Visiting business school

One good approach to select a class to attend is to know the cases that are going to be discussed one day and attend a class that would have lot of students participation.

Before attending Babson, I attended a few classes in other schools. It was very good experience to assess my fit with the rest of the students and get a more realistic expectation of the classroom.

In Babson, we have had some case discussions that were far more involved than the others. All the cases in strategy and some in marketing were good and visitors would have learned a lot from those.

I hate those schools who fix up some uninteresting class to attend. In one of the schools, I was taken to a macro economic class that was boring to death. Likewise I would hate to see some prospective student in our ethics class.

Consulting project and a review of module II

I was not too busy not to write for more than a month. But, I had a plenty to talk about and could not spend enough time on one subject to write about.

I thought module II exams were more demanding and required lot of preparations. Nope. It was the consulting project that we did needed more time. The BCAP (Babson consulting alliance program) has two components, first industry analysis in Fall and a consulting assignment for a sponsoring company.

Our group of seven analyzed enterprise software industry, did a lot of research (thanks to electronic library resources @ Babson) and created a very good report based on our analysis. We also had to present in front of a faculty panel. We exceeded our own expectation. Many in our group did not have IT background and yet they stepped up and contributed very well.

Module II was very interesting. The quantitative aspect of this module threw a few people off in the beginning. We had very good case discussions ranging from Wal Mart to iTunes. At the end, it seemed like all roads pointing to strategy as economics, marketing, data analysis and accounting emphasizing the strategic component in the decision process. Kudos to those who organized this curriculum.

I must mention the interesting thing about Babson, the writing and speech resource center. We got to use these facilities to review our work.

PS: If you are interested to know more about Babson, feel free to contact me at ns dot email at yahoo dot com

CEO Exchange

I had earlier posted about people who have successfully transitioned from marketing background to lead an organization. I watched CEO Exchange on PBS yesterday (Nov 12th, 2006). Ed Zander of Motorola and Ed Liddy exchanged their views on putting technology on good hands. Ed Zander has engineering background, worked in marketing, went on to lead software group in Sun and now leading Motorola. You can checkout PBS sites for more episodes on this CEO Exchange series. This event was conducted in Kellogg and I liked the questions asked, especially the one about openness and communication. Read the text if you have time.

Cyberposium @ HBS

Here is my quick update. The symposium was organized by HBS. However, there were definitely out numbered by students from other schools: Babson, Boston U, Boston College and Ivey school from Canada. Google VP: Marissa Mayer did her PR about Google on her keynote speech. No major stuff from Google(except for the nice T shirt I got along with the Google's symposium bag). Personalizable search was more in the lines of "My Google". I was looking for some Web 2.0 and google search integration and there was not any mentioned.

I am not a big fan of panel discussions. Even the experienced take significant time opening their statement leaving very little room for discussion. The energy discussion was awful. One guy took almost 15 minutes bragging how Kleiner Perkins was enthusiastic in funding his efficiency idea.
Did not stay long in open source panel for it was too basic.

Startup fair had representation from very few companies. Why would a company come to HBS and hire for Engineers, QAs? Autodesk, platinum sponsor, was keen to push these positions to future MBAs.

I am glad the organizers cut the entry fee otherwise I would have rued wasting my money on this conference.

exams, ethics and BCAP

Exam fever started a week before the exams began. I enjoyed the CSCA-strategy exam analyzing Robert Mondavi case written in 2001. It was a group exam and we had one day to work on. It was one of the rare occasions our study team sat together to answer. I like my study group a lot because we did not need to have face-to-face meeting a lot. We have gotten better and better at doing group assignments over email. I was satisfied with the results we submitted for CSCA.

We have ethics stream for the past two modules. Do not get me wrong. I am very interested in the subject. However, the classes were so boring and made me wonder why we have this subject at all. I think it is there just to please the potential employers: "look we teach ethics too". I wonder how students at other schools think about their coursework.

Now, we are busy with our BCAP (a year long consulting project with real companies). We are studying the enterprise software industry. Babson has access to very good online resources. I am getting familiar with a bunch of them. In Fall we do the industry analysis and in spring we focus on the sponsoring company and they problem they ask us to look at. We will know the sponsoring company next monday.

I will be attending Cyberposium organized by HBS this Saturday. We at Babson get more and more invitations from HBS and MIT events. More on that cyberposium next week.

Communication stream and exam

Here is our schedule for this week:
Monday - Tech Briefing - Present a technical topic from one of the six streams (Data Analysis, Accounting, Economics, Marketing, Strategy or Law) and present in front of a group of 14 + a speech consultant who provides feedback on how you present.
Catch: You need to speak to an imaginary audience, assuming assuming the audience to be unaware of the topics.
You want to know what I presented? Read on.

Tuesday - final accounting class. I am going to miss this class. I never expected this class to be this interesting.

Wednesday - Send a second draft of writing assignment. Topic: You are the CEO of Whirlpool writing to the employees of the newly acquired company, MayTag, informing bad news - a plan to cut jobs during the integration process.

Thursday - Accounting Exam. Receive group exam question for Law/Strategy

Friday - Submit the exam paper

Here is the topic I presented in the tech breifing. P-Value, its meaning and uses. Audience: high school graduates planning to take some surveys for a company.

Events: Rocket Pitch Competition - Review

Babson organizes rocket pitch competition every year. This year, there were about 108 participants: current graduate/undergraduate students, alumni and some faculty as well. It was very well organized, presentation in four rooms were even synced to facilitate easy movement from one topic to another.

It was a very interesting event. One would think 3 minutes allotted time is too short. However, good presenters communicated enough to enthuse the audience and create an interest. As you can expect there were a few very good presentations and a few very good products. But, due to time limits there were not enough details to evaluate their feasibility.

I presented one too. It was about a niche product in emerging market. I thought it would take lot of efforts to convey the context. It did not. Though the investors did not flock to my table after the presentation, I got good feedback from a fellow students.

Overall a very good experience.

Law Stream: Microsoft Antitrust and NAP

Our law professor makes the classes very interesting though the stream may sound boring. He brings a theme each class and wears a tie according to the theme. The theme of Antitrust discussion class was Monopoly.

Here is the interesting part. One of the bullet items was the 2004 antitrust case raised by Japanese fair trade commission alleging that Non-Assertion Provision in Microsoft's contracts with Japanese OEMs . The case in point is: Microsoft signed contracts with a provision to not sue MS for any future infringement.

(You can google and get more details. Anyway here is my analysis of this issue)
If MS get some supplies from a Sony subsidiary, they can not sue MS for infringing, say PlayStation related patents. Oh!

Prof's theme was very apt, right??

Law stream is one of my favorite. I am learning a lot of new things which I have never paid attention to.

Career Path: Product Marketing in HiTech

Before starting my MBA, my plan was to serve in product marketing role post MBA and in a few years, look for opportunities to start my own.

Still it is a plan. But I wonder if it is the best way for me. Let me explain why I started rethinking about my plan.

I have an alumnus mentor (through Babson Alumni Mentor Program, AMP) who is product manager in a medium sized software company. He was very helpful. He came to our Olin hall one evening to discuss about our plans. It is his first year participating in this program. He mentioned that even after ten years working in this field, he still finds to describe his role clearly. Product marketing, product manager roles are often mixed. While he said product marketing is a great place to be in because of the interaction with pretty much every other team in an organization: sales, marketing, engineering and often finance, he mentioned growth is very limited. A few people remain in product marketing for ever(10 - 20 years). Plus, the pay seems to be comparable to engineers (and not greater).

My plan now is to do some research on how many people have successfully moved from product marketing position to become CEOs. If you have any thoughts, comment or/drop an email.

(PS: Here is the link to learn more about product marketing: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/productmarketing/topics/index.asp)

Text book or manual?

We have a data analysis stream in this module and our text book is "Data Analysis and Decision Making" and in smaller prints "with Microsoft excel".

I get it. Excel is good and authors may have wanted to make this book sell to non students? Nice try.. Wont work easily.

We also need "StatTools", excel plugin to do the analysis.

The book has instructions on how to use StatTools all over. It makes me think whether it is a text book or a software manual.

Letting go is a difficult job. How can I accept the software without understanding the concepts and its implementation? Hmm.. I am in the minority if I opt to create my own algorithms to figure out p-value etc. Well. I just have to believe in whatever the software does and go along with the rest. Or, I will lag behind.

My interest in MBA is to get into product management with a hope that I will be a better judge of a product/market and in a few years I can start something on my own. I am rethinking that strategy. Stay tuned for my next post for details.

Why are we after grades?

Is this a common phenomenon to go after grades in the first year/first semester? Or is it specific to Babson? Babson has an interesting way of assigning grades (EXC, ESP, MSP..) and later converting to GPA.

Too much of grade focus affects the outside class participation in Babson. I hope this trend changes soon.

We have monday holiday and next friday we have a day off to attend Entrepreneurship conference. (babsonfei.com) I am looking forward to attending.

By the way, one fellow babson first year is wondering who I am. I am surprised some from our school have started checking the blogs. That is a good sign. I will remain unanimous atleast for some time.

Second day in Second Module

Today is just the second day in module 2 (Assessing market opportunities). But it seems like, our work load has increased tremendously. In Babson we have "Streams" and there are integrated stream classes. For example: Strategy may share a class with accounting once and may share with marketing some other time. Interesting. But, we are still trying to figure out how to prepare for the classes. There are some informal reading groups. I am yet to join/form one.

Some of the other streams in this module are: microeconomics, marketing intro, law and ethics:

Babson and Creativity

Module 1 is over before we realized that we have been here in Babson just for a month. In contradiction to many who think first year to be very difficult, lot of work etc., I think I can take more load, only if I get time to do the things I like to do as well. Sometimes we are forced to do things we do not necessarily like to do. For example, attending career counseling "classes" or the ethics course add very little value to me. Getting used to classes, homework etc take a bit time but should not be so hard to scare people away.

I must mention about the Creativity steam in module one. Each student is assigned in a group of 13 and assigned an activity (one of drawing, improvisation, movement, poetry, sculpture or puppetry). I was doubtful about the role of this activity in business education. After attending (and presenting) in the last two days have changed my outlook. Creativity takes a new dimension in a team setup. One can do the impossible, provided the team is up for it. The drawing team presented an innovative and humorous group presentation in an event that is supposed to be show causing individual talent.

Kudos to the artists, the fellow students and those who have included this stream in our curriculum.

The case approach

Well. It is fashionable to teach using case approach in business schools. It gets used, overused and abused pretty much by everyone in the B-school.

Initially, I was very skeptical about this approach. My view was supported in first two weeks of classes. Not everyone added value and quite a few discussions were around stating the obvious.

Something has changed in the past two weeks. The discussions threw new perspectives and often people contradicting each other. The discussions were about the classic case "Konigsbrau-Hellas". It kind of showed the people's characters as well. On the one extreme, some were talking about playing hardball in business and on the other a few pressing for "idealistic" approach to deal with people. Now, it seems people got a hang of this case approach. This is not for everyone and requires significant restraint from the students and moderation from the professor.

Need to mention that the "case" approach used by a non-academic team to teach how students need to communicate with alumni was tasteless.

Introduction from a Babson MBA student, class of 2008

I intend to share my exerience at Babson. I am a first year student of the class of 2008 MBA program.

A brief profile about the school
Approximately 165 students in first year
Three sections.

Other related programs:
1 year MBA
Fasttrack MBA
Evening MBA program.

My reasons behind choosing Babson are
1. City of choice. Having lived in Silicon Valley, wanted to be in a city equivalant to bayarea in east coast. It is a great place (at least till winter hits)
2. Fellowship. Can't complain about the free ride. Can I?
3. Diversity in class. 49% international, people from very distinct professional backgrounds.

About my class:
I am only one of a max five engineers.
We have actors, family business owners, accountants, sales and marketing professionals.
On a side note: I do not think they are many people from finance background at Babson.