Knowledge at Wharton

Money to paraphrase the Beatles can’t buy you love. But it can certainly buy a lavish wedding as noted in Rebecca Mead’s new book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. Indeed according to Mead America’s wedding industry exceeds $161 billion annually -- an enormous sum that suggests how much weddings have become not only big business but big fantasy. Yet as our reviewer notes the wedding boom is not just confined to wealthy Western nations but has become a global phenomenon concerned with ”displaying and solidifying social position in a world where such things are fluid and changeable.”

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When you sit down you probably don’t check under your seat for a bomb. Even though it could kill you chances are slim that it’s there. A similar view of risk led bankers their regulators and other government officials to overlook dangerous investments and business models that contributed to the global credit crisis according to speakers at the financial risk roundtable held by the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and the Oliver Wyman Institute.

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What if you visited an investment site and found advertising messages suggesting therapies for your recently diagnosed heart condition? Chances are you would experience what Fran Maier executive director of TrustE a nonprofit advocate of online privacy calls the ”creepiness factor.” Maier and several others discussed the challenges of maintaining online privacy -- amid rising Internet use and plummeting costs of data storage and tracking -- at the recent Supernova conference in San Francisco.

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According to David Gergen the man elected president of the United States in November will face the most daunting foreign and domestic challenges since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Gergen who has been an advisor to four U.S. presidents and who currently directs the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government equated the presidency to ”feeling a little like Gulliver in Lilliput.... Giant accomplishments are expected” even as presidential powers are not always what they seem. Gergen discussed today’s presidential candidates as well as former presidents at the recent Wharton Leadership Conference.

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Hewlett-Packard Netflix Apple and others want to move content from the Internet to that big flat-screen TV in the living room. Wharton experts wonder if there is a market for this and indeed whether consumers are even willing to accept interactive television. The best advice to companies for now: Hedge your bets.

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Consumers tend to associate Johnson & Johnson with Band-Aids and baby shampoo but those well-known products are only part of a much larger picture according to William Weldon chairman and CEO. In fact Weldon has the mind-boggling task of overseeing more than 200 operating companies across three sectors including consumer products pharmaceuticals and medical devices. On June 18 Weldon spoke at the 2008 Wharton Leadership Conference about the challenges of running the J&J family of companies. In an interview with Knowledge at Wharton he elaborated on J&J’s decentralized structure and on what he sees as key issues for the health care industry in the coming decade among other topics.

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Multinational corporations have been sourcing from China for years but that doesn’t mean that all the questions have been answered about how to engage in procurement activities in the world’s fastest-growing economy. In this interview David Lee a partner and managing director at BCG says that plenty of challenges remain. Among them: finding good suppliers that offer products at relatively low costs and being willing and able to outsource a sufficient volume of one’s business to Chinese suppliers.

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The subprime crisis ”was a wreck that could have been predicted ” Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel says in this interview. Siegel is one of seven Wharton professors interviewed by Knowledge at Wharton for this special report on the credit crisis.

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In the never-ending quest for cost savings many companies have reduced the number of suppliers they use consolidated their purchases and negotiated better prices. So where can chief procurement officers and other managers now turn for savings? In this interview Bob Tevelson a BCG partner and managing director says firms must segment suppliers to identify those that can deliver what he calls ”partnership value” by establishing relationships that move beyond the transactional level.

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First U.S. Bankers raised questions about how the daily London Interbank Offered Rate was calculated and then The Wall Street Journal demonstrated that the rate was inexplicably diverging from what the data suggested it ought to be. Getting it right is important because LIBOR is the basis for many kinds of loans. The British Bankers Association says it will make changes.

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