Four Imperatives Driving Business Schools to Adopt Mobile Content Delivery

Look around at people on any sidewalk, school hallway, classroom, and, most disturbingly, any car around yours on the road. You know that you are likely to see a staggering percentage of those people staring into the screen of a “smart” phone. Millennials and post-millennials are constantly “connected.” The Millennials even connect during class; at best to fact-check their teachers, at worst, to check the latest updates on Facebook. It will only get worse with the soon to arrive Post-Millennials who have been termed “millennials on steroids” by Lucie Green, the worldwide director of the Innovation Group at J. Walter Thompson. Post-millennials who account for a quarter of the U.S. population have not had to adapt to these devices. They were born into them and will expect nothing less than having them as a fixture in their learning experience. Significantly, the parents of post-millennials concur with their Generation Z offspring and believe that education technology has a positive influence on their children’s learning. Universities are struggling to catch up to this trend, with mixed results. Since teaching about the importance of detecting and acting proactively on macroenvironmental changes is part of its curriculum, it is particularly incumbent upon the AACSB-accredited business schools to lead the way for the rest of academe. This paper will report on the four main imperatives driving universities, and business schools in particular, to adopt mobile content delivery. Specifically, those imperatives are demographics, finances, ubiquitous technology, and concerns over accreditation. The current AACSB accreditation standards are built around three themes: innovation, impact, and engagement. Adopting mobile content delivery would seem to fit ideally within this new framework. This paper will discuss some innovative methods currently being employed by schools of business to utilize mobile delivery of teaching content. Finally, it will point out the advantages and the disadvantages associated with departing from the traditional classroom content delivery model

Social Media and the C-Suite: The Ethical and Legal Implications

The last twenty years has seen phenomenal growth of social media, with companies such as Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter seeing their registered users growing into the hundreds of millions worldwide (and, in the case of Facebook, over a billion). The advantages of using social media have been touted by many, and fortunes have been made by savvy practitioners with a deft hand at using social media to their advantage. However, as with any new technology unintended consequences have begun to unfold. These consequences have been thrust to the forefront as several high-profile corporate executives and celebrities have sabotaged their own success and the success of their companies by unwise and unfiltered use of social media. Furthermore, companies have created faulty social media policies and have utilized Facebook in the employment arena in a manner that has spawned an ethical and legal minefield. This paper will examine the maze of problems generated by the unbridled use of social media in the business and employment arenas. It will also offer some common sense solutions which could limit liability for companies and their shareholders