Riz’s Rotman Blog

Just an FYI: When you graduate from Rotman you get a free 12-month digital subscription to HBR. Get you hooked then jack up the price.

Mihnea Moldoveanu is a big name in Integrative thinking @ Rotman. He just published an article in Business Week that might be of interest to many of you. Excerpts:

The MBA is a much-needed selection machine which comes on top of the selection machines called high school, college, and a two- or three-year work assignment. Like all selection machines, the MBA works best because it is based on a clearly defined selection criterion, which is twofold. It selects for general intelligence and conscientiousness, not for lateral or divergent thinking, moral development, or epistemological sophistication, as we do yet know how to measure these. 

…

So the critics are right, the MBA is in crisis—because it selects for and cultivates traits and skills that are increasingly vacuous and superfluous. The markets are right in that the dominance-hierarchies and markets of today need one more selection engine. Out of this tension arises the opportunity for designing the thinker of the future. Let the design work begin. 

…130 posts later and I’m done the MBA. Well, not quite. I still have to hand in a take home exam for business law and a paper for game theory but we had “Disorientation” last night which was very disorienting… good party.

Thanks for reading a long. I hope you got something out of this blog and if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment. I’ll try my best to continue to maintain this blog.

If you’d like to keep up with me you can check out my personal blog. You’ll quickly learn that I’m a big scatter brain.

Thanks! 

I’ve posted a great talk that might be of interest to many of you. The majority of the talk outlines some of the building blocks of the Integrative Thinking program at Rotman.

I forgot to post the more recent videos. Here are the newest ones. Laugh away.

I just wanted to make sure I posted a disclaimer (like all the ads on TV): Results not Typical. That is, I seem to be one of the few who find that there isn’t much work at school. Many others are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

With respect to my free time, I want to point out that I am doing a lot of other stuff… I’m not just sitting in my boxers all day playing video games… although it  sounds like a lot of fun.

I might be in London (England) for the bulk of May. Just an FYI. 

When I was finishing off my undergrad degree I ended up with only 4 courses in my last year. This left me with a considerable amount of free time since I was accustom to taking 12 to 16 courses a year. At the time I decided to start working full-time and I found myself a good job to keep me busy.

By the time school came to an end it wasn’t a very noteworthy event for me because I felt like I had finished school a year a go. I didn’t end up going to convocation and my degree is still rolled up in the tube they mailed to me. I just didn’t care anymore since I’d gotten on with my life.

I’m in the same position again at the end of my MBA. This semester’s workload is considerably less than any previous semester in my life (that last semester of my undergrad excluded). Consequently I’ve taken on a lot of projects in my free time. I’m also out of town most of the week. This also means I don’t have much Rotman related material to share.

So that’s that… Please leave a comment if you have any questions or ideas of things I should cover. I’ll try to keep posting what I can until the end of school but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I got this e-mail from Rotman’s IT Help Desk:

Please be advised that some European websites are unreachable from the UofT network due to a dispute between internet providers Cogent and TeliaSonera.  

Cogent is the internet provider for the University and one of the largest in North America. TeliaSonera is a major provider in Nordic and Baltic countries.  Until this dispute is resolved the following geo-locations may not be accessible from either network. Traffic that has originated on either of these networks has been blocked regardless of other network paths (3rd parties) that may be available to each company.  We will keep you up to-date as we receive new information.

For anyone who want’s more information (like me) you can check out this blog. Excerpt:

In the past, when Cogent got into a peering fight, it fought with other tier 1 providers who felt that Cogent shouldn’t belong to the exclusive club. Tier 1 providers have “settlement-free” peering between each other, meaning nobody pays anyone else for network access.

As you can imagine, this can save a lot of money.

Cogent is the company that other Tier 1 providers love to hate because it has the lowest prices, 100 Mbps for $1,000 per month (yes, that’s $10 per Mbps).

Now, GigaOM is reporting that Cogent is no longer linking with Swedish backbone provider Telia because Cogent wants payment from Telia for peering.

It seems important that these guys figure out some sort of agreement. This type of silly fighting just gives customers a reason to go pay a slightly higher price for their internet access. Eh UofT? *wink* *wink*

Can be found here.

Sorry about my lack of posting, I don’t have a whole lot to say now as school cycles down… I’ll try to post something about that this weekend.

JK asked the following on my previous post: 

So I’m wondering, how has the subprime and credit crunch affected Canada, the employment in the banking sector.

Especially for a foreigner like me who wants to go to Rotman for an MBA and break it into the finance and banking industry in Toronto.

Since I’m not into the banking side of things at Rotman I asked someone I knew what they thought and they gave me this (well thought out) response:

While the impact of the credit crunch on the Canadian economy has not been as extremem in the US, the US is still Canada’s largest trade partner and, as such, the country’s financial institutions are hurt by the cooling of the US market (as well as all that subprime debt they’ve got sitting on their balance sheets!) While Canadian financial institutions (read: banks, money managers, private equity, etc) are still hiring, the numbers they are hiring reflect demand for services in the market so this year has seen a definite cooling down in numbers. The bad news it that there is a lull; however, the good news is that markets are usually cyclical and by 2010 or so (when you may be looking into getting a full-time job), the economy will likely be on an upswing and there will be a need to make up for years of slower higher to meet increased demand for services. Hope this helps.

 So there it is. Let me know if you have any other questions.