Wednesday, December 31, 2008

1st Semester Summary - BGE (Part II)

Our final project for BGE was a group effort to analysis an emerging country (United Arab Emirates - UAE), using the techniques studies during the course, and determine recommended areas for potential Foreign Investment. Below is our final presentation. More so than our recommendations (which were generally bullish in several areas), the process of data gathering, data analysis, content organization and overall recommendation creation was most interesting to me. Not only did the team do an excellent job of dividing up the workload (risk analysis; financial markets analysis; political analysis; foreign investment analysis; current cultural trends , etc.), but the discussions we had about how the pieces were inter-related was invaluable to bring together the learnings of the classroom. At least for me, it finally allowed me to "follow the money" and "ask the questions to connect the dots" that Dr. Kennedy had pushed me to explore early in the class.
WFU-MBA-BGE-Team5-UAE-5Dec2008
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: uae wfu)
I'd like to give thanks to my friend Sam Alkharrat, Managing Director of Sales & Business Development for Cisco UAE, for his insight into our country analysis.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

1st Semester Summary - BGE (Part I)

It's getting close to 2009, so I need to start moving this blog from flashback mode into real-time mode fairly soon, so I suppose I'll just need to summarize aspects of the courses from the 1st Semester. These will by no means be complete, but rather hit on some interesting highlights and augment my notes from class.

To start with, I may as well start with the first course we had in August, which was Business in the Global Economy (BGE). Seems like a simple enough topic, just Economics for the Entire World, including all the nuances of Interest Rates, Foreign Exchange Rates, Balance of Payments, Trade Deficits, International Joint Ventures, Global Trade Agreements, etc.. Come on kids, the deep end is over here and the water is warm, jump on in!!

The first thing that excited me about this course was the experience of Dr.Chuck Kennedy, who had previously taught at UVA Darden School and has mentors back at Harvard Business School, so he's well versed in effectively using the Case-Study method of teaching. The next thing I looked forward to was a lack of a textbook. This class was going to evolve out of case study and current events. It wasn't without structure, but it was going to be focused on the realities of the world, rather than primarily based on research.

In the first couple of classes, we covered several historical events that now seem extremely relevant given our current financial crisis. We started with Bretton Woods and how the Global Economy evolved after WWII up through the 1960s. We looked at how fixed-rate currencies affected interests rates, balance of payments and fiscal and monetary policies worldwide. We then watched at the oil and inflationary crisis of the 1970s forced the move to floating rate currencies, affected inflation and interest rates and subsequently led to the recessionary challenges of the 1970s.

After a couple weeks of BGE, and comparing the course to others such as Quant or Accounting, I explained to Dr.Kennedy that I was struggling to a certain extent to get my head around the myriad of levers that could affect change in the Global Economy, and wondered if there were some primers that I could reference to get a bigger picture of the interactions. With a very stern look, he simply told me, "I don't think you're trying hard enough. Connect the dots. Follow the flows of money. It's all there right in front of you. The case study method does not spoon feed answers to you, it expects you to explore and find them. Force yourself to ask questions of yourself and the class." This was a lightbulb moment for me not only about the depths of the course, but about the expectations of the overall program. I appreciated the gentle slap in the face (figuratively), as the method of teaching/learning had not yet completely sunken in for me, and this put things in a much better perspective. This was truly going to be a challenge, and one that I needed to step up for.

As the class progressed, we investigated the Debt Crisis in Zaire, the Debt/Currency Crisis in Mexico, an International Joint Venture in formerly communist Poland, and the breadth of economic impact that China is having on the world and many other topics that may be many years old but are finding ways to repeat their mistakes or lessons in other parts of the world.

I learned a great deal from this class, with this list being a small summary:
  • The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New York Times and several other global business publications are a completely different read now that I know which lens to focus with.
  • We talk a great deal about living in a global society, and how the world is much smaller now due to technology. But we've lived in a globally connected economy for a long time. It's just that now, the US is become less and less the center of that connectedness.
  • History continues to repeat itself, led by greed and short-sighted decision-making by countries and leaders looking to take advantage of a short-term situation (abundant natural resource, low interest rates, etc.).
  • Allowing your country to get significantly out of balance with your neighbors, trading partners and the rest of the global economy typically involves longer difficult times when the rebalancing occurs....and it always has to occur.
  • Economics does have a set of fundamentals, like other disciplines, but the results of influencing those fundamentals often have less than expected results. The science of economics is often clouded by human emotions of fear, greed, uncertainty and protectionism.
  • "Following the money" and "asking following questions" are the best ways to gain perspective on the global environment we live in today.
2009 is going to be an extremely interesting year to see how the US and the world address the global financial challenges we share. I'm looking forward to my trip to China in May to better understand their culture and economy. And I'm looking forward to viewing the world's interconnectedness through a completely different set of eyes.

Monday, December 29, 2008

A Welcome Break and a Place to Think

The last couple of weeks have been very strange in terms of activity levels.  MBA classes ended on Dec.6th, and don't resume until Jan.9th, so I'm able to shutoff my B-School brain for a little while. Throw in that my company has decided to shutdown from Christmas to New Year's, and this is about the longest stretch I've ever had of no school or no work.   One of the things I've been doing lately is to create some 2009 plans and goals, both for school and work.  With all the doom and gloom in the media these days, many people are worried that 2009 is going to be miserable, a 21st century depression.  I'm taking a different outlook on 2009.  I think it will be the beginning of huge opportunities for people willing to change the way they think about the world.  It's a year of re-investment in yourself, in education, in new ideas and in new ways of thinking about difficult challenges.   

These aren't minor tweaks I'm talking about here, so it helps to have a place to get away and think.  If you don't already have that place, wherever it might be (coffee shop, in a library, yoga class, rock climbing, etc.), I highly suggest you find one.   Mine is usually in the backyard (pictured above), overlooking the pond.  I find a great set of music on the iPhone, and periodically use QuickVoice to keep track of ideas.  Today was a great example.  Leaves from about 15 trees still needed to be raked and the kids were off with mom at the mall, which meant 2hrs of uninterrupted quiet time for me.  The combination of fresh air, some moderately hard work and nature are a great way to refresh your mind or think clearly.

btw - One of things I thought about today was sort of a combination of two things:  (1) an upcoming Strategic Marketing class, and (2) the 300,000 applicants for 3,300 roles in the Obama administration.  With the odds of success at no better than 1%, how would I go about creating a way to get myself noticed in less than 1 minute (probably less) as the applications are reviewed?  Thinking about this led me to think about all the noise we deal with on a daily basis and how any of us can get ourselves or our products/services noticed in today's world. Needless to say, it generated a number of ideas that I need to explore further in 2009.   

Sunday, December 28, 2008

A Moment of Zen

I sent this out to my team several weeks ago, but for some reason I keep thinking about this.

Detroit Newspapers to end Daily Home Delivery

I mentioned in my LOB presentation that my first job was a newspaper boy. It was for the Detroit Free Press. I now work in technology. I've seen alot of things change due to technology, but this is the first time I've truly seen where something I created (Internet technology) actually destroy something I had previously worked on, on a major scale. It was sort of a circle of life moment for me.

Back in 1998, I started working on a technology called Voice over IP, which was going to revolutionize how people communicated using the Internet. My previous CEO, John Chambers, told an audience of Telephone Company CEOs that "voice will be free in 10 years", which was considered blasphemous at the time. I even wrote a book about the technology. And even though landline voice calls are now essentially free, it didn't eliminate people using a telephone to communicate with one another.

The power of the Internet does some amazing things, many of which we take for granted today. I've been very fortunately to have been on the leading edge of many of these changes, but sometimes the changes hit closer to home.

One of the Great Ironies of B-School

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, one of the great challenges in life is accepting that you won't get your predictions about the future correct, so you need to be flexible in your planning. It's exactly the reason most of us go back and get our MBA. An MBA provides flexibility by exposing us to breadth and depth of business knowledge, often filling in existing gaps and further strengthening existing strengths. But the B-School model of groups
and teams, creates two interesting dilemmas:

1) If you only focus on your strengths during group projects, then you deny other people on your team the opportunity to expand their skills, and conversely you will suffer in areas of weakness on other projects.
2) Because of the variety of coursework within an MBA program, there typically isn't enough time to explore the depth of a single area that you may desire.

Faced with our current work culture, and the sad lie of mediocrity, how can anyone justify an MBA program if their goal is to reach higher levels in their organization?

I think the answer lies in an expanded way of thinking about goals and outputs from an MBA program. If you look at it strictly for grades, you'll most likely not retain the knowledge long past graduation. If you focus narrowly on a specific subject, then you have to question why you didn't just take some specialized coursework. But if you realize that the value in the program comes from much more than the coursework, and you deeply explore relationships, experience and critical thinking with classmates and professors, then I believe you'll come to the conclusion that great leaders overcome any areas of mediocrity by not only surrounding themselves with great individuals (who you need to identify, recruit & retain), but by being great in all the areas that exist between the subjects and relationships. An MBA program gives you the breadth and time to explore how to be great in those areas, and to me, that may just be the most important element of any MBA program.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Future Predictions and Reasons to get an MBA

"Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"

What a great job interview question! It probes into whether someone has a plan for their life, and how this position (and company) fit into those plans. It explores where you fit into the big picture of the world. And it's my least favorite question to answer. "Why?", you may ask? From an MBA perspective, I previously touched on this. From a job/career perspective, I've always found it somewhat limiting because of the pace of the world we live in, and the technology arena where I work. Unless I'm being asked by someone who is truly a big-picture thinker, the "right" answer is always somewhat predictable (next job level, etc.). But that's actually the "wrong" answer. A much better answer is to tell people that I don't have a crystal ball to predict the future, and then show how I've been taking steps to take advantage of the opportunities I think may happen in the future. I'll get the future wrong, but at least I'll be in the right mindset and have the right skills and experience when those opportunities arise.

How badly will someone get those future predictions? My favorite marketing blogger, Seth Godin, does a nice job of explaining how planning for the future to be anything like it is today can be the most career limiting move you'll ever make.

Monday, December 22, 2008

People, Places and Panic

To this point, I haven't really talked about the program in detail. So let me cover a few basic questions that I get asked all the time.

What is the structure of the program?
The program is 17 months long, and the Class of 2009 runs from August 2008 until December 2009. The group meets every other weekend, Friday and Saturday, in Winston-Salem on the campus of WFU, in the Babcock Graduate Management building. We have two courses each day when we're on campus. Three times during the program, we meet for extended periods. The first is the Orientation Week in mid-August. The next is a two week international trip, with the options of visiting Japan, China, India or South America (Brazil/Argentina/Chile). The final week of the winter 2009 semester is a practicum project which ties together many aspects of the entire program. Because the program is condensed to 17 months, it is not only a huge time commitment from the students, but also for the sponsoring companies. The entire program requires students to be on campus ~45-50 days, so we're very appreciative of the support our companies provide us to participate in this outstanding program.

What type of people are in the program?
In a couple words..."an interesting mix". I don't have exact details about demographics or scores, but let me share some tidbits about the diversity and backgrounds of the group.
  • There are 31 people in the class.
  • The majority of the class are married, with about 50% having children.
  • They come from as close as Winston-Salem, and as far away as Charlotte, Raleigh, Roanoke, Hickory, Asheville and Charleston, WV.
  • About 20% of the class are Senior Executives, or run their own businesses.
  • About 25% of the class have worked &/or lived abroad and speak at least 2 languages fluently (besides English)
  • The following markets are represented in the class: (Green) Architecture, Automotive, Banking, Computer Engineering, Consulting, Education, Healthcare, IT, Telecommunications, and Textiles.
  • Beyond traditional manager roles, the class includes existing or former Doctors, Police Officers, Fire Fighters, Science Teachers, MTV Producers, Kick-Boxing Instructors, Black Panther protestors, Race Car owners, Punk Rock Guitarists, Authors, Porn Mustache wearers, and Military Brats.
How do you manage work and school?
The keys to surviving an MBA program, and "survival" is the optimal description, are prioritization and sacrifice. If you're like most people in the class, you were already working 50-60hrs weeks (or more), and managing a certain amount of work travel. Now throw in the alternating weekends in the program, and roughly 20-25hrs a week doing reading, papers and preparing for the next weekend. So something has to give, and it usually falls into one of a couple of categories:
  1. Hobbies - These are the easiest and hardest to give up. In my case, my golf clubs have literally been put in the attic. Matt Kirk and I have sworn that we'll get in a game in the Spring/Summer, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. But otherwise, they are collecting dust.
  2. Exercise - Prior to the program, I was an avid runner, typically getting up at 5:30am and putting in 25-30 miles a week. I was down around 167lbs. When you're up studying almost every night until 12:30-1am, it gets much tougher to get up at 5:30am on a regular basis. So like many 18yr old undergrads, I've developed the dreaded "Freshman 15" (actually 13). Getting this back on track and consistent is moving to the top of my list for 2009. 11:30pm is now going to be my cutoff each night.
  3. Family Time - This probably belongs at the top of the list, because an MBA program is very difficult on the family. Probably more so than the student. The irony is that for most people in the class, they are in the program because they want to provide better opportunities for their family. While the sacrifice here is difficult, it is short-term. I've found that the key here is communication (over-communication) and dedicated time. I never touch the books on off-weekends and Sundays. That's time for the family. And I try and find ways to stay connected to my beautiful little girls, through phone calls or video. We use Skype to talk live, and I try and create them a short video every weekend:

  4. Work - This probably isn't a good thing to ignore or de-prioritize, especially in today's economy. If anything, the program's demands are an excellent opportunity to see how well you can better learn to delegate, as well as hone your communications to your teams.
What's the biggest challenge in the transition back to school?
Panic. There are many outstanding people in my class. People that have been successful in every aspect of their life. But the pace of this program, and the variety of new topics has exposed me to a number of people who are experiencing Panic for the first time in their lives. It's been really interesting to watch people struggle with new concepts, and potentially face failure. I suspect this is a huge learning experience for them....both good and bad. The good news is that our groups have really bonded together and people are very helpful in getting others through these times. Sometimes this is just a reassurance that they aren't the only one struggling to learn something. Sometimes it's taking extra time to help them work through homework problems. Sometimes it's being available on the other end of a phone call to listen to their challenges. And sometimes it's having to be blunt with them that they need to step up their work and raise the level of their game. I suspect that while people may worry about grades now, by next December they will just be glad to have the MBA title on their resume and will look back at the relationships as being much more important that a B+ or A- in Quant. I know I will.

What are you going to do with your MBA once the program is over?
That's the $64,000 question, isn't it? The knee-jerk answer is to file for a Federal Funds Bailout for my tuition bills, but that line may be fairly long:) The real answer is that I look at this program as part of the process, and not the answer. I went into this program knowing that I had a number of skills that I needed to improve, and several areas of knowledge that I needed to expand. I'm confident that I'll leave the program improved in both of those areas. But as far as a specific job or project I'm hoping to obtain, that's not on my list of goals. It may be for some of my classmates, but not me. One thing that I do plan to do as part of this program is to expand my international exposure. I'm planning to attend the two-week trip to China in May 2009, and will be working to learn at least a moderate amount of Chinese/Mandarin prior to the trip. I have a Chinese woman on my work team that has offered to tutor me, so maybe by May we'll be able to conduct our 1:1 meetings in Mandarin...at least a little bit.

More than a WFU MBA journal

Since I'm still in time-warp mode until January, backfilling a bunch of posts to recap the 1st semester, I'm occasionally going to preview some of the other things that I hope to do with this blog.  If it were just a journal, I doubt anyone would keep reading.  But if I take Seth Godin's advice and create a Tribe, then the possibility exits that we can create interest and expand the conversations we have in Winston-Salem (and Charlotte) each week

1 - "Decision of the Week" - Each week, I will take a recent topic from the Business Press and highlight certain aspects that are worth exploring in more detail.  It may be an executive decision, a competitive market shift, a unique marketing approach, a savvy financial transaction or some other interesting element.  I'll open up the discussion (via blog comments) to my classmates in both the Winston-Salem and Charlotte programs.  We have mechanisms in the program to do this within the context of a class topic, but this should let us explore cross-topic impacts of business decisions, as well as open it to outside input and discussion.

2 - "Discussion of the Week" - This segment allows me to highlight an interest discussion, or person from each weekend's discussions.  These discussions may involve classroom topics, or may center around back-of-the-napkins brainstorming that often leads to great ideas and great companies.  I also hope to highlight some of the gifted personalities from the WFU EXFT2009 class, or across the WFU MBA programs.  

3 - "Connecting the Dots" - Academics are greats, but unless you can tie it to real world activities, it's just learning for learning's sake.  This segment will highlight connections between the topics in class, and real world examples of the concepts in practice.  

4 - "inVinCible Ideas" - What would a MBA program be without the creation of new business models and company ideas?  This segment will spotlight the activities that classmates are exploring and developing as they plan for the next step in their career or life.  VC funding may be required.

[Update - Dec.28, 2008] - The more I think about this, and the more I follow people like Fred Wilson, Umair Haque and the read books like What Would Google Do?, I have to ask myself if the recent worldwide economic crisis doesn't require us to truly think differently about how we conduct business, define government and shape societies.  I don't have a name yet for this segment, but there will definitely be segments where we'll explore this type of thinking, which should be a lot of fun.

Orientation Week & Team Building - Part II

Yesterday I wrote about the initial orientation & team building activities, and I wanted to expand on that today by looking at some additional things we did to understand each other and ourselves.  

The next phase of the process was to see how people thought about challenges, and how they could solve those challenges in a team environment.  The tasks themselves were simple for individuals, but required coordination and communication to make it work efficiently for groups of 15-30 people.   As expected, lots of "leadership" styles emerged once the rules were announced.  Some people wanted to attack the task on the fly; some people wanted to start explaining their ideas, while others were there to quickly point out the flaws; still others stepped back and thought through their ideas in silence.  Factions quickly gathered around loud speakers, or like ideas.  Ultimately, we took action..and failed..and reassessed...and took action...and made progress (but failed)...and reassessed...and took additional actions. Throughout these activites, it was interesting to see who was focused on the results, and who was more interested in the process.  Both types of people are useful in any company, and their skills each fit certain types of roles, tasks and environments.  This separation would come into play later in the team-building and evaluation, and throughout the program.  

Following the large group activity, we moved back to smaller group activities.  This time, personal disclosure and team discussion of goals and motivations.  I'm not sure how the other teams approached this, but in retrospect, this was a huge moment in the 1st semester success of Team 5.  We all had the opportunity to share our backgrounds, our goals, our motivations and our likes & dislikes.  Out team has people from the Midwest, the West Coast, the South and India.  We come from backgrounds that literally ranged from near poverty to village royalty.   We come from stable families, broken families, families of change agents, and families that spent the family fortune.   We're motivated by work, by family, by new challenges and personal goals.  We have a sense of humor, and a thick skin.  We like to laugh, and we're not afraid to ask questions or be blunt.  

The most important part of that session, to me, was the frank discussion about how we'd build our team, what we wanted our team goals to be, and how we would resolve the differences we had between our goals and priorities.  It was not an easy conversation.  Some people have families and didn't plan to spend off-weekends in group sessions.  Some people saw this as their stepping stone to the C-Suite and were willing to do anything to make top grades in the program.  Some people saw "nobody as a stranger", while others were the first to say that they struggled to trust others.  Still others needed to break down stereotypes about men, women, blacks, whites and Indians.  To the credit of the team, and I consider this one of our strengths, we put all the issues on the table and discussed each of them rationally and completely.  We were able to resolve issues like off-week meetings, group expectation levels (ie. grades) and communications quickly.  Some of the other issues we agreed to compromises, or took a "lets-see-how-it-goes" attitude.  But more than anything else, we walked away from that discussion as a unified team.  We were transparent in our discussions and our actions.  We articulated our goals and stated our plans.  And we agreed that we would do everything we could to make sure that everyone in the team got through the entire program, as long as we each put forth the best effort possible.  

To many people, this probably sounds similar to activities that you've done in your business life, and it probably is.  But when you're paying your own "salary" (tuition), you have your own goals (Increased Salary; Promotion; New Learning, etc.) and then you have to mesh those with people that you've never met, it's a critical step to ensure your success in the program.  I applaud my team for coming through these activities stronger and more knowledgeable about themselves, and I applaud the WFU MBA administration for putting together an outstanding Orientation / Team-Building model.  It was a difficult week, making the transition back into academia, but the introduction was invaluable.  It's something that I plan to use with my teams in the future, and an investment of time and energy that will pay dividends for many years to come.  

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Orientation Week & Team Building - Part I

Most MBA programs are centered around a team-based curriculum.  The thinking being that you learn from others experience, help each other through new concepts, have a part-time support group, and learn how to make decisions in group settings.  In theory this is an excellent model, since the days of benevolent dictators running companies are long gone (even at Apple). 

In the WFU MBA program, you are assigned to a team at the beginning of the program and you stay with that team for the duration.  The teams are usually five to six people, and the administration does it's best to group people with a mix of skills, background, geographic location (for meetings) and any sense of personalities they could interpret from the interview process.  It's definitely not an exact science, and it leads to one of the biggest fears any MBA student has going into the program...What if I get a terrible team, or terrible teammate?  Unlike Fantasy Football, there are no trades allowed.  The team could go "Survivor" and vote a member off the island, but that is extremely rare and involves approval from the administration.  So let's just say, you're keeping your fingers crossed that the stars are aligned, because this group will become your second family for the next 18 months.  

I was assigned to Team 5, which is made up of myself, Matt Kirk, Matt Johnson, Marty Jones, Vish Manickam and Portia Mount.  Geographically were were evenly split between Raleigh and Winston-Salem, and had a decent mix of backgrounds (IT, Marketing, Operations, Healthcare, Banking, High-Tech).  I can say now that I believe we have an outstanding team and a great group of people.  But when we first started, I wasn't completely convinced that we were aligned enough in our goals and motivations to be a great team.  But as the week progressed, and we worked our way through several exploratory activities, it became clearer that we had a strong foundation and great potential for success.  

Prior to Orientation Week, WFU MBA administration sends out a personality survey called "The Big Five", and we got our results back (individual & team) during the week.  As you go through work and life, we all take a number of these surveys and it's always interesting to me to see if you change and how you change.  It's even more interesting to get your results back and have to review them within your team, a group of people that you've never met.  Here is your personality laid out in front of you, and everyone else is trying to slot you into a category or similarity to a previous co-worker.  As we made our way through the 5 traits, we found that we had a reasonable mix of Passive and Aggressive, Introverts and Extroverts, Type-A and Type-A(-), Leaders and Bridge-Builders.  This lead to the next stage in our discovery process...initial peer evaluation.

Instead of asking people to tell us about themselves, the program asked us to give everyone our initial assessment of each other.  What were their strengths, their weaknesses, and what suggestions did we have for each other to improve a strength or weakness.?  This was an interesting process, because not only did we need to read other people, but we also had to determine how we wanted to present this information.  Was it best to be cordial and friendly (maybe sugar-coating), or was it better to be direct?  Do we emphasis the strengths, or try and improve the weaknesses (see Prospect Theory in a much later post)?  Not knowing how anybody would react, there was a real possibility that you could be setting yourself up for a 18month nightmare if you burned a bridge at this stage in the process.   

Throughout the Orientation Week activities, we were alternating between team activities (5-6 people) and entire group activities (32 people).  The next phase was to determine how we prioritized work, life and school.  With the simple question of, "Which is the most important for you?", we broke up into three groups.  The goals here became obvious once we were asked "Why did you choose that priority?"  It wasn't a clear-cut decision, but it was important and would need to be balanced (or sacrificed) against the others.  It also showed us that not everyone had the same priorities, within our team or across the program.  I'll get into this in more detail later, but it was important to understand that we'd have to find a way to work with a group that didn't have consistent priorities, but would ultimately have to have consistent goals and deliverables.   

At this point, we were beginning to understand something about ourselves, a little about the people on our team, and the idea that one of the great challenges of this program was learning how to work well across the broader set of people.  The good news was that this is an incredible set of people, with diverse backgrounds, goals and experiences to share.  Figuring out the best way to blend that with individual learning will be one of the most interesting aspects of this entire experience.

Enough background...let's get to the program

The weeks leading up to an MBA program are a mix of excitement, anxiety, list making and change preparation.  It's a little bit like being a first time parent, when several of your friends have already had kids and you've only visited a few times.  You have some sense of what's coming, but until you actually live with it 24x7, for several months, you really don't know what you're getting into.  My brother had just recently completed the Evening MBA at UNC, so I thought I had some idea...nope...uh uh...don't kid yourself.  It's going to be a lot more work than I expected, and it's going to require a lot more emotional commitment that I planned for.

A few weeks before the program starts, a FedEx truck shows up at the house with a large box. A very large, heavy box of books and handouts for the semester.  At first you think they might have mistaken your house for an IRS Audit warehouse, but no such luck.  This is your reading for the next 4.5 months.  Somewhere in a dense forest, trees are crying:)  This is your first sign that the workload is going to be significant.   

The course list for the first semester is as follows:
The first thing I did was look at the required reading for the first couple classes, and divide it by the number of days before the Orientation Week.  That turned out to be Mistake #1.  As if I hadn't learned my lesson 18yrs ago as an undergrad, I severely under-estimated the learning curve for new topics.  This wasn't going to be like ready work reports, where I had years of background to draw from, this was all going to be new.  And I needed to approach it in a different manner.  Needless to say, I was behind from Day 1 in class :(  Luckily for me, and I suspect many of my classmates, the first week in class was primarily focused on team building and self-assessment activities.

The team building activities were so good, in my opinion, that they really should be used as a blueprint for any leader that is starting a new team.  While it seems somewhat tedious at times, looking back on it now, it did really built the foundation for our team (Team 5) and lead to our success.  I'm going to devote an entire post to those activities, so I'll skip any more details for now.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Finding the right MBA program

As I began investigating MBA programs, I knew that my search wouldn't be easy because I had a number of challenges I would need to align between my lifestyle (personal & work) and the potential programs.  My list looked something like this:
  • The program needed to have an excellent reputation.  Lucikly, living in Raleigh, NC, I'm close proximity to a number of world-class programs (Duke, UNC, WFU, UVA).
  • The program needed to meet face-to-face on a regular basis, and attract a broad background of students.  I knew that making new contacts was as important as what I'd learn in the classroom.
  • The program needed to have flexibility of schedule.  I travel quite a bit for business, so a full-time or weeknight program wasn't going to be possible.  I need a program that met weekends, in some variation.
  • Duration and starting time of the program was important, because of the sacrifice my family was making for me.  I wanted to be done before my kids were in school or actively participating in sports.
  • Cost is always a factor, especially when the cost of today's MBA programs could pay off your mortgage or put your kids through school (assuming you could put it in a 529 today). 
Beyond those four schools, I looked at the weekend/executive programs at Kellogg, Ross, Wharton, and Harvard.  These are all tremendous programs, but the travel requirements were too much for me at this time. 

As I narrowed it down to the four local programs, I really spent a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of each program.  What was the length of the program and when did they meet?  What classes were offered?  How were the classes taught and how much was individual vs. team-based? 

My final decision came down to several criteria:
  1. The case method taught at Harvard was constantly emulated or used by other programs, so I was very interested in a program that used this method.  This included both UVA and WFU.
  2. The program needed to have an international component, but this couldn't be the primary focus of the program.  This ruled out the Duke OneMBA program.
  3. The program needed to have a broad variety of classes, as I was looking to add breadth and depth to my skill set.  All of the programs had excellent curriculums, so this was somewhat of a wash.
  4. Travel to the program should be reasonable.  This ruled out the UNC Executive Program, which met in WashDC.  UVA also was going to be difficult as it was about a 4-5hr drive from Raleigh.
  5. The costs should be reasonably.  UNC and WFU were both below $80k, and then there was a huge jump above $100k for both UVA and Duke.  I know that we're talking about an ROI that extends over a lifetime, but $30-50k is a good chunk of change when you're raising two kids and still paying a mortgage.
So at the end of the day, when I weighed all the pros and cons, I narrowed my choice to WFU Weekend Exec and UNC Weekend Exec.  UNC was ranked higher, but WFU was 6 months shorter and started in August, 2008 rather than January, 2009.  Throw in the case-study method, the excellent curriculum and the previous WFU experience/bias and I decided that another tour at WFU was the right decision for me.   

Maybe it's finally time to get my MBA..?..?

At age 36, with two young kids (3yrs and 2yrs) already consuming all my free time, I finally decided to go back and get my MBA.  Seems like a strange point in life for someone to make that decision, but there is some rhyme and reason to it, and a lot of history.  First, let me explain some of the history.

I can remember all the way back in 5th grade thinking that I was going to get good grades in school, go to University of Michigan, and then get my MBA.  It was a perfect fit for a Type-A, focused young kid.  And growing up outside of Detroit, surrounded by neighborhoods full of white-collar automotive managers, that was the mindset I had all around me.  Somewhere along the way, that path didn't exactly work out as smoothly as I had envisioned.

  • Instead of U of Mich, I headed south to Wake Forest for warmer weather, a great school and a chance to play college baseball.  After four years, I was pretty sick of being in school, but just before graduation I took the GMAT just in case I decided to go back in a couple years.  
  • A couple years into the real world, after some college friends went back for their MBAs, I looked into several programs.  But after looking at the "graduate salaries and jobs" listings, I convinced myself that I was already there in most cases and couldn't afford to stop working for 2 years.  
  • After the Internet Bubble burst in 2001, I looked at several programs again.  After seven years, maybe it was time to look at something other than technology, and an MBA might just help me find that new path.  But once again, the timing just didn't work out to make the sacrifice of time and money.
In the fall of 2007, I was invited to be part of an Executive Leadership program at Cisco Systems (my employer at the time).  The program was designed to identify 50-60 high potential Directors/Sr.Directors within the company, and give them a 3-4 month project targeting a $1B/yr new market opportunity.  I was invited to assist one of the project teams as a technology Subject Matter Expert (SME), but was allowed to be part of every aspect of the program and have direct access to Senior Leadership.  Not only was it a tremendous opportunity to impact the company, but it gave me a completely different perspective on the breadth and depth of thinking that occurs at that level.  When the program ended, I knew that I needed to make the sacrifices needed to get myself into an MBA program as soon as possible if I ever wanted to have the skills to succeed at that level.  

Now the biggest challenge was going to be convincing my wife that we could make this sacrifice together, because it was going to take a complete commitment from my family to make this work.  Not only would it require huge commitment and sacrifice from me, but it was going to mean a difficult two years for her and our girls.   

A "Who am I?" Presentation

This post is going to seem strangely out of order (since I started six months late and I'm backtracking), but I figured that I ought to give you at least a little background.  

This was a presentation I gave during our Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LOB) course, in the Fall of 2008. The purpose was to look at why you have the personality you do today (some background), and then based on surveys, studies and concepts from the class, take a look at where you may be going. There was a companion paper with more detail, but I wanted to try out a presentation style that I thought fit my personality and working environment...short, fast-paced, a blur of text and images. It borrowed from Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 presentation, which of course borrowed from Lawrence Lessig. I don't know if I pulled it off, as the feedback either loved it or hated it, but it was fun to create and present, which is all that mattered to me.

An Introduction

Hi.  My name is Brian Gracely and I'm now a 2nd year MBA student at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC).  I'm starting this blog about six months late, so you're going to have to excuse my flashback and flash-forward style for a while as I recap some of my thoughts and experiences from early 2008 to today. 

I'm writing this blog for a number of reasons, and potentially for a number of audiences.  First and foremost, I'm writing it as an outlet for myself.  What I've experience over the last 8 months, and what I expect to experience over the next twelve months have been truly life changing for myself, my family and a lot of good friends (new and existing).  I'm also writing it because I like to write, and I need a place to work on using the blogosphere as a communication medium.  I currently blog on work-related topics, The Virtualization Effect, but blogging on personal topics requires a different approach.  Just like my MBA learnings, I'm hoping to better find my voice with this blog.

My goals for this blog are fairly simple:
  1. (As I stated above) Provide an outlet to write about this experience, on various levels.
  2. Provide a history that I can share with my children someday, as they are a huge part of the reason why I'm involved in this program.  I hope to give them great opportunities in the future.
  3. Provide a medium to discuss the program and experiences with other people at WFU, both inside and outside our program.
  4. Potentially provide some insight for other potential WFU MBA candidates (note:  this will not be a recruiting tool)
I'll do my best to keep this updated frequently, and hopefully keep the content interesting.  If the next twelve months are anything like the first six, this should be a worthwhile read.  I welcome your comments and feedback.