Christine Lagarde: Emerging Market Nations Will Get More Power in the IMF

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), sees no alternative to the strict austerity policies being imposed on many peripheral European countries, says the double dip recessions in Italy and Ireland just announced come as no surprise, and notes that IMF reforms will shift 6% of current quotas to dynamic emerging and developing countries. Lagarde’s comments came in an exclusive interview with Knowledge@Wharton and media partner ParisTech Review.

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UCL’s Malcolm Grant on Cost and Collaboration Challenges for Higher Education

As the U.K. government curtails funding to schools and colleges, University College London president and provost Malcolm Grant finds himself very popular with student protestors. But Grant acknowledges the burden put on students, who just over a decade ago enjoyed free higher education.

Grant says there are ways for schools to manage costs and still conduct worthwhile research and provide intellectual innovation. One critical step, he says, is greater collaboration between universities in researching key contemporary issues.

“Our view is in this globalized world it can’t be the universities alone that sit at home, we have to I think engage with globalization; and it’s not sufficient to do what we’ve done for decades, which is to have the world come to us,” he tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton.

“Like most of the really research-intensive universities around the world, we are turning down huge numbers of proposals to establish ourselves elsewhere. We have to be able to do it at a pace that we can manage, because there’s a huge drawdown on senior management time to do any of these ventures. And we have to be satisfied that it fits with our mission and what we want to do.”

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Wharton professor’s study: Shy people can be leaders, too

Whether it’s in a group or a national political campaign, a strong leader is said to have a dynamic, take-charge personality. However, Wharton associate professor of management Adam Grant proves magnetism isn’t always a trait in successful leadership.

Grant’s study found that although extraverted superiors work well with acquiescent subordinates, their lack of reception to ideas of the ambitious proves detrimental to group cohesion.

The study explains that “although extraversion is a consistent predictor of supervisor and subordinate perceptions of leadership effectiveness, extraverted leadership may not always contribute positively to group performance.”

In other words, if a unit was staffed with both extravert leaders and extravert workers, it is likely that productivity would not be lucrative. The reason being leader extraversion would clash with worker extraversion, resulting in failure of efficiency.

In such cases, directors with introverted disposition work successfully with affable employees. The ability of an introvert leader to be amenable, partners with the proactivity of an extravert.

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For a video game to succeed, best producers are the boss

The new ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ video game has been panned for being an exercise in poor taste and stilted gameplay, but for video game industry insiders, the game’s real failure was the lengthy delay from its last release in 1996.

If the developers of the game had good producers to manage their efforts, they could’ve had something much sooner to sell in the $US1.36 billion retail video game market, reported Wharton management professor Ethan Mollick.

Mollick conducted a study of 800 games released between 1994 and 2006, which in total earned $US4 billion. He found that 30% of revenue differences between games could be linked to the producer-designer team, with the producer mostly playing the key role in successful game releases.

Keeping game development on deadline and on budget — despite the ever-changing nature of the video game industry, it too needs boring but basic management, Mollick noted.

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The best-prepared companies? Those with multiple workforce plans

With economic austerity and increased demands upon reduced resources, a company should do better to analyze the needs of its workforce to ensure they remain satisfied, according to a recent Wharton study. The research, done by Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli, suggests even a company with the best workforce plan focuses on a single goal to accomplish in a planning cycle, without taking into account the multiple factors that could occur in the future. The study recommends managers improve their communication with employees to help the effort to develop multiple workforce plans.

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Previously: ‘Talent on Demand’: Applying Supply Chain Management to People

Wharton lecturer says global cocoa bean shortage is a lesson for commodity buyers

When politics in the Ivory Coast turned bloody, the impact was felt across global commodity markets, as cocoa bean shortages drove prices to a 32-year high in early March. Wharton lecturer Edwin Keh, a supply-chain specialist, tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton the cocoa crisis illustrates the dangers of overreliance on a single source, and should encourage buyers to consider alternative suppliers.

Read the story here: http://bit.ly/ilu3Gz