I'm getting one MBA and 2 PhD's

If all goes well, in just 11 months they will give me a a really expensive piece of paper with fancy writing on it and the WFU logo, which will allow me to add "MBA" to my resume.  And hopefully along the way I will have gained a good bit of knowledge on topics such as these and these, and a few others from May to December.

Two courses that aren't on the course-list but it feels like we're getting PhD level exposure are corporate layoffs and corporate leadership.  I'll start with the later.  

I don't usually write about my company on this blog, but thought it might be appropriate for a couple reasons:

1. Leadership seems to be in short supply these days, and our Vice-Chairman is truly an outstanding motivation speaker about leadership topics.
2. Education is so important to our Vice Chairman that he endowed the Business School at his alma mater.
3. This talk was given as part of a leadership series at the graduate school at NC State, so it's speaking to students.  (NOTE - It's about 65 mins long, but worth a watch)

This talk does a really nice job of highlighting why attitude and motivation are so important, especially during difficult times.  He provides some excellent examples of how the company dealt with the Internet Bubble, as well as how they realized changes in the world and took actions to reposition the company to better compete in the new realities of the world.   Finally, he talks about how he uses frequent goal setting and open discussion to build and maintain culture and focus through good times and bad times.

One the flip side, I'm also getting a PhD in watching how companies, their leaders and their employees deal with layoffs on a massive scale.  This isn't Organization Behavior, this is Laying Off People 101.  I have two Senior Executives on my team who are dealing with layoffs of nearly 20%.  I have one classmate that luckily was on the right side of a 33% cutback, and another that is going through a major merger and restructuring.  And this is just my team.  The stories are fairly consistent from the rest of my classmates and their teams.  

While I don't get any credit for these two additional topics, they are definitely adding to my list of experiences and will hopefully be valuable at some time in the future.  

Strategic Marketing Project - Lessons from the Front Lines of Social Media

I'm pretty excited tonight because we got our mid-term Strategic Marketing project approved. (The abstract is listed below) Portia Mount and I had actually talked about a concept like this prior to the class starting, so we were glad that we'd be allowed the flexibility to choose the topic and scope.

Portia is VP of Marketing for her company, so I believe she's been thinking about aspects of this since last summer.  I got the original idea while reading this article from Umair Haque, as part of a continuing series he's doing on Edge Economy and the need for radical innovation to break us out of the challenges of the current economic crisis.  It also connected for me as I reflected back on stories from both Wikinomics and The Future of Work, as they looked at the value of sharing information externally, building communities, building partnerships, and truly building companies that can survive in the pace of the 21st century.  Listening to Seth Godin's podcast on Tribes and Leadership today completed the circle for me, showing how all of these pieces and ideas came together in the 2008 election.

The other element of the project that I'm excited about is that we're hoping to show how this 21st century approach can be applied to more traditional brick & mortar companies.  Portia and I felt like this would be an interesting challenge to research, as well as our way of giving something back to the rest of the class.

The paper and presentation aren't due until mid-April, but I'm already looking forward to starting on this project.  I'll be sure to post updates as we move along.

=======ABSTRACT========

ObamaNation: Lessons from the front lines of social media.

This presentation will look at how the Obama campaign used social media strategies to mobilize grassroots audiences to win the White House and what business might learn from this success. In this presentation we'll highlight noteworthy examples including:

1. The use of Social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter that created new online communities.
2. The Campaign website and its use of targeted messages to create urgency to generate record breaking campaign donations
3. How mainstream newsmedia outlets took advantage of the unprecented online presence during the campaign season to connect to new and younger voters
4. How the rise of the citizen journalist and an expanded blogosphere allowed Obama, a virtual unknown at the start of the campaign, to gain global recognition in one campaign season

Three Steps for Inspiring during Challenging Times

While we don't specifically have a course called "How to be a better Leader" in the MBA program, there are frequent classroom and hallway discussions about how to be a better leader, or examples of great (or poor) leadership.  

A number of us have been sharing tips about how we're managing and motivating our teams through these challenging times.  I recently saw this article about Obama's Inaguation Speech and it does a very nice job of laying out a simple blueprint for highlighting the challenges and plotting the course when difficulty is ahead. I think it's a very useful model, and something I plan to use sometime soon.

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.