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FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: New students introduced to Kellogg |
Kellogg’s Complete Immersion in Management (CIM) Week kicked off Aug. 31 as the school welcomed the Class of 2017. During her welcome address on Monday, Dean Sally Blount ’92 posited the question, “Why do you need an MBA?” To her, the answer is obvious and inspiring. Dean Sally Blount ’92 “Business education is more important than ever because business is the dominant social institution of our day,” Blount said. “Business creates jobs, creates wealth, and moves wealth and jobs faster and more efficiently than any other social institution in human history.” Over the course of CIM, the new students will focus on collaboration, negotiation and relationship-building as they learn how to develop great teams. Ziegler said these skills will help the students to “build your own Kellogg.” “My hope for you as you embark on this journey is that you act with intent, that you block out the noise of the crowd and reflect on what is most important to you,” Ziegler said. “It is your journey to design, and we’re here to support you on whatever path you pursue.” Read more about Day 1 of CIM Take a look at the Class Profile for the incoming class [INFOGRAPHIC] See more photos from CIM Filed under: Academics, Student Life Tagged: cim, Complete Immersion in Management, culture, new students |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: ‘Learn how to walk the high wire’ |
Gil Penchina has failed in epic fashion, and not just once. “This is the life of an entrepreneur,” Penchina ’97 told the incoming Class of 2017 during the second day of the school’s Complete Immersion in Management (CIM) Week. “Silicon Valley is a town full of people who are failing all the time.” But failure, he countered, is often the path to success. And as the keynote speaker of the weeklong orientation for new students, Penchina talked about his time during and after Kellogg while advising the incoming class on how they could best use their time in Evanston. “Kellogg is a safety net, so you might as well learn how to walk the high wire,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity we have at this school, which is giving you a chance to learn anything.” Read more about Penchina’s talk. Read more about Day 1 of CIM. Filed under: Academics, Business Insight, Career, Student Life Tagged: alumni, cim, Complete Immersion in Management, entrepreneurship, new students |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: KWEST 2015 #TBT |
Last week, hundreds of first-year and second-year students traversed the globe as part of KWEST: Kellogg Worldwide Experience and Service Trip. Kyle Burr, one of the student-run KWEST executive committee members, wrote about the KWEST experience in the run up to this year’s trip. As Kellogg’s first-year students continue their Complete Immersion in Management (CIM) week, take a look back at some of the photo highlights from their trips as part of Throwback Thursday. Filed under: Student Life Tagged: Kellogg Worldwide Experience and Service Trip, kwest |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: 3 productivity principles | 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. Some of my highest impact learnings as a graduate student have been around productivity. One of my professors in the first couple of weeks described getting your MBA as a two-year course in decision making and trade-offs. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve written about what my process has looked like. And today, I thought I’d attempt to pull out three productivity principles that have become apparent to me in the past year. 1. There is no productivity without a goal. We are either active or productive. The difference is whether we’re making progress toward a goal. This goal has to be necessarily overarching. For example, if your goal is to become CEO and CEO alone, talking to family becomes an unimportant activity. So, the first principle of productivity is to decide what matters. 2. Strategic decisions cannot be taken in isolation / You can’t optimize sub systems. If you’re trying to figure out how to live a good life, you can’t work toward optimizing a “sub system” or part of your life. This means you can’t make a good decision on your career if you don’t consider the impact on the other parts of your life. For example, what is the impact of accepting a new role? Does that compromise your desire to be healthy? The latin root of decision comes from ‘cis’ or ‘cid,’ which literally means “to kill.” Good strategy involves good decisions that, in turn, involve killing options. And such decisions need to be taken with a view of the whole picture. A quick additional plug – making decisions while keeping the whole picture in mind helps us be consistent and “walk our talk.” The one word that describes that well is integrity. Integrity is derived from “integer,” which, as you probably know from third grade math, means whole. It all ties together. 3. The key goal – to keep the main thing the main thing. There’s a story that a productivity coach in the 1920s once gave millionaire Charles Schwab a simple piece of advice – write down the three most important things at the start of the day and don’t move to item No. 2 until you finish item No. 1. He received a check for $25,000 (a big amount in those days) a few weeks later. Once you understand what you are optimizing for and make decisions that ensure you’re optimizing for the right thing, the next step is getting things done. The first step to getting things done is to constantly keep the main thing the main thing. This isn’t easy to do. But I’ve found that the Charles Schwab technique of being consistently mindful is one of those that works very well. To each their own, though. I find it unfortunate that discussions around productivity often revolve around tactics – how to keep your inbox at zero, write things down as you think of them, etc. There is a lot of merit to tactics, and maybe I’ll attempt to pull together what I’ve learned on them someday. But they are secondary to strategy. It is also telling that two out of the three principles I’ve pulled out were thanks to the fantastic book on operations strategy – The Goal, by Eliyahu M Goldratt. As we learned on day one of our operations course, good operations support strategy. After all, if it isn’t contributing toward the goal, it is just activity, not productivity. 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: goals, MBA Learnings, operations, operations strategy, productivity, strategy |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: Could ‘Growth’ Become A New Business School Discipline? (via Poets & Quants) |
Francisco Ochagavia arrived at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management from a family business in his home country of Chile. The 30-year-old, who graduated with his MBA in June, says that one of his more memorable courses focused on the growth challenges of mid-sized companies. It helped to prepare him for the CEO role at his family’s fruit-growing export company that he is looking to scale into a more global operation. “Normally,” he says, “business school doesn’t cover these kinds of companies. Yet, our family business is a mid-sized company like the ones we studied in class. During the class we really got to understand the challenges you face when industry marketshare is shrinking and the competition is increasing.” The course he took, Strategies for Growth, is one of seven new offerings at the Kellogg School that attempt to train students on how to successfully scale a business. Arguably the ultimate general management challenge, achieving growth has certainly been a part of every business school’s core and elective MBA curriculum. But Kellogg has carved out an unusual niche in the growth and scaling space from both a curricular and thought leadership perspective. The school has rolled out seven different courses on the topic since the spring of 2014. The school also is considering a capstone course or experience to what it calls a “pathway,” or set of cohesive courses that help students develop a specific set of skills. Developing the initiative has turned the more typical way courses are developed at a business school on its head. For years, academics in narrow disciplines largely constructed theories of business education in the abstract, hoping that their outcomes would eventually line up with market needs. In crafting a curriculum around growth, Kellogg went to the market first, asked business leaders what challenges they faced, and came up with a series of courses to teach the required skills. Read the full story on Poets & Quants. Filed under: Academics, Student Life Tagged: Growth, growth and scaling, pathways |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: Faculty podcast: How to handle a bad boss |
From Kellogg Insight Of all the annoyances the workday can entail — that too-early alarm, rush hour traffic, late nights stuck at your desk on deadline — having a bad boss can be the most insidious. “Nobody wants to go to work when they don’t get along with their boss,” says Jon Maner, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School. “It really weighs on people’s everyday life.” Kellogg Professors Jon Maner, left, and James B. Shein Maner has studied bad bosses, with the goal of understanding their behavior so that it can be curtailed. He has focused in particular on power-hungry bosses who are surprisingly willing to sideline their best performing employees — and promote incompetent team members — in order to keep themselves from being out shined. (You can read more about Maner’s research into why bad bosses sabotage their teams here.) “Top performers are really, really valuable members of the group,” Maner says. “These are the people who are often innovating, they’re creating, they’re pushing the organization forward. That can make power-hungry bosses nervous because these are the people who are probably the most able to take over some of their power.” And, of course, bad bosses are not simply unpleasant for employees. They also can be disastrous for companies. Learn about what motivates bad bosses and how to manage them from Kellogg faculty members Jon Maner and James B. Shein in this month’s Insight in Person podcast. Do you have a burning question about how to deal with a bad boss, or how to avoid becoming one yourself? Ask your questions here and Professor Jon Maner will answer a selection of questions next week in a special Kellogg Insight article. Submissions will remain anonymous. Kellogg Insight is an online publication where faculty bring their latest research and expertise to you in an accessible, engaging format. Kellogg Insight provides ambitious business leaders with the research and expertise needed to drive growth. Filed under: Academics, Student Life Tagged: faculty, faculty podcast, Insight, Kellogg Insight, podcast |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: Lessons from Social Impact Days |
Smit Naik presents during Social Impact Days. By Smit Naik “Dreamers, innovators and visionaries assemble!” That was the call I imagined myself and other first-year students hearing last month at the start of Kellogg’s Social Impact Days. OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little. But honestly, not by much. Over the course of three glorious days, 100 of my closest friends and I embarked on our first Kellogg-guided journey. And what a journey it was. To be honest, when I first signed up for Social Impact Days, a pre-term program run by the Kellogg Public Private Interface (KPPI) Initiative, I had no idea what to expect. What kind of people would I meet? What do they really expect out of us this early in the journey? Am I even going to have any friends there? Fortunately, all of these worries were quelled on the first night when I met the other students, many of who had the same initial questions I did. Our first task on the second day was to think of our own socially impactful business idea and present it to the group. This part proved to be trickier than I thought it would. After bouncing around ideas with new friends the night before that touched on various fields in social impact, I came up with a list that looked a little like this:
As we went around the room, each of us explaining our areas of interest and/or business ideas, I was struck by the amount of passion and intelligence in the room. Everyone had noticed a problem in their world worth solving, and I got my first true taste of the diversity of cultures and opinions at Kellogg. Though I didn’t feel very confident about my own idea, I was fortunate enough to be saved by the brilliance of those around me and joined a group who already had a well-thought out problem to solve. We spent time late into the evening hammering out the solution before presenting it to the rest of the group the following day. After all was said and done, there were countless lessons I was able to take away from the experience. Here are five of them:
Smit Naik is a first year student in Kellogg’s Full-Time Two-Year MBA program. Prior to Kellogg, he taught at an education start-up and was a biomedical engineer. Filed under: Academics, Student Life Tagged: Innovation, Kellogg Public Private Interface Initiative, KPPI, social impact, Social Impact Days |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: What got you here won’t get you there | 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. I started a collection of content subscription projects via my “A Learning a Day” blog between 2009 and 2013 – “good morning quotes” on week days, “book learnings” on Sundays, “Monday learnings” on Mondays (this was one I actively participated in vs. initiated) and “Real Leader interviews” every fortnight. All this worked just fine for a few years. They taught me a lot. But, I couldn’t possibly keep doing these forever. As I thought about 2014 during the Christmas-New Year break 21 months or so ago, I decided I needed to embrace change and simplify. So, over the next six months, I shut every one of these projects down and integrated every content project into my blog. Effectively, this led to my “200 words project” on Sundays and various categories of posts. Simpler. Better. This was my first experience with “what got you here won’t get you there.” All of these content projects played a huge role in who I am today. They helped me build up my discipline muscle, helped me believe in my ability to keep commitments, and also enabled me to connect with some incredible folks around the world. But for the next step, I needed to change things. So, as I prepared for my first year in business school last summer, I spent time thinking about the systems I needed to develop. What got me to business school wouldn’t help me at business school. The game had changed. I needed to change, too. But until a month or so in, I didn’t know the answers. All I knew was to ask myself the following questions: 1. What is important here? (priorities) 2. How should I approach this experience? (process goals) 3. Who are people who can help me in my journey? (people) My recent post on “Making the most of your first year in an MBA program” was a culmination of the approach gleaned from those questions. When you know what you are looking for, the universe often throws a clue in here and there. I had a couple of pivotal conversations in my first month at school that helped me piece together an approach for my first year. But, as I take advantage of a week’s break before the start of my second year, I feel it is time to revisit these questions again. Moving into my second year is like taking on a new promotion at work. A lot of what was important in my first year isn’t as critical this year. I feel comfortable operating the way I operate and could easily do so for another year. But I can almost hear that voice in my gut screaming as I contemplate the thought of not changing anything. As is the case when you lead change within yourself, the emotions on the surface seem to lobby against it. It generally feels easier to keep the status quo and continue cruising. But I’ve learned to dig deeper and listen to my gut. And both that voice and the evidence unquestionably point to the fact that the game has changed. I should, too. What got me here won’t get me there. 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: first year, life lessons, MBA Learnings |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: How to live a good life takes center stage during orientation (via Clear Admit) |
This article appeared on clearadmit.com. Read the full story here. Before diving into the fray of finance, accounting, operations and marketing, every incoming first-year student at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management first spent an afternoon grappling with the question of how to live a good life. “What do I value?” “How do I find my personal mission?” “How do I create an action plan to live a life consistent with this mission?” These considerations—not how to cut costs, gain market share or increase profits—were part of a new element introduced this year during Kellogg’s Complete Immersion in Management (CIM) Week, the stretch of days before classes start when incoming students meet each other and the school for the first time. Coined the “Good Life Afternoon,” this newest element of Kellogg’s orientation grew out of a student-led initiative launched last spring called the “Good Life Sessions.” The brainchild of Kellogg students Rohan Rajiv (’16 Kellogg) and Lexie Smith (’15 Kellogg), last year’s series of workshops and this year’s orientation exercise were both designed to help students create a game plan for leading fulfilling, balanced lives in tandem with successful careers. GET THIS RIGHT OR FORGET GETTING THE OTHER THINGS RIGHT “This is stuff that I believe is incredibly important and if we don’t get right there is almost no point in getting all the other things right,” Rajiv explains. A self-professed “work/life balance geek,” Rajiv spent much of his 20s thinking about and researching happiness and balance, including maintaining a personal blog called “A Learning a Day,” where he shares his thoughts on the topic. Smith, not so much. “Pretty much all throughout my 20s I was in some really fantastic jobs, but they were incredibly challenging and I was working really long hours—80 to 90 hours a week and traveling a lot,” she says. She spent a few years after college in a financial management program at GE that involved rotating departments every six months. She went into private equity after that, the first woman ever hired by her firm. “It was a really interesting experience for me, but it meant that I didn’t make time for anything else.” The two met when Rajiv visited Kellogg for an admitted students’ weekend and immediately hit it off, so much so that Rajiv signed up for a KWEST trip Smith was leading in the Galapagos Islands before school started last fall. It was on that trip that the idea for the Good Life Sessions began to take hold.
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FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: Round 1 application deadline is one week away |
This is a friendly reminder that our deadline for Round 1 applications is quickly approaching. To be considered for Round 1, please submit all application materials by 5:00 p.m. (CT) on Tuesday, September 22. If you submit your application for Round 1, you will receive your admissions decision on December 16. If you are unable to make the Round 1 deadline, please remember these dates for Kellogg’s Round 2 and Round 3 deadlines: Round 2 Deadline: January 6, 2016 Decision notification: March 23, 2016 Round 3 Deadline: April 6, 2016 Decision notification: May 11, 2016 In the meantime, you may want to take a look at these three different series of tips from Beth Tidmarsh, director of admissions for Kellogg’s Full-Time programs.
Learn more about Kellogg’s Full-Time program. Filed under: Admissions Tagged: admissions, admissions tips, application, application deadline |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: I gave a TED talk. Here’s what I learned. |
By Emily Gipple As I stood at 4 a.m. in the stairwell of an apartment building in China trying to email a minute-long video via a horrendous WiFi connection, I thought, “This will never work.” The video, taken in selfie mode on my cell phone, was of me attempting to compress five years of thought and research into one compelling minute. I had to email the piece as my application to speak at the upcoming TEDxNorthwesternU conference, which I had just heard of that day, and the directions stipulated that all applications had to be received the previous day. My cover email vaguely blamed my late submission on time zones and begged that I still be considered, but after the organizers’ email systems wouldn’t accept the large file, I sent one more desperate email to a general NU email address, gave up, and went to bed. A few weeks later, I was genuinely shocked when I found out that I had been selected to present. As you may know, TED conferences present “ideas worth spreading.” Like many of you, I have been edified and moved by TED talks. I’ve always loved the idea of giving a talk, and it just so happened that when I heard about the conference at Northwestern, I had something to say. The idea I shared is the same one that compelled me to apply to business school and attend Kellogg: I propose that companies can improve their own operations by recognizing and leveraging expertise in the nonprofit sector. By this I mean that when businesses examine their needs — to manage risk, streamline operations, or grow their activities — instead of considering only the resources within the firm and traditional for-profit partners, they should also consider the potential in the nonprofit sector. I have been thinking about this for a few years, and spent the winter quarter of my second Kellogg year studying abroad in Asia and pursuing research in that region. I’ve found many examples of companies actively engaged in these cutting-edge partnerships, and I mentioned several in the TED talk. I applied to business school with the goal to develop this idea and make it my career, and Kellogg was an excellent place to make that happen. My classes showed me how I can weave impact into traditional business outcomes. I met amazing fellow students with similar passions. A Kellogg professor oversaw my independent research, and a grant through social impact funding covered partial costs of field research in Asia. The access to careers, a huge network, and companies where I can pursue my passion after graduation was also invaluable. The prep for the talk itself was a lot of work. There is an unending supply of interesting and worthwhile things to do at Kellogg, and I had to literally shut myself in an attic for a week or so to streamline the message, make slides pretty enough for the TED standard, memorize the 15 minute speech, and practice delivery. I send unending thanks once again to the classmates who sat with me in the days leading up to the conference and offered advice and encouragement as I finalized the piece. When the day arrived, I was definitely nervous, but advice from a Kellogg professor helped: Focus on what’s most important — getting your message to the audience — and any trepidations become secondary. Like most overachievers in business school who tend to be overly self-critical, I think my delivery could have been better, but I’m pretty happy with how it all went over. I really believe in the core idea, and want it to be seen and shared. If you’re reading this blog, you probably have an interest or practice in the business sphere, so, enough about me — please go watch the talk (available above, or here)! Emily Gipple graduated in June and took a position with Amazon. If you are interested in the idea of improving business outcomes by leveraging expertise in the nonprofit sector, feel free to reach out to her at egipple2015@kellogg.northwestern.edu. Learn more about Kellogg’s Full-Time MBA program. Filed under: Academics, Business Insight, Student Life Tagged: nonprofit, social impact, TED, TEDx, TEDxNorthwestern |
FROM Kellogg MBA Blog: Examining entrepreneurship in Cuba |
The famous American Economist, Frank Knight said, “Profit is the reward for taking risk.” Dr. Knight argues that profit and risk are intertwined. In seeking profits, we must therefore seek risks that are attractive. That is how Kellogg students are introduced to Risk Lab, an experiential learning course that allows students to examine the attractiveness of risk in a real-world investment decision. Last year, the course examined the opportunities and challenges facing Cuban entrepreneurs. The students worked with the Cuba Study Group, which released its full report based on the students’ findings this summer. Carlos Castillo, who was one of the students in the course and graduated in June, took some time to talk about what he learned from the experience. What would you say the goal of your Risk Lab project was? Understanding that the most significant problem facing small business on the island is the cost and availability of supplies, the team worked with the Cuba Study Group (CSG) to analyze the costs of acquiring necessary capital inputs for Cuban entrepreneurs along nine different categories of government-approved enterprise. What were you most excited about going into the project? I selected the Cuba project to contribute to the Hispanic community while also having the opportunity to have both a business and a social impact. With recent political developments, I was confident that the result of the project was going to have a tangible impact in the short term. What surprised you most about your findings? The first surprising aspect of the project was the evident lack of information from the Cuban government. Initially, data collection was almost impossible and forced us to be very resourceful in order to obtain the necessary data points. Secondly, while our findings suggest that Cuba has price advantages over imports (from the U.S.), entrepreneurs continue to source from the U.S. This seems to be counterintuitive; however, it may be explained by perceived advantages of U.S. products (i.e. quality, availability, etc.) In previous conversations, you have mentioned the project helped you realize how certain things that are taken for granted in the U.S. are much larger challenges in developing countries. What are some of those aspects you think are taken for granted? From a research perspective, in the U.S., pricing data is readily available for almost all products imaginable. In Cuba, formal databases do not exist. The government controls the pricing of official items and there are only informal ways for Cuban people to exchange goods (i.e. Revolico.com – a website similar to Craigslist). Another interesting example is the availability of items. If I want to buy a digital camera in the U.S., I just need to walk or drive to one of the many store options and get it. In other countries, and Cuba in particular, I am at the mercy of what inventory the government stores want to hold. There may or may not be a digital camera for me to buy. And if there is a camera, it may or may not be cost prohibitive due to the high tariffs paid on imports. Lastly, and interestingly, a Cuban entrepreneur can only choose among 201 approved categories of business, and it would be illegal to start something outside of that list. In my mind, this policy stifles creativity and limits opportunity of true business breakthroughs. What does it mean to see your research and findings being shared the way they are? The level of interest given to the findings makes me confident that there will be additional projects to further our team’s research and increase the positive impact on the lives of current and future Cuban entrepreneurs. Is there anything else you’d like to add? When we started the project in September 2014, a change of the U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba was only a hope. It was something that experts thought could happen in two to three years. However, only one week after we presented our final deliverable to the CSG in December 2014, President Obama ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba. Talk about perfect timing! Learn “four ways Cuba can become more business-friendly” from two Kellogg professors Filed under: Academics, Business Insight, Student Life Tagged: Cuba, entrepreneurship, experiential learning, global, Innovation, Risk Lab, social impact |
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