Ivey MBA blog

Have you met George? (2)

2011-12-17T21:55:00.000-08:00

Thenext huge change came when we were planning the move to Canada in 1998. Thetough part was that my own mom was using me as leverage, telling my dad toexchange my share in her apartment for her permission for me to leave thecountry. After going through messy divorce my dad didn’t trust her a bit though and Ivolunteered to be a mediator between them. I asked my dad if he is OK for me totransfer property rights to mom and he was, but he said he didn’t trustthat she would give me the permission. They were at a gridlock telling the eachother to make the first concession. I thought it’s easy: I would get my mom towrite permission first and then I would ensure that she gets the property share.I talk to her and she agreed that it was a good way to proceed. The biggestshock came when after agreeing she went back and said that she’s not going todo it. My trust foundation was rocked.. it affected me fundamentally,afterwards I kept asking myself a question: if I can’t trust my parent how canI trust anyone. It was a fundamentally difficult question which had significanttrust repercussions for the coming years.

Asthe result of this we also had to hide the fact that we’ll try to sneak out ofthe country so I was prohibited from telling anyone that I might be leaving thecountry for the fear that my own mother is going to discover that we areleaving and try to stop it.

Itwas a difficult thing to comprehend for a 15 year old. The only two people whomI told a day before leaving Russia were one neighbor who acted as an adoptedmother to me and my girlfriend at the time. And precisely what I told them wasthat I’m going tomorrow and I might or might not come back. I think it was thebiggest shock for my girlfriend who I’ve been seeing for 9 months. Essentiallyshe thought I was joking...

Thenext day we packed and went to airport. We deposited our luggage and then itcame turn to the airport immigration. The official asked where my mom’s permissionfor me to leave the country is. My dad sunk.., I thought to myself, this is adeciding moment of my life, which it really was. On one side I get turned backand return to my previous life and the prospect of being drafted into Russianarmy in the coming years. On the other hand there was an exciting prospectiveof going to Canada and starting anew. We wouldn’t get second chance to try. Allof these things passed through my mind in an instant and I said “mother is justoutside terminal, she brought us here and will be joining us in Canada later”. The officer gave me a mean look and after checking with her superior gave us a nod. And off we went to Canada.

Canadadidn’t seem real for the first while I was there. The fact that my dad up tothe last minute didn’t believe that we had a chance to get out without my mom’spermission resulted in me not having a chance to prepare myself, whichcomplicated matters. I would dream that I’m still in Moscow and that move toCanada was indeed the dream. I would dream of army drafters knocking on my doorand wake up in cold sweat. The language and cultural barriers were quitesignificant too. I would have a feeling that everyone around me can speakRussian and just pretending that they can only speak English to make my lifedifficult. Guess perception is a funny thing when you are younger.

Thinkwe invent shortcut in mind to make life more logical and easier to comprehend.Those ideas came under a lot of pressure when we moved to Canada. It was reallya big challenge to adapt and again I stood up to it and faced it. Or did I?

Irealized that a lot of times what I was actually doing is absorbing thechallenge and moving on, thinking that a passive response is the easiest. I sawthe very same approach from my dad when he struggled to find application forhis experience and who university masters degrees from Russia. He took it instride and went for the available choice of a laborer. I saw disappointment inhis eyes as he moved to Canada thinking that it’s a land of opportunities andinstead discovered that it was precisely the opposite for him, more like a stepback.

Iwent back to last grade of high school in Canada as I was too young foruniversity and to improve my English. Then as my grades were all A’s my dadtold me to follow in his footsteps and become an Engineer. The following fouryears are an absolute blur, I don’t remember much from university. I found itcompletely uninteresting and not engaging, repeating my Russian high schoolexperience. I kept on thinking to myself, why am I doing this? I cruised alongtaking as many courses at a time to finish it faster, having an idea thatthere’s going to be a good job waiting for me at the end…

Thewake up came when I graduated from university and discovered that no oneactually was interested in hiring and average engineering student without anywork experience. I reacted in my normal way, retreating and waiting for the jobto come. I started sleeping late and waking up late. I lasted for three monthsjust sending around resumes and waiting for people to reply. At which point Irealized that I’m pretty screwed.

Ialso realized that I’m at a crossroads. I thought of my dad. I respected a lotthe fact that he sacrificed his business in Moscow to move me to Canada. At thesame time reflecting on his and my experience I saw similarities. All of asudden I come to realization that if I was to continue cruising along I wasgoing to end up average and struggle through life. I started readingbiographies of successful people trying to understand what was going throughthe minds and learn from them. I didn’t have any role models or mentors andtherefore I was seeking the advice indirectly from those books. I found thatwhat differentiated majority of those people is that they tried and were notafraid to fail. The definition of success of course can be argued, but Ibelieve having comfortable conditions in which you don’t worry about food isessential.

Withthat idea I decided to try get out of the conundrum I got myself into bygetting experience and since no one was willing to pay me to get thatexperience I had to get it for free = volunteer my time in return forexperience. I went around looking for volunteering jobs, and to my surprisecouldn’t find any neither. Nobody was keen to take a recent grad.

Atthat point I started to get quite irritated; I came to the local Chamber ofcommerce and asked for a volunteering job. They said they had nothing… I said Icould sort paper clips for all that matters as my only other alternative wouldbe to pay somebody to give me work. Fortunately they were encouraged by myenthusiasm and called me the next day and said that they actually had lots ofthings I can help them with. That’s how my full time three months stint withthem started. I ended up doing quite a bit of interesting work with them,including public policy design and negotiation and membership drives. On top ofthat I’ve got loads of local business contacts from the Chamber and was able toland a couple of decent jobs as the result. I was on fire and continued gettinginvolved in more and more stuff. Doing projects with government and local nonfor profits, participating in community leadership programs and speaking aboutimmigration issues to college and high school students. I felt alive again. Iwas the youngest among all these groups and people looked at me with amazementand that I thrived on that energy and recognition in addition to feeling goodabout the things I was involved in.

Thecity we moved to is in mid-Canada, relatively quiet and remote place and Iquickly felt like I was outgrowing it. And despite people telling me it’sbetter to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond I madea decision that there’s something more than the city and I need to make themove sooner than later.

TheMBA was my ticket out. I studied really hard for GMAT and surprised myself andpeople who knew me from university with the result. I then spend timediligently researching schools and choosing the one that appealed to mecarefully. In the mean time I started writing a blog about the wholeexperience. To my surprise I started getting a lot of readers. I was excitedagain, even though I have never thought that writing has been my strength Ifound myself really drawn to writing and spending countless hours reading otherblogs for ideas and style. My writing gradually improved and I started gettingeven more readers. At the end I was getting more than thousand people from allover world reading my blog monthly. I was on a cloud 9.

TheMBA experience was more interesting than my prior educational experience and Icame out more confident. Thinking that I want to do consulting or finance inToronto. Apparently life had added a slight twist to that plan and I endedmoving to Hong Kong instead. I felt energized again, trying somethingcompletely different, moving away from small Canadian city to an exciting placein Asia. I didn’t even think twice about moving. I just packed and said bye tomy dad, who I think was slightly surprised that I didn’t hesitate to move sofar.

Sincemoving to Hong Kong with Prudential though I feel like I lost the thread. The job was going allwell and I’m paid a multiple of what I was paid in Canada. I should be happy asI can now afford majority of things that I dreamed off before.

I’vebeen in Hong Kong for a year plus and after that moved to Singapore, where I’vebeen for a two years. Looking back I feel like life kinda stood stillsince I left Canada. Like a hamster in a wheel I move my legs, sometimes evenrun, but looking back the progress has slowed down.

The things have a potential to change though, and since three months ago I've joined AXA. There has been a multitude of new challenges awaiting me there and I'm hopeful that I can accelerate my learning and make a positive impact on the business. More on this later..

Hope you have enjoyed this little trip down my memory lane!

Till next time,

George

Have you met George? (1)

2011-12-06T21:35:00.001-08:00

I want to share with you something about myself, something that made me the person I am. Trust me, it was not an easy decision. I was debating for a while whether I should reveal some personal things on not. Having given it more thought though I'm hoping that you'll find it interesting and won't use it against me in the future.

Mylife began in Moscow, Russia. I don’t recall any extraordinary happenings in myearlier days. I was generally a happy kid; although my parents might argue thatI was a bit oaf a hand-full, and at times quite stubborn. I remember being toldthat I was an angel, but only when I was asleep...a

Nowthat I think of it, the most memorable early life moments included my uncle, hewas the most adventurous of the family and always came up with ways toentertain and excite me (from parachuting a pair of goggles when I came tovisit him to flipping his kayak twice, once with me in it). He used to take metravelling every summer, kayaking through less explored parts of Russia andcamping. It was a blast!

Unfortunately,the end of stability happened early for me, coinciding with some major changesin the country at the time. The wave of major transformation swept across thecountry ripping it apart and causing some major overnight changes. I was only 9when it happened and to me those things were more entertaining than anythingelse. Tanks on a street one day, change of government the next week and sniperson the roofs the day after. The more direct impact happened when the 1000%+inflation hit, all of a sudden I remember that certain staple foods simplydisappeared from our table. At the time I didn’t quite understand why we can’thave my favorite- cheese. I remember having to go to stores to line up forcooking oil and getting a number written on my hand to mark the place in line(1168)...

Thenit hit even closer to home, our family rapidly fell apart. It turned out thatmy dad’s salary went from being quite decent to provide for a family of four topeanuts as he was working for a government research institution. My mom, on theother hand, was giving private lessons in high-school and was doing well. Thefact that she became the main bread winner put a lot of pressure on the family.It was unfortunate when it happened, as I was only 11 and my sister 3. I don’tthink our family was unique in that respect though, the whole country was goingthrough an incredibly stressful time.

I made a choice to stay with my dad and thenext thing I remember were the hardships of the next few years. I remember thewinter of ’93 was particularly a tough one, I recall having to eat spoiledspaghetti with milk every morning before school and complaining about bugsswimming and being told that those were just sugar bits. I don’t think Iperceived it as being a hardship at a time, just thought of it as apeculiarity. Funny how the prospective differs when you are younger and don’tknow any better.

Notsure if parent’s divorce affected me much, just remember being sad and not surewhy things happened the way they did. Before the split up my mom used to takeme and sister on “dates” and I remember being quite irritated after thesplit-up when I understood that the guy was not “just” a friend. I actuallyoriginally stayed with my mom and the guy was really trying to be mean to meand get rid of me. I got the message…

WhenI think back, I think I really grew up mentally during the period. It was anaccelerated school of life. I also recall feeling rather strange at school. Inever “fit in” I tried smoking and let that go after a year as I realized thatI was doing it for social purpose rather than actually enjoying it.

I’venever felt like something was missing, my dad tried really hard to provide forme doing some odd jobs here and there. One day he’d be selling carpets, thenext day he’d be a courier and the next month would be working as a laborer inconstruction. It must’ve been really tough for him just to provide enough forus to have food on the table every day. A different set of challenges, to saythe least, really puts things into prospective… My granny on the other handwent through WWII in Russia and always recalls being starved and as the resultalways tries to eat as much as possible as a matter of habit. My dad had hisown very tough period in life where everything he was used to went away and hewas left with no income and a kid.

Iwent to a very good school in Moscow and the only strange feeling I had wasthat my classmates had infinitely more things than me. The moments I recallfrom my schooling in Moscow were winning marathon and another schoolingcompetition. Other than that I struggled with school, mostly because I couldn’tsee the purpose of doing exercises and spending time learning. I was gettingall average marks and some teachers actually told my father that I was notcapable of learning and he should hope that I become anything in life. Havingsaid that, other teachers saw through my aloofness and said that I was one ofthe most capable students but I’ve never bothered to study so never got torealize the potential.

Iwas average student in all areas except math, in which I all of a sudden gotnear the top of the class towards the end of high school, to everyone’ssurprise. To me it was quite apparent thought. One semester I was sick for along time and accidentally spend more time than usual studying. I passed with aflying colors and realized that it was not only quite easy to do math but alsoenjoyable to be featured as a top students. That was the very first examplewhen recognition pushed me forward.

Theyears went by and my dad gradually recovered and found something that could payfor our bills on a more of a permanent basis. He got a stall in downtown Moscowselling books and magazines. It was a small business but a decently profitableand my uncle got involved as well. Together they were able to gradually growand make it more successful.

Atthe same time they saw an opportunity for another small business nearby. Theydidn’t want to be distracted from their own one so they gave me an opportunityto try it. It was selling joke ids (i.e. ID of an alcoholic or an ID for a lazybum, Russian humor is slightly different from Western one). The businesswas doing well and I spend summers and time after school running this venture.I found it was one of the most fun things that I’ve done. Considering I wasonly 13, I had an early start in business world: sales, managing merchandize,figuring out profits. To say that I really enjoyed it would be a bigunderstatement.

Atthe same time I had couple of interesting side lessons like dealing with mafiaone day and drunk special forces marines another day. Police would occasionallypick me up and put me into police station for running the business underage.The normal rules of doing business clearly didn’t work! When I was 14 I learnedthat gambling is not good after losing a day’s salary in a slots machine, sinceday I stayed away from gambling.

This concludes the part 1 ;)) of my journey.

Hope you have enjoyed it,

George

Diamond and dog food shopping.

2011-12-01T21:45:00.001-08:00

Today I want to share my thoughts on something that a lot ofpeople, especially of male gender are acutely aware of. A lot of guys haveeither experienced it personally or know of what’s coming down in couple ofyears. Its called girl’s best friend and guy’s worst nightmare: diamonds;alright maybe I’m exaggerating here slightly but none the less it usually endsup being a larger than expected ouch to our financial well being.

To start lets get a bit scientific here, if you don’t mind,and understand what are we really talking about here. Diamond is essentially a very old piece ofpencil that has been cut and polished to reflect light. It does help that itsalso quite strong due to the long time it was sitting there being compressedunder earth.

For more info see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond

It sounds a bit simplistic, and it is. The value of thediamond is actually the marketing behind it.

The greatest gimmick of diamond marketing is that majorityof marketing is done to the user (female) rather than the buyer (male). It isthen the female who takes up a role of an influencer and tell the guy that shewants a big “rock” as it will reflect on the financial standing and success ofthe groom.

DeBeers was the company which initiated this successfultradition and marketed the diamonds as sign of love and commitment, reallyingenious if I may add. It tricks people into thinking that they are buying avaluable thing, investing in the future. What you are really buying is a pieceof personal branding, courtesy of the DeBeers. They spend billions of dollarstelling everyone for the best part of the 20^th century that diamondsare forever and are signs of love and success.

So here I was, earlier this year, I was finally in themarket for diamond shopping. Over the years I’ve heard both sides of the story:girls telling me that they have a “number” in mind, referring to carat and guyscomplaining that it’s largely a rip-off. I remember watching Blood Diamondmovie with Leonardo De Caprio couple years back and thinking… oh man, now I getit why diamonds are so expensive. It did leave me with a question mark in,about origins of diamonds and at least doing my little bit not to sponsor harmwhen I will be in the market for a diamond.

Where could I find some info about Diamonds? Internet was ofcourse the first choice. Then came a visit to a local branded shops, where Iwas starting to get a sense about the price and 4Cs: Carat (size), Cut,Clarity, and Color. Its quite a process, I tell you. It made me wonder if allthese things were simply invented to increase the value of the stones. Andperhaps I wasn’t very far from truth, majority of these Cs did not exist tillDeBeers introduced them in early 20^th century to differentiate theirdiamonds (commodities).

OK, let me share why Diamond is really a commodity: there’sactually a significant supply of them in the world, chemically its not uniqueand to majority of people it looks more or less the same.

So why are diamonds so expensive? The answer is simple: thereare essentially price controlled. The couple of very large minding companiescontrolling the market set the prices to maintain fat margins. That is possibleas long as people are buying into this trick: the more expensive the morevaluable it must be.

The tricky part is that the resale value of diamonds isactually quite low and if a lot of people tried to resell their engagementrings in the market the prices would drop by half or maybe even 80%.Essentially it’s an artificially created bubble which has been sustainingitself on marketing for a very long time.

Back to my own experience, after doing the preliminaryresearch myself I decided to bring my girlfriend shopping for the ring. She has never been much into diamonds and Ithought it would be a relatively easy task to get something reasonable. By thatI mean something that is not going to hurt my savings too bad and at the sametime will make her happy to wear day to day. I was wrong… the marketing pull proved hard to resist and all of the suddenI was getting told again of the two month salary benchmark, where girls tellguys to get them a ring that is at least two months their salary. Guess this isdone so that the girl can show to her friends how successful the guy is, orsomething along those lined.

As my shopping progressed so did my stress level, every timewe would walk into a branded shop my heart would skip a beat. “Oh this oneshines so bright” and is only whaaa? Tiffany and Cartier were in particularpricey. At the same time the branding is so strong that my girlfriend wastelling me that one of the colleagues at work got an Tiffany engagement ringand how happy she was and how other girls were jealous. The part I foundparticularly fascinating is the strength of marketing. After you buy a Tiffanyring, it looks exactly like any other engagement ring. The dominant part is thediamond, which the company buys in bulk and cuts, just like majority of otherbrands. However, that one simple world: it’s a Tiffany and the fact that itcame in a blue box stays with the person forever and differentiates them. Theycan keep piggy backing on the company branding.

Actually the concept is very interesting, so lets take asecond more to discuss it. What you actually buy doesn’t have a value in itself,it’s a piece of branding. Just imagine a large Blue tiffany box, you throw inyour money and in return you get branding. In this world of marketing this isactually what sells the best. And companies love it, because the actual productcan be an absolute commodity and the value comes from what’s happening incustomers head. They get your hard earned money and in return you get a littlepiece of happiness, because people around you will now know that you have asuccessful fiancé and they might even be slightly jealous. So if we think aboutit, jealousy and perception is the real currency!

Getting closer to my own finale, I finally decided thatbuying branded ring is not for me. I did some more research and found thatthere are number of reputable online retailers who sell engagement rings. Youcould even customize a ring and the diamond that you are getting. And the bestpart was that it’s almost half the price. I did my careful research and pickeda diamond that was exactly the same as the ones sold in Tiffany. It wasn’t easybut the dimensions, cut and all the other qualities were precisely the same.The only part I didn’t get was the assurance of the blue or red box. I will beabsolutely honest, I was a bit scared that the diamond was not as shiny or clear,or the setting not as nice as the one in the branded shop. The only thing thatkept me less worried is the 30 day return guarantee for the online purchase.

Once the ring was delivered to me though I was more thanhappy, I kept on looking at it and trying to compare in my mind to all therings we saw in the shops. I couldn’t tell the difference. I was brilliant withall the sparkle that the other ones had.

Having said all of this, the ring was received well by mygirlfriend. Even though I know it’s a piece of marketing that I put on herhand, she likes it. It makes her happy and I’m happy as the result as well. AllI’m saying is understand what’s going on, as it will help you make a moreconscious decision and hopefully save you some money.

The reference to the dog food was a bit cheeky, on my part.It refers to my previous post in which I mentioned that the price for thepremium dog food is actually set by the manufacturer and the user (dog) doesn’thave any way to tell the owner if its really worth the premium. Diamonds are“sold” to us and the price is set on a subjective set of criteria called 4Cs.Maybe next stage would be 4Cs of dog food: color, calories, cholesterol andcrunchiness hahaha

Till next time,

George

Dog food marketing

2011-11-24T06:47:00.001-08:00

Do you really need another one?

Let me ask you a question? How can you tell a differencebetween an average dog food and a premium dog food? I can bet that majority ofyou have no desire of trying it for yourself, and unfortunately until thepowers of science can translate dogs barking into English we are left with aninteresting dilemma: do we trust the very same people who are trying to sell usthe product. This IS the best dog food in the world!!

This is actually quite a common occurrence. In our daily liveswe come to rely on the advice of the very exact people who are trying to sellus to goods. Its called one of the two things, Advertising: which means thatthe company tries to beat its chest and tell you that they are the best and PR:in which case the company convinces somebody who you trust that they are thosepeople in turn tell you that the company is the best. I find it reallyfascinating. In order to understandwhat’s happening you have to sometimes stop and take a breather, am I reallydoing something that makes sense or something that you are being told?

Being in the Marketing field I used to think I couldidentify the tools of the trade and avoid their influence. This is indeed notthe case, the volume and sophistication of tools is such that you actually growto “want” to give them your hard earned money. It went from being a field in which you are made aware of the companyoffering to something in which your brain is being tricked into thinking thatyou absolutely need the thing. It appears that the strongest linkage is the one,which identifies the product with happiness.

Essentially if people can be convinced that they’ll becomehappier if only they had this bigger car instead of the smaller one theirneighbor drives. This in itself not abad thing but we gradually get pulled into a treadmill of unhappiness. Peoplestart associating happiness with material things; this lays a foundation for alife long quest for things to make us happy. Its very rare that people canunplug from this idea and really ask themselves, is Ferrari going to reallymake me a lot happier than a Honda? Do you need yet another Watch to make youfeel good? Does the money a guy pays to De biers equal his love for the girl?Which business De Biers is really in? Diamonds or brides?

Life in Asia

2011-04-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

Its been a really long time since I wrote anything here. Partially I felt like a lost my creative thread and partially it wasn't as relevant to the MBA, which was the original topic of this blog, so I wasn't sure if its going to be relevant to you, my reader. In any case, here goes my attempt to resurrect the blog and hopefully we can both find it interesting and relevant to start this new chapter.

Quick recap of what you might have missed: I'm originally from Moscow, moved to Canada when I was 16, did my Computer Engineering degree at University of Manitoba and then worked for couple of years in IT before venturing out to do an MBA at Ivey School of Business. Since graduation I've been working in Asia, with Prudential UK, first in Hong Kong and now in Singapore. Its been a very interesting journey and I'm happy to share with you, my reader my ups and downs.

A lot of my friends were asking me, when I first moved to Asia, if I'm finding it very difficult to live here. A lot of people thought it would be a different world out here. In reality it does have its differences and that's what makes it interesting, but so far nothing that I haven't been able to overcome. Having said that, I'll make a disclosure that I've taken the route of working in a more developed Asia so far. So the experience might be slightly different if I would have been working in Vietnam or Indonesia where conditions are more extreme than Singapore and Hong Kong.

I love both cities! Everyone always has this question: which city is best? Hong Kong or Singapore. My answer to that one, they are different, its like asking: do you prefer coke or pepsy. Hong Kong is a very vibrant city and is my first Asian love. Its the city which never sleeps! You can be going to the gym at 8am on Saturday morning and people are coming out from clubs, or if you are hungry at 6am I came out to discover on Sunday a bustling flee market right outside my doors in central HK. Even though Cantonese (Traditional Chinese)is the official language in Hong Kong, its very hard to find people who won't try to help you when you speak English to them. Even though the pace of life in Hong Kong is really fast (some people actually run from the train to escallators in the morning to beat the crowds) people won't hesitate to stop and try to help you.

Singapore is great and I love it a lot too. The ease and cleanliness of Singapore is hard to deny. Everything is in English here, taxes are low, and things just work. The air is generally much cleaner than in Hong Kong too, which makes it a lot better for outside activities. Moreover, the city is so close to other travel destinations that it makes it a perfect base town if you like travelling to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia. All within a short flight over from Singapore.

Singapore has also been the place where I found my lovely girlfriend, who has brought a lot of joy into my life over the last year. The journey continues...

Keeping it together, and mostly stable.

2010-05-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

Today I'd like to share a bit more of a personal note with you. While also attempting to introduce you to my theory of pillars. In my life I found it to be helpful to think of ones mind/existence as a table top resting on four legs/pillars. Those three legs are: family, friends, career and personal relationships. Moreover, think of having objects on the table, we have plates, cutlery and food, which metaphorically represents stuff, like thoughts, ideas, aspirations, worries and so on. OK so you get the picture.

The tricky parts with tables is that you have to keep all the legs equally strong to provide the adequate support for the stuff on top. The idea actually came to me couple of years when I was sitting at a coffee shop in Toronto and the table was just not cooperating. One of the legs was clearly shorter and the second you leaned on it slightly the coffee cups went sliding all over the place and I had to scramble trying to catch them. After that point came number of make shift solution attempts: napkins under the table leg, sugar packets, shifting the table to find more solid ground... but all the attempt were futile. At that point I was dating a Russian girl, Ekaterina who had a lot of issues, so somehow in my mind I saw a parallel between those two.

I really think that in order to be “balanced” you cannot forget/disregard one of the pillars. The main difference in this metaphor is that the table is gonna stay the way it is if you just leave it along. While we have to constantly reinforce our pillars to ensure that our life remains stable and things don't start falling off of the top.

Unfortunately, Ekaterina had a lot of family issues and her table was very shaky indeed. I tried to explain that by ignoring the issues it won't go away and only will bring more instability into other aspects of her life. Furthermore, when you try to combine one unstable table and one stable one it rarely works. There's only so much you can do to bring stability to the person that you care about. Only if they realize that its very tough to try to fix all the pillars at the same time.

Anyways, whenever I feel like things are shaky in my life I keep on thinking of Ekaterina and table tops and things become a bit more clear. I realize that I've disregarded one of the pillars for a tad too long and its time to invest more time in one of those four key areas.

Interestingly enough, I thought things were going quite well with Ekaterina. We've met at a salsa dance studio, where she was an instructor. She was a very smart and cute gal and we got along well. However, after a number of months of seeing Ekaterina she got engaged to her best friend, which happened completely out of the blue. The best part was that I found out about it really randomly. I thought that kind of stuff only happens in movies. ie. I was sitting in Starbucks with her friend. The friend left to the washroom and I decided to play a prank by writing something funny in her calendar. Instead I got a shock of my life when I opened the page onto Ekaterina's engagement dinner date ... big ouch indeed ;)) It further confirmed my theory about instability: basically her life was very shaky and she didn't really understand that the source of it was her own family situation. Things became even more tangled up when she came back half a year later saying that she broke off the engagement and wants to get back with me... Very unstable table indeed.

The moral of this story is that by disregarding one of the legs you are ultimately risking the stability of the whole. Moreover, if too much focus is concentrated in one direction the table is gonna end up lopsided and you'll likely come to regret it at one point in the future or other, although you might not openly admit it.

Just some food for thought, as usual.

The end ;))
- George

Life in a fast and busy lane

2010-04-11T01:44:00.000-07:00

Call it whatever you want, I actually feel my life getting better and more interesting by the day. Whether its sheer luck, like some of my friends say, or some careful planning and execution, which I'd like to attribute where I am now to. In any case, I am greatly enjoying the experience. For the first time in life I'm in the place in which I'm challenging myself. Moreover, I am putting it seemingly to a good use helping the organization see the gaps and move forward in return for it giving me a lesson in what works and what doesn't work in the world of business.

Its been four months since I came to Singapore, and I have been fortunate to be able to gain exposure to lots of different projects. Both the organization and my bosses are being surprisingly very accommodating to my learning style. I basically get involved in anything and everything. I started in the Product Management position which mostly entailed analyzing the performance of our product promotions as well as bringing quantitative rigor into the design of the new campaigns, an interesting tasks in itself and the best part being the exposure to all the various departments that Products naturally impact: Sales, Actuarial, and Finance. I quickly discovered that I needed to keep everybody in the loop to make it a successful exercise. The Product Management remains the core area of my responsibilities.

As an aside, there were two funny questions that people kept on asking me when I first joined our business in Singapore. First of all, the question of how old was I, kept on coming up time and again. It was a safe bet, no matter who I got introduced to, the first question never failed to be related to my age. It was a bit shocking for the first little while, as I couldn't understand if its simply part of the greeting or there was something wrong with my age. The answer turned out to be that people were apparently really curious about how young I looked for the position. Which is really not the case, but I attributed it to the fact that I was a new face and everybody wanted to know who I was. The second question was whether I have a girlfriend. Honestly, I was a bit shell shocked for the first couple of days by this friendly interrogation. I ended up shifting the topic by asking them why they were curious about my age / relationship situation and than talking about an unrelated topic of mutual interest. The girlfriend question was even funnier, as it turned out that people's curiosity went to the extent of doing a due diligence on my life back in Hong Kong. I took it in good heart though as people were surely curious, and sometimes a little bit too so. At the same time its good to know those things right off the start, so that you can manage them appropriately going forward.

So in terms of the actual work, the first month was mostly concentrated on learning about the products while helping on the product launch initiatives. It did not take long to land in the thick of the action. I remember the CMO calling me into the office and explaining that he needs a simple calculation to estimate an impact of a promotion, easy enough that spiraled quite quickly into a model which spanned multiple spreadsheets. That marked the beginning of lets go to George as he is the Excel guy story. Of course I didn't mind as I was actively adding value to the team and helping them to become more data driven.

Second month was more interesting yet. In the beginning of the month it was announced that we have signed a distribution deal with a major partner and also as part of that have to take on their insurance business. The next day I was informed that I'm going to be spending a large part of my time helping with the integration of the two entities. As the integration project progressed I have gradually get to participate in all the various parts of the project eventually ending up playing a supporting role on Steering Committee for the whole integration. It has definitely been an eye opening experience as far as the complexities go. Giving me visibility into some foundation things that happen in all the various areas to write a new business.
Lastly, my boss suggested that we have a challenge with one of our distribution channels and he mentioned that he volunteered me to provide an objective assessment of the problem and come up with potential solutions. So that was actually very interesting as I got a chance to spend time with our distribution people and understand how the whole sales process happens on the front end of our business. I've spent number of days interviewing various stakeholders. After spending some time on the project, I did come up with three main ideas, two of which was very well received by the channel head and one is already being implemented. And the best part? I'm actually getting to implement the second idea which can have a potential for a major impact on our distribution.

I feel that my work is finally having a meaningful impact on the business rather than simply recycling information and putting it in different formats. This is exactly what I was looking for and I'm glad that I was finally have been able to get to this place.

Till next time,
George

Call it a gut feeling..

2010-04-02T04:19:00.000-07:00

So let me share with you today what that mysterious gut feeling means to me. First of all, I believe all of us have it and its the matter of choice if we chose to listen to it or not. The gut feeling is technically a subconscious process which happens deep down in your mind and does not really require much conscious effort on our part. When it happens people say... I feel, rather than I think.

All of the people are born with this shortcut hardwired into our brains. Its such an integral part of our essence that when activated it causes physical reaction akin to when all of a sudden we feel thirsty once the body starts to run low on liquids. You can say that this gut of ours has a dual purpose, keep the owner happy with the supply of tasty energy while at the same time keeping us out of major troubles.

Personally I've discovered the gut feeling for the first time at a tender age of 12. Obviously back then I didn't know what it was. Let me share with you the experience and hope that should make things a bit clearer on your end of things as well.

At the time I was in an all boys summer camp. Which by itself usually spells some trouble. To set the scene, just imagine Sunday, parents visiting day. Excitement is in the air and camp management lets us go up to the road and wait for the arrival of our parents. This was clearly a mistake on their part. Combine bunch of excited mischievous boys with an occasional fast moving vehicles and something is bound to go wrong sooner or later. In this case thankfully nobody got hurt, although we came quite close... so here's how it went down:

Two of the camp troublemakers decided to conduct a live experiment. They would pick up a small rock and throw it up in front of a car as it would be passing by ay 100km/h+... smart right?! Since the rest of us were there just to wait for the parents we could care less about their experiments. So clearly seeking more attention those two decided to up the ante by increasing the effect, now those guys weren't educated in physics but they thought that if a single stone wasn't producing enough effect why not pick up a handful of stones and through them in front of a car... I think you can imagine that nothing good was gonna came out from that idiotic experimentation.

I just remember looking away for a second and the next thing I remember hearing was squeaking of tires. And then a driver coming after everybody screaming on top of his lungs as we ran back to the camp....great adventure the troublemakers got us into. Thanks guys!!

Right after the incident the driver had a discussion with the camp management where they paid him for the ruined windshield and damages to the car. In the process the driver pointed out the boys which he could remember running away from him.. and guess if yours truly was among those pointed out......hmmm double great. That day was just getting better!

So I'm telling you all of this just to set the scene. The fun part which had to do with the gut feeling is coming shortly, I promise!

So here we are, the two troublemakers and myself and another kid. To make things more interesting it turned out that one of the troublemakers' mom was an assistant camp supervisor, which created a potential for an explosive situation, at least for a 12 year old. I mean, I point them out and his mom comes after me hard, I don't point them out and the camp supervisor comes after us two innocent bystanders.

To add some spice to the story the bullies started using all kinds of mental techniques on us two, it consisted of threats as well as incentives (in Russia we have a saying which translates literally into them using both sweets and wips on us, how wonderful, right?).

The basically told us: you tell on us and we'll beat the crap out of you (and I knew that it wasn't an empty threat) and if you say that it was you than we'll give you this brand spanking new flashlight with a radio... wow amazing, (OK don't laugh, when you are 12 it did seem pretty enticing OK!) The camp management wasn't helping the situation neither. They kept repeating that somebody should just confess and there are absolutely no consequences to us, apparently they just wanted to know... all of them were very convincing. But even as a 12 year old I knew that something was fishy...

At the time I remember weighting all of the options: on one hand I had a seemingly harmless take the blame option, I get the flashlight and no harm comes to me and the situation resolves....riiiighht? ;)) Second option: tell on the troublemakers, that's not so great neither as I don't have any guarantee that anybody will believe me plus likely him and his mom are going to come after me....at night???.... help anybody?? ahahahah

Anyways I actually came close to picking the option numero uno (1), taking the blame to get it over with, and in reality there was a lot of pressure on me from everybody to take that choice. But something invisible was not letting me take the seemingly easy way out, something from within my gut was reaching out and putting a breaks onto my false admission. I could not grasp that it was my brain telling me not to pick the stupid option. So the choice that I wisely settled upon with the significant assistance from my gut was the option 3: deny your involvement and say nothing else...

At the end things turned out relatively OK. After a day of trying to get a confession out of us by putting us to bake under the sun while trying to get a confession out of us they gave up. Russian camps are tough but Russian kids a even tougher...And everybody learned something:
Management: Don't EVERRR let boys out of sight;
Troublemakers: Don't mess with expensive things and you can't always force a false admission;
Me: Nothing is without consequences even if people say that it is. And gut feeling saved my neck and probably quite a bit of money for my parents.

Who would have known that this lesson would come handy over and over again. Get this: Only one year passes by and I'm on my way back from school. I heard a hissing sound when walking by the neighbors truck, that's strange I thought to myself as I paused to listen. Oh well, must just be my imagination.. as I continued walking home. Little than 10 min later the door bell rang, and I've heard some commotion as my dad answered the door. My dad came out and asked me if I've punctured the tires on the neighbors truck?? say Whattt dad?!

And here it came again, the neighbor was using the same techniques on me again: just say that you did it, I promise there won't be any consequences. I understand that you were just playing around and I'm not angry with you, just say that it was you! I thought to myself I'm not as dumb as you think I am and having learned my lesson in the summer camp I wasn't about to fall for the same trap again. But he kept on insisting that I did it, apparently his sons actually saw me do it and then running away, they saw the knife in my hand as I punctured the tires.

I have to admit, at this point it was starting to get a bit confusing. I mean for a second it sounded so convincing that I started retracing my steps back in my mind to when I walked by the truck and thinking maybe I was sleepwalking and my alternative personally kicked in??? huh? but than I ultimately knew that I didn't do it and so I stuck to it. At the end all I got was an empty threat from the neighbor: apparently if he'd seems me anywhere near the truck he'd come after me... OK pal, you do that, I thought to myself.

Subsequently I had numerous times through which I gradually learned to trust and work with my gut or inner voice, whichever you want to call it. I'm also trying to further hone it by reading books about people making right and wrong choices: ie. lots of biographies and historical books. I obviously use my own head when taking the information from those sources as sometimes its presented from a bit of a pedestal (the author uses the book to say how smart and gifted they are and give themselves a pat on a the back). The latest best example of the later case being: A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O'Reilly. About 20-30% of the book actually strike me as genuinely interesting while the rest reads like a personal soap box monolog of a guy who wants to rail against the world. None the less most personal books are a good way to hone my gut to recognize the differences in people's thinking and get a glimpse into their mind.

Alright, I think I have said enough. The only thing I'll add is that gut helped me in both personal and professional life. It none the less best used together with the quality of knowing how to settle which I discussed in the previous post. I think it really helps to polish off the inner voice by putting the upper limit on what the gut is allowed to tell you. Meaning that if the gut feeling at times gets too sensitive and starts telling you that you are basically get screwed in everything. Than its time to let fire up your settling engine and desensitize the gut of yours. As you probably have figured by know, I'm a big believer in balance, too much of anything is bad...

Hey Gut, I guess I owe you one big Thanks!
- George

Thoughts from Singapore

2010-03-11T07:22:00.000-08:00

Its been a really long while since the last time I wrote, the two contributing factors being that I got really busy as work as well as I wasn't sure how interesting my new adventures is going to be for everybody. Anyways in the past couple of weeks I got messages from various people who suggested I pick it up again and so here I am.

First of all, thanks to all of you who followed up with me and bugged me to pick it up again.

In any case, I figure it might be interesting to follow somebody their MBA and see how their life continues, beyond the walls of the educational institution. Perhaps, the real value of your investment actually comes as you embark on your career, after the program completes.

As some of you might recall, I was really lucky to have come across and ended up connecting with Prudential UK. At the same time I'd like to share the following pearl of wisdom which I discovered through a lot of pain and mental exercise in the past 3 years. Things come to those who believe in themselves and work hard to make others see it too. It turned out to be actually much tougher than you think, but trust me, its worth it.

Basically it goes like this. You think you can reach some goal, but everybody around you just don't see it. Starting with your school teachers and finishing with your own family, everybody keeps on telling you that you are just an average Joe Shmoe. In the beginning it hurts, you don't understand why people don't see what you see in yourself. Then you start to wonder if those people are right, and that maybe you are really not worth all that much and that you should settle for something that's available to people with you supposed level of intellect and mental abilities. Well and in here comes the challenge... do you settle (like a number of my ex girlfriends suggested, in those particular cases, on them) or does one keep on looking blindly believing that there's something out there that's going to be worth your time, mental efforts etc.

I've learned this lesson the hard way right after my undergraduate days. Since I've never really found school mentally stimulating nor particularly applicable to the real world I didn't put an excessive amount of effort into it for the four years of my Computer Engineering degree. I didn't understand nor do I still do the value of learning all the various theories other than to build a learning strength of your brain. But at the same time I had a lot more interesting ways to build that strength, for example through challenging and learning by yourself. Anyways, back to the point of settling. Since I was an average student I really didn't have employers lined up to hire me. Perhaps contributing factor was the fact that it was a smaller Canadian city, and that it was 2004 when the job market for IT jobs has not quite recovered after the Internet Bubble of 2000. Whatever the case might have been I found it next to impossible to find a decent job upon graduating from my undergraduate degree.

So what choices was I left with, may you ask? Fresh grad with no real experience and no outstanding academic record, in a smaller Canadian city.. I was cast to live a life of mediocrity. Fortunately I didn't follow my families advice and get a job at Canadian coffee chain, Tim Horton's, not did I take an enticing offer from Philips Medical Systems to move to an even smaller Canadian city to become technologist fixing their medical equipment. I sensed that both of those would have been absolute dead ends. Years later when I was working as a Product Manager in a fast growing IT company, I used to still see my uni classmates working in jewelry and photo processing stores.. quite sad.

So how does that have to do anything with a belief in yourself, you might be asking yourself at this point.. Or more like, well not quite sure where he's going with sharing his whole life story. Or even, c'mon George get on with it, the lunch break is running out.

Without further adieu: the belief in yourself in the missing component of when they tell you that you have to work hard and you'll get places. Or if you look at it in a different way its the zing while pushing ahead is the zang. Very creative, I know...

To cut the long story short, after the undergraduate I ended up spending couple of months scouting around for my ideal jobs, gave up on that and instead walked into the local Chamber of Commerce and asked to volunteer with them instead. And after volunteering with them for couple of months I managed to make enough contacts to land me my first and second jobs.

I had the same lesson reiterated to me after the MBA. Wherein due to my limited years of experience and IT background I wasn't a best fit with Consulting and Ibanking, which are both traditionally big recruiters of MBA Grads. This time around though I took it a lot less stressful and just had a blind belief that settling is not the answer and I'll find a great opportunity if I keep on looking and constantly working towards finding one. To which after three months of soul searching came the answer of the career at Prudential.

So here I am, you can guess the place where I'm writing this. Starbucks of course... Its month number four in the new Asian city. The second part of the adventure started last November when I moved to Singapore to join our local operations here. And what's the most important is that I love my job here. Its full of learning and challenges. Perhaps for the first time in my life I feel like I can do this for a long time and not get bored.

Let me put a disclaimer about the things which I said above. I recently read a very interesting book, which is called “Marry Him”LINK , in it the lady by the name of Lori shares with readers her ideas about finding a right husband. The key to the book is the fact that author recommends to draw a set of key criteria which the lady needs in a husband and settle for a guy who satisfies those criteria even if the guy does not satisfy other less important criteria (like hair and physical shape – ie he is bold and short). It was a fascinating read and its exploring a very interesting concept. One would think that the concept of settling is foreign to a lot of things that we do in a modern world, we want the biggest TV the best Stereo system, the highest paying job, the spectacular looking partner, etc. And what's more important yet, we might not want to settle and be happy with what we've got. That sadly predisposes us for a life of unhappiness as we will feel that we've settled on something that wasn't good enough.

Settling is not really settling if you have reached your goals. It actually something that gets you out of the hamster wheel at the point which you think you have reached your potential in that particular area of your life. Its actually something that should make you really happy, as you've reached a lot and its time to concentrate on finding a balance by striving to reach higher in another part of your life, whether that being a family, or mental or spiritual development.

So lets go back to the believing in thyself and using that to reach forward. I guess the lesson for me would be to be ambitious and at the same time realistic about your own potential. More importantly yet, I think setting time bound efforts helps one to focus the efforts in a particular area and achieve the most before you move onto the next area/challenge.

Its all obviously not mean to be prescriptive, as each individual has their own path in life. Just thought that by sharing my thoughts I might trigger some positive ideas in your mind.

Cheers,
George

Hong Kong life

2009-08-13T01:30:00.001-07:00

When I came to Hong Kong, I had a couple of major curiosities, among other things I wondered how the work environment going to be like as well as how I’m going to fare outside work (i.e. finding friends and in general people to hang out with) and how I’m going to adapt to the local climate.

Being five months into my rotation I’m happy to report that I find people to be very positive and respectful at work. Thing that one notices is that people are in general are a bit quieter and a lot of things get decided after the meetings, face to face, especially true with respect to a larger meetings.

“Face” is in general a very important concept in Asia. The last thing people want to do is to challenge their superior openly which could lead to the loss of face. So one finds majority of Asian people are rather quiet in meetings vs. North Americans who are used to the style of meetings in which if you didn’t speak, your ideas would not likely to be taken into the consideration. As the result, I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in a different environment and people might perceive me as being overly aggressive if I continue with the style that I was used to in Canada.

Hong Kong office composition is roughly 90% Asian and 10% European/North American. Naturally, one of my initial concerns was the fact that I don’t speak either Cantonese or Mandarin and I won’t be able to effectively communicate in the office. Thankfully, it turned out that even though the conversation language for majority of Hong Kongers is Cantonese, everybody in the office is fluent in English. The only problem that I occasionally run into is when I travel somewhere, majority of taxi cab drivers don’t speak a word of English, so you are stuck with either going to the major tourist destination spots and walking from there, or keeping handy a phone number of a person who can translate to Cantonese. The one other downside or upside, depending on how you look at it, is the fact that the office gossip is in Cantonese so it all sounds like gibberish.

Finding friends and people to hang out with didn’t turn out to be a challenge neither. Majority of expats are here are on a 2-3 year secondments so none have an established circle of friends and are quite open to meeting new people. I found the easiest was to meet people in the office or through common interests/activities. I quite enjoy hiking and dancing salsa, so I’ve met a group of people through both of those activities.

Hong Kong is great, like Vegas it’s the city that never sleeps. Any time of day you will find people on the streets of Central. Some bars have people partying till 8am the next morning and a lot of food places stay open through the night. Everything in the city is really close and convenient (i.e. 20 min is considered to be a long commute). The coldest it got so far has been +8C, and people were complaining how cold it was and wearing fur coats and parkas. I mean I can definitely get used to this, after the -30C winters in both Canada and Russia.
As with anything there is couple of negatives to offset some of the positives. The summers here are quite hot and humid, which I hear makes for a moist walk to the office. Pollution is bad and is due to the heavy industry across the border. And finally the city is way too crowded, which could simply mean that I’m not the only one who likes this city.
Cheers,
George

Hello brave new world!

2009-08-07T02:01:00.000-07:00

I moved to Hong Kong in mid-October ’08. It was quite a welcome move for a number of reasons not the least of them being the fact that October was the month that one had to start scrapping ice of the car in Canadian icy mornings. While Hong Kong welcomed me with the +31C degree weather and all of ice contained in the fridges where it truly belongs as far as I’m concerned, and not on your car.. brrr

Having visited Hong Kong for the first time in December ’07 as part of the MBA school trip, I was really looking forward to the chance to experience living in it. The impressions that I carried from the ’07 trip were the vibrant city which people defined by three simple words: work, eat and shop, and just shrugged their shoulders when I asked about another one that they’ve seemingly forgot to add to the list: sleep. As I know now, being here for three months, they weren’t that far off, after all.

My friends in Canada were shell shocked when they’ve heard that I’m moving to Hong Kong to start a job with Prudential UK. They were wondering if I was crazy and what made me accept the job half a way across the world. I’ve been warned multiple times that it’s not only going to be really different culturally wise, but everything else is going to be difficult as well. The question that kept on popping up was why I didn’t just get a job in Toronto instead. I think though, they were secretly jealous of my upcoming adventure.

One of my life passions is travel. But what I was dreaming of was actually a get a chance to experience a new culture on a deeper level than what you get on a two-three day tourist visit. So when Prudential offered me the opportunity in Hong Kong I jumped on it. Don’t get me wrong, it was an interesting opportunity to start with, but the location was a big bonus for me.

Now a little bit more about the actual opportunity. Through the interview process Prudential matched me to the Business Analyst role in the New Markets development group. We are part of the Prudential Corporation Asia regional office. My role focuses on providing analytical support for the Prudential’s expansion in Asia and beyond, helping to identify and execute expansion into new areas within our current markets as well as brand new markets. We are basically the team which is on the bleeding edge of Prudential UK.

It was October 9th Thursday when I touched down at my newly found HK home. It honestly didn’t feel real for the first little while. Part of it was probably due to the fact that the whole process happened so smoothly, for that I have to praise to our HR department, they helped to make it go off without a single glitch considering all the little details that needed to be taken care off before it could all happen. There were all the employment contracts that had to be UPSed back and forth between HK and Toronto, the HK employment visa that luckily took only two weeks to process, and then all the other nitty-gritty stuff that had to be taken care off before I could start.

I was to start the job on Friday, the day after my arrival. The 13 hour time difference and the 16 hour flight didn’t help, what did help was the fact I was full of excitement and quite busy right from the start. Well that and couple of double espressos that I might have accidentally grabbed from Starbucks ;)

Before starting at Pru, I have been familiarizing myself with insurance industry, the company and our product specifics. However the first couple of days were a deep dive for me, getting a full overview of our product set and our presence across the region. That was followed by the overview of framework for new country analysis and examples of the countries that we considered before.

I was a bit of an early starter at Momentum as our official start was supposed to happen in London on November 9th. We were to spend a week in UK building our understanding of the group, meeting with managers from various members of Prudential family and getting to know other participants in the Momentum program to help build us a support network in whatever we decide to tackle later on.

Till next time,
George

The other side of the pacific

2009-07-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

Sitting at Starbucks and sipping on a caramel late I glance outside at a beautiful harbor. It could be just like any other Starbucks in Toronto, Vancouver, or New York, but it is not. This Starbucks is actually in another part of the world, far far away from Toronto. I’m actually sitting at Starbucks in Hong Kong, the city which I’ve been calling my new home for the past three and a half months.

Before I jump into telling you more about my life in Hong Kong, let me share with you a bit of my background. I was born in Moscow Russia, where I lived until the age of 16, at which point both me and my dad moved to Canada. After a year of Canadian high school I enrolled into a Computer Engineering degree at University of Manitoba. That in turn led to a relatively uneventful four years of school and put me squarely on track for a career in IT. Fortunately, at that point I was brave enough to admit that IT wasn’t the right field for me, and after taking number of Project Management courses I decided to pursue graduate business education to help me switch into Finance. So long story short, after working couple of years in IT sales and then in Product Management I decided to take a plunge and go get an MBA.

As a bit of a side note, I find it really funny that my pursuit of education is perfectly aligned and correlated with the global recessions. Well, to be more precise it actually precedes them by about one year. Let me elaborate: I started my Computer Engineering degree at the peak of the tech hype in 2000 and saw the whole bubble burst a year after, same deal with the MBA which I started in early 2007. Fortunately the second time around I’ve learned my lesson and chose to do a more intensive one year MBA instead, finishing couple short months by before the market collapsed in September ’08. Moreover, it seems the more serious my education gets the more severe the associated recessions, so watch out the world economy if I ever decide to do a Ph.D., cause by the time I’d be done that the world would not be the same, if its still around that is…

On a more positive note, Momentum program @ Pru has turned out to be everything that I’ve though it could and would be. Great people, awesome company and an amazing location. Doesn’t get much better than that, if you ask me.

After finishing an MBA mid 2008 is was really torn, I had an offer from IBM to go into their Project management training program in a smaller Canadian city, I was interviewing with Eli Lilly and Company for the pharmaceutical sales and had some discussions with boutique management consulting firms. But it all felt quite routine and didn’t excite me at the very least. I mean all of the positions were solid, but it felt like I had to sacrifice something in order to take each and every one of them. I would have had to settle if I was to take one of them, so I kept my fingers crossed and continued actively looking for an opportunity that would be a better all around “fit” for what I was looking for.

And I can tell you this: I wasn’t looking for a horizontal comfortable move. I was searching for a stretch opportunity that would be both interesting and challenging. And to my surprise I did find it, browsing through the Pru’s Momentum website. I remember reading about the Momentum and thinking… wow, this sounds exactly like a perfect opportunity for me. The second though was… is this really real or just one of those smart marketing tricks.

After the chance to meet with men and women of Pru including people who were already in the Momentum I was pretty convinced, this was not a marketing trick, the Momentum program was exactly what I was looking for and I desperately wanted in.

To be completely honest with you, I had always envisioned Insurance organizations as a bit of slow moving entities, unexciting, and such. But after getting to know number of people at Pru and chatting with the CEO of Insurance operations as part of my interview process I was absolutely sold. Apparently I was mistaken, insurance companies are not all alike and after 160 years of existence Pru is still very much alive and kicking [competition].

So three rounds of interviews later, I was in. I landed the job that I really wanted and was packing my suitcases in Toronto, Canada and getting ready for my cross Pacific move to Hong Kong.

Hello new world!!!

Real life begins

2008-11-27T05:48:00.000-08:00

Now is the time to begin an exiting new chapter in my life…

That was exactly what I was hoping to say thinking about my future two years ago. I was debating with myself whether the investment in an MBA is going to be worth my time, effort, and even more significantly if it is worth it going back to the life as a poor student, giving up the car, salary and jumping into the deep end of student debts. The feedback from my family didn’t help my decision process neither, they simply told me that it would be a mistake to waste, such a big pile of money on an Education.

For those of you who have followed my blog for a while, you can see that my MBA experience has been an uphill battle with its fair share of ups and downs. I’m happy to share though that it has accomplished all of the things that I ever wished it to. I ended up in an international position in Hong Kong, switching career from IT into Financial services and as a cherry on top is a significant boost to my pre-MBA salary.

Some people might say I got really lucky with my post MBA career, some others might argue that it was a deliberate concentrated effort that I put into it, and the truth would be somewhere in-between. Just like one of my favorite cheesy movies “Shakespeare in Love” says: it will all somehow come together, and it certainly did for me.

Looking back, one of the best things that I’ve learned at Ivey was to trust in myself. And it made all the difference in my MBA experience. I stayed happy throughout the time in school and I landed a great job, even though it did take me a while to find it.

You are the one who knows yourself the best. You know just what you are capable of. The key becomes to find an employer who shares your vision. Rejection in this context is actually quite a lucky event. Rejections do sting your pride, but if you think about it, they are actually quite helpful. For example, without rejections I would have never landed my current opportunity. But unfortunately its not nearly as easy as letting rejections do all the work. You have to be selective as well.

If I would have accepted that first lower offer after my undergraduate degree to go and work in a small town for Phillips Medical machines as a technologist, I can almost guarantee you that I would have not been here or nowhere close to being as successful as I am right now. But temptation is always there, like the IBM asking if I would consider taking a good opportunity, but in Winnipeg... And again you have a choice of either playing it “safe”, taking that sure bet position and a comfortable life, or betting the house that something much better is going to come along.

In Russian there is a saying: “if you don’t risk you won’t get to drink a Champaign”, and so just happens that I really like the taste of Champaign ^^

George

CDN MBA helps find international careers

2008-10-03T17:54:00.000-07:00

For those of you curious where I have ended up after the Ivey MBA (and not wanting to wait till my next blog post) here's is a brief excerpt from an Ottawa Life Magazine article that was written with the input from yours truly:

"During his studies, George Kesselman, a recent Ivey graduate, took part in a China Study Program. After graduation in May, the 26-year-old landed a job with an internationally renowned financial services company, Prudential UK, and will spend his first year of employment in Hong Kong. While Kesselman liked Ivey’s strong international focus, it’s not the only factor students need to consider when choosing a business school, he says. They also need to research the quality of the faculty and the success of the school’s graduates, to name a few. A year and a half ago, while Kesselman looked for the right MBA program, he noticed a lack of information beyond any schools’ glossy brochures. He soon launched a blog to help other students wade through the complex process. "You’re investing such a big amount of money, there is no such thing as too much information.” The blog, which transformed into a more Ivey-specific forum, details what students should expect of the fast-paced 12-month program and garners about 4,000 hits a month, says Kesselman"

(Full article)

-George

Ivey MBA Career quest, going in “deep and wide”

2008-09-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

Let’s make this a part 2 of the George’s MBA career search series. A quick recap of where we left it off last time:

1. Came into the MBA program over ambitious
2. Thought a top tier consulting job was the “it” job
3. Started wondering if consulting was really “it”
4. Didn’t get second round consulting interviews
5. Thought I was a failure
6. Took another look at non-Investment Banking and non-consulting jobs to realize that despite the lack of glamour they are jobs out there that might be just as good if not better that those “it” jobs

Alright so here you might start to get a sense of what the MBA career search really feels like. The analogy that comes to mind is the one of a roller coaster. If you have ever been on one of those crazy high roller coasters, you know the feeling where you rise up up and up, and it seems like you are on top of the world just to be screaming and going doooooown the next moment. Similarly, MBA career search too has a lot of ups and downs. And the first time you go through one of these downs, your get a shrinking feeling in your stomach. You think to yourself: Was it the right decision to spend $100 grand on the MBA, or maybe I should have listened to my family!

So here I was at the end of September, I found myself with no job and at a bit of dead end in my initial industry of choice (consulting). I was at a crossroads; I could continue my career search in consulting, targeting more boutique firms and ultimately lowering my career expectations. Other option would be to decide that despite my initial decision consulting wasn’t the right “fit” for me and move on in my career search. As a bit of side note, I believe human beings are naturally prewired for continuity, from the infancy majority of us seek comfort in routines and familiar environments that we are accustomed to. That in turn makes life predictable and comfortable. Moreover, to make life even easier we create a mental picture of our environment, a map of sorts to help simplify the everyday life. One of the hardest realizations at least for me has been to admit to yourself that your map is wrong and needs fixing. For an instance you realize that you are in conflict with yourself, and you have to tell your old self that she was wrong and that hurts. It does sting your pride but none the less you have to take the “plunge” and just move on.

And plunge I did take…

First of all I decided not to be closed minded to any job posting that comes up on school’s internal job posting website. While trying to look at those posting as objective as I could. That was the wide part of the “deep and wide” strategy. As the result I ended up interviewing for Product Management at Google, Project Executive at IBM, Leadership Development program at Eli Lilly and Company (Pharmaceutical) and a couple of other ones that I would have never considered just few short months before. The only promise that I made to myself was to be honest with interviewers about both myself and what I was looking to get out of the next job. That way I was hoping to make the job search process more collaborative, enlisting employers to help me land an ideal job. I took the principles that at least in theory should make you a more successful entrepreneur and applied them to my job search. Those were an almost unlimited faith in success and the willingness to push yourself forward towards your goals despite people around you telling you it won’t work.

The months of October through February I was going wide, doing as much research on my own as learning in action through interviews. I kept actively reaching out to alumni to meet with them and to understand new industry niches that appeared as a good “fit” for my skills and future career aspirations. At the same time I started to better understand the rules of the game: understand your strengths, realize your weaknesses and look for jobs where there are jobs. Let me elaborate: Strengths and weaknesses help you realize some of the constraints that you are going to be operating under in your job search. And looking for the jobs where there are jobs is a “no-brainer”!

I took a clean piece of paper, and I wrote my direct work experience, so out came the experience with Wealth Management industry, Product Management experience with Technology and finally some Sales experience. Then I started thinking about my other interests, such as Project Management, Leadership and Finance. Then I wrote down my weaknesses, but I’m not going to tell you those ;)

And finally after months of searching, BINGO!! One of the things that I accidentally got involved in at school was a helping to put together a transportation conference. The purpose of the conference was to bring together majority of stakeholders for the upcoming Québec – Ontario transportation corridor and to get process moving on public policy framework for this project. One piece of the project that I found of great interest was the use of public private partnerships (P3s) to help finance and build the infrastructure. On top of it, the more I researched it the more I was getting convinced that this is the perfect thing for me. I thought that this industry will not only let me leverage my experience with Public policy and project management but also be a perfect fit with my interest in Finance. Lastly, talking to alumni and doing research made it sound as if there’s a lot of potential for growth in this industry thus creating a lot of potential opportunities.

Now it was time to go deep…

I spend the next three months doing exactly as planned: strategically trying to hammer at the P3 market here in Canada. I reached out to major organizations such as Infrastructure Ontario, Greater Toronto Transportation Authority (now Metrolinx), banks, and contractors, basically you name it. And things were going great. I’ve applied to a job at a major player in the Ontario P3 market. I spoke to their CEO, HR and couple other people. I felt that the prospects of me getting the job were good. I even had people trying to help speed things up internally. Now let me bring you back to my roller coaster analogy at the beginning of this post. It felt as if I was on top of the world and could smell and touch that P3 Job. But fortunately for me I would get a chance to experience that again couple of times during the summer. Did I mention that I love roller coasters? So needless to say the P3 job never happened for me.

Next on the list was an international career. I spend significant part of my life in Moscow Russia and speak the language fluently, so I thought why not look for a job there. Furthermore, the job situation in Canada and North America has been deteriorating significantly throughout the year leading to a recruitment freeze on both Bay and Wall Streets. Again working my contacts and alumni I was actually able to come quite close to getting an internship in Moscow Russia with European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). And again up I went on that roller coaster getting all excited at the prospects of joining EBRD and helping them put together a policy framework for micro financing in Russia with potential for a permanent job after the 6 month internship. But you guessed it, at the last minute EBRD cancelled the position as they didn’t get enough applicants. All I could do at that point was to smile and think that this all felt too much like a déjà vu over and over again. How can one operate if even such a basic thing as the lucky three rule has failed you ahaaahah (consulting, P3, and now EBRD)? I knew though that instead of putting my hands down now was the time to push it even harder.

But what I didn’t know if that my luck was about to finally take a turn for better.

The art of luck and the science of success when it comes to an MBA job search.

2008-09-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

First of all I want to Thank all of you who directly or indirectly asked me about my MBA job search and wished me luck. It’s been quite an involved process and I’m glad to report to you that I have landed my dream job. Sorry to keep you in suspense, now I can finally write to you about the MBA career management and job search at Ivey. I’m planning to do it over a couple of separate posts so stay tuned.

Let me start off by making sure that we are all on the same page, I write this post with an underlying assumption that the objective of the majority of people pursuing an MBA is to get a better job, myself included. It typically happens either through landing a position of increased responsibility in their existing firm/career path or through switching into a totally new industry upon graduation. I say majority as there are always exceptions to a rule, and there might be people who are either looking to start new businesses, are working in a family business setting, or just decided to do it for fun (don’t laugh I met people who have done just that).

MBA is no doubt a hyped-up degree, at least at this point. And with it comes a warning: use with caution as a targeted career advancement tool. Just like a surgical scalpel it’s not a universal tool and is only as good as the hand guiding it, you being the hand in this particular analogy. So one has to not only have a good idea of what you want to get out of the MBA but also be realistic about one’s own skills going into the MBA. On the flip side it’s also seemingly hard to believe whether there’s actually any real content behind all that hype, and if it is worth investing perfectly good $100,000+ into the MBA when Porsche Cayman might seem like a pretty good investment at least in terms of a subsequent gain in popularity.

Consider the following though, I did a rough first year Return on Investment (ROI) calculation couple of days ago, using the numbers from my new job. I also compared that to the ROI from my undergraduate computer engineering degree. Turns out that the undergraduate first year ROI for me worked out to be in the order of 10-12% while ROI for the MBA is at least four times as much. Not bad… Having said that, there are number of conditions that might affect your MBA ROI, for example you being in right place at the right time; level of salary going in and the condition of a general economy upon the graduation.

Let me now rewind the clock a year and a half back and take another look at my expectations going into the MBA (and whether they were entirely realistic)

At the time, my view of the MBA world was shaped by the information I gathered from MBA portals on Business Week and Financial Times websites, student blogs and school placement statistics. Moreover, in the beginning the recipe seemed unbelievably easy: add three magical letters (M, B and A) behind your name and your salary doubles or even triples, what can be easier, right? Then came the question of why does it cost $10,000 to get an MBA at some schools while at others it’s a cool $100,000+ for the same three letters. Maybe you get those letters in “gold”, joked I with my friends back then. The answer is of course as with any other product the final price is a combination of variety of factors. Brand premium is certainly there for a top tier schools as you are paying for prestige of attending a school that has distinguished history. There are a lot of tangible things though that you get at a top tier MBA School, such as:

ability to forge strong connections to your classmates who are bound to have a future multimillionaire or two amongst them

access to the responsive alumni network that has a lot of senior decision makers amongst it’s ranks (read people who can hire you or back your next business venture)

there’s also the quality of recruiters that the university is able to attract

and finally, the higher quality of education (although it’s becoming more of a plain vanilla component with a lot of lower tier schools able to provide at least as good of education)

With the top tier MBA program you get all the high quality ingredients, while with the third tier program you might get a great education but that alone might not be able to propel you forward in your career by as much.

So to come back to my initial expectations, I though getting into one of Canada’s top business schools pretty much guaranteed that are you will become rich by the age of 30 i.e. get a great Consulting or an IBanking (CIB) job with a top tier firm (plus the associated competitive compensation package). In retrospective, that was obviously a bit of an overestimation on my part. Allow me to elaborate: on the first day of classes I realized that I wasn’t so special in my preference for the post MBA career, meaning that pretty much all of my classmates wanted to also get some flavor of a CIB job. That presented me with a bit of a pickle as there was only a limited number of spots available at the top consulting firms, in past years top tier consulting firms combined took five – six people from of each MBA class. So having 40 people compete for those 5 available spots did start to sound like a bit of competition. None the less I was quite confident in my abilities to prove to a top tier consulting firm that I was the right guy for them.

To be honest, at the time I was completely blinded by those highly desirable CIB jobs, and simple logic worked wonders: if everybody else wants it means those CIB jobs are great. It was clearly the case of “group think” where we all wanted those top tier jobs and thus it made it so much more desirable to get them. For me it translated into good three months of research as well as endless hours of interview practice getting ready for those tough consulting interviews.

As far as the school initiated career activities go, less than a month into the program we started getting a constant stream of visitors from consulting, finance and industry. Each trying to shed a bit of light on exactly what they did in their day to day jobs. Furthermore, two months into the program we had a career week in Toronto, where there was a selection of top firms lined up for us to meet. Full days of various industry information sessions, company hosted info and mingling sessions, mock interviews, and one-on-one meetings. It was then when we first started to get a real sense of what different industry jobs are all about, and how they stack against the CIB jobs.

And then came September, the month that majority of top tier CIB firms do their hiring (a year in advance). I had a couple of first round interviews and that’s as far as it went for me in consulting. Ouch… I being rejected?! Of course I was initially somewhat disillusioned and disappointed, although the more I thought about it the more I realized I was relieved deep down, as right around then I was starting to doubt that consulting was really the place for me at this point in my career. I figured, on the bright side those consulting interviews are really rigorous at testing whether you are going to be a good “fit” with the firm’s culture. Based on their extensive experience firms have a pretty good idea if you’d do well in their consulting environment. That in turn saves everybody unnecessary pain and suffering of discovering two months down the road that you hate your new job and want to quit.

If you are considering Consulting you have to really ask yourself if you are ready to work 70-80 hours a week, IBanking is more along the lines of 100 hours. Granted the pay for either stream is quite competitive at mid $100s for the first year, including year end bonus. Furthermore, IBanking is used to be a steeper climb after the first year vs. Consulting. The Subprime meltdown in 2007 in US might change that.

One of the most common MBA student traps is that students typically equate those top tier CIB jobs with all the future glamour. Seeing their peers get those sexy six figure jobs early on makes people naturally think they missed out on a one in a lifetime opportunity and now it’s much less likely that they will land any kind of a decent job. And taking a look around I saw that my situation wasn’t all that unique and there was a large number of my classmates that didn’t get those dream (or so I thought at that time) jobs.

October was a month when one could sense some tension in the air at school... The question of the month in October was whether MBA was the right decision for me. I mean here you are having invested big chuck of your net worth into your MBA education, going knee deep in debt and it turns out you can’t get the job that you wanted so much, it sucks! to say the least. Furthermore, the question that lingers on your mind at that point is: So what’s next?

From the information sessions earlier in the year we saw that Industry and Corporate Finance (ICF) jobs have their own very tangible set of benefits. You not only get the hands-on experience of seeing your ideas through but you also maintain your quality of life (relatively of course). Despite the initial impression the compensation is actually also competitive, especially if you consider it on a $ per hour basis. Furthermore, those ICF jobs are not as volatile as the CIB jobs, which are highly related to how well economy is doing at the given moment.

More about my job search in the next post…
George

Ivey’s China Teaching Project

2008-07-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

Written by: Rebecca Liu, MBA 2008

In recent years, the business world has been eyeing China with great interest as untapped opportunities continue to emerge. The Chinese capital, Beijing, is known for its rich culture and extensive history, preserved in its many landmarks such as the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. The world is also counting down to the August 8th start of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games to be held in Beijing. You can imagine how honoured I felt to be part of the team to represent Ivey for one month to teach an undergraduate course at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University for their School of Economics and Management (SEM).

You can find the full post on the Ivey MBA Business Week blog (Click here)

KEY MARKETING TRENDS FOR 2009

2008-06-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

What does one do when you have a bit of free time on your hands after finishing an MBA? The answer is of course simple: you put together a prediction of key marketing trends for next year!

I bet that the top three marketing trends that will impact how Canadian marketers do business in 2009 will be:

Mobilization
Personalization
Greenification

With the cell phone technology becoming more advanced, marketers need to dial into a new wave of mobile linked promotions. Apple has been leading the trend in this area, with their iPhone, which is going to be launched in Canada July 2008.

Second version of iPhone is going to be equipped with a new generation of location-aware software created in collaboration with Google Inc. Furthermore, expected to retail at a price of $199 (under a 3 year contract), iPhone is going to be quite affordable compared to other Smartphones on the market today. What does that mean for marketers in Canada? It means that with the increased popularity of the iPhone marketing spending on mobile medium is likely to receive a significant boost; in particular companies are going to start investing more into mobile advertising and building their mobile presence.

There are already services in US that allow promotional coupons to be sent to user’s cell-phone once they are in the vicinity of a particular registered business, maximizing the potential for lead generation and conversion. Combine that with the fact that new generation of Smartphones will likely allow for a far more granular measurement of marketing ROI and there’s a real possibility that mobile marketing dollars are going to be the biggest growth area next year.

As Canadians increase the use of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS technologies available in majority of new Smartphones, their mobile experience will become more personalized. Prior to these technologies such level of personalization was only available sitting in-front of the computer. With the mobile personalization, depending both on their location and preferences users would be receiving selected promotional information on their mobile phones that could be made much more relevant and appealing to them. This also lessens the traditional gap of time and distance between when a consumer sees an ad and when they can actually buy the product which in turn would increase the effectiveness of promotional activities.

Furthermore, as marketing dollars continue transitioning towards online medium, social networking sites will start to play an even more important role in 2009. Websites like Facebook and MySpace as well as other niche players will increasingly help marketers to deliver their message effectively through the clutter to their target audiences. This will be made possible through the abundance of personal preference data that users willingly share on those sites.

Gas prices have skyrocketed over the last three years. Last year alone the price of gas shot up 31%. As gas prices increase, the topic of energy starts to occupy greater share of consumer’s mind and so does the related topic of environment. Hence, Greenification is becoming another hot topic. As companies continue to attempt differentiating themselves in consumer’s mind being the Greenest is finally starting to pay off real dividends. Therefore metrics measuring how Green is the company perceived by its target segment will provide an additional insight of potential sales driver in 2009.

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Now we'll just have to wait a year to see how close I really was ;)

George

McLoving it!

2008-06-12T21:20:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought following two words could be found in a same sentence:

1) McDonalds™ and Love
2) Subway™ and Pizza
3) Me and MBA-grad

None the less McDonalds marketing slogan is "i'm lovin' it". Subway, which is a major sub chain in North America, has recently added 90 second pizzas to their menu (maybe they should also think of changing their brand to Sub + Pizza way = SuPway). And, YOU GUESSED IT: I’ve graduated from the Ivey MBA! Big Yay for George!!!

It has been a challenging year with its fair share of ups and downs, lots of learning not only about variety of business topics but more importantly about myself. Comparing MBA to my undergraduate experience I’m tempted to say that the undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering taught me how to research a narrow topic in-depth while MBA taught me how to think broadly about business problems.

Lots of people ask me if I’m happy about my decision to pursue the Ivey MBA and if I had a chance to go back would I still do it. The answer is resounding YES! Now let me elaborate a little bit about what I mean, it will also help to explain the ups and downs that I’ve mentioned in passing above. Interesting nature about Ivey is that it stretches you to the limit and then some, and that’s what really helps to build your capacity to succeed. Not only does it do that, it also trains you to think like a good manager by looking at problems broadly.

Combination of a case teaching method and large number of brilliant professors has been two real highlights about my experience at Ivey. Cases are real situations that managers are faced with in their everyday activities. It trains you to recognize patters of problems analyze those situations systematically and act accordingly to resolve them. After a year of Ivey it feels like you’ve been in a management role for at least 5 years based on the number of management problems that you’ve seen and collaborated as a team to resolve.

As anticipated, it turned out to be one expensive year. The final number is hovering close to a cool $95,000 including living expenses and an optional trip to China, and excluding lost wages. I’ve also told my family to forget buying me a watch as a graduation present and instead to get me a sturdy helmet to safeguard my head which now officially is the most expensive asset that I own!

The other day I was pondering a question whether I could have lasted another year if Ivey still had a two year MBA program? The answer is a simple NO. First of all my finances are stretched to the limit with the one year MBA. Second, going back to life of student has been fun for the first 4 months, but I’d like to go back to having an income, rather than just living off student loans. Finally, talking to alumni from the two year program it sounds like it was fairly tough to keep the same level of focus on education over the span of two years.

I want to thank everybody for following the blog over my year at Ivey. One last part of my Ivey experience that I want to share with you is the whole career search process at Ivey. I’m planning to write it once I accept a job offer.

Cheers,
George

Book recommendations from my favorite Ivey prof

2008-04-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

Following is the list of book recommendations from Robert Nourse, my all-time favorite professor at Ivey. Bob taught Entrepreneurial Manager elective for us. It was truly amazing to have somebody with his level of experience sharing insights and knowledge with us. Bob founded Bombay Company and grew it from one store to 432 stores; he was named 1993 Entrepreneur of the Year by Inc. magazine.

Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested Battle Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything, (New York: Penguin Group, 2004)

One of the early pioneers at Apple, Guy Kawasaki is the founder of the venture capital firm, garage.com. He’s down to earth, humorous and practical. You should, at minimum, read something he’s written. If you like this, you’d also enjoy his earlier book, Rules for Revolutionaries.

Fareed Zakaria, The Post American World, (New York: Norton, 2008)

This book won’t be out until the first week of May, but it’s widely-anticipated and, because Zakaria speaks extensively, its content is somewhat known. A naturalized American of Indian descent, the author is the editor of Newsweek International. He’s a brilliant thinker and you’ll find his insight into the rise of China and India, and their impact on the advanced economies of the West, fascinating and thought-provoking. His earlier book, The Future of Freedom, was a New York Times bestseller.

Collins and Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: HarperBusiness, 1994, 1997)

This is certainly not a new book and, technically, not one that deals exclusively with entrepreneurship. But the authors, who are Stanford researchers reporting on a six year study of 18 successful companies, have a lot to say about what makes a visionary company and vision is an important ingredient of any entrepreneurial venture. That’s why I like it.

Lewis, The New New Thing (New York: Penguin Books, 2001)

Different than other books on the list, this is a biography. It looks at Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon. There was an earlier hardcover edition, but this is the paperback.

_________________________

Enjoy!
George

Is there a best time to start an MBA?

2008-04-02T18:00:00.000-07:00

By: George K.

So it’s been a long road but you’ve finally made the decision to pursue an MBA. Congratulations! Now there are a couple of things you might want to take into the consideration when making the next decision about when you actually start your future MBA. As usual, please keep in mind that following are just my personal subjective thoughts and may or may not work for you and are definitely not meant to act as de facto rules.

In this blog post I will discuss couple of potential factors that might affect the ROI of your MBA investment. In particular I will focus on those factors which are associated with the timing of an MBA: such as current economic conditions, your age and years of experience.

Following discussion is going to based on a 12 month MBA program format as that’s the type of program I am currently attending here at Ivey. You might also find it interesting that one of the reasons why I chose Ivey was because it is a bit easier to plan around since it’s only a one year program. Shorter program means lower probability that economic conditions are going to shift drastically while I am at school affecting my career search strategy.

First, let’s talk about global economic conditions or at least economic conditions of a country that you are planning to start your post-MBA career at. Even though I was not able to find any empirical data to confirm this, one can probably sense that the type of jobs that a brand new MBA grad would be going after are a bit tougher to find during a period of economic recession as compared to a period of prosperity. It is especially true for the high paying consulting and investment banking jobs; those types of jobs are highly correlated to the GDP growth. Having said there are still all kinds of jobs available during a recession. Industry jobs are usually much less dependent on the economic cycles (See following interview). What the economic slowdown or a recession means is that MBA grads would typically have to be much more proactive in their job search, orienting their search towards the hidden job market. Unfortunately, there might be some unforeseen consequences associated with graduating during the tough times: "A growing body of research on both MBAs and undergrads suggests that graduating into an economic downturn will substantially reduce lifetime earnings" (BusinessWeek).

Furthermore, I’m going to take a subjective view that Canadian economy is still tightly coupled closely to US economy (good thing that IMF agrees). If you combine that with the fact that US economic recessions has lasted on average 11 months with longer ones taking up to 16 months to unwind and are typically followed by an average of 57 months of economic expansion. The logical conclusion would be that the best way to start your Ivey MBA would be within a year or two after a recession has passed. That appears to be the best way to capitalize on ones investment if that would be the only factor that you are looking at. (Recipe 1: Add a one US Recession, wait for it to cook for 11-16 months, and then add the Ivey MBA within a year or two)

To make it a bit more fun, there are a couple of other factors that get added to the mix. Years of experience appears to be another good one to look at. This one is particularly interesting one for me personally, as I only have three years which is on the lower end of the curve for Ivey. Talking to number of people in the industry and Career Management team at Ivey, the optimal number of years appears to fall in the range of 3-5 years. You would get the biggest % boost to you salary. Lets assume that the average salary for 4 years of experience would fall somewhere around $60,000 per year and even if you get the average $85,000 salary upon graduation that’s a 42% boost to your salary. Not bad! However if you wait another 3-4 years and you are already making around $75-80K/year, the starting salary might not be that much higher than what you had going in. I also know couple of people that came in expecting pay cuts right after the MBA, hoping that MBA will ultimately act as a strategic tool which will help to increase the longer term salary ceiling. 4-5 years of experience in would also allow you to take the full advantage of the learning opportunity available at Ivey. (Recipe2: add 4-5 years of solid experience and the Ivey MBA, mix well)

The last thing I’m going to mention is role of one’s age. I will be honest; being on either extreme of the age spectrum has its potential challenges. For one, it might be a bit harder to “connect” with your classmates. Having said that there are enough people with diverse backgrounds and in various age groups that there’s always opportunities to socialize and form life-long friendships. (Recipe3: Be yourself and respect others, age matters not)

So let me quickly recap this post: Years of solid work experience is probably the single most important factor contributing to the high ROI of an MBA. Graduating during a recession – a bit more stressful but doable none the less. Those are universal factors that might affect you ROI in Ivey, there are certainly variety of other factors such as personality, ability to learn, etc that also affect ROI as well, but they are much more individual, and therefore I can’t speak to those.

Having said all of this, keep in mind that there are always exceptions to every rule, as correctly pointed out by an Anonymous reader of this blog. The example that comes to mind is the one from our Venture Creation elective class when we had a chance to talk to couple of Ivey grads who founded a successful business right after their graduation (PolicePrep).

I hope you found info in this post useful.

As always, if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to email me at: GKesselman.mba2008@ivey.ca

Till next time,
George

P.S. Here's an intersting collection of thoughts from BusinessWeek magazine about Graduating into a Recession

P.S.S. For those of you wondering, I did not end up buying the Asus Eee laptop. I had horrible experience trying to purchase it online at The Source by Circuit city which totally screwed up my online order loosing it in the process, so I’ve decided to hold off on that purchase until I can find an easier way to buy it (read not involving The Source)

One MBA Woman’s Perspective: on doing the 1-year Ivey MBA

2008-03-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

Guest writer: Rebecca Liu
Date: March 22nd, 2008

I feel fortunate to be a woman in this day and age. It was only a few decades ago that women excelling to management positions, let alone studying for an MBA, was considered rare. These days, the business community not only welcomes more women in the senior management ranks but even encourages it. The issue is whether enough of us women are willing or able to answer this call.

My class is perhaps somewhat unique. There is typically a 30% composition of women per cohort, yet mine started with 17%. Understandably, it’s a big commitment to step away for a year. There are women in our class who have husbands and children. I come from the dynamic world of IT consulting yet even I considered whether it was worthwhile to study in London, Ontario for a year. Yet I feel that this has been the best personal decision I’ve made in my life – at least so far! I would definitely encourage any woman who wants to understand management and/or get to senior management to do her MBA. Ideally, it would be after about 3-6 years of work experience, as this gives you enough work experience to fully grasp the concepts and enough to leverage the greatest impact in your career, and probably the best time for minimal disruption in your life. However I firmly believe there’s no time limit for when to invest in your own education.

Now the other question may be whether the high male to female ratio has hindered me while in the program. And my answer would be a resounding no. Being a woman has not stopped me from being elected to the Ivey MBA Association executive team as VP Internal. It hasn’t prevented me from participating in the activities that I truly wanted to be part of, such as the Ivey China Teaching Project or Community Consulting Project. There’s also a club for Women in Management, run by Ivey students. In the past, senior executive women have been asked to speak to us, including our own esteemed Dean Carol Stephenson. But keep in mind that there are times when there is only one woman in a team of 6. This could be reflective of what teams are like in the professional world as you start advancing in your career but it’s better for women to learn how to deal with these situations now. As a woman, the key is to leverage it as an invaluable learning opportunity within a safer environment than the professional world. You’d be surprised how much learning you can get out of it and even more rewarding, how much of a positive difference you can make.

I’m looking to take the greatest opportunities that life can offer me regardless of my gender. The rewards that I’ve gotten have far outweighed any challenges I’ve had to face in the program. These past 11 months have taught me to manage my time much more wisely. And it’s allowed me to reflect on who I really am, and what my greatest strengths and areas of improvement are. It has ultimately steered me into understanding what I truly want and need from both professional and personal standpoints. I’m confident that the Ivey MBA will enable me to more effectively seek and more quickly achieve all that I want.

Cheers,
Rebecca

P.S. Dean Carol Stephenson has written a wonderful article on how a diverse board that includes women has benefited organizations. Check this Ivey Business Journal article out at: http://www.iveybusinessjournal.com/view_article.asp?intArticle_ID=507

Effectively leveraging Public-Private Partnerships to meet Canada’s growing infrastructure needs + Ways to get involved @ Ivey

2008-03-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to try a different approach, instead of making this a monologue about a general MBA topic I'm going to write on the specific subject of private-public partnerships (P3). Moreover, I have a twofold goal in mind for this post: first, I want to illustrate one of the numerous opportunities to get involved in extracurricular activities here at Ivey as well as to give you a backgrounder on P3s and using them to make Canada more competitive.

Lets start at the start: having expressed my interest in "getting involved" to a member of teaching faculty back in September, I was right away contacted by the director of The Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management here at Ivey - Dianne Cunningham. After chatting to Dianne I was sold on the idea of volunteering my time to help organize the upcoming Transportation conference. The conference had a mandate to focus on policy recommendations for making the ON-QC transportation gateway a reality. The piece of the conference that was of particular interest to me was the consideration for private funding, operation and maintenance of the continental gateway infrastructure.

Having finished the three day conference earlier today, I can say it was a truly amazing experience and I'm really glad that I got involved with Dianne. It not only gave me a great deal of insight into the way government thinks about private sector but also supplemented nicely my previous knowledge about P3s. Moreover, I was really surprised to find out that parts of Canadian government are actually quite dynamic. In particular, I was really impressed by the forward thinking that exists at the very top of such organizations as Metrolinx (former Greater Toronto Transportation Authority) and Industry Canada.

Having singled out the conference experience as an example, I want to stress that there are various other opportunities to get involved @ Ivey. You can pick the flavor and level of commitment that fits you interests best. Those opportunities include but are not limited to the MBAA, Leader Project, China Teaching Trip, Ivey Connects and the list goes on.

So now lets talk about the exciting stuff: the concept of P3s, or the emerging multi-billion dollar opportunity like I like to refer to it. The concept is based on the fact that there are different areas that public and private organizations excel at. A partnership between public and private entity allows for the transfer of risks to parties most qualified to handle those risks. For example a private company operating a public highway will likely be better qualified to handle day to day risks which translate into a lower cost of operation while government would still carry the overarching set of risks associated with the variability of demand for the highway.

Recently, there have been an increasing number of success stories associated with the use of public-private partnerships in various infrastructure projects around the globe. UK has been a pioneer in using the partnership approach and has illustrated to the rest of the world potential rewards which can be achieved through a smart use of public-private partnerships.

As the result of its efforts UK is seeing an increasing level of private investment in its infrastructure renewal and its brand new infrastructure projects. Currently between 10 and 13 percent of all public infrastructure investment in UK is originating from private financing initiatives helping the country to significantly narrow its existing infrastructure gap.

There has also been a number of public-private partnership successes right here at home. BC has taken a leading role in the use of public-private partnerships while other provinces are following its path, including such successful partnerships as Highway 407 and Royal Ottawa Hospital in Ottawa. (Not to say that those haven’t faced their own fair share of challenges)

Due to a number of significant successes of Canadian projects, public opinion has started to gradually shift towards support for these types of initiatives. Moreover, there has been upswing of interest and increased public investment into public-private partnerships in Canada. Various stakeholders are starting to quickly realize that the public-private partnership approach is one of the most effective ways to bridge the widening infrastructure gap that Canada is currently facing, which by some estimates has already reached $125 billion. However, care needs to be taken to satisfy the need for the continued education of Canadian public about advantages and successes of using P3 approach to ensure that Canada continues on the path of progress towards wider adoption of P3s as one of the key considerations for future infrastructure projects.

It is really encouraging to see that the Government of Canada has finally made a significant commitment to the “winning combination of transportation and public and private partnerships”. Furthermore, by supporting their investment of $33 billion into Canadian infrastructure with a $1.26 billion national fund for public-private partnerships, as well as allocating additional $25 million over 5 years to set up federal P3 Office the Government of Canada has created a clear path to success by allowing businesses an opportunity to what they do best, increase Canadian competitiveness. As a future business leader I see this initial step as opening a great potential for Canada to bring our infrastructure back up to the world standards and increase our country’s competitiveness in the global business environment.

Public-private partnerships will allow for a significant value building activities. It will not only help to create new growth opportunities for a number of Canadian businesses but it will also allow those businesses to gain the necessary expertise in time to enter emerging public-private partnership market in U.S. Our neighbor to the south of the border has been slightly lagging behind in adopting public-private partnership approach which might spell a great opportunity for those Canadian businesses which can figure out successful models of structuring partnerships and working with public institutions to build value for their host countries.

More interesting yet, is the fact that a single dollar invested in public-private partnerships is likely to have a multiplier effect for both Canadian infrastructure and our economy. It will do so by attracting additional investments from both businesses and private investors. It will also have positive effect on Canadian economy by helping to create net new jobs as companies look to build their internal capabilities to take relationships with public institutions to the next level of collaboration.

Furthermore, partnerships will help to unleash the true potential of the public infrastructure through a combination of a long-term focus on efficient construction and operation of those assets. Depending on the model of operation chosen, public-private partnerships might also be able to help better align the costs associated with use and maintenance of the transportation assets with the particular users who are directly benefiting from the use of those assets. For example, through a system of tolls for users of Highway 407 its current operator is able to maintain high quality of maintenance and service for that highway, users are in turn benefiting directly from a more efficient transportation infrastructure which 407 is able to offer them. One challenge associated with near monopolies

However rosy the recent picture, the initial support for public-private partnerships can rapidly reverse if not enough care is taken to ensure string of successful projects. Therefore, to reinforce current public support, it is absolutely imperative to work close with private sector on early projects to not only ensure that businesses have the capabilities necessary to deliver a project, but also that both private and public partners are absolutely clear on the roles, responsibilities, rules, as well as the nature of risks and additional commitment that this new partnership structure involves.

Finally, as with any new approach, public-private partnerships have their fair share of risks and potential challenges. However, all those risks fail in comparison to potential benefits to Canadian economy that can be gained through this innovative partnership approach.

Till next time,
George

Globe module and electives

2008-01-26T06:09:00.000-08:00

by: George Kesselman

In this post I will briefly describe our MBA journey at Ivey starting from where I left it off last time (month 4 of 12) up to our current point in the program (month 9 of 12).

After we finished module 2A (Finance, Strategy and Accounting) at the end of August and wrote our 48 hour report we had a first week of September off for our recruiting efforts. During that time there were number of self organized groups of students that went to London UK, Calgary, Toronto, and New York to meet with alumni and potential recruiters.

Just to put things in prospective, the main recruiting cycle for consulting and finance falls on mid September. That resulted in at least 20 job postings for each consulting and finance with couple of new postings coming up every day. With recruiting in the full swing we have entered our first elective cycle with an option to choose one or two out of the following three courses (Financial Strategies for Global Success, Competitive Analysis and Negotiations).

Electives are quite an intense experience, with three hour classes for each course running for two consecutive weeks. You get immersed in the course material to that degree that you start having dreams about it… which is kind of scary; especially if it’s an accounting elective :) In my experience electives don’t feel rushed but they do fly by in a blink of an eye, just imagine, you do the whole course in only two weeks.

I definitely recommend Bob White’s course, Financial Strategies for Global Success, as a must have for people going into finance. It’s generally considered one of the harder electives with a lot of material packed into it. That is also the course that really separates the future investment banking gurus from us mare mortals.

After those two weeks of electives we had the last week of September off for consulting and finance job interviews. Interesting fact to note: by the end of September close to 15% of students in the class have already landed jobs.

October 1st marked the return to the core MBA material, this portion of the course is called Globe module. The purpose of this module was to expose us to issues facing a global manager. Although we have covered fascinating topics ranging from Corporate Governance to Environmental impact of doing business it still didn’t feel like the module accomplished everything that it set out to. That was a bit unfortunate as we had some great professors teaching in this module. The nice part about it was that the time during this module felt quite relaxing (we had every Friday off for recruiting purposes) and I was able to put some quality time into my extracurricular activities and catching up with friends whom I’ve ignored for the past couple of months.

Following Globe we had another intense cycle of electives in which my personal favorite was Corporate Financial Reporting with Rick Robertson. Here’s an amazing professor and one of the very few people who can energize you about accounting for an 8am in the morning class. Simply amazing!

Two days after finishing the second cycle of electives large part of our class went off to an optional 10 day China study trip (CST). More on that in one of the future posts.

Finally, on January 7th we’ve started our current, pre-final leg of the Ivey MBA journey. This is module 2B and we are coming back to the core material. Our current courses are Marketing, Operations, and Managing information technology. I have to say that Marketing classes with Niraj Dawar have been an eye opening experience for me. I will admit, in the past I thought of marketing as a bit fluffy, but our time with Niraj has totally changed that perception. I guess the fact that Niraj is one of the top professors in his field doesn’t hurt neither.

Till next time,
George
___________________________________________
George Kesselman
MBA Candidate 2008
Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

To Fall or not to Fall?

2008-01-07T21:28:00.000-08:00

And if to fall than when? (Figuratively speaking of course)

By: George Kesselman

I have been repeatedly asked by potential students the following two questions: What is the difference between the two cohorts Fall (starting in September) and Spring (starting in May)? And is there an optimal time to start the program? I will try to answer the first question in this post.

I am myself a member of the Spring 2007 cohort, so I might be a bit biased towards our cohort. Spring cohort is advertised to be specifically geared for people interested in getting into the consulting and finance jobs. The main reason Spring cohort is positioned that way are the so called historical recruitment cycles for those two industries. If you think about it, those same employers are actively recruiting from major MBA programs all over North America and are therefore doing it in the beginning of the second year of the typical two year program, which incidentally falls on months of September and October. Those are pretty much the only two industries that recruit a year in advance, meaning that those students who are recruited into those firms would start their jobs in the fall of the following year.

The tricky bit comes from the fact that if you are a member of the Spring cohort you are competing for the same jobs with every other major MBA school in North America. While members of the Fall cohort are flying solo as there are no other major schools that function on the same schedule (at least to my limited knowledge).

Furthermore, from what I understand about finance and consulting jobs, if you are a good candidate you will get hired no matter when you are applying to them. Having said that members of the Fall cohort might have to put in some more proactive work to connect with the firms, and in return will enjoy lack of competition from their peers at other schools. If you ask me, it’s actually not a bad trade-off.

Theory aside, our cohort has tracked much stronger when it comes to finance jobs while the previous Fall cohort enjoyed a good track record when it came to consulting jobs.

In addition there are couple non recruiting differences between cohorts: Spring appears to have a higher male/female ratio (more guys) as well as quite a competitive spirit. It’s probably due to the nature of jobs that people are going after in our cohort. In general there wouldn’t be as many women who are going after the Investment banking and Management Consulting jobs as those types of jobs typically don’t mix very well with a family. Fall cohort has a Health stream mixed into it, meaning that there are 4-5 PhDs and M.D.s in the class, which makes for a very interesting class dynamic. While Spring class shares part of the curriculum with an AMBA stream (Accelerated MBA’s are students with an undergraduate degree in business from University of Western).

Fall cohort starts at the same time as the main university so they get a chance to do a lot more social fun stuff at the onset of their program. Spring cohort, on the other hand, starts when the main university finishes in May and majority of undergraduate students leave the city for the summer. So Spring cohort gets to do a lot more outdoor sports stuff instead.

Overall, jokes aside, there’s no clear advantage of picking one cohort over the other. To figure out if one cohort “fits” you better than the other you might want to consider coming down for an actual visit, sitting in both classes and talking to students from both cohorts.

In the next post I will try to share my thoughts on whether there is a best time to do an MBA.

Till next time,
George

___________________________________________
George Kesselman
MBA Candidate 2008
Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

Happy New Year!

2008-01-04T20:18:00.000-08:00

С Новым Годом! Which is Happy New Year in Russian (pronounced S Novym Godom). All the best wishes for 2008 and good luck to all of you trying to join the Ivey family this year!

Special thanks to all of You, our readers, for making the first year of the Ivey MBA blog such an overwhelming success. Having started at the end of February 2007 this blog has seen almost 5,000 unique visitors from all over the world since its inception.

Thank you for all the emails asking for a follow-up posts. I guess people are finding this stuff at least somewhat useful. I'm personally guilty of not having written in a while and there’s a good reason for that: it’s been a very busy couple of months with school, recruiting and the other fun stuff all happening at the same time!

Good news is that graduation is only 16 weeks away and I’m about 15 weeks away from running dry on my student loans. One might say its a good timing, while others might argue that it’s the pure genius of an evil mind, either way I can’t believe that our cohort is so close to being done…

So here it comes! Over the next couple of weeks I’ve set myself an ambitious goal: I’m hoping to write a couple of new posts talking about our Globe module and the second round of electives which we finished in December, our China study trip, advantages/differences between the two Ivey MBA cohorts, and finally some general fun stuff about the city of London Ontario. So one might ask: Is this goal a bit too ambitious? - Maybe. But is it impossible? - Never!

Finally, there’s now hope of actually saving my back while I attempt this near Guinness record. I’ve ordered myself an Asus Eee laptop which is supposed to be a new disruptive innovation coming from Asus. Weighting a mere 2lb (1kg) and advertised to cost only $200, in reality it costs $400 (hence the above mentioned one week shortfall in my self financing though student loans) it will hopefully act as my muse and will also be much easier to carry around on my expeditions to Starbucks.

Till next time,
George
___________________________________________
George Kesselman
MBA Candidate 2008
Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

Month 3 - Now convinced that 7 hours qualifies as "sleeping in"

2007-11-20T19:28:00.000-08:00

by: Marc Folch

Now that we have had a few months to get settled in, the MBA program is decidedly starting to feel like home. The learning curve is steep and sleep still a rarity, but I am getting used to it.

Admittedly my time scarcity is partly of my own making. I decided before I came that relationship building was one of my key goals and as a result I have taken on quite a few extra curriculars. It is still important to get above average marks, but I would not recommend the pure "bookworm" approach to anyone doing an MBA program because you forgo much of the program's value.

The biggest time drain for me comes from the fact that I was elected as the peer rep for my class, so I arrange all the tutorials and act as a liaison between the students and faculty on academic matters. I try to make it as easy as possible for my classmates to learn and take away the key material from each class. It is a big job (particularly around test time), but I thoroughly enjoy helping others so I don't mind one bit. I believe that the best way to succeed in life is to help others around me succeed. If you have the opportunity to be elected to any positions, take them! The experience is invaluable and it often lets you expand your network in ways that would not normally be open to you.

When not running tutorials, I am often playing rugby, exercising, or hanging out with classmates over a beer or a meal. The rugby team is a lot of fun, but gave me a black eye for Industry Week when the school paradeed us in front of all the big employers in downtown Toronto. On the bright side, at least they won't forget me!

The camaraderie and bonding you do with classmates by being on a team is not something that can be replaced by class sessions or even by a night out at the bar. There is something about battling together against a common foe that brings people together and makes the connection stronger.

Overall, the people in the program here are amazing and I have already made many friends which I will be keeping for many years to come. I am glad I came to Ivey.

Marc Folch

___________________________________________

MBA Candidate (October '08)

Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

Women @ Ivey MBA

2007-10-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

by: Cecilia Liu

The society has developed in a way that swipes away more and more the differences between men and women, which is one reason why more and more women are stepping out of the traditional roles and showing up in MBA programs and active on the business management stage. On the other hand, women are still shouldering some unique pressures, or even more of them than are men, once they choose to step onto such a competitive career path.

It has to do with the role definition of men and women at work and in personal life. At work, performance measurement for women is no different from for men; actually, diversity and equality at workplace is more of a trend and something good employers have to maintain. On the other hand, women’s share of family responsibilities, in general, have remained larger than the share of men during the course of societal change towards more women participation in management roles. For women in management to deliver an overall increased magnitude of responsibilities from both work and life, and perform well, they need to develop their own strategies, both short-term and long-term.

A few thoughts for those women who are currently contemplating on pursuing an MBA. First, do your due diligence. Conduct your in-depth market research on the functions and industries that you want to focus on for your future career. Make a self-assessment of your past and become able to articulate your strengths and weaknesses and post-MBA career plan. Then come to a clear answer as to why you want to do an MBA at this point in your career. This whole thinking and evaluation process will help you clearly define your goals for pursuing an MBA, go for it for the right reasons, and choose the right school.

Next you need to secure all the supports and resources necessary for you to complete your MBA. Better have the timing work in your favor. If you are in any kind of serious relationship, make sure the other part of the relationship is willing to provide you serious mental and spiritual support for your effort. You also need to plan yourself so that you enjoy sufficient financial capability to sustain the whole MBA program. The more resources and support you have, the better you will be off.

Third, you can count on the fact that you will need very good time and stress management skills to make the most out of your MBA program. So if you already have such skills, start to sharpen them by picking a good book to read, talking to incumbent MBA’s about what an MBA life is like, and getting mentally ready for a big challenge ahead.

Last but not the least, women do face the unique burden of building and raising a family, if they choose to go through that course. No matter this comes before or after the MBA program, the extra work and responsibilities are real and significant. As such, female MBA students had better make good career planning to work around this issue, so that they are not strained when this piece of task has to interrupt you suddenly from your career. Again, timing and social support are the two biggest factors you want to give deep thoughts on.

Your MBA decision is a big one. Make the most out of it. And enjoy it!

Cecilia Liu
MBA Candidate 2008

Balancing MBA and a Family

2007-10-04T05:31:00.000-07:00

Traditional MBA program is quite a demanding experience, here at Ivey the workload is kicked up a notch yet, due to the fact that it's delivered in one year format. So how can somebody manage not only to be successful at Ivey but stay effective at managing their family as well? I had a chance to pose the same question to Grace. Grace moved from China with her family to start her one year Ivey MBA experience.

"When I decided to do my MBA a year ago, I was concerned if I could survive the program at Ivey while taking care of my son. I understood that it was an ambitious decision for me to pursue an MBA as a mother of a four-year old son. The first moth at Ivey proved that it was particularly difficult to commit to both MBA coursework and motherhood.

However, I was able to successfully manage my time to fulfill my commitments thanks to my parents' coming over from China to look after my son for me during the day and my increased time management skills over the course.

Now, even though I feel the MBA program at Ivey is quite intensive, I dedicate one to two hours every day after dinner to be with my son telling him stories, teaching him songs, or playing games with him. On weekends, I typically spend a whole day taking my son and my parents to nearby parks, beaches or farms. I enjoy very much the time with my family and I feel that I can balance my study and life very well." (Grace Shi, Ivey MBA Candidate 2008)

So here you have it, managing both family and MBA is tough but none the less doable. Grace and four other classmates of mine, all with families and kids, are my role models when it comes to effectively managing one's time while balancing personal and professional commitments.

George
___________________________________________
George Kesselman
MBA Candidate 2008
Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

24 / 48 hour reports, Jack Bauer style

2007-09-05T13:38:00.000-07:00

Question: if Jack saves the world every time in 24 hours why can’t we, and the guy doesn’t even have an MBA?

Non the less, Ivey group reports are feared by some and are mentally compared by others to an experience which is as close as you come to slavery in the free world (right.., I should be careful here and make a note that I make an implicit assumption that slavery is not a pleasurable experience for majority of us). Fortunately, I’m here to shed some light on this urban myth. Having gone through both the 24 and 48 hour reports, I can honestly say that, like majority of students, I survived this experience and actually fared fairly well, apart from a slight lack of sleep that is, and we all know that sleep is overrated anyways.

So as it turns out, like a lot of things in life, the experience of a 24 or 48 h report is what you make out of it. There’s no question about it, it puts teams under a lot of pressure to deliver high quality end product within a very aggressive timeframe. However, you can also look at it as a battlefield where your tactics and theories can get a reality check.

Following is my brief recollection of a group report experience. As I’ve mentioned in one of my previous posts we got assigned to our learning teams at the start of the program. Those were also the teams that we worked in for the 24 hour report. Right at noon on Thursday we got a case and associated questions which would be at the foundation of our report. The case that we got was Harvard case dealing with rise and fall of equity research group at US investment bank Lehman Brothers. The case was about 30 pages, which is a bit longer than a typical in-class case. The primary focus was issues of leadership and organizational change. The report was due 6pm the day after, with presentation slides due four hours after that.

Looking back, it was a challenging experience with the hardest part being the issues around trust and control. Real challenge was that since we didn’t work on any significant deliverables as a group before there just wasn’t a sufficient level of trust. Each one of us was trying to write our own equal piece of the report and then attempt putting it all together. I lead the group through the initial analysis, brainstorming, and structuring of ideas. We ended the day at 12pm with a clear outline of the report, feeling pretty good about our progress.

Morning of Friday was spent writing and editing individual pieces of the report. Even though we were running a bit behind the schedule we were moving along nicely.
And then we got a real curve ball. One of our professors came in and gave us a little “hint” which if taken literally meant reversing course of the report 180 degrees at the 19th hour mark. And as they say, the rest is history.

The shear number of lessons that I took away from the 24h report experience is impressive. Apart from the obvious chance to apply the material that we’ve learned in class, team dynamics, leadership, project management, and the list goes on.

We had our second group report last week at the end of second module. The report was the extended version, running for 48 hours. This time around it was a lot smoother, with us being able to manage and delegate well and even finish the report ahead of schedule. Lessons that we’ve learned from our first experience still vivid in our minds we fine tuned the project to deliver a much better results this time around.

That sleep thing… So do any of you recollect how much did Jack sleep during the 24 hours? Wonderful world of TV comes to my rescue again when I’m looking for parallels.

MBA program research

2007-09-01T13:06:00.000-07:00

This post is primarily geared for those of you in the MBA program research phase of the pre-MBA process. I thought I would share couple of ideas about finding an MBA program which is right for you.

Good place to start is to think about what is it that you want to get out of an MBA? Whether it's strictly more money, career growth, or learning aspect that you find appealing. Once you have figured it out, it’s good to keep it in the back of your mind when you are doing your MBA program research.

Next, try to outline your strengths (eg. strong analytical ability, leadership, teamwork, etc.). Being realistic about it is going to help not only in the MBA search but also in the later MBA career search.

Combination of strengths and your goals should give you a pretty good idea about the types of MBA programs that you should be targeting. At this point you should be able to narrow it down to 5-10 schools.

Then there’s a question of fit. The tricky part about fit is that it works both ways. From school’s prospective they are ultimately looking to maximize the number of students successfully placed in high paying jobs. As those students would not only look good on career placement reports, helping to justify high cost of the program, but will also be a generous alumni, providing future support for school. Programs also want to ensure that each student contributes positively to school’s learning environment. On the other hand, you, as a candidate, want to find a best program that would help you accomplish and exceed your goals while being a good personal fit, lets call it a fun factor.

Once you have narrowed the list of schools down to 5-10 schools you can try to prioritize those schools by putting together a list of factors that makes each school different. Those factors can include average starting salary after graduation, tuition fees and cost of living, rankings, program length, class size, just to name few. Depending on how important each of those factors is to you, assign weights (1-10) to each one of them. Adding up the results for each program would tell you the top picks.

Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and make plans to meet some of your top picks in-person. I would say the easiest way to start would be to find one of the MBA fairs in your area. If you are lucky, all the schools on your list would be there to meet you. You can even go as far as email each school’s admissions and try to set up personal meetings before the fair. If you are lucky, some might even offer to take a look at your qualifications and do an interview if they think that you might be a good fit.

Use an MBA fair as an acid test. Approach all of the schools on your list and ask admissions if your background /goals are a good fit for a program. Make sure to talk to some of the alumni and current students to get a sense of what each program is looking for, both personality and background wise.
If you get a good feeling from talking to both admissions and students don’t hesitate to ask about possibility to visit the school and sit in one of the actual classes. That should give you a much better sense of a fit. You can also try to email both professors and current students to see how responsive they are to answering questions.

MBA fair links:

http://www.topmba.com/mba_fairs/
http://www.thembatour.com/

I’ll be one of the students representing Ivey at the MBA fair on September 23, 2007 in Toronto. Hope to meet some of you there.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to email me (gkesselman.mba2008@ivey.ca).

Good luck!
George

Useful MBA resources

2007-09-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

Going for interviews majority of employers expect you not only be well versed in the MBA material but also be aware of the industry and economic trends. I found the following resources quite useful for both coursework and for career related research.

Coursework related:
How to read financial reports (Guide by Merrill Lynch)
Various MBA topics (Financial Times)

Career related:
Vault guides
Wetfeet guides

Sample case interviews:
McKinsey
BCG
Baine

News:

Economic research:
The World Bank
IMF - International Monetary Fund
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

How to Make the Most of MBA Fairs

2007-08-27T08:49:00.000-07:00

by: Niki Healey
Manager of Ivey MBA admissions

Knowing that in the next few months there will be plenty of MBA Fairs happening around the world, I thought it would be useful to share my thoughts on two things: how to make the most of attending an MBA fair, and what benefit you can get from attending these events.

If you've never attended an MBA Fair, stepping into a room with 30, 40, or 50+ tables from different MBA Programs around the world with several thousand other prospective MBA applicants can be an overwhelming experience to say the least...The MBA Fair is not a great place to do preliminary research on schools - it is too busy, and your time with Admissions staff will be fairly limited. My view on Fairs is that they are a great tool to help firm-up the shortlist of schools you intend to apply to. This implies that it really is necessary to do some background research on the schools you're targeting prior to the Fair. As mentioned, your time speaking with the Admissions rep at a table is short, so to use up your questions asking things like 'what is your GMAT requirement' or 'when do classes start' is really not the best use of your time! Think of the MBA fair as your opportunity to make a strong impression on members of the Admission team...this will be good motivation to do your homework on their respective schools! If you can stand out in what is often the chaos of a Fair, you are leaps and bounds ahead in the game of differentiating yourself to the Admissions committee!

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Find the rest of this and other related posts at Ivey MBA admissions blog

First Impressions (Fall Cohort)

2007-08-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

By: Marc Folch

So... All the applying, GMAT writing, interviewing, reference chasing and waiting have paid off. I am now at what many consider to be Canada's premier MBA school.

What is it like? Well, there is a lot of work for sure. Full classes haven not even started (we are doing an optional preparatory knowledge course) but we are waking up for class that starts at 8:00am and goes straight to 5:00pm with a good 3-5 hrs of homework after.

I suppose when you are cramming a full MBA (normally 2 years), into a year and two weeks, there is not much time left for a slow ramp up. You really need to hit the ground running. Good thing I brought my Nikes.

It's a very collaborative environment here and we do a good bit of group work, but this translates to our social life as well. Even outside of class there is an incredible attitude of brotherhood/sisterhood in the program and any time you need a hand with something, there is always someone ready help.

The staff here are also like nothing I have ever encountered at an academic institution. The profs are interesting and know how to relate the material to the real world in a way that makes it relevant and forces you to think about the big picture. That was my biggest frustration with undergrad, it was often too abstract.

As for the admin staff, they are amazing. Most admins either treat you like a number or just don't care. Here, they are on the ball and will bend over backwards to help. When I first arrived, I couldn't get in touch with my roommate because his phone was off so i figured i might as well ask an admin. Within 5 minutes, she'd tracked him down to an international student orientation and had someone pass him a note to call me with my cell phone number. Never seen anything like it!

Overall, I'm impressed. We work hard, play hard, will sleep when we're dead.

Marc Folch
MBA Candidate 2008 (Fall Cohort)
Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

Industry week (Recruiting begins)

2007-08-08T19:56:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe that it has already been three months since the start of the MBA program. What I find even harder to believe though is that we are starting our main recruiting cycle fairly shortly. So one might think that it is happening way too fast and that might indeed be the case if you are thinking in-terms of a two year programs. When it comes to the Ivey one year MBA experience it somehow ends up feeling more or less like a natural progression.

Recognizing that for the majority of students it’s the career enhancement aspect why we are ultimately here, Ivey places a big emphasis on trying to tightly integrate the career management activities into the curriculum. Right from the day one we are encouraged to take advantage of the fact that Ivey has such a resourceful career management team. The way it’s structured is by having individual Relationship Managers focusing on particular industry segments, such as consulting, finance, and general industry.

So now let’s take a look at a more specific career management activity to-date. Two weeks ago we had the “Get Connected” industry week in Toronto. Its purpose was to meet and get to know a variety of interesting companies. The beauty of it was that the whole week was pre-arranged for us. The recipe for success was simply to add Ivey students and mix and mingle.

The week was packed with networking events, information sessions, and career coaching activities. We had presentations and networking events going back to back starting at 8am and sometimes going until 10pm. For those of you curious about some of the companies that participated in activities that week, starting with management consulting firms – McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Oliver Wyman, Monitor, AT Kearney, Deloitte, IBM, ZS Associates. Finance – RBC, Scotia Capital, CPP, CIBC, BMO Capital markets. There was also number of general industry representatives. The one that particularly stood out for me was Google.

Overall, it was a great week, lots of useful contacts, tons of insightful information that we would not have had otherwise. The real test is going to come in less than a month when the main recruiting cycle starts!

Till next time,
George

The Strategy Paradox - Book review

2007-08-04T20:38:00.000-07:00

I got this book based on the recommendation made by one of Corporate Strategy professors at Ivey. Coincidentally, one of my friends invited me to this book's release event. Michael gave a very interesting and insightful speech and as the result I was left itching to grab the book and dive into his ideas deeper.

This book turned out indeed to be quite a treat. The Strategy Paradox is a "collision between commitment and uncertainty". Michael not only identifies the challenge that managers face everyday: in order for a strategy to succeed resources have to be committed to it, but at the same time future by its nature is inherently uncertain and therefore there is no way to know if the strategy that they have chosen to pursue is the "right" one. The example analyzed in the book is the famous Betamax vs. VHS bet that Sony made back in the days.

The idea developed in the book is a J&J strategy of hedging strategic choices by investing a small portion of resources into creating independent strategy options. Those new initiatives take on life of their own and become alternative realities. Moreover, if one of those options takes off it will get absorbed back into the main business, ultimately helping to shape the overall company strategy.

I do recommend this book as it not only has interesting ideas about selecting the "right" strategy but is also very well written.

Till next time,

George

Playing on a Seesaw vs. MBA experience

2007-08-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

by: George Kesselman

Have you ever played on a seesaw? I’m sure many of you have. As it turns out, it is not only a fun physical exercise, but it teaches us about important concepts in physics, statistics, and negotiations. And with any luck, I will try to illustrate that it also might teach us a lesson or two about MBA grades.

In one of my posts I mentioned that marks are probably one of the hardest ways to differentiate yourself in an MBA program. I’ve received number of emails from readers curious to find out why that might be the case.

Throughout our lives we are instilled with a notion that being great means being better than your peers. In high school we were happy when we got the top grade in class even though it might have been only 72%; it was all the same, as long as we were at the top of the hill. That is precisely why the question of whether one would chose a $10,000 bonus if it was the highest bonus in the company or a $25,000 if it was a lowest one becomes hard to answer. It is as true in an MBA as it is in any other environment, and probably even more so in the MBA as everybody here is a type-A personality and everybody is aiming for a win.

Let me make myself clear here, what I’m not trying to do is to prove that marks are not important, as they definitely are. Especially if you are targeting Top Five consulting and finance firms, they are going to be scrutinizing your MBA grades in addition to other quantitative pieces of information such as your Undergraduate marks and GMAT score.

What I am trying to convey here is that while concentrating on maintaining good marks there has to be a definite focus on trying to differentiate yourself though other means, such as extracurricular activities, your professional network, depth of knowledge about the industry, and the list goes on.

By now you are probably wondering why I threw in the seesaw analogy at the beginning of this post. The reason being is the intimate curve. It is near and dear to a lot of us here in the MBA program, even though it does feel a bit tight at times. Curve is a tool which statisticians refer to as a normal distribution, in reality you can think of it as a semi-flexible seesaw; the central point being the mean value. If the two people at sitting right at the opposite ends of seesaw they are two standard deviations away from the mean (central value). Interesting property of this type of distribution is that 68% of values fall within one standard deviation away from the mean and 95% fall within two standard deviations away from the mean. Furthermore, a lot of distributions of values in the world fit well under this type of description, and the ones that do not fit are sometimes force fitted.

And now the big secret that schools and majority of employers know about: mean value of MBA grades is 78% with standard deviation of approximately 2%. If we assume an average class size of 100 students that translates into 68 students being somewhere in the 76 to 80% range as far as their final marks, another 27 students being somewhere in the 74 to 82% range, one or two students around 72% and finally two or three in the 85-90% range. Combined with the fact that dean’s list is top 25% of the class, grades might mean that the difference between student on a dean’s list and the one who is not on it might be in the order of a tenth of a percent.

One thing that I didn’t mention when I introduced the concept of a curve is the fact that it has to balance on both sides of the mean. The seesaw analogy comes in handy here again, as similar to the game, if somebody is on one side there has to be somebody on the other side, at approximately the same distance from the center for seesaw to balance. You can think of a curve as playing on a seesaw with multiple people on each side.

And finally one curious fact about the curve, let’s take a hypothetical situation: say Bob decides that his future depends on getting 88% in an ABC course, he works nights and days, doesn’t sleep or eat to get that grade. At the same time John works hard as well but tries to maintain some sort of a balanced lifestyle. The curious thing that John starts to discover soon enough is that even though he is putting solid effort into the course, his mark for ABC is starting to slide because there has to be somebody offsetting Bob’s outstanding results on the “other” side of the mean. At this point John gets scared as he also wants a great job which depends on him being on the dean’s list, so John decides to up his efforts and cut back on sleep for the next couple of weeks. To Jane’s surprise, her marks in ABC are suddenly sliding quite fast to “balance” both Bob’s and John’s increased contribution. But now comes the B-School reality, at the end of the day any school is faced with a choice: would they rather have Jane really upset despite the fact that she paid $xx,000 for the program and put solid amount of work into the course while John and Bob would be quite happy with their marks, or would the school rather have everybody not unhappy to various degrees. Hence a tight curve with a fixed mean and resulting need to differentiate yourself through means other than marks.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or comments about this or any other posts on this blog.

Till next time,
George
___________________________________________
George Kesselman
MBA Candidate 2008
Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

Two months into the Ivey MBA experience

2007-07-15T19:18:00.000-07:00

School is getting progressively busier with each week's passing. Now that we are more or less getting used to the rhythm of studying we are getting career stuff thrown into the mix.

First, I want to mention couple of words about the courses that we are taking as part of the second module. The courses are: Managing Financial Resources, Accounting Control for Managers, and Designing and Executing Strategies. I always thought Strategy to be quite interesting subject so I was definitely looking forward to that class. Moreover, I was always fascinated by financing activities of companies and as the result was also looking to forward to Finance course. Lastly, to be absolutely honest, I had mixed feelings going into the accounting course based on my undergraduate experience.

I remember taking the introductory accounting course as part of my management minor and having to spend hours figuring out if financial transactions were either credits or debits and then recording them in company ledger. So now you can imagine a bit of skepticism I had when David Sharp, our accounting prof, told us that he is going to make accounting fun... yet somehow in my mind fun wasn't the first synonym that came to mind when I thought of accounting.

We are now about a half way through the module two and my biggest surprise, so far, came from the fact that I'm actually finding accounting FUN. Let me explain myself here, before you think that George has finally lost it. The type of accounting that we learning is a managerial accounting, the type which looks at assessing health of businesses, whether or not banks should grant a loan to a business, and all kinds of other neat things that I can actually see being applicable to the real world. Moreover, professor Sharp has a unique ability to make accounting material seem much more interesting and indeed fun.

Strategy and Finance courses are even more interesting and informative than I originally anticipated. That is not to say that I'm finding either of them easy. There's lots of reading and studying for each one of those courses. So far I've been finding that the best way to stay on top of coursework is to spend 4-5 hours on a typical weekday, working on the next day's material, and 6-7 hours on each Saturday and Sunday to do some career related work and pre-reading for the week ahead.

As a closing comment I would like to leave you with a following thought: Trying to differentiate yourself in an MBA based on marks is probably one of the hardest ways to do it. More on this later.

George Kesselman
MBA Candidate 2008
Richard Ivey School of Business
London, ON, Canada
GKesselman.MBA2008@ivey.ca

Team as a functioning unit at Ivey:

2007-07-08T19:32:00.000-07:00

by George Kesselman:

In the first week of classes we all were assigned into learning teams of 6-7 people. Each learning team got a nice mix of cultural and educational backgrounds. On average each team has two international students, one female student, and the rest of composition is pretty random. Learning teams are designed to maximize learning experience in the program by helping to digest the material before the class.

As experience has shown, diversity in learning teams has both its strengths and potential weaknesses. The main strength of diversity lies in the ability to leverage individual strength to achieve results beyond just a simple sum of work by each member. (Ex: Think Bob and John can do a case analysis in two hours each. However, chances are that their case analysis results are going to be quite different because they made different assumptions based on their past experience. Now if they will work together, the result is going to be quite a bit more comprehensive as it will consider both of their insights but might not include some of the information that they would have included in their individual report) One potential weakness of diversity lies in the fact that the difference in backgrounds might make it harder to reach a common ground. (Ex. Lets think back to Bob and John example: if it takes them individually two hours to do the case it might take them now up to three hours to do it together as they will have to incorporate consideration for their join analysis into the report)

General rule of thumb: Each additional team member might add up to an hour for a team to reach consensus.

That being said, majority of teams gelled well together right from the start. Of course there was some natural tension during the first couple of weeks as teams figured out the best way to function as new learning units. It was interesting to see that over the first module each team adopted a unique working style. Some teams meet to brainstorm ideas and other teams meet for couple of hours a day to work through all the cases together.

To help each team bond better Ivey puts us through “trial by fire” by creating common challenges for each team. One of these challenges was the goal to win in team sport competitions during our orientation week. Our first module started to build team strength further by including two team presentations for the communications class. The biggest test of how well each team functions came during the 24 hour report at the end of Module 1. Read more about on this in an upcoming 24 hour report post.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or comments about this or any other posts on this blog.

Till next time,
George
___________________________________________
George Kesselman
MBA Candidate 2008
Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

First Module

2007-06-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

By: George Kesselman
MBA Candidate - May 2008

It's hard to believe that we've been here for more than a month already. The time is flying by faster and faster further we get into the program. We have our first round of exams next week for Module one courses. Module two courses start the day after we are done with the exams for this module.

First module courses were: MDU - Making decisions under uncertainty (Quantitative heavy course with lots of Statistics material), LPO - Leading people and organizations (Leadership analysis of difficult management decisions), CM - Career management (Self-analysis of our career goals, strengths, weaknesses, etc.), CE - Communicating effectively (Works to improve communication/presentation skills), TCM - Total career management (Course with Career management geared to help us build our resume/cover letters).

Our exams consist of a 24 hour report for LPO. 24 hour report is basically a case that gets assigned to our learning team and then we have 24 hours to put together a report. And then present it to a group of managers. MDU has a separate in-class three hour case exam. CM has a final paper that we have to put together based on the results of all self-assessment tools. CE has a final presentation.

First month @ Ivey

2007-06-10T20:17:00.000-07:00

By: George Kesselman

Come to think of it, it’s been a month since our MBA experience has started. What a ride it's been so far, and it only seems to be picking up more and more every week. With a full mix of social and school activities the experience has met and exceeded any of the expectations that I had before starting the program.

The program is definitely an intense experience, considering that we barely had a month of classes we already have exams coming up in short two week. So the ramp-up period doesn't really exist and yet majority of students are caught up to all the material through either working within groups of students, individual study, or working one-on-one with professors. At Ivey I came to realize that one of the most important parts in the one year program is the support structure that insures that nobody falls through the cracks and ends up missing part of the material. Part of that support structure is a continuous feedback loop with our professors. For example, it's not a rare occurrence to get an email from a professor thanking a student for an excellent point made in class.

Another unique feature that I came to appreciate even more in the month that I've been here is the interactive nature of the program. Professors don't lecture at you; class learning is a collaborative process that resembles a multidirectional conversation. It's really fascinating to see the learning lessons unfold right in front of you, as the result I find, to my own surprise, the retention level is a lot higher than in any course that I've taken before.

Ivey MBA costs

2007-05-31T19:25:00.001-07:00

Here are couple of costs that one might want to consider when planning for the Ivey MBA*:

Tuition: $59,000
MBA student association fee (includes health insurance): $900
Casebooks (mandatory): ~ $4,000
Appartment rental: $600-$800/month
Lunch: $5 - 6.50/day
Bus Pass: $74/month
Average taxi ride: $10

*Based on costs in 2007

Orientation Weekend '07

2007-05-23T19:56:00.000-07:00

by: Andrea Jang

Senators from the October cohort began “O-Week” for the May ‘08 class with a Wine and Cheese event at the Spencer Leadership Centre. Sipping on Pellar Estate Wine while munching on crudités, we became further acquainted with one another and met the our buddies from the October cohort. This event was definitely a great way to end the intensive two-week Pre-Ivey Program, while bringing students and faculty together in an informal setting.

As we moved into the night, groups headed out to the Taphouse on Richmond Street. The diversity of the crowd and eclectic mix of music definitely showcased the budding Beyonce’s and JT’s in the May cohort! Exhausted from Friday’s class and social activities, we headed home to rest before Saturday’s outdoor events.

Saturday arrived cool and breezy, some students even anticipated chances of rain. Armed with Starbucks mochas (taken from the Executive MBA breakfast), we donned our new Ivey t-shirts and marched into the South wing of Spencer to hear Don MacDougall reminisce about effective leadership in the workplace. A brief lunch followed along with meeting with our highly anticipated learning teams. As the sun began to emerge from behind the early morning clouds, we sported our colorful wristbands and headed outdoors to the vast landscape of Spencer’s backyard.

Pitted against one another in various learning team exercises, energetic groups brought a spirit of determination to win to the field. However, as the competitions ensued, the casualty rate increased exponentially. Key learning from Saturday: effective leadership involves not only playing hard, but also playing safe while having fun! The non-injured teammates regrouped for a delicious dinner barbeque at Spencer. While we snacked on the s’mores, Krista announced that the red team won by a mere half point! To celebrate, we moved to one of the main “Ivey” hangouts, the Barking Frog, to party the night away. With its multiple dance floors and strategically placed bars, the October and May cohorts continued to mix and mingle; without getting too up close and personal. J

Sunday proved to be a wonderful culmination to the weekend’s festivities. At the Waltzing Weasel, groups of students tackled the mini golf course and took a couple swings at the driving range. Definitely a key bonding session, newbies at the range received valuable pointers from the more experienced golfers in class.

Overall, the weekend proved to be a valuable experience for everyone and Orientation Weekend was a great introduction to an amazing year ahead!!

Andrea Jang
MBA Candidate 2008
May 2007 Cohort

First week of classes – The Ivey Difference:

2007-05-20T09:10:00.000-07:00

by: George Kesselman

Following is a quick recap of my first week of classes at Ivey. Looking back at it, it flew by in an absolute instant. 8 hours of classes a day did take some getting used to.

Monday we had a full morning of introductions to the program from faculty and staff. Following the introductions we had lunch break and then came a part we’ve been waiting for: LPO (Leading People and Organizations) team simulation.

I’ve heard from students in the previous cohort that Gerard Seijts was an excellent professor, but nothing prepared us for the eye opening case that we’ve got on Monday afternoon. Not to give it away for future students, it was a real treat, with professor expertly directing the discussion along the path for it to finally unfold into a beautiful story. The feeling most of my colleagues got was one of one of being a participant on an amazing journey. I personally, don’t think I will ever forget the lesson I’ve learned during that session. The four hour class flew by like a speeding train and at the end I was left yearning for more.

Tuesday we dove deeper into the actual process of learning with cases. And in the afternoon we came back to another leadership case discussion which expanded on leadership challenges that we’ve covered in the first class by providing new challenge situation.

Wednesday was another amazing class experience. We had a heated forum about Function of a Firm. The two speakers were Kevin O’Leary, founder of Softkey which in 1999 sold to Mattel for $3.7 billion, and his opponent Wade Oosterman, co-founder of Clearnet which was acquired in 2000 by Telus Corp. for 6.6Billion. It was unbelievable to have business people of such a high caliber answer our questions about importance of shareholder in a company and wealth creation in general.

The day continued with a warm welcome from Major and COO of City of London. Both of them talked about the important role Ivey is playing in community and later entertained our questions about business environmet in the city.

After a lunch break we had our first Career Management class with Lyn Purdy. This class places emphasis on helping us discover ourselves better with discussions around the reasons for choosing to pursue an MBA and particular career paths. We’ve also looked at a case of a person who followed traditional high earning jobs just to discover personal vacuum at the end.

I’m finding that case method is really effective in putting ourselves in somebody else’s shoes and trying to discover an effective decision for this situation. This particular Career Management case was also designed to help us think not only about the effective decision at that particular point but also to think through the decisions that would help us avoid ending up in the same situation of a personal “gridlock” in the future.

Thursday was a community action day. To illustrate the fact that Ivey not only talks about caring for community but also takes action when it comes to making positive community impact Ivey MBA studnets participate in Reforest London initiative.

Friday we had another special treat in form of a class with Dennis Shackel, an amazing communications guru recognized with multiple Teaching Awards. The communications class felt more like individual coaching session with professor helping each and everyone of us feel part of the discussion while helping us identify ways to communicate more effectively. Multiple times he engaged members of audience to drive his point home. The class experience felt really fluid, with Dennis pulling-in personal facts about class members from his memory and inviting students into the conversation.

The day concluded with presentation from Career Management group. Through the transition from two year to one year MBA format career management became much closer integrated within the curriculum. Director of Career Management group discussed the value that Executive Career Coaches play in the Ivey MBA experience and how their role differs from that played by a typical Career Councellor. We were also advised to take a more proactive approach to the career search and preparation through engaging in early conversations with Coaches/Relationship Managers responsible for our particular industry of interest.

George Kesselman
MBA Candidate 2008
May 2007 Cohort

Leadership Quotes:

2007-05-15T19:21:00.000-07:00

"Leadership is not a designated position...it's a phenomena. Leadership is....People following people because they want to...not because they have to." ~Larry Wilson

"Of all the biographies in the world, most deal with men who have talked themselves upwards. More than all of the scientists, writers, saints and doers combined...speakers have always ruled, and they will continue to rule. The smart thing is to join them." ~Bruce Barton, Advertising Legend

"If business is your game, don't be a dabbler. Find your passion, pick your game...and focus." ~Jack Welch, Chairman, General Electric

"I never worried about becoming a successful person. I wanted to be a significant person." ~Nido Qubein, Business Author/Consultant, Recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor

"In order to do something you've never done, you've got to be someone you've never been ." ~Les Brown

"If I went back to college again, I'd concentrate on two areas: learning to write and learning to speak before an audience. Nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively." ~Gerald R. Ford, Former President, U.S.A.

"The road to happiness lies in two simple principles: find what it is that interests you and that you can do well and when you find it put your whole soul into it - every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability you have." ~John D. Rockefeller III

"Formal education will make you a living, self-education will make you a fortune." ~ Jim Rohn

"I don't want to find myself in a nursing home someday thinking all I did was play it safe." ~Charlie Eitel, CEO Simmons Mattress

"The people who tell the stories rule society." ~Plato

"Champions aren't made in the gym. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them - a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than skill." ~Muhammad Ali

"Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe." ~Winston Churchill

Ivey MBA + Kids

2007-05-06T20:06:00.000-07:00

By: Amy Gibbons
Ivey MBA -May 2007 Cohort

Ivey Kids

While the Ivey Moms and Dads are busy, the Ivey kids can find lots to do in London. I asked my niece, Madeline (age 4), for all her favorite things to do in the city.

City of London Programs & Services
Information on parks, swimming pools, skating rinks, neighborhood day camps & community centers.

London Public Library
Check out the Kid’s Space on the London Public Library’s website for all programs and services.

London Children’s Museum
“Play together, learn together” is the museum’s motto. The museum is hands-on and interactive and focuses on the educational and social development of children from infancy through age twelve.

Storybook Gardens
The attractions at Storybook Gardens are designed to meet the specific needs of children from infancy to age twelve.

Adventures on Wonderland
“Adventures on Wonderland” is London's Largest Indoor Playground Facility for children 13 years old and under. They offer interactive, energetic play where kids can explore with their minds & bodies.

The Little Gym
Programs are targeted at children from infancy to age 12. Classes include: movement, music, gymnastics, sports, exercise, games, listening and cooperation.

Ivey Parents

This short list of parent resources reflects the recently expressed needs of students. If you are looking for other services, please feel free to contact me at AGibbons.MBA2008@ivey.ca.

London Children’s Connection
London Children's Connection is a non-profit, family-focused organization providing high quality child care/early education programs and related services for over 4000 children and their families in London and the surrounding area. The Children’s Connection can also help you find childcare facilities.

Western Day Care

Before & After School Programs
Contact you child’s school Principal for information about programs. Many schools offer these types of programs on site.

The London YMCA Child Care Services

The UCC Flexible Child Care
The UCC Flexible Child Care program offers drop-in child care on a per hour basis.

“The 10 Things I’ve Learned” – Advice to Incoming Ivey MBA Students

2007-05-04T11:15:00.000-07:00

By: Lorraine Wong

Prepping for cases, attending learning team meetings, absorbing information at Career Management clinics… oh, and I almost forgot, going to class! A typical day in the life of an Ivey MBA student is a real test of time management skills. The first week back in a classroom was a big change for me, but overall, I found that the transition to life and school in London, Ontario has been relatively smooth. Of course, instantly gaining 67 new friends doesn’t hurt! To give you some insight into my Ivey experience in the last two months, I’ve put together a list of 10 things

I have learned:

1. Yes, Guinea Pigs
It was a bit risky, but we took a chance on joining the inaugural class of the new one-year MBA program. Given Ivey’s reputation as a leading business school, we are confident that the quality of the Ivey MBA would be maintained, if not improved. So far, so good.

2. Thinking Cross-Enterprise
The most engaging cases we have reviewed so far in class have been the ones that allow two or more instructors to take us through the various issues affecting one company. For example, the “IT” instructor does not only delve into specific IT issues, but also integrates aspects of leadership into the discussion.

3. Speak Up!
Participation in class discussions frequently count for at least 30% of your grade. That being said, contribution marks are awarded based on the quality of comments as opposed to quantity. Class is a “safe environment”, so we shouldn’t be afraid to speak up.

4. Teamwork
On the first day of class, we were assigned to learning teams that comprise 6 or 7 students from various backgrounds. In my team, there are two engineers, one IT consultant, an HR specialist, an investment banker and me (miscellaneous accounting and finance person). The different perspectives that each of us have really contribute to the lively discussions in our meetings, while our different skill sets allow us to rely on each other if we are weak in any specific areas.

5. “Work Hard, Play Hard!”
Various local establishments have benefited handsomely from our class. Every week, our schedules are packed not only with school-related events, but many social outings. Formally, there are two Social Reps who plan official events (this week, there’s a mini-golf tournament and a beach day). Informally, we frequently get together at local bars and restaurants, in addition to playing volleyball, basketball and golf.

6. Making Some Big Decisions
A one-year program means we have to make decisions fairly quickly on our post-MBA career path. Last week, our class went to Toronto where representatives from various companies held mock interviews and information sessions. Career Management did a great job of pulling everything together; now it’s up to us to narrow down our choices, research the available opportunities and begin preparing for interviews. Recruiting season begins in less than two months!

7. 24, no, 48 hours
The infamous 24-hour reports are truly a unique experience. Two weeks ago, my team was immersed in a case that was given out to us at 1:30pm on Wednesday. A written report was due at 3pm on Thursday; 5 hours later, the PowerPoint presentation slides were due! The next day, each team made a presentation to the Faculty and several executives from industry. To avoid losing sleep two nights in a row, our team developed a timeline/schedule and clarified the responsibilities of each team member.

8. “The Country Club”
Some of us have described the Spencer Leadership Centre as having a “country club” feel. Although I heard how fantastic the facilities are at Spencer, I did not fully appreciate it until I was sitting on the balcony of the lounge during the 24-hour report, looking out at the beautiful surroundings, on a much-needed break. There are beautiful lounges, new lockers, beach volley-ball pits, a basketball court, and a restaurant (much nicer than the cafeteria on main campus!). And on most days, you can see a gopher or rabbit on the grass!

9. Not Just Talking, but Communicating
A component of Module 1 focuses on the importance of communicating effectively. Watching videotapes of ourselves making presentations in front of the class, we quickly learned the importance of “planting”, moving our hands above the shoulder, and removing “filler words”.

10. Endurance is Key
Congratulations on making it to number 10! It’s easy to get worn out quickly in this intense program. There are many things going on simultaneously and sometimes it’s difficult to keep up. This experience is like a marathon, so I just try to pace myself and know that I can count on my classmates for support.

“This experience is really what you make of it.” I can tell you that this was repeated to us a few times in the first week of class, so I will be the first to pass this on to you. You may have heard this already in your past, but at Ivey, it really is turning out to be true. We only have a year together, so we have to make the most out of this experience!

Lorraine Wong
Ivey MBA Candidate, 2007

First day @ Ivey MBA

2007-04-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

by: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

Today was the first day of Ivey Preparatory Knowledge Program (PKP). The MBA is finally starting to feel real.

I flew into London, Ontario around noon yesterday (April 29, 2007). Despite its small size London has its own airport, which is very convenient. My first surprise came as I boarded the direct Winnipeg - London flight to discover the plane surprisingly full. After getting into London and taking couple of minutes to unload my stuff at the Bed and Breakfast, I ventured out for the rest of the day exploring the neighborhood. So far, I’m left with a very favorable impression of London. The city definitely has a university town feel to it. Considering that there are 350,000 permanent residents in London and 60,000 seasonal students the city feels much larger than it is just by the shear number of young people that you see around the city. At least that’s my first impression. Starting in the summer MBA Cohort we get the unfortunate part of seeing the tale part of the student body (to my disappointment that also includes the better looking part of the student body) migrate back to the places of their permanent residency outside London, at least until September.

OK, now a little bit about the Ivey PKP program: it is designed to ease students back into the study routine while reinforcing the foundation of skills necessary to hit the ground running when the actual program starts. The PKP program consists of three modules, first four days are Quantitative Skills, the next two days we will live and breathe Economics, and the last three days focus on Accounting Skills. The classes run from 8am to 5pm with couple of breaks in-between. The 8 hours of classes a day will definitely take some getting used to. My second surprise came when a saw the number of people that are attending the PKP, according to the rough count there was 52 of us out of the class of 69. As the result, one of the bonuses of the PKP program is a chance to meet and work with majority of your classmates before the start of actual classes.

The material taught today consisted of a morning session which started to build on the fundamentals of statistics. For me that was a much appreciated refresher. The afternoon session dealt with modeling a case problem using MS Excel. We’ve learned number of Excel tricks that will most definitely come handy in couple of weeks when we will start analyzing actual cases.

With that in mind I’m off to doing my homework for tomorrow,

Till next time,

George

“MBA as a life for school, or school of life”

2007-04-30T14:30:00.000-07:00

So here I am, sitting at yet another Starbucks in yet another city. But somehow this feels different… oh yes, I landed in London, Ontario this morning, the Preparatory Knowledge Program starts tomorrow, and the actual MBA program begins in two short weeks.

Let me start by explaining the meaning behind the opening statement. How does an MBA differ from any another graduate degree? MBA is designed to arm its graduates with a knowledge toolkit that will help the transition into the middle management positions. What its not, is another research based graduate degree. At its best, it’s a much more practical degree than anything else out there.

The majority of potential students look at an MBA as a program that will give them the skills necessary to contribute to their future success by helping to accelerate the career while contributing to their personal development. When researching programs I looked for a slightly different angle: a program that would provide me with a learning environment I would be totally immersed in, and hence become an accelerated school of life.

Why an MBA journal?

Before writing this journal I did a quick search of MBA students’ insights. Reading those insights, I came across a large number of amazing stories of accomplishment and luck. Unfortunately, there is a fine line between the motivational pull of high accomplishment and mildly discouraging push of overachievement. I will be absolutely honest, one of the main reasons for writing this journal is to share the fact that you don’t have to have a stellar past in order to get into a prestigous MBA program. For a lot of students the MBA becomes a life changing experience by helping them to realize their full potential.

I don’t think I would be doing anybody a favor if I used this journal to self-advertise. I’m writing this journal with the following goal in mind: share my MBA and pre-MBA experience to help future students with difficult decisions associated with committing to pursue an MBA. My hope is that this journal will at least partially alleviate anxiety associated with the whole MBA process.

Who am I?

I’m a strong believer in the fact that people are at least partially products of their past and it plays an important role in shaping our values and thinking.

With that in mind let me tell you a little bit about my own past. I was born and raised in Moscow, Russia. One of the most vivid memories of my younger years was tanks on the streets of Moscow in early 90’s during the days of “Putch” and enormous lineups of the “Prestroika” era. It was a period of a fundamental transformation for Russia from a Planning Communist economy to an Entrepreneurial Economy driven by opportunities. I remember starting my first business in Moscow in my early teens and seeing it grow rapidly in a short couple of months. I carry that experience with me as a fundamental lesson about taking advantage of an opportunity at a right time and right place.

I moved to Canada with my father in late 90’s. I earned my undergraduate degree from one of the provincial universities. In my undergraduate degree I majored in Computer Engineering and also took Business as a minor. One of the most valuable lessons that I took away from my undergraduate days was the fact that I get excited by challenges and I do my best learning through personal interaction.

Why MBA?

I view an MBA as a truly life changing experience. Like many of my colleagues, the primary goal of pursuing an MBA is the career enhancing aspect. And as the result I hope to gain a job in consulting. However, it would be too narrow to look at an MBA as only a career tool. MBA, much like a Swiss Army knife is so much more than it appears. And if you look at it as only a knife you would be missing out on the number of other significant aspects. For example, there are very few other opportunities out there to become a part of such a diverse network of business professionals. I’ve heard again and again how powerful those MBA alumni networks can be in both personal and professional respects. Moreover, the enormous challenge of an MBA that you put yourself through really helps one to discover new things about themselves. You also get to build a close relationship with your classmates that are all going to be in senior management positions in the next 10 years.

My path to an MBA started during the third year of my undergraduate degree. I started to realize that focusing on technology rendered a relatively narrow view of the word. Moreover, even though I did get good grades in technical courses they didn’t challenge or excite me. Through extensive research I realized that the MBA would be an extremely important tool to add to ensure future career success. The more I researched the MBA programs the more I became excited about it. With MBA I also found a direct relevance to my short and long-term career and personal goals.

Why Ivey?

I want to narrow down why I picked the Richard Ivey School of Business, based out of London, Ontario as the school of choice for my MBA program. It was quite an involved process, as you might have seen from my blogs on Business Week, so here I will give a condensed version of the journey that lead me to Ivey.

I started my search by identifying the main variables between different MBA programs and relating those back to why I decided to take an MBA in the first place. The frustrating part of the program search process spans from the fact that it’s a two way selection process, which is meant to ensure the closest fit between students and the MBA program. In retrospect, it not that different from a dating game, with students having to court the programs they are interested in and the programs trying to get the best students for their classes. As in any dating there’s lots of disappointment, anxiety and rejection, adjustment of expectations, and finally excitement of moving through the process and being accepted by the school of your choice.

After compiling the list of factors that I was looking for from an MBA program I tried to apply it to the group of selected MBA programs to try to narrow it down to a manageable size. I’ve started with a group of 20 schools and was able to narrow it down to five schools through extensive research. I followed with in-person visits to get a feeling for each school’s culture and to get an appreciation of value of a particular school.

The factors that attracted me to Ivey were that it definitely was one of the top business schools in the world. It is also only second to HBS in the number of cases produced. Another major factor that appealed to me about Ivey was program’s steady placement track record for the field of Management Consulting that I found immensely appealing. Moreover, students and alumni were giving the school their highest praise. The one year format is also a really attractive option, minimizing opportunity cost my saving a year of lost salaries and time away from work, while maximizing the use of living expenses.

What do I want YOU to take away from this journal?

I would like for this journal to become part of your MBA research toolkit. In particular, if you are considering top international schools outside US. I also know, based on my own experience, that GMAT+MBA Admissions can be experiences full of anxiety. I want you to feel at least a little bit less stressed out about the whole process. Each one of us is and individual with our own unique strengths and weaknesses and there is a program out there for each one of us that is a perfect “fit” for our background and goals.

Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions,
George

George Kesselman
Ivey MBA
May 2007 Cohort

Why Ivey?

2007-04-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

by: Khalil (Kevin) J. Mouchantaf - MBA2008

When I first started researching schools, the Richard Ivey School of Business was not even on my list. However, after investigating MBA schools thoroughly, the Ivey MBA quickly rose to the top of the list.

I am a Canadian of Lebanese origin in my early 30’s. I am currently a practicing physician in Boston, US. However, over the course of my career I had become drawn to management. In addition, I was drawn to an international career. At this point in my life, an MBA makes the most sense in terms of helping me switch careers and aim for the international career. While my background is slightly different from most prospective MBA students, my aspirations were similar, I wanted to change one or all of the following: function, industry and country.

I researched and visited countless top MBA programs in the US, Canada and Europe. It was hard work to sift through the endless marketing campaigns which schools use. No wonder many students just decide to apply to a program based on reputation or rankings. I concluded that when comparing Canadian MBA programs to the ones in US, the ones in Canada have very solid and competitive curriculums but lack their counterpart’s full blown marketing machines. The latter was probably the reason why I had not heard of Ivey during my initial MBA research.

After visiting a number of US programs, I was disappointed with the low percentage of International students (around 30%), and the relatively sparse discussion of non-US businesses. I was also disappointed with the schools’ limited ability to place graduates globally, despite their powerful brands. Lastly, in today’s busy world the two year program is starting to became a less attractive option.

As a result, I started looking into European programs. Over the last couple of years, those programs have come a long way with their global reach. However, I found their respective curriculums uneven (in terms of balancing out the soft and hard skills) and placement outcomes inconsistent (each school has a reputation for focusing on one type of industry but not all three out of finance, consulting, and industry)

So what is so special about the Ivey MBA (in no particular order)?

1) Ivey’s revamped Cross-Enterprise Leadership curriculum putting increased emphases on both the soft and hard skills. The program uses the case method as a starting point, looking at each business as a complex matrix enterprise. Not to mention, that more than 35% of the cases are international. A lot of those cases are written by Ivey faculty, the second largest producer of cases after Harvard. Concerns about the case method not being best suited for teaching finance and accounting turned out to be not well founded, since a number of the Professors who teach using the case method are well published finance writers.

2) Ivey’s brilliant professors. During my class visit to Ivey, I had the chance to hear the new program director, Tony Frost. I was blown away by his assertion that the mission of the Ivey MBA is to “change our lives.” I also attended the finance case led by Professor Jim Hatch, an equally accomplished finance professor with significant experience in entrepreneurial and biotechnology finance.

3) Ivey’s admission’s office was by far the most personable and professional I had encountered. Unlike a certain top UK program, where I encountered dispassionate approach towards potential students, Ivey staff treated me respectfully. My first encounter with the admissions office was through sending my resume in order to get feedback about potential fit for the Ivey MBA. Following that, I had multiple phone conversations in order to learn more about the program. I was interviewed by a relationship manager from the career office which helped me jumpstart the process of thinking about a post MBA career. I also had a face to face interview with a member of the admissions’ committee. Everyone displayed utmost professionalism.

4) Ivey’s career placement office has come a long way in helping students locate their dream jobs, surpassing their Canadian peers. I hope they continue to do that and attract recruiters from more countries. Ivey boasts more than a 92% placement rate, with graduates entering very competitive fields, including I-banking and management consulting.

5) Ivey’s participants come from diverse backgrounds, are articulate, well accomplished, independent thinkers, self starters, and are future global leaders.

I can go on and on about my positive experience even before setting foot on campus. The above reasons sum up my decision to attend Ivey. If you were to ask me about the one negative so far, I would have to say, the school’s limited brand name, at least where I currently live in the Northeastern part of the United States. I hope this blog that George started will at least play a small role in getting the word out about our “hidden gem.”

Khalil (Kevin) J. Mouchantaf
Ivey MBA- Fall 2007 cohort

Globe and Mail - MBA articles

2007-04-23T06:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to the "Lessons Learned" article by Richard Bloom, published in Globe and Mail on Friday, April 20, 2007. The article talks about the Schulich MBA program and tries to identify couple of the most important "focus points" for students in an MBA program:

- Choose teammates carefully
- Don't forget party time
- Find a mentor
- Never stop networking
- Don't be afraid to fail
- Take risks

---------------------------------------------------------
Another interesting G&M article: Report on MBA schools by Marjo Johne. This article identifies number of possible specializations for students pursuing an MBA in Canada.

10 days to Pre-MBA

2007-04-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

by: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

The floodgates of information have been opened - we have been assigned our Ivey MBA email addresses. We have also been granted full access on the ezone (Ivey web portal). With loads of information including career related info and full access to such websites as Vault and Career Leader, its bound to keep you busy for countless hours.

The past couple of months flew by so fast that it still doesn't feel real that the pre-MBA program starts in 10 days. The only thing that reminds me of the big upcoming change in my life is the increasing number of both good bye lunches with co-workers and friends and correlated to that the number of Ivey information emails.

Networking @ Ivey

2007-04-20T13:01:00.000-07:00

Ivey Network:

•18,000 alumni
•1 in 4 alumni are in a senior management position
•Global
•Loyal

How to Start the Conversation:

•Re-assess your goals and how this individual might help
•Research their background, their industry, the firm and, of course, their role
•Email to set up meeting time – short, concise and clear on what your goals are with the meeting
•Be prompt with “meeting” time
•Structure some solid questions around industry, firm, role that will help you feel confident, comfortable and get you real information (probing is expected)

Ever wondered who else is reading this blog?

2007-04-17T14:24:00.000-07:00

In the past month we have had 312 visitors:

Thanks everybody!

Please don't hesitate to send me you feedback/ideas,

GKesselman.mba2008@ivey.ca

George

Class stats - May '07 Cohort

2007-04-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

Total number of students: 70
Percentage of female students: 17%
Percentage of Int'l students: 25%
Percentage of students born outside Canada: 52%

Of those who filled-in their career section, listed... :

50% - Consulting
25% - Finance
15% - Entrepreneurship
10% - Other

... as their area of interest.

Ivey MBA '07 - a year in pictures

2007-04-15T22:44:00.000-07:00

Ready, Set, ...

2007-04-13T21:47:00.000-07:00

by: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

Yet another week flew by, bringing me closer to the start of my MBA program. Two weeks left until the start of the Pre-MBA and four until the start of the actual program. I almost cannot believe that I’m about to start it. The torture of GMAT and the uncertainty of the application process still fresh in my mind.

Car is sold, student loans are lined up, and apartment is ready. I do have to say that it went much smother than I originally expected. Only two and a half months ago I was submitting my application to Ivey and anxiously awaiting the verdict. Then came the challenge of the interviews and the excitement of acceptance. So for the past two months I have been running around trying to balance finishing/handing off projects at work, getting though the project management courses that I decided to take for “fun” back in January, and getting things lined up for the MBA program.

To add a bit more excitement to the mix I’ve decided to email all of my future profs and ask for the book recommendations (some of which you can find in the right menu). Needless to say I sometimes wonder if employees at Starbucks ever get tired of me, I think by now they simply view me as a part of the store interior.

Now that I have a second to reflect on the past couple of moths, I realize that I’m about to open a new and exciting page in my life, the MBA for me is full of unlimited possibilities. At the same time I'm keeping in mind the fact that an MBA is not a silver bullet that will get you the dream job, but it’s an enabler that if used as prescribed will help your optimize your efforts to get that job. But non the less it brings me a step closer to realizing my goals.

Feel free to contact me with any questions at:

GKesselman.Mba2008@ivey.ca

George

Ivey MBA Admissions questions

2007-04-12T20:18:00.000-07:00

Email exchange between George Kesselman and Scott Walker (Director, MBA Recruiting & Admissions for Ivey MBA)

GK: I want to pursue a career in Management Consulting. If I chose to go for the May07 intake, does that mean I have a lower chance to find a job after I finish in the spring '08?

SW: Actually, the May cohort is perfectly aligned for the consulting industry and you would be able to maximize your consulting opportunities in the May cohort.
[also true for the financial sector jobs]

GK: I'm applying to number of MBA programs and was wondering how long does the decision process take after the completed application is submitted to Ivey? Do you have any suggestions as far as coordinating the application process for multiple schools?

SW: Once we receive a competed application, your file is reviewed and a decision to move to the interview stage is made. Once the two admissions interviews are complete we are trying to get back to applicants within 3 to 4 weeks. So depending on your availability for the interviews, the entire process could take as little as 5 weeks although it could be as much as 8 weeks. Let us know if you have a specific time frame and we will do our best to work with you.

As far as coordinating your applications, I would only suggest that you keep them straight. We read every file and more than you would expect declare that some other school is the right one for them in our application. Don't try to copy the answers, even if the questions are similar between schools. It shows when someone has not taken the time to really think about their answers to the essay questions on the application.

I hope this was helpful. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions about the Ivey MBA program or the admissions process.

Warm regards,
Scott Walker
Director, MBA Recruiting & Admissions
******************************

MBA '07 Curriculum

2007-04-05T21:51:00.001-07:00

Module1:
Developing Leadership Competencies (8 weeks)
Focus on the development of personal leadership competencies.

Module2:
Developing business skills and executing strategies (16 wks)
Examine an organization’s key structures and processes, and how they are aligned with strategy.

Module3:
Competing Successfully in a Global Environment (8 weeks)
Analyse how an enterprise can compete successfully in a global environment.

Module4:
Excelling Through Cross-Enterprise Leadership (12 weeks)
Electives in key sectors such as, investment banking, consulting, entrepreneurship, marketing, operations and the health sector.

Key Dates May 2007 Cohort

2007-04-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

DATE	EVENT
Week of April 30th	Pre-Ivey Program
Week of May 14th	Orientation Week
Monday, May 21st	Victoria Day Holiday (Observed)
Week of May 21st	- Leading People and Organizations - Making Decisions under Uncertainty - Managing Your Career - Communicating Effectively
Monday, June 25th	LPO Report
Tuesday, June 26th	- Managing Financial Resources - Accounting and Control for Managers - Designing and Executing Strategy
Monday, July 2nd	CANADA day (Observed)
Week of July 3rd	Career Management Industry Week (Toronto)
Monday September 3rd	Labour Day Holiday (Observed)
Tuesday, September 4th	Report
September 5th - 7th	Recruiting Trip Week (Optional)
Week of September 10th	Electives Period
Week of September 17th	Electives Period
Week of September 24th	Recruiting Prep Week (No Classes)
Week of October 1st	Global Environment of Business
Monday, October 8th	Thanksgiving Holiday (Observed)
Week of November 26th	Electives Period
Week of December 3rd	Electives Period
Week of December 10th	Electives Period
Week of December 17	International Trip (Optional)
Week of December 24th	UWO and Spencer Closed
December 31st – January 1st	UWO and Spencer Closed
January 2 - January4th	UWO and Spencer Reopen
Monday, January 7th, 2008	- Marketing Products and Services - Managing Operations - Leveraging Information Technology - Ivey Consulting Project
Week of February 18th	Ivey Consulting Project Week
Week of March 10th	SABRE Marketing Simulation
February 5, 2007	Elective Period
February 28, 2007	Good Friday Holiday (Observed)
February 12 – April 3, 2007	Program Culmination
April 6, 2007	Convocation
April 18 – 20, 2007	China Teaching Project and LEADER Project

An Inside Look at Ivey :

2007-04-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

Ivey B-school Acting Admissions Director Scott Walker looks for enthusiastic applicants who will "contribute meaningfully to the class"

Scott Walker is the new acting director of MBA admissions at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario (No.2 in BusinessWeek's 2006 ranking of full-time MBA programs outside the U.S.). Walker joined the Ivey school in the spring of 2002 as manager of marketing and recruiting. But he's no stranger to the London, Ontario B-school, having completed his MBA there in 2001.

Prior to getting his MBA, Walker worked for high-end pen retailer Mont Blanc in marketing and sales. He recently spoke with BusinessWeek Online reporter Mica Schneider. Here's an edited transcript of their discussion:

Q: Applications to Ivey dipped about 20% in 2004. How did the smaller applicant pool affect your selection of new MBAs?
A: It didn't...though we did interview 100% of our admitted applicants this year [up from 85% in 2003.] We've been pleased with the quality of the applications.

Q: Is the class that's arriving in September already full?
A: Pretty much. [But] if we get a good applicant this summer, we'll be able to find a place for them.

Q: Ivey has seven admissions rounds. When is it too late to apply?
A: It's never too late. Next year, we'll probably move toward a rolling [admissions] process.

Q: Which part of the application do you tend to review first?
A: Ultimately, we look at the whole application. But we tend to look at the essay questions first because that gives us the most insight into an individual. The essays are an applicant's way to tell us what they'll provide to the class and what their expectations are for the MBA.

Those things are further explored in a personal interview. The GMAT score and work experience are quick reference points, so [even] if you've got a 760 GMAT and four years of work experience, you won't automatically get in.

Q: Which attributes are important to show in an Ivey application?
A: One is interpersonal skills, the ability to communicate clearly and effectively. Another is a demonstrated potential for leadership...at work or in extracurricular activities.

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jul2004/bs20040726_1537_bs037.htm

Finding Apartment in London, ON

2007-03-31T23:16:00.000-07:00

By: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

The best way to look for an apartment in London is to try to get in touch with current MBA students that are going to be graduating at the same time as you are starting your MBA. Talking to current students doesn't hurt neither, as almost everybody knows where the good places to live are. London is not a large city by any stretch so I was a bit surprised to see the prices for some apartments on par with cities like Calgary. The average price for one bdr is $800/month + 20/month parking.

I found my apartment by joining Ivey MBA MSN Community http://groups.msn.com/IveyMBA. (NOTE: You have to be accepted into the Ivey MBA for the administrator to approve your request to join) Generally, students post apartment, furniture, and book sales on the board. Keep in mind that apartments do go fast. If you are lucky enough you might even get an apartment with a furniture passed on to you (for a bit extra).

About the third of the class lives in the Windermere Rd apartments which are very close to the new Ivey MBA campus (Spencer Leadership centre). NOTE: the new MBA Campus is separate from the main Ivey campus. A free shuttle bus runs between main campus and Spencer.

It might be also worth looking at different locations in the city, in case you are bringing a car: http://www.has.uwo.ca/housing/offcampus/index.htm apparently downtown might not be a bad option.

Ivey MBA Information Session

2007-03-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

by: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

Both Ivey and Queens MBA offices started doing another smart thing this year. As we all know, big components of an MBA program are the quality of its content, the way that content is delivered to students, and the atmosphere of growth and innovation, nurtured by the school. At the same time, the academic content is one of the most tangible parts an MBA program, as the result it can be easily replicated. By simply using the same books, the same cases, and the same study materials, content becomes common between any two MBA programs. The real trick then becomes to figure out the best content delivery system and at the same time build a collaborative environment on campus. So what was it that Ivey and Queens MBA programs do differently?

Both schools started offering travel awards to potential students to come and visit them, sit in one of the classes, and talk to current students. Travel awards at Ivey for 2007 are 600$ for North American travel and $1,200 for those traveling from outside North America. It’s not much, but should at least provide an incentive to come and visit the school in person if it’s on your list of potential schools. The smart part about getting a potential student to come and visit an MBA program is the opportunity to let them experience the program first hand and at least get a snapshot view of a typical day at that school.

I would recommend visiting at least top three schools that you are considering. As I wrote in one of my previous postings, during a school visit to my number one choice at the time, it just didn’t feel right. I have also visited couple of schools in UK which helped me better understand the true value and advantages of one year MBA program. At the end, choosing an MBA is not that different from the game of dating: you have to find the right fit, but it also goes the other way around too in that you have to also be the right fit for your partner.

I really enjoyed my Ivey MBA Info session experience. It fully confirmed the preliminary research about the program. It was interesting to hear that both students and alumni were excited about Ivey MBA. I also had a chance to talk to couple of students in both the new one year MBA program and the last class of the two year MBA. It sounds like the job prospects for the new one year MBA program are turning out to be better than those for the last class graduating from the two year MBA. (Students in the one year MBA program are getting offers earlier in the year).

The day before the information session, we were sent a case study that outlined challenges that a company was facing through its growth period. The information session day started at 10:15am at Spencer Leadership Centre. We were greeted by the MBA program director. He talked about the exciting changes that the MBA program is undergoing and then opened the floor to questions. I would say there were about 35 potential students at the info session. After the program director, we had a chance to get our questions answered by two Profs: Strategy and Leadership. They gave up a quick summary of the case based teaching style and the types of material presented in class. After the session with professors we were given the tour of the building and then came lunch. Following lunch we had a Q&A session with current students that covered everything from how the like the program to how do you do your MBA if you have a husband and kids at home? It was a very positive session with students sharing their thoughts about the Ivey MBA program. Following the session with current students we invited for the highlight of our visit: an actual Ivey MBA class. We came into class, mixed with current students and sat down in anticipation.

The first couple of minutes were taken by one of the students talking about his 3x3 session with investment bankers the week before (three students and three investment bankers talking about their experience during specially arranged dinner meeting). After the student’s quick presentation we jumped into the case and started discussing the details with professor shooting questions at the class trying to lead the learning process towards the answer. It was really interesting to see how the discussion started to unravel. All of the students had their financial analysis results based on the metric analysis of the company from the financial data that was included in the case. The whole class was very interactive with very little lecturing from professor. It looked as if the professor was playing a role of a facilitator instead, helping students to come to the decision themselves rather then telling them the solution.

The information day concluded with the career services session. We’ve talked about career prospective and the strengths of Ivey career management team.

How to Succeed and Fail at Ivey...

2007-03-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

Anonymous Alumni recollection:

Ivey taught me:

- stop being a passive observer
- become a creative active/action person
- stop blindly following others, letting others make the decisions
- actively design my own career and my career moves

How to FAIL:

- Listen much, speak little
- Let others do the talking in the learning team
- Socialize with friends not classmates
- Rely on Career Services alone to find you a job

- Do not take risks; speak only if you are absolutely sure
- Don't contact a professor if you do not understand the subject
- There is nothing to talk about in Accounting class; it is all #s
- Relax on Fridays; 15 cases a week is too many

How to SUCCEED AT IVEY:

- Participate in class
- Participate in class
- Participate in class

- Make a decision on the case issue
- Be prepared for each class
- Attend each class
- Participate in each class discussion

MBA book list

2007-03-22T10:36:00.000-07:00

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade by Pietra Rivoli. By tracing the whereabouts of her $6 T-shirt from a West Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory to trade negotiations in Washington, D.C., to a used clothing market in Africa, Rivoli helps unravel the politics and human side of the globalization debate, say critics.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Hosseini's debut novel is billed as both political chronicle and deeply personal tale. It's the story of Amir, an Afghan immigrant to the U.S. who is plagued by guilt for betraying his best friend back home. When his friend is killed by the Taliban, Amir returns to his homeland, a country now in turmoil, to search for his friend's surviving son and make up for his past mistakes.

Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work by Debra E. Meyerson. Meyerson reveals how "everyday leaders," not necessarily those at the top of an organization, help create family-friendly and socially responsible workplaces. She offers innovative examples that should help students get a bird's-eye view of leadership.

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs. By providing horrifying portraits of what life is like in the Third World, including one sketch of a Malawi village whose young people of working age have been completely wiped out by AIDS, Sachs calls readers to action. He presents his plan, which is based on 25 years of advising world leaders and international institutions, for eliminating poverty.

The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay Christensen. Provides an insightful analysis of the impact of technology on industries and organizations, and a convincing argument for why thinking outside the box is so critical.

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein. What appears to be a decisive error managing volatility of a portfolio of financial assets is reveled to be human factors in causing a breakdown of a management system under pressure. It could happen anywhere?

Industrial Organization: A Strategic Approach by Jeffrey Church and Roger Ware. In the past two decades there has been an explosion of high quality analysis of the organization of industries - the number and size of firms, rate of growth of firms, chronological change and the resulting competitiveness of markets. Find out what the experts know by reading this book. (For example, Chapter 16, Strategic Behavior: switching costs, vertical separation, tying, managerial incentives).

Modern Competitive Analysis by Sharon Oster. The application of strategy to obtain competitive advantage is carried to the higher level of sophistication in this Third Edition of a book widely used in strategy courses in the top twenty business schools. There is much subtlety in the understatement of winning strategies so that this book has to be read very closely.

Endurance by Alfred Lansing. An amazing but true action-adventure story, with powerful, often subtle lessons about leadership.

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela. An inspiring story about leadership in the most difficult of circumstances. Nelson Mandela led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa from a prison cell. He had a long-term view, persisted against all odds, had a support system of colleagues and knew how to build coalitions, negotiated a settlement, and then, when he won and became President of South Africa, he forgave his enemies.

The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli. An interesting insight into the dynamics of power. In addition to the technical side of business and the financial fundamentals taught in MBA programs, it is important to understand the forces that drive people in organizations. Decision-making is not always rational; it is sometimes, maybe even often, affected by executive egos and power struggles. Its enduring insights are relevant to the crisis in modern corporations today, because of the Enron collapse and subsequent revelations about financial missteps in other companies.

BW - Average Ivey MBA ROI:

2007-03-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

Assumptions:

Pre-MBA salary: $48,000US
Work experience: 3 years
Pre-MBA employer size: fewer than 5,000
Undergraduate major: non-business
GMAT: 700
Career plan: Consulting
MBA School name: Western Ontario (Ivey)

ROI Results:

Investment (in $1,000s): 115.0
Salary Increase: 92.0%
Salary Increase (in $1,000s): 59.3
Breakeven (in years): 4.0
Annual ROI (10-year basis): 40.2%

Explanation of results:

Investment: An estimate of your total MBA costs, including tuition and lost income.
Salary Increase: The percentage or dollar change between your pre-MBA income and predicted post-MBA income.
Break-even: The estimated number of years, beginning from your entry into business school, that it would take at the new income level to make back the amount of money invested.
Annual ROI: The annual rate of return (over a 10-year period beginning the year you enter school) on your investment in the MBA, based on the projected salary increase of a typical student with your characteristics.

Note: US Dollars are used throughout the calculation

Successful Application Strategy: Idea #1

2007-03-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

Letters of recommendation are a great tool for the admissions committee to hear about the leadership skills, people management, and team experiences that are key competencies for success in an MBA Program - so think carefully about who to ask! Use a professional reference - someone who knows you well and either managed or worked directly with you - these individuals can provide depth and detail demonstrating you have the qualities our admissions committee is looking for in a very convincing way. Last but not least - spend some time with your references explaining why you want to pursue an MBA. Ensuring they are invested in your decision and understand your motivation for applying to MBA Programs ultimately results in a strong message to the admissions committee.

Niki Healey
Manager MBA Recruitment
Richard Ivey School of Business
University of Western Ontario

Ivey MBA - Financing options

2007-03-06T12:48:00.000-08:00

by: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

During my visit to Oxford Saïd Business School I received a suggestion that I should try to finance my MBA by finding a sponsorship from my rich relatives. I decided to follow a more conventional approach by taking out student loans.

In Canada there are two types of student loans: Government students loans, which don't accrue interest charges during the course of the program, and student loans from private banks. The maximum amount for the government student loans (available only for Canadian residents) are about $330/week for the maximum of $17,200 per year. Which in itself is not much in the big scheme of things, considering the fact that I'm looking ahead to one expensive year ahead of me. However, private Banks come to the rescue and lend up to $70,000 covering majority of your tuition costs and some additional expenses.

To be absolutely honest, I was surprised to get an approval for the maximum line of credit from a bank two hours after submitting my online application. Considering the fact I don't have that much of a Canadian credit history I take it that banks feel pretty comfortable about the fact that we will make good money after an MBA.

There are four banks that provide special student loans to Ivey MBA students.

Toronto Dominion
Royal Bank of Canada
Bank of Montreal
Scotia Bank

All the loans have similar conditions. At this point they all offer a line of credit with an interest rate of Prime + 0.5 and interest only payments while you are in school.

Be careful to read the fine print, apparently RBC at one time adjusted the interest rate on their loans to Prime + 2% after students graduated from the program.

Talking to current students it sounds like TD student loans are by far the popular choice. One thing to keep in mind, if you enter an application online for the TD student loan, you might be directed to visit your local branch. At the local branch I was told that I will definitely need a co-signer. Considering the fact that I've been offered higher limit line of credit without a co-signer at Scotia Bank, I explained the situation and negotiated to take out the loan under the same conditions as were offered to me at Scotia.

Something else to consider: Average MBA entrance award at Ivey is $10,000, which is about 17% of the tuition cost. (you will receive all your scholarship awards with your acceptance letter).

From what I gather, International students will either require a Canadian co-signer or they will have to through The Paras Education Foundation (read more on Ivey Financing site).

NOTE: For the detailed information about Ivey MBA financing options please refer to the following document

On an unrelated to Ivey note, I also came across interesting student loan program at Rotman School of Business, which actually pays your student loan interest while you go to school.

MBA Admissions Essays: THE ONE QUESTION ALL BUSINESS SCHOOLS ASK

2007-03-04T06:56:00.000-08:00

by Avi Gordon, author of MBA Admissions Strategy: From Profile Building to Essay Writing

The key to getting the essays right is knowing what each question seeks – what the admissions committee expects from your response in each case, and what bonus information can legitimately be added. But schools each ask different questions. They appear different but if you look closely they are just variations on a few classics and the most common of all is the "Why an MBA?"

Question Examples

1. “Briefly assess your career progress to date. Elaborate on your future career plans and your motivation for pursuing a graduate degree at this Business School.”

2. “Think about the decisions you have made in your life. Describe the following: Past: What choices have you made that led you to your current position? Present: Why is a MBA necessary at this point in your life? Future: What is your desired position upon graduation from this Business School?”

3. “Why do you want to do an MBA at this Business School at this point in your life? What will you do if you are not offered a place on the this Business School MBA or any other MBA program?”

How to recognize this questionKeywords: progress, past, present, future, career, goal, plan, aspiration, ambition, decision, position, objective, aim, intention, purpose, life, short-term, long-term.

The underlying issue the committee is asking you to address Stripped of its verbiage this question always asks you: why do you need an MBA, why now, and why from us? Your response forms the backbone of your essay set and your whole application.

Notice that there are five parts to the question, covering three time periods:
• Past – What experiences have led you to this point and this ambition?• Present – Why an MBA right now, at this point in your career?• Future – What do you want to do with your degree, in the short and long term? • Why an MBA from this school particularly? • Why an MBA at all? (Why not another kind of Masters, or a PhD?)

You should touch on all five topics somewhere in your complete essay set, but be careful to answer this and all questions exactly as posed. If the question is broadly posed, as the first sample question above, all topics can be fully addressed. Notice, however, that the second question does not ask for long-term goals and the third question has a particular sub-question. In general, shape your “Why an MBA” answer carefully to whether the question asks more about your past (“What has led you to want an MBA?”) or about your future (“What will you do when you graduate? How will an MBA help you?”)

How to tackle itThis essay should be done in a clear and straightforward way. You can be creative in your answers to many other questions, but here it is too risky. Here the committee is looking above all for unequivocal evidence of your professional maturity, as shown by your clarity of purpose.

Show due diligence: The “Why an MBA” question is one of the best places to prove you have done your homework on the school, and to argue that there is a specific match between your agenda and what’s on offer. Mention the school’s features, courses, or extra-curricular opportunities, and say which are relevant to you and why.

Have definite goals: The admissions committee is looking for an organized career strategy that rests on solid self-understanding. They want to know why you have made the decisions you made, how they have brought you to this point in your life, and where you are going from here. Goals can include broader, non-career and personal or community aspirations – but your first priority is to establish a clear professional path.

Connect past to future: The committee is asking how your past connects to your future via business school. You must show that the MBA is the bridge between your yesterday and your tomorrow. Paint a picture of a future that rests naturally on your past, assuming the MBA from the school in question. Past, present and future can be described in any order. What works will depend on the details of your situation.

A generally versatile template is:
• Start with your direct goal on graduation

• Give a sense of your long-term (major) goals

• Show why an MBA is relevant to these goals, and why now

• Bolster this with what in your past has led you to this point

• Finish with the particular aspects of the target school that are relevant and attractive, given your stated goals.

Communicating future aspirationsa. Dream and be real: You have to walk a fine line here. On the one hand you must think big. Whether you want to manage a billion dollars, or create new brain technology industries – whatever it is, you should communicate high aspirations and a potential career worthy of an MBA graduate in 20 years time. On the other hand you must demonstrate career-path realism: your dreams will take a lifetime to mature, and even then they may not. You should sound like you understand how careers evolve in your field and the ways you might have to “do your time” (even if highly paid) before you become a true titan of your industry.
b. Show first steps: Show that you have already taken steps towards the goal you claim to aspire to. Have you done the certifications you need for your career move? Do you have a plan for attracting investors to the business you hope to set up? Convince the committee that you will make it happen no matter what – even if you don’t get into their school, or any school.
c. Have a worthwhile future: Faced with applicants who have equivalent grades and GMATs, the admissions committee will promote those who are on a unique, interesting, worthwhile career mission. So don’t hesitate to project yourself into valuable, distinctive roles.
d. Don’t hedge on your aspirations: Applicants sometimes say something like: “I want to go to Silicon Valley and create a startup using my knowledge of XPF-Bio data mining. If that doesn’t work out I may go back to my old job at a financial institution, or join the family business.” Admissions committees prefer to bet on candidates who have a single-minded focus and who will do anything (legal) to realize their dream. If you don’t back yourself 100 percent the committee won’t either.
e. Differentiate yourself: A common question is: “Should I include a family and kids in my stated life goals?” The problem in doing this is not that you will appear a less serious candidate if you want a family; it is that you will spend precious space talking about a very common goal. You benefit most by focusing your reader on the aspirations that set you apart.

Internship for Ivey MBAs

2007-03-03T22:30:00.000-08:00

Here's one way to get around the lack of internship for the one year program. Below is the text of the email I received from the admissions office at Ivey. Advanced Placement Program with a well known consulting company offers you to postpone your enrolment from May to October and do a summer internship before you even start the program. I think that's a really good idea for those looking to switch industries and/or looking for more practical experience with their MBA. Ivey also offered to pay for the travel expenses associated with the trip to the info session and help in editing resume and cover letter (which I thought was really nice of them).

"Congratulations on your recent offer to join the Ivey MBA program!

I wanted to follow up with you to ensure you received and have had an opportunity to review the email that was sent out on behalf of Ivey and the [well known consulting company]. This email was to introduce you to a unique summer opportunity (Advanced Placement Program) that is available to students that have accepted their offers of admission for Ivey's full-time, 12 month MBA program.

To launch this program and to provide more information, the company is hosting an information session at ---, 2007 at Ivey's ING Leadership Centre in downtown Toronto. "

Interview process - Ivey MBA - University of Western Ontario

2007-03-03T21:47:00.000-08:00

by: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

Reading other MBA blogs and Journals I realized that some people find MBA Interviews one of the most painful parts of the admissions process. Based on that, I decided to expand a little bit on the interview process and the questions one can expect.

One of the most interesting things about the interview process at Ivey was the fact that there actually were two admissions interviews. First interview was conducted by a member of an admissions team and another by a member of career services. I was told that the main purpose for the second interview is to determine how employable you are going to be at the end of the program, and also to confirm that you have a clear career focus, which is especially important for one year MBA programs. I think that it's a really good idea and it is unfortunate that there few other school that go through the same rigorous process to select their students. One thing that for example surprised me about Schulich MBA at the University of York, Toronto was the fact that they've told right when I met them as long as I have the 660 GMAT I'm in, no interview no nothing... that's good and not so good at the same time. It guarantees you entry but doesn't provide any assurance that the caliber of your MBA classmates is going to be up to any standards. They might have been able to wing the GMAT but they have a limited practical experience and lack of communication skills, for example...

Both interviews at Ivey were over the phone and the first interview was with a Manager of Admissions. Since I was provided with her name ahead of time I was able to do a bit of research and find out that the lady actually taught some undergrad courses at the university level and was in her late 20s. Based on that information I put together couple of relevant questions that tied together her experiences teaching undergrad business courses as well as the MBA program. During the interview she asked me the usual questions about the resume and my essays. It felt like she spent some time reading through my background and had a pretty good handle on it. One of the most interesting questions that was addressed to me was modeled after the approach that the school is using to "cold call" students in class when talking about different challenging situation. In this particular case I was asked what are some of the biggest challenges that the industry I'm working in is facing and possible ways those could be addressed. This question makes sure that you can really think on your feet. I found that I had to stall the conversation for couple of seconds to summarize the answer in my head before presenting it, and the interviewer approved of my approach saying that it's OK to think about it for couple of seconds. Overall interview went well and it lasted exactly 30 minutes. I found it was very well structured with excellent and honest answers to the questions that I had in return: for example I've asked the interviewer why she did not go through the program herself, and her answer was that the Undergraduate HBA program at University of Western was fairly similarly structured to the old MBA program and that it did not make that much sense at the time :)

My second interview with a member of career services took place 3-4 days after the first one. This one felt more like a job interview based on the short-term career goals that I've outlined in my admissions essay. It was a lot of questions like: What were the main reasons you moved from this position to that, what were the main skills that you've learned in that particular job that you think would be most applicable to the field that you've chosen to pursue upon the graduation from the MBA program. I would say it was the easier of the two interviews. The interview lasted 30 min and included a question period during which I clarified the finer points about the differences in early placement between the students that are graduating from the last intake of the two year Ivey MBA program and the ones graduating from the first intake of the new one year Ivey MBA program. Again I was given excellent concise answers. And was told to expect the final decision within next 3-4 weeks.

Sample Ivey MBA Essay from '05

2007-03-02T11:49:00.000-08:00

QUESTION: Describe the most significant lesson you have learned in your full-time employment and how this influenced your personal development and career aspirations

"Unity in Diversity" is the most important lesson that I have learnt while working in the [deleted]. The organization that I work for, [deleted], fabricates steel for building petrochemical plants, cement factories and refineries. It employs personnel from different countries all over the world. When I joined as a Sales Engineer, it was a challenge to work with people of diverse nationalities. I made the effort to learn about and understand the cultures of the people that I worked with, which helped me to foster better team spirit, as illustrated below.

In the steel fabrication business, a team is assigned the responsibility of executing a project. The team is lead by a Project Manager, who is supported by section heads who oversee the various sections of the project. For this particular instance, we were invited to submit a proposal for building certain sections of a cement plant. As we had almost no experience in this field, we hired industry experts as consultants to help us with designing and cost estimation.

After winning the contract, while setting-up the project it was discovered that there had been an error in the cost estimation. Due to the loss-making nature of the project, none of the Project Managers were interested in handling the project. It was a 'catch 22' situation as not accepting the contract would have meant bad publicity for the company, resulting in the company being blacklisted from future cement projects in the GCC. After analyzing the situation, I decided to accept the responsibility, even though I head the Sales Department and am not directly involved in project management.

Once I decided to take on the project, I called for a meeting with all the department heads. I requested their co-operation by assigning their best personnel to this project. I received their complete support and that of their personnel as a result of my personal rapport with each one of them. We worked as a team and despite many difficulties, managed to complete the project on time and in the specified cost. I encouraged my team throughout the year by often repeating one of my mottoes in life: "Tough times don't last, tough people do".

During the course of the project I improved my knowledge of Arabic (while dealing with the local authorities), handled a multi-cultural team, and successfully executed the first cement plant construction in the history of our organization. My management rewarded my success by promoting me to Project Sales Manager.

At a personal level, this project helped me to discover myself as a leader of men and someone who thrives on challenges. It enhanced my self-confidence, improved my communication skills, and elicited a much more analytical approach to tackling difficult situations, both in my personal and professional life.

In the future, I want to learn more about the turnkey construction industry. I wish to achieve this by joining a global organization, involved in building infrastructure in developing countries like mine i.e. India. I want to be involved in its management, rather than just executing a project. I feel that this would ensure my participation in the day to day running of the firm and help me to understand the fundamentals of running such a business. My interaction with people in the industry has revealed that the main motivation lies in the pleasure of building. My ultimate aim is to head such an organization, which employs creative people who help countries develop. When we built the cement plant it was like a dream come true, I felt immense pride at what we had created. This is the same feeling that I look forward to when I start and build my own business

Ivey - University of Western Ontario - Admissions time

2007-03-01T21:46:00.000-08:00

by: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

NOTE: The text below describes admissions process for May 2007 Cohort

Having looked at different program types I realized that one year format was the one that I excited me the most. First of all, it will definitely be a challenge and I love challenges. Second, and even more important, it will save a year of my life, and a year of living expenses as a poor student. Even if it's not a full year, but lets say, 8 months, that's still close to 2% of average person's work life. Anyways, enough with the philosophy and on to the application process :)

After a thorough research of variety of MBA programs, having visited couple of them in-person, I narrowed my search to Ivey MBA. Being really impressed with the level of service I received from Admissions department at Ivey (20 min average response time to emails throughout the day, even at 11pm!), and also the feedback from current and past MBA students who were raving about the program, I decided that Ivey MBA just might be the one for me.

One of the most challenging parts of the whole application were the essays which told you to describe your short and long term career goals and how Ivey fits in those in UNDER 200 WORDS!!! That's like saying, well tell me your life story, past, current, and future, but I'd appreciate if you could do that in half a page. I personally, found it much harder than Schulich's 750 word essays in which you could add a lot of water to dilute the real content. At Ivey they wanted the concise "elevator pitch" style presentation of yourself. I must have gotten through at least 10 complete rewrites of those essays. But found it quite interesting non the less.

Originally I was aiming for the Jan 8th, 2007 deadline, however, I was told by Admissions that those deadlines are fairly artificial and it's typically a rolling admissions process. Moreover, the final decision should be expected 3-4 weeks after all the documentation has been submitted. Most of the application is filled and submitted online, apart from the two transcripts and the scholarship applications. A copy of your resume has to be emailed to admissions as well as your Referees has to submit their Reference letters electronically or paper directly to the admissions office.

Admissions office was helpful in providing status of my application and the receipt of the supporting documents. I got the invitation for the first of the two interviews with Admissions manager within three days of my last part of the application being received by Ivey. I received an invitation to the second interview, which was done with Career services staff member, about a week later. Both interviews were done over the phone and lasted 30 min each.

After the interviews comes the most painful part... you've done all you can and now it's just sit and wait for somebody else to decide your faith ;)

Visit to Oxford and Cambridge MBA programs

2007-02-22T21:45:00.000-08:00

It's interesting how the whole prospective can change within a short period of time. After my trip to the UK, after much more indepth research and information interviews with both schools and students the information was telling me that the one year programs are actually a better option is a lot of respects. It's about the 96% of the material taught in the conventional two year program compressed in a shorter time frame. Moreover, as it turns out, the timeframe is not that much shorter as the two year programs would like you to think. Typical two year program is 16 months with extended holidays and Fridays off in a lot of cases. I've heard number of students from different programs tell me that it's actually quite relaxing towards the end of their two year programs. So one year programs that are quite a norm in Europe and are a new animal in North America are not as scary as they look. As long as you understand all the facts are able to weight them according to your situation you will be able to make a right choice.

During my trip to London, UK I've arranged to meet with both Cambridge (Judge Business School: MBA) as well as Oxford (Oxford Saïd Business School). Both schools were very accommodating in arranging the meeting, however unfortunately my time wasn't the best and I didn't get to sit in any of the classes because of the Winter break. I was really impressed with Cambridge, member of the admissions staff her name was Natasha I believe gave a thorough tour of the facility and gave excellent questions to all of my answers. Overall my meeting confirmed the preliminary research which shows that his is an excellent school. The only challenge is the cost of living and the tuition itself. The tuition alone is about 26,000GBP on top of that there's a mandatory college fee which gives you access to the college of your choice (an additional 5,000GBP). There are also associated academic and living expenses. All in all the overall cost of the one year degree adds up to around $100,000 US. Which is pretty significant. The big advantage that they are trying to sell you is the international (European) doors that this school opens for you. Non the less I still believe that the cost of the MBA might be quite high.
Oxford on the other hand did not impress me as much, the admissions lady tried to avoid majority of my questions and tried to push their brand name as the main advantage of the school. However, honestly the fact that some college on campus was built in 1287 does not add any value to my future MBA degree. And the answer I liked the most was the one about financing the MBA: she said that its not uncommon for students parents or aunt/uncle to pay for the tuition... and again, how does that help me? So the whole attitude at Oxford did not impress me too much, and I safely crossed that school of my list as well.

Upon my arrival back to Canada I started researching one year North American programs much closer realizing that it was something that I became really interested in. Ivey was one of the schools that grabbed my immediate attention: One of the oldest MBA programs in Canada, as well as highly ranked internationally by both Business Week and Wall Street Journal. I have also done a quick calculation which showed me that actually both Ivey and Schulich cost approximately the same overall. In Schulich half of it goes towards the living expenses and at Ivey it goes towards the tuition. In either case it works out to be about 84K. Either for a year or for two years. One has to also consider the increased opportunity cost at Schulich due to the additional year of lost salaries.

Schulich MBA class visit

2007-02-03T21:43:00.000-08:00

Schulich remained my number one choice for about a year. None the less, during that time I kept an open mind and kept digging into information about other schools. Majority of other interesting programs that I could afford took place outside United States and were accelerated one year programs. With that in mind, I decided to visit an MBA fair in Toronto, September '06.
For me, the value proposition of an MBA program consists of the following components, weighted differently, depending on ones priorities. First and the most important one is the knowledge made available to students and the approach used to relay that knowledge; academics is still the core value of each program. Then there are softer components, such as networking opportunities with your classmates and potential employers. There's also a brand name that each school loans to its alumni, quality of career services, practical experience opportunities, and finally, social activities.

My initial belief was that the traditional two year MBA at one of the top Canadian universities is the way to go. Those are generally at least a third cheaper than a comparable US based MBA. The cost of living is cheaper around here too. I also thought that the two year format ensures that you will have ample networking opportunities and enough time to successfully transition back from work to school environment. Moreover, the traditional program would not have to cut any corners. It's the way the MBA has been delivered in North America for quite a number of years, so why change a good thing?

Being ambitious as I am, I decided why not pay another visit to Schulich the same day as I was going to the MBA fare. Sit in couple of classes to see what it's all about down there. Again I was pretty impressed with the response from Schulich staff, however after the process got handed-off to a student ambassador it became much less apparent that my Schulich visit is going to be a well organized experience. At the end of the day they did arrange for me to watch two classes, first year Economics and a second year Brand Management class. I was warned before the class, by couple of students that the Economics class is one of the less interesting classes with hardly any class participation. I decided to keep that comment in mind when I sat in class. The class was indeed really dry with professor mumbling something about his red shirt and unsuccessfully trying to make both a joke and an economics example out of it. Students seemed extremely disengaged and disinterested, some surfing Facebook website and instant messaging each other. After the class I tried to analyze my experience. One comment that popped back in my mind was the answer I received a month before that: One year MBA vs. two year? on yahoo answers. I was told that two year MBA is good if you want to have some down time and play some golf, at the time I ignored the comment, however now that I could put it in the actual context it seemed so much more relevant. During the break between classes I was invited for lunch with the Dean of International MBA at Schulich, who tried to recruit me for his program. The International MBA adds a requirement to learn a foreign language and a mandatory work term in the summer. The program has only 35 people which might further minimize networking opportunities. I have to say that the Brand management class was much more energizing and interactive.

Later that day, at the MBA fair I talked to number of European business schools and decided that the trip to see some of them might be worth my time in the near future. In the mean time I could not stop thinking about the Economics class at Schulich.

Choosing between Asper, Rotman, and Schulich MBAs

2007-02-02T21:42:00.000-08:00

I thought the hard part of my MBA process was over after I was done the GMAT. In retrospective, however, it turns out to be the easiest part of whole process as there are hardly any variables. Basically, you have to decide how much time you want to invest into preparing for it, and the rest is decided for you: you don't have to worry which test location you go to or which test to take. When it comes to figuring out which school to get your MBA from it becomes a much different process with great number of variables involved. Its not that different from a dating game, you pick a university you think would be your best choice, but might not accept you, and then you pick some that would probably accept you, but are not the best.

I started my process by considering a local school - Asper School of Business, at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Costing only $18,000Cdn it sounded like a good deal (well apart from the online, two month MBA degrees which as the ex Radio Shack CEO illustrated are not the most valuable degrees :). The reviews said Asper MBA it's not a bad degree if you want to stay in the province and on top of that it has only 15 students in the program and no dedicated teaching staff and out of 15 students 50% do not find a job within three months after the graduation... ouch, as the result that was the first University to get crossed off the list. With that in mind, I went to the next stage, looking at the rankings for MBA programs around the world and in Canada.

I found the MBA rankings really confusing to look at. Each one of them used different methodologies and as the result emphasized different things. One really has to dig deep to try to figure out what those numbers are telling you. I find it worth my while to also try figuring out the secondary signs, obvious one for example, if you want to work for a financial institution it's probably worth looking at the WSJ or FT rankings. Overall I found that there were four top tier MBA programs in Canada, offered through the following universities: Queens, Schulich (York University), Ivey (Western), Rotman (UofT).

I tried to narrow down my decision to the top two school and came to the following conclusions, Queens, which has consistently ranked at number one in International School ranking compiled by the Business Week magazine is a good school if you have a technical background and have been in the workforce for at least 7-8 years, as the average age of students there is 32. It a one year program and it didn't strike me as anything interesting right from the start. Western is the oldest MBA program in Canada and from what I could gather had been a pretty solid curriculum at least before the transition to a one year program. At that point I wasn't quite sure that one year program had everything that I was looking for out of the MBA. Moreover, I had a preference towards larger cities, so I decided to start my selection process with Schulich and Rotman. Both of those schools were highly ranked and well respected internationally, with Schulich having a bit better international reputation and Rotman being a very traditional destination for financial sector. I did my preliminary research and emailed both schools to arrange a visit. It took couple of days to get a response from either school. I liked Schulich's response way better, they were very accommodating with trying to arrange a school visit, while Rotman admissions just told me to come down there anytime I wanted.

Big advantage of Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto is that it's located right in downtown Toronto and as the result is much easier to get to, from my experience. However, during my visit to Rotman, I was totally unimpressed by the admissions personal who seems very disorganized and unprepared to answer any questions. I found it was really hard to have a meaningful conversation about their MBA program. They told me that CIBC was the biggest recruiter on-campus every year and finances is what you will eat and breathe for the two years you are there. I was told that the rest of the information could be located on the website. I was quite disappointed and crossed Rotman of my list at that point, as I believe, the admissions is a face of an MBA. If the program director decided that they wanted to present a potential student with such a person then most likely that same approach going to resonate through the whole program. (Rotman MBA Blog)

My second visit was to the Schulich School of Business at the York University in Toronto. I was pleasantly surprised with the reception I received there, compared to my Rotman experience. I genuinely felt they were interested in me as a potential student, and directory of admissions spend more than an hour talking to me about advantages of the program. I very much enjoyed my visit there and moved Schulich to the top of my list. The only thing that I did not quite understand was the comment about the GMAT score. I was told that even though my GPA is not stellar I didn't have to aim high for the GMAT score and if I could achieve 660 or higher points I would pretty much be guaranteed a spot in the program. Add to that the fact that Schulich rarely interviews it's applicants, and you might get a questionable classmates that might have studied quite hard for the GMAT but lack in other key skills. Other than that I was very impressed with the program and the flexibility that it offers to its students in terms of electives, specializations, and switching between part- and full-time schedules. So as of June 2006 my number one choice became Schulich school of business.

On MBA rankings

2007-02-01T18:04:00.000-08:00

by: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

I'm still very curious what caused such a large adjustment in Ivey MBA's ranking this year on the FT list (Globe and Mail article). From the looks of it there was no explicit changes in the methodology used for the FT rankings. And yet somehow there seems to be a very significant reshuffle of players on the board. Furthermore, how do you consolidate such information as a loss of 10 places on the FT list with a gain of 6 on the Business Week list of International schools. It surprising to see that gain correlates to the loss on the other. Personally I find it really confusing and mildly unrealistic. The best way to avoid the confusion is to search for alternative sources of information such as placement reports from each school and then visit the school, sit in classes, and talk to current students.

Ultimately MBA is the degree that will help you capitalize on your strengths, therefore it should feel like a right fit when you try it on. Same idea as with a pair of professional running shoes, if it's a size smaller it would not matter that it's the most technologically advanced shoe on the planet it will not help you win any races.

GMAT

2007-02-01T09:49:00.000-08:00

By: George Kesselman
Ivey MBA - May 2007 Cohort

Majority of people start their MBA research by looking at a variety of business programs and their corresponding admissions GMAT and GPA averages. As it turns out, GMAT and the GPA are pretty much the only quantitative data that potential students can measure themselves against. Moreover, GPA is a constant value for the majority of those looking at MBA program, which leaves GMAT score as the primary quantitative variable on your MBA application. GMAT is an interesting animal in itself. It is administered by GMAC (Graduate Management Admission Council®) not to be confused with GMAC Financial Services.

With enough practice, potential test takers feel that the questions themselves are not very hard. The hardest part comes while working on the timing for those questions. Like a perfect machine, your mind will have to spit out the correct answers at an average of one minute and thirty seconds, per question. The test is an adaptive creature and changes the difficulty of question depending on the answer to the previous question. Correct answer earns you a harder question. It's also rather hard to aim for a certain score as the particular score represents the difficulty level of the questions at which your answers are correct 50% of the time.

The following books might be worth taking a look at: ("Kaplan GMAT, 2007 Edition: Premier Program" and "Kaplan GMAT 800, 2006-2007").

The thing to keep in mind is the fact that GMAT score is an important but not the only part of your application. It’s all about keeping it balanced: GPA, GMAT, Work experience, and extracurricular activities.

Warren Buffett MBA Talk - University of Florida

2007-01-28T23:58:00.000-08:00