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.

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.

I just wanted to point everyone over to a solid article at Thinking Faster. We really do need to focus on the “whole product” and this is a critical component of the whole “business design” methodology that has a fair amount of traction at Rotman. Quote from the article: 

Given the complexities that we live with and the expectations we have of our products and services, it is not enough to simply create a great new product. Along with that product, you need to create what Geoffrey Moore calls the “whole product” - that is, the manuals, support, training, registration, help and surrounding infrastructure that can make or break a product or service. The old thinking is that people don’t want drills, they want holes. The new thinking is that people want to understand how to drill the hole effectively, and want someone to call in case they need help with their hole. 

It’s not only the ability to drill the hole that creates value for the customer but the whole experience surrounding it.

As requested I’m going to share my thoughts on doing a full-time vs part-time MBA at Rotman. I want to preface this entire thing by saying that my opinion is severly biased since I decided to do a full-time program:

• The age in the average full-time program is a lot lower as well as the students have a lot less work experience. I believe this is the main criteria that you should use in deciding which program is best for you (not to mention the executive program). Age and work experience factor into the likely stage of your life and career you’re in which in turn will imply which learning environment will be best for you and your life. Some of these environmental factors are discussed below.
• I can infer that being in the part-time program wouldn’t provide as immersive of an experience as I’ve had in the full-time program. In the last two years I’ve essentially lived and breathed MBA life where-as in the part-time program, since you’re working, you live in two worlds. I’m not sure what this means as far as the final experience or if it’s even important. Draw your own conclusion.
• The part-time program is organized to allow students to continue working while getting their MBA, this means a few things:
  • You can still continue earning at your current job which presents an  opportunity cost trade off between the full-time vs part-time: i.e. you earn your current salary for three years vs earning no salary for two years but earn a potentially higher salary for the third year.
  • No internship opportunity in the part-time program since it’s year around.
  • “Lower risk” in the part-time program since you will (likely) still be employed at the end of the program.
  • You can’t take certain elective courses in the part-time program since they will conflict with your work schedule.
  • Organizing group meetings with students in the part-time program can be difficult sometimes since they can’t meet in the day, generally have evening classes, and have to consider family obligations.
  • The part-time program students sometimes miss out on Rotman events simply because they are working.

There are probably a lot of other things I can talk about but what I’ve said are probably the main points. Most of the rest I’d have to say revolve around your lifestyle choices and how they should impact your decision but those are far more personal.