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.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Sunday, August 10, 2008
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:
I removed the email thread after some advice from people. Probably not the best thing to do.
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.
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:
I removed the email thread after some advice from people. Probably not the best thing to do.
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.
Friday, August 01, 2008
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.
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:
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