IE Online Programs – more than just distance learning

Go for IE

Why switching your postgraduate plans just because of your recent promotion? Are you “scared” about distance learning or online programs just because they do not provide the same learning as in a full-time programs?  Join the upcoming IE presentation about its online programs and the worldwide recognized blended learning methodology. Prof. Gamaliel Martinez will guide…

Details

Are we really so ignorant?

Academics

IE Focus | By Jose Mari O’Kean, Professor at IE Business School

The economic crisis has taught us an important lesson, namely that increases in wealth have to be based on real business, not on rises in the price of financial assets.We now have different books and reports on the financial crisis and they all have one common denominator: our ignorance of what happened and the difficulty involved in predicting it.

But if we stop and think for a minute, we can perhaps see that we aren’t really so ignorant:

a)We know that the market is what works best, but it has its faults. Several of them led to this crisis, namely the lack of information and the low-level transparency of financial markets, the principal-agent problem in bank management, behaviour among brokers that gave rise to moral risk, and inappropriate choices made by savers regarding financial assets and by banks regarding mortgage borrowers.

b)For better or for worse, states have intervened to correct these faults in economies, but we have no regulators to correct the faults of the global economy.

c)We operate in a global environment and this has made it possible to channel savings from where they were made to where they were needed with relative ease. The appearance of an emerging country such as China, with a savings rate of more than 40% of its revenue and a current-account surplus of 6% of its GDP, has brought an influx of funds available for loans on global financial markets.

d)And the newest facet of this crisis is perhaps that a generalized mega-expansionary monetary policy has been put in place coupled with the controlled inflation of the prices of goods and services, but nobody thought to control the significant increases in price it brought to financial and real assets.

Details

The iPad or cult of the apple

Academics

IE Focus | By Enrique Dans, Professor at IE Business School

Apple did it again. It focused everyone’s attention on the iPad launch, and it will be a success because it takes the best that tablets had to offer and adds the Apple touch.The world of technology has experienced another of those characteristic “cult of the apple” events, also known as the “field of distortion of reality”. Once again we saw how that high priest called Steve Jobs, thin and fragile after his liver transplant, hypnotised the world of technology from a stage, completely redefining, almost reinventing, an entire market segment. For several hours, searches on Twitter for the word “iPad” returned more than five thousand new results per minute, while devotees and critics eagerly followed the news via the several thousands of bloggers and journalists who were at the Yerba Buena Centre of San Francisco. Once again the mystical information system designed by the company worked its magic: a combination of obsessive secrecy seasoned with a few information leaks that were not confirmed until the moment of truth and a staging capable of creating a truly surprising level of expectation. 

Before the iPad, the world of mobile devices began with mobile telephones, continued with the so-called netbooks and ended with laptops, the category in which Apple´s sales reached their high. However, Apple had often snubbed the intermediate category of netbooks, which it referred to as small, limited computers that led to poor user experiences. As a result, Apple had a clear gap in its product range, a gap it has filled with a move that is strategically perfect. It offers a product that is familiar: after redefining mobile telephones with the iPhone and becoming the reference design, it has designed something that is simply a very big iPhone, something everyone who has ever had an iPhone in their hands knows how to use or, in the light of the company´s concept of usability, even if they have never held one. It is everything from a book or a magazine to a simple computer when used with a keyboard base. 

Details