Olin Business School

Photo by Mary ButkusSeveral traditional Thanksgiving dinners were held on campus to celebrate the holiday.

James J. Beirne has joined the Olin School of Business as the associate dean and director of the Weston Career Resources Center effective Nov. 29.

Kevin Louis Sobol, a senior in the Olin School of Business, died Saturday, Nov. 27 in a one-car accident in St. Charles County. He was 22. A St. Louis area native, Sobol was a 2001 graduate of Chaminade College Preparatory High School and lived in University City.

The winners of the 2004 Olin Cup Entrepreneur Competition will be announced Dec. 2 from a pool of five finalists chosen Oct. 29. The finalists are competing in a yearlong competition for $70,000 in investment capital provided by Washington University’s Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

Projects could receive up to $10,000 through a five-year, $3 million Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation grant program.

“Bob and Julie Skandalarises’ generosity has transformed the study, teaching and practice of entrepreneurship at Washington University and this most recent gift will spread the entrepreneurial culture to virtually every venue at our University,” explained Stuart Greenbaum, dean of the Olin School of Business.

Business experts from all over the world are visiting the Olin School of Business at Washington University to participate in a three-day conference on corporate governance “Key Issues in Corporate Governance,” co-sponsored by the Olin School, the Center for Research in Economics and Strategy (CRES), and the Journal of Financial Intermediation, is being held at the Charles F. Knight Executive Education Center Nov. 11 to 13. The conference features two days of academic presentations and a third day devoted to panel discussions among senior corporate executives, policymakers and academics. Topics include financial markets and corporate governance regulation in the United States and similar issues in the European Union.

Surprisingly, officers leaving the military — even after service in Iraq — are finding that a bachelor’s degree and leadership experience are not enough to arm them for more than an entry-level job at a Fortune 500 company. So what they’re seeking — and what makes them particularly desirable to employers — is a master of business administration degree, says Stuart I. Greenbaum, Ph.D., dean of the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis.

BundersonWhy do the challenges and tasks taken on by the teams on the popular reality shows “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” so often result in failure or disaster? Perhaps these short-term work groups are assigning responsibilities based on superficial assumptions of expertise. A recent study by J. Stuart Bunderson, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, shows that work groups perform better when they rely on valid cues, such as education and experience, rather than superficial characteristics such as race and gender.

Washington University in St. Louis has licensed a system developed by Washington University engineers that is meant to detect counterfeit credit cards by reading a unique magnetic “fingerprint” on the stripes of credit cards and other objects that carry magnetic information. The system — called Magneprint — was invented by Ronald Indeck, Ph.D., Das Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Washington University.