1st Year Almost Over!

It's hard to believe that my classmates and I are in the final stretch of our first year in the Jenkins MBA program at NC State. Four more weeks till exams are over! Then, a few short days of rest or travel before we begin our summer internships. Time has definitely flown by and it's hard to believe I'm halfway through my MBA already.

Looking back on my first year I have the benefit of hindsight and there are a few things I've realized. I see now that I shouldn't have been so stressed the first month of school. Yes it was hard. Yes, I wondered at times if I could handle the work load, but I realize now how quickly you adapt. It's so much easier to consume large amounts of knowledge each class period now and actually understand how to apply it. Note I said easier, definitely not easy!

Another thing I've realized is that I haven't taken full advantage of getting to know my professors. I am well aware of the benefit of building strong relations with classmates and how my network will be one of the most valuable things I gain in B-school. I'm only recently realizing the same could be said for my professors. They have a vast amount of academic knowledge and many have great industry experience as well. I plan on making it a priority next year to get to know my professors better and to seek out more interaction with them. They are always communicating a willingness to interact with us outside of class and I should take advantage of the offer.

For more ways to get the most out of your MBA experience, Poets and Quants has another good article you should check out here. 25 ideas to make the most of your MBA

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

Summer Internships

Most full-time MBA programs require a summer internship between your first and second year. These are not the low level internships you might have had in college but are pretty challenging jobs where you often get to interact with senior executives. Some of my fellow classmates are working with large Biopharma companies and Fortune 50 oil companies for example. My internship this summer is with a business technology development center. I'll have the opportunity to be a summer consultant for two small tech startups as they seek to manage their companies and growth their market. I debated whether to pursue the typical Fortune 500 internship or this opportunity. Ultimately, I decided that I would really enjoy getting to wear many different hats and function at a higher decision level with these small companies. I think the internship will be challenging and exciting and I'm looking forward to applying all the things I've been studying over the past 8 months.

Real MBA

One thing we emphasize here at North Carolina's Jenkins MBA program is the word Real. What is meant by the tagline "The Real MBA" is that we form key alliances with real companies to work on real projects. In my second semester I'm already working on an actual software sourcing project for a $2 Billion dollar health care company where we are tasked with saving at least $600,000 from their software procurement budget each year. At first I wondered how we could even accomplish this but the funny thing is, by applying what we are learning in our Supply Chain class we are developing a plan that should easily save much more than our target savings. We speak weekly with the Chief Procurement Officer and CIO who are working with our team and eventually our report will be sent on to the CEO of this organization where it will be implemented. The fact that we are getting experience as both external consultants and supply chain analysts if extremely valuable to us when we are only 1/3 of the way through our MBA degree.

There are dozens of other opportunities in the Jenkins MBA program to work for real companies, from initial start ups to Fortune 50 companies. Without this program I don't think I would have had this same opportunity and it's another benefit of getting an MBA at a nationally recognized school.

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?

The Techno MBA

Xerox, within it's PARC group invented the ball mouse, some of the first personal computers and the first graphical user interface (GUI) but failed to truly capitalize on their ideas. Apple computer was the first computer company to popularize the GUI in its personal computers and we all know the success Microsoft had in taking all 3 of these technologies mainstream. Meanwhile, although Xerox is a high tech company involved in a multitude of technologies, they are primarily known as a photocopy company.

Why is it that some companies produce great ideas in R&D but fail to capitalize on them? A major focus of the Jenkins MBA here at NC State is on real world experience coupled with an emphasis on how technology plays a role in today's business environment. I enjoyed a recent lecture in my Management of Technological Innovation class where our professor referred to us as Techno-MBAs. Most traditional MBAs operate in the realm of managing existing products rather than creating new innovation. He explained that in business today there is often a gap between R&D on one side and existing product management on the other. One goal of this program is to turn out graduates who can operate in the fuzzy middle. The Jenkins MBA will create graduates who can take the exciting but unproven ideas that come out of R&D and filter them to find value where a new product or service can be created. The challenge will be to manage the process in the middle, as a liaison between the inventors and the managers. We will learn how to translate management needs into ideas for R&D and how to identify potential new innovations that will end up creating value and ensure good ideas are not lost in obscurity. This concept excites me and I'm looking forward to diving deeper into this topic!

Another Beginning

Classes started again today. It's a good feeling to be 25% of an MBA! I think this semester will be a little more challenging than the first semester but also very interesting. The second semester of a full-time MBA program is usually where you start studying the core program classes in Marketing, Finance, Operations, and in NC State's program, Supply Chain Management.

For a relatively newer MBA program, our Supply Chain Management program is highly rated and we have a great reputation with major companies for producing great graduates in that area. I'm currently pursuing the Supply Chain concentration and my two Supply Chain focused classes should give me a great idea if this is truly what I want to pursue here at the Jenkins MBA program. I'll definitely be posting on my experience with this concentration as the semester progresses. Stay tuned!

Productivity over Winter Break

Winter Break begins this week and our first semester is completed! I know all of my classmates and I have worked really hard to reach this moment. I'll just be decompressing for a few days at first, but if you are like me and you don't remember the last time you had 3 weeks off of work (or school) and are wondering what to do with yourself, click the link below for ideas to stay productive over the break.
Source: lifehack.org.

20 Productive Ways to Use Your Free Time

Finals!

It's hard to believe that finals begin this week. The semester has been busy and challenging but it's amazing how fast it flew by. It seems like yesterday we were all sweating on the ropes course during orientation and now we are only a few days away from Winter break. I remember wondering how much information I would really learn in just one semester but looking back on things I feel much more capable to get back into management than I did just 5 months ago. Next semester we begin some more focused courses on Finance, Marketing, and Supply Chain so I'm excited about getting into the meat of our program.

Community Service

The MBA Student Association has been getting more and more involved in community service projects this year. As part of the new leadership team, I've had the opportunity to work with the rest of the team to put together some local community service projects. So far we have worked with the Raleigh Parks and Recreation Department to make improvements to Pullen Park and helped with some clean up work at the Municipal Rose Garden.

The Students in the Jenkins MBA program are very focused on giving back to the community and it's great that the MBA student association provides opportunities to get involved. Outdoor activities are drawing to a close with the onset of winter weather but the Spring semester will again provide many more opportunities to get involved.

Ultimate Power Speak

Ultimate Power Speak is part of our MBA 500 Career Effectiveness class in the Jenkins MBA program at NC State and something that I think gives us a leg up on other business schools. Ultimate Power Speak is a company that prepares people for effective communication whether it's one to one or to a room of hundreds. I think that this class module will help our MBA students to come out of the program as a more polished product than when we entered.

I recently stumbled across this web video of a politician giving a campaign speech and I couldn't help but thinking how he could use a class on communications skills. From the video it's hard to tell if he's running for political office or is trying to jump start a professional wrestling career!

Career Coach

One of the things I appreciate about the NC State MBA program is the availability of 2nd year students to function as our Career Coaches. Obviously we also have the Career Resources department in our program but what I enjoy about the student career coaches is that they understand what we are thinking and experiencing right now because they were in our shoes just last year. The benefit to this is that they know the best strategies for landing an internship and what employers are currently looking for in MBA graduates. They are also helpful in navigating the program and classes themselves or just for general advice. The NC State MBA program as a whole has a very team oriented, positive attitude which I love and there is definitely an atmosphere of cooperation rather than competition within the program.

Supply and Demand

We had an interesting lecture recently in our Economics class about supply and demand. One of the more interesting examples demonstrated what happens when public policy artificially shifts the demand slope. The example highlighted the rent control policies in New York City. Because prices were kept artificially low, demand for apartments skyrocketed. The demand was so great at times that people could be seen standing outside the newspaper offices in the wee hours of the morning so that they could be the first to get a jump on newly available apartments. Here's the interesting part. They weren't looking at the classified, they were looking through the obituaries.

The lesson learned was that as some costs are artificially kept low (rent), other costs increase, like the obtrusive behavior of someone showing up on your doorstep early in the morning the day after your loved one passed away to ask for their apartment. The class discussion wasn't that rent control and other policies that interfere with natural supply and demand are bad necessarily, it was that there will always be other costs associated when supply or demand is shifted artificially, and these things need to be considered when establishing policy.

This is just one example of a situation where economics has something to say. I'm finding the Jenkins MBA course material very interesting and I can see how having a solid understanding of economics as a manager will be a very beneficial thing for my future career.