As a Harvard Business School MBA, I learned that the leading edge of knowledge about the American psyche can be found in the back rooms of Madison Avenue. Other than the NSA, probably no group is more in tune with American desires than advertisers. They survey, they run focus groups, they look at what’s trending and what’s actually generating sales…and they put their bullets in the marketing guns that will win the battles for their clients.
This morning I opened my day-after-Christmas newspaper and the advertisement pictured below fell out onto my breakfast table. Continue reading “What America Wants…according to Walmart”
Within my college circle, a career in business was not an admirable path. When I revealed to my friends that I intended to seek an MBA from Harvard Business School, for the next several meals I became invisible. No one spoke to me. I had died, and they referred to me in the past.
I got my MBA in 1968, and the world was surely different then. In my class of 700, there were only seven women, with not a single one in my section of 100. Fifty women were in the 1970 cohort, and by 2007, the Harvard MBA class was 35% female [