Japan business mood at six-year high

16 December 2013 Last updated at 01:03 GMT  The weaker yen has helped many large Japanese companies Japanese business confidence has soared to its highest level in six years, according to the Bank of Japan's latest Tankan survey.

The big manufacturers' index rose to plus-16 from plus-12 in September's survey, exceeding market forecasts.

Large companies also plan to increase their capital spending by 4.6% next year, the survey showed.

The results indicate the government's stimulus policies, aimed at spurring growth, may be starting to take effect.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken aggressive steps in recent months to end nearly two decades of deflation - or falling consumer prices - in the economy.

Analysts said the survey's results indicate his policies, also known as Abenomics, were starting to have an impact.

"The general Abenomics-related boost and the weak yen have helped, along with the monetary easing by the Bank of Japan" said Marcel Theliant, Japan economist at Capital Economics in Singapore.

"We had a lot of fiscal and monetary stimulus. These measures have certainly helped in the short term."

However, the key question was whether the measures can create a longer term improvement in the economy. "The structural reform measures have been rather disappointing so far," he said.

 

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Business Groups Crank Up Defense of Common Core

Members of the business community are being urged to take up the fight to defend the Common Core State Standards in statehouses and in local communities, as the ambitious academic guidelines come under attack from an unlikely set of detractors on both the political left and the right.

That message was delivered most directly at a recent forum for business leaders held by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce , which backs the standards. The group has sought to combat what it sees as myths about the common core—such that they are being directed by the federal government, or that they attempt to set detailed prescriptions for daily classroom lessons.

Leaders from Intel Corp., Cisco Systems, and the ExxonMobil Foundation, at a Sept. 17 event held at the chamber's headquarters, described their efforts to promote the standards through different strategies, including coast-to-coast advertising campaigns and outreach to company employees and parents in the overall community. That salesmanship will continue in coming months, according to...

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New Study Rates U.S. News Business School Rankings

A recent study found that U.S. News has the most stable business school rankings, compared with the Financial Times and Businessweek.

Which business school rankings are the most reliable and valid? According to a scholarly article, it's the U.S. News & World Report Best Business Schools rankings, published as part of our Best Graduate Schools rankings.

In the article in the June 20 edition of the Journal of Marketing Education, "A Psychometric Assessment of the Businessweek, U.S. News & World Report and Financial Times Rankings of Business Schools' MBA Programs," Dawn Iacobucci examines the three major full-time MBA rankings.

This peer-reviewed article joins a rapidly expanding body of academic literature that take a scholarly, analytical approach to the study of academic rankings and their impact.

The Vanderbilt University professor favors U.S. News largely because she believes our Best Business Schools rankings have shown greater reliability over the years and have greater validity in terms of objectivity.

In an email, Iacobucci wrote, "I would look at U.S. News as a result of this research partly due to objectivity of the measures and components that go into the ranking. It would also be extremely difficult to game U.S. News. The Financial Times is pitched to favor the more international schools, and the Businessweek student poll has a good deal of variability to it. You don't want to see schools slipping up and down and all over the place. If there is that much variance, what good can there possibly be to the ranking?"

The study measured whether the salaries earned by MBA graduates were influenced by the rankings by looking at the monetary differences students earned by going to higher-ranked schools in the three different rankings.

U.S. News did significantly better on this measure. The analysis found that students who attended business schools that ranked higher in the U.S. News rankings earned larger salaries.

For each higher U.S. News rank, a school's graduates earned $908.03 more in yearly salary, on average, at their first jobs following business school for the most recent year of data.

Every rank improvement for a school in the Financial Times rankings translated to, on average, $377.58 more, and in the Businessweek rankings, $605.27 more.

The paper evaluated the consistency and reliability of the overall rankings by looking at how schools' ranks had changed over time, starting by looking at all the b-school rankings of each publisher from the time each of the three rankings were first published.

The study concluded that "comparing across media, we see that Businessweek varied quite a bit over its first 15 years or so (e.g., the formulae may have been changing, school sampling may have undergone changes, etc.), and it has become stable since approximately 2004. On this criterion, we can laud the U.S. News as yielding the most stable results, year to year, even from its inception. The Financial Times results are stable as well."

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Is the Apple iPad Mini Ready for Business?

Apple's iPad Mini is a classic example of that old saying, first impressions can be misleading. At a quick glance, the smaller version of Apple's now-iconic tablet hardly looks like a business tool. The screen is just shy of 8 inches, and as anyone who has ever used a similarly sized Samsung Galaxy Tab, Google Nexus 7, or Amazon Kindle Fire knows — all too well — smaller tablets haven't really cut it as serious productivity devices.

Sure, they make for handy e-readers, email-checkers, and media players. And they suffice for occasional web surfing. But their reduced screen size, typically in a widescreen format better-suited for movies and games than documents, is a real limitation doing serious work, like composing and marking up PDF and Word files.

The real strength — and differentiator — of the iPad Mini is that it changes this status quo. Here is a tablet that brings the key advantages of being small and suitable for business use. I picked up the Mini not expecting much. I had used the Tab, Nexus, and Kindle and loved them — for reading books on airplanes and playing Angry Birds. In two years I had yet to do anything more substantial on these devices than read the occasional Office document — too much scrolling, zooming, and squinting. After a week with the iPad Mini, however, I was using it instead of my full-size iPad for two reasons.

First, the Mini is remarkably comfortable to handle. It weighs just under 11 ounces, less than half the full-size iPad. But it's also startlingly thin — barely a quarter of an inch deep. That combination not only makes it easy to carry around but means you can hold it for long stretches without your hand tiring. For the many of us who don't use a tablet while sitting at a desk — where it can be placed on a hard surface or held in place with a stand — this is an ideal design.

Lawyers who tend to use their tablets while standing before a jury box during voir dire, for example, will quickly appreciate the Mini's uber-mobility. The smaller size — ironically — also lends itself to rapid, accurate typing. While virtual keys are spaced closer together than on the regular iPad, I found that by holding the device in landscape mode, with a hand on each side, I could quickly thumb-type without any uncomfortable stretching.

Second, the Mini is a real game changer for smaller-size tablets. It forgoes the usual widescreen display for one that is, simply, a smaller version of the iPad's "squarer" screen. (Indeed, the iPad Mini's display is about 80 percent the size of its sibling's.) Movie fans have long taken issue with Apple's insistence for using an old-school-television 4:3 aspect ratio; too much black space when watching modern TV and movies designed for 16:9 screens. But for documents on a sub 8-inch display, 4:3 is a revelation.

The made-for-TV aspect ratio affords the Mini more surface area for documents than other sub-eight-inch tablets. Documents can be viewed, composed, and edited on the Mini with far less user manipulation — and far less frustration — than on its rivals with smaller footprints. Annotating and note-taking work surprisingly well on the Mini (another plus is that apps originally designed for the full-size iPad all look right on the smaller version, with no weird formatting or glitches in the couple of dozen programs I tried).

Keep in mind, though, that at the end of the day, a smaller screen means smaller text. So while you will see more of your documents and web pages on the Mini's screen, you might not find them as easy to read as on a full-size iPad. Compounding matters: The current Mini lacks Apple's razor-sharp Retina display technology. So text isn't as crisp as it is on the bigger tablet (the difference will be more apparent to those who have used the iPad 3 and iPad 4). With my own 20-20 vision days long past, I did find the Mini to require more of an effort while reading. I suspect many lawyers will find this the case, as well. But for the way I use tablets — largely on the go and rarely at a desk — the ease of holding the device, combined with its ability to get 'real' work done, more than make up for a bit of squinting. Attorneys who use their tablets similarly may find that the balance works out that way for them too.

A word about the 'lower-muscle' CPU found in the Mini, which sports the same Apple A5 chip as the iPad 2 instead of the more potent A6X chip found in the iPad 4. Yes, it's not quite as powerful. But a lot of the faster chip's brawn is needed to power the bigger iPad's Retina display. I did not notice any noticeable slowdown on the iPad Mini — web pages, for example, were rendered with perfectly adequate speed. One area that did lag, however, was battery life. While Apple claims a 10-hour life — same as on the full-size iPad — I got more like 6 hours using it in my real-world conditions (Wi-Fi on, full brightness, using the device sporadically over a couple of days instead of in one marathon session). That's about an hour or so less than I get with my larger iPad.

Currently there is much speculation about the next iPad Mini, one that is widely expected to feature a Retina display. I don't know if Apple can pull that off while improving battery life. But I know this: I'll be looking at that Mini in a whole new light, knowing that smaller tablets, done right, do fit in the workplace.

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Alan Cohen is a New York-based freelance reporter. Email: alanc31@yahoo.com.

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