2005
January - February
• Required Reading: Looking for a great book on investing? Then avoid books with words like "millionaire," "rich," or "quick" anywhere in the title, advised a recent personal-finance column in The Financial Times. "Investing books are a lot like diet books: most of them involve fads, promise immediate results, and offer inconsequential flim-flam that does not stand up to scrutiny," wrote Stephen Schurr. The same can't be said of The Financial Numbers Game by accounting professors Charles Mulford and Eugene Comiskey of Georgia Tech's College of Management. Schurr listed the 2002 book among his top seven picks ever, calling it "a fine guide to finding red flags in company accounts." Mulford and Comiskey have just published a follow-up book, Creative Cash Flow Reporting: Uncovering Sustainable Financial Performance.
• Hot Stuff: After a three-year chill, MBAs are again a hot commodity in corporate America, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently reported. The article quoted Mary McRee, director of MBA Career Development for the College of Management, who expects heavy recruiting on campus throughout the academic year. Second-year MBA student Ray Cirone told the AJC, "I've seen more second-year MBA students interviewing this year than last." His classmate Ed Baiden, said, "I think we're going to do much better than the class before us." He's interviewed with multiple companies since September and received offers from Gillette, American Express, and DuPont.
• Mission Accomplished: The College of Management achieved its $45 million fundraising goal to cover the cost of its new home, reported The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Atlanta Business Chronicle's online edition. Terry C. Blum, dean of the business school, noted that the Management building was financed "without a penny of state funds," making it one of the few Georgia Tech facilities to be fully funded privately. The College's fundraising efforts will now largely focus on increasing its endowment and supporting faculty, students, programs, and other strategic priorities.
• Back to Basics: Many people now consider luxuries like TiVo subscriptions and cell phones with Web capability as basic necessities, said the College of Management's Nate Bennett in a recent article on budgeting in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "There may be, for some people, a blurring between what they need to have and what's nice to have…," said Bennett, professor of strategic management and senior associate dean. "Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to buy it."
• Go-to Guy: Several national publications have turned to accounting professor Charles Mulford recently for his expertise, including The Washington Post, BusinessWeek, and CFO Magazine. In one of two Washington Post articles quoting Mulford, he commented on the 28-percent rise last year in the number of restatements made to companies' financial reports. "I think that it's only a matter of time before what might be viewed as a backlog of restatements gets worked off the books and the … regulatory environment leads to a decline in restatements," Mulford said. In BusinessWeek, he commented on Best Buy's practice of not reporting profits from its lucrative extended-warranty contracts separately from consumer-electronics sales. This practice "flies in the face of this new world calling for more transparency in accounting," Mulford said.
• World Renowned: The Financial Times recently ranked the College of Management 84th out of the world's top 100 full-time MBA programs, a 10-position jump since last year's survey. In addition to the overall ranking, the 2005 survey listed the College as the forty-eighth best value for the money and thirty-second in graduates' career progress. The publication also recently announced the new GlobalTeam EMBA offered by the College of Management in collaboration with ICN école de management in Nancy, France, and the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires in Argentina.
• Deep Discount: Retired marketing professor Fred Allvine recently appeared on WAGA-TV (Fox 5) in Atlanta and WFTC-TV (UPN 29) in Minneapolis to discuss Delta Air Lines's plans to cut its fare prices by as much as 50 percent. Allvine said this move will not make the troubled airline a more efficient operation.