Business is People

A recurring theme we hear in the Jenkins MBA program at NC State is that businesses are looking for MBA graduates that have good people skills. This is echoed by the companies themselves when they come to campus for recruiting sessions. The days of the lone wolf MBA superstar are fading and companies now are looking for leaders that interact well with their team and the people they are charged with managing. It doesn't matter how effectively you accomplish a project if you burn a lot of bridges to get there.

This article at the Harvard Business Review drives this point home. It's a quick and interesting read about how getting fired by now Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz led to a revelation in the author's business life.

HBR online: Why I'm Glad I Got Fired

Changing Almost Anything

Tony Schwartz has an interesting article at the Harvard Business Review online on making change last. He outlines 6 key steps for changing almost anything.

Ingenious research by Roy Baumeister and others has demonstrated that our self-control is a severely limited resource that gets progressively depleted by every act of conscious self-regulation....Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically

What follows are our six key steps to making change that lasts:

http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2011/01/six-keys-to-changing-almost-an.html

How do you think this could apply to a corporate culture shift or switching business strategies?

Harvard Business Review Supply Chain Spotlight

HBR has an October Spotlight on Supply Chain Management with several very good articles. Click here to check it out.

This One's for the Entrepreneurs

The Harvard Business Review has another great article titled 3 Mistakes Made in Scaling Up New Ventures. I've often daydreamed about starting a company and what it would take to scale up a new business. Many a great idea has been prematurely run into the ground shortly after takeoff by making some key strategic mistakes during the initial growth stages. This is a good short read for anyone thinking about beginning a new venture after MBA school and has some simple but insightful points to make. Enjoy.

Productivity

Increasing my productivity is something I've become very interested in since starting my MBA program. The Harvard Business Review has a great article titled "Six Ways to Supercharge Your Productivity"

I found two takeaways especially helpful for MBA students. First, sleep deprivation can have serious impacts on your cognitive capacity so make sure you aren't trading sleep for productivity or you might be making the wrong choice. Second, it's beneficial to free your mind of all you have to remember by writing down everything you have to keep track of. This serves as a mental data dump and frees you up to focus on the task at hand. These two concepts alone have contributed to reducing my overall stress level and have increased my productivity. Check out the article linked above, it's a short read.