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09 May 2016, 03:00
| FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: What this season’s Premiership title race can teach us about spotting and nurturing talent |
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By now, even non-football fans would have read about the incredible exploits of Leicester City Football Club. Rated 5000-1 outsiders by bookies before the season, they completed an amazing year-long turnaround from being bottom of the table at one point last season, to winning the title with 3 games to spare. This is a team that was assembled on a budget at a fraction of the top teams. In fact, Leicester City became the first team outside the top 5 wage paying clubs to win the Premiership (I am not including the time before the Premiership started) — Leicester was in the bottom 5 in terms of wage spent. This is remarkable given that the wage bill is the top determinant of a team’s final position in the table. Leicester’s accomplishment has overshadowed what, in any other season, would have been the fairytale story of the year. That of my beloved Tottenham Hotspur who exceeded everyone’s expectations and not only qualified for next year’s Champions League, but with one game to go, will finish no lower than third, which would be their highest spot for decades. Again, the team achieved this with a wage bill, while much larger than Leicester City’s, is not in the top five. Both clubs have achieved their results with a mix of talent and incredible team work. Leicester’s team comprises journeymen from other clubs who clicked and under the leadership of their manager, believed in the team ethic over their individual objectives. That is not to say that their players are not individual talents. One of them was rewarded with the the Player of the Year award from fellow professionals and their top scorer is a nail on addition to England’s Euro 2016 squad. But it is incredible how many of their players were written by other clubs before this season. As for Tottenham, their manager moulded a young team to his philosophy of a tireless work ethic and a willingness to promote from the youth ranks if a player was good enough. I was reflecting on this while watching Spurs’ last home game of the season yesterday. In particular, I remember an open discussion on Reddit with the man who is in charge of Tottenham’s youth development. I had expected him to talk mostly about how to spot and develop talent but he devoted the entire hour to talk about identifying and developing character. He talked about how a great footballer would play 800 games in his career, of which 200 of those he might be a 10 out of 10 player; another 200 would be 7 or 8 out of 10; and the remaining 400 he would be just horrible. The Spurs coach saw his job as helping young players develop the mental strength to go through and bounce back from those 400 poor games. He also gave the example of a player who was deemed unsuitable and cut from the development team when he was just a young teenager but he refused to leave. He came back every day to the training centre and pleaded his case. His coaches were impressed with his resilience and took him back and he has since played for England’s national team. The coach also talked about all the players who made the jump from the youth team to play for Tottenham’s senior team. But he also said that for every one of these successful players, there were 10 others who didn’t make the grade. This was not news to me, but what was revelatory was what he said next. That he felt it was his duty to make the successful players know that their success was due to these 10 other players. And that it was the duty of each player to help everyone else succeed. This last part really got me thinking because at the Cambridge MBA, we emphasise collaboration. But at the same time we tell our students that collaboration only works if they achieve more as individuals by working together. And it is through projects like the Cambridge Venture Project and Global Consulting Project that students practice how they can balance the individual with the team. Now I know that it isn’t enough to just have a team. Talent is also important. But watching the Spurs and Leicester teams (it is revealing that most neutral fans describe both clubs as teams and not focus on any superstar individual talent) it does suggest that qualities like resilience, strong work ethic and a fierce commitment to the team are just as important. And in what I promise is my last football reference, I pulled out this article from the Economist that draws a comparison between perceptions about two successful footballers and how investors or recruiters value determination over talent. For football fans of a previous generation, the choice was between George Best, someone who was supremely talented but ruined by the trappings of his success, and Kevin Keegan, a less talented player but who achieved a lot through sheer determination. A recent study showed that investors preferred to invest in someone with talent and potential rather than someone who had accomplished a lot through determination. The question was whether this behaviour applied to recruiters. And I would say whether that applies to admissions in business schools. It is something that I am very conscious of as well. When I first started in admissions, I would catch myself imagining what a promising candidate could do if they were to come on the MBA and what they would accomplish after. Now I am much more careful about thinking more deeply about how a candidate has reached their accomplishments and look for that balance between talent/potential and determination/resilience.  The view from the South Stand at White Hart Lane, home to Tottenham Hotspur |
13 May 2016, 00:14
24 May 2016, 04:00
| FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: What using the iPad Pro has taught me about change management |
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As most people know, I use a lot of Apple products. I don’t count myself as an Apple fanboy (although I still don’t understand what possessed me to buy the first iPod shuffle) but I do like my gadgets. Just four months ago, I bought a 12.9 inch iPad Pro. It was my third iPad (I had bought the very first generation and the first generation iPad mini) and it had been unveiled as a “laptop killer” that for most people would be more than sufficient in terms of their computing needs. This inevitably provoked an uproar amongst some of the tech intelligentsia who pointed out that this was nowhere near a laptop, and that despite the nifty stylus (sorry I meant Apple Pencil) it lacked some basic desktop capabilities that its main rival the Surface Pro 4 had in spades because that was really a laptop moving into tablet territory. Having used the iPad Pro for several months now, I can safely say that, while it cannot completely replace a laptop in every function (most notably recording a Skype interview for podcasts) it more than makes up for it in other areas that can create its own tipping point. Yes, it runs on iOS, a mobile operating system so it won’t allow you to have 10 windows open at the same time, or allow you to customise the size of each window (and you would be surprised how many people find it a deal breaker if a computing platform won’t allow them to do these actions). But it is incredibly portable, has tremendous battery life, has a much better screen and speakers than most laptops, and apps have made use of its processing power to close the gap on their desktop counterparts. Sure, I still don’t have all the functionality in Excel (for example I can’t create pivot tables, only update them) but it does enough of the other stuff well that I don’t mind these little irritations. In fact, I find myself at the point where the iPad Pro has effectively replaced my office desktop and the incredible battery life I mentioned before is beginning to decrease as I enjoy using it more and more. And this brings me to my point about change management. Too often, people get used to a certain way of doing things that they don’t question what were the underlying reasons for those processes and behaviours. The processes become so much a part of what they do and their identity that they are unable to break free from them. Or they are too quick to dismiss new processes or technologies which admittedly, are not that good at the initial stages but are good enough in other areas. Very soon a tipping point is reached where so many people have adopted the new technologies that there is now motivation for more rapid innovation in those spaces. Every MBA in the world would be familiar with cautionary tales told in the classroom about Kodak and digital film. Or the late Andy Grove’s exhortations to “be paranoid”. But where the answers are less clear cut is how to convince teams and organisations to recognise that they need to change, or how to balance the need to change rapidly against the need to be sympathetic to the people who are being asked to change. As I said, for many people, the process is part of their identity and it can be a scary journey to embrace change. But I am always reminded of a graph that someone showed me when I had my first managerial position. It showed how people’s stress levels increased exponentially when the rate of change imposed by external events exceeds their own rate of change. So while it is scary to start the change process, it is much better to start that process before external events (eg in Kodak’s case, the rapid adoption of digital photos) give an organisation no chance but to change. No one wants to be like Kodak. |
27 May 2016, 11:00
| FROM Cambridge Admissions Blog: What I am reading and listening to this Bank Holiday weekend |
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Coming from Singapore where all holidays have specific dates, it was quite a change for me to find out that in the UK, all the public holidays intentionally fall on a Monday with the exception of Christmas and New Year’s Day. Public holidays are also called Bank Holidays here. This Monday the 30th of May is a Bank Holiday and while many of my colleagues are taking the opportunity to go on holiday, I will be staying in Cambridge trying to do some cycling to increase my mileage to date, listen to music and read some books. My reading list this weekend comprises “Act Like a Leader, Think Like A Leader” by Herminia Ibarra. Ibarra draws upon her experience running leadership development programs to distill insights into how many people’s careers derail when they are given new managerial responsibilities, or when the environment changes such that their job requirements change. I was interested to read the book because as the academic year draws to an end for our MBAs, I began to think about how our MBAs will handle the career transitions that all of them will be making very soon. And this is what I will be listening to this weekend. Let me know of any other musical recommendations that you might have. |
26 Jun 2016, 18:40
26 Jun 2016, 22:26
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Hi Generic [Bot],
Here are updates for you:
ANNOUNCEMENTS
 Wednesday, Apr 24, 2024 11:30am NY / 3:30pm London / 9pm Mumbai Watch earlier episodes of DI series below EP1: 6 Hardest Two-Part Analysis Questions EP2: 5 Hardest Graphical Interpretation Questions
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