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

How to Stand Out When Applying for an Online Job

Kiplinger's has a good article about how to stand out when applying for online jobs. It's worth a quick read. Here's an interesting takeaway from the article. Follow the link to continue reading.

Source: Kiplinger

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.

Video Projects

As part of our MBA 530 Organizational Behavior class we were required to make a video based on a seed book as part of our final project. Our book was Switch by Chip and Dan Heath which was about the topic of change. Here's the final product.



Here's another one about multitasking I enjoyed from a different team in our class.

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.

Tragedy of the Commons or: Our Coffee Pot is Sentient

Here's something I find interesting, a phenomenon called the Tragedy of the Commons. The title refers to a time in medieval Europe when there were shared grazing pastures for farmers to freely use. Rather than only consuming enough resources to make the communal fields sustainable for all, each farmer was looking out for their own interests, and over grazing pretty much ruined the nice set up for all. Broadly speaking, everybody's responsibility becomes nobody's responsibility as we pass the buck on to the next guy.

To see this in action take a look at our coffee pot in the MBA lounge and you'll see a graphic example of this problem. What you will find is either an undiscovered cure for cancer or some organic matter slowly becoming sentient. What started out (possibly months or years ago) as a nice, free shared resource of a coffee pot has now morphed into a container for a weird green growth. This shouldn't be a surprise when you consider the responsibility for cleaning the pot falls on all of us and by default, none of us. I'll be following the situation as it continues to develop and will let you know if this growth ends up somehow meaningfully contributing to society.

Communication Final

After many nervous days of preparation for our communications final with the Ultimate Power Speak trainers we have completed our final presentation! I think we all passed with flying colors. The training provided us with the framework to structure nearly any type of talk of any time duration and provided us with some great tips on effective presentation skills. I definitely think this training is going to help us be better prepared for future interviews and future business presentations. In a few weeks we will get our DVDs with the before and after videos which should be quite interesting as we see our progress over these past 5 weeks.

Student Loan Payback

If you are in full time graduate school there is a good chance you have some student loans. Some students are counting on their future income to be high enough that they aren't worried about payback and are content to borrow enough to maintain their former lifestyle. Others are borrowing the bare minimum for tuition only and using savings or part time work to supplement living expenses. Either way, these loans will have to be paid back so what is your payback strategy? Have you begun to think about it yet?

Here is the strategy I used to accelerate my undergrad loan payback and a good strategy for debt reduction in general.

Step 1. Avoid unnecessarily adding to the problem now. The old adage that when you find yourself in a hole you should stop digging holds true here as well. Develop a budget and stick to it. This is a great habit to establish now when you have to that will insure that you can easily accomplish step 2 upon graduation when you may not be forced to be as careful with money.

Step 2. Fight lifestyle inflation. Just because you have an excellent chance of getting a great job offer after graduation doesn't mean you will find it easy to pay back your loan balance. There is a reason that some doctors and lawyers who make mid six-figure salaries live paycheck to paycheck like many people living at the median family income level. Lifestyle inflation is a hard thing to overcome and the temptation to increase your spending in direct relation to your increased income will be a factor you will have to purposefully try to avoid.

Step 3. Pick a strategy. Your long term strategy should kick into place after graduation when you are again bringing in a regular income. There are two main methods of debt repayment strategies but I favor one over the other.

Strategy A is to list all of your consumer debt from highest interest rate to smallest and attack it in that order. By looking at your budget you've maintained since Step 1 you should have an idea of how much additional money you can put toward paying off the highest interest rate first. Work to pay that debt off and then continue to work down the list. Again, while this is mathematically the best method there are psychological factors involved that cause me to prefer the next method.

Strategy B is to organize your debts from smallest to largest balance without regard to interest rates. This sounds counter intuitive at first but in my opinion is a better debt repayment method for reasons I'll discuss below. This strategy is basically the Debt Snowball method popularized by financial guru Dave Ramsey. Here's how it works. After looking at your budget, you pay the minimum payment on all of your other debts and dedicate your excess money solely to your smallest balance. For example, you have a $500 debt with a $25 monthly minimum payment and $225 monthly extra above your budget. You would devote the entire $250 ($25 minimum plus $225 extra) to that debt each month. After 2 short months you have paid off that debt and now instead of $225 extra in your budget you now have $250 to apply to the next lowest balance. If that debt is $900 with a $50 minimum payment you now have $300 ($250 extra plus the $50 monthly you were already making) to apply to that debt each month and you will have it paid off in just 3 months, which frees up a total of $300 to apply to your next debt and so on and so on. The benefit of this debt reduction strategy is that it provides you with the quick reward of eliminating some smaller debts and allows you to contribute more and more money each month to your debt payback strategy. This method has worked for thousands of people and is nothing more than a psychological strategy to help you stay committed to your debt repayment plans. If you are a model of self control and make decisions solely based on the logic or analytical assessment of an option then Strategy A is for you, but for most people I believe the Debt Snowball is the most effect method for actually sticking to the goal of getting out of debt.

There are a few instances where I wouldn't recommend this method such as having one large loan with a really high interest rate far above the other debts but for the most part the debt snowball is the method that most people will actually stick to because of the immediate gratification and feedback you get by following it.

Debt repayment is never a fun topic but keep this thought in mind. You are willing to sacrifice now to pursue an investment in your education that will have a significant long term payoff. Debt reduction is the exact same concept where you are making some sacrifices now for a better long term outcome. So, what are your strategies for student loan payoff?

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!

Full Swing

Things are in high gear here in the Jenkins MBA full time program. It seems like multiple projects are all hitting at the same time and we are in a whirlwind of activity. This busier schedule combined with my home closing last week has put me a little behind the 8 ball. The stress is mostly having a positive motivating effect on our class but it's stress all the same. Looking back over the past 3 months it's amazing how much we have all learned so far and I can clearly see how the fast pace of business school really pays off in quick knowledge acquisition. A recent study I read seems to indicate that learning a second language later in life as an adult might significantly delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease. I'm wondering what learning binomial distributions in statistics class is doing for us?

How Fake Money Saved Brazil

"This is a story about how an economist and his buddies tricked the people of Brazil into saving the country from rampant inflation. They had a crazy, unlikely plan, and it worked."

NPR published the above story about how a young economist saved Brazil from their recurring hyper inflation problem. The trick was to establish a sense of confidence in the stability of the currency by creating a virtual currency that would remain stable, even as the physical currency, the cruzeiros, continued to fluctuate. The solution worked and Brazil went from a country with some pretty severe monetary problems to a major player in the global economy. This is the story of how an unreal currency became the Brazilian Real.


Click here to read the full NPR article. How Fake Money Saved Brazil

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.

The House

Good news! Just a quick update, we found a house and have our closing in 2 weeks. It's unbelievable how low interest rates are right now and I'm glad the timing of our home purchase lined up so well with these historically low rates. Raleigh was just named the 4th smartest city in the country so hopefully settling here is also a smart move which I think it will be as long as the housing market remains stable after the recent declines. I am definitely excited to get more permanently settled into the area but I don't look forward to moving for the second time in 6 months!