User:Lwiner

Leon Winer, Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at Pace University in New York City has developed a widely applicable method, Strategic Creative Analysis (SCAN) for analyzing business case studies and real situations. Unique contributions of this approach include: (a) a logical approach to ranking objectives strategies and tactics, (b) derivation of SWOTs (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) with reference to the Top Rank Objective and (c) creative development of TRO directed strategies from the SWOTs. An examination of the literature of case analysis and strategic planning will reveal that these are nontrivial contributions. Winer has updated relevant Wikipedia pages to include these improvements.

During his teaching years at Pace University's business school Winer conducted two surveys that revealed student-perceived gaps in the MBA curriculum sanctioned by the AACSB accrediting body.

In his 1988 survey of graduating MBA students, Winer found that students reported deficiencies in acquisition of essential business skills: influencing, negotiating and networking. Faculty and Administration at Pace acted on these findings and modified the curriculum. Many other schools did as well. Winer also developed instructional materials to help students acquire these skills.

In 1999, Winer conducted surveys of incoming MBA students and found that their greatest self-reported need in business education was to learn how to recognize business opportunities. A survey of graduating MBA students showed that in their opinion, they had not sufficiently learned how to recognize business opportunities. This is a finding of great importance because the recognition and exploitation of business opportunities is the engine of economic growth. Without new businesses, the United States loses the competitive battle to countries that have lower labor costs and newer and more efficient manufacturing plants like China, South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa, India, Israel, Mexico and Brazil. Winer developed a small exercise for students to direct their attention to recognizing business opportunities. Winer gave several presentations to professional organizations about his work regarding "recognizing business opportunities."

As an avocational endeavor, Winer discovered during 1992-93 that the TIAA-CREF Stock Market account was underperforming the S&P 500 index by a substantial margin. This information had not been presented anywhere in TIAA-CREF's reports. After a year of meetings and presentations, Winer convinced his employer to offer alternatives to TIAA-CREF. An account of this experience was reported in "Smart Money" magazine, which was later included in Citibank's website. Many other non-profit organizations have also expanded the choices available to employees.

In 1998, Winer discovered that the widely-cited Body Mass Index (which is often posted in doctors' offices) is based on the erroneous assumption that human bodies are two dimensional. This error leads to absurdities in the BMI tables at both ends of the height scale. Short people are encouraged to be fat and tall people are encouraged to be impossibly skinny. Winer produced alternative tables based on the reality that human bodies are three-dimensional to correct this error but did not publicize them. Recently, Winer edited the Body Mass Index Wikipedia page to reflect his work but someone, while admitting that Winer was correct, replaced Winer's edits with an incomprehensible chart. Winer did not persist.

Summarizing Winer's professional career: Ph.D., Columbia University Graduate Business School. Seven years in Business: Mobil, as Planning Analyst. IBM, as Business Scientist. Thirty three years Business School teaching at Pace University and Baruch College, mostly in MBA programs. Developed innovative teaching methods. One hundred articles and papers published in double-blind peer-reviewed journals and proceedings at professional meetings in the United Sates and Switzerland, France, Poland and Hungary. One book, which forms the basis of his website (see below). Consulting: AT&T, Nynex, IBM, others.

After retiring from teaching, Winer set up a website, mbatoolbox.org to preserve his work and to increase its accessibility. This website is free and carries no advertising. Forty thousand people have viewed the method for case analysis since August 2005, which is eight times as many as the number of students who have read the method through its many refinements during Winer's 33 years of full-time business school teaching.