Nanyang MBA leadership seminar

I know: I said I wasn’t going to write any more MBA posts. Still, I keep on hoping that this time it will be OK, last night I attended an event organized by Nanyang Business School. It had been advertised by email some time ago; I hadn’t meant to go, especially as I normally have a martial arts class on Friday nights. In the event, a reminder email came to tell us that “Very limited seats were left” for “this event not to be missed”, which sounded promising, and as it happened I’ve been over-training lately and needed to give my knees a rest. So I went, and paid over my twenty bucks for admission…

The event was titled “Speed Up Your Career Evolution”. There were three speakers, in this order:

• Ms. Jill Lee, Senior Executive Vice-President and CFO, Siemens China;
• Mr. Paul Davies, Regional Business HR Manager, Hewlett Packard Asia;
• Mr. Leonard Yeow, Founder President and CEO, The Eximius Group Pte Ltd (the main speaker).

Now, I have to say: all three speakers were very good, and delivered very interesting and informative presentations that I enjoyed a lot. Leonard Yeow in particular was excellent, and very entertaining. His talk was the most relevant for me as an MBA alumnus; the other two were perhaps targeted more at current course participants. Putting the three together, it was worth going to the event, and the admission fee!

The turnout was OK for a Friday-night event; I didn’t do a headcount, but I would estimate that there between forty and fifty people there. The auditorium was only half full, though: “very limited seats remaining” was, let’s say, testing the boundaries of what that phrase might be expected to mean!

So if the speakers were very good, what made me unhappy about the evening? First of all, it was a little sad that an event with this quality of speaker was organised by the MBA Alumni Association, and not by the Careers Unit. Career support was weak throughout my time in the MBA, and a few things have happened since then to suggest that the school still hasn’t got its act together in this respect; perhaps that’s for another post, though.

The second, and main, reason came during the Q&A session at the end. One of the current participants, an Indian, was concerned about his job search. He described himself as having an IT background (in fact, by the sound of it, pretty deeply technical), and no real managerial experience. He’s applying for entry-level managerial jobs (including with Siemens and HP) and getting nowhere. What, he asked, could he do to help improve his applications?

The response from the participants was unanimous: forget it, no HR manager in their right mind would hire you for a managerial position if you have no experience, MBA or no MBA. They suggested trying to find an alternative entry path into an organisation and then, after a year or two, wangling that into a managerial role. After that, it would be possible to leave and begin a career path as a manager.

I was watching the panel, so I didn’t see the questioner’s face as the answer came, but I can imagine that this was not what he was hoping to hear. Going into a non-managerial post for a couple of years is not going to help him recoup the expense of his degree – and perhaps he could have tried this approach without needing the MBA at all… I can sympathize, because I was in a very similar position – a deep geek hoping to use the MBA to change career path, and I found this out the hard way as well: my job applications to the corporate world went nowhere.

Now, the panel’s response is totally realistic and reasonable, of course. The thing is, how did that participant get so far without knowing it? Like me, he almost certainly went through the MBA application process and interviews being open with the b-school about what he wanted to do – and wasn’t told that it wouldn’t work. Why not? I can think of a few answers to that, and I don’t like any of them.

In my case, I’m luckily pretty resilient. I already had experience of setting up and running my own business; plus, I had a lot of political experience, so I had more under my belt than just my IT work. On top of that, my applications to big-name companies were more to do with being caught up in the general MBA group-think; it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. (What do I really want to do? Heh, I’m working on it; maybe I’ll have more to say in the next few months on the topic!). But, in terms of my post-MBA career, I had to do it all myself; I don’t feel that I got much meaningful help from the B-School.

In any case, that student was the reason I left the evening with a bad taste in my mouth: how can he have committed two years of his life and the cost involved in an MBA without someone having told him as honestly as the panellists did last night that it wouldn’t work?

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…

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 “Aha!” moment

The discussions I had recently with NBS about a PhD didn’t lead anywhere, but they did get me interested in the concept of Cultural Intelligence, a concept that NBS is pushing quite hard. I should say, it was a sore point for me that since the Nanyang MBA sold itself as an “Asian MBA”, there was very, very little content that dealt with managing in a multicultural, Asian context. Of course, I learned a great deal about it, but from mixing with a very diverse set of classmates, not because of the courses. Anyway, one of the jobs I’ve applied for is very OB and HR-oriented, and so when I was in Singapore last week I bought Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. I’m still working through it, but it’s being a real eye-opener. Now I have to say: I bought this in the Popular bookshop on NTU campus, so perhaps the OB class at NBS does deal with these issues. I don’t know – I took OB at Tsinghua, which didn’t touch on the differences between national cultures at all (naturally: in China, MBA grads are probably only going to be managing other Chinese, so this isn’t a big issue for them, and the course focused more on other topics). Anyway, just reading the section on Power Distance, and looking at the values for different countries, is really interesting. Of course, we all know that Singapore is hierarchical, but I was suprised to see that the country with the #1 degree of power distance is Malaysia. That explains a lot of the differences I had with a Malay manager when I first came to Singapore… The reason I’m blogging about this now, is that suddenly a few things make a bit more sense. Taking a couple of quotes from the book, in cultures with a high power distance:

• Inequalities among people are expected and desired.
• Less powerful people should be dependent; they are polarized between dependence and counterdependence.
• Hierarchy in organizations reflects existential inequality between highter and lower levels
• Subordinates expect to be told what to do.
• The ideal boss is a benevolent autocrat, or “good father”.

Now, in my job search, I’ve applied to lots of companies in the UK, China, and Singapore. This makes it clearer to me why all of the British companies have responded, and eventually informed me of the outcome, while the Singaporean companies are usually up-front about saying they won’t bother to respond. I doubt that it’s because the Singaporean companies are deluged with applications and the Brits aren’t. As a job-seeker, I’m a supplicant, and so as a high power distance culture, the Singaporeans don’t feel that they have to make any effort. I suspect that it affects other issues as well – I’m sorry to pick on the Singapore Tourism Board again, but I have a feeling that the “we are in charge, so what we do is right” attitude colours Singapore’s methods of marketing itself, and never mind the issues this causes on the ground. (That comment sparked by reading this post on YawningBread). Of course, there are alternative explanations – maybe the woman on the bus and the Hong Kong family simply couldn’t speak English, so had to speak Chinese (but that doesn’t affect the author’s points about using Chinese names that aren’t used by Singaporeans themselves). Also, I disagree that Cantonese is rare in Singapore. Maybe it depends where you live, but in ‘old Singapore’ I hear it a lot. (Granted, I only speak a little bit of Putonghua, but Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese do sound quite different and I can usually differentiate between them).

Putting a name to a face…

I was in Sculpting in Time last night, and ran into a Singaporean who is on exchange in Tsinghua right now. We wound up having a discussion about challenges facing Singapore right now – partly because I was reading Alain Vandenborre’s book, Proudly Singaporean at the time. I need to make it a bit clearer when I talk about this subject, on this blog as much as anywhere else, that even though I see problems and things I disagree with in Singapore and can be passionate about discussing them, I nevertheless like the place very much, and feel very attached to it! This is a roundabout way of getting to say that one thing I like is the strong Indian culture there. When I went back in January, pretty much the first thing I did was head up to Little India for a decent curry. I also decided I wanted to pick up some Indian music, which I always like listening to but know very little about. I went to the music section in Mustafa’s (but the offical site’s not very interesting – read this as well), and asked the attendant for a recommendation. He gave me a DVD of wedding songs, culled from various Bollywood films. Watching it back in China, I realised that the woman on the cover was also in many of the clips – and was absolutely stunning. I had no idea who she was, though, and no way to find out. Today, I was reading an online article from an Indian paper, and happened to click on to another page, to see a picture of the same actress… It turns out that she is Aishwarya Rai… Wow – that’s all I’m saying! (Picture from aishwaryaworld gallery). Aah, found this relatively recent CBS article…

MBA evolution: a challenge for Singapore

Interesting to see in the IHT today that INSEAD is setting up a joint EMBA with Tsinghua university.

I bet this will just be the beginning – more Western b-schools will establish joint MBAs, and Chinese (and Indian) campuses will follow. I’m interested in this of course because I spent a trimester at Tsinghua. A number of people I know, such as Qian Xiaojun, are mentioned. Also, as of this year, exchange students are also eligible to join the Tsinghua MBA alumni group, which (given Tsinghua’s prestige in China) you can bet I’ll be making the most of.

I’m also interested because it quotes Hooi Den Huan, who was my Marketing prof at NBS, and is now the vice-dean. He says “We have definitely seen a decreasing number of applications from China within the last couple of years, maybe something like 20 percent”. A 20% drop in applications is definitely not good – and I know NBS is worried about it, as I discussed this with people there when I was last back in Singapore.

The implications affect more than just NBS, though. Singapore is trying to position itself as an ‘education hub’ for Asia. (Members of my MBA Strategy class will know that I think the ‘hub’ strategy is too diffuse, but let’s not get started on that now). he trouble is, what can Singapore offer to attract world-clas institutions? It doesn’t have a domestic market. It does have a strong legal environment, which worked to attract MNCs, but as recent events with Warwick University showed, this isn’t necessarily going to help attract universities.

The other issue is that Singapore is often described as “Asia for Beginners” – a safe place to start for Westerners to get to know the Asian market. I wonder if the creation of CEIBS, this new EMBA, and plenty of other ventures such as the new university being set up in Suzhou by Xi’an Jiaotong and Liverpool universities, don’t show that Westerners have now confident enough to go further than Singapore?

Who knows? I think Singapore is going to have to raise its game a bit. I know the government is putting a lot of effort into this, so let’s wish them well.