School Notes: School of Management
March/April 2015

Alumnus is new US surgeon general

The US Senate confirmed Vivek Murthy ’03MBA, ’03MD, to the post of US surgeon general in December. Murthy earned an MBA and an MD from Yale through the university’s joint program.

Murthy, a professor at Harvard University, has also founded and led a number of organizations, including Visions Worldwide, which developed HIV/AIDS education programs in India and the US; Swasthya Community Health Partnership, which trained rural women in India to provide health education and health care; TrialNetworks, a company that developed an online platform for coordinating clinical trials; and Doctors for America, which works to improve access to health care. Murthy received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Harvard University, and completed his residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he remains an attending physician.

New online Global Network courses

Three “small network online courses” will be available for students at member schools in the Global Network for Advanced Management this semester, including two new offerings. Handling Disruption will provide sociopolitical contexts for leaders working in humanitarian crises; and International Management and Organizational Structures will analyze how strategic decision-making is used in the global expansion process of businesses. A return offering is Natural Capital: Risks and Opportunities in Global Resource Systems, first taught in 2014, which examines the environmental, economic, and social impact of businesses’ natural resource usage, and analyzes the risks, choices, and liabilities companies may face while using those resources. These courses, open only to students from Global Network schools, use web-based technology to connect students across the world for class sessions and team-based project work.

Yale CEO Summit honors Alcoa CEO

>Klaus Kleinfeld, chairman and CEO of Alcoa, was honored with the Legend in Leadership Award during the Yale CEO Summit, held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City last December. The summit, led by SOM professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, brought together business leaders, current and former government officials, academics, and other thought leaders. The summit’s theme was “The Global CEO and Local Sensitivities: Leading at Once as Diplomat, Patriot, Entrepreneur, Financier, and Industrialist.” Sessions dealt with the CEO voice and when to use it in global events, the role and types of activist investors, disrupting existing industries, and reinventing established enterprises. This summit looked at the business climate in the US, Europe, China, and elsewhere, and examined trends in industries including telecom, entertainment, technology, health care, retail, and more.