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FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: Going behind-the-scenes with Ecuador’s national airline |
International Business Strategy Lab, taught by Prof. Susan Perkins, provides a real-life consulting experience for students to work with international clients. In 2014, the class worked with the Ecuador Trade Commission on three different projects. One team’s strategy led to the creation of 10,000 new jobs in Ecuador. In 2015, students in the class once again worked with clients in Ecuador. This post highlights one of their projects. By Tommy Kantapasara For International Business Strategy Lab class, I was part of the TAME airline team. TAME (pronounced tah-may) is Ecuador’s national airline. Our team of four consisted of three second-year students and one first-year student who came from diverse backgrounds ranging from engineering to consulting and banking. We all wanted to work on the TAME airline project because of our personal fascination with the airline industry and our desire to know how an airline operates. Our project was to evaluate and consider a launch of a new route for TAME from Quito, Ecuador (UIO) to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and our main client was ProEcuador, the Ecuador government agency whose objective is to facilitate and grow trading activities between the United States and Ecuador. The first eight weeks of the course were spent laying the foundation of the client’s problem and gathering insights from different airline industry experts. We examined everything from the potential for air cargo, passenger demand between UIO and ORD, airport infrastructure at each airport, government regulations, aircraft capacity configuration, the approval process for new routes, and most importantly, whether the route made commercial sense. Additionally, it was important for us to understand the context from several perspectives: the people (from cargo entrepreneurs to airline experts), the organization (businesses), and the government. With all these stakeholders, we applied “MORS” concepts during the whole case to address all the stakeholders’ needs (The importance of MORS and the Management and Organizations Dept. will become clear when you join Kellogg). Apart from the analysis we did, the most fascinating experiences were the “experiential learning” trips we went on. Before our trip to Quito, we visited O’Hare International Airport (ORD) in Chicago. The clients wanted us to have a frame of reference for our visit to their country, and therefore arranged for us to visit the facilities at O’Hare, one of the world’s largest airports by passenger and cargo traffic. We spent the morning at O’Hare on the live runway and saw the cargo operations where Boeing 747s from Taiwan were landing and pulling up to the cargo center. The complexity in operating an airport as large as O’Hare kept us in awe of the airline businesses. The highlight of the class was certainly our trip to Quito, the highest capital city above sea level in the world (2.8km or 9,200 ft). Our five-day visit included a visit to a rose farm (Ecuador’s largest air cargo export) and the flower export association, as well as a meeting with the TAME Airlines CEO. We were given a tour of TAME cargo and Quito airport operations; we were also invited into a plane’s pilot cockpit, the control room of the airport operation – all of which felt so surreal. Through the day, instead of feeling we were causing disturbances to people doing their work, we felt so welcomed as everyone was so eager to share their daily experiences. Additionally, we were invited to meet the Minister of International Trade to present our market assessment of the project. It was incredible how our findings and preliminary recommendation brought on lively discussions. Our meeting with the minister garnered media attention. We were interviewed and found out later it was broadcast nationwide! We then met with representatives from the Ministry of Transportation and Tourism. Understanding what each organization’s interests and objectives were shed light into the complex organization and interaction between private and public enterprises. Seeing it all come together was a powerful way to see how a nation is run, the challenges it faces and how the decision it makes will impact and steer the direction of the country’s growth journey. Our trip was made more special when our client took us on a tour of Quito. Understanding the history of the capital city put everything we read about the country beforehand into perspective. This experiential learning opportunity opened our eyes to a new culture and a new life. We were so proud to have been part of this project, and our memory of the good people of Ecuador and the beautiful historic city will lead us to return again soon. Tommy Kantapasara ’15 graduated from Kellogg’s Two-Year MBA program in June. He is originally from Thailand. He joined Citigroup in Investment Banking in New York City. Learn about other experiential learning opportunities at Kellogg. Filed under: Academics, Business Insight, Student Life Tagged: experiential learning, global, international business strategy lab, international strategy lab, strategy, strategy lab |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: Designing for introversion | 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. During my time as a consultant, I had a couple of memorable experiences working with extraverted managers. My favorite collection of experiences were with a very extraverted client manager who also became a very close friend. We had a running joke – every Friday, we would check in with each other on our plans for the weekend, and he would unfailingly ask about potentially going out and doing something social on Friday night/during the weekend. I would, almost without exception, pass on the idea. We both knew that was going to be the outcome of the discussion. We still did it and laughed about it. We had reached a point of comfort where I didn’t need to explain my introversion to him. At the end of a week full of meetings, I didn’t really want to go out and be social. I needed time by myself. Similarly, I always preferred finding myself a quiet corner of the client’s office to do work versus sitting around a meeting room table (as was generally the norm within the team). The introverted managers understood this. The extraverted managers took some time, but for the most part were happy to let me do as I pleased once we’d established rapport. A lot of modern day office work or work that requires “connection” requires a certain degree of extraversion (the research world, on the other hand, is predominantly introverted). After all, you are working with people. Over time, however, it has led to a huge bias for extraverts and, I think, the early rise of extraverts into senior positions has also led to systems that work best for extraverts. Fully open plan offices are a great example of this sort of evolution. Fantastic idea for extraverts who don’t mind having people who bump into them. Horrible idea for introverts who find every such interaction draining. Now, there are lots of benefits of this sort of layout – more team bonding, creativity, ideas, etc. It is just that there has to be middle ground. And, it is only over time that offices have learned to create quiet spaces for the introverts to plug in and focus. In her book, “Quiet – The power of introverts in a world that just can’t stop talking,” Susan Cain described how MBA programs around the world are designed by extraverts, for extraverts. Examples of this are “networking nights,” parties and bar nights, large swathes of time spent on group projects. etc. So, coming in to graduate school, I was curious about how it would all work out for me. A year in, I’ve learned a few interesting lessons: 1. Susan Cain is right – there are a lot of systems in the professional/connection world that are designed for extraverts. I have found her take on the professional world and graduate school to be largely true. I think extraversion is thought to be the norm and I’ve regularly found people overwhelmed and uncomfortable at the thought of another networking night or another bar night they “have to” go to. 2. While some of these systems will stay the way they are, many of them can be changed. As a simple example, I found both the admit weekend and the orientation week designed for extraverts. It turned out that I had the opportunity to run the orientation week for the next class, and our team made a conscious effort to cater to the introverts, too. I’m not saying we got this right, but it is a step forward. The truth remains that the population is typically split 50-50 between extraverts and introverts. Occasionally, I get the feeling it skews even higher to introverts. So, there are plenty of folks who crave quiet time – it just requires a bit of initiative to design for introversion. 3. Design for introversion. There are many little things that have helped me design this experience around my introversion. A few examples:
So, that’s where I’ll end. As I’ve discovered through my consulting experiences and at graduate school, in most cases, you can choose how you want to engage and design experiences that work for you. It just requires you to understand what you want and then figure out ways to make that happen. As with most good things in life, it is what you make of it. Read Dean Sally Blount discuss introverts and extroverts on Fortune.com. 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: Consulting, extroverts, introverts, leadership, management, MBA Learnings |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: What it’s like to start a business |
This is part of an ongoing series highlighting MMM summer internship experiences. Name: Bobby Powers Industry: Entrepreneurship Company: sharEdFunction: Co-founder & CEO Location: Evanston, Ill. / India Starting a business is like playing a game where no one told you the rules. It can be a scary, intimidating and frustrating experience, but there’s no better time to do it than while at Kellogg. My team (including three other MMM students) and I came up with the idea for sharEd as a part of the Hult Prize Competition. We were selected as a Hult Online Finalist and raised $13k to get the venture off the ground, so I spent the summer trying to do just that. I led a team of four in an accelerator program at The Garage at Northwestern to build an minimum viable product that we could use to test out our idea. We started the summer using the design thinking approach, immersing ourselves in daily life of preschool teachers to understand how they were using current curriculum solutions. We even traveled to India to better understand our specific market and observe our customers in action. Through in-depth interviews and observation we were able to find pain points and ultimately finish designing Version 1.0 of our product. We also worked on building a brand, building credibility and building partnerships that we could use to help deliver our service. Through the process I was able to learn so much about the process of building a business: recruiting talent, incorporating the business and legal issues, pitching a business, marketing myself and the company, generating sales and delivering on operations. No other internship could have given me the chance to go from brainstorming on the white board walls of a local incubator to riding through the slums of informal settlements in India. Read an earlier post about how sharEd was initially launched. Learn more about the MMM program. Filed under: Academics, Career, Student Life Tagged: Design, design innovation, design thinking, entrepreneurship, internship, internships, MMM, MMM internship, social impact, summer internship, The Garage |
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