DARPA crowd guru gets a new lab

It’s been a little over two years since I came back to the tech private sector from my government service, and it’s great when we have other folks take the same path, for it improves the knowledge of each side about the other. Today we’re announcing that Peter Lee, currently the leader of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Activity’s innovative Transformational Convergence Technology Office (TCTO), is joining Microsoft to run the mighty flagship Redmond labs of Microsoft Research.

Slate of the Union Day

Today is “Slate of the Union” day, when the two most charismatic individuals in recent American history go on stage and attempt to reclaim mantles as innovators. I’ll leave aside the fellow with lower poll numbers for now (President Obama). More eyes in the tech world will be watching as Steve Jobs makes his newest product announcement, the Apple tablet/Tabloid/iSlate thing iPad (it’s official).

Back in the late 1980s I worked for the legendary “Mayor of Silicon Valley” Tom McEnery (he was actually the mayor of San Jose), and we did many joint projects with Apple, particularly with CEO John Sculley, a great guy.

Top Undergrad Business Programs in the U.S.

FACT: In the recently-released annual BusinessWeek ranking of top undergraduate business programs, Wharton (the feeder program for UPenn’s better known Wharton MBA program) once again leads the field, and the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce again comes in second.  The Top 10 this year are:

1. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
2. University of Virginia (McIntire)
3. Notre Dame (Mendoza)
4. Cornell University
5. Emory University (Goizueta)
6. University of Michigan (Ross)
7. Brigham Young University (Marriott)
8. New York University (Stern)
9. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
10. University of Texas-Austin (McCombs)

ANALYSIS: My alma-mater bias compels me to mention that “The big news this year is the University of Virginia,” as noted by Louis Lavelle, Business School editor for BusinessWeek, during an online chat outlining the results. “It really gained on Wharton. The ranking is based on an ‘index’ number, and the No. 1 school is always an index number of 100. Last year Virginia was way behind — it had an index number of 92.7. This year it was 99 — a virtual dead heat” for the top spot.

Oddly, my grad-school alma mater Stanford, which ranks high perennially on MBA program lists, has no undergraduate business school or program, so it’s missing from this list entirely. 

The big question is, what explains movement in the ranks?  What are some schools doing right, and some wrong?