Economist, Businessweek, Harvard Business Review win Olin prizes

The Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis announced the winners of the first Olin Corporate Strategy Prize honoring the best business journalism covering a company experiencing significant strategic change.

The business school hopes the annual prize will help to expand awareness and understanding among business school students and the general business public about the importance of successful strategic change to the ongoing vitality and competitiveness of the firm.

The winners of the 2010 Olin Corporate Strategy Prize are:

1st prize: “The World According to Chambers,” a profile of Cisco Systems by Ludwig Siegele, technology correspondent at The Economist.

2nd prize: “The Transformer: Why VW is the Car Giant to Watch,” a profile of Volkswagen by David Welch, Detroit bureau chief at Bloomberg Businessweek.

3rd prize: “How GE Teaches Teams to Lead,” a profile of General Electric by Steven Prokesch, senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

“This new prize provides a wonderful opportunity for the worlds of academia, business and media to intersect,” says Mahendra R. Gupta, PhD, dean of the Olin Business School and the Geraldine J. and Robert L. Virgil Professor of Accounting and Management, in a statement. “It allows us to spotlight today’s best reporting on leaders who are managing strategic change and to share those examples with our students who are tomorrow’s business leaders.”

The Olin Corporate Strategy Prize grants honorariums of $5,000 to the first prize winner, $3,500 to the second prize winner and $1,500 to the third prize winner. Submissions were received from leading business publications worldwide and judged by a distinguished panel of leading journalists, journalism professors, business leaders and faculty.

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