The 10 Most Colorful Quotes Of 2016

I learned that in the face of the void — or in the face of any challenge — you can choose joy and meaning

When Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, gave the commencement address at the University of California-Berkeley this year, she delivered an incredibly powerful and vulnerable address. She spoke of walking into a gym and finding her husband, Dave Goldberg, lying on the floor before he would eventually pass away from cardiac arrhythmia. Sandberg’s address was the first time she had spoken publicly about her husband’s passing. During her courageous address, she spent 25 minutes fighting back tears, delivering an inspiring speech about life, death, and eternal hope.

“Dave’s death changed me in very profound ways,” Sandberg told the graduates. “I learned about the depths of sadness and the brutality of loss. But I also learned that when life sucks you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again. I learned that in the face of the void — or in the face of any challenge — you can choose joy and meaning.

“I’m sharing this with you in the hopes that today, as you take the next step in your life, you can learn the lessons that I only learned in death. Lessons about hope, strength, and the light within us that will not be extinguished.”

It’s pretty clear that I need to keep listening, we all need to keep listening

Those words were spoken by former University of Colorado Leeds School of Business Dean David Ikenberry during a July phone call with Poets&Quants. Ikenberry was defending himself against some harshly critical feedback that preceded his being appointed to a second five-year term. “Dean Ikenberry is an unethical narcissist,” an anonymous faculty member wrote. “I have never heard a positive word spoken about him.” The dean’s main faults, it seems, lied in the way he treated and acted toward women on the Leeds faculty. “Although he presents himself as an advocate of diversity, he appears incapable of responding positively when challenged with different views, especially when challenged by women,” another faculty member wrote.

“These are really important issues to me and to this school,” Ikenberry told Poets&Quants a little more than a month before he resigned in August. “I really value all of the feedback, both positive and that which is critical and suggesting room for improvement. I think any great leader needs to be open to receiving that feedback in a constructive way, and I firmly remain open to that. There are difficult issues raised there.”

A Black Friday for Europe

Remember back in June when Britain shocked the world by voting for BREXIT? It almost seems like a distant memory after the United States’ shocker of an election in November. Think of BREXIT as the first big political earthquake of 2016, and soon afterward we asked faculty and deans from some of Europe’s leading business schools to weigh in on the potential magnitude of what had just happened. Reactions ranged from “Keep calm and carry on,” from Jérémy Ghez, affiliate professor of economics and international affairs at HEC Paris, to, “Today is Black Friday for Europe and constitutes the most dramatic event since the end of the Cold War,” as Jorg Rocholl, president of the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) and a member of the economic advisory board of the German Federal Ministry of Finance, told Poets&Quants.

“The strong negative reactions of the financial markets are only a harbinger for the longer-term economic impact, particularly for the UK,” Rocholl said. “In the short term, only the central banks will be able to appease the situation. Therefore, everyone is waiting for their reactions with great suspense.”

Why he teaches at Yale instead of Wharton!!

More than a decade before the world ever thought Donald Trump could become president of the U.S., Yale University School of Management Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld had his beef with the reality show star. Sonnenfeld wrote a scathing article in the The Wall Street Journal in 2004 in response to Trump claiming his show, The Apprentice, should be required to be viewed in all of the nation’s top business schools. “The selection process resembles a game of musical chairs at a Hooters restaurant,” Sonnenfeld wrote of the show. During a weird time when Trump’s reality show was praised, Sonnenfeld went on a media crusade against The Donald and his leadership style. After several other published pieces and a dozen or so TV appearances, Sonnenfeld finally got a response from Trump that we unearthed earlier this year.

Trump went on NBC’s Dateline and wrote to The Wall Street Journal to claim Sonnenfeld lacked “the understanding of the architecture of a corporation, which is why he teaches at Yale instead of Wharton!!” (The double exclamation points came from our president-elect.)

Oddly enough, Trump eventually got Sonnenfeld on a phone call and offered him a job. Sonnenfeld declined, but then Trump invited Sonnenfeld, another Yale colleague, and their wives to lunch and golf.

We do express our unequivocal stance against the xenophobia, sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry that you have actively and implicitly endorsed in your campaign

Back in July, during the heat of the summer and presidential election in the U.S., more than 2,000 current students and alumni from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School signed an open letter to Donald Trump titled, “You Do Not Represent Us.”

“We, proud students, alumni, and faculty of Wharton, are outraged that an affiliation with our school is being used to legitimize prejudice and intolerance,” the letter reads. Signing the letter were Samir Nurmohamed, an assistant professor of management, Katherine Klein, a management professor, and several administrators, including Allie Harcharek Ilagan, manager of marketing and communications for the Wharton Social Impact Initiative, and Stephanie Kim, an associate director of the same initiative.

“Although we do not aim to make any political endorsements with this letter,” the letter continues, “we do express our unequivocal stance against the xenophobia, sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry that you have actively and implicitly endorsed in your campaign.”

I think this idea that business is somehow bifurcated from the rest of life — it has no responsibility to the environment, it has no responsibility to social good — is total bullshit

For the first time ever last September, B the Change Media hosted its annual Best for the World gathering in collaboration with a business school. B the Change Media, the media arm of B the Change, a multi-platform company dedicated to being a “force for good,” invited more than 1,000 individuals from the world’s leading companies and organizations to discuss how business can be a positive force for change in the world. One of the most admired CEOs in the space, Rose Marcario of Patagonia, set the stage early with her unabashed views on the relationship and interaction between business, society, and the natural world.

“I think this idea that business is somehow bifurcated from the rest of life — it has no responsibility to the environment, it has no responsibility to social good — is total bullshit,” Marcario said to Robert Strand, the executive director of the Center for Responsible Business at Berkeley-Haas. “We all know that. And it’s a totally outdated way of thinking about the world.”

Parting Quote

HBS gave the world Bush. Wharton gave us Trump.

When Donald Trump was elected president last November, it sent shockwaves through urban areas in the U.S., across the world, and within elite business school campuses. Realizing their school exists in a “bubble,” Harvard Business School students responded — like a lot of the rest of the world — in disbelief. “No one expected this,” Preeya Sud, who will earn her MBA this spring, told Poets&Quants. “HBS students are known to say, somewhat flippantly, that we live in a bubble … Just how much of a bubble we live in seems to finally be sinking in.”

Sud is the editor-in-chief of The Harbus, the Harvard Business School student newspaper, which ran a feature earlier in the fall based on a study of HBS students that said Hillary Clinton would win by a “landslide.” Of course, many college campuses across the U.S. were deeply surprised by Trump’s victory, and the result was a rash of class cancellations and delayed finals. One Harvard MBA candidate summed up the involvement of elite U.S. business schools in American politics best: “HBS gave the world Bush. Wharton gave us Trump.”

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