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.