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18 Jan 2017, 07:41
18 Jan 2017, 19:00
| FROM Haas Admissions Blog: MBA Team Takes 1st Place at Microsoft Innovation Challenge |
 By Elspeth Ong, Thomas Chevallier, and Risa Shen, FTMBA 18 The Win: 1st place at the Microsoft Business Innovation Challenge Finals in New York, December 9, 2016 The Team: (above, left to right) Elspeth Ong, Thomas Chevallier, and Risa Shen, MBA 18 The Field: Thirteen teams from top US MBA programs pitched an app idea based on two prompts: What should Microsoft do next with its built-in app portfolio to increase relevance in premium devices? and Propose the single most important challenge Microsoft should tackle with all of the resources we have or could build. Each team that placed first in their school round advanced to the finals. The Pitch: We designed an app called Microsoft Hive, which would revolutionize the way people work in teams. At its heart would be Microsoft's AI assistant, Cortana, which would take care of mundane group logistics while enabling teams to focus on higher-order activities. Teams would be able to interact with transcribed meeting notes and content to quickly generate insights from discusssions. Cortana's feedback on each members airtime and emotions could help improve team dynamics and potentially address gender equity issues in work meetings. Meetings could also be seamlessly converted to Augmented Reality through through Microsoft HoloLens to make it easier to work across geographic borders. The Haas Factor: We applied the design thinking methodology that we learned about at Haas to identify a core problem faced in today's workplace: the difficulty of managing team dynamics. Additionally, we drew on the work we did in Teams@Haas with Lecturer Brandi Pearce, as well as what we learned in our core class Leading People about what makes teams feel psychologically safe. And of course, our Leadership Communication course helped us present with authenticity and conviction. The Clincher: The judges liked how our idea highlighted the unique qualities of Microsoft premium devices and would get users excited about the whole Microsoft ecosystem, from the Surface Pro to Hololens. Our idea fit with Microsoft's overall mission of enabling people to achieve more.  Related stories:
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19 Jan 2017, 09:00
| FROM Haas Admissions Blog: Shaping Your Business School Studies for a Product Management MBA |
 Part problem-solver, part storyteller, part trend analyst, and part entrepreneur, a product manager is part of putting The Next Big Thing in people's hands. To do so, they juggle competing priorities and call upon many of the skills gained in an MBA program.  Berkeley-Haas alum Tim Gray has served as a product management industry specialist for the Berkeley MBA Career Management Group and has worked as a product manager (PM) for both startups and established companies, including Autodesk, BandPage, and Ask.com. He regularly speaks with Berkeley MBA students about how to shape their studies for a product management MBA.Understanding the diverse range of skills needed is key to determining if the role is right for you and how you should shape your time in an MBA program, according to Tim. Work for the win (and the win-win) One of the most important skills good PMs possess is the ability to negotiate. “PMs are constantly doing negotiations, especially around product trade-offs,” Tim says. “A major accounts manager may want to see a certain feature in a product, but adding it will mean the product won’t ship on time, or the engineering team might want to make part of the code more robust and stable, but that won’t necessarily produce more revenue. So a huge responsibility of PMs is to negotiate these trade-offs. Look for courses that will strengthen your ability to build cooperation and achieve strategy-supporting outcomes, such as Berkeley MBA Program classes in Negotiations and Conflict Resolution, Game Theory, and Power and Politics in Organizations. Think “Hamilton” You may not be translating history into hip-hop, but you do need to know how to weave a compelling narrative. “PMs are frequently telling the story of a product to both internal and external audiences,” says Tim. For example, they may explain a customer’s workflow and goals to the engineering and design teams, help the product support team understand a new feature, or describe the problems the product solves during interviews with industry analysts or reporters. Look for classes that will strengthen your presence and your ability to build trust and be persuasive. Berkeley-Haas classes that support this product management skill include Leadership Communications and Storytelling for Leadership. Dig data Quantitative skills are also required. “Product managers need to analyze trends and project how the product is going to be adopted and grow over time,” Tim says. Recruiters are now asking that PMs be knowledgeable about SQL, so they can pull data and do analysis without depending on others for help.  Unleash your inner entrepreneur It helps to think like an entrepreneur. Some companies, like Google, prefer PMs with entrepreneurial instincts, who can research and pitch their own product ideas, according to Tim. Even if you're at a firm with more of more of a top-down, programmatic approach to creating products, you'll need a strong sense of ownership. MBA entrepreneurship courses can equip you with skills that help you with everything from recognizing opportunities to running an enterprise. Courses on entrepreneurship at Berkeley-Haas include Innovation Strategies for Emerging Technologies, The Lean Launchpad, and Business Model Innovation. Be intentional Tim also advises students to use their MBA internships to gain specific experience they can later point out to recruiters, for example, creating product roadmaps or prioritizing product features. But whether students are talking to alumni or recruiters for PM internships or full-time jobs, it’s especially important to demonstrate a genuine interest in the particular company’s products and/or customers. Tim suggests tailoring MBA class projects to a specific area of interest whenever possible. “Being really committed to a product, or even better, to a specific customer problem or opportunity, and demonstrating this, is one of the most important things you can do as an MBA student interested in product management. It shows that you have already done some work that is relevant for the job.” Read more about how Berkeley MBA studies have helped people become product managers at Amazon, GoodHire, SlingMedia, Twitter, and @Walmart Labs. You'll find curriculum and connections relevant to a career in product management in all three of our MBA programs. Compare our programs to learn more about the Berkeley MBA.  
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21 Jan 2017, 04:24
21 Jan 2017, 05:30
23 Jan 2017, 11:00
| FROM Haas Admissions Blog: MBA Student Perspective: How I Leaned In to Become One of the 7% of Women In Venture Capital |
 Photo: At my internship with my soon-to-be boss, Bee Partners Founder & Managing Partner Michael Berolzheimer, MBA 07 My passion is solving problems that matter. That passion often attracts me to disruptive industries and ways of thinking. My appreciation for risk-taking attracted me to entrepreneurship, and motivated me to apply to business school. I chose Haas because one of its Defining Principles, “Question the Status Quo,” deeply resonated with me. From my perspective, questioning the status quo is exemplified by Haas’ vast entrepreneurial ecosystem, the cultivation of emotional intelligence, and its emphasis on gender equity. These three things have defined and transformed my time here. Sink or swim Before arriving at Haas, I had naturally gravitated toward sink-or-swim environments and realized those are the places where I thrive. For example, as program manager for Google's Project Ara, I was one of the driving forces in creating a disruptive hardware ecosystem to deliver the mobile internet to 6 billion people—an industry game-changer. I co-led a 35-person team charged with designing and implementing the project’s minimum viable product (MVP) at its launch in Puerto Rico. It was a high-visibility, high-pressure, zero-room-for-error project—and I loved it. .jpg?t=1485125384406&width=320&name=Kira_IEEEargentina%20(1).jpg) Thriving in these environments requires emotional intelligence. For example, when I moved to Buenos Aires for three years, I was a fluent Spanish speaker but needed to quickly adjust to a new speaking style and technical vocabulary (in the photo above, I'm giving a talk on wearables and the IoT at Argentina's Universidad de Tecnologia Nacional). I also had to adapt to deep-rooted cultural differences in business, personal relationships, and daily life. I found that my ability to closely observe and tune in to what people were thinking and feeling helped me quickly make this transition. I could see how emotional intelligence was a key ingredient to my success, and set out to develop my skills further. Building skills—and a network Upon matriculating at Haas, I learned about LAUNCH—the University of California’s leading startup accelerator, based on Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad curriculum. The LAUNCH curriculum teaches entrepreneurs to rapidly validate ideas by seeking out extensive customer feedback, overcoming the reason most startups fail. I knew I had to get involved, to learn ways of seeing things that others don’t, and to learn how to better take risks and succeed. To immerse myself, I took on a role as one of LAUNCH’s mentor-startup liaisons, acting as an interface between and among the accelerator’s 24 cross-industry startup teams, the Berkeley entrepreneurial ecosystem, and our Silicon Valley mentors. The experience was invigorating. It not only motivated me to intern in venture capital over the summer, it also helped me network and land my internship at Bee Partners (founded by Michael Berolzheimer, Haas MBA 07). I networked intensively, attending myriad events and always requesting introductions. In hindsight, one of the best opportunities I had was interviewing 30-plus entrepreneurs and VCs to produce five marketing videos prior to LAUNCH’s Demo Day. This gave me a chance to build deeper relationships than I would have in straight networking events because my interviewees and I shared a common goal of unifying and strengthening the Berkeley entrepreneurship community.  Photo: The LAUNCH team and faculty on Demo Day Boosting my EQ In addition to building on my professional goals, Haas has made me a stronger leader by giving me opportunities to heighten my emotional intelligence (EQ) and work to foster a culture of gender equality. The school’s emphasis on emotional intelligence is evident through core classes like Leadership Communication—for which I became a Graduate Student Instructor in my second year. The course fosters authentic communication through personal presence, message, and style of delivery. I’ve also been inspired that Haas faculty and students alike embrace these concepts beyond the formal curriculum. I participated in Haas’s first “T-group”—a type of training group where participants learn about themselves through their interactions with others. The idea is to create an organizational vacuum by removing the three characteristics required for any group to function: a formal leader, a set task, and established rules of procedure. Facilitated by lecturers Erica Peng and Cort Worthington, learning occurs through observation, emotional reactions, feedback, and explained concepts. And, this spring, I’m organizing a Mindfulness and Meditation (Mind & Med) speaker series with my classmate, Chuck Huggins. The series will explore a variety of Mind & Med practices and the science behind them, and support students in developing their own practices. As I evaluated b-schools, the fact that Haas had a record 43 percent women enrolled in the Class of 2016 was a real differentiator. Though that percentage has unfortunately dropped, the full-time program still has about 40 percent women overall, and program leaders and students are working hard to welcome even more women to the school. In contrast, when I worked on Project Ara and other projects with Fortune 500 clients, it was impossible to ignore that I was often the only woman on the team. I yearned to be in an environment that embraced, included, and empowered women. Leaning into the VC world While only 7 percent of venture capital partners at Top 100 firms are currently women (see TechCrunch's study), my experience at Haas has helped create that possibility for me. On my last day at Bee Partners last summer, I received a full-time offer. I took the fall to soul-search as to whether working in venture capital—a male-dominated field in which the “product” is money—was the right course for me. I connected with and sought counsel from my Haas entrepreneurship family, including my entrepreneurship Lecturer Rob Chandra, a seasoned venture capitalist, and Rhonda Schrader, executive director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program, a LAUNCH faculty member, and a serial entrepreneur. I recently accepted Bee’s offer of a senior associate position upon graduation. Reflecting back, I am so grateful to have found a school where I could follow my career passions while being part of a strong, gender-conscious and emotionally aware community. I’m excited to continue tackling high stakes problems that positively impact the world.  Photo: Me and the Bee Partners team, along with my fellow Haas intern Shantanu Mittal, MBA 17  Related posts MBA Student Perspective: Finding My Voice as a Nontraditional Student MBA Student Perspective: Sharing Haas With a Partner MBA Student Perspective: Choosing a Graduate Degree to Maximize My Social Impact MBA Student Perspective: "I Am From Saudi Arabia and I Am a Feminist" 
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23 Jan 2017, 23:03
24 Jan 2017, 00:38
24 Jan 2017, 00:44
24 Jan 2017, 11:00
| FROM Haas Admissions Blog: MBA Student Perspective: How I'm Leaning In to Become One of the 7% of Women In Venture Capital |
 Photo: At my internship with my soon-to-be boss, Bee Partners Founder & Managing Partner Michael Berolzheimer, MBA 07 My passion is solving problems that matter. That passion often attracts me to disruptive industries and ways of thinking. My appreciation for risk-taking attracted me to entrepreneurship, and motivated me to apply to business school. I chose Haas because one of its Defining Principles, “Question the Status Quo,” deeply resonated with me. From my perspective, questioning the status quo is exemplified by Haas’ vast entrepreneurial ecosystem, the cultivation of emotional intelligence, and its emphasis on gender equity. These three things have defined and transformed my time here. Sink or swim Before arriving at Haas, I had naturally gravitated toward sink-or-swim environments and realized those are the places where I thrive. For example, as program manager for Google's Project Ara, I was one of the driving forces in creating a disruptive hardware ecosystem to deliver the mobile internet to 6 billion people—an industry game-changer. I co-led a 35-person team charged with designing and implementing the project’s minimum viable product (MVP) at its launch in Puerto Rico. It was a high-visibility, high-pressure, zero-room-for-error project—and I loved it. .jpg?t=1485278459089&width=320&name=Kira_IEEEargentina%20(1).jpg) Thriving in these environments requires emotional intelligence. For example, when I moved to Buenos Aires for three years, I was a fluent Spanish speaker but needed to quickly adjust to a new speaking style and technical vocabulary (in the photo above, I'm giving a talk on wearables and the IoT at Argentina's Universidad de Tecnologia Nacional). I also had to adapt to deep-rooted cultural differences in business, personal relationships, and daily life. I found that my ability to closely observe and tune in to what people were thinking and feeling helped me quickly make this transition. I could see how emotional intelligence was a key ingredient to my success, and set out to develop my skills further. Building skills—and a network Upon matriculating at Haas, I learned about LAUNCH—the University of California’s leading startup accelerator, based on Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad curriculum. The LAUNCH curriculum teaches entrepreneurs to rapidly validate ideas by seeking out extensive customer feedback, overcoming the reason most startups fail. I knew I had to get involved, to learn ways of seeing things that others don’t, and to learn how to better take risks and succeed. To immerse myself, I took on a role as one of LAUNCH’s mentor-startup liaisons, acting as an interface between and among the accelerator’s 24 cross-industry startup teams, the Berkeley entrepreneurial ecosystem, and our Silicon Valley mentors. The experience was invigorating. It not only motivated me to intern in venture capital over the summer, it also helped me network and land my internship at Bee Partners (founded by Michael Berolzheimer, Haas MBA 07). I networked intensively, attending myriad events and always requesting introductions. In hindsight, one of the best opportunities I had was interviewing 30-plus entrepreneurs and VCs to produce five marketing videos prior to LAUNCH’s Demo Day. This gave me a chance to build deeper relationships than I would have in straight networking events because my interviewees and I shared a common goal of unifying and strengthening the Berkeley entrepreneurship community.  Photo: The LAUNCH team and faculty on Demo Day Boosting my EQ In addition to building on my professional goals, Haas has made me a stronger leader by giving me opportunities to heighten my emotional intelligence (EQ) and work to foster a culture of gender equality. The school’s emphasis on emotional intelligence is evident through core classes like Leadership Communication—for which I became a Graduate Student Instructor in my second year. The course fosters authentic communication through personal presence, message, and style of delivery. I’ve also been inspired that Haas faculty and students alike embrace these concepts beyond the formal curriculum. I participated in Haas’s first “T-group”—a type of training group where participants learn about themselves through their interactions with others. The idea is to create an organizational vacuum by removing the three characteristics required for any group to function: a formal leader, a set task, and established rules of procedure. Facilitated by lecturers Erica Peng and Cort Worthington, learning occurs through observation, emotional reactions, feedback, and explained concepts. And, this spring, I’m organizing a Mindfulness and Meditation (Mind & Med) speaker series with my classmate, Chuck Huggins. The series will explore a variety of Mind & Med practices and the science behind them, and support students in developing their own practices. As I evaluated b-schools, the fact that Haas had a record 43 percent women enrolled in the Class of 2016 was a real differentiator. Though that percentage has unfortunately dropped, the full-time program still has about 40 percent women overall, and program leaders and students are working hard to welcome even more women to the school. In contrast, when I worked on Project Ara and other projects with Fortune 500 clients, it was impossible to ignore that I was often the only woman on the team. I yearned to be in an environment that embraced, included, and empowered women. Leaning into the VC world While only 7 percent of partners at Top 100 venture capital firms are currently women (see TechCrunch's study), my experience at Haas has helped create the possibility that I can become one of them. On my last day at Bee Partners last summer, I received a full-time offer to be a senior associate. I took the fall to soul-search as to whether working in venture capital—a male-dominated field in which the “product” is money—was the right course for me. I connected with and sought counsel from my Haas entrepreneurship family, including my entrepreneurship Lecturer Rob Chandra, a seasoned venture capitalist, and Rhonda Schrader, executive director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program, a LAUNCH faculty member, and a serial entrepreneur. I recently accepted Bee’s offer of a senior associate position upon graduation. Reflecting back, I am so grateful to have found a school where I could follow my career passions while being part of a strong, gender-conscious and emotionally aware community. I’m excited to continue tackling high stakes problems that positively impact the world.  Photo: Me and the Bee Partners team, along with my fellow Haas intern Shantanu Mittal, MBA 17 Related posts MBA Student Perspective: Finding My Voice as a Nontraditional Student MBA Student Perspective: Sharing Haas With a Partner MBA Student Perspective: Choosing a Graduate Degree to Maximize My Social Impact MBA Student Perspective: "I Am From Saudi Arabia and I Am a Feminist"
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24 Jan 2017, 15:04
24 Jan 2017, 20:54
24 Jan 2017, 21:59
25 Jan 2017, 05:05
25 Jan 2017, 07:00
| FROM Haas Admissions Blog: How an MBA led to more meaningful work for Digital Green's Karin Lion |
 For many, being a program officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sounds like a dream job. And for Karin Lion, EMBA 15, it was – for eight years. As an associate program officer at the Seattle-based foundation, Karin worked in such diverse areas as agriculture, urban development, water, sanitation, and hygiene, emergency response, global libraries, and family interest. She played multiple roles on multiple teams – developing program and donor strategies, creating budgets, managing implementation, and evaluating impact. She hoped to advance within the organization to higher levels of managerial and decision-making responsibilities that would change the direction of the work, and that’s what motivated her to pursue her Berkeley Executive MBA. But once she received her degree, Karin realized that she’d hit a wall at Gates. She wanted to become more of a decision-maker with a better perspective on the ultimate impact of programs but, even with her advanced degrees, there wasn’t a clear route to advancement within the organization.  Fortunately, using her MBA as a path to more meaningful work, Karin was prepared to jump. She landed back in San Francisco to begin a new role as director of global agricultural strategy for Digital Green – a nonprofit international development organization. While Gates has about 1,500 employees, Digital Green has 100. Karin is part of the global leadership group, exactly where she wanted to be. “Before, I was an individual contributor, but now I’m leading a team,” she says. “I’m able to shape and build something real. I can immediately see the impact of my decisions.” Karin enthusiastically credits her Berkeley EMBA experience with her ability to choose more gratifying work. Looking back, she appreciates the framework the EMBA curriculum provided, which helped her to understand how she thinks, designs, strategizes, and presents her thoughts. In particular, she loved the courses “Trust-Based Relationships” taught by Rajiv Ball and “Executive Leadership” with Jennifer Chatman. Even more valuable was the confidence she gained through the program and from her classmates. “Everyone is so brilliant, with such strong experience,” she says. “Before, I sometimes had trouble believing I deserved a seat at the table. But they taught me to think outside the world I had created for myself. My contributions were valued, my voice was heard, and they forced me to push my own limits.”  At graduation, Karin was elected by her fellow students to be class speaker. Finally, there is the degree itself. “I know it got me my current job,” she says. “In my interviews, every single person brought up my Berkeley MBA as something that would bring value to the organization. And my salary increased by 35 percent.” No job, of course, is perfect forever. As we grow and gain experience, our professional sights change, too. And Karin is sure that, as her own career develops, her degree has equipped her with the skills and knowledge that will advance her along that road. “My MBA is preparing me for that dream job ten years from now,” she says. “It’s helping me think long-term about who I want to be at the end of my whole trajectory.” Are you considering what meaningful work means to you? Get our free ebook with five steps toward making your next career move.  Main image courtesy of Digital Green 
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25 Jan 2017, 18:00
26 Jan 2017, 10:41
26 Jan 2017, 20:30
27 Jan 2017, 15:04
27 Jan 2017, 15:31
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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  ➡️ Sayali narrates her experience of succeeding on the GMAT after 4 attempts & 2 years of preparations with 32 percentile improvement on GMAT verbal.
Tuck at Dartmouth
AGSM at UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE
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