GWSB Business Gives Back – What a Blast!

January 30, 2012

What a great evening! Really enjoyed the night with my wife. Great cause, great entertainment, great networking, great organization! The event was held at the House of Sweden, on the Potomac waterfront in Georgetown. There were celebratory speeches, acknowledgement of this year’s recipient of Distinguished Alumni Award, hors d’oeuvre, open bar (take a note, if [...]

Read the full article →

My George Washington MBA Experience

January 25, 2012

Written by Brian Fitzgerald, VP of Digital Strategy at O’Rourke Hospitality In late 2007, early 2008 I started to prepare to go back to school and get my MBA in the Washington DC area. I researched the various schools, weighed my pros and cons and took the GMAT. When all was said and done I [...]

Read the full article →

Business Gives Back at GWSB

January 24, 2012

I just bought two tickets for me and my wife to the 2-nd Annual Business Gives Back event that will take place this coming Saturday. If you are in the GWSB community and somehow missed multiple prompts and invitations to this event in the busyness of your days, you still have a chance to register and [...]

Read the full article →

GWSB MBA Alumni Stories

January 24, 2012

This post is just a brief introduction to the article I am preparing for publishing tomorrow. I am planning to have stories from the GWSB MBA alumni published on this site. Basically, I am interested to hear from them about: why they decided to pursue MBA in the first place, why part-time, why GWSB their [...]

Read the full article →

Final MBA Term First Day of Classes

January 23, 2012

Today was my first day of classes in the final term of part-time MBA program at George Washington University School of Business. I had two classes piggy-backed from 4.30 PM to 9.40 PM. I don’t have classes for the rest of the week in the first Spring Module, so it seems like a reasonable workload. [...]

Read the full article →

La Isla Cancun – Zara Undressed!

January 21, 2012

Last summer we had a family vacation in Riviera Maya, Mexico. We stayed at a resort some 50 miles south of Cancun proper. I even had a brief post Cancun Vacation with some pictures back in summer. During that vacation we had one day trip to Cancun and among other things we stopped by at [...]

Read the full article →

Spring Term – Final Push to MBA Degree

January 18, 2012

This is the beginning of the final term in my quest for the MBA degree. And it is arguably going to be the most intense in terms of the study load. Up until now throughout my part-time MBA program at George Washington University School of Business I have had 7.5 credits in each of my [...]

Read the full article →

MBA Winter Break Accomplishments

January 16, 2012

While the winter break in business schools around the world brought about a significant dip in traffic to my blog since mid-December, for me personally it was a very productive period in my MBA blogging. I mostly kept my promise to keep up with regular updates to this site and in the process I was [...]

Read the full article →

MBA Bubble to Burst?

January 11, 2012

The subtitle for this post could probably be How to manage your risks if MBA bubble to burst? There is no question in my mind that the MBA degree and MBA education have been going through the significant changes in the last decade or so. The question I actually have is, are those changes just [...]

Read the full article →

Conflict Management and Negotiations Resources

January 9, 2012

This class – Conflict Management and Negotiations, probably got the most of coverage of all my MBA classes in this blog. There were two reasons for this: first, it was a highly engaging and even entertaining class, which was of great interest to me personally; second, I kept a self-reflection journal which I had been [...]

Read the full article →

Negotiation – More on Importance of Preparation

January 7, 2012

I have already reflected on the Ridgecrest School Dispute Negotiation Simulation in my blog earlier. There were also couple of posts on the importance of preparation for negotiation: Negotiation Preparation – Do the Numbers and  Cover Your Butt – Prepare Your BATNA. This is the last post with my thoughts on the importance of preparation [...]

Read the full article →

Humor and Workplace Productivity

January 4, 2012

At the beginning of the Conflict Management and Negotiations classes last Fall MBA term at GWSB professor often had a short musical intermission with some comments, or a humorous YouTube video to set the positive tone for the lecture. At one point there was a brief comment about the humor and its effect on increasing [...]

Read the full article →

Labor Disputes – Unionized Dis-Unity

January 2, 2012

One of the assignments in my Conflict Management and Negotiations class was to prepare for discussion of the documentary Final Offer.  You can watch it online, if interested. A very suspenseful documentary about the labor negotiations between the Canadian section of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and GM in 1984. Even though the immediate objectives [...]

Read the full article →

Cover Your Butt – Prepare Your BATNA

December 30, 2011

In my past post I was reflecting on the importance of knowing your BATNA (Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement) based on the car sale negotiation. The emphasis there was on remembering your BATNA in the process of negotiation. However, there was another negotiation case in my Conflict Management and Negotiations class at GWU School of [...]

Read the full article →

Negotiation Conflict and Interdependency – After Us, the Flood?

December 28, 2011

This saying was in the lecture slide for my Conflict Management and Negotiations class at GWSB MBA on the topic of inter-dependencies in the negotiations:  Leave a good name in case you return (Kenyan Folk Saying). When I read it I recalled a couple of other sayings which are similar, but have a bit different [...]

Read the full article →

Negotiation Preparation – Do the Numbers

December 26, 2011

Here is another extract from the self-reflection journal in the Conflict Management and Negotiations class at GWSB MBA program. Capital Mortgage Insurance A great case with multiple take home lessons. For me, the most important one was about the necessity of thorough preparation for negotiation. Specifically – analyzing the data with numbers. The Capital Mortgage [...]

Read the full article →

Used Car Sales Negotiation Exercise

December 24, 2011

This post is another extract from the self-reflection journal that I kept in my Conflict Management and Negotiations class at GWSB MBA program this past fall term. Used Car Sales Negotiation Exercise The Used Car Sales exercise was a very refreshing one and the most important lesson I took from it was: “Know Your BATNA [...]

Read the full article →

Conflict Management and Negotiations Styles

December 21, 2011

In my Conflict Management and Negotiation class in MBA program at GWSB this past Fall term one of the assignments (graded, too) was to keep a Self-reflection journal throughout the course. To quote the syllabus:  ” Participants should focus on how course lectures, discussions, self-assessments, exercises and assignments inform their personal and professional lives.  That [...]

Read the full article →

Flash Mob for Business School Marketing

December 19, 2011

Around this time two years ago I learned what the flash mob was. Even though it was not completely novel phenomenon at that time – it was such for me. In that post two years ago I made a passing remark on the great potential flash mobs held for marketing purposes. And it seems that [...]

Read the full article →

Business Schools on Winter Break

December 17, 2011

On Thursday I had my final exam in Macroeconomics. This officially marked closing of my Fall 2011 term of part-time MBA program at George Washington University School of  Business. I have five weeks of winter break ahead! Unlike this time last year I am not going to disappear from the blog for over three months. Pinky [...]

Read the full article →

Conflict Management and Negotiations Course Overview

December 11, 2011

The elective course on Conflict Management and Negotiations in my MBA program at GWU was a very interesting, and great educational experience. I greatly appreciated the case analyses from the textbook that we had in class, such as Capital Mortgage Insurance, or the Pacific Oil Co. cases among others. I had a few posts on [...]

Read the full article →

Rate My Professors – Validated!

December 3, 2011

In my last class on Conflict Management and Negotiations professor mentioned a recent article in the George Washington University newspaper about the research on the validity of ratings at ratemyprofessors.com co-authored by the associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. Valid or not, I, and a few of the MBA [...]

Read the full article →

Economists Do It with Models – It’s More Fun That Way

November 26, 2011

In my recent post on Macroeconomics I quoted a joke from my Microeconomics professor that “Economists Do It with Models”. He never implied it was his joke, and mentioned that he had seen it on the t-shirts of Economics students at either MIT or University of Michigan. So I knew it was a widely circulated [...]

Read the full article →

Negotiation Simulation Role Playing – More Play, Less Role

November 20, 2011

This week in my part-time MBA class on Conflict Management and Negotiations we had an in-class presentations for the group negotiation simulation based on Ridgecrest School Dispute case. Essentially, the case is based on the dispute between the Board of Education and the Teachers Association (the teachers union) about the ways of closing the budget [...]

Read the full article →

Macroeconomics – Funny Joke of the Day

November 18, 2011

Just wanted to add another fun video to keep your interest in economics up and demonstrate that macroeconomics is not all that boring as the economists try to make it look to us – lay -men and -women. I first saw this video about a year ago when I was taking my Financial Management class. [...]

Read the full article →

Macroeconomics Fun – Notes From the Classroom

November 12, 2011

Macroeconomics is one of the core classes I am taking right now – a little bit later in my MBA studies. The first part of Economics – Microeconomics – I took in my very first module when I just started my whole part-time MBA program journey back in fall 2009. As everything with economics, regardless [...]

Read the full article →

Consulting Club Networking Social at GWU

November 6, 2011

Just a couple days ago I was complaining about the lack of time and opportunities for part-time MBA students to network within the context of the business school. Apparently, having pumped myself up with discontent about this situation, I subconsciously was looking for opportunities to do something about it . Over a week ago I [...]

Read the full article →

Social Networking for Part-time MBA Students

November 3, 2011

This past weekend I had a negotiation simulation with my classmate in Conflict Management and Negotiations class. As I mentioned in the past, this class requires some of the negotiations to be held out of the class, so we had a scheduled appointment on campus on Sunday. We had allocated an hour for the whole [...]

Read the full article →

All-American Darling Netflix Fallout

October 24, 2011

Today I was looking at my business cases portfolio that I have prepared in the course of my part-time MBA studies at GWU School of Business and I noticed that I have not published any cases from my Marketing classes yet. So I found one of the sections I prepared for a group project on [...]

Read the full article →

Fall Mid-Term Breather at GWSB

October 21, 2011

On Wednesday I got done with the first module of the Fall term at GWSB part-time MBA program . In the last week I was scraping up to finalize two group project papers, two final in-class group presentations and a final exam  administered online. It was very taxing period, to say the least. I spent [...]

Read the full article →

Part-time MBA Blog – Two Year Anniversary

October 15, 2011

Another milestone in my blogging experience. Don’t have too much time to reflect on this now, but if you are interested in some background information on how this blog came to be, you can read the post I had a year ago on One Year Anniversary of this blog. I would still like to share [...]

Read the full article →

GWU School of Business – Ascent in Economist MBA Ranking 2011

October 14, 2011

Last time I had a post on George Washington University School of Business rise in Financial Times MBA ranking there was a lot of fanfare going around the school. I think I received at least 3 or 4 emails within a couple of days from different sections of the business school and university heralding the [...]

Read the full article →

Taking Care of Business – MBA Russian Way

October 11, 2011

Just stumbled upon an interesting article in Economist – School of the dark arts. It is about, if not the best, at least the most touted, Russian business school – Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO. The school has been known since its founding in 2006 as a pet project of the Russian government and the [...]

Read the full article →

Risk Is Not a Dirty Word in Project Management

October 6, 2011

This first module of the Fall term at GWU School of business I am taking class on Risk Management for Projects. I am taking this class as a follow up to the one I took last Spring term – Introduction to Project Management. One thing I was surprised to learn in the Risk Management class [...]

Read the full article →

Competing on Analytics vs Intuitive Courage

September 29, 2011

I mentioned in an earlier post that I am taking a “Database and Web Analytics” elective class this first module of the fall term at GWSB MBA program. The required reading for this class is Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning – not exactly a textbook, but rather – a high view of [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →