School Notes: School of Management
July/August 2008

New SOM "raw" cases provide real-world situations

When business school students anywhere in the country consider the buyout of the Texas utility TXU by a pair of private equity firms, they don't have to use a standard business school case study. (Such studies are traditional business school teaching tools, but they are heavily predigested and interpreted for students.) Instead, students can use a "raw case," a new type of multimedia online case developed by SOM to support the school's innovative, integrated MBA curriculum by more closely replicating real-world business situations. The SOM case-writing team, which has developed more than 20 "raw" cases for the Yale MBA program, originally created the TXU case for a competition sponsored by the Aspen Institute and JPMorgan Chase.

Rather than a "cooked" narrative, summarizing the background of the issue, the case team prepared a website that linked to a plethora of "raw" documents that would have been available to a person deeply involved in the actual deal. Students are provided with news accounts, analyst's reports, news releases, videos, maps, 10Ks, and stock charts as they try to put together a strategy for how the various parties should proceed. View the TXU case and learn more about "raw" cases at http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/6434.shtml.

Successful faculty recruiting brings senior academics to Yale SOM

An exceptional faculty recruiting season last year has resulted in significant additions to the SOM senior faculty. Gary Gorton, whose research has focused on banking, corporate finance, asset pricing, and commodity futures, comes to Yale from the Wharton School, where he was a professor of banking and finance and held a secondary appointment as professor of economics in the University of Pennsylvania College of Arts and Sciences. Stephen Redding, formerly a reader in economics at the London School of Economics and director of the Globalization Program at the LSE Center for Economic Performance, has focused on productivity growth at the firm and industry level, international trade, and economic geography. Redding was a visiting associate professor in the department of economics at Harvard University in 2007-2008. The two are joined by Constance Bagley, newly appointed professor in the practice of law and management, who comes to Yale SOM from the Harvard Business School, and seven other new tenure-track hires in marketing, economics, organizational behavior, and operations management.

Q3 asks, "Can good health be good business?"

Q3, the third issue of the SOM magazine, takes a look at the intersection of health and business and how strong management practices can improve healthcare around the globe. The issue addresses the problems surrounding employer-sponsored health insurance, the best ways to fund medical innovation, how to reduce medical errors, and how healthcare consumers make decisions. Q3 pulls together top practitioners and faculty from SOM and around the country to tackle some of the most important issues facing business today. The magazine can be found online at som.yale.edu/q3, where you can also request a print copy.