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Biz School

tips for Capstone

In my recent review of Michael Fern, my professor in the final course in the MBA program (known as Capstone), I mentioned a few tips on surviving the class.  I thought they might merit a post on their own.  So here they are…

6 person teams – The most important part of the entire class, IMO, is finding the right team.  Find the right people, the right mix of skills, and the right set of personalities to be as productive as you can be.  If that’s 4 people, great.

Having said that, you’ll want to try to get to 6 people if you can find the right ones.  Just think about the roles that are needed and/or the sections to be covered:

  1. Integrator (and make sure you have 1-2 others that will look over things at the end, too)
  2. External Analysis (this might be 2 people easily)
  3. Financial Analysis (need a 2nd set of eyes here, too)
  4. Corporate Strategy (linked to Business Level)
  5. Business Level Strategy (linked to Corporate)
  6. Exhibits (collecting, making them look consistent, etc, which requires a single person at the end)

So I indicate 6 people there, but note that some areas will need more people and help.  Imagine doing all of that with fewer than 6.  Also, this doesn’t even consider the Intro section, the Synthesis or Recommendations.  The last part really needs to be done as a team, then written up by 1 person.

Collaboration tools – One of the biggest issues I’ve had with the Leavey School of Business over the last 3 years is that the school doesn’t really provide anything that aids collaboration.

During Capstone, you will be going through financial statements and making exhibits(documents), articles (often web pages), and communicating every which way (e-mail, phone, real-time screen-sharing).  You’ll want ways of keeping all files in one location, being able to have multiple people edit a single file, communicate with the group, and probably doing a kind of real-time, video/phone conference session with shared documents.

We utilized the following:

  1. Mailing list – we used google, but whatever will work.  This was used just for e-mails.
  2. Dropbox.com – We kept all of our relatively static documents here.  Financial statements and various other electronic sources, plus our drafts of each section.  The 2GB you get here and unlimited file size were the key factors here (Google Lists’ files section has a file size and capacity limit).
  3. Google Docs – for the few documents that we wanted to truly quickly collaborate on.  The best example is the Bibliography, which we just kept adding to as we found and entered citations.
  4. vyew.com – This was the best free tool we found where we could all talk together (they offer a conference call number for free), look at documents simultaneously, and mark them up as needed.  For instance, if we felt that an exhibit posted should look differently, then any one of us could use the pen tool and just draw on it.  The person in charge of that area could then make the real changes, share them again, etc.

Ground Rules – Set these early.  Good ones are:

  1. Citation style – MLA is probably the easiest.  Don’t let anyone cite anything without using the style, or it’ll likely slip by in the final edit.
  2. Receptivity to changes – you can discuss changes that the integrator made to a section, but you can’t be arguing about it and no one can go about feeling hurt because a paragraph was edited out or whatever.
  3. When and how often you’ll be meeting – we agreed early on that we would meet “as often as we needed, for as long as we needed” and acknowledged that during the quarter we would meet more often and for longer periods of time.
  4. What you will do in case of writer’s block, lack of data, help needed on something, etc.  How will you respond, as a team, to obstacles?

June 12, 2010 Biz School, , , , , , 0 Read more >

Review: Michael Fern, Management, Santa Clara University Leavey School of Business

Management 619:  Something or Other but known as:  CAPSTONE
At a glance

  • 3 unit course offered every quarter but summer
  • Workload:  Ridiculously Heavy
  • Teaching Style:  Discussion, case-based
  • Interest in students: Very High
  • Relevance to outside world: Ridiculously High

Overall Professor Rating: 4.5

Overall Course Rating: 5

Note:  Since this is the last required course in the entire program, it is one heckuva class.  It beats you down, it brings you together, it pulls you apart.  But you learn a tremendous amount from it.

About Me

I haven’t done one of these reviews in a while.  The truth is that 1) I have gotten worn down a bit by the program so I have been less motivated to write about my courses and 2) I have a bit of senioritis.  I actually am going to be walking in my commencement this Friday, so I’m easily distracted, I guess.

I started the program almost 3 years ago – March of 2007.  During the past years, I have had trouble finding good, expansive reviews of faculty and/or courses.  So I started writing these.   There are lots of sites out there that provide feedback and rates – ratemyprofessor is the most notable. The SantaClaraMBA Yahoo group also has a big database of comments and lots of additional information in its message archive. That database can be a bit hard to wade through, and the comments are short and often just link to other threads, which are themselves pretty short and superficial. Only here can I write as much as I want  🙂

I review professors from a variety of perspectives.  First, I explain the context(s) under which I took the class.  Time of year, time of day, etc.  Then I talk about the quality of the class and the professor, and finally about the professor as a person.  After all, we are trying to learn about our interactions with people, so knowing that side of a teacher is critical, too.  So these would be interactions outside the classroom, etc.  I also just write whatever it is that I think is relevant or will be helpful to others.  That is my overall goal.

The facts

I took MGMT 619 in Winter 2010, in the 7:20 section.  This was the best quarter for me, as it interfered the least with any other event at my work.  Capstone is not a class with which to be trifled, and I wanted to make sure I planned it correctly.  This is also the only course about which I warned my manager that I would “check out” at some point from my job responsibilities.  This is important – be careful about when you take Capstone.

Selecting a team is critically important for Capstone.  Unlike some other final courses for MBA programs, this is all about teamwork, rather than an individual thesis.  I received emails throughout the summer if I was available to be on a team in the Fall, and then again for the Winter.

I was lucky in that many of my classmates from my very first class – MGMT 501 – whom I knew well, considered friends, and had worked with in the past, were all taking the course at the same time.  It is true that one never knows what will happen with any team, even one composed of people whom you know.  But at the very least, this is a case of the “devil you know” being better than the devil you don’t.  And trust me – at some point, during all the stress of Capstone the devil does make an appearance.

Fern is one of 3-4 faculty in the management department that teach Capstone.  The number of sections offered depends on how many petition to take the course by a certain deadline.  For instance, there were 3 sections in the Fall, 2 in the Winter, and I think 4 in the Spring.  Some of the other faculty that teach the course include Madsen, Levehagen, and Chandy.

(more…)

June 7, 2010 Reviews of Professors, , , , , 1 Read more >

Review: Judith White, Management, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University

Management 713:  Introduction to Sustainable Development
 At a glance

  • 1 unit course first offered Fall 2009
  • Workload:  Heavy final paper
  • Teaching Style:  Discussion
  • Interest in students: High
  • Relevance to outside world: High

Overall Professor Rating: 2 (though this might be because this was the first time the course was offered)

Overall Course Rating: 3 (should be higher, but it needed more organization

Note:  Like many 1-unit courses, Professor White proposed this course as a full, 3-unit class to the department.  Apparently, they decided that it was best to do this on a trial basis as a 1-unit course and to see how it went.  However, as I have learned this quarter, this can lead to inconsistencies.  In this case, while I think the workload was a bit up and down, it was more that I didn’t really know what was going on, what was expected of me, etc, from class to class.  We only met 3 times, but I think I got far more confused than I should have been in 10 or so hours of class time.

About Me

I haven’t done one of these reviews in a while.  The truth is that 1) I have gotten worn down a bit by the program so I have been less motivated to write about my courses and 2) I have a bit of senioritis.  In fact, I just came home from an 8 hour marathon session with my Capstone team, to work on our first case.  But the truth is that I do care about providing useful information to my fellow classmates and those that might take these classes down the road.  So I’ll spend a bit of time now writing…

I started the program almost 3 years ago – March of 2007.  I am now in Capstone, which is, as you can imagine from the title, the final course in the program.  During the past years, I have had trouble finding good, expansive reviews of faculty and/or courses.  So I started writing these.   There are lots of sites out there that provide feedback and rates – ratemyprofessor is the most notable. The SantaClaraMBA Yahoo group also has a big database of comments and lots of additional information in its message archive. That database can be a bit hard to wade through, and the comments are short and often just link to other threads, which are themselves pretty short and superficial. Only here can I write as much as I want  🙂

I review professors from a variety of perspectives.  First, I explain the context(s) under which I took the class.  Time of year, time of day, etc.  Then I talk about the quality of the class and the professor, and finally about the professor as a person.  After all, we are trying to learn about our interactions with people, so knowing that side of a teacher is critical, too.  So these would be interactions outside the classroom, etc.  I also just write whatever it is that I think is relevant or will be helpful to others.  That is my overall goal.

The facts

I took MGMT 713 in Fall Quarter, 2009.  The course, “Introduction to Sustainable Development,” started off, I believe, as an undergraduate class that was proposed to the MBA program.  Professor White has been with the school, apparently, for some time now – she is not a new hire.

This is a 1-unit course that the school was evaluating for possibility of conversion to a full 3 unit one.  It is offered again this quarter, Winter 2010, as  1 unit.

To be clear, this course is about environmental sustainability in business management.  I was worried that it would be about how to keep a company going (sustainable…), but was glad when my fears were allayed.  Now, it did take about 3 very confusing e-mails to figure that out, but at least I got the facts straight in the end.

Them’s the facts (slim as they are). Now read on for the review. (more…)

January 30, 2010 Reviews of Professors, , , , 0 Read more >

what is a “disruptive technology?”

The other night and throughout Educause, people have been talking about “disruptive technologies.”  Because I’m getting my MBA, I think back to disruptive technologies in terms of products and markets.

For instance, the transistor was a disruptive technology.  However, many manufacturers of radios considered it a process change – they put them in their existing, big radios rather than tubes.  But other manufacturers (Sony, with the Walkman), used it to create a whole new market.  The actual disruptive technology is the transistor, but the innovation was how it was used.

And it is always about how it is used.  How something is put together to create something new.  Google Wave, for instance (yes, I am still trying to get my head around it), combines several items that aren’t really all that disruptive anymore, if you think about it.  Instant-message style communication?  That’s old.  Threaded discussion?  Been there, done that.  Multi-contributors?  Well, a mailing list is a communication “stream” with lots of people contributing, too.

Does combining them all together make it disruptive?  Honestly, in this case, I don’t know.  I don’t see this as creating a new market, for instance, at least in terms of education (I think it does for project management, btw, though it needs to be combined with other tools like document management and calendars, etc (you listening, google?!?!?).

Are there other disruptive technologies out there?  Twitter is massively disruptive (I’d still get in on the VC funding for that (with strong liquidation preferences) if I could).  Wikis are/were, too, but they have not evolved as much as I would have thought.

I have found it useful to take a business approach to a lot of these topics at Educause.  Anyway.

November 5, 2009 Biz School, Conferences, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, , , 0 Read more >

teach me how to fish

Mere moments ago, I was meeting with some of the administration at the business school where I am pursuing my MBA, and found myself stunned by a statement.  For the most part, I am very happy with my education here.  Most of the faculty I’ve had have been very solid to great most of the time, with only a few duds.  However, I was shocked when I was given the “you’re grad students, you should be able to take care of/figure out X yourself” speech when meeting with one of the academic administrative leaders.  I was seeking advice on how to handle something, and was essentially told to handle part of it myself (not all – I’m trying to be accurate in my depiction so that I am not unfair to the person with whom I was meeting)

Don’t get me wrong – I am 100% behind the “teach someone to fish” model of learning.  I want to learn how to do something – management, finance, whatever – so that I can go out and do it myself.  It can be theoretical, but even then I should be able to come away from that with an ability to apply those theories in a meaningful way.  I would never advocate for someone just handing me or any student a finished or nearly-finished idea.  I want to be stimulated, intellectually, and I want my opinions and positions to be questioned, challenged, and refined.

However, there are people that should be helping me along the way – teaching me how to fish.  Those people are the faculty and, in a broader but perhaps even more important sense, the heads of the various academic departments that help define the direction and goals of that set of faculty.  It is their job to challenge me, to make me, as an adult with presumably some degree of intelligence (a sound presumption since I got into the program), support my positions, etc.

Faculty should also care about whether their students are learning.  They should provide counsel and guidance.  Not hand-holding.  Not provision of answers.  But providing guidance is part of their job.  It doesn’t matter how old I am or that I’m a grad student rather than an undergrad (and I think undergrads should be taught to fish, too, for what it’s worth) – it is a terrible, terrible thing to feel that there are faculty and/or academic administrators out there that feel that there are questions we shouldn’t ask because we should already know the answers.  To have our concerns – even the poorly formed ones – be dismissed as part of “something we should already know.”

After all, when do we know when we are asking one of those questions?  How shall we know if we’re pushing back in the right way, to our benefit, if it is suggested that, as an adult, there are some things that we should not question or should just figure out ourselves?

October 21, 2009 Biz School, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts 0 Read more >

preaching to the choir, making us not want to go to church

I am taking a class right now about developing sustainable products and methods in business.  This goes from management to organizational design.  On the face, it is an extremely interesting topic and I applaud the SCU Business School for having a course dedicated just to this topic.

Unfortunately, it’s a terribly-designed course.

First, while it is a 1 unit course and many students take a few of these just to get an extra unit here or there rather than a full 3 unit class with all the work that entails, I would venture that most students in this class have a pre-existing interest in sustainability.  We were drawn to the course by its title, but the concept of thinking about this topic as we move forward with our careers, etc.  The students in this class are there because we are interested in this topic.

Of course, any course that one takes as an elective is, to some extent, preaching to the choir.  We elect to take the course because the topic interests us, and therefore the professor is telling us stuff we want to hear and with which we largely agree.  Maybe we want to be stimulated about the topic and will put up a bit of an instinctive fight, but I would be shocked if someone took an elective and he or she flat out hated the topic.

However, in this case all the preaching to this particular choir has many of us not wanting to go to church anymore.  It’s not that all the issues about the environment and how companies and organizations and even just people in general aren’t important – of course they are.  And nothing will shake my own personal beliefs about the importance of change today.  But for a 1 unit course, this is making being interested in the environment off-putting, to be honest, and that’s a terrible shame.  I know that there are a billion reasons to care about the environment, and thousands of ways of analyzing a person’s or company’s environmental “footprint.”  But if one tried to assimilate all of those reasons at once, and is then given an assignment that could easily become a dissertation in terms of research and detail, it can kill motivation.  Simply saying “but don’t go into more depth than you have to for the topic” doesn’t counter “contact your vendor, find out what process they use, from where they get their supplies, then contact those suppliers and…”  You get the idea.

There are other aspects of the course that really discourage me, but those are about the professor and I will get to that in one of my reviews later.  But the point is that we’re there to have discussions about what we can do, as humans, as employees at companies, and as ambitious students who are pursuing an MBA and hope to move up in our careers, to develop sustainable methods.  I think we’re there to look at things we can do.  Talking about what a CEO did to change his entire company and then saying that we have to go that deep on our own projects, when most of us are middle-management at best, is ludicrous in my opinion.  It’s like asking a line-level worker to implement Six Sigma.  There has to be buy-in from all levels.

My point, to be clear, is that to basically assault students with this much information, to ask them to analyze everything from 300 different perspectives, to give examples of what we “could” do that potentially involves weeks and weeks of research, for 1 unit and 9 total hours of class time is simply overwhelming.

And one of the last topics about which one should become overwhelmed and perhaps frustrated to this point is the environment.  We are dangerously close to thinking of trying to develop sustainable practices as too hard.

October 17, 2009 Biz School, , 0 Read more >

Review: Linda Kamas, Economics, Leavey School of Business

ECON 405:  Macroeconomics
At a glance

  • Workload:  Moderate
  • Teaching Style:  Lecture
  • Interest in students: High
  • Relevance to outside world: High, especially if you’re into economics

Overall Professor Rating: 3 (she can get a bit impatient at times)

Overall Course Rating: 4 (but she can also make the course entertaining while getting the teaching across

The Review

This is the latest of my reviews on the professors I’ve had while an MBA student at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business. There are lots of sites out there that provide feedback and rates – ratemyprofessor is the most notable. The SantaClaraMBA Yahoo group also has a big database of comments and lots of additional information in its message archive. That database can be a bit hard to wade through, and the comments are short and often just link to other threads, which are themselves pretty short and superficial. Only here can I write as much as I want  🙂

I review professors from a variety of perspectives.  First, I explain the context(s) under which I took the class.  Time of year, time of day, etc.  Then I talk about the quality of the class and the professor, and finally about the professor as a person.  After all, we are trying to learn about our interactions with people, so knowing that side of a teacher is critical, too.  So these would be interactions outside the classroom, etc.  I also just write whatever it is that I think is relevant or will be helpful to others.  That is my overall goal.

The facts

I took ECON 405, Macroeconomics, in Winter 2009.  This is the second of two required economics courses, and Professor Kamas teaches several sections.  I took the later section of the evening, and I think that some of my comments about her patience, etc might be a result of that.

Them’s the facts (slim as they are). Now read on for the review.
(more…)

September 18, 2009 Reviews of Professors, , , , , 0 Read more >

How to become a SCUMBAG in 2 years

First – a SCUMBAG is a Santa Clara University MBA Graduate.  It’s also an acronym that I really don’t like, but it’s catchy for a blog post title.  Works at the twitter-size level.

When I first entered the SCU evening MBA program, I was provided two options for how to get through the program in either 2 or 3 years.  The former included taking 3 classes per quarter in the Fall, Winter, and Spring, and then 2 in the summers.  It was pretty intense, and I realized that I was likely to come much closer to 3 than 2.

Well, it turns out I could have finished in 2, despite a far less taxing schedule.  Before you go onto “more,” I will say that I have slowed down my course progress a bit to time my enrollment in the ultimate “Capstone” course with a large group of others that increase my chances of being on a good team.  And so that I can use Santa Clara’s employee tuition program to take a few classes out of pure interest, rather than only those required and needed to graduate.  So I am looking at 2.75 years.  But somehow I could have finished in 2… (more…)

June 19, 2009 Biz School 0 Read more >

MBAs: Public Enemy No. 1? – BusinessWeek

MBAs: Public Enemy No. 1? – BusinessWeek.

This is a really fascinating article.  Essentially, it is about how the training and education of MBA students to examine the bottom line – return on shareholder value – rather than ethics or a higher standard of management over the last few decades has led to a group of leaders that have run companies into the ground, taken too many risks, and put us into our current crisis.  The article does acknowledge that lots of those CEOs’ classmates have not done things to damage our economy to the benefit of shareholders, and lots of CEOs without MBAs have.  But the basic premise is that there is a push back against formally trained individuals because they are taught to look at dollars instead of ethics.  

This is a pretty difficult topic for me.  I’m in an evening MBA program right now, but also work in academia, which is not generally driven by the bottom line and certainly not by the pursuit of profits/return on equity to shareholders.  On the one hand, I am still generally taught that the goal of a CEO is to make money for shareholders.  Those are our clients, we find customers to buy our products, and we try to make money for people who have invested in the company.  Plain and simple.  However, at no point have I ever been taught that this is the only goal for a CEO.  It might be the primary one, but not the only one, and not more important than, say, doing business in an ethical manner or taking risks beyond what one’s organization can hold (such as being leveraged 30 to 1 or offering products that sell now but are missing the point for the future).  

At the same time, even at the Jesuit University at which I attend school, I do not have a single business ethics course as part of my requirements for graduation.  There is one elective that has not been offered in the two years I’ve been here.  

Personally, I think that anyone who is a good CEO, or a good candidate for one even coming out of biz school, should realize that there is a right way to do business, and such practices should be pursued, not ignored.  Even if one bends a rule here and there to make sure the company hits the earnings estimates for the year by delivering a product at 12:01 AM (outside of the quarter that ended at 11:59PM…), that’s a mile away from driving GM into the ground, or creating an idiotic financial monstrosity that was Lehman Brothers.

May 29, 2009 2008 Economic Crisis, Articles from the Web, Biz School 0 Read more >