Business leaders advise executives of the future

ANTALYA - Senior executives of Turkey’s leading corporations and financial institutions come together with MBA students, sharing their experiences in the business world. Kamil Gökhan Bozkurt of Türk Telekom emphasizes the importance of collective intelligence, while Galya Frayman Molinas says a ’segmented approach’ helped Coca-Cola to break sales records.

Organized by the MBA clubs of Sabancı University and Bilkent University, MBA Forum 2009 was held in the southern city of Antalya over the weekend. Senior executives of Turkey’s leading companies attended the forum to share their experiences with MBA students.

Focused on four main topics, namely leadership, entrepreneurship, innovation and branding, MBA Forum 2009 witnessed a barrage of questions from MBA students to executives.

Speaking on productivity in business life, Kamil Gökhan Bozkurt, human resources chief of Türk Telekom, addressed MBA students as "CEO candidates of the future."

"The MBA is a general program. What is crucial during this program is to decide which specific way you will take. This decision will affect your career path in the future," Bozkurt said.

Collective intelligence as opposed to individual action

Highlighting the importance of using collective intelligence instead of acting individually to achieve productivity, Bozkurt also said especially European and American companies implement this principle well, although they are perceived as "individualistic societies."

Defining productivity as "displaying the right behavior at the right time and place" Bozkurt listed the elements for success in business life as self-confidence, will to struggle, planned endeavor and avoidance from emotional behavior.

Galya Frayman Molinas, chief executive of Coca-Cola İçecek, said the organization is a great opportunity to prepare potential directors for their career journey in the 21st century.

"Coca-Cola multiplied its sales together with the profit margins when it diverged from the ’one size fits all’ approach to a segmented approach," Molinas said. "The company employs around 20,000 people just in Turkey."

Molinas said consistency and continuity are key factors in business success. "The primary focus in the business world is to achieve sustainable growth," Molinas said. "There are four main elements to this: marketplace, communities, workplace and environment."

Bringing a different perspective to the meeting, Hüsnü Özyeğin, chairman of the board of directors at Fiba Holding, stressed the importance of a social personality for a successful business life. "What MBA programs lack in general is a clear development plan," he said. "The factors of change and coincidence are also determinant along the career path."

"It is not so much important for a senior director to know the sector he works in very well," said Özyeğin, adding that the most important factor in business life is to have management skills, which include follow-up work, motivating employees and having a clear road map.

Answering a question on whether he has made any important mistake that might have affected his life or career, Özyeğin said he did a lot. "However, what is important is to make small-scale mistakes while achieving large scale successes."

Spotting employees with high potential

Highlighting "the desire to learn" as the crucial factor in managing businesses, Tayfun Bayazıt, chief executive of Yapı Kredi Bank, said experience plays a very important role in business life. "However, more important than that is to determine the high-potential employees and orient them into professional life as soon as possible."

Tarık Bayazıt, partner of Changa Restaurants, on the other hand, mentioned the difference between pursuing a career in a corporate business and setting up one’s own business. "I advise you to do the job which makes you happy the most. Do not be afraid of the job you do not know well. Maybe this is the very place of your success and happiness."

Disagreeing with Bayazıt, Burhan Karaçam, the former chief executive of Yapı Kredi, advised MBA students either to gain a good knowledge base before starting a job or to do the job they know well. "This is not a good time to risk your time and energy," he said.

MBA, or Master of Business Administration, is a master's degree in business administration, attracting people from various academic disciplines. The MBA designation originated in the United States as companies sought out scientific approaches to management.

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Earnings Gender Gap in Business

PARIS — The worlds of finance and big business are notoriously dominated by middle-aged men. But recent research suggests that this may not be for the usually suspected reason — a glass ceiling molded from male prejudice. The research, by Marianne Bertrand, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and two Harvard economics professors, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, provides a statistical explanation: women with children fall behind because they work less, the study says.

The joint paper, “Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Financial and Corporate Sectors,” tracks the careers of male and female graduates of the Chicago business school who received their master’s degree in business administration between 1990 and 2006. It follows their progression into the corporate and financial sectors and shows how career paths differ by gender in terms of earnings and labor force participation, several years after graduation.

“Despite the narrowing of the gender gap in business education, there is a growing sense that women are not getting ahead fast enough in the corporate world,” the report says. Indeed, while 40 percent of master’s degrees in business awarded in the United States are earned by women, the survey cites research from the 1990s that showed only 2.5 percent of senior executives in large and medium-size U.S. companies were women. While the number of women chief executives in those companies rose eight-fold between 1992 and 2004, they still numbered only 34, or 1.3 percent of the total.

“The main conclusion from our work is that female M.B.A.’s have not done as well as male M.B.A.’s in the labor market,” the report says. “That finding should not come as a surprise. The more startling findings concern why they have not done as well.”

In business school and early employment, male and female career paths are quite similar, the survey shows. Women tend to take more marketing classes and men more finance classes; but their grade point averages differ only very slightly, and the years following graduation generally lead to similar jobs and performance.

The real difference, said Dr. Bertrand in an interview, starts with maternity leave. “Any departure, for six months or more, is costly,” she said. “Male or female, you never re-enter where you were.”

Women executives who do not have children follow career paths that closely replicate those of their male peers. Successful M.B.A. couples have similar work patterns, said Dr. Bertrand. “Women without children married to high-earning spouses are just as likely to work and accumulate post-M.B.A. work experience at an almost identical rate,” she said. “Call a woman without a child a man.”

Until the first child arrives, M.B.A. couples act as mutual drivers, encouraging each other to work more, Dr. Bertrand said. But with the arrival of motherhood, the picture changes. When women executives return to the office, after several months of absence, they typically start to work shorter hours, the study shows: 52 hours per week, compared with an average 58 hours for their male peers, as they adapt to their new double task. “They try to have both pieces,” Dr. Bertrand said.

About a decade after completion of the M.B.A. course, the gap in hours worked adds up to the cumulative equivalent of a six-month difference in job experience between men and women, and the difference is a costly one, the report says.

The relative earnings of female executives start to decline in the first two years after the first child is born, and the rate of decline accelerates thereafter. “Earnings decline linearly with hours worked in the first two years after the first birth, but hourly wage penalties, associated with career interruptions, become evident for M.B.A. women three years after the birth.

“A woman’s annual earnings drop by about $45,000 in the two years following the first birth, and the impact grows close to $80,000 a year in subsequent years.” In contrast, the earnings of male M.B.A.’s continue to rise after they become fathers. “Male labor supply is virtually unaffected by fatherhood,” the report notes.

Because top executive jobs are hard to fit with motherhood, high-flying women may quit the corporate rat race for self-employed consulting, and then cut back even further on working time: 10 years after completing an M.B.A., 62 percent of self-employed women in the survey sample had made that decision. “They want to be excellent professionally, but they want to be excellent mothers, too,” Dr. Bertrand said.

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MBA Live completes one year!

Hope all you are doing fine and MBA Live is keeping you all time update and ahead of others!

Thank you to all the readers of MBA Live. MBA Live has just completed one year with 2500 visitors (not bad!). I plan to put some more important and useful information, links and eBooks in near future, so keep visiting it. Your suggestions, comments and feedback is very important to me for improvement of this blog.

CAT 2009 online

Bangalore/Delhi: India’s deficient power, telecom and technology infrastructure is looming as a stumbling block in other educational institutions following the elite Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in taking their admission tests online.

The IIMs will conduct the Common Admission Test, or CAT, for 2010 online over 10 days at the end of this year. The B-schools, which have been conducting the entrance test for admission to their management programme in a paper-and-pen format for 33 years, have outsourced the conduct of the online test to Prometric Testing Pvt. Ltd, the India arm of Prometric Inc., a US-based testing company.

Other institutes such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) also desire to take their admission tests online and avoid the logistical nightmare of administering it physically for tens of thousands of aspiring students. That may not be possible in a hurry.

For an admission test to be administered online, students need access to a computer with a broadband connection plus uninterrupted power supply.

For a country of over one billion people, the broadband subscriber base in India stands at just 3.87 million as of March 2008, according to data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Personal computers, including desktops and notebooks, total 7.3 million.

Small towns in India bear the brunt of severe power cuts and have shaky Internet connections, if at all. A.K. Binda, sub-dean of examinations at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, also cites the same reason for not moving online in the next few years.

The IIMs, which said on Monday that they would take CAT online, have departed from the paper-and-pen format to cater to the rising number of applicants. About 250,000 students took the CAT in 2008, up from 95,000 in 2003. Students who appear for CAT are largely urban students with a degree in hand.

Computer-based testing companies have long regarded India as a large, untapped market with at least 36 million children enrolled just in higher secondary (class IX-XII) schools. The potential market in India is larger than in the US given the sheer number of students, says Pawan Adhikari, business development manager at Gurgaon-based Prometric Testing, whose parent conducts seven million tests every year including the Graduate Record Examinations, or GRE, and Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL.

Another problem is that online tests will require the creation of a question bank as students will take the tests over a period of a few days and questions cannot be repeated. In a paper-and-pen format, all students write the examination simultaneously and only one question paper is required.

IIT Madras director M.S. Ananth says IIT-JEE will not go online next year and several issues such as creating a large question bank need to be tackled first. Nearly 375,000 students sat for the IIT-JEE this month to win an undergrduate seat in engineering schools.

Despite the problems, “All exams will move online sooner or later,” says Gautam Puri, vice-chairman of Career Launcher India Ltd, a test-prepatory company.

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