Finding your Mojo - The act of motivation

According to Walt Disney- “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them”. Courage really appears when we have a reason or there is something motivating us towards our goals.

Motivation is especially important as students prepare for their exams. The ability to see beyond the current raft of assignments or examinations to foresee a rosier path to achieving goals is a spring board that can help to overcome short term setbacks.

Carpe Diem

Most lecturers over their careers meet literally thousands of students. It would be satisfying to think these lecturers could positively transform the lives of all these students. Equally, it would be good if each meeting could positively add to each student’s knowledge and personal development. However, in reality transformative educational experiences are not commonplace, but this makes them even more special when they occur.

Eating Soup with a Fork: Teaching Entrepreneurship to Business Students

More and more people are getting aware of the benefits of “inventing a job rather than finding a job”. Across the world, universities and colleges are rushing to introduce entrepreneurship classes. This phenomenon has rekindled the age-old debate, whether entrepreneurship can be taught in business schools or one is better off learning it ‘by doing’?

The MBA Legacy

As if a day at the Olympics wasn’t exciting enough, I happened across a couple of MBA classmates there. It was as uplifting as being in the stadium.

There is a special quality to meeting up with people who went through an MBA experience together. It hardly takes any time at all to reclaim the mutual support and respect which ran through the year I spent studying. I did my MBA course because I needed to learn more about strategy and finance. Like most people, I came away with that and so much more including the self-understanding which underpins leadership.

A Deliberately Opaque Piece

I was thinking about the value of opacity last week, something I haven’t done since I worked in the paint industry. Opacity is crucial in paint but elsewhere transparency is the order of the day. Whether it’s open government, shining a light on corruption or businesses demonstrating attention to stakeholder interests transparency’s credentials as a liberal value and part of a healthy civil society rule supreme.

As part of a package of proposals on directors’ pay last week Vince Cable, Business Secretary, said that companies would be required to disclose the total value of a director’s pay, a further transparent step in this troubled area. Transparent so of course a good thing? Perhaps not unequivocally, I suggest.

The business case for fiction

In a recent blog I passed on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s praise of philosophy and other serious reading. I want to make the case for reading fiction.

There are good reasons for reading including novels of all kinds – basically it’s enjoyable.  More than that though, I suggest there is a business case for fiction. So much of business is about people – your colleagues, your customers, your business partners – and a good novel provides insight into their hearts.

So, when friend asked me recently what to read before she went to China, I lent her three novels. I could have recommended a textbook which explains what it means to live in a communist country with a rampant capitalist economy but stories make it much more real.

Why are you reading this?

I’m gradually working my way through a reading list from Ha-Joon Chang, reader in Economics at Cambridge, which was promoted by Heffers bookshop last summer. It’s an odd time to take up reading about economics as it is a discipline under some pressure at the moment. Behavioural economics has for a while been eating away at the rationalist principles underlying much of micro-economics. More recently the financial crash and subsequent recession continue to challenge macro-economics. I decided it was time to explore how thinkers in this field are responding to the challenges and remedy my own ignorance at the same time.

Dressing for success

Never mind "The Artist" what about the BAFTA frocks? Vivienne Westwood, Sybil Connolly, Armani and a Valentino “Eco-gown”. Much as I’d like to have the figure to wear one, I’m really glad I don’t have to bother quite that much about what I wear to work.

I did have a little flurry of bothering about it just before Christmas. I smartened up. I was meeting a potential external partner in some new MBA developments and decided that I needed a “customer facing” outfit. I dug around in the back of the cupboard and found things that I haven’t worn for ages. Straight black skirt, white top and short grey jacket. Cool new shoes. It felt good to be sharp. I felt I was standing up straighter and was more alert, potentially more impactful.

Is there any strategy?

It was amazing, when I read the news in November last year that Emirates have placed an order for an additional 50 Boeing 777-300 ER" planes, in addition to 20 Boeing 777-300ER as an option. This order was the single largest dollar-value order in Boeing's history.

According to emirates Group chairman ‘Emirates is financially strong enough to fund the purchase of new aircraft as part of ongoing expansion plans by one of the world’s fastest growing airlines. Emirates made net profits of Dh827 million in the first half of 2011, confirming its status as ‘one of the fastest growing carriers’.

In the current recession scenario when many airline companies are in either loss or debt what’s made Emirates so different from other airlines?

The glass ceiling and MBA’s

During my time working for the Centre for Women’s Enterprise (CWE) at the University of Bedfordshire I frequently had to consider whether the services we provided were accessible to women with childcare responsibilities. This included ensuring that the CWE services were offered during school hours to ensure women with children were able to participate and on occasions, providing a crèche to enable mothers with pre-school children to benefit from business support services.

China and me

I’m sitting in front of a photograph which shouted China to me before I even looked at the caption.  It’s not the Great Wall or people doing tai chi in a public park, not a Terracotta Warrior or the Water Cube, not the exuberant skyline of Pudong which has sprung from nothing since the 1990’s to be Shanghai’s financial and commercial centre.

What I’m looking at is a close-up of a block of flats and it was The Independent’s picture of the day recently.  It’s a close-up in the sense that you can’t see the ground, the top or either side of the block.  You can clearly see clothes drying at the windows.  Nevertheless, it is distant enough to see 12 floors and probably six apartments on each floor.

The world after email is on its way

It’s clear from the habits of our undergraduates that young people have moved on from email, or have never adopted it in the first place. Teenagers think that email is middle aged and, of course, they cannot conceive of a world without email, instant messaging (IM) or mobile phones at all.

Now the hi-tech services company Atos has announced that it is phasing out email over the next 18 months. Email will go the way of the smoke signal, letter, telex and fax. According to The Independent, Atos will be moving to other tools, including IM, wikis and social networking, including a business-based social networking service called Yammer. The idea is partly to reduce the time spent on useless emails – spam, marketing emails, emails copied to everyone just to cover backs, etc. It is a disruptive, intrusive, demanding medium. Most us aren’t much better at ignoring incoming mail than we at ignoring a ringing phone.

To Google, or not to Google?

I received an email today requesting some information on time differences between the different countries our MBA operates in, to which my reaction was ‘couldn’t Google answer this question?’

After reflecting about this, I started to think about how we go about getting information these days and the effect this has on our interactions with one another.

How social is networking?

I was talking to one of my MBA colleagues this afternoon about networking.  I asked her whether people are organising meetings any better now than they did 20 years or so ago (not that she is old enough to address that question exactly but that was the comparison I was wanting to make).

I remember when a group of us established a branch of the Institute of Marketing (as it was at the time) in Cambridge.  We were all young, the city was quite small then and the viability of the branch was a little fragile so we had to do everything we could to keep people coming to meetings.  We had several people who had the specific task of greeting people and introducing them to someone else.  Nobody was left on their own.  As a committee, we tried to know everyone.  We weren’t a bunch of mates meeting up but a welcoming, professional team running a welcoming, professional event.