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.