Top Five Back to B-school Posts of 2009

Like many people, I tend to reflect on the year gone by as a new year approaches. In this spirit of reflection, I'm counting down the top five posts of the last year. My criteria? I looked for the ones that struck the biggest chord with you, the readers. Here they are:

5. Why Sales Quotas Can Hurt Your Profitability
Sales managers largely dismissed recent Stanford Graduate School of Business research that showed that in some cases, eliminating sales quotas could increase profitability. The idea did garner some support, however, from sales staff fed up with seemingly arbitrary quotas.

4. MBAs and the Management Myth: An Interview with Matthew Stewart
Author Matthew Stewart's ideas that the business world is becoming littered with too many MBAs and that MBA programs should include subject areas aimed at improving critical thinking drew both criticism and support from readers.

3. The Truth About Managing Generations X and Y
My discussion with author and speaker Nancy Ahlrichs about best practices for managing younger workers ignited a passionate discussion in the comments section between Gen X/Gen Y and boomers about what work means to them.

2. Will Obama Be Good for Business?

Readers largely weighed in to lambast the pro-Obama ideas of Robert Frank, a professor of management and economics at Cornell's Johnson School of Management and author of The New York Times' "Economic Scene" column. A vocal minority, however, ensured an impassioned debate in the days following this post.

1. Focus on Individualism Creates MBA "Monsters"?
We returned to the topic of ethics and MBA programs several times over the last year, but none generated the same level of lively discussion as this post discussing Peggy Cunningham's assertion that programs' focus on individual success was creating monstrous business leaders.

Image courtesy of Flickr user *Sally M*, CC 2.0.