Digital MBA: America’s Best Business Schools on Your iPod

Is it some­thing of an odd­i­ty to see the words of famous philoso­phers and his­to­ri­ans get­ting dig­i­tized

and down­loaded to iPods every­where? Sure it is, and that’s why we gen­er­al­ly like talk­ing about human­i­ties pod­casts. But is it strange to think of Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing busi­ness schools carv­ing out a space on iTunes and bring­ing their ideas to an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence? Hard­ly. For schools whose suc­cess depends on being close­ly tied to the pulse of Amer­i­can and glob­al audi­ences, get­ting involved with pod­cast­ing is a no brain­er.

Let’s take a brief tour of what Amer­i­ca’s top b‑schools are up to these days, start­ing with The Whar­ton School of The Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia. Launched about a year ago, this pod­cast col­lec­tion (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) is an off­shoot of the school’s online busi­ness jour­nal called “Knowledge@Wharton.” And what you get here are “audio arti­cles” that fea­ture high-pro­file exec­u­tives and fac­ul­ty, includ­ing sev­er­al that high­light stock mar­ket guru Jere­my Siegel. Some of these pod­casts focus on time­less b‑school issues (strat­e­gy, inno­va­tion, merg­ers, alliances, etc.). Oth­ers explore more time­ly ques­tions: New Mod­els for TV and Inter­net, What Makes an Online Com­mu­ni­ty Tick?, and Which New Tech Com­pa­nies Are Inno­vat­ing Most?. Most are worth your time.

From Philadel­phia, we move to Har­vard in Cam­bridge. This pod­cast col­lec­tion, known as HBR Idea­Cast (iTunes  Feed), is also close­ly aligned with the school’s busi­ness jour­nal, the famed Har­vard Busi­ness Review. And, here again, you get well-pro­duced audio seg­ments that offer insights on key issues in today’s busi­ness world, whether it’s how to do busi­ness in Chi­na, how to be an effec­tive and resilient leader, or how to adapt to very new trends in e‑commerce.

Mov­ing south to the Research Tri­an­gle, we vis­it Duke’s Fuqua School of Busi­ness (iTunes — Web Site), which has the begin­nings of what promis­es to be a strong audio col­lec­tion. While you’ll want to give the most time to the fair­ly robust Dis­tin­guished Speak­er Series, you may want to peruse the MBA Lead­er­ship and Mar­ket­ing Expe­ri­ence series as well. Also in the same gen­er­al vicin­i­ty is anoth­er col­lec­tion worth a good look. It’s from the Dar­d­en School of Busi­ness at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia (iTunes — Feed — Web Site)

By now, you prob­a­bly have a good sense of what you can gen­er­al­ly expect to find in these col­lec­tions. So let’s briefly leave you with two last ones. First, the com­pi­la­tion assem­bled by The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness (iTunes  Feed  Web Site). Among oth­ers, you’ll encounter talks by Nobel Prize win­ner Gary Beck­er and also Steven Levitt, the co-author of the recent best­seller Freako­nom­ics. Last­ly, we end at Stan­ford and its series called “Entre­pre­neur­ial Thought Lead­ers,” which gives you access to what Sil­i­con Val­ley has in no short sup­ply — entre­pre­neurs, includ­ing ones from Google, Genen­tech, and Juniper Net­works. Click. Down­load. Sync. And you’ll be in busi­ness.

For more pod­casts, see our uni­ver­si­ty pod­cast col­lec­tion and also our  com­plete pod­cast col­lec­tion here.