardio for Commodity Consumers

Mad Money covers the fundamentals in researching, buying, and tracking the returns on purchased stocks. Appendices include an updated cyclical chart and research checklists. “Lightning Round” chapters are provided to augment TV segments where Cramer makes split-second evaluations and how to use his C-level corporate evaluations to make prudent buys. The book also evaluates Cramer’s broadcast assessments, leaving readers with reasons why they were strong—or why they were dead wrong.

Cramer says, “I may play a total madman on TV. However, when it comes to stocks, I believe in being rigorous and methodical, not crazy.”

About James J. Cramer

James J. “Jim” Cramer graduated from Harvard in 1977 and went on to earn his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1984. After graduating, he went to work in Goldman Sachs until he started his own hedge fund company in 1987. He is co-founder of TheStreet.com and author of Jim Cramer’s Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World and Confessions of a Street Addict.

About the Author

Gabby Hyman has created online strategies and written content for Fortune 500 companies including eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Microsoft Encarta, Avaya, and Nissan UK.

Posted on January 24, 2007 at 11:39 AM

by Gabby Hyman
gabby.hyman@MBA-business-schools.com
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, hardcover; 299 pages. W. W. Norton & Company, $24.95. Why would a man with a graduate degree in economics from the London School of Economics write a book about a football prodigy? Perhaps the larger question is why a book about a football prodigy rides near the top of this month’s New York Times Business Book Bestseller’s List? Perhaps because Michael Lewis has followed the success of his baseball economics book Moneyball with a story that surely appeals to MBA students and CEOs everywhere.

Talent—How Young Is Too Young?

Having assessed the financial bottom lines that drive major-league baseball, Lewis tackles the ever-narrowing trend in professional football to identify talent at a troubling young age and impress a narrow focus on the individual at the cost of all other concerns. So what’s the key that unlocks The Blind Side’s popularity in the business sector? Are talented young financial wizards treated the same way by our culture? Do economists and managers who mentor in our MBA programs single out prodigies and groom them for roles that forgo most other options? The answers tell us whether MBA students are so devoted to success that they eschew social and spiritual aspects of living.

Putting on the Moves

Michael Oher, The Blind Side’s unlikely real-life protagonist, has a legendary change of life at a young age. The 300-pound behemoth from a black West Memphis ghetto gets adopted by a cross-tracks, well-strapped Republican family. In spite of his near-zero scholarly aptitude, Oher attends a Christian school that is more than willing to have him patrol the defensive side of their football field with his lithe footwork and brute destructive mastery. In short, early in life, Oher’s professional molding began in earnest, following an NFL paradigm that advances the super-able while cutting all other corners.

By his Ole Miss football hero years, Oher has become a man of privilege—contingent on his continuing health and usefulness to his team as a recruiting tool, of course. In short, he’s a huge success by both physical and financial measures.

Lessons for the Bottom Line

How close are the forces that drive this Cinderfella’s tale to those that power Big Business—or an MBA paradigm? Perhaps unspoken identification explains the book’s powerful appeal to an unlikely business audience longing to be mentored into a position of success. Still, the bottom line message may be “Pace yourself. And be wary of getting too much, too soon.”

About Michael Lewis

Lewis is author of Liar’s Poker and Moneyball. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Bloomberg, former Spectator contributor, and senior editor of The New Republic. He holds a B.A. from Princeton and an MSc in Economics.

About the Author

Gabby Hyman has created online strategies and written content for Fortune 500 companies including eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Microsoft Encarta, Avaya, and Nissan UK.

Posted on December 28, 2006 at 12:46 PM

by Gabby Hyman
gabby.hyman@MBA-business-schools.com
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson, hardcover; by Hyperion, 2006.

The digital age has brought with it earthshaking shifts in the way America does business. In Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, we’re introduced to the brave new commerce world where traditional boundaries of warehousing, distribution, and services are blown away by strokes on a keyboard. MBA students should take heed before entering an eCommerce marketplace they may have underestimated.

Anderson’s Secret for Sustained Success in the Business Book Market

No wonder The Long Tail has ridden a crest of sales on The New York Times Business Book Top Ten List this fall. Anderson provides solid examples of how digital selling has eliminated businesses’ traditional lumping of consumers into large, generalized audiences. Of course brick and mortar establishments must focus on best-selling items. They have limited floor space, narrow distribution lanes, and slender resources when it comes to carrying most anything a consumer might want.

If you’re pursuing an MBA degree, Anderson is must reading. Why should MBAs be limited in managing a sales organization that offers only popular, best sellers that are eclipsed in fashion almost as fast as they appear in the marketplace? The Long Tail suggests that MBAs should lead organizations mirroring the successful examples of Amazon, Netflix, or iTunes—companies that always offer a back inventory of niche items that please ALL consumers, not just ones seeking the glitzy item of the moment.

MBAs: Break Down the Walls of the Marketplace of the Future

Today’s marketplace is made up of “countless niches,” Anderson says. Consequently, it may behoove MBA leadership to consider three revolutionary practices:

1. Make everything available to all consumers. There is a buyer for everything you can stock and ship using virtual ordering and tracking.
2. Slice all your prices in half and then lower them further. The lower the price, the greater the total number of sales. Consider the iTunes 99-cent song.
3. Help people find what they want to buy. Profile your customers. Show them niche products to buy.

MBAs pay attention here: Anderson contends that not only will future marketers continue to shape buying trends, but the clever ones will create and serve a marketplace that has nothing to do with trends and top-selling brands.

About Chris Anderson

Anderson took over the popular digital sage publication Wired in 2001. He previously served The Economist as a business and technology editor for seven years. Before turning to business, Anderson studied physics at Los Alamos Laboratory and spent six years at the journals Nature and Science.

About the Author

Posted on November 10, 2006 at 1:28 PM

by Gabby Hyman
gabby.hyman@MBA-business-schools.com
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman, hardcover; 496 pages, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, is simply must-reading for business leaders, all people with MBA degrees, and anyone considering business school. Friedman is modern-day Columbus with an economic historian’s pedigree, out to destroy your misconceptions of the way the world does business and to ferry you to the landscape of contemporary realities.

Through September, Friedman’s book led the prestigious New York Times’ Business Book Bestseller’s List for a reason: he is dead-set on delivering a wake-up call to anyone who will listen: our antiquated perspective of the business world will end in widespread failure. The book has sold over two million copies since July.

Friedman’s Brave New Business World

Long-held barriers to entry into the world marketplace are dying, Friedman says, along with the perceptions that were wrongfully there in the first place. Nearly 30 years ago, Bill Gates warned Friedman of the digital flattening of international boundaries, saying that he’d rather take his chances being “a genius” born in China than an ordinary person hailing from Poughkeepsie. Friedman wants you to know that given today’s level playing field, technology makes it possible for anyone to become an MBA from Anytown, Planet Earth.

What MBA Degree Seekers Need to Hear about Irreversible Trends and Realities

Friedman, a New York Times columnist, first sounded the warning call on globalization in 1996 with publication of The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999; ISBN 0-374-18552-2). Since then, he has traveled the world extensively in examination of trends and outcomes. Now, in The World Is Flat, Friedman declares with the tone of a world explorer debunking old myths that the dot-com collapse forever transformed the business world. The dot-com bust lead to cost cutting, which led to outsourcing, which led to wiring up the planet. Wal-Mart alone, Friedman explains, imported $18 billion in Chinese goods from 5,000 manufacturers just last year. MBA degree students should perk up their ears at Friedman’s global business war cry. After all, analyzing the impact of globalization on twenty-first century business practices is a core component of the best MBA programs.

About Thomas Friedman

Friedman is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his commentary with the New York Times. He served as Times bureau chief in Beirut and Jerusalem. Friedman received his B.A. in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975 and a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford in 1978. His writings on foreign policy and economics have been published in 27 languages.

About the Author

Gabby Hyman has created online strategies and written content for Fortune 500 companies including eToys, GoTo.com, Siebel Systems, Microsoft Encarta, Avaya, and Nissan UK.

Posted on October 17, 2006 at 9:41 AM