Creating passionate users

OK, this is my last MBA post.

The title is a tribute to Kathy Sierra’s blog, which is well worth subscribing to. It’s also a sentiment that should be burned into the mind of anyone marketing a product or service. There’s so much competition, and consumers have so many options, that the specific features of your offering just aren’t going to be enough to really cut it. To move from “OK” to “WOW, great!!!” in your customers’ minds, you need to engage them: to offer something more, to make the experience of dealing with you so remarkably great that they’ll not just stick with you but act as your unpaid salesforce.

Is it really too much to suggest that this applies to MBAs as much as to any other service?

Just before I went to Thailand, I attended an event organised by Nanyang Business School, to celebrate their reaching #67 in the Financial Times MBA Index. Well, congratulations are due, I’m sure their team worked hard to get this, and they would want to celebrate.

As soon as I arrived, I went to collect my name tag. They’d got my name wrong. Not just the usual “We’re going to write your name in the Chinese style, regardless of which race or culture you actually belong to“; I’ve long since gotten used to that! No, on this occasion, my name was completely jumbled up on the tag, in a manner I haven’t actually seen before. I mentioned this to the person from the NBS office who’d given me the tag. She just shrugged, and said “That’s how it is in our records”.

Well, thank you for caring. It became obvious that as far as she was concerned, that’s how it had come out of the printer, and she wasn’t going to worry about it. In the end, I took a blank tag and hand-wrote my name on it.

So: two years of almost daily interaction. Tens of thousands of my dollars spent. ‘ve acted as a recruiter for them in Singapore and China on several occasions. And they still can’t get my name right. This person knew perfectly well that this wasn’t how I like to be addressed, and could have done something about it. In fact, this must happen on a regular basis with their students, and any one of the staff could have said, “you know, maybe we should fix our records so that it can handle complexity a bit better”.

Whatever. I did get a lot out of my MBA. I did have good times, and meet good people. But, looking at it overall, I still sometimes find myself wondering if it was the right thing to do. I wish I’d gone to that event, and left feeling energized and enthusiastic, rather than that I was just another database entry.

Reasons not to intern

Hehehe, I’m still subscribed to the RSS feeds of Business Week’s MBA Diaries. I started reading these when I first started considering an MBA, way back in mid-2003, and kept on reading them during the course of my MBA experience. I guess they acted as a kind of control group, against which I could check my own progress. I never got round to unsubscribing, although I don’t read them very often these days. I just took a look though, and one of them really got my attention: Rachael Klein on why doing an internship while classes are ongoing is a really bad idea. I totally agree. My own internship spanned a break period and my final semester; it was great, really rewarding, during the holiday but it was a mistake to have let it carry on into term time. It definitely meant that I didn’t get the best experience during my exchange period at Tsinghua, and led to an enormous amount of stress and unpleasantness. Don’t do it unless you really know what you’re doing…

More Mac good news

I’m glad to see via a Wired article that Microsoft will be updating Office for the Mac. It’ll be out in 2008, and will have a Mac-specific interface. Yay! I couldn’t have got through my MBA without Office on the Mac; luckily, I’d kept the installation DVD, so I’ve been able to put it on my new iBook (I had the Academic edition, which is a reduced version but has 3 licenses). This is good news for Mac users.

Things I wish I’d known

Business Week has a good piece on advice MBA grads would like to pass on to applicants. I can vouch that most of it is true, in my experience!

Convocation

I headed over to NTU mid-afternoon, to make sure I was in good time for everything.

1 arrived at the Auditorium about 4pm, and started shelling out for the various photos and things. There was one company offering a there-and-then studio shot for only five bucks, so I pulled my robes out of my bag, quickly put them on… and realised I’d forgotten to bring safety pins, so the hood slipped down over my arms whenever I made the slightest move! We managed to get the pictures taken, anyway, but it turns out I’ll have to go down to Suntec City sometime in the next few days to collect the print.

I went straight to the bookshop then, to buy pins! There was no way I could fasten everything myself, so I went down to the MBA lounge to look for help. A fellow-student’s wife helped me, and used about a dozen pins so I was firmly fastened in! There was no way for me to get out of them without help after that! Luckily, Carole helped me to take them all out later on.

Back to the auditorium then, a very hot walk with all those robes on! At first, there were many people wearing MBA robes – but not a single one that I recognised! Who were these people, I wondered. Mostly, part-timers or EMBA, I guess. Friends from the course started to trickle in soon enough, often with family in tow. Many of them I hadn’t seen since before I went to Beijing, and it was really great to see everyone again. It’s true that an MBA is an intense bonding experience; I’ve been through a lot with these good folk. It does make me wonder what might have been. As I mentioned before, I was in a relationship during the MBA, and I spent a lot of time with my girlfriend that might otherwise have been spent getting to know my fellow MBA-ers even better… Well, it’s all water under the bridge now.

The ceremony itself was as graduation ceremonies always are. Unlike my first, I didn’t trip on the stage, or fall asleep while waiting for my row to go up. I remember thinking that this time, at least, the Dean had no choice but to shake students’ hands. The keynote speech was delivered by the local Accenture boss, but he’s not a good speaker, and it was pretty anodyne.

Afterwards, there was a meal for the fresh graduates. Here we had the oportunity to chat to our old Professors. Prof Wee, in particular, was in good spirits, and expressed astonishment that I actually had hair! (I had a buzz cut and a goatee for most of my time in NTU; now that I come to think of it, I must have looked quite different to those who hadn’t seen me since then!). Pelly and John were looking well, and I managed to chat with them both for a while, as well as with Lee Lee for a short while later on.

I stayed quite late with the usual crowd of ne’rdowells and bitter-enders -the same crowd that were famous for the rooftop parties at the Grad Hall, enjoying the free flow of red wine. After that we went on to the New Asia Bar, where conversation continued late… Abhishek has some pictures on his blog.
It was a fitting end to the MBA experience, and it really was wonderful to see everyone again. Who knows if or when we’ll all be together again. It was a pity that so many people couldn’t make it. Still, it was a great evening…

Three years of effort

I’ve been transferring a lot of  posts from my old MBA blog across in the last couple of days, so it’s fresh in my mind what I was thinking when I first applied to do an MBA back in late 2003…

Three years of effort, intense study, a love affair that preoccupied me but eventually didn’t last. My entire net worth. High temper, great friends, the jungle, dawn taiji, Beijing,  a wonderful experience at Tsinghua. Despair and exhaustion.

If I’d known what lay ahead of me, back then in 2003, would I still have applied? I think so.

Today I graduate. Then, that’s it; the MBA is finally, officially, over and done with.

An interesting comparison of pricing

I went to NTU yesterday, to register for the convocation ceremony. I was able to collect my MBA degree certificate – the first time I’ve had a certificate in advance of the ceremony. I was also fitted for my gown, mortarboard, etc. The full set (gown, hood, cap) cost the grand total of…. S$33! Renting for the day would have cost S$27, so of course, I bought my own set! That got me thinking…

In the UK, as far as I can make out, one firm – Ede and Ravenscroft – appear to have a monopoly on academic gowns. I rented from them for both my undergraduate and MSc graduation ceremonies. Of course, I thought then that it might be cool to buy from them, but it was way too expensive.

Out of curiosity, I’ve looked up the cost of buying on their web site. As of today, the cost of buying a gown, hood and cap, of equivalent quality to those I bought yesterday, is GBP 316. Using Yahoo’s currency converter, S$33 = GBP11.34.

Now, I know they will have storage, cleaning, and transport costs etc, but… I guess there’s a market opportunity there, if someone wanted to use it!

Aah, Paris

Julia, one of my fellow MBA exchange students at Tsinghua, is back at ESSEC and continuing her studies. She’s just posted a few pictures of springtime in Paris and, I have to say, I’m just a tad envious!

Still… Beijing is nice in the spring as well (give or take a few sandstorms!). In my last week there, I went out to the Fragrant Hills to visit the shop attached to a martial arts equipment factory; it was a wonderful sunny day, with a cloudless blue sky, and the hills truly were fragrant with the scent of all the trees waking up up for spring! They must all be in bloom now…