Knowledge at Wharton

If 401(k)s and similar plans are the main way Americans invest for retirement how can employers improve them? By making enrollment automatic minimizing the use of the employer’s stock expanding the role of annuities and improving employees’ financial knowledge according to a set of recommendations issued by the Financial Economists Roundtable a group of about 50 prominent economists including several Wharton faculty members.

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Clear Channel Communications which owns more than 1 200 stations and is the nation’s largest radio company has begun selling five-second two-second and even one-second spots that they hope will appeal to cost-conscious marketers. But how much can an advertiser communicate in a five-second ”adlet” or a two- or one-second ”blink ” as these super-short ads are called?

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Tough Choices Carly Fiorina’s new book about her rise to the top of corporate America as CEO of Hewlett-Packard and later her firing at the hands of the HP board is almost like two books in one: A story about the passion and dedication that drove her to succeed along with an unwillingness to fully address why her tenure at HP was so short-lived. Knowledge at Wharton reviews Tough Choices and in an interview conducted earlier this week  talks to Fiorina about her book her image the leadership at HP and what’s in store for the future.

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Seven years ago Rajesh Jain ignited a dot-com storm in India when his portal IndiaWorld was sold to Sify an Internet service provider for $115 million. Today he is CEO of Netcore a Linux-based messaging software firm and also maintains an active blog emergic.org. Jain met with Knowledge at Wharton at his offices in Mumbai to discuss how mobile phones could hold the key to the Internet’s evolution in India and other emerging economies.

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Despite the hurdles they face in entering the global market companies emerging from the highly fragmented and competitive domestic market in China will have distinct advantages that many Western competitors are unprepared to deal with according to experts from Wharton and Boston Consulting Group. Among them: steep cost savings in wages and safety requirements and a widespread lack of concern or clear regulation regarding intellectual property protection.

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Experts from Wharton and Boston Consulting Group say that firms should not underestimate the skills they will need to navigate the labyrinthine networks of state-owned distribution companies and small private wholesalers in China -- particularly as they try to expand outside the country’s largest 30 or 40 cities into its 500-plus other large markets.

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Despite rapid urbanization and the emergence of a strong status-conscious middle class experts from Boston Consulting Group and Wharton point out that China is still ”a country of extremes ” where it pays to understand the differing habits and mindsets of the rich and poor as well as the subtleties of consumer rationales for trading up and down when making purchases.

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Because it is so difficult to generalize about Chinese consumers multinational companies using global ”one-size-fits-all” marketing strategies seem destined to fail in China. Knowledge at Wharton spoke with Deepak Advani senior vice president and chief marketing officer of computer manufacturer Lenovo and Hal Sirkin senior vice president of BCG and leader of the firm’s Global Operations Practice about strategies for selling to Chinese consumers. The key they point out is to tailor products and messages to local markets.

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Less than three years after emerging from nowhere the hot social networking website MySpace is on pace to be worth a whopping $15 billion in just three more years. Or is it? And is the much smaller Facebook really worth the $900 million or more Yahoo is reported to have offered for it? The problem say Wharton experts is a dearth of information -- including data on expected revenue generation and cost structure -- to plug into the standard valuation models.

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In writing his latest book The Go Point: When It’s Time to Decide -- Knowing What to Do and When to Do It Michael Useem asked more than 100 leading decision-makers to analyze decisions they had made to name their best and worst decisions to describe how they reached them and to comment on what if anything they would change about how the decisions were arrived at. Useem director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at Wharton talks with Knowledge at Wharton about The Go Point.

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