Quebec City

5 of us are on a road trip to Halifax for MBA Games. About half of the class is heading out there and the organizing committee decided to fly out there. D and I thought it would be more fun to drive out there and spend new years out east. A housemate of mine is from there so we'll know some people to hang out with for a couple of days before the rest of the class shows up on Jan 2nd.

We decided to stop for a night in Quebec City on they way there to break the drive up and to avoid driving through a sparse stretch in New Brunswick at night. I've never been to the city before so naturally I wanted to stop and check the place out.

We got here around 4:50pm and checked into the hotel. The we went walking around town. It's a really nice city that has a very European feel to it. The roads and highways are a little crazy around here and there's lots of ice and snow. We walked to the old part of the city and checked out a few things. We stopped by an outdoor spot with a bar made of ice and serving some hot bevies:





Then we walked around a little more up to the boardwalk by the Chateau Frontenac and saw this cool toboggan slide thing. At $2 per person, it was hard to resist.



I tried taking a video of the ride down, but the cold sucked the juice out of the batteries in my camera. Here's a short clip of some other people on the ride:



It feels a lot faster than the video shows...awesome little thrill.

After that we stopped for some dinner and a few pints at Pub St. Alexandre. Nice place...pretty busy though. Here's a little shot of the place:



I'll have to find a way to come back here in the summer time. We'll be heading out early tomorrow morning...10hrs of driving to get to Halifax. Here's what our route looks like.

Emails from readers

I got a couple emails from people looking at applying to the Queen's MBA program. I have to say that it's a pretty cool feeling hearing from people that read my blog. If you're thinking about applying to Queen's or are coming here on exchange next year, by all means, please email me. Would love to hear from you.

MBA: Module 8, Capstone Simulation

The final module of the team portion of the program was a week-long simulation. With 13 teams, we were split up into two separate fictional industries of firms competing with what were called set-top boxes...kind of like Tivo systems. The simulation itself is done by an organization called Links Simulations...I guess they're pretty popular with the business schools. Some of my friends that went to other schools did the same sort of exercise. You can get a sense of the simulation here.

The simulation ran for 10 financial quarters. We had to submit a memo for each quarter discussing our decisions. We also had to submit a final 5-page report explaining how we made our decisions, why we made them, and whether or not someone should invest in our company. These write-ups were a bit of a pain. Especially the final report!

The simulation itself was a great exercise though, run by Professor Peter Dacin, the husband of Tina Dacin who taught the Strategic Implementation and Change course I talked about in an earlier post. My team ended up winning our industry with the highest cumulative net income. It was a really good way to end for our team. We had some rough patches along the way, but we really came together at the end. We had to make service, marketing, pricing, and production decisions every quarter while keeping an eye on our competition and what they were doing. There were three primary markets: US, Europe, and the Pacific region. A new Latin American market was introduced half way through the simulation. We also had two selling channels: retail and direct. We had to observe market trends, customer trends, competition product configurations, and pricing. We also had to watch our production costs and decide whether or not to invest in plant capacity. It's hard to explain exactly what we did and how we did it without going into lots of detail. I took on the production decisions and worked with two other people on forecasting decisions. Our overall long-term strategic decisions were made together as a team with different people checking research reports, industry trends, and competitive position. Here's a little bit of what my spreadsheet reporting looked like...there's a comparison of forecasted sales versus actual sales and the overall trends:



Our prize for winning is that we'll have our names engraved on a plaque that future classes can ooh and aah over. It was a weird feeling when it was all over. One of our team mates is going on exchange to China and we may not see him again. We'll all be taking different classes in the elective portion of the program so we may not even interact all that much for classes. It was a strange feeling at the end of it. It didn't last long though...we went out on our '12 bars of christmas' tour that night and burned a few brain cells.

MBA: Module 7, Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

Module 7 was a week-long course in Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship taught by Professor Packalen. It's hard to pin down exactly what this course was about, but it covered topics about personal characteristics of entrepreneurs, how to manage and grow a business, and how to obtain funding for a new venture.

Again, there was a serious burnout factor left over from the previous module and motivation was really low. Regardless, I found a couple of points in the class interesting. One was a simulated negotiation of a new venture with a couple of Venture Capital companies. Instead of participating in the exercise, my team was split up to observe the negotiations of the rest of the class. Each negotiation session had three teams, one as the new venture, one as an existing VC already invested in the company, and the third as a new aggressive VC wanting to invest. The dynamics of the negotiation was really interesting to observe and some people really got into their roles. One thing that really stood out to me was how quickly the negotiators started talking about pushing the founders of the company (they weren't present at the negotiation).

Another interesting exercise involved a pitch from an actual entrepreneur trying to get his business going. We had to develop our own framework for evaluating a business idea and use it. I guess it was an exam of sorts. We had two hours to apply our framework and decide if we would invest in the business. The actual business idea was really cool. The company is called Ocorant and they're trying to develop a next generation heart monitor. I can't say much about what was pitched to us, but you can read about it here. My hand was sore after two hours of writing, but I think I did well...my framework was pretty involved.

The course actually made me think of working with Venture Capital companies. I'll have to think about that career tack a little more and explore it.

MBA: Module 6 Strategic Leadership

Module 6 was the toughest module to date. I don't think the content was particularly difficult, but with the weather turning and 7 months of work behind us, the burnout factor was setting in. It was difficult to get motivated to do work, and some of the assignments we had seemed to be work projects for the sake of doing work. We managed to get through it, but I'm looking forward to the Christmas break and not seeing the school for a while.

The module was called Strategic Leadership and the courses were Finance Strategy, Strategic Implementation and Change, International Business, Negotiations and Conflict Management, and IT Strategy. A lot of the topics had to do with making strategic management decisions and how to get people to go along with them.

Finance Strategy
This was a fast paced course! Only five class sessions but a lot of topics to cover, Professor Wang seemed constrained by the short length of the course. He flipped through slides really quickly and there wasn't much time for questions and discussion in the class. I had to do a lot of reading form the textbook just to get a sense of what the topics were. People coming from Arts backgrounds without a strong command of math had a hard time with the course and some groups even hired tutors to get them through. The quizzes and exam were fair though, but the course was a lot of work. A lot of people were happy when it was over. The general consensus was that the course needed more classes than 5.

Strategic Implementation and Change
I wrote about this course already in an earlier post. The course ended well with a simulation about implementing change at a fictitious aerospace technology company. The simulation was-web based and you had to go through an information gathering phase, a planning phase, and an implementation. The idea was to get everyone on board for a change in the company's business strategy by a sequence of initiatives with limited time and money. The goal was to get over 60% of the company on board. My team didn't do that well, some of our decisions took too long to implement or drained our resources. It was an interesting exercise in any case.

International Business
I didn't like this course much. I thought the amount of assigned reading was unrealistic and, at this stage of the program, time management was more key than actually getting through all the topics. I basically did the minimum amount of work required for this course. It dealt with topics dealing with international business like the bombardier-embraer feud, the dubai-ports fiasco, Chiquita banana in south america, and other similar topics. If you were an news junkie like I was over the past few years, you had a good handle on what the topics were about. I had a hard time knowing what we were supposed to be learning though. The discussions and presentations were interesting, but at the end of the day, I didn't really get something out of it that tied everything together.

Negotiations and Conflict Management
This was an interesting course, albeit a short one. The textbook is a good one: Essentials of Negotiation. We had to do negotiation exercises in pairs where half the class had one side of a story, and the others had the other side. The idea was to get to a negotiated deal. I learnt a lot about myself and how I negotiate. A lot of past conversations, relationships, and interviews boiled up from my memory. I think just being aware of my tendencies in negotiations will help me in the future. We had to do team presentations about doing business and negotiations in different cultures. For our final paper, we had to take a negotiation from our past and break it down and analyze it. I did mine on my salary negotiation at my last job.

IT Strategy
This was a looooooong course. The idea was to make good business decisions in terms of using IT resources. I found the topics repetitive and I think this course was better off being 5 sessions rather than 10. We did learn a good analysis tool in breaking down a business problem and getting to the central underlying issues. We also learnt a good technique for writing memos with less than 250 words that were direct and efficient in conveying problems and recommendations.

I was glad when this module was over. I decided to pass on an information session trip to Toronto for meeting with companies and touring some facilities. I figured I needed a few days to lay low and vegetate instead of hob-nobbing and shmoozing in a suit. I know that companies aren't really looking to hire at this time of year, plus none of the companies really matched what I'm looking for. My job search will begin in earnest in January.

MBA Jobs in 2009

The job market when we graduate in May might be interesting. It's hard to sense what job hunting will be like in the new year. I know going into Christmas, there's no point in applying for jobs because all companies are pretty much winding down for the year. Come January, companies should have a better handle on what the need for the coming year in terms of resources...will have a better chance on finding some type of job.

How good that job will be is up in the air. I know some of the people who've been getting job offers said that the salary levels aren't as good and companies are using the current economic situation as a reason. With Canada moving into a recession now, I know it will be tough looking for work.

Here's a take on the current financial climate and some commentary about the job prospectus for MBAs in the coming year.

Obama and homework

So years from now, when people ask me where I was when the most powerful country in the world, military and economically, elected the first black person to be their president, I'll remember that I was up until 3:30am writing a paper for Strategic Implementation and Change for Tina Dacin.

Her course is actually pretty awesome. She teaches about all the stuff managers will need to do to turn companies around from failing to successful...how to develop and implement strategies for change. It's difficult to describe the course content here because it isn't quantitative or qualitative. It's about situational awareness, psychology, problem solving, motivation, and leadership. There are two books referenced in the course. The first is "The Heart of Change" by John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen. You can get a sense of the book here. The other book is "Execution" by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. You can go to your nearest library or bookstore to check out the content.

The paper we had to write was about the Tar Products division at Allied Signal circa 1994. The division was suffering from declining negative profits, increased raw material costs, and was the only losing division within a successful large conglomerate. Chuck Griffith (I tried to find some good info online about him but no luck) was hired to turn the company around. Our paper was about how we would go about turning the company around. The class after we turned in our papers was awesome. We did a live simulation exercise of the initial meeting of Mr. Griffith and the Tar Products senior managers. It was amazing how quickly the situation can go bad. Body language, word selection, and general attitudes came into play...and we were just simulating it! I can imagine how tense the actual situation might have been. In any case, Mr. Griffith's approach was shear genius...I don't really want to tell the whole story here because it will ruin the case for potential students. A few of us sat around after class discussing the issue...really cool.

Anyways, I'm really enjoying this class. Professor Dacin is awesome with a neat sense of humour. Really gets the class going in some interesting discussions.

Now about Obama...great to see him get elected. It's a weird parallel that we're studying how to implement change and Obama won on a platform of change. His speeches are incredible (the best part starts at minute 9)...I wish we had a leader here in Canada that can inspire people like that. How does he do it? You think this is inspiring ? How about this? or this? This?

The US had one of their highest voter turnouts in their history, we had our lowest...both in the same year and within a month of each other. Any idea why? Where are our new leaders going to come from? What does that mean for our future?

Cool Knee Brace from SFU Research

I saw this browsing around the news today. It's a really neat idea...power small devices using power generated from walking. It's a shame that the military application is the one that will likely be first to be implemented, but I guess that's how they'll generate the revenue to make a commercial product. In any case, check it out here.

Sheesh...

Hmmm...I wonder what these people are hiding from...

Lemoine Point Walk

The fall season here in Canada is a nice time to go out for a walk in the woods. The colours of the leaves turning are pretty vibrant. They usually only last for a couple of weeks before the leaves fall due to wind and rain.

I organized a little outing a couple of weekends ago to the Lemoine Point Conservation Area near here. About 20 of us went. It's a short 20 minute drive from downtown Kingston.

I've been luck with the weather for the events I organized. It was a beautiful fall day. Here are some pictures:















You can have a look at the rest of the album here.

MBA: Module 5, Functions of Management

Module 5 ended last week with a couple of exams and was pretty challenging from a time management standpoint. We're now on a week long break and courses start up again on Oct 14th.

The campus recruiting season was in full swing and we had to balance team meetings and projects with information sessions. People had to write cover letters and customized resumes pretty regularly. I decided to bypass the campus recruitment period...partly out of laziness and partly because I wasn't looking for just another job with another big company. I did keep an eye out for interesting consulting opportunities and applied to a strategy and operations consulting position with Deloitte. I managed to get an initial interview with them. They called me a couple of days later to tell me that I wasn't going on to the second round of interviews. The interview was at 8:30am and I'm not the sharpest tool in the box that early in the morning. There are a lot of good candidates in our class so I wasn't too disappointed when I found out that I wasn't getting the job.

Anyways, the module consisted of five courses: Business Communications, Finance Fundamentals, Marketing Fundamentals, Business Decision Modelling, and Operations Management.

Business Communications
For the premium tuition that we're paying at Queen's, I kind of expect a certain level of organization. The program structure should be all figured out and things should run like clockwork...that's what I think in any case. This business communications course kind of got lost in the shuffle. It seemed like it was a bit of an afterthought and the lack of coordination between the mba office and the course lecturers was obvious. The lecturers were two guys who used to work for CTV and are now doing consulting and teaching executives how to give presentations. The course was meant to teach us what constitutes an effective business presentation and how we can be effective presenters. There wasn't much information that I didn't already hear before except for a tip to use a web cam to record the presentation practise sessions. I remember taking a presentation undergrad course at U of Waterloo for clean technologies that covered the same material. This course itself would have been more useful at the beginning of the program before we went did several presentations over 5 months. Since we didn't know what the course was going to be about and there were no instructions given to us to put together material, some of us ended up presenting material that we already presented in previous courses. So it two days of repeat material...pretty boring. It was a bit of a waste of time in my opinion, especially since we had a ton of other work to do.

Finance Fundamentals
This was another funny quirk in the organization of the program. The professor who was scheduled to teach this course ended up going away on paternity leave. Another professor who was asked to teach this course declined since it was a 6 week period...too short for her course structure. So we ended up getting a professor from RMC to teach one of the most fundamental courses of any business program. They guy was a terrible lecturer and his style and course structure was very confusing. I resorted to learning straight from the textbook. I don't know how well I did with the theoretical portions of the exams, but I think I did well on the calculations.
The course itself dealt with the financial tools used to make business decision. We covered time value of money concepts like annuities, perpetuities, and bonds. We also learnt how to evaluate potential projects based on initial investments and projected future cash flows to decided if it was good to invest in a given project or not. These decisions used net present value, payback period, IRR, AAR, and other tools. Although the concepts didn't seem that hard, this was a tough course for me since it involved more memorization than application of concepts. I also can't really visualize interest rates and money moving around.

Marketing Fundamentals
Grooaaaan! Marketing...maybe it's my engineering background but I didn't enjoy this course at all. It seemed to touch on concepts we already covered in previous courses for strategy and positioning. The topic seemed pretty straightforward to me: know your company, know your product, distinguish yourself from your competitors by meeting you target market's needs. I found that there were too many frameworks that made it seem that there was a lot more to marketingk: 4 P's, 5 C's, 6 M's. I know I'm not cut out for a marketing career...I'm too direct and logical.

Business Decision Modelling
I really liked this course. It was about developing tools to help you make business decisions. Applied stuff like figuring out what the optimal product mix to produce to maximize your profits. Or how many maintenance bays a mechanics garage should have to maximize profits and meet the local demand. The course dealt with linear programming, integer programming, decision trees, and AHP. Professor Yuri Levin was pretty effective in teaching this course. He kept the classroom atmosphere pretty light and was readily available outside the class hours. His course notes were also pretty detailed and provided a lot of practise problems for people to work on. People who didn't really know MS Excell were at a real disadvantage in this course.
Part of this course was a project where we had to apply the concepts directly. My team did an optimization of a machining process from one of the small projects that I worked on when I was at Aero-Safe Technologies.

Operations Management
Another really good course. Professor Paul Roman was really good. He grabbed everyone's attention right away and kept the class engaged. His course was mainly case based. For every class each team had to deliver a brief where we had to review a case study, select 3 main issues, and provided 3 recommendations to help the business featured in the case. Paul would then break down the class in terms of their decisions, have an in-class debate, and then show what each company ended up doing so we can compare our business decisions to their's. Another part of the course involved a field trip to a company where we had to select a company and then arrange a tour of one of their processes and report on it with possible recommendations. Our team did a tour of Metal Craft Marine. It was a bit of a challenge for us since there was no steady manufacturing process for us to observe. Metal Craft is more of a job shop for boats and the guy we dealt with had a lot to say about marketing and not much to say about their process. We did our best and I think we did ok on the report and presentation. For people in future years, I don't recommend going to Metal Craft for this project...too difficult to pin down process inefficiencies.

I was really glad when this module ended. It took a lot out of me in terms of dealing with team dynamics. I've recharged the batteries over this past week. All set to start the next module...looks like it'll be pretty challenging as well.

Interesting Article...

Here's an interesting article on the current financial crisis:
here

Looming election issues

A federal election is happening again here in Canada. I think this is the third in the last decade. Personally, I think it's a sign of a great political divide here in Canada as a whole and an indication of the quality of leadership that we have on the political level. No one leader has emerged to rally the country around a solid vision and goals to achieve as a people.

The Stephen Harper party seem like the default choice because they control their optics very well and seem like the most organized compared to the other parties. Although recent political gaffes highlight their behavioural issues and

The green party has more visibility these days with Elizabeth May as their leader, but they're a long ways from making a significant impact in parliament.

The NDP seems more ballsy this campaign, but I still think they're a little too socialist for my liking. I think they're really good at complaining about the status quo, but I don't have confidence in them to run the country. All talk, no walk. But that's just my impression.

The Bloc Quebecois are irrelevant at the federal level since they're only concerned with what happens in Quebec and will never form a government. They have less punch these days since the separation movement has pretty much died in recent years. They do take away votes from other left parties, especially the liberal party.

The liberal party seem to have a good team, but they're running a weak campaign so far and I don't think Stephane Dion has a strong enough personality to get people over the negative ads by the conservative party. Their initial attempt to focus the election around the environment has not worked and they're shifting their campaign focus to the strength of their team. They should have worked it the other way round.

On leadership
Personally, I think leadership is such a subjective thing that everyone has a different impression of what a good leader is supposed to be. Harper is a strong man that runs a tight ship. However, a leader also has to be measured by the people that follow him, and in that his followers are poor. Putting together a manual on how to obstruct parliament committees isn't displaying leadership at all, rather it shows strength as a political tactician. It seems selfish to me and doesn't have the good of the country at heart. I don't know why the other parties aren't hammering him on that. Tasteless jokes, puffin poo, and poor class also speak to this.

Dion has an impeccable record as a public servant with a great deal of integrity. His seemingly weak persona throws people off and is easy to dismiss. I'm sure he'll be a great prime minister for the country, but I don't think he'll get a chance. The conservative media blitz on him will be too hard to overcome.

Layton...I have a hard time taking him seriously. Likes to hear himself talk too much.

On the environment
Byrne Purchase spoke to us during our course on corporate social responsibility. He's had various positions in government including a stint as an energy minister for the government of Ontario. He shared his candid views on the environmental issue and his prognosis is pretty bleak. It's not something that any one country can fix alone. It's a global phenomenon and it needs a global collaboration to do something about it. Of all the plans that are in place, he favours the Carbon Tax system because the tax revenue infrastructure already exists. The Cap and Trade system may work also, but governments would have to build the system first and that will take a long time. I tend to agree with him. So with that, the liberal green shift plan makes the most sense to me, but again, I don't think the majority of the country will agree. All Harper needs to do, and has been doing, is to scare people into believing that it will be bad for the economy. The liberals also have a hard time breaking the plan into simple bite-sized concepts that average people can absorb.

I know the NDP favours a cap and trade system. The green party has it's own carbon tax system but it's too extreme for people to accept.

It'll be interesting to see what plays out over the coming weeks.

Kingston population boom

Wow! Kingston just exploded after labour day weekend. The Queen's campus got overrun with a ton of students returning to school. There's a lot more excitement around campus and the business school is a lot busier and noisier.

I keep walking around campus and wishing I was an undergrad again. It's a vastly different atmosphere than the one I experience at Waterloo. Lots more girls...I mean lots !

That also makes me feel a bit old. I know I'm over ten years older than the majority of the kids on campus.

The house I'm living in is also full now. We went from four people to seven...4 girls and 3 guys. The new people seem nice. I'm hardly ever there so I only run into them every now and then. We only have one laundry machine in the house so managing that might be a little tricky.

Whitewater Rafting

I organized a trip for the class to go white water rafting about an hour east of Ottawa with River Run Rafting. Organizing the trip was a little bit of a hassle but the service from River Run was excellent...night and day compared to what we received from the skydiving place.

We had to get there a couple of hours before we were scheduled to go on the river. Lunch was included with the ticket price...I guess they want to make sure people had enough energy before the trip. They had a volleyball net, basketball net, horseshoe pit, and a ping pong table setup so people can entertain themselves while waiting for the safety briefing.

Organizing a caravan of MBA students is a bit like herding cats, but we managed to get there with plenty of time to spare. The rafting itself took about 6-7 hours...it was great! We decided to go with the 6-man sport boats because we thought it would be more exciting that way. I'm glad we went that way. There were some other outfits on the river that had 12-man boats (some even more) and it didn't look like it would be all that much fun. They packed us on a bus to get us to the beginning of the rapids and we had a little safety pep talk before launching.

There were a couple of other boats in our group of 5 boats...don't know much about them since we didn't really interact with them other than splashing them as we paddled by. The video's pretty neat...only $30 and well done.

I might have to plan another smaller trip for next May when the rapids are supposed to be crazy...

Here's the video in any case. I had to split it up into two parts because of the Youtube time restriction...

MBA: Module 4, Corporate Social Responsibility

Module 4 was just one course about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) taught by the full-time MBA program director, Dr. Scott Carson. It was another "soft" topic course and started with a couple of days of lectures and then three days of presentations by the class teams about a variety of topics relating to CSR. My team's topic dealt with the ethics of using sex in advertising and specifically dealing with Abercrombie and Fitch (A&F). It was an interesting project. The documentary I watched about Edward Bernays came in handy...I wrote about him in an earlier post. W used an excerpt of the documentary as part of a discussion about the psychology behind using sex in advertising.

Studying A&F was interesting too. Apparently they have a history of using racy advertising to sell to teenage and college kids. You can read about their 61 year old CEO here. I'm not a brand-name person but the marketing strategy works...A&F is making a ton of money.

Another component of the course was an individual paper about a company discussing the congruence its CSR and corporate strategy and how the two match up. To be honest, I found the paper to be a really difficult one to write. My enthusiasm for the topic was very low and I felt that I was writing a lot of filler material just to meet the 6-page minimum requirement. I wrote about Westport Innovations, an interesting environmental technology company in British Columbia. They were ranked 9th in Corporate Knight's 2008 50 best corporate citizens in Canada. The paper was also due at 10pm on a Sunday night...not the best way to spend a sunny weekend.

Skydiving Drama

As I mentioned in a previous post, I arranged a skydiving trip for our class. It's something that I wanted to do before starting MBA school but ran out of time. It turned out that we had to do a business case for a skydiving outfit in Gananoque for our Management Accounting class. I thought I'd only get about 10 people to sign up, but ended up with 23 people in total including a couple of professors.

In talking with the owner of Skydive Gananoque, I decided to book the day before Canada Day since he was going to have a Twin Otter plane that could take a group of 6 tandem jumpers at once. I planned it out that 12 people would go in the morning and 11 would go in the afternoon, sandwiching a class that we had that day. Things didn't go according to plan...the pilot for the plane got held up at the border and they had some other issues. We ended up going on the smaller Cessna planes that could only accommodate two tandem jumpers at a time. The morning group took a lot longer than expected while the afternoon group and me ended up waiting around for about 3 hours before the first of us got on a plane. It was a bright sunny day with minimal clouds and they barely squeezed us in before sundown. Our management accounting prof who set up a whole business case for them didn't get to jump. They suited him up and then told him that it was too dark to go. Not very nice. A little communication on the part of the owner to let me know what was happening would have been good just to manage expectations a little bit. We could have figured out a way to make it work out for people.

It wasn't an entirely negative experience though. The jump itself was euphoric. I laughed myself to sleep that night. It's too bad it got marred by bad customer service.

Here are some pictures and videos:





I think this one of Kwesi is the best though...


Here's the video I paid $100 for...maybe I'm losing my sense of humour, but I didn't appreciate what the tandem instructor was doing during the free fall.



Here's one of the videos that we took on the ground. You can see how dark it was at the time. Kwesi took this one for me...you can hear what they said about Clinton (the prof) not jumping in the end.



Clinton decided to take his money back and go jump somewhere else.

You can have a look at the rest of the pictures here.

At the end of the experience I was a little upset by the customer service we received. One of my former colleagues asked me about and I replied to him in a bad way. Word got around to the owner of Skydive Gananoque, Tom, and a few nasty emails got exchanged. Here's how it went:

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I removed the email thread after some advice from people. Probably not the best thing to do.

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I know I'm no angel in this, but I think Tom was over the top. Personally, I think he had a really bad weekend on Canada Day where things didn't go very well and my comments just gave him an outlet to take out his frustrations. As much as he dislikes me, he still has my picture on his website. It was a good lesson on how not to do customer service in any case.

I'll have some recommendations for next year's MBA class if they want to go skydiving. Tom's outfit is close to Kingston, but he probably has a grudge against MBA students now...thanks to me. Next year's class may be better off going to Ottawa for the day...that's a 2 hour drive to get there but they might get better service.

MBA: Module 3, The Foundations of Management

Module 3 of the Queens's MBA program was pretty intense. We had four courses: Financial Accounting, Management Accounting, Organizational Behaviour, and Managerial Economics.

Financial Accounting
This course was actually pretty good. I'm not about to pursue a career in Accounting, but we learned how to read an annual report of a company, pick out unusual information, and assess the health and management of the company just by looking at their financial statements. Professor John Moore is a dynamic old school prof. So old school that he still uses transparancies and a projector. I haven't seen anyone teach like that in at least a decade. He had great command on the class and it was obvious that he's been teaching that course for a long time. He uses a putter for a pointer too. He ended up calling on me one class when he was discussing the subjective and objective aspects of accounting. Since that class, everytime he wanted to call something subjective, he pointed at me so I could say it. It was good...kept me on my toes.

Management Accounting
I'm one year older than Clinton Free, the professor who taught this course. A really smart and interesting guy from Australia, he quit a consulting job to be a professional cricket player for a while. His class goes at a fast pace, but he keeps it interesting and lively with some jeopardy-like game play and other shenanigans. The course itself dealt with making managment decisions using financial information. e.g. whether or not you should drop a product, buy a machine, or if you should accept a special order of a product. We had a business case about Skydive Gananoque and had to evaluate their busines and produce some marketing ideas for them (I ended up organazing a skydiving event for the class, but that's for another post).

Managerial Economics
Dr. Bo Pazderka is a really interesting character. He has a dry sense of humour that I really liked. His class was very well structured and the course notes were really organized. He's also really soft spoken and talks slowly. You really have to pay attention to what's going on in class. It's also really easy to fall asleep. The course dealt with supply and demand curves, but in relation to companies and firms. It dealt with the behaviour of the market in an industry with perfect competition, a monopoly, monopolistic competition, and an oligopoly or cartel. Interesting stuff really, but it was hard to keep up with the readings.

Organizational Behaviour
I don't want to say too much about this course. I didn't really enjoy it and the work load for it was a bit ridiculous. The volume of reading and writing that the professor required from us was crazy without any added benefit. A lot of the material was repetitive and I found the whole topic very academic and without enough focus on practical applications. In my mind, you can talk all you want about human resources management, but there's no substitute for rolling your sleeves up and walking down to the shop floor and talking to the people doing the work. Then you find out what makes them tick, what they're looking for, and how to motivate them.

This module was a lot of work and the stress level was showing in the class. Tempers were short and I think people were happy when the break came along. We'll have to enjoy the break because I don't think it'll be long before the work load kicks up again.

More pics from the Toronto autoshow

I finally got around to developing a roll of film that I had lying around. It's got some more pics from the Toronto autoshow. Here are some of the better ones:

Kinston New Ventures Tour

The Queen's MBA program had been working with some of the local businesses in the area. I think the idea is to promote Kingston as a place where people can stay for a while...not just go to school and move on to bigger cities. They set us on a tour of about 13 local business. It's hard to coordinate 75 students showing up a these different businesses, so they gave each team 3 business to visit. There was a elevator pitch competition at the end where each team was given a company and had to deliver the pitch to a panel of judges. There was a nice trophy at the end.

I was really happy that one of the businesses on my team's list was Transformix Engineering. They design and build automated high speed assembly systems for various clients. Their plant is small but they're doing some neat things. It was nice to be back in the familiar world of cutting metal and assembly things on the shop floor. I made a mental note to contact them later in the year to start a conversation about the possibility of working with them. I still like engineering but I'm ready to move on an get involved on the business side of things. Working with Transformix would give me a chance to have both sides.

Down time...

July's been a busy month. The school work kicked up a few notches and I've been trying to find that balance between work and play. It's worked out so far, but it's been difficult. We have about a week off now. I have lot's to post about...it's been almost a month since I've posted anything.

In Ottawa

I decided to do a day trip with some of my classmates up to Ottawa on Sunday. They haven't been there before and it was the first chance most of us had to get out of Kingston. It was another fun day and I had a good time showing people around. It was also a good chance to get together with some friends that I haven't seen in a long time. After checking out Parliament Hill, we had brunch at a restaurant called the Courtyard in the downtown market area...good spot to eat!

Have a look at the pictures here.

Finally some sailing!

Part of my role as the fitness liaison for the class is to organize about two events per month. A lot of people were keen on sailing. There's a rental place in Kingston called Ahoy Rentals. The rent out bicycles, canoes, and kayaks. They also rent out sailboats and can even setup sailing excursions around the 1000 islands near Kingston. I managed to rent a Tanzer 26 and set up three 2hr sails for about 15 people in the class. One of the guys in the class, Dave, has sailed for a long time and used to be a sailing instructor. He helped me out for the day in teaching people points of sail and sailing the boat.

It turned out to be a really fun day and the weather cooperated. We had a steady gust of around 10 knots and the big boat handled fairly well. After about 9 hours out on the water, I was pretty beat. The sun has a way of tiring you out.

Here are a couple pictures from the day:





You can check out the rest of the pictures here.

MBA: End of Module 2

Well, two exams in one week marked the end of module 2: Statistics and Microeconomics. It was a start contrast in teaching styles by two different professors. Prof. McGill made a boring topic like statistics and made it seem interesting by continually referring to the real business applications of statistical methods. Prof. McHale, on the other hand, made the interesting topic of economics and made it seem really boring. You can't expect every professor to be great at classroom management, but I was really disappointed with how the economics class turned out.

I meant to post a blog last week, but I spent the weekend doing multiple regressions of housing data for North America. It was an interesting assignment. We had to use the regression technique to forecast real estate investment for the first two financial quarters of 2008.

The mad rush to finish the assignment in time was followed by a study session for the exam in the middle of the week. There wasn't any time to relax because we had to get to studying for the economics exam on Friday.

It was a pretty crazy week and I'm glad that it's over. No doubt, there's more craziness to come.

MBA: Statistics and Microeconomics

This past week we started with a new module in the course curriculum. It's called Making Decisions in a World of Complexity. The theme of studying two aspects of the same topic continued pairing Microeconomics with Statistics. The microeconomics course is about the big picture thinking regarding industries and society while the statistics course deals with how to collect and manage the numbers that aid in forming the economic picture.

Microeconomics
The course is actually titled The Global Environment of Business. Prof. John McHale is really a brilliant guy. You can tell that he's highly intelligent and knows his stuff really well. I get the impression that he thinks at such a high level that he has a hard time explaining economics concepts in simple terms. I asked a couple questions in class and got some really long answers when I was just looking for a simple one. I think he's so advanced in the field where some of the basic concepts like the supply-demand curve is second nature to him that he has a hard time relating to people who have no experience in the field.

The course gets really interesting at times. We discussed big issues like Peak Oil and Climate Change from an economic perspective. One team had an interesting presentation about the Stern Report. My team had to present an alternate point of view by Bjorn Lomborg. We had to read a chapter from his book "Cool It" and present the information as advocates of his argument. You can get the gist of his point of view from this YouTube video.

Apart from the funny similarity of his name to a character in Office Space, I think Lomborg is missing the boat on some key aspects of the increasing global temperature. He's primarily concerned with some big humanitarian issues in the world like HIV, poverty, and famine. My view is that if the global temperatures continue to increase, the weather instability will magnify the issues that he's concerned with. Maybe my reading of The Weathermakers has had a big influence on my point of view, but that's another topic of discussion.

In any case, I still have to learn the material and understand some of the economic analysis tools that we're being taught.

Statistics
The course is actually titled Acquisition and Analysis of Information for Management and Prof. Jeff McGill does an excellent job of making the topic interesting. In a way, it's refreshing to be back to the familiar world of formulae and number crunching where there are definite right and wrong answers. It's been a really long time since I did anything with statistics though and I don't remember much from my university course. I do remember that I didn't enjoy it very much and that I didn't do very well in it.

Naturally, the course is heavily dependent on using spreadsheets and in our case, Microsoft Excel 2007. In one sense, the Microsoft programmers have done a good job in including some advanced analysis tools that makes breaking down data very easy. In another sense, the new interface is very unintuitive and is cumbersome to use. It takes a while to get use to it and the simple tasks take longer than usual since I spend a lot of time trying to find where the commands are.

The course material isn't difficult in itself, but the time crunch of learning everything in a span of a week and a half is pretty challenging. Some members of our class have no background in using formulae and some have never used MS Excel. It's a steep learning curve for them. I'll encounter the same thing when we get to the finance courses.

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I decided to run for the student executive body. They are the link between the program administration and the class. I ran for the fit-to-lead liaison position and found out today that I got elected. The fit-to-lead program (you can read about it at the bottom of this page) is there to make sure the students get a balanced experience and form healthy lifestyle habits. They provide information about healthy diets and set up opportunities for people to get out and be active. They also set up personal training sessions and fitness assessments. I ran because I thought it would be a fun thing to do. I know it's going to be a tough balancing act between my school work and the liaison duties, but it's only for a year and I think I'll have a lot of fun doing it. Along with a couple of other guys, I've already played a part in getting a sailing program running (we'll find out more concrete details this coming week). I also made a personal list of things that I want to do this summer...getting the class involved in them will make it more fun.

MBA: Second week...

The second week of the Queen's MBA program was a little more structured than the first. There were two courses: The Role of the General Manager and Leadership. I guess they wanted to start us off thinking about leading an organization from the top and entertaining the possibility that one day we would be CEOs and general managers. It was an interesting week covering both the technical and abstract aspects of leading an organization.

The Role of the General Manager
This was a really interesting course taught by a dynamic lecturer with a really interesting job outside of teaching. Professor Peter Richardson gets recruited to conduct strategy workshops mainly for mining companies to help them form business strategies that will help them turn around and become profitable. He told us some interesting stories about some big mining operations and how he conducted the workshops that involved selected people from across the entire organization; all the way from the executive level down to the labourer level. We had a case study where we had to look at Acklands Grainger and come up with a strategy to turn them around. He even brought in Doug Harrison talk to us for an hour and entertain our questions. Mr. Harrison was the guy in charge of turning Acklands Grainger around back in 2000.
Professor Richardson works with his wife, Elspeth Murray, in the Strategy field and they published a book called Fast Forward: Organizational Change in 100 days. We had to read four chapters out of the book for the course, but the workload was fairly heavy and I only skimmed through it. It'll be on my reading list for when I actually have the time to sit down and do some leisurely reading.
I was really intrigued by the Strategy field of study. I'll have to make a point to visit Prof. Richardson's office and ask him about the academic research aspect of what he does. I did manage to talk to him a little bit about general management consulting companies like BCG.
After coming up with a strategy, a key part in implementing it is getting everybody in the company aligned with the goals set by the corporate strategy. Part of the process is coming up with corporate vision, mission, and objective statements. You can see those statements in the lobbies of most companies...they usually have an airy and flowery tone to them. I saw them when I was working at JDS Uniphase and didn't think much of them. It was interesting to learn about how they actually come up with those statements.
I was more concerned with the details of implementing a strategy than coming up with some phrases that sounded nice. The part of the course that I found most interesting was Prof. Richardson's break down of the employees of a company when a strategy goes into implementation. He has a 20-70-10 rule of thumb. When you outline a new strategy, 20% of the employees will see the value of the strategy and will be highly enthusiastic about implementing it. 70% of the employees will take a wait-and-see approach. The remaining 10% are what he calls "the saboteurs." These are the people who hate change and will fight it every chance that they get. Prof. Richardson said that the key to successfully implementing a new strategy is to find the 20% employees (they could be the receptionist, secretaries, line workers, maintenance people, engineers, any employee at any level really) and engage them to rally the 70% fence-sitting employees. The 10% saboteurs will either leave on their own volition or will eventually find a way to allow the company to get rid of them. It was an interesting perspective...I kept thinking back to some of the places that I've worked at and recalled several sceptical people who always had something bad to say about the company. I don't know if they would have actually been effective at derailing a corporate strategy, but they definitely made the work atmosphere miserable.

Our team assignment for this course was to take a case study for Paradigm Foods and form a strategy to turn their business around. We had to present our strategy to Prof. Richardson, Elspeth Murray, and the MBA Dean, Dr. Bill Blake. Our team came up with a solid strategy (we thought so in any case) and had a good presentation...really good if you consider that it was the first one we did as a team and we were unfamiliar with each other's styles. We paid a heavy price though...we were up until 4:30am on Friday night putting the strategy slide deck together. It seems that we're a group of perfectionists with poor time management skills.

Leadership
Dr. Blake has been studying leadership for around 30 years. He was in the Canadian navy and had some neat stories to tell us. This class was a stark contrast to that taught by Prof. Richardson. The GM course dealt with concrete concepts regarding corporate strategy and Prof. Richardson had a lot of energy and was in constant motion. Dr. Blake, on the other had, is a soft speaker with a soothing voice that made it hard to stay alert...especially after lunch. The course itself was more of a discussion class that dealt with the abstract concept of leadership. It took a while to get going in the class, but people got engaged and there were some interesting discussions in class. Ethics was one area that we looked and it was interesting to hear the different interpretations of the same case study. The assignment for the course was an individual essay talking about the best or worst leaders that we have ever worked with or been around. I decided to talk about the worst leader that I encountered...won't go into details here but it was an interesting course none the less.

This week we'll get into microeconomics and statistics. I'm not sure if these courses will be as interesting as the previous ones, but I'll have to wait and see.

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One that that really struck me here was the Maps of Meaning series by Prof. Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. He's a psychology professor who occasionally shows up on the news as an expert when something crazy like a school shooting happens. The first episode had a lot of relevancy to the team building course while the 2nd lecture related to the leadership course very closely. I had watched the series back in 2006 and referred to it every now and then. It had a big effect on how I now view the world. The quote on the title of this blog is the last thing that Prof. Peterson says in his last lecture.

MBA: Thoughts on the first week...

Well...1 week down, 51 to go.

It's been a crazy week! I have to say first that the MBA staff are really good. They know how to make the program structure run well and smoothly. They're very helpful in terms of getting the students set up and running. If you have a question about something, they're very quick to get you the answers. They've been doing this sort of thing for a while and pretty much know what the students are going through.

A lot of people, especially the international students, arrived right before the program started. There isn't enough time to get used to a new city and find out where to get the essentials like food and how to get there. The school understands this and provides lunch and dinner for the first week until people have time to settle in and figure out their personal needs and logistics. The program content itself is just like a regular 2 year MBA but condensed into 1 year. So getting off to a fast start is essential...that's pretty much what the first week was about.

Know Thyself
The program is centred around teaching the individual how to work as part of a high performance team. Most people usually know what they're like but they don't usually know how to describe themselves in a nutshell. Getting to know the people you work with also usually takes time since interacting with new colleagues usually is a slow process that starts with getting to know them at work and then, later on, outside of work. Individual personalities and different levels of introvert/extrovert tendencies affect the time it takes for any team to gel and get to the level where they're in sync and working well with each other.

In the Queen's MBA program, there isn't enough time for that process to occur naturally. There's also a risk that a team won't gel at all and that would work contrary to the goal of the program. So they've done a lot of work in getting people to know themselves and getting team members to share they individual info with each other. The idea is to accelerate the gelling process of a team.

One of the tools they use is the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI). A guy named Ned Hermann did a lot of research into how the brain works and figured out a way to show it using a survey. Basically, he divided brain tendencies in to four categories and assigned colours and letters to them. Once you've done the survey and seen the results in a diagram and data form, you get a clearer picture about who you are and what your natural tendencies and preferences are. Obviously, most people know themselves pretty well. Not many people, however, know how to communicate to other people who they are in a nutshell. This instrument provides a way. There's a lot to it and it'll be difficult to summarize it all. You can read more about it here.

For me, my dominant quadrant is yellow, followed closely by blue. My green and red quadrants about equal, but about half as dominant as the other two. My blue/yellow dominance means that people like me are suited for jobs that have a combination of creativity and quantitative work...like a design engineer. So I guess the fact that I've worked as a design engineer for my entire professional life is no surprise. It's a nice affirmation of what I think I'm about and what my preferences are.

Another tool they use is a Gallup survey that tells you what your themes are. It's difficult to explain what a theme is without showing the report. I wanted to scan the pages to show people, but I'm still adjusting to the rhythm here and haven't gotten around to setting up my scanner. Once things settle down a bit, I'll post the info. The basic idea of the Gallup survey though, is that it gives you another sense of who you are written down in a report. There are 34 themes in total and they list them in the order of most dominant to least dominant. Since every individual is different, every individual report will be different. I guess that since every person's fingerprints are unique it only makes sense that every person's brain works in a different way. My most dominant theme is Strategic while my least dominant theme is Significance. I don't have the exact definitions handy right now, but, if I recall correctly, the Strategic theme has to do with big picture thinking and problem solving while the Significance theme has to do with how I feel about what people think about me.

I can see where they're going with these kind of tools. Written reports that paint a picture of who you are make it easier for you to identify the kind of work that you really want to be doing and also helps you put together a strong resume and gives you the basis for being really strong in an interview situation.

Team Work
The team aspect of the program is intriguing. In one sense, I feel like I'm a bit of a lab rat with experimenters watching how I work and how I interact with other people. In the other sense, I'm starting to see the how of the team program at Queen's stands out from the other programs. There's a lot of socializing going on in the first week designed to get the students interacting and getting to know one another. Whatever the reasons are, you naturally gravitate toward certain types of people based on who you are and who they are. You also form quick impressions of the people around you and categorize them to make sense of the frenzied social situation. When I finally found out who the people on my team are, it really stood out to me that I hadn't talked to any of them in the socializing aspects. At that point, I pretty much saw the real value of the Queen's team structure. They deliberately set you up with people that you aren't naturally compatible with. The idea being that if you can work with that team, you can pretty much work with any team.

Apart from myself, my team includes a girl from a Greek family and a background in IT consulting, an Irani girl with an architecture background, an Indian guy with a telecom background, another Indian guy with a telecom background, and an English guy with a political science background.

They put us through some exercises designed to get us to know one another. One interesting team building exercise was called "bombardment". There's some info about it here. Basically, it forces you to see the positive aspects of the people that you'll be working with and then tell them about it bombarding them with positive feedback. I found it to be a strange and weird thing to go, but it does force you to break up your initial impression of them and how you categorized them. I found the body language of the exercise particularly interesting. It'll take too long to elaborate any further here, but I might write a more detailed post about it some time down the road.

As a group, our brain dominance is very yellow and the Strategic them is one of our top five themes. To me, that means that we have to potential to be really creative and come up with really good solutions to problems. If we can find a way to work with each other really well and manage our natural personality conflicts, we could be a really good team.

There are four stages that any team goes through: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. You can read about the stages here, but if we can manage to get to the Performing stage quickly, we'll be really good.

Each team also gets a team facilitator/coach. Someone to help us get over some of our problems and get us working together. Our facilitator has a really strong human resources background and has a lot of info that can help us out.

Achieving Balance
This is something that I naturally try to achieve in my life, but, thankfully and probably for the best, not everyone is like me. So the Queen's program tries to illustrate that to people with the Fit-to-Lead implementation. A healthy body and a healthy mind will allow people to perform at their best. Since the brain is a physical organ in your body that affects how you think, having a healthy and active lifestyle combined with good nutritional habits will lead to a healthy state of mind. So they encourage physical activity and devoted the latter half of the first week to getting people out an active. They organized a trip to a driving range and mini-putt place to get people active. There was a volleyball court there as well so people go do what they preferred. I stuck to the driving range...I went through 3 buckets of balls cranking them with a driver. Lots of fun for free!...everything was paid for by the school. I might bring my clubs back the next time I visit my parents...there are a number of golfers in the class.

There's also another silly aspect of the fit-to-lead program. Every now and then, some of the student employees of the program will come in with a boombox and get everybody dancing for 10-15 minutes. People who've worked in a large corporate atmosphere will be familiar with this. I hate being forced to dance so naturally I'm not really big on this. I know why they do it...it lightens up the mood in the class room and gives everyone a fun diversion. I dance when I feel like it, but forcing me to do it has the opposite effect of what was intended. Whatever...I'll go with it and who knows, I might come to enjoy it.

Continuity
A group from the previous class came for a visit yesterday and threw us a party. They made us wear silly things and got us running around Kingston on a scavenger hunt. People who've gone through engineering schools in Canada will be familiar with this...it's just a fun thing to do and good excuse to have a few drinks.

Those guys were still fresh out of the program...they only just graduated a week before our class started. Things started out in a very civilized fashion, each team sat in their team rooms while a graduate from that particular room came in and talked to us about the previous team. Apparently, my team's room is one of the better ones and last year's team was one of the best...a good omen. The graduates also gave us some pretty good pointers and assured us that everything will be ok...Queen's wants us to succeed and they'll do everything to try to help us out.


This post is starting to get a little lengthy so I'll wrap it up here. The main thing that I got out of this first week is that if you approach this program in the same way you start a new job, things will work out well. I think the fact that you're paying a significant financial price for this education and that you're in a class room environment throws you off for a loop. In a way, you are starting a new job. This program is a very intense and long training session for the work that you'll be doing afterwards.

It's going to be a gruelling year, but I think it'll also be really fun and I'll end up with a really great sense of satisfaction by the end of it.

MBA: First day...

I officially started the MBA program at Queen's today. I wore a suit since they asked everyone to wear "business attire". It's a bit of a switch from the jeans and shirt dress code that I got accustomed to working as an engineer. I guess I'll have to get accustomed to wearing more formal attire from here on in.

There was a pre-program mixer organized through a group on Facebook Saturday night. I got to meet some of my classmates and mingle together. I met most of the rest of the class today...there's 77 of us so it's difficult trying to get to know everyone right off the bat. It's a good group overall...should be a good time getting to know everybody.

Anyways, it seems like this week is going to be a long one. Lots of details to take care of and lots of info. Here's what the schedule looks like:



Pretty busy week! A lot different from undergrad years...everyone's going to be busy for most of the year. I like it...it'll be intense and busy, but I think it'll also be fun.

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I'm the oddball in the group as far as computer use is involved. I ended up getting a linux laptop from Dell because I wanted to avoid Windows Vista. In hindsight, I might have saved myself a headache and just buckled into buying a machine with Windows on it. I installed Windows XP using VirtualBox...today was a trial in seeing how it would work. So far so good. I installed Lotus Notes without a problem. I'll see in the coming weeks how the networking and printing will work. I know that there's a version for linux, but I think I'll tackle that if I have some time over the weekend.

It's all gone JMo

If you're ever driving around Markham, Ontario, and you hear a guy's voice in the background occasionally yelling "Beat it!", then hear a loud bass and with some dance/techno music, that's probably JMo driving by your vicinity. He's a real life Frankie Wilde minus the coke badger, Ibiza clubs, bikini babes, and cheap whiskey...and he still has his hearing, remarkably.

Anyways, I sat next to JMo at MTC...good guy, but loud. He put together a new mix: Sunday Sessions April 2008. It's pretty good...I have it playing right now. You probably need a good sub woofer to really appreciate it, but it's still good to listen to. You can listen/download it here.

Why get an MBA?

I've thought about getting an MBA for a while now. A couple of my friends have gone through Rotman and one through Wharton and they shared their experiences with me. I liked everything that I heard and was really interested in the topics, but, in my mind, two years of schooling with no income was a steep price to pay...never mind the tuition. It wasn't until I found out about one year programs that I seriously contemplated going back to school.

Here are a few of my reasons for doing it:

Ambition
I've had thoughts of starting my own business for the past few years and even attempted starting my own mechanical design company after my career break. I've also been keen on sometime managing an engineering department. To achieve either goal, I'd need to obtain some sort of management and business knowledge and apply it somewhere. An MBA is one way to get that knowledge...applying it in a new position after school would be a great experience.

Increased Opportunity
Between my co-op and full-time experience, I've spent almost 9 years in the same sort of mechanical design role designing machined/stamped metal parts. The context of the design, whether in high-tech, aerospace, or automotive, has changed, but the overall process and methodology has been the same. Over the years, I've developed other interests and contemplated a career switch to something in the field of computers/software. Starting over from scratch at an entry level would have been a long and arduous process. An MBA gives me access to other non-engineering industries without having to start all over again. Industries like banking, financial investments, information systems, and management consulting all recruit MBA students. Last year's Queen's MBA annual report shows a list of companies that recruit their students...it's a long list (page 8).

Personal Growth
I've been able to excel at almost every job that I've had. I want to see just how far my talent and ability can take me. The personal coaching and leadership training that an MBA offers can be extremely helpful and can help me attain higher goals.

Higher potential income
Pretty self explanatory here. I can draw a higher income with an MBA than with an engineering degree alone.

Timing
Manufacturing in Ontario is slipping and the local economy is not doing so well. It seemed like a good time to step out of it for a while and go back to school.


Here are a few of my reasons for choosing Queen's:

• 1 year program


• Technology based


• Team oriented approach


• Kingston: smaller town and sailing mecca


• Timing: the program starts in May and my lease in Toronto ended at the end of April...it just made a lot of sense.


• Intangibles: not sure why exactly, but when I tried their student-for-a-day trial I pretty much knew that an MBA was what I wanted to do and Queen's was where I wanted to do it.

Most people apply to a bunch of schools but I only applied to Queen's. It was a pretty safe bet that I would get in as long as I didn't screw up on the GMAT exam.

Anyways, student life officially started today. I just moved into a room in a house with 6 other grad students. Tomorrow I'll stop by the MBA office and pick up my student card. I'll pick up some groceries and a few items. I already have homework to do so I'll have to get cracking on some reading.

I've thought about making entries on this blog summarizing my readings as a study method to try and make the knowledge stick better. I'm not sure how practical that will be, but I'll try it and see how it goes.

Moving on...

Yesterday was my last day of work at Multimatic. I'm headed back to school for an MBA at the Queen's School of Business. I'd only been at MTC (Multimatic Technical Centre) for a year...a year and two days exactly. It's a decent place to work, there a lot of highly capable people and I got along with almost everyone. In terms of Mechanical Engineering, there aren't many other places that have the capabilities that they have. Their core business is automotive hinges, but they're also into race cars, high end sports cars, and the occasional sailboat.

I got to work on an interesting project relating to European automotive standards for head impact protection in the event that a car hits a pedestrian or a bicyclist. The basic idea is that the hood of the car would be designed to absorb the energy of the impact of the victim's head as a method to reduce head trauma or fatalities. You can read more about it here.

In terms of design, there are two ways of achieving this goal. You can design a passive "soft" system where the hinge, supporting structure, and the hood buckle under the impact of the victim's head. The other method is to design an active system where the car has sensors on the front bumper to detect a collision and an active lift system where the hood is raised by about 50-150mm at the hinges. This youtube video shows the implementation of the system on a current Jaguar vehicle (EUMatic is a European division of Multimatic and they produce the hinges for Jaguar).

The project I worked on was an active system that was already in development, but I was tasked with designing a hinge system proposal for a future European version of the Chrysler 300. Instead of airbags or other pyrotechnic devices for lifting the hood, the system I was working on used gas struts. The central idea is that in the event of a false deployment (faulty sensor or impact with a garbage can or other inanimate object), the driver could just manually reset the system by opening the hood and continue driving. Currently, a false deployment with the Jaguar system would mean that the driver would have to call for a tow truck and have the hinges/hood/airbags replaced...pretty costly. The Multimatic system would protect against that.

I can't go into details about the project, but it was a really good learning experience. The workload was heavy but interesting. I did some pretty neat kinematics on the design side (something akin to this), had three quarters of the analysis department work on the strength and dynamics of the system, and got to be part of a technical review at the Chrysler Technical Centre in Auburn Hills, Michigan.

Unfortunately, even though the Chrysler engineers loved our system from a technical standpoint, the price tag was a little to high for their liking. The last I heard was that our system was around US$50 more per system than the next competitor. That came out to around US$6M more for the entire vehicle program. They went with a supplier that offered a non-resetting pyrotechnic system.

My last design task was to design some demo fixtures of the GM Tech World show where GM invited a select number of suppliers to show case their technologies. One of the demo fixtures was for the active system using a Saab 93 hood. It was really cool seeing the system in action...the fixture literally jumped of the floor. Pretty dramatic! It'll be interesting to hear about the reactions of the GM people.

In the end though, as interesting as that work was, I decided that it was time to move on to something different. Pursuing an MBA was a step that I need to take to get to do the kind of work that I'd grown more interested in. I'll write more about the thoughts that went to that decision in another post...

About Biodiesel...

I've been reading a lot about Biodiesel lately in terms of an alternative energy source. It's attractive since it's a closed loop cycle type of fuel. Vegetable oil from plants like Rapeseed (Canola), Peanut, and Soybean can be converted into a fuel suitable for running in diesel engines. Rudolph Diesel, the German inventor of the engine, initially ran his engine on peanut oil in the very early 1900s. With the advent of cheap petroleum, diesel fuel extracted from crude oil was more cost effective to run in these engines.

You can read about the benefits of a diesel engine here.

Biodiesel seems to be gaining in popularity with the current rise in gasoline prices (As of today, crude oil goes for about US$120 per barrel). There seems to be a grassroots movement for home made biodiesel fuel, a Youtube search for biodiesel shows a lot of instructional videos on how to make it.

CBC Marketplace has a good article about the fuel. Canada Clean Fuels is a Canadian company that distributes biodiesel and their website has a lot of good information about the benefits and drawbacks of using the fuel. Other good resources can be found here, here, and here.

As I understand it the main benefits and drawbacks are as follows:

Benefits

• The carbon contained within the fuel is extracted from the atmosphere by the plants harvested for the fuel. No carbon is transferred from underground storage (petroluem) to the atmosphere.


• Pure bisdiesel (B100) burned in a diesel engine has significantly lower CO2 emissions that current gasoline engines.


• Engines run with biodiesel run cleaner and more efficiently. They also last longer and require less maintenance than when run with petro-diesel. Biodiesel does not contain the substances that can gum up an engine.


• Lower cost fuel.

Drawbacks

• Increased NOx emissions. These can be offset with good catalytic converters.


• Poor cold weather performance. Biodiesel becomes very viscous and can freeze at the cold temperatures that Canada experiences in the winter. Blending biodiesel with petro-diesel can alleviate this problem.


• Large areas of agricultural land will need to be devoted to growing the plants needed for large scale fuel production.


• Not readily available at gas pumps


• There aren't a lot of passenger vehicles that have diesel engines. Volkswagen is at the forefront with the Turbo Diesel Injection engines (TDI)

In a previous post about Tim Flannery, I mentioned a Canadian company called Dynamotive and their process for producing Bio-oil through pyrolysis. I started wondering if the Bio-oil could be used to make Biodiesel. That way the process has a double effect on removing CO2 from the atmosphere: carbon sequestration and reduced tailpipe emissions. Maybe that was their original intent with their business idea.

I also started thinking that a series hybrid vehicle with a small efficient diesel engine generator would be a relatively simple car to develop. This sort of solution has already been implemented for locomotive engines and buses (see here and here).

Maybe it's just a matter of time before this type of solution is implemented economically for passenger cars. I guess we just have to be a little more patient...