B-school trends come and go, but one that seems to have legs is the creation of specialized MBA programs, particularly by second-tier schools. The schools find them useful for attracting students and cementing their brand identities at a time when competition among schools for the best students is intense. In recent years, they’ve becoming increasingly common (BusinessWeek.com, 7/19/07) even at high-profile schools. Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, and the Wharton School now offer specialized MBAs, majors, or dual degree programs in areas like real estate, sports management, biosciences, electronic commerce, and health care.

But is a specialized program always a good choice for an MBA student?

Not necessarily. While established programs have placement records on par with those of their general MBAs, many newer programs have not yet established the kind of recruiting relationships that guarantee students high-paying jobs at graduation. And graduates always run the risk of getting hamstrung by their specialties later in their careers, when an industry downturn forces them to look outside their specialties for opportunities.
Chart Your Own Path

Some who have gone through the specialized programs say they are best for those with a firm idea of their future goals, and who are keen to chart their own path. “I knew what I wanted to do,” said Carrie Stern Rathod, who received her MBA from Wisconsin’s Brand ‐ Product Management Center in 2005 and now works for Procter & Gamble (PG), which recruits regularly from the program. “There’s a range of people for whom this program is ideal. If you have an entrepreneurial bent but are not sure you’re ready to take the leap yet, the program might be right.” But, she added, “I think it would be tough if you wanted to go into consulting or something like that.”

For students who aren’t comfortable breaking away from the pack or seeking out professional contacts in unconventional ways, a specialized MBA might not be the best choice. This is especially true at less well-known schools, where big companies often don’t recruit. Students in these programs agree that making industry connections can require a lot of initiative from the student. “If you have a very specific company in mind, you might need to be a trailblazer in making relationships with those companies,” says Rathod.

More : businessweek.com

Would-be MBA students getting ready to take the GMAT might be in for a little surprise when they show up at the testing center. In addition to all the usual security measures—including video monitoring and the computer adaptive test itself—test takers will soon be asked to submit to a new one: a biometric device that uses an infared light to capture the test-taker’s unique “palm vein pattern.”

Pearson VUE, the company that administers the GMAT for the Graduate Management Admission Council, plans to announce the new security effort tomorrow, but BusinessWeek got a sneak peak at it today.

The Fujitsu “PalmSecure” device will be rolled out next month at 16 testing centers in India and Korea for GMAT candidates. It goes live in the U.S. this fall, and when fully deployed will be used in 400 facilities in 107 countries by May 2009.

The announcement comes as the b-school world is embroiled in a cheating scandal involving the GMAT–users of a now-defunct test prep Web site, Scoretop.com, have been accused by GMAC of using it to post and access live test questions, and GMAC has said it will cancel the test scores of anyone who violated its rules.

But the new security measure is designed to stop a different kind of cheating–the use of professional test takers, or proxies, to take the exam on behalf of someone else. GMAC’s been burned by this type of cheater before. Back in 2003, it busted a half dozen people who took the GMAT for others for about $5,000 a pop. GMAC canceled 166 scores as a result, and five of the six imposters ended up at Rikers.

More : businessweek.com

Aaron F. Cooper II, a self-described worrywart, never thought his penchant for devising foolproof backup plans could translate into a calling. But that all changed when he signed up for an elective in risk management while at the University of Georgia’s Terry School of Business executive MBA program last fall. “It entails pretty much everything I’ve always been interested in my entire life, even before I knew risk management existed,” said Cooper, 27, a telecommunications engineer at AT&T (T).

Cooper is part of a new wave of students hitting business school campuses. For years, risk management—the process of analyzing exposure to risk and determining how best to handle it—occupied a sleepy corner in business schools, a subject mainly of interest to those who want to enter the insurance field. But with the recent turmoil in the financial markets and a push for more accountability, risk management has rocketed in status at business schools.

In the past decade, a growing number of B-schools have added concentrations in the subject, ramping up the number of classes they offer. Executive MBA programs are also incorporating risk management electives into their curriculum, responding to increased demand from executives and companies. In some instances, schools such as Georgia’s Terry are developing custom programs on the topic for top executives and boards of directors.

More : businessweek.com

Steve McKee, a partner in an advertising agency McKee Albuquerque Wall Work Cleveland, found that in June, after writing his monthly column for BusinessWeek.com.

The column entitled “Five words, never to use them in an ad” was one of his most popular songs. Research has shown that the blogs, they had 36 and the withholding of their sites, something that, in general, as “fair use” in the blogosphere. However, McKee’s wrath, 13, it adopted the writing credit for it, since their original prose.

“They are like cockroaches,” says McKee. “Ideas are our capital, and it is frustrating to see that, if people you without shame.”

Other examples. WiserAdvisor.com, a sort of yellow pages for financial advisors, contributions contributions of advice on how to get the traffic. A recent article was written on Social Security for the problems that arise when married couples are not about age. The authors of the line of the article is Michael Bischoff, Certified Public Accountant with Webb Financial Group in Bloomington, Minn. However, the same item appeared on August 15 at the site of financial information journalist Andrea Coombes.

Bischoff said Coombes interviewed and quoted him, and he had e-mail to the Financial WiserAdvisor history. He said he did not know why he received a secondary line. Tom Murcko, CEO of WiserAdvisor Publisher WebFinance, said the financial adviser of the site is only with the surrender of original material.

“We are confident that this was an honest mistake (Bischoff),” Murcko said. Last week, seven WiserAdvisor removes all items that Bischoff, and asked once again to one, “he wrote.

Murcko said to his business, intellectual property is serious and most often themselves victims of Internet plagiarism. Thus, Factor News Network, but no one has the means to do something, “says David Geller, president of the Internet-Magazin.

It all started here …

A July 3 column, Business Week, the former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch and Suzy by his wife, was approved at the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) website of New Delhi. There was no reference to Business Week, or who, just a picture, appeared with the column of Professor Arindam Chaudhuri, a business guru and the author of India, for works IIPM.

If the USA TODAY Chaudhuri tried to contact by e-mail on July 21, the e-mail was sent to Naveen Chamoli, Dean of IIPM, the Centre for planning and entrepreneurship. Chamoli, by e-mail, was that Chaudhuri travel, inaccessible and had nothing to do with the column Welch is sent under his photo.

Chamoli said in his e-mail, he has rights to IIPM Welch column by the New York Times News Service / Syndicate. Chamoli said in an e-mail below, that the authors Welch line has been established according to USA TODAY request, because “the others might be confused.

Jack and Suzy Welch, on vacation, had no comment.

In some quarters, there is plagiarism as a serious offence. But where there are around the Internet, plagiarism, the readiness to take to maintain, and if confronted often, offenders are alike hardly topical.

Pew Research two weeks ago, she said that of the 12 million adults, blog, 44% say they have taken, songs, images or text and “Remix” it in his own artistic creation .

A new variant, the software is used by spammers to automatically generate and never deliberately original content for websites and blogs. The authors are byproducts of the victim of an attempt to draw visitors on content, and readers are misleading, click on the links in order to give them publicity.

Legal?

It needs a high-profile legal case to slow it down, Mr. Kaushansky Howard, the president of the Umbria, rental companies of the Internet to monitor, and report on, what is said about them and competitors.

McKee’s BusinessWeek.com column shows how Internet plagiarism a winding road. It was for the first time, the elimination of CRM Daily, a Web editor based on the possession of Factor News Network, which has signed a contract with a consortium of BusinessWeek.com content.

The association CRM Daily BusinessWeek.com was on the ground and in small print, and McKee was not mentioned as the author. Other blogs, and then brought the content of CRM Daily. Some mistakenly attributed to the origin of the work of CRM Daily, some attributed to him. At least four words Blogs due to Jim McKee Berkowitz, who writes a blog called CRMMastery.com. Berkowitz, he says topple McKee’s Daily column CRM and CRM Daily mistakenly gave credit. So if other Blogger CRMMastery she stressed that it wrongly attributed Berkowitz, like the author, because his blog is where she was found.

“People are incredibly bad,” said Berkowitz, who said he had issued a quantity of content they need, but also to identify the other, which is not his job initial withdrawals and Highlighting in yellow.