Tag Archives: mba

Is the MBA worth it?

October 9, 2011 By in mba, Motivation, QuakeAware Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I received an e-mail from the Dean of the Business school after our convocation ceremony yesterday. Here was the introduction….

“Congratulations on your graduation from the Beedie School of Business. This is a significant achievement and a major milestone for you in your life and career. You have succeeded in a program that combines academic rigor with practical application, has notably high standards, and most importantly, provided you with opportunities to meet new people and confront challenging ideas.” That is certainly what I hoped for when I joined the program. This was not quite my experience though but more on that later.

It seems to me that the benefits of an MBA depend a great deal on who you talk to. Many successful entrepreneurs consider the program a waste of time. They believe you are far better off to actually do\create a business or a product rather than learn from academics. Many professors are incredibly intelligent but lack real world commercial experience and\or have successfully run a business. From a corporate perspective an MBA can be an important “enabler” for more senior positions later in your career. Completing the program shows a drive to gain valuable experience and acquire new skills needed in executive life. I think there are merits to both points of view.

The MBA “gravy train” for major academic institutions is being disrupted by innovators like the University of Phoenix who are offering similar content delivered online for a fraction of the cost. I think business schools obsessed with their brand in light of this very stiff competition are misguided and have lost focus on their core mission. I thought Tony Hsieh of Zappos had a very profound insight when he said that brand is a lagging indicator of culture. His point was that organizations need to align their employee and customer experience to achieve outstanding results. Established universities need to deliver world-class education, foster an entrepreneurial culture and supportive ecosystem to truly differentiate their products and services from their online competition.

A couple of thoughts in terms of my personal experience as an MBA candidate:

1. If students choose not attend most lectures and rarely participate in group assignments how valuable can the MBA credential be?  This suggests to me that as long as you pay the “substantial fees” you earn the credential\brand. This is not rigorous or high standards. I think this is one of the reasons why MBA’s are not as held in as high regard as they used to because of perceived grade inflation. Obviously there are a lot more people with the credential now as well.

2. To charge higher prices established universities need to deliver premium instruction, preferably original research or at least the latest research from talented and engaged professors. The problem from a prospective student is you only find out how good the instruction is after you sign up for the program. My experience was that lecture quality was very inconsistent. It’s fine to tell me about the world-class academics on staff but if I am not taught by many of them frankly who cares? Some professors had little grasp of technology even though it was an MBA with a technology specialization!  One course had content was quite dated with examples that were relevant about 1o years ago. Fortunately many courses were excellent, taught by dynamic professors or incredibly experienced veterans with compelling stories and connections to boot! I would have paid a lot more for some courses and not at all for others had I known what I know now.

3. I was really impressed with the efforts the Beedie Business School make to provide a supportive eco-system for students to develop business ideas. They offer a variety of incubator programs for new ventures and provided free passes to the excellent BC New Venture Competition lecture series. I was fortunate to work with a great group of students that developed an iPhone app called QuakeAware as part of the program. A great way to make your MBA count is to apply the learnings to an endeavour as part of the program. Without a doubt working with this team on our pet project was the highlight of the program for me. I regret not making more of the incubator resources the University offered.

4. Burnout becomes a real issue the further you progress in the program. I became a father towards the end of the fourth semester which made a tough schedule occasionally unbearable. While my wife rapidly lost weight after the birth I continued to expand because I was eating junk food and drinking coffee late into the night on a regular basis. Needless to say this was bad for my health and not sustainable in the long run. Fortunately I was not alone. :) Many other members of my cohort joined me in the “pleasantly plump” brigade. My patience for “light lectures” of questionable value wore thin towards the end as the personal sacrifices I needed to make and the price I paid was not certainly not worth it far too often.

5. I really enjoyed the safe environment for students to share their perspectives on their professional challenges. Most lecturers made a point of encouraging discussion which was often insightful and thought-provoking. I learned that the challenges in my organization were not unique by any means and that in many instances Sage was ahead of the curve in our industry. I highly doubt I could have had these type of conversations over an e-learning or online course as it takes sometime for students to get comfortable with each other to share what they really think.

Was it worth it? All in all I think so. I have a broader perspective on business. I have a solid platform to move from the technical to the business side of my organization. The program has already proven beneficial to at least half the cohort. Many have moved up in their organizations or moved on to new employers already. The MBA is as much a test of endurance as it is a test of intelligence. I promised myself I would do this and now I have. I am pretty proud of myself actually!

2011 Targets

January 9, 2011 By in Building teams, Employees, Motivation, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Personal:

  • Spend more quality time with Min Chi
  • Learn to be a great dad
  • Spend more time with my family back in Ireland
  • Reconnect with some old friends

Blog:

  • 10,000 hits
  • 50 personal posts
  • 2 guest posts
  • 25 comments

QuakeAware:

  • Setup a non profit organization
  • 25,000 downloads of the App
  • Redesign the website
  • Expand into at least one US city
  • Explore open source model for global presence

Professional:

  • Build 2 high-performing agile R&D teams
  • Bring out one hidden talent or maximize a known one for every employee I work with
  • Become a better presenter
  • Attend networking events monthly
  • Raise my performance on R&D management team

Health:

  • Eat better
  • Loosen up – stretch more
  • Drop 15lbs
  • Vary my exercise more
  • Play soccer this summer

Study:

  • Complete MBA with 4.0 GPA average
  • Write an excellent business plan for my final project
  • Write one more plan by the end of the year for practice
  • Attend BC New Venture Series this summer

Are you a good colleague?

May 22, 2010 By in Leadership, Management, mba, Motivation, Personal development Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I attended a three and a half day self-management course last weekend as part of my MBA program. It was by far the most intensive course I have ever experienced. Gervaise Bushe has designed a simulation that helps identify your strengths and weaknesses in meeting the challenges and possibilities of working and managing in ambiguous, fast paced organizational environments. I highly recommend this course for organizations that are struggling to manage change. If you would like to learn more about it you can check out this link.  A few weeks ago I discussed Kolb’s learning style inventory assessment. I learn primarily by doing. Simulations are an optimal learning environment for people like me. I loved it!

The cohort was given a brief overview of the principles of the simulation and some key barriers that get in the way of our learning. One of the key points Gervaise made was that there is a difference between what we know and what we do, particularly when levels of stress increase. We often know the correct principles to handle a situation but all types of external and internal factors limit our ability to execute successfully. Our challenge over the course was to evaluate our performance against the six characteristics of a great co-worker identified by Gervaise (I think).

1. Makes A Contribution

  • Sees what needs to be done and does it
  • Notices when you need a helping hand
  • Hard working, good work ethic
  • Competent and organized
  • Good time management
  • Committed to the team’s success
  • Goes above and beyond the call of duty

2. Dependable and Takes Accountability

  • Makes and keeps agreements
  • Meets deadlines
  • Able to own problems and accept responsibility
  • Able to prioritize
  • Makes and owns tough decisions
  • Coordinates with others
  • Ensures what they do integrates with the big picture

3. Straight-talking and Fair

  • Objective and fair
  • Tells you the whole truth
  • Means what they say and lives by their values
  • Won’t lie just to make it easier for themselves
  • Brings up hard issues that need to be discussed

4. Finds Creative and Innovative Solutions

  • Comes up with new ideas
  • Doesn’t get caught in assumptions
  • Is open to trying out new ideas
  • Encourages experimentation
  • Thinks out of the box
  • Looks for ways around problems
  • Doesn’t accept limitations

5. Self Aware and Continuously Learning

  • Open to learning
  • Accepts criticism
  • Gets curious when something doesn’t make sense
  • Asks for feedback and suggestions
  • Is willing to learn from their failures and move on
  • Can describe what is going on in them
  • Sees and acknowledges their part in problems
  • Challenges self and others to grow in difficult situations

6. Creates a Positive, Motivating Atmosphere

  • Encourages and motivates others
  • Stays cool under pressure
  • Enthusiastic
  • Takes a hit and stays focused
  • Doesn’t gossip or bad mouth others
  • Relieves tension
  • Sees the best in people
  • Sees the opportunities in challenges

For my sins, I have a fifteen page paper to write about what I learned from the course this weekend. I won’t bore you with all the details but there are some nuggets that are worth sharing.

  1. We each create our own experience. Our experience is not what happens to us but what we do with what happens to us. This is a very powerful idea. If we are mad, we choose to be mad. There is an alternative to how we currently view our situation. If we are checked out, there are options to re-connect and opportunities to make a difference if we so choose. I think this is very relevant given the malaise in employee morale across so many organizations after the distress of last year.
  2. In order to learn from experience we need to pay attention to our results(not our intentions). The most powerful stance for learning when I don’t like my results is: I created that result, probably because of thoughts, feelings and/or wants I’m not aware of. What’s in it for me to create that result? I experience this challenge at work occasionally. I take a course of action with what I perceive to be noble intentions yet others experience this a very different way.  A big part of my challenge is that I am too focused on solving the problem rather than gaining consensus that a problem in fact exists. I attended an R&D management excellence program recently at work with a useful framework to tackle problems from a problem vs solution approach. I’ll keep readers posted on my progress with this.
  3. Perhaps the most interesting insight was the idea of “competence compulsion”.  At work, we are all compelled to act and to make sense of every situation in a way that ensures we appear competent to ourselves and we appear competent to others. Unfortunately, when we are learning, we can appear less than competent. I spoke with a peer only on Friday who was opposed to managing employees outside of her core area of expertise for this reason. Here is the challenge though. Our environment is changing so fast now that we MUST continue to upgrade our skills or face obsolescence. How do we create a working environment where people feel safe to “fail forward” to improve their professional capabilities?

I will wrap up for now. As always, if you have feedback I would love to hear it. It’s time to get started on that paper I was telling you about.

Thanks,

Donal

Managing the media

April 18, 2010 By in mba, Personal, QuakeAware Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Attention readers! This post is longer than usual. As some of you may know, a product I have developed with class mates has featured prominently in the local media here over the past two weeks. I was interviewed by Global TV last weekend. I am going to share my perspective and our team’s experience of working with the media  over these past few weeks.  All in all, it was  enjoyable, nerve-wracking, time intensive but ultimately rewarding experience.  

But first some background. As part of our MBA program I was part of a team tasked with developing a product that would serve the local community. We were inspired by the tragic events in Haiti. Team QuakeAware decided to leverage our technical and new-found product management skills to build an iPhone app. (We aim to deliver versions for the Android & Blackberry platforms shortly) Our app helps residents prepare and react to earthquakes if they ever hit our local city in Richmond, BC. 

The media first heard about our product through the director of Public Relations at Segal Graduate School of Business. He attended two presentations we had given. He seemed to immediately grasp the potential of the product and made contact with the media. You can check out our first interview with the TV media here if you like. The entire clip lasted a full five minutes. As we gained more experience with the media we would come to realize we were even luckier to feature for so long on prime time TV.

What made this interview particularly challenging was how little time we had to prepare. Ryan appeared on national TV after only three hours sleep, kept awake by those awful energy drinks. He had no idea what the questions would be and answered in real-time. Thankfully everything went well. Ryan did a fine job in the circumstances. You can tell he was nervous but who wouldn’t be! His phone seemed to ring non stop for four days fielding calls from radio and TV stations requesting interviews after his success. It was incredible!  

As Ryan spent more time on the air you could tell he gained in confidence. The media was friendly. He was more polished in his answers. It was great! Other team members were eager to feature on TV. It made sense to give everyone a chance. The problem was that Ryan was often the only one who could appear on the TV in the time frame required during the day (he works nights). When the media call, they have a tight deadline to manage to. Are you available or not? For example, in the last round of TV appearances we needed to be available within forty-five minutes. If you are not available, events quickly move on and you are less likely to feature again. Fortunately another opportunity came up where another group member Dylan (AKA Jesus in our group) was able to appear. Dylan works from home and was able to respond to another last-minute request. You can check out the clip here.

 

CBC did an amazing job of presenting the power of our app for us. It also helped that Dylan was excellent. A key difference was that this TV interview was recorded. If mistakes happen, no problem, you can just shoot the clip again. I am sure Dylan must have felt a little  pressure. I doubt it is as daunting as being interviewed live though. Ryan was very confident that the interview had gone well and so it proved. He was a now a bit of a pro advising us on various aspects of the process having done this several times. In my opinion Dylan’s interview gave the most favorable impression of our work.  This clip lasted two minutes.

The second last of the interviews to date took place last weekend. You can see the 60 second clip that featured on the Sunday evening Vancouver news below.

As you can tell from the chronology the interviews on the TV at least were becoming shorter. I wsa selected to represent the team for this interview. There was twenty-five minutes of footage taken. Only sixty seconds made the final cut. If you check out our Facebook Fan page you can see the photos we took of the first part of the interview. The camera man spent around ten minutes taking close up shots of Kelvin (our finance guru) using the app connected to large monitors. Unfortunately, none of this material made the final news. Then it came to my turn. I thought a reporter was going to show up for the actual interview. This never happened. Instead I was talking to the wall (literally) pretending I was being interviewed. It was surreal! That said, because we were recorded there was less pressure. That didn’t stop me from forgetting most of the features of our product to my chagrin. Apart from that this minor detail the interview went  well. One could say, this was the easiest of the three interviews to date in the sense that it was not a really an interview at all. In fact, I could probably have prepared the questions and answers had I liked. That evening when I first watched the clip I was very disappointed. There was no footage of the app at all. There was a brief intro and then a thirty-second ”elevator pitch” from me. I had no idea that this was all that would feature. In hindsight, we were very lucky. If there was any thirty seconds that should have featured, this was it! The feedback over the next few days was overwhelmingly positive though.

Incredibly then another massive earthquake struck in China. Another request for interviews came from CTV. This time we featured for approximately fifteen seconds at the end of a segment dedicated to earthquake preparedness for BC schools. I don’t have a clip to share with you at this time. I’ll upload it later when I have access to it.

All in all QuakeAware has featured on prime TV for five or six days over the last two weeks. This has created incredible mind share for us. For example, several colleagues at work had heard of our application. On Tuesday a random attendee at an innovation event  I went to advised us that he had heard about us on the local radio. We have requests coming from people all over the lower mainland, including Vancouver island and as far away as  Seattle, Southern California & Taiwan to deliver an app to them. What an opportunity! I will tell you how we progress in future posts.

For now, I will close with some key takeaways from the past few weeks.

  1. You have to be ready at any time for an interview. Simply put, without Ryan’s availability at a moment’s notice we would never have received the publicity we did. Our policy has been to do whatever it takes to respond to the media’s request for an interview. We are more likely to feature as a result.
  2. Be prepared. Know the format of your interview if possible. If open-ended questions are asked be sure to make them count. This is your big opportunity to get your message out!
  3. Have an elevator pitch. Know it inside out. It would have been nice to be armed with a FAQ and a product pitch before the media momentum took off.
  4. Realize you have little control over what appears on TV. Footage is edited back at HQ. I had unrealistic expectations of what footage would appear. For example, I made a request to get volunteer assistance during the interview. This was never going to make it into a sixty-second slot.
  5. Media momentum is hard to manage. Once it begins, you just have to roll with events as they unfold.
  6. Like everything in life, you get better with practise. Don’t be scared. Just do it if you get the chance. We were fortunate because we have a great story to tell. The media were eager to help get some good news out.
  7. Don’t peddle fear. We have made a conscious decision not to try to scare people unnecessarily. I think this helped us. People react to fear but it breeds cynicism and contempt as well.

Thanks again for checking out my blog. I will try to get back to my weekly schedule of posts. This has been hard to do given recent events.

Pretentious or Paramount

April 3, 2010 By in Personal, Personal development Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

 I had the good fortune to attend a dining etiquette class recently as part of my MBA program. The ladies looked great. The gentlemen did too.  We dined at the salubrious Vancouver club downtown. The club is very much an “old money” establishment where you go to unwind and network with captains of industry. Membership is expensive and by invitation only. The club obviously prides itself on its exclusivity. If you wanted to impress a future business partner the Vancouver club would certainly be a good place to take them to presuming  you are a member of course!  I was grateful for the learning opportunity in a relaxed environment.

Our cohort had a very pleasant and entertaining evening. Our host was Tim Ellison. He is very engaging, witty and dare I say it camp presenter! Tim is a connoisseur in the food and beverage industry. It never ceases to amaze me how truly talented speakers connect with their audience and engage a room. Tim has this talent in spades. He made us laugh at our bad habits, highlighted dining behaviors we were probably not even aware of and explained some etiquette we all should know but don’t.

I was surprised to learn that there are two different cutlery standards North American and European in dining etiquette. In the North American style all food is eaten with the right hand. After the food is cut with the knife the diner proceeds to put down the knife, transfer the fork to the right hand and eat. I am chagrined to admit that I never noticed this in my ten or so years in Canada and California. This is a perfect example of my lack of “awareness” in social settings. Apparently I am not alone. Tim advised the class that American spies often gave themselves away by using the North American style sub consciously during the cold war.

Some other excellent advice included:

  • Switch off your cell phones and remove them from the table.
  • The host always pays.
  • Leave your credit card with the manager before the meal starts to avoid haggling.
  • Pace your consumption with the rest of the table.
  • Always eat what your host has prepared. A clear plate demonstrates the best gratitude possible.
  • Make sure your host knows if you have any allergies or dietary restrictions in advance.
  • Defer business until later in the meal unless the host initiates the conversation.

Tim also challenged the males to be more chivalrous. He suggested we remove the chair from the table for ladies and seat them. I share his perspective on chivalry. I don’t do this now but may do so. I hold the car door open for my wife and other ladies when she is not present. Opinions vary on this topic though. Some women consider this old-fashioned and prefer equal treatment. There was disagreement on whether the host should always pay as well. I think in a business setting or with very good friends this guideline makes sense. I have dined and socialized with several people over the years who were happy to socialize at my expense without ever returning the favor. At the risk of annoying friends in North America this rarely happened in Europe or Australia. Perhaps the best piece of advice all night was be present. We live in hectic and challenging times. Take the time to honor your guest with your full presence. Enjoy your time and meal together.

Tim’s key point was that dining etiquette was not pretentious. Etiquette is designed to allow you to relax with your peers safe in the knowledge that you know how to behave appropriately. This makes sense. Your boss needs to know that you will effectively represent the company at important functions. An alternative view is that these rules are elitist and snobbish. I think there is merit to this point of view as well.  In my experience some people who  excessively pride themselves on their sophistication are self-absorbed and boring. 

Allow me to elaborate on my view with two recent examples. After the class I decided to spend more time drinking fine wines and scotch. Finally, a lesson in business I was eager to pursue! I was invited for drinks with a connoisseur of scotch. I was eager to learn. We sampled several bottles of good scotch over several hours. He gave me his perspective and was eager to hear mine. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Although I was the novice I didn’t really feel like it. In comparison I attend regular wine tasting event hosted by Sip Wines.  There is one patron who regularly shows up who  fancies himself as quiet the guru. I find it quite entertaining to watch the store owners humor yet disagree gently and respectfully with him regularly. This guy certainly knows more about wines then I do and likely ever will. He makes others feel uncomfortable and demands all the owner’s attention which is unnecessary at an event of this nature. He thinks he looks accomplished. I think he’s an idiot.

Is dining etiquette pretentious or paramount? It depends on the event. Both probably. Fortunately, when you are the host it is up to you.

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