Riz’s Rotman Blog

I’m very impressed by the alumni group’s handeling of my (somewhat childish) fit I had yesterday. Screwups are bound to happen but they jumped on that problem and took care of it VERY quickly. Well done.

It is really really really bad to contact someone asking for money without bothering to ensure that you have the right name.

It makes your recipient feel unimportant… So I won’t be giving you money… For a long time.

It doesn’t take an MBA to see that chain of events.

(Sorry, they also caught me on a day when I’m in a bad mood, most other days I’d just laugh it off but not today)

Anyone remember this post where I mentioned a talk about how it’s going to be more expensive to produce in china than domestically? Well, it came true (although not for any of the same reasons so maybe my assertion that I don’t agree with the model was still correct):

Thanks to rising fuel prices and wage inflation in China, it’s actually more expensive to manufacture and ship electronics across the Pacific for the American market than it would be to produce them domestically, according to a report from The McKinsey Quarterly.

I don’t think that the BCG talk mentioned anything about rising fuel prices and wage inflation but was all about networks (social and technilogical) as well as channel saturation.

Source

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.