Knowledge at Wharton

When it comes to rolling out new goods and services companies tend to choose one of two strategies as a way of generating interest in their products whether it’s Apple’s iPhone or Microsoft’s Surface Computing effort. One is pre-announcing the product to give customers partners and even competitors advance notice of what’s to come. The second approach is the surprise unveiling where a company hopes to make a big splash by giving few advance hints about an upcoming release. Which approach is best? It depends -- on the product the company and its position in the market say experts at Wharton.

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Lucrative deals are hard to come by these days for investors looking to extract value from distressed companies around the world. As global markets become increasingly sophisticated success will be determined by those who know how to navigate local corporate legal and cultural terrains. At the 2007 Wharton Restructuring Conference turnaround consultants and distressed asset investing experts noted that calibrating strategies for individual markets obtaining accurate information and building trust are more important for a successful outcome than spreadsheets and financial models. ”What you don’t know will kill you ” one panelist said.

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Last week the United States’ first major immigration reform bill in two decades collapsed in the Senate. Buried in the ongoing debate was the potential economic impact of a measure that could change the composition of America’s workforce in significant ways: By cracking down on illegal immigration the legislation could constrict the future supply of low-skilled workers while a move to skill-based visa evaluations could provide more workers for booming high-tech industries. Meanwhile it isn’t exactly clear what impact the country’s 12 million illegal residents have on its economy. Experts from Wharton and elsewhere weigh in.

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As baby boomers retire and start spending their nest eggs they will need new financial products to make their money last according to speakers at a recent Wharton Impact Conference titled ”Managing Retirement Payouts: Positioning Investing and Spending Assets.” The conference explored emerging patterns in spending during retirement and debated new ideas to help retirees manage their finances after leaving the workforce.

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Think of them as the ”walking dead ” a type of customer who currently maintains service with a particular company but whose next action will most likely be to discontinue that relationship according to a new study that examines how the customers of a telecommunications firm acquire and discard services over time. The paper -- ”Modeling the Evolution of Customers’ Service Portfolios ” by Wharton marketing professors Peter Fader and Eric Bradlow and a former Wharton PhD student -- focuses in part on whether it is possible to predict future purchasing patterns by looking at past buying behavior.

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It seemed only right that James Watson who co-discovered the structure of DNA with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin was the first to receive a DVD holding the sequence of his own DNA produced by 454 Life Sciences a division of the Swiss drug giant Roche and academic researchers. While DNA mapping technology under development at Roche and other companies has the potential to bring the long-awaited era of personalized medicine closer there are enormous ethical legal and investment hurdles to building successful business models based on decoding an individual’s DNA according to Wharton faculty and executives in the industry.

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In April Rupert Murdoch made a $5 billion offer to buy Dow Jones and Co. which publishes the Wall Street Journal and also owns Dow Jones Newswires and Marketwatch.com. The Bancroft family majority owners of Dow Jones initially rejected the offer but came back several weeks ago to say it would consider it along with offers from any other groups. Murdoch’s move has dismayed some Journal staffers who worry that the paper’s editorial quality and objectivity will suffer. Murdoch though seems to have more in mind for this acquisition than just getting control of the Journal. Knowledge at Wharton has asked Wharton management professor Larry Hrebiniak and Joseph Turow professor of communication at the Annenberg School for their thoughts on this possible deal.

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Earlier this month Cerberus Capital Management bought 80.1% of Chrysler Group from German auto maker Daimler-Chrysler effectively ending a nine-year marriage between the two that never quite worked out. The expectations created by this acquisition are huge and revolve in part around Cerberus’s ability to make a deal with the United Auto Workers union that would include restructuring billions of dollars of retirement and health-care benefits -- a burden that both Ford and GM -- but not Toyota -- also carry. We asked Wharton management professor John Paul MacDuffie co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program to give his views about Chrysler Cerberus high gas prices and other auto-related issues.

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Microsoft buys aQuantive; Google acquires DoubleClick for $3.1 billion; Yahoo purchases the 80% of Right Media it doesn’t already own and ad firm WPP gets 24/7 Real Media for $649 million. And that’s just in the last six weeks. The common thread: All the takeover targets are online advertising companies. The race to consolidate the online advertising industry is heating up at the same time that advertisers are demanding more return on their marketing dollars. Wharton professors and others analyze how this will play out for tech companies ad companies and consumers.

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Dana Gioia (pronounced Joy-a) claims to be the only person in history who went to business school to be a poet. Having earned a degree from Stanford’s graduate school of business he worked 15 years in corporate life eventually becoming vice president of General Foods. In 1991 Gioia wrote an influential collection of essays titled ”Can Poetry Matter?” in which he explored among other themes the nexus between business and poetry. Since 2002 he has been chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts where he has overseen programs aimed at making Shakespeare and poetry recitation more popular in the U.S. Gioia who is a speaker at the Wharton Leadership Conference in Philadelphia on June 7 talked about these ideas with management professor Michael Useem and Knowledge at Wharton.

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