Trip to Europe, the rest

It's been a while since my last post and the story of my trip is starting to fade. Here's a quick run down of the rest of the trip.

Amsterdam
Amsterdam's a cool city. I know it's a cliche place to go and party, but it's still a good time. The tourist area, especially the red light district, is over-hyped in my opinion. There's a lot more to the city than the party spots. We walked around the city away from the tourist areas and there are some really nice neighbourhoods to walk around in and soak up the atmosphere. I'm sure it's a really beautiful place in the summer time. We checked out the Van Gogh museum and the science centre and took a canal boat tour. I didn't really take many pictures of the place though.

Brussels
Brussels was my favourite spot. It was mainly untouched by the world wars so a lot of the old building are still there close to their original state. The grand square is amazing. You don't really see it until you walk into it and once you're there it's awe inspiring. Especially when it's all lit up at night.

Here's a stitched shot that I modified into black and white and tried to give it an old look:


There are some cool spots around the city and I'm sure you can spend a whole week there and still be looking for places to explore. Le Cirio is one of the coolest bars I've been to. It's got a really old feel to it. The bartenders are old guys that are pretty funny. A La Mort Subite (the sudden death) was another cool spot. It seems like it's been a place were people have gone for an after work drink for years. Has some of the best beer I've ever tasted. The peach beer is really good.

Bruges
Bruges is the most well preserved medieval town in Europe. If you haven't seen it, check out the movie "In Bruges"...it shows how scenic the area is and it's a good movie. It was a bit of a time warp going there...really slow pace. We climbed up the bell tower and had a good lunch of crepes. We also stopped in one of many chocolate stores and had some really good hot chocolate.

Here are some pics:




After the day trip to Bruges, we hung out in Brussels for another night and then hopped on a train back to Mannheim.

Meinz
Germany has a festival called Carnaval. Not sure what it's fore, but I think it's the same idea as Brazil's carnival...last party before the lent season. We took a train to Meinz because it was recommended as a cool spot to check out the festivities and it was less than an hour away. Overall, it was a really fun day. We got dressed up and checked out the parade and the atmosphere.







Heidelberg
Heidelberg's another cool little town about a 30 minute train ride from Mannheim. It's got some cool little bars and an old castle at the top of a hill. Really scenic. Unfortunately the weather was cold, rainy, and cloudy. Still cool to see.

I was pretty wiped by the time end of the trip. The flight home was good...I slept for most of it. Overall a great trip.

Trip to Europe, Berlin

The elective courses that I want to take are scheduled so that I was frontloaded with two courses in January and early February and backloaded with three courses in March and April. In between, I had 6 weeks of free time...well mostly free time. I got a job as a teacher's assistant for a 4th year commerce course on management of new enterprises and the Tricolour Fund is an ongoing project course.

3 of my classmates were on exchange in Mannheim, Germany, for a couple of months. They had some travel plans laid out and talked me into going over there and travelling with them for 10 days. It doesn't take much to convince me to go on a trip anywhere...I just checked my finances and made sure I didn't have any outstanding deliverables for the fund or my TA work.

I met up with them in Mannheim on a Friday and that night we took a train to Berlin. Berlin was an interesting place. Apart from the old buildings like Reichstag, it felt a lot like Toronto...except with Germans. We spent a couple of days there...had an awesome dinner at a rustic Italian restaurant and went to a club. We checked out the historical sites...the holocaust memorial put a somber tone on the second day...kind of depressing combined with the cold snowy weather.

Here are some pics in any case:

A square in Mannheim


From the Reichstag




Sometimes the people around you make a picture...it's worth putting them in your shots. Here are a couple from around the Brandenburg Arch. You get some surprises like this one...


...or you can people watch and take some interesting ones.


Had to stop and check out this Bugatti


There are some really nice spots around the area...like this pano shot of the museum and cathedral (forget the names) near the arch


(I forgot to set the camera to manual so the exposures were all different. Had to photoshop it quite a bit to even things out...)

Of course, had to check out the wall...


Next was a brief stop in Rotterdam to have some lunch with some other classmates on exchange and on to Amsterdam...

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?

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.