Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Foundations
Well, Foundations is now 20% complete. Monday started off with a welcoming address by the Dean of the business school, the head of the MBA program, an alumnus, and a 2nd year student. Interestingly enough, the 2nd year was far and away the best speaker of the group. It was an varied series of speeches, but very un-HBS-like because they ran way over, so our first real class was cut short.
That class was Learning to Lead, where we did a short case designed to teach us about management issues as well as introduce us to the case method. The case discussion was ok, not great, partially I believe because the instructor was not real experienced in shaping the discussion. My afternoon class was Creating Modern Capitalism, where we had an excellent instructor and I really saw the strength of the case method. At several comments I found myself thinking: "Wow, I didn't even see that" or "Huh, I didn't think of it that way..." All in all, very impressive.
Today we spent the entire day on Crimson Greetings, which is a business simulation of a greeting card company. There are 13 people in my company, and we are divided into Production, R&D, Sales, and Admin. I'm in Sales, along a with former finance guy from Japan. The simulation itself is fairly stressful and feels like something out of The Apprentice (much more so than Sunday's "Apprentice" games...). Unlike the TV show, though, our team has bonded under the pressure and it was a really fun day. I'm looking forward to wrapping up Crimson Greetings tomorrow and then getting to the Learning to Lead follow-up course where we discuss personality types and group interaction. It should be interesting.
That class was Learning to Lead, where we did a short case designed to teach us about management issues as well as introduce us to the case method. The case discussion was ok, not great, partially I believe because the instructor was not real experienced in shaping the discussion. My afternoon class was Creating Modern Capitalism, where we had an excellent instructor and I really saw the strength of the case method. At several comments I found myself thinking: "Wow, I didn't even see that" or "Huh, I didn't think of it that way..." All in all, very impressive.
Today we spent the entire day on Crimson Greetings, which is a business simulation of a greeting card company. There are 13 people in my company, and we are divided into Production, R&D, Sales, and Admin. I'm in Sales, along a with former finance guy from Japan. The simulation itself is fairly stressful and feels like something out of The Apprentice (much more so than Sunday's "Apprentice" games...). Unlike the TV show, though, our team has bonded under the pressure and it was a really fun day. I'm looking forward to wrapping up Crimson Greetings tomorrow and then getting to the Learning to Lead follow-up course where we discuss personality types and group interaction. It should be interesting.
