Well, our 7-week Markstrat marketing simulation deathmarch is over. And we came in third. Third out of three really, since the other two teams were so far below everyone else that they didn't really pose a challenge to anyone. We're still digesting the sad news, and wondering what we all learned about marketing as a result of doing the simulation.
I think part of the whole thing was to demonstrate how difficult it is to make informed business decisions without a solid information dashboard. The user interface for Markstrat was arcane and almost impossible to digest, so it was kind of like flying a plane wearing glasses covered in wax paper-- you could kind of see things, but in the end you never knew if you were going to crash into something or not. Every week, we'd submit our decisions and cross our fingers until the results came out the other end.
For the first two weeks, we were flying high on top of the other six teams, but everything after week two was pretty much downhill as the other teams figured out how the internal Markstrat machine worked and we continued experimenting. Overall I think we did the best we could-- how much time can you really spend on something like this when you also have a family, full-time job, and all your other coursework to do? Some of the winning teams spent 4-8 additional hours per week in Markstrat-specific meetings. No way we were going to do that.
So in the end, it's 25% of our grade, and we'll chalk it up to experience. But I warn you, beware the seven-week madness that is Markstrat!
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Value for the Money?
Going into this Executive MBA, I always wondered what the real value of the exercise would be. Pitted against a "traditional" MBA grad, how would my part-time program measure up? When I've mentioned my intentions to older, more senior people, they always ask things like "what are you majoring in" (there is no major in an executive MBA), and they tend to look on the exercise as pursuing an MBA lite.
The degree is the same as the part-time and full-time MBA programs, so what, really is different? Are we somehow getting away with doing less than our part-time and full-time peers?
First semester I would have said "no", since our stats class was a full-semester class (delivered in just 9 class periods, mind you) and the other classes, though they all suffered from "compression" to some degree (i.e., having to do a full semester's work in 9 weeks), we still felt like our money was well-spent.
Enter second semester. We have a marketing professor who is in the hospital due to unexpected surgery: what can you really do about unforeseen events like that? To fill in, we have a lecturer (not a PhD), someone from the world of corporate sales who is very polished and generally a very nice guy, but you can tell the substance just isn't what you'd get from a tenured professor. And it's really starting to irritate me.
This morning we had a guest lecturer (a PhD Associate Professor) on pricing strategy, and his talk was full of insights and commentary, all delivered without the aid of PowerPoint or notes (something I consider amazing and proof of his intelligence). Then came our lecturer to cover the remaining three hours, and you could tall almost immediately that the substance went out the window. Do I really want to pay $5,000 to hang out every other week with someone who's just basically a really nice guy? I find myself craving more, and even a guarantee of an excellent grade this semester won't really keep me more engaged than I am now.
The degree is the same as the part-time and full-time MBA programs, so what, really is different? Are we somehow getting away with doing less than our part-time and full-time peers?
First semester I would have said "no", since our stats class was a full-semester class (delivered in just 9 class periods, mind you) and the other classes, though they all suffered from "compression" to some degree (i.e., having to do a full semester's work in 9 weeks), we still felt like our money was well-spent.
Enter second semester. We have a marketing professor who is in the hospital due to unexpected surgery: what can you really do about unforeseen events like that? To fill in, we have a lecturer (not a PhD), someone from the world of corporate sales who is very polished and generally a very nice guy, but you can tell the substance just isn't what you'd get from a tenured professor. And it's really starting to irritate me.
This morning we had a guest lecturer (a PhD Associate Professor) on pricing strategy, and his talk was full of insights and commentary, all delivered without the aid of PowerPoint or notes (something I consider amazing and proof of his intelligence). Then came our lecturer to cover the remaining three hours, and you could tall almost immediately that the substance went out the window. Do I really want to pay $5,000 to hang out every other week with someone who's just basically a really nice guy? I find myself craving more, and even a guarantee of an excellent grade this semester won't really keep me more engaged than I am now.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Finally Catching Up
It was hard last week, being out of the country on vacation and not completing all the reading and practice problems I had intended to complete. Coming back this week has been harder than anticipated, and I've essentially had to complete two weeks of work in four days-- plus I've had to study for the one-hour quiz we just took.
At some point Thursday night, I finally started to believe the Accounting world wasn't in fact coming to an end, and last night I really hit my stride. Walking into the quiz this morning, I felt I had picked the right things to study, and the quiz was time-consuming but I felt I knew the model into which to plug the numbers. We'll see how accurate my calculations were (we weren't allowed to use Excel for this quiz, which was a undesirable throwback to circa 1987 manual calculations), but it feels good to finally have all of this "click".
At some point Thursday night, I finally started to believe the Accounting world wasn't in fact coming to an end, and last night I really hit my stride. Walking into the quiz this morning, I felt I had picked the right things to study, and the quiz was time-consuming but I felt I knew the model into which to plug the numbers. We'll see how accurate my calculations were (we weren't allowed to use Excel for this quiz, which was a undesirable throwback to circa 1987 manual calculations), but it feels good to finally have all of this "click".
Friday, January 25, 2008
Fear
We're well into our second semester now, and we have a new set of professors (two classes) and we're all getting used to each other's styles and approaches. As expected, Managerial Accounting appears to be the hardest of the two classes, the one you can expect to give the most heartburn. Why does Accounting need to be so evil?
One thing that's interesting to watch has been the differing teaching approaches taken by our two accounting professors (Financial Accounting last semester and Managerial Accounting this semester). Last semester the professor used trickery to teach: apparently he felt we would learn best by looking for little tiny discrepancies or tricks in exam questions. All this ever did was teach us we couldn't trust our professor.
This semester, the Managerial Accounting professor is using fear as his prime motivator: he told us on the first day that he took a 10-sided die (10 groups in our class) and a 6-sided die (6 people in each group) and rolled 20 combinations to see who in the class he would randomly call on to answer case questions. He said our entire team would be evaluated based on our responses to these random questions, and we would have to present them when called upon in front of the entire class.
My first thought was, "what is this, eighth grade?" Now we're all just mad, just as mad (but in a different way) as we were with last semester's trickery approach.
What's the point of these misguided motivators? While they might work fine for 19-year-old undergraduates, they're really just noise to us. What's happened is that we now find ourselves focusing obsessively on being ready for every question on every case, and we're not doing much of the reading. So there you go: another totally ineffective tool for learning.
One thing that's interesting to watch has been the differing teaching approaches taken by our two accounting professors (Financial Accounting last semester and Managerial Accounting this semester). Last semester the professor used trickery to teach: apparently he felt we would learn best by looking for little tiny discrepancies or tricks in exam questions. All this ever did was teach us we couldn't trust our professor.
This semester, the Managerial Accounting professor is using fear as his prime motivator: he told us on the first day that he took a 10-sided die (10 groups in our class) and a 6-sided die (6 people in each group) and rolled 20 combinations to see who in the class he would randomly call on to answer case questions. He said our entire team would be evaluated based on our responses to these random questions, and we would have to present them when called upon in front of the entire class.
My first thought was, "what is this, eighth grade?" Now we're all just mad, just as mad (but in a different way) as we were with last semester's trickery approach.
What's the point of these misguided motivators? While they might work fine for 19-year-old undergraduates, they're really just noise to us. What's happened is that we now find ourselves focusing obsessively on being ready for every question on every case, and we're not doing much of the reading. So there you go: another totally ineffective tool for learning.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Balance of Power
Well, today was interesting. Our first day back in class, and we met professors for two new classes: Managerial Accounting and Marketing. It was interesting to see their approach to each class compared to the approaches of our professors from last semester: these profs seem to be more serious, more intent on exerting their control over us.
Last semester, our class ended up gaining a fair amount of dominance over the structure and flow of the classes: we were able to get exams rescheduled and/or converted into take-home tests, we got presentations postponed, and we got online assessments restructured. It doesn't look like we'll be as successful this semester, though it will be interesting to watch how things all play out. One of the profs commented today, "the final will be a 4-hour in class exam, closed book. And no, this is not open to discussion."
It's got to be hard, standing up in front of adults paying $20,000 per semester, and telling them what to do. We're not 19-year-olds. 14% of the people in my class even have PhD's of their own. So this is a balancing act for the professors, and we have shown ourselves to be a strong-willed group who has no hesitation about complaining about every little thing-- if you let us. Today we were all like jackals in a way, watching our target and looking for weakness. The good thing is we also learned a lot about our subjects today, so as long as the "give/get" relationship continues equitably, we should be ok.
Still, it's funny how much we've all come to detest and even be offended by the standard evaluation methods like in-class exams, closed-book exams, and essay questions. Hey, it's the 21st century, and we're all in our 30s and 40s. Give us a break, professor.
Last semester, our class ended up gaining a fair amount of dominance over the structure and flow of the classes: we were able to get exams rescheduled and/or converted into take-home tests, we got presentations postponed, and we got online assessments restructured. It doesn't look like we'll be as successful this semester, though it will be interesting to watch how things all play out. One of the profs commented today, "the final will be a 4-hour in class exam, closed book. And no, this is not open to discussion."
It's got to be hard, standing up in front of adults paying $20,000 per semester, and telling them what to do. We're not 19-year-olds. 14% of the people in my class even have PhD's of their own. So this is a balancing act for the professors, and we have shown ourselves to be a strong-willed group who has no hesitation about complaining about every little thing-- if you let us. Today we were all like jackals in a way, watching our target and looking for weakness. The good thing is we also learned a lot about our subjects today, so as long as the "give/get" relationship continues equitably, we should be ok.
Still, it's funny how much we've all come to detest and even be offended by the standard evaluation methods like in-class exams, closed-book exams, and essay questions. Hey, it's the 21st century, and we're all in our 30s and 40s. Give us a break, professor.
Back at It
Here we are, back in this windowless room, ready to resume the fun and exciting world of part-time graduate school. Today is our first Marketing class, and we're all both excited and exhausted to be back. Through herculean effort, caffeine, and a willingness to not see my family, I have been able to catch up with the mountain of reading that was required for our class today. I feel good about that, and I feel ready to resume this crazy intellectual pursuit. Bring it on, and bring me a coffee.
Monday, January 7, 2008
That Old Sinking Feeling
Just when I was almost forgetting what it was like to live without panic in my life, along comes the resumption of class. After a nice 3-week break for the holidays, here we are again, at the beginning of another class week, mountains of reading and assignments in front of me, in a panic.
That little voice in my head that used to shout "are you sure you haven't forgotten to read a chapter?" every Sunday has returned. That other voice that whispered "Hmm, I wonder if your other classmates are doing as little reading as you are?" is also back. I missed you, fellas, but really, couldn't you have given me a littler longer to recover?
That little voice in my head that used to shout "are you sure you haven't forgotten to read a chapter?" every Sunday has returned. That other voice that whispered "Hmm, I wonder if your other classmates are doing as little reading as you are?" is also back. I missed you, fellas, but really, couldn't you have given me a littler longer to recover?
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