Have not had enough time to post lately as I have been doing a lot or writing for my classes. I finished and submitted to the group my part of the research on the Nordstrom: Dissension in the Ranks case for Human Capital Management class. So far, my write up is the first for our group.
Most of the cases I have had in my classes since the start of the MBA program have been from Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) cases. So I would assume that the names of the cases are familiar to many MBA students in all MBA programs accross the country. Interestingly, the same Nordstrom case was also a part of my Managerial Accounting course. From the case it’s obvious that at the end of the eighties Nordstrom screwed up big time in managment of their Sales Per Hours (SPH) performance evaluation system. Not only did they lose millions of dollars in settling labor disputes and suffered partial loss of business reputation at the time, but they also became the fodder for the MBA textbook case which is probably going to be studied in business schools for years to come.
Another interesting point is that our professor in Managerial Accounting gave quite different appraisal of the Nordstrom situation than what we are leaning to in Human Capital Management class. Whereas in Human Capital class we are mostly going to bash Nordstrom management for all the failings of the SPH performance evaluation system, the professor in Managerial Accounting offered an argument in defence of that system, because it allowed to weed out all low-performing, low-motivated sales clerks, and reward handsomely the driven high-performers. Admittedly, there were some shortcomings in the implementation of that system anyways.
I also had to do personal write up on another case: SG Cowen:New Recruits. There was another group that did formal presentation of the whole case in class. But everyone else in the class had to prepare a written answer to one of the four questions in the case. We had to identify two candidates from the pool of four to make a job offer on behalf of the company if we were on the recruiting committe. During the presentation the group conducted a mini-poll to see how many votes each candidate received from the students in class. The most striking result was that Martin, one of the candidates in the case, was dinged almost unanimously by our class of about 50. To me it was obvious that he was not a good fit for the company, even though he had some very strong background, and was the only Wharton student in the pool (the rest were from Cornell). But I was still surprized by such an overwhelming consensus on his candidacy in our class. The rest of the candidates received some overlapping support from the class, probably with some slight lead of Natalya – another candidate in the case.
From now to the end of the module it is going to be very tough. Many deadlines for write ups in Entrepreneurship are coming up, as well as a mid-term exam in Data Analysis next Monday, our group presentation of the Nordstrom case is due next week too, and finals being just half way of the module now. I have to prepare a lot of midnight oil to burn 
If you followed this blog for a bit, you might have noticed that I have been participating in group projects in some of my classes since the beginning of my part-time MBA program. So far, I have co-authored two group research papers (Business Ethics and Global Perspectives) and have been doing group assignments in Managerial Accounting and Microeconomics.
I find these group assignments to be a very crucial part of my learning experience. A few most significant benefits/challenges:
- Learning from others, as other students from different backgrounds often have interesting insights. Even if sometimes those insights turn out wrong or irrelevant for the “final answer”, you learn about the potential pitfalls of various approaches.
- Getting to know new classmates in a more personal way which is mostly not possible in a lecture setting.
- Doing the balancing act of reconciling everyone’s schedules and other constraints if the group face to face meeting is necessary.
- The last but not the least – working the group dynamics, with sometimes conflicting interests, and occasional ego bursts, or just people not delivering their share.
This last point is becoming especially obvious in the latest group assignment I am working on in my Managing Human Capital class. The particular challenge of this assignment is that that we have 10 (ten!) people assigned to a relatively small project – four questions to a case study need to be squeezed into 8-10 pages write-up and 20 minutes in-class presentation. The very first challenge was to creatively divvy up the work among all of us, so that everyone had their part to contribute. That we managed to do quite efficiently via online collaboration. However now we will have a bigger challenge to tie all these people with their small chunks of work into one cohesive paper/presentation. We already got one discontent voice about how this is going to work.
By the way, I remember talking last summer, before the start of my own MBA studies, to one of my undergraduate acquaintances who did her MBA in Thunderbird some ten years ago. I was asking all kinds of questions, including the ones about the specific challenges of MBA experience. One of the things she mentioned was that she did not like the group projects. The reason for that was this need for working the group dynamics and also dealing with the “free riders”. She said, often times it would be easier to do the whole thing by herself, than to deal with the group. That was when I decided to avoid this reputation by all means. That’s why I am almost done with my assigned write up section, so I will be free to deal with other issues as they come up.
There was another blast class in Entrepreneurship this week. From the two first classes it seems that the main purpose of our instructor in this class is to evoke our creativity and show us how indispensable it is for those of us who aspire to venture on our own or join a start-up after getting our MBA degree, and in business environment in general.
Professor already mentioned that in a seven week module there will be not enough time for all the material that used to be covered under the standard format of 14 weeks/3 credits. So some parts of the old course will be squeezed out from our current course. Namely, writing the business plan, among other things. Based on the syllabus we will still have an opportunity to try our hand in preparing Executive Summary and doing the Elevator Pitch.
But, as it seems, creativity is not going to be sacrificed in the course. I actually have had this dilemma about the MBA program in general. The standard curriculum in most business schools is focused on introducing the students to a rather rigid, formalized way of thinking and manipulating the data. It is also geared to equip us with the standardized tool set for solving business problems. This is, no doubt, a very important skill set to acquire in the business school. However, I always had this thought in the back of my mind, that this rigid approach, exacerbated by the fast pace of packing a lot of knowledge in a short period of time, would force us into a very formal, standardized and somewhat narrow mind set, would not allow us to develop some other softer, but still very important business skills, including creative business thinking.
As a matter of fact, I remember reading an article in the summer before the start of my MBA program, that one of the complaints from the recruiters was that the MBA graduates in general were well equiped in “hard” business skills, such as analyzing financial statements, or performing statistic analysis. But they were relatively lacking in the “softer” skills, like leadership, negotiations. I don’t remember if creativity was explicitely mentioned among those “underdeveloped” soft skills, but this is what came to my mind when I was reading the article.
That’s why I personally see this creativity slant in the Entrepreneurship course as a welcome respite from some other less “creative” classes. To some degree I feel that my right-brainness in a way is “rehabilitated” in this class. Not that I am the most creative person in the room, but I have always thought of myself being more on a creative side of business.
Anyways, back to this week’s class. This time professor brought one of his PhD students, and let him run the class. The guy was no less enthusiastic on the subject of creativity than the professor. And since he is younger, he brought even more energy in presentation. Admittedly, we did not learn much in a formal way, but he provided some invaluable pointers for further learning and provoked us to let ourselves play. Overall it was a well-prepared and conducted interactive presentation on the subject of creativity in entrepreneurship and business at large.
Just a couple of things the PhD student gave us as interesting resources:
I also found these two recent articles in Businessweek on Entrepreneurship being hot among MBAs now that the traditional MBA jobs in finance, investment, and consulting have become more scarce and less lucrative:
. I already ordered it in the library. If I like it, I am planning to buy it later.
