Business - BusinessWeek

Our dog is a total alpha. Combine that with his Napoleon complex -- he's just a wee Boston Terrier -- and you've got the makings of a canine Castro. To counter his quest for complete apartment domination, my husband and I keep him in a crate while we're out.

Want to know what is going to happen in the real estate market in the months and years ahead?

The expensive approach to retirement is to pile up so much money that you'll be safe no matter how long you live or what goes wrong with your health or the markets. But for many families, the amount required seems ridiculously out of reach, especially after the twin crashes of Wall Street and Main Street. "There's a big sense of futility and hopelessness," says Liz Davidson, founder and chief executive of Financial Finesse, a Manhattan Beach (Calif.) educational firm.

The government keeps promoting programs designed to help existing homeowners refinance their mortgages at a lower rate, as well as get perspective buyers into homes. In other words, Uncle Sam says he's here to help. "Phooey," say homeowners and prospective homeowners, who keep complaining that it is ridiculously hard to get a mortgageor refinance one. Can both sides be right? Unfortunately, yes. But if you are willing to do a bit more work than in the past, it is possible to lower your mortgage rate to 5% or arrange to buy your first home. It is clear that there is pent-up demand to do both. ...

After the housing bubble nightmare, does it still make sense to invest in real estate?

Chelsi Pohlmeier still remembers the butterflies she felt in 2007, when she first saw the barbed wire fences surrounding the Cleveland Prison Unit in Cleveland, Tex. After she passed through security, a guard escorted her down a hallway to a classroom full of former gang members and convicted felons awaiting Pohlmeier and her classmates from the honors program at Texas A&M Mays Business School (Mays Full-Time MBA Profile). ...

I waved to the lifeguard as I walked to the pool, slipped in, and started my laps. At this pool, 72 lengths equal a mile, and that was my goal for the day. My employer was generous enough to allow me to work in Seattle part time while I was still in school, and so every day I was in Seattle I tried to make it to the pool. When I started the EMBA program, one of the suggestions that UW (Foster EMBA Profile) had made was to try to make some time to work out. ...

Peril permeates a steel mill. Molten metal explodes when exposed to water. Overhead cranes hoist steel coils weighing up to 80,000 pounds. Heavy vehicles roll within feet of high-voltage wires. "We have a work environment that presents every hazard known to man," says Alan H. McCoy, vice-president and spokesman at AK Steel in West Chester, Ohio.

James Tsai is the sort of MBA corporate recruiters covet. He went to a good prep school, earned a degree with honors from Middlebury College, and made vice-president in Bank of America's (bac.) international wealth management group at the age of 26. Today, Tsai is about to graduate, straight A's in hand, from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a top-rated program in America. And he's hustling to land his first post-MBA job -- in China.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a bunch of small companies in Silicon Valley thought the future of television was theirs. Soon, the thinking went, TV would be everywhere. Frequent fliers would tune in on laptops and vacationers on tablets from the beach. If so inclined, you'd be able to watch Glee on a cell phone in a tree house. The network suits and the cable guys just didn't have the digital chops to make it happen. ...

I am in my late twenties, I'm unemployed, and my limited savings from five years of employment are nearly depleted. Yet, unlike many victims of the recession, I actually put myself in this position voluntarily. Why? Because I have nearly two full years of my life to pursue whatever academic and career endeavors I choose. I'm on my own clock, and the only person I am accountable to is myself. It's an incredible opportunity, and I consider myself extremely fortunate to be in this position. ...

Richard Florida, the author of the bestselling books The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, is a preeminent thinker about human capital and its importance for business. His new book, The Great Reset, due out in April, argues that a true recovery will require a complete break from the consumption lifestyle and a move towards a new economic model that is actually sustainable.

Graham Birch's knee-high boots are caked with mud as he climbs onto his tractor. His two dairy and sheep farms in southwest England cover 3,658 acres, an area more than five times the size of the City, London's financial district, where Birch worked for the last quarter-century in shoes seldom covered in anything but a shine.

With the job market still rocky, a growing number of MBA students are launching their own businesses straight out of school. Recruiting remains down at many campuses this year, and as a result, starting a company looks more appealing than ever to beleaguered B-school students. At business schools across the country, students are signing up for entrepreneurship classes in droves, entering business school competitions, and dangling their carefully crafted business plans before angel investors and venture capitalists. ...

After six frenetic years, credit analyst Jennifer Wright watched her industry cool off overnight. What had been a bustling area prior to mid-2007 -- collateralized loan obligations -- went into shutdown mode. Firms liquidated, investors grew leery, deals dried up, and suddenly "there wasn't any significant career potential," says Wright. It was a perfect excuse to go back to school. By January of 2008 she had enrolled in Columbia Business School's Executive MBA program with the aim of switching to another area of finance, like capital markets. ...

According to insiders at Prudential Plc , Tidjane Thiam, the chief executive of the insurer which said last week that it was bidding $35.5bn (23.6bn) to buy AIG's Asian insurance business is a firm believer in emotion over analysis.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek compiles comments from Wall Street economists and strategists on the key economic and market topics of Mar. 10. Kim Rupert and Michael Wallace, Action Economics The U.S. Treasury reported a $220.9 billion deficit for February. That's not quite the -$223 billion estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, but it's up 14.0% from the -$193.9 billion from last year. It brings the fiscal year deficit to date to $651.6 billion, vs. -$589.8 billion for the same five-month period in 2009, up 10.5%. February receipts climbed 23.1% year-over-year, while outlays were up 16.8%. ...

It's no secret that small businesses in the U.S. face difficulties accessing credit. According to a survey of a random sample of 751 small businesses conducted by Gallup at the end of 2009 for the National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation, 44% of small businesses seeking credit in 2009 received only some or none of the money they sought. This level of credit access compares poorly with mid-2000, when nine of every 10 companies seeking credit received it. While there is broad agreement that a small business credit problem exists, there is less consensus about its causes. ...

Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business (Mendoza Undergraduate Profile) took the top spot in the Bloomberg BusinessWeek ranking of undergraduate business programs for the first time this year. Students praised the program for its values and strong alumni network. And there were many other surprises for undergraduate business programs in 2010. Bloomberg BusinessWeek editors Louis Lavelle and Geoff Gloeckler recently revealed the top 50 programs and answered questions about the ranking from reporter Francesca Di Meglio (FrancescaBW) and readers during a live chat event. ...

Who got us into this mess? It's not just greedy mortgage lenders and irresponsible economists who are responsible for the current financial crisis. Leaders, so called, have played a role too, by not managing their companies and so being detached from what was going on in them. And behind much of this has been an educational process that encouraged such detachment. As I've argued at length in my book, Managers not MBAs, the MBA is fine education -- but in the functions of business, not the exercise of managing. ...

Change is a dominant feature of business schools. Curricula change, new courses are added or dropped every year, professors come and go, and entire programs are born, evolve, or die. But until recently one thing that hasn't changed much in many years is the application process: A paper application, set deadlines, interviews, and recommendations are still its component parts. Today, though, that process is beginning to undergo a transformation. Some applications have become more inclusive by accepting GRE and IELTS scores, in addition to the more traditional GMAT and TOEFL scores. ...

A first semester in business school is probably best summed up through some sort of interpretive dance.Refusing to be confined to words only, I am supplementing this entry with music."My B-school Playlist" (downloadable here) is a song collection recapping my first semester. 1) Jordin Sparks, Battlefield Business school is the most intense thing I have done -- and that includes fleeing a war-torn country. The pace of classes is brutal and the amount of learning intense. As a career-switcher, I've had to add researching companies and pursuing informational interviews to my plate. ...

ITT Educational Services didn't pay $20.8 million for debt-ridden Daniel Webster College in June just to acquire its red-brick campus, 1,200 students, or computer science and aviation training programs.

When numbers are the political weapon of choice, the Republicans turn to Paul Ryan to do their fighting. In prepping for the Feb. 25 televised health-care showdown with President Barack Obama, it was Ryan, a representative from southern Wisconsin's rolling hills and industrial enclaves, who was tasked with challenging the math of the Administration's $2.3 trillion health-care overhaul. At 40, and already on his sixth term, Ryan has the right mix of freshness and experience for the moment. ...

Welcome back, dear readers, to the third installment of Jonathan Stern's Adventures in Business School.In our last chapter, I was in the midst of what I described as the busiest time of my life.Now, as I sit here at my keyboard, mere hours from the start of my second quarter at the Anderson School of Management (Anderson Full-Time MBA Profile), I suppose it's time to reflect on the quarter I have just completed and, I hope, recovered from. The best way for me to do that is to address the questions friends and family ask me most. ...

To identify the top undergraduate business programs, Bloomberg BusinessWeek uses a methodology that includes nine measures of student satisfaction, postgraduation outcomes, and academic quality. This year we started with 139 programs that were eligible for ranking, including virtually all of the schools from our 2009 ranking plus six new schools that met our eligibility requirements. ...

When the Class of 2010 enrolled in college four years ago, majoring in business seemed the best route to securing a plum job at graduation. Seniors were graduating with two and three job offers, starting salaries averaged close to $50,000, and big signing bonuses and benefits packages were typical. Then came the Great Recession. Students returned from summer internships without job offers. And those lucky enough to land a position had to settle for lower salaries than they had expected.

Kristin Davie misses her freedom. The 22-year-old has been living with her parents in Colonia, N.J., since graduating from Marist College in May. She and two friends set a deadline of September to find jobs and a New York City apartment they could afford to share. September's long gone, and she's still at home. Davie left her first job, where she was unhappy; now she has a new one. "I'm hoping we'll be in the city by the end of April," she says.