School Notes: School of Management
November/December 2016

Yale SOM embarks on fifth decade

The School of Management celebrated the beginning of its fifth decade in September. The school was officially inaugurated on September 13, 1976, with a campus still under construction and with an innovative curriculum that emphasized connections between the public and private sectors. “Our fundamental education objective is the conscious and sustained examination of common characteristics between public and private institutions,” wrote Dean William Donaldson ’53 in the school’s first admissions brochure, “not only in their structuring and interrelationships, but in their management.”

Citigroup executive addresses class

Valentina Antill ’94MBA, managing director for global markets at Citigroup, encouraged Yale SOM’s incoming class to polish both their hard and soft business leadership skills when she spoke during orientation on August 16. Antill said that her time at SOM provided her with not only the technical skills she needed to structure financial derivatives for Citigroup’s multinational clients, but also the ability to work with people from all over the world. She noted that additions made to the SOM curriculum—including increased emphasis on the “raw case” format, the Global Virtual Teams course, and Global Network Weeks—have made the school uniquely suited to shaping leaders who can work across sectoral and national boundaries.

Entrepreneurship across borders

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology hosted the inaugural Global Network for Advanced Management “unConference” in Haifa, Israel, August 28 to 30, giving scholars an opportunity to discuss ways to incorporate entrepreneurship initiatives into the network. Ryan Schill, a professor of entrepreneurship at INCAE Business School and one of the event’s organizers, said that the event was an opportunity for faculty across the network to learn about different approaches to entrepreneurship. “Activities like the unConference promote cross-collaboration to un-silo our often regionally categorized methods for coping with uncertainty,” Schill said. “It opens up borders and lines of communication to deal with challenges and allows us to see how others have succeeded in similar and not-so-similar economies.”

The Global Network is a collaborative union of 28 leading global business schools, including Yale SOM.