School Notes: School of Management
November/December 2006

New MBA curriculum launched to very positive reviews

Yale SOM's innovative new curriculum was launched in the fall. This was a milestone for the school as well as the 208 students who embarked on the new interdisciplinary core curriculum, and it received wide media coverage. The changes garnered attention from Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and Business Week Online. The Business Week article features a Q&A with Dean Joel Podolny titled "Breaking Down Silos at Yale," in which the dean explained that the curriculum needed to change because the needs of managers in the workplace have changed: "Effective leaders need to be able to own and frame problems and take real responsibility for solving those problems, and then work across organizational boundaries in order to solve those problems. The curriculum in the past was broken down by these disciplinary silos and because of that, got in the way of effective management and leadership." For more information about the new curriculum, visit: www.mba.yale.edu/curriculum.

Mentoring students for future success

A new mentorship program, part of the revamped SOM curriculum, aims to enable students to connect their professional education with their goals and values. The initiative began at orientation when each first-year student was grouped with 13 of his or her peers, a faculty member, a staff member, and a second-year student mentor. The program's objective is to increase student success in three areas: academic performance, interactions with others in the community, and meeting career goals. Heidi Brooks, a lecturer in organizational behavior at SOM who has been instrumental in developing the initiative, says, "The mentoring program is really about students being able to seek, understand, connect to, and articulate their own meaningful aspirations. We are here to inspire real inquiry and reflection about how each of our students can be successful at SOM and beyond." More about the mentorship program is online at www.mba.yale.edu/mentorship.

New book takes historical view of Wall Street

William N. Goetzmann, the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies and director of the International Center for Finance, and Roger G. Ibbotson, professor in the practice of finance, have published The Equity Risk Premium: Essays and Explorations (Oxford University Press). The book examines the historical development of the equity risk premium (the built-in reward for making riskier investments) with a collection of the authors' research on the subject, which spans 30 years. Among the topics covered are vital issues to investors, such as whether historical data should be used in equity investing. The book also updates the authors' study of the New York Stock Exchange's historical performance from 1792 to the present. A section of indices contains individual stock and dividend data from more than a decade of research at SOM.