School Notes: School of Management
May/June 2016

Building global teamwork skills

Yale SOM has inaugurated a new core curriculum course, Global Virtual Teams, which introduces students to research on what makes global teams succeed or fail, and helps them develop the skills to work on projects with teams spread across regions and countries. The three-day course debuted in January and was required for all MBA students starting with the first-year Class of 2017. Students then used the skills developed in the course as they worked with colleagues from two schools in the Global Network for Advanced Management on a virtual team project in the Operations Engine course.

The new course emerged in part from discussions that Professor Olav Sorenson, the director of the integrated MBA curriculum, had with students returning from summer internships about the challenges they faced working on global teams. “Our hope is that they will develop a set of skills for how to interact better with people who might be working from different cultures and different time zones,” Sorenson said, “so when they go into real jobs they’ll be able to drop right in and be productive from day one.”

Conference on antitrust enforcement

“Problems in Global Antitrust Enforcement,” a two-day conference organized by the School of Management, brought together antitrust enforcement officials, senior executives, top antitrust lawyers, and academics at Edward P. Evans Hall in February for a critical assessment of major challenges in the field.

The conference was organized by Professor Fiona Scott Morton and Dean Edward A. Snyder of Yale SOM, Pierre Cremieux of the Analysis Group, and Professor D. Daniel Sokol of the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, and included keynote speeches from Brent Snyder, deputy assistant attorney general for criminal enforcement for the antitrust division of the US Department of Justice; Diane Wood, chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit; Massimo Motta, the EU’s chief competition economist; and Edith Ramirez, chairwoman of the US Federal Trade Commission. Panelists included representatives of such technology companies as Google, Microsoft, Toshiba, and Expedia, as well as senior antitrust officials from India, Brazil, and the European Union.