Articles

by Michael Sean Hendrix, MBA ‘13 My pursuit of tech and startups is deeply rooted in the desire to build businesses that benefit consumers. My pursuit of strategic marketing, when I first arrived at Johnson, was rooted in the same concept. Marketing, at its core, is centered on how companies drive their business through various […]

Cuba is poised to rapidly expand its economy once diplomatic relations have been restored with the United States.  How should its neighbors react? by Francisco Jose Robles Cedeno, MBA ‘15 Decades after political and military standoff, there is a rumbling of a new challenge in the Caribbean. After the baton was passed between the Castro […]

North America remains the top destination for Chinese outbound investment, particularly in the high technology, industrials, and consumer products and services industries. by Kaiwen Zhong, BA ’15 The last few decades witnessed China’s thriving economy. While the country has been a popular destination for cross border investments and mergers and acquisitions, it recently started getting […]

Evaluating default risk for SME’s in emerging markets can require non-traditional methods of credit worthiness. by Damian Kearney, MBA ’15 In my travels to and work in emerging and frontier markets, it has been easy to see the presence and influence of Multi-National Corporations. I’ve eaten at KFC in Guatemala, filled up at a Total […]

Streamlining the rental process for tenants and landlords by Joseph Edgar & Rhett Weiss As a Johnson student (MBA ‘14) Joe Edgar was irritated by the lack of efficiency when it came to renting. Redundant paper applications, fees, mailing paper checks, no receipts and the pan on the floor collecting water from the leak in […]

A MBA student tests Jim O’Neil’s 2003 predictions about the growth of BRIC economies and concludes O’Neil was too conservative. by Jivesh Govil, MBA ’15 Jim O’Neil, retiring chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management UK, coined the term BRIC—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—in his landmark study published in 2003. His predictions and analyses have been […]

Breathe Deep Victoria Chen immediately noticed something was different when she landed at Shanghai Pudong International Airport last December. Though it was nearly 11 p.m. and the food court was closed, the airport smelled like barbeque kebab. After staying in Shanghai for a few days, she saw clouds of smog so thick shrouding the city […]

Growing Dropbox If a startup is a company designed to grow fast, then Dropbox, the online storage firm, still fits the model. Since Olga Narvskaia joined the San Francisco-based company as head of user operations in 2012, the number of employees has spiraled to 1,200 from less than 200. “The brand is so big and […]

Better banking in Dubai As a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Dubai, Salmaan Jaffery advises banks on how to operate more effectively. But since moving to the Middle East in 2008, he’s found that working with banks in the region is a completely different undertaking than assessing financial institutions in the United States. While Jaffery primarily […]

Change for good In China’s remote villages, residents who don’t have access to electricity cook their food by burning wood or yak dung inside poorly ventilated homes. The toxic smoke generated from these primitive stoves causes more indoor air pollution than can be measured on a city street in Beijing. Yet in 2008, a company […]