Business & Entrepreneurship

It’s not easy being a Chicago Cubs fan. Just ask Chakravarthi Narasimhan, PhD, the Philip L. Siteman Professor of Marketing at Olin Business School. Though Narasimhan’s sports life may have more downs than ups, his professional life has been a grand slam. “Chak is a key member of the school’s senior faculty and has built an outstanding marketing group here at Olin,” says colleague Todd Milbourn, PhD.

President Barack Obama is calling for a more modernized and concentrated hiring process in the federal government as more of its workers retire. While the government attracts many excellent candidates, the recruitment process remains bureaucratic, cumbersome and complex, leading many talented workers to be turned away. “The federal government is facing a war for talent and its competitors are winning,” says Jackson A. Nickerson, PhD, professor of strategy at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Maxine Lipeles, JD, co-director of the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic, participates in “speed mentoring” sessions with law students at Washington University School of Law during Women’s Law Day Sept. 21 in Crowder Courtyard of Anheuser-Busch Hall.

The Federal Reserve’s latest plan to prop up the sagging American economy, known as Operation Twist, won’t have a significant impact, says a finance expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Many companies struggle with how to use innovation and technology to grow their business. A new book by a Washington University in St. Louis business professor guides senior managers and executives in developing a straightforward and effective growth strategy.

The undergraduate and graduate programs in entrepreneurship at Washington University in St. Louis have been recognized as among the top 10 in the United States for the second year in a row by The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine survey of more than 2,000 schools.

Fatou Bensouda, deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), will discuss the current issues facing the ICC at noon Thursday, Sept. 22, in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall. She also will receive the 2011 World Peace Through Law Award from the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute.

A new study by a finance professor at Washington University in St. Louis finds that the amount of stock options in a CEO’s compensation package can result in an increase in risk-taking by company leaders. Such a finding seems obvious at first blush, but uncovering clean empirical evidence always has been illusive.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s “Ponzi scheme” charge and Florida Sen. Mark Rubio’s assertion that Social Security is unsustainable recycle baseless attacks that go back as far as the 1930s, says Merton C. Bernstein, LLB, a nationally recognized expert on Social Security. “These are attempts to muster political support by appealing to long-held prejudices to satisfy those who never accepted Social Security,” Bernstein says. “To use them as guides to public policy would undermine our country’s most successful family protection program.”

The Administrative Law Section of the American Bar Association (ABA) recently named Ronald Levin, JD, the William R. Orthwein Distinguished Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, the 2011 Volunteer of the Year. Levin has served as the section’s chair and as the ABA’s adviser to the drafting committee to revise the Model State Administrative Procedure Act.