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The pot is stirring at Harvard Business School Harvard Business School made the front page of the New York Times last weekend.  It wasn't because one of its alumni is perched atop a Fortune 500 company or another announced a blockbuster merger with another mega-company.  It wasn't because one of its alumni is waging a ferocious shareholder campaign to take over a multinational company. And it wasn't because one of its alumni is the announced head of McKinsey, Goldman or Booz Allen. It was because its dean and staff are fighting a fierce fight to change the culture of the school and make it more accepting of the growing number of women on campus. According to the article, women now comprise 40% of the students in the business school. But the culture still remains entrenched in male dominance--in case-study groups, in classroom discussions, in the assembling of secret societies ("Section X," one is supposedly called), and in seizing the highest-compensation opportu...

Siebert: A career of firsts Many people on Wall Street who knew Muriel Siebert well called her "Mickie."  Other people who interacted with her or conducted business with her firm knew about the Chihuahua dog that always tagged along. The dog even shared her office and sometimes interrupted meetings, often scrambling around the office craving attention. Visitors wouldn't dare complain. On the Street, everybody familiar with her knew about her long career of firsts--the first woman to become a member of the New York Stock Exchange, the first woman to become New York State's top banking regulator, one of the first to found her own brokerage firm, and arguably the first icon in the securities industry for all the women who've followed behind. They knew, too, about her dogged, determined ways, her bold, sometimes brash manner in speaking up on behalf of women. She thrived in one of the most recalcitrant environments, where men ruled the industry as if it were a college...

Consortium Gets DC Footprint On deck is Georgetown's McDonough School of Business . This week The Consortium selected Georgetown's business school as the 18th Consortium school. Georgetown will join the other schools formally in July and start admitting Consortium students in the fall, 2014. Consortium Executive Director Peter Aranda made the announcement June 24, marking The Consortium's first new school in three years. Over the past five years, besides Georgetown, The Consortium has added Cornell, Yale , and UCLA and invited back UC-Berkeley after it departed in the early 2000s.  Georgetown follows the footsteps of other prominent business schools affiliated with The Consortium, including such schools as Emory, USC, Yale, Texas, Dartmouth, Wisconsin , and North Carolina.  What does Georgetown bring to The Consortium table? It gives the organization an immediate footprint in the Washington, DC, area.  Consortium business schools, often known nationally as top schools by...

Cornell attracts its share of Consortium finance MBAs On your mark. Get set. This week, over 300 new Consortium students will launch their campaigns to earn an MBA by heading to New Orleans for the Consortium 's 47th Orientation Program.  As in previous years, they will be engulfed by activity, events, recruiters, school staff, seminars, sponsors and celebratory gestures. For most of them, OP is a festive, uplifting time. They pause and take a week-long breath before embarking upon the frenetic pace of graduate business school.  Among the new MBAs, who's headed into financial services in 2013? How many among the 300-plus have expressed an interest in concentrating in finance at school or a career in financial services? As they take new twists and turns over the next two years, what do they aspire to do when graduation comes in 2015? Let's consider the current environment.  The awful, dreadful financial crisis is receding into memory, although there is a haunting, lingerin...

Applicable to all under-represented groups? So the topic that has made a torrent splash in the early weeks of 2013 is a new catch-phrase:  "Lean In," taken, of course, from Facebook COO's Sheryl Sandberg's new book of the same name. The book raced to the top of best-seller lists. The subject--how women can push (or propel?) themselves into the top echelons of business--is relevant. The advice and guidance are useful, although Sandberg acknowledges there are no quick fixes, no one special way to progress along the path, and certainly no assurances that every woman who "leans in" will one day find herself chair of the board. Nonetheless, Sandberg determined it was time to put the issue back on the table and force companies and business leaders to assess where we are.  She advises women to seize control of their destinies, bang on the door and avoid waiting for it to open. So next question. Are her advice and guidance relevant to other under-represented segment...

Rogers: "We are just not fighting hard enough." Last fall, John Rogers of Ariel Investments found a convenient forum to discuss the state of diversity in finance. At a SIFMA diversity conference last October, he scolded executives and the rest of the industry about the woeful numbers from under-represented groups in senior roles. "The state of diversity in the industry," he reportedly said, "is appalling."  He added, "Ninety percent of leaders talk a big game, but...we have gone backwards. We are just not fighting hard enough." Rogers is Ariel Investments ' founder and CEO. He, also, happens to be a pioneering African-American in the industry, one who has been a prominent investor and leader in mutual funds for 30 years. Hence, Rogers is no new kid on the block, not an industry novice who just appeared on the scene to make this striking, candid observation.  He has seen dozens of market trends and phenomena, endured more than a few volatile m...

Jenn Wei, a Stanford MBA who once worked in investment banking, is now researching, chasing and negotiating deals in technology as a venture capitalist at Bloomberg Capital.  Last week, in postings that appeared widely in business media, including  VentureBeat.com , she wrote about the startling, but not surprising lack of women in venture capital--in Silicon Valley (California), in Silicon Alley (New York) and at other pivotal venture spots around the country. She reminded us of the glaring scarcity of females at negotiating tables, within network huddles when ideas are bantered about, and in closed-door meetings where entrepreneurs, deal-doers and investors decide the right amounts for an early-round investment to support the next new thing. She offered a few reasons why women are not prominent in the industry and dared to propose solutions. She said women desperately need role models in the industry and industry participants need to take time to understand the likes, intere...

For the past three decades, top business schools have hustled every way they can to improve levels of diversity on their campuses. They have aggressively recruited under-represented minorities (URM) and women. They have participated in pipeline programs like the Consortium . They have sponsored scholarships and funded fellowships. But two weeks ago, a Wall Street Journal article suggested that for many schools it's a one-step-forward, two-steps-back effort. Graduate business schools from Harvard and Stanford to the Consortium 17 have made praiseworthy progress among some segments (Asians, internationals), but insubstantial progress in others. "While many top programs boast that ethnic or racial minorities comprise a quarter or more of their student bodies," the Journal 's Melissa Korn wrote, "most of that population is Asian-American, a group that is statistically overrepresented at business schools when compared with their proportion of the U.S. population at l...

Publishers publish lists because they think readers swarm to them. There are lists (and rankings) for almost everything. There is a cottage industry of lists. Some are frivolous, many are arbitrary, and others are humorous. Most are meant to sell magazines and newspapers or attract attention. Some are a serious attempt to report a trend or celebrate the efforts and programs of participating institutions.  Lists occasionally confuse, because students, readers, consumers, and business people who peek at them don't know what is subjective, credible or useful. Finance professionals rush to see deal lists, underwriting rankings, league tables for transactions, M&A rankings or rankings of the best capitalized financial institutions. The list of business-school rankings can be useful, except what list is most reliable or captures the correct attributes of an MBA education? What list is updated and, beware, what list uses irrelevant criteria? There are many b-school lists--from the Eco...

NYU-Stern graduate Daria Burke Who are the women of color, the women from under-represented groups who occupy "C-suite" positions at companies involved in global business? A roster of such names usually includes Ursula Burns at Xerox , Andreae Jung (until earlier this month) at Avon , and Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo , CEOs of companies with billions in revenues and even greater numbers in market value. Burns, Jung, Nooyi and others preside over companies, business sectors, geographic units, corporate brands, major subsidiaries and functions in finance and treasury. They would also be women from who hustled, regrouped, paused to raise families, scratched, climbed and willed their way into top spots, board rooms and significant leadership positions.  Their  few numbers, while growing, suggest there is still a ways to go. Those in CEO roles, such as Burns, Nooyi and Jung, are known and are seen commanding the podium at shareholder meetings or outlining strategic plans in a broadca...

Tuck: Over 2,700 applications for just 250 spots At top business schools, including the Consortium 17 , this is the time of the year  admissions offices fine-tune and compose a new class that will start in the fall.  Many schools have rolling admissions, while most schools notify applicants during the spring. The Consortium , too, notifies those who will be invited for membership and those who will have earned full fellowships. How will the Class of '14 be different? How will it be like others? What do members of the class hope to achieve from two years on campus? The application numbers and statistics are likely similar to those in recent years.  At selective schools from Harvard to Haas at Berkeley and from Chicago to Carnegie Mellon , gaining an acceptance letter for a spot in the first-year class is still a hard task and the result of perhaps a half-year process of securing recommendations, writing essays, taking tests, visiting campuses, expressing interest and tryin...

Consortium Alumnus Boomer Sometimes experienced professionals among minority groups choose the route of being an entrepreneur--taking a risk and having the courage to go out on their own. They do so, once they figure out the timing and are confident about resources, opportunity, and often family support and understanding. There is a long history of blacks, Latinos and women, who gained experience at established institutions and decided to start their own firms in banking, brokerage, or investment management. Muriel Siebert, widely known as a pioneer in the industry, started her own retail brokerage decades ago after a long stint as New York state's supervisor of banking.  Her firm evolved partly into Siebert Branford Shank, now an established women- and minority-owned firm and prominent in municipal finance.  MR Beal, Loop Capital, Guzman, W.R. Lazard, Blaylock, Advent, Williams Capital and Utendahl are other examples of minority firms that launched af...