MBA: Last courses and the end of the program

It's been a while since I last posted and the memories of the courses are fading fast.

Managing Innvation
Managing innovation was taught by Lib Gibson. She's also an adjunct professor at the Rotman school of business in Toronto. She presented some interesting concepts in terms of how to create business environments to encourage the flow of ideas. Much of what we discussed can be found in Peter Drucker's book Innovation and Entrepreneurship. We also discussed how disruptive innovations work, how to protect your company from being blindsided by disruptive innovations, and some interesting topics from TED.com. Overall, I really enjoyed this course.

The Tricolour Venture Fund
This was the highlight of my MBA academic experience and was run by Elspeth Murray, Peter Gallant, and John Molloy. Queen's has a Venture Capital Fund closely associated with the Parteq Innvotions, the technology commercialization entity for the university. We were split up into three teams and provided with a list of 9 different new ventures who are looking to secure funding to help their businesses grow. The first phase of the course was to do an initial investigation of the companies and decide on which companies to do a deep investigation and due diligence work to evaluate the investment potential. The second phase involved the due diligence work on the companies we selected through extensive meetings with the new venture entrepreneurs and management, and detailed research of the technology, market, and competitors. The companies we evaluated included:

• Skymeter - a gps technology company


• Shoeboxed.com - a digital receipts company


• iPeak Networks - an internet technology company


• SciSense - a medical device company

My team evaluated Xuuk, a fledgling start-up company that developed eyetracking technology for measuring how many people look at a sign and the length of time that each person looked. Really neat technology. The small management team had done a lot of work with the small amount of funding that they received up to that point. We recommended investing but our recommendation went to the investment committee who decide on the actual investment. This was a fun course that involved a real project with real companies and making an investment decision with real dollars. It wasn't just an academic exercise. I really liked it and it inspired me to seek work within the start-up area with VCs and on the government policy side. Unfortunately, the state of the VC industry is bad right now and work prospects are not good.

Marketing of New Ventures
By the time I started this course, the end of the program was in site, the weather was starting to get nice again, and my motivation for course work was incredibly low. I was the only student from Queen's to take this class, the other four students in the course were exchange students. I kind of liked it because of the small size and the company tours that we had. We checked out Mitel's technology incubator in Ottawa called Wesley Clover. We also did a live project to develop a marketing strategy plan for the Westbrook Golf Club in developing a new sports complex on their land.

The final days of the program were spent saying goodbye to classmates who were going on exchange, the exchange students who were with us for a few months, and a big party where we all wore white t-shirts and signed each other.

Over the last month or so, a group of us welcomed the incoming class (2010) and passed on some of the culture of the program, lessons that we learnt, and survival tips. We sent them on a scavenger hunt around town and threw a party for them. It was interesting to see them starting the program and wondering how we looked at this point last year. They're going to have a great year.

Convocation happened on May 26th at Grant Hall. It was a nice ceremony that started off with bagpipes. It was nice to meet the parents of classmates and introduce mine to some of my closer friends. It was fun, but also a little bit sad. It officially marked the end of our MBA experience and an end to one of the best years I've had to date.

MBA: Strategic Leadership

This course was designed to help explore personal leadership styles and to give students tools to develop their own leadership styles. There were more personal style surveys such as the FIRO-B instrument, another try at the MBTI to see if it changed since the beginning of the program, a survey about one's degree of self-monitoring, and some other stuff all designed to help you know yourself better.

I had high hopes for this course as real opportunity for personal growth, but the learning side wasn't as valuable as I thought it would be. There was a lot of writing involved and it seemed frivolous at times.

One interesting exercise was a project on networking where we had to interview a couple of executives and ask them questions about how they built and manage their professional networks to help them be successful. D and I partnered up and interviewed Joe Pal, the founder of Pal Insurance, and Paul Vallee of Pythian (see earlier post on Financing New Ventures). Both are interesting men with some solid life experience. In terms of networking, both men agreed that networks are built slowly over time in an organic manner. Neither had a deliberate and structured approach to managing their professional relationships. Also, you have to be genuine and be ready to help people with no benefit to yourself. Over time, this strategy will payoff because of the reputation you build for yourself.

Meeting these two gentlemen was the real benefit of this course...not sure I really learnt anything from the class work.

This leads me to a bit of a rant about business school in general. Coming from an engineering background, sometimes it seems that business people apply buzzwords and frameworks to things that should really be in the realm of mundane common sense. Not sure why it's done...maybe some business profs need something to do sometimes and come up with some intelligent sounding framework or theory. "Networking" is a buzzword that drives me nuts sometimes. They host 'networking' sessions and give talks on how to build your 'network'. Basically, they talk about how you make friends...something you've been doing your whole life since you started kindergarten. But now, in the academic business realm, it's a field of study and there are theories on the benefits of networking. End of rant. Won't even touch "synergy".

MBA: Financing New Ventures

After the Christmas break, everyone starts taking elective courses so the class breaks up and we're no longer all together all the time. My focus is on entrepreneurship and new ventures so my elective choices are geared toward that.

Financing New Ventures was co-lectured by Elspeth Murray and Andrew Waitman. The course is about how venture capital companies work, pool money together, and set up their deal flow.

The course is a prerequisite for the Tricolour Venture Fund which is also offered as a project course as part of the MBA curriculum. It's like a real life Dragon's Den where we get to evaluate start up companies and decide if the fund is going to invest in them in return for an equity stake in the company.

Andrew Waitman taught most of the course. He was a key part of Celtic House, a VC company in the Ottawa area that financed some successful technology companies over the past 10 years. He's got some great knowledge of the industry and some great insights in what it takes to make a new venture successful. He's not an academic type, speaks frankly, and tells it like it is. He had a column for a while in which he wrote about different topics with the VC and entrepreneurship realm. You can read some of it here.

As part of the course, three entrepreneurs were brought in to talk to us and we were given the opportunity to ask some detailed questions about their business and what it took for them to be successful. Really interesting.

Damian Lamb started Genesys Capital with a partner because they saw an opportunity to tap into the life sciences research in Canada and turn some of the ideas into viable businesses. He was another very frank speaker and gave us some real insights into how VC companies get started, function, and make money for themselves and their funders.

Wael Mohamed started a network security company called 3rd Brigade and gave us some good knowledge about what it really takes to get a new venture off the ground. One key learning I took was about how to simplify your idea and show your due diligence to make it easy for investors to understand what your talking about. He showed us his initial pitch presentation and it was very simple, clear, and concise. Really neat.

Paul Vallee was an entrepreneur at an early age and actually started a business when he was still an undergrad. After 3 or 4 new ventures, he became successful with the Pythian Group, a database monitoring and management company. Andrew Waitman is now CEO of Pythian. They just revamped their website and there's a video with both of them on the home page.


Rob Ford also came to talk to us about term sheets, the legal documents that accompany VC financing deals. Nice guy...he had some interesting stuff to say about the legal side of things and how deals are structured to protect the VC companies.

PEI and the Trip Home

We decided to swing by PEI on the way home because it was so close. The confederation bridge is also a Canadian landmark and an engineering marvel that was featured on the Discovery Channel. The original plan was to go have dinner in Charlottetown, but the wind was blowing hard and there were snow drifts on the road. It was a nice sunny day but still brutally cold.

We crossed the bridge and pulled into a little sleepy town called Summerside and had some seafood for lunch. Funny enough, the restaurant was out of lobster at the time.

Here's a picture of the bridge:


Really cool driving across it.

We stayed the night in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Not much of town...I was surprised by how small it was. New Brunswick doesn't have much in it anyways. Small logging communities and long stretches of road with nothing around. Scenic though.

We hit a bad snow storm around Quebec City and were stuck in it for the rest of the ride home. Driving through Montreal was brutal! We just took our time the rest of the way and made it home safely.

MBA Games in Halifax

It's been a while since my last post. I was waiting for some pictures from MBA games and then course work kicked in.

The games were good times! The first night was exciting with lots of cheering and excitement. I felt sorry for a wedding reception that was being held in the hotel at the same time...we must have been really loud.

Overall, we weren't that impressive on the sports front. We got hammered in basketball and didn't do so well in dodgeball. We won both our waterpolo games and did well in the outdoor soccer portion. We had a small contingent and there isn't a lot of athletic talent in our class anyways. It was still fun though.

Unfortunately, someone broke the window of our van in the hotel parking lot and stole a laptop. We got a new van rental but had to pay a $500 deductible on the damages. Apparently Nova Scotia's experiencing hard times and there are a lot of similar robberies in Halifax.

Anyways, here are some pictures from the games:











Here's a little clip of the opening ceremonies:


The waterpolo team:


Love this picture!


The dodgeball team:




The snow soccer team:


The basketball team:


me in action




Group picture after the closing night dinner:


The Dalhousie business school did a great job organizing it. With 13 different schools and a couple hundred mba students (organizing them is like herding cats) it couldn't have been easy but they pulled it off.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.