A Run

Monday was a well deserved holiday(Victoria Day), after the tiring Pre-MBA and week 1 of MBA. Not realizing that the groceries shops are also closed on National holidays unlike in India, I had a long walk with no fruit.

Tuesday, we had an electrifying communications session from Professor Denis Shackel. We also had to prepare for a 3 minute speech for that class. We delivered the individual presentations to our learning teams. All the speeches were recorded and we should be receiving our feedback from the professor, shortly. Later, Jeffrey Gandz Managing Director for executive programs at Ivey (who also is a member of Board of directors at Maple Leaf Foods Inc) delivered his guest lecture. Guest speaker series has been truly inspiring. Listening and learning from real life people has been terrific.

Week 6 had presentations from the Ivey Consulting Projects and New Venture Project coordinators. Students are required to participate in either of the two projects. More details on these projects to follow later. We also had tutorial sessions for the Decision Making and Analytics course. Reza walked us through several key concepts and it helped us tie the many loose ends.

On Thursday, we had a brief session about consulting companies and handling case interviews. Diana Wong( a current from My cohort who has extensive consulting experience) led the session. The consulting club plans to conduct “case-interview mocks” every Sunday.

The week ended with the Outward Bound Ropes Course, coordinated by YMCA at Western. The session was wonderful. Almost everyone had to push outside the comfort zone and work as a team to reach the goal. The course easily demonstrated trust, empathy, leadership, teamwork, commitment, overcoming fear, etc.

I’ve started to cook and surprisingly, things seem to work well so far. I hope I can continue and build on my cooking abilities before I complete the MBA. We also had a couple of Golf sessions at the Windermere golf Centre driving range. At the outset, I had to unlearn my cricket postures ;-)

Finally, my long wait (ever since I got admitted to the program in Nov 2007) officially came to the end. The long sought Day 1 of the MBA arrived. I was super exited. We started the day at 7:15 AM with a quick breakfast. The classes for the first two modules were to be held at Amphitheatre A (AMP-A) at the Spencer Leadership centre. All the students were pre-assigned their seating spots and I believe that the distribution is in terms of background, nationality and other diversity factors. We all had our name plates at respective locations. We also had the CASEBOOK binder for module 1, a nametag, an Ivey Bag and a folder containing program information (such as MBA handbook, key dates, course outline, contacts information, etc). Frazer Johnson, the MBA Program services director introduced the MBA program at 8:00 AM and Dean Carol Stephenson greeted the incoming students with a welcome address. Student introductions followed. I was amazed at their backgrounds and everyone seemed to have had an interesting and unique competency/hobby. The learning teams were then unveiled. MBA program services, Information technology, Spencer Management Centre, everyone gave their quick orientation sessions.

At 1:30 PM, the actual class work started. Professor Gerard Seijts commenced the first session on Leading People and Organizations course. Students were required to prepare for that day’s cases and I could just not believe the contribution level in the class. I’ve never seen such an active and dynamic classroom in my experience. The Professor pushed the students as far as he could and I could instantly realize the true influence of “Case Method”. Students are constantly being pushed outside his/her comfort zone. Class Participation contributes 30-40% weightage to each course. “74 students; 75 minutes per session; everyone wants to contribute; that leaves to 1 minute per person?” Unbelievable Class competition!!! We discussed a Harvard case that session. It was a case on Mt. Everest’s 1996 tragic events that led to the death of 8 people, attributing to the failures in leadership and decision making at high-stake situations. What an eye opening case!!! We learnt numerous leadership lessons (I’ll write separate blog posts on this, later). After the LPO sessions, Prof. Greg Zaric facilitated the DMA(Decision Making with Analytics) course with a case from the Pharma Industry. Day2 started with a workshop on learning with Cases and a quick session on norms and values at Ivey.

Regular classes continued and we had four guest speakers during the first week.

1. Sukhinder Cassidy: CEO at Accel Partners; Previously, President of Asia Pacific and Latin America Operations at Google Inc

2. Dr.Matt Melis from the NASA Glenn Research Center

3. Ferio Pugliese and Richard from Westjet

4. Arkadi Kuhlman, Chairman, President and CEO of Direct USA.

Not surprisingly, we did discuss cases on westjet and NASA(Columbia’s failure) before the guest speakers made their presentations.

Week 1, did have sessions on career management by Professor Lyn Purdy. Ivey MBA is unique in terms of integrating career management to its core-curriculum. They do have case discussions during career management sessions. The week ended with a classic movie show (“Twelve Angry Men”), and Prof Gerard led interesting discussions to make us realize the importance of persuasion and leadership.

Here’s a quick outline of the program: