MBA Final Quarter Blues

It is really hard for an MBA to stay focused and motivated during final quarter. Generally, finding that new job takes precedence over class work. Even once you find a job, you get a whole new set of distractions: preparing new employment paperwork, background checks, drug tests, preparing for the new job, and finding a new apartment (that may be in a new city). Additionally, as you think about your new career you come to the realization that right now may be the last time for awhile that you will have some flexible time to enjoy life. So, class work gets further pushed down the priority ladder.

I think you need to keep that in perspective when you look at your final quarter group experiences. It is incredibly difficult to be part of a team where one, two, all members are not motivated and/or distracted. In that situation you need to set your expectations low to avoid frustration. While it is great to have the team commit to a group goal, it is very hard for MBAs to admit that they will likely do the minimum or less on this project. So you will end up with everyone saying they will do their best, but their actions will reveal their other priorities. So, the message is even when group goals are set, adjust your expectations downward to reflect the realities of MBA final quarter.

Now you may wonder if there is an Org.Behavior lesson on how to manage a team in this situation? And I think there is, but it is not a pretty answer. If you have an unmotivated and/or distracted team, there will be little you can do unless you can find their motivation and eliminate their distractions. In this situation, you can't eliminate an MBA's life distractions; and motivation really depends on the individual - how interested they are in the project versus other things they could be doing.

Achievement: Job Before Graduation

Career search for an MBA is a full time job. As great as my program is, we do not get the parade of major companies recruiting on-campus like some other schools. We get a number of the local majors, but we do not get the Googles and Amazons of the world. That is the challenge of being part of a building process. No doubt in my mind, Merage is moving in the right direction, but attracting major companies will be a long process for this school.
In hindsight, as a international, I may have more aggressively pursued a major MBA program to make my career search easier. Internationals have enough hurdles to cross as it is. I strongly believe Merage is the best educational fit for me, but if you want to go to a big name company you will need to do alot of networking as you will see below.
The good news is that I accepted a position this week with Experian; and it is a really fantastic position. I will be a Synergy & Innovation Manager. I am part of a 4 person team led by an EVP who reports directly to the Americas CEO. Our task is to help Experian's 16 business lines improve their cross-communication and collaboration to spur innovation and revenue growth for the company.
As a company grows it naturally forms groups who solely focus on their business idea. While focusing on their idea, they not really interact with the other lines. That is needed for the business to excel, but there comes a point when the revenue growth from those business lines slows down to a level below what is demanded from a successful company. New ideas must be spawned. Sharing information is the first step.
The next step for our team will be to identify great opportunities that arise from this information sharing and help build them into strong business lines in their own right. Huge challenges and a great opportunity with a great multi-national company that would not have been possible without Merage.
My job search process took alot of time. Internationals not only must demonstrate that they are the best candidate for the job, they must demonstrate they are worth the extra trouble over the next best candidate (a difficult proposition in this slowdown period that is seeing more candidates in the job pool). I classify my search in three categories: 1) Opportunities arising from Merage; 2) Opportunities from networking; and 3) Generic job board opportunities.
Opportunities that flow through Merage are prime opportunities. Those companies know about Merage's great program and are looking for people trained in that manner. We get a number of great companies coming to Merage like Yum Brands, Experian, Mervyn's, and Walt Disney. I credit our career center. They have made dramatic improvements and I am sure the quality of incoming companies will only improve.
The second way to drum up job opportunities is to network. This is incredibly important for all MBAs, but critically important for internationals. After the companies that come to your career center, these opportunities will be your best ones. Personally, I contacted alumni at my target companies, leveraged LinkedIN to find people in my extended network at these companies, and attended trade shows in my industry to make contacts. At the time I accepted the Experian offer, I was 2/3 the way through the interview process with Amazon. I got the opportunity to interview with Amazon by attending the Web2.0 trade show where I introduced myself to an Amazon recruiter and followed up with an email indicating my interest in a specific position.
The last way is a long shot for internationals, but we have nothing to lose: Follow job boards at specific companies and websites such as Monster.com. For this strategy, I recommend the shotgun approach - create a few generic resumes and cover letters for certain jobs and send them out to as many jobs that fit your interest. The resumes and cover letters should have as many key words as you can fit in them without sounding stupid (I call it recruiter keyword bingo). Don't expect a high response rate (maybe 1-2%), but just look at any response as a new networking opportunity. My experience saw 3 responses in an estimated 80-120 applications.
All three methods are important. You never know how or when you will resonate with a company. Even if you are rejected at one company, you should strive to build relationships with that company (I was rejected for another position at Experian). Finally, persistence and aggressiveness will win over talent any day. Call your alumni and extended networks in the companies your are interested in, create online profiles (I am sure my professional blog helped my manager better understand what I offered Experian), and keep applying. It is not easy, but it can happen if you make opportunities for yourself.
I am grateful for Merage focusing its curriculum on innovation. I think it has given me a number of tools that will improve the chances of success at this new position. I am nervous about going into a large, more political company. While I believe I have dramatically improved my diplomatic capabilities as a management consultant and at this program, I have not been true tested in this kind of environment. I am looking forward to the challenge and working with a small team dedicated to an incredibly important goal that I whole-heartedly believe in. Most of all, I am glad that Lindsey and I will have the opportunity to stay in Southern California a little longer. To everyone that supported us, we thank you and will keep you informed as we extend our California MBA Adventure.

Mobilizing to Help Great Causes

In my final quarter of my MBA program, I have the great honor of participating in a project that uses web2.0 tools to generate awareness and financial support for fantastic charitable and non-profit projects. My group's project is dedicated to support aspiring women in emerging countries. These are women entrepreneurs who require loans to expand their businesses or young girls from Africa who need education and safety in order to improve their lives and communities. We ask that you rally around these great causes. You can make an immense difference in the lives of these incredible women with just a little bit of effort!

What You Can Do

1. Buy Articles You Normally Buy At Amazon.com: We have set up an Amazon WebStore, CaringMBAs.com, where you can buy articles that you can buy at Amazon.com at the same prices. The only difference is that all of the commissions we receive go to giving scholarships to promising young girls in Mozambique.
2. Let Other People Know: Make a brief blog post about our cause. Use the text above and link to our caringmbas site!
3. Let Us Know: If you shop at our WebStore, give directly, or simply want to let us know you support what we are doing, we ask that you let us know by leaving a comment below.

Thanks for your support. If you have any great ideas on how we can spread the message about this great cause - leave a comment.

E.T. Outdoors

This past Tuesday, our family housing community hosted an outdoor movie night. People gathered on an inclined grass area and watched E.T. Lindsey and I bundled up in sweaters and blankets (it was a cold 16C that night), brought our hot chocolate, and watched the show. It was kind of neat watching a movie that takes place in the hills of California in those hills. I kept looking up to see E.T.'s spaceship in the clear sky.

Course Updates

Final quarter is moving through quickly. I only have 2 classes plus an independent study for my internship at Silverpoint Investments. Forecasting is a numbers class; any numbers class comes very easy to me. The other class is Merage's Edge course. Edge is a very interesting course that encourages students to use web2.0 tools to mobilize action whether in your company or your customers or your suppliers. I was part of the student advisory committee to help set the course syllabus. I was asked to give a quick presentation on how I use blogging to build professional value (see my professional blog here), but my main contribution has been pushing the class to adopt Twitter.

Twitter is a new web2.0 technology that, in over-simplified terms, is the most efficient means of communicating to your network. Think of a more active and constantly used facebook update that you can access online and through cell phone text messages. It is still in early adopter phase, but I am highly confident it will go mainstream like blogging has. I am proud to say that Merage is probably one of the few (if not the only) MBA school that is using the technology in one of its classes. A blogger recently posted that he gave a presentation to Stanford MBAs and was disappointed to discover only handful knew of the technology. So I pushed the Edge prof to have the class experiment with it. Many students use it to have a side commentary to speaker presentations. We used it in our last class to formulate more relevant questions to steer the speaker to topics that interested us. This is bleeding edge for MBAs and I am excited to drive its adoption.

We have a pretty interesting project for our Edge class. It is to set up an Amazon store and raise funds for special charitable/non-profit projects. My team had a very good learning lesson early. I have worked with most of them in the past and our traditional method of working was to divide up the project into little pieces to work on individually. When due, we assemble our parts, polish, and usually we get a very good grade. This project has proved to be very difficult to use this method. Many of the individual assignments did not get done or were done very poorly. I hypothesize that this is due to the interconnectedness of the individual tasks and the need for creativity.

The level of interconnectedness means that my work product can impact my partners work product or shift my perception on how my partner should do his project. This means that as we do our work our perception of the project as a whole continually changes. Therefore, when we reconvene it creates frustration because people's views have changed since we last met and results in the desire for constant changes. By forcing people to work in teams of two or three on these interconnected tasks, while the team's perception may change it is easy to share that new perception as they work on other tasks because they are group not an individual. I think this theory could be a post of its own.

I am becoming a strong believer that creative projects are done best in a collaboration of a small (read 2-3 people) teams. Most MBA's are analytical in nature and not necessarily the natural creative types. Thus, if you send us off on our own to come up with creative solutions, it may produce mixed results. But, when two or three work together and build off their each other's ideas, I feel the creative product is dramatically improved. This EDGE project demands some creativity. Therefore, when we work on our own, the quality of our creative product is very mixed.

We are trying to adjust how we work, but I am finding that we are very set in our ways. Even when we agree to collaborate more on the smaller project tasks, we generally resort to dividing the task up into smaller parts and again working on our own. So, I am not sure how well we will do on this project.

Natural Food Results

We finished our natural food experiment last Sunday. The final total was that we spent $406 over four weeks. I will deduct $20 from the total because Lindsey spent about $80 for a dinner party last Saturday. So lets say $386 over 4 weeks. We traditionally spend about $350 in the same period. So that means going natural and organic cost us an additional 10% - alot less than I expected.
We weren't sure about any immediate health benefits, but we were definitely eating better by being more aware of what we ate and controlling portions.
As for taste, Lindsey swears that the natural chicken tastes better. I really like the organic bbq sauces and salad dressings. We found some really good organic snacks. Kettle makes some amazing chipotle bbq organic potato chips. The big challenge was in soft drinks. There are organic and all natural carbonated drinks, but they generally cost about $1/bottle (Hansen's has some all natural cans for about 50c). I decided to buy sparkling water and big jugs of unsweetened organic iced tea and mix the two. It's actually quite refreshing. If I really need a sweet fix, I could add organic sugar.
Going forward, Lindsey and I decided to always try to buy organic within reason (We will not pay double the conventional price). If organic is not feasible, we will look for "all-natural" products. Where the price difference is too high for both organic or all-natural, we will just use the conventional products (or not buy at all).

Some Definitions:
Organic - Organic has a very specific meaning about how it must be grown in absence of some defined pesticides on land that has been pesticide free for 3 years prior. For products composed of ingredients, it must consist of 90% organic inputs and not use certain defined substances. For meats, this means the animals were raised in a very specific way (free to move about and graze) and are fed only organic products.
All-Natural - For meats, this means that the animal must have been fed vegetarian grains and not subject to hormones or antibiotics. For products composed of ingredients, all-natural means that there are not preservatives or chemicals used , but the ingredients may be non-organic.

Natural Food Experiment

My work with Silverpoint Investments has exposed me to the growing trend of organic or all-natural foods. Essentially, many meat products feed the animals hormones or antibiotics to make them grow better. For produce, we all know it is common to use chemical pesticides to protect the crops. The theory behind the trend to all-natural or organic food products is that these hormones and chemicals are not good for us. While there are no conclusive studies that links these practices to ill health effects, one can certainly understand the simple argument that if these hormones are not good for me to take myself, why would they be good for my food that I ingest? Further, it easy to see that as pesticide and hormone use has increased over the past 30 years, we have seen rises in cancer and obesity rates.
It is these thoughts and my work's interest in the organic movement that led me to propose a 3 week challenge to Lindsey, where we strive to eat only organic or all-natural products. The goal would be to evaluate if we noticed any immediate health effects and how it impacts the budget.
We have just completed our second week or the experiment. Our awareness of food ingredients has improved tremendously. It is obvious that we are spending more money, they key is how much more. In this experiment we have discovered that some product areas actually have comparable prices for all organic ingredients (salad dressings, bbq sauces, meat marinades). I think the big benefit of this experiment has been our raised awareness of the quality of the food we eat. At the end of this we may not move to a complete all-natural/organic diet, but we will likely shift our consumption to many of these products. After all, if you have the choice between an all-natural or a chemical-filled product, which would you consciously choose?
I will post our findings at the end of the experiment. We may extend it to 4 weeks because Lindsey has been stocking up on all-natural meats when she sees good sales.