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| FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: Kellogg welcomes new associate dean |
![]() We are pleased to welcome Matt Merrick as Kellogg’s new Associate Dean – MBA Operations. In this role, Matt partners with Kellogg’s Senior Associate Dean – Curriculum and Teaching, while overseeing day-to-day operations across all of Kellogg’s full-time, part-time, MSMS, joint degree and certificate programs. His scope includes admissions, academic experience (registrar, advising, experiential learning), student life and career outcomes. Matt has an MBA from Harvard and most recently worked at Wake Forest University, where he served as the Executive Director, Business Analytics & FTMBA Programs. Prior to his time at Wake Forest, he held senior leadership roles in the private investment banking and the media industries. He also served for several years as the head of Harvard Business School’s career services group. Matt took the time to answer a few questions about Kellogg and his early impressions. What brought you to Kellogg? Kellogg is a special place, and I was first attracted by the reputation of the school and students. Once I learned more, I was drawn in by the energy around our vision and the commitment to growth. I knew that a place that puts “inspiring growth” – particularly personal and professional growth – front and center would be a good fit for me. Where are you focused on your first 100 days? It is all about learning — digging into how things work here and understanding what is important to students. That means lots of great conversations focused on getting to know students and the Kellogg community. Has anything surprised you? I certainly had high expectations about the professionalism of Kellogg students, but I have been absolutely blown away by my experience so far. In every conversation, the students I have met have been thoughtful and positive, incredibly well prepared and committed to the school. It has been a terrific introduction. Learn more about Kellogg’s Full-Time MBA program. Filed under: Academics, Student Life Tagged: associate dean, leadership, operations, Student Life |
| FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: Why Amazon’s first physical bookstore was smart, and inevitable | MBA Learnings |
![]() Second-year student Rohan Rajiv is blogging once a week about important lessons he is learning at Kellogg. Read more of his posts here. Amazon opened its first bookstore in Seattle earlier this week. This led to a many interesting questions in the media: Has Amazon taken a step backward by jumping back into traditional retail? Didn’t Amazon start an online store to improve on the traditional bookstore model? To understand this, let’s begin by taking a walk down memory lane and look at Jeff Bezos’ initial rationale for starting an online bookstore. Bezos understood a fundamental benefit of having an online store — “unlimited” access to inventory while also eliminating the fixed cost of owning a physical location. Why did this matter? For a category such as books, there are millions of published works. However, even the largest of bookstores can possibly only stock tens of thousands of books. So, within bookstores, you now need to forecast/guess demand for books. And that, inevitably means high inventory costs because estimates are rarely right – especially for niche category books. So it is now easy to understand why Bezos narrowed in on the following five categories as possible areas for Amazon to focus on for its initial product:
The principle we’re getting at is that the characteristics of a product drive the ideal supply chain/distribution strategy. Let’s imagine two kinds of products:
![]() This, in turn, leads to the next natural step in the logic:
Essentially, it is in the interest of Amazon to have physical locations to complement its online offerings. There are three massive advantages to doing so:
And at the rate at which Amazon has added businesses to its portfolio in the past decade, one could make the argument that few understand that idea better than Amazon and Jeff Bezos. (HT: Prof Chopra’s work on Omni-Channel retailing @ Kellogg) Rohan Rajiv is a second-year student in Kellogg’s Full-Time Two-Year Program. Prior to Kellogg he worked at a-connect serving clients on consulting projects across 14 countries in Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. He blogs a learning every day, including his MBA Learnings series, on www.ALearningaDay.com. Filed under: Academics, Student Life Tagged: Amazon, distribution strategy, MBA Learnings, retail, strategy, supply chain |
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