Professor Kusum Ailawadi's research report on promotion profitability for a retailer, completed in collaboration with the drugstore chain CVS, was selected as a finalist for the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Practice Prize. The report will be published in Marketing Science in 2006. Ailawadi and her coauthor from CVS, Bari Harlam, presented the work at a special practice-prize session at the Marketing Science Conference in Atlanta. Ailawadi also organized a special session on store-brand research at the Marketing Science Conference and was invited to present her research at the University of Kansas, University of Missouri-Columbia Distinguished Speaker Series, the Winter Research Camp at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, the University of Cologne, and the upcoming European Marketing Association Conference in Athens.
Professor Gert Assmus has joined an advisory council at Sweet Briar College, where his wife, Jan, went to school. He has also been elected to the assembly of overseers at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Assmus traveled to Germany five times this year, where he is still working on an accreditation committee for private universities, and last year went with a group of Tuck students to Singapore and China for three weeks to work on a Tuck Global Consultancy project. He thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
Professor Ken Baker's new textbook, Optimization Modeling with Spreadsheets, was published in July by Duxbury Press. By late August, the book had been used by students in a course at Emory University, and around the same time, used copies began appearing for sale at Amazon.com. Baker continued his research efforts in conjunction with the Spreadsheet Engineering Research Project (SERP), which is funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. As part of the project's activities, he and Professor Steve Powell coauthored papers for presentation at the INFORMS and Decision Sciences Institute national conferences, both held in November.
Professor Andrew Bernard's paper "Survival of the Best Fit: Exposure to Low Wage Countries and the (Uneven) Growth of U.S. Manufacturing Plants" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of International Economics. In October Bernard was an invited speaker at the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association annual meeting in Paris, where he presented new research on transfer pricing by multinational firms. He has also presented this work in Wisconsin and Toronto and at Princeton, the FIEF [Trade Union Institute for Economic Research] conference on multinationals in Stockholm, and the winter meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research's International Trade and Investment Program group in Palo Alto. In November Bernard presented his research on "Trade Costs, Firms, and Productivity" at the Carnegie-Rochester Conference on Public Policy.
Professor Hans Brechbühl has been interviewing a number of Fortune 500 chief information officers (CIOs) recently. Many of the interviews are focused on the subject of CIO leadership and change management, recognizing the increasingly important corporate change and process management role that CIOs play in today's information-hungry corporate environment. One of the results of the interviewing is the launch of CIO Leadership Notes, a compilation of CIO interviews sent out to Fortune 500 CIOs via email and updated quarterly. As part of the second-year Tuck Global Consultancy course, Brechbühl also took an eight-person team to Central and Eastern Europe this winter for a major home-improvement retailer's project. He also introduced a new online cultural learning component to add to the course. Brechbühl also served on the advisory board of 2005 Future Forward: The New England Technology Summit.
In September, Professor B. Espen Eckbo was appointed member of the Corporate Governance Group of the Norwegian Central Bank. The bank manages the Norwegian Petroleum Fund, which receives the country's oil revenues from the North Sea and invests the cash flow in broad international portfolios of stocks and bonds. The total value of the fund exceeds $200 billion, and its equity portfolio consists of more than 3,000 stocks listed on 30+ stock exchanges worldwide. Eckbo joins a newly created, six-member team that will assist the Central Bank in overseeing the corporate governance practices of the companies held by the fund. The objective of the fund is to become a key player in the corporate governance field and to exert the sort of influence so far only seen by large U.S. pension funds, such as TIAA-CREF and CalPERS. Today, the Petroleum Fund exceeds even the size of these U.S. pension giants.
Professor Sydney Finkelstein has recently published a new series of articles on strategy and leadership in several leading journals, including the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Business History, Journal of Business Strategy, and the Ivey Business Journal. In addition, he has been a keynote speaker at events in Japan, Australia, England, and Canada, as well as in the United States. He is currently working on four book projects on the topics of dynamic capabilities, strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic leadership.
