HEC in the press

The enormous leaps in technology and HR have created many opportunities for companies to rethink how they address processes around human resources. The potential for efficiency and speed is unlike anything considered, and at a time when there is more choice than ever to draw talent from a global pool. Still, there is a greater need to ensure successful recruitment and retention, writes HEC Paris Professor Shaheena Janjuha-Jivraj, in an op-ed for Forbes. 

The answer to such a straight question isn’t as obvious as you might think. In fact, this issue has been hotly debated in management and finance circles for decades now. While plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that CEOs can make or break a firm, many business scholars see CEOs being merely the most visible cogs in complex machines, writes HEC Paris Professor Georg Wernicke, in an op-ed for CEO World Magazine. 

HEC Paris has decided to partner with the Women's Forum For The Economy and Society and Protect & Gamble to start an ambitious initiative called #WomenEntrepreneurs4Good accelerator program. This initiative is designed to inspire women to innovate, grow, and foster their female creativity by turning their big idea into a business that aligns with the European Green Deal, writes Clear Admit. 

While hardly an uplifting storyline, the themes of lust, lewdness and luxury perfectly capture the luxury industry, said Gachoucha Kretz, an associate marketing professor at business school HEC Paris, in an interview with Bloomberg. 

HEC Paris Emeritus Professor of Management and Human Resources Charles-Henri Besseyres des Horts believes that even if they’re able to work from home, younger generations will need little encouragement to return to the office. “Younger generations may be digitally native, but they still want this interaction" , he says in an interview with Business Because. 

“In a sense, European law can increasingly become the law of the land everywhere. And Chinese tech giants looking to penetrate the European market will need to abide by these regulations. This explains why the EU is becoming the world’s top tech regulator,” says HEC Paris Economics Professor Jeremy Ghez, in an interview with CNBC. 

Academic research also shows that activist hedge funds, which control more than US$146 billion in assets, often target their attacks on companies that are sustainable because they tend to view corporate social responsibility as a sign that a company is wasting money rather than focusing on shareholder returns, writes The Asset. 

The study, conducted by Pennsylvania State University’s Mark DesJardine, Erasmus University’s Emilio Marti and HEC Paris business school’s Rodolphe Durand, looked at some 500 US-based activist campaigns between 2000 and 2016 and found that companies whose corporate social responsibility ratings were above the industry average had a 5% chance of being subject to hedge fund activism. That compares with a 3% likelihood for the industry average.

HEC Paris started teaching a fully online MSc in innovation and entrepreneurship using Coursera in 2017, writes The Financial Times. Its associate dean of executive education, Anne-Valérie Corboz, says: “The important thing for us is to build partnerships outside our campus walls.” Nevertheless, while she praises the “flexibility and adaptability” of the online model, she adds: “Online education is not recession proof and it will not replace our teaching offline.”

HEC Paris strategy professor's Denisa Mindruta's newest research finds that generalist CEOs follow a different acquisition strategy than specialist CEOs: they are likely to pursue both more deals and diversify their acquisitions more than specialist CEOs do, she writes, in an op-ed for Forbes. 

HEC Paris Economics Professor Gaetano Gaballo discusses the impact of a third French lockdown on businesses and the economy, in an interview with BBC World Service Radio.