Archive for March, 2009

By Darien Carroll, Thunderbird student

A survey released this winter shows a significant drop in corporate recruiting activity at business schools worldwide, which has created an opening for small and midsize companies looking for talent at top-ranked MBA programs. “For some companies, there is some good news in that they now can attract students from top tier schools that they may not have been able to afford in prior years,” said Thunderbird Associate Vice President Kip Harrell, president of MBA Career Services Council, an association of business school career management offices that compiled the 2008-09 Winter Survey. | Video: Kip Harrell on MBA recruitment trends (4:21) |
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Argentines consume millions of pizzas each year from mom and pop restaurants, and entrepreneur Sebastián Maril has turned this appetite for Italian cuisine into a successful business in his home country. The 2002 Thunderbird graduate quit his day job as a banker in 2006 and launched a company in Buenos Aires that puts advertising messages on pizza boxes for clients such as Pepsi, Wal-Mart, Fox Latin American Network, Hewlett Packard and Unilever, among others.
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By Paul Kinsinger, Thunderbird Professor

As the economic meltdown continues and major blue-chip companies fall into a tailspin, questioning business strategies and senior-level decision making has come into vogue once again. How could venerable companies such as Citicorp and AIG have found themselves in such dire straits? How could longstanding mainstays of the U.S. economy such as General Motors and Ford have painted themselves into such a corner? The answers, of course, range from the risks of engaging in edgy forms of business, on the one hand, to greed and incompetence, on the other.
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