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:
The use of Social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter that created new online communities.
The Campaign website and its use of targeted messages to create urgency to generate record breaking campaign donations
How mainstream newsmedia outlets took advantage of the unprecented online presence during the campaign season to connect to new and younger voters
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
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
(As I stated above) Provide an outlet to write about this experience, on various levels.
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.
Provide a medium to discuss the program and experiences with other people at WFU, both inside and outside our program.
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.
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