One of the pieces that has to go into the Business Policy (BPL5100) team presentations is an analysis of the company’s strategy. Students have to address the strategy issue at four levels: corporate, business, functional and global. There is clear guidance on how to define these in the textbook, Strategic Management, A Primer, so you can ask the students to start there. Multiple copies are on reserve. You can also direct them to a guide for BPL5100 that gives more specific guidance. Look at the tab “Answers to Your Questions.”
Author: lklusek
Conference Board Redesign
The Conference Board Research Database is undergoing a re-design that probably won’t be finished for several weeks. What does this mean for us? We will be connecting to the full corporate members site and if you try to access reports that are not part of our subscription, you will be asked to login with a user name and password. To find the reports that are available through our library subscription, click on “Business Management Research.” You will see the usual keyword browsing/search and download options. When the re-design is finished we will have direct access to the library subscription with added full text search features.
Bloomberg Law
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about Bloomberg entering the legal research market in competition with LexisNexis and Westlaw. The Journal says this is only one product in Bloomberg’s push away from the “terminal.” Other products in the pipeline are a data service for the sports industry and one that covers the interactions of government and business. Read the article “Bloomberg hangs a new shingle” in the July 8, 2010 issue.
Smarter or Dumber
If you read the Saturday essay in the June 4th Wall Street Journal where Clay Shirkey and Nicholas Carr faced off on the question “Does the internet make you smarter or dumber?,” you might want to read more at the Edge Foundation website. The Edge Annual Question for 2010 is “How is the internet changing the way you think?.” In their World Question Center you will find essays from over 170 members of the Edge community, names like Esther Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Richard Dawkins and Nissim Taleb. You will also find a collection of articles from newspapers and magazines from around the world that have responded to the question.
BPL5100 – Business Policy
Harry and I have met with several of the first summer session BPL5100 sections. Here is a list of some of the industries that have been assigned for the team presentations:
- Beer
- Biotechnology
- Coal
- Electric Utilities
- Funeral Homes
- Gaming
- Life Insurance
- Lodging
- Pharmaceuticals
- Pipelines
- Railroads
- Toys and Games
- Waste Management
Most of these industries are covered in the Standard & Poor’s Industry Surveys. Others like toys and the funeral home industry can be found in Ibisworld. (Our trial runs through the end of the month.) Government websites are good for coal and railroads and electric utilities. The Oil & Gas Journal is the key source for the pipelines industry.
Students need to include both a SWOT analysis and a Porter analysis in their presentations. Several of the classes have been encouraged to recommend international companies for investment. You should be seeing many of these students at the reference desk as the presentations are due the week of June 27th.
Subotnick Center Summer Hours
Starting Monday June 14th, the Subotnick Center will be open from 10 am to 5 pm, Monday through Thursday.
The CDO Meltdown
Linda E. shared a blog post with me that you might find interesting. Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker and the recently published, The Big Short, praised the research of a Harvard undergraduate who wrote her thesis on the market for subprime mortgage-backed CDOs. The thesis is now on the reading list of a Harvard course on the financial crisis.
Improving Wikipedia
At last week’s Tech Sharecase in a discussion of Chemspider, a search engine that addresses the problem of finding reliable information on chemical structures on the web, Stephen mentioned that the team that built ChemSpider organized a group of scientists to review and authenticate all the Wikipedia articles on chemical structures and add new entries for structures that were not available.
Chemists aren’t the only group of scientists who are working on the Wikipedia. A recent blog in Science magazine mentioned that the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is asking its members to edit the Wikipedia as a form of public outreach.
The Wikimedia Foundation itself is starting an initiative to improve the quality of the site. In a recent press release they announced that they will will recruit Wikipedia volunteers to work with public policy professors and students to identify topic areas for improvement.
C-SPAN Video Archives
I just finished a chat with a Baruch student who needed to analyze the communication style of Alan Greenspan. The Fed keeps the transcripts of the former Chairs online; just search by name. You can also see all of Greenspan’s Congressional testimony on C-SPAN. They claim to have all programs aired since 1987 in their Video Library. All the Programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location. The congressional sessions and committee hearings are indexed by person too.
Guides at Baruch
If you haven’t checked out the Library’s Guides lately, there are twenty-six guides published and ready for use. In the last two weeks we have added Guides for:
- Graduate Student Services
- Computer Information Systems
- Communication Studies
- Primary Sources in American History and Culture
- New York City Data
- Health Care Administration
You can click on “Recent Guides” to see what’s new or search all the Guides from the search box on the library home page.