Can anyone of you answer that? Maybe yes, maybe perhaps, maybe no.
Well, Mr. Michael E. Porter, himself being a professor at Harvard Business School and being seen as THE guru of strategy, seems to have some profound answers. Those and many other things related to strategy were we able to encounter in our first class of the original MBA program called “An introduction to general management and strategy” during the last week. Each day five hours of class, followed by an average reading workload of some 50 pages for the following day, followed by the reading and the preparation of a case for the next day. Plus, my group had to prepare a presentation about Inditex (better known for its most famous brand Zara), where we had to present a SWOT analysis and give an outlook of possible future strategies of the company at the end of the weak. By the way, now I know one more meaning of SWOT analysis: the original Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats one, and the new one: Such a Waste Of Time as our professors warned us that, as important such an analysis is, you might easily get lost and the time spent might not always be appreciated by everyone.
What is strategy? Mine definitely was to get as much out of the course as possible as I love the subject and want to continue working as strategy consultant after the MBA. And, to anticipate the outcome of my strategic goal: YES, I had an amazing time, with very interesting course material and a lot of new things to learn, exactly what I had expected! One reason for that is that we had been given the perfect environment! Why? Well, the two professors we had were, in my personal opinion, simply brilliant! Silviya, who has a PhD in Management from IESE Business School and taught Strategy across the MBA and Executive programs, and Luis, who also owns a PhD of IESE Business School, a bachelor degree in business administration, piano performance and music theory and, amongst other things, was Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Sloan School of Management. They really boosted the course to a level I haven´t seen before. The level of interaction was amazingly high, they regularly managed to present very interesting and high ranked lecturers from the business world (e.g. a former CEO of one of the worlds leading candy producers) and they even invited us to go on an excursion to one of the most famous Cava producers in Spain / the World as part of a case study we had to do about the wine industry. If there is anything I might mention to improve, then that would be more a thing for the administrative office at ESADE than with those two. For there might be a chance to improve the communication towards the students as soon as new information of course material is available (here: centralize it to one distribution channel rather than to use four, as it happened in that course and most of the students couldn´t read the information due to the first lecture).
The groups work though that was given to us and that we had to finish until Friday and present in front of the class developed quite interesting this time. First, we needed until Wednesday evening to meet for the first (time and neither had gathered information about the corporation nor read anything about it to start a profound discussion of how to continue. We therefore tried to structure the agenda more or less by guts feeling and decided to split up the work on the seven of us to prepare each part until the next day. The next day arrived and we all joined again, prepared but unstructured. Trying to solve it needed time and some discussion and we ended up still being at the University at 10 pm, with a slight sense of aggression and infuriation in the air for still not having finished the presentation. And you know what? The presentation at that time still didn´t look good, at least in my opinion and what I had learned about in my previous job as Consultant of how to build a good presentation. The end of the story of your first small group conflict: I offered to review the presentation (what finally took me until 3.30 am in the morning, and it still wasn´t that good, in my opinion that is). The next day after every one of us had been able to think about what happened over night, we agreed to talk about other ways of dealing with similar future situations and establish a project management structure as our new strategy.
At home, the strategy of having asked the one girl from Mexico to leave the apartment and having picked Cynthia from the Dominican Republic seems to be a complete success! She is responsible, talkative and has a really nice character. Hope this momentum in our flat keeps on going!
So what? Be aware of your mission, formulate your vision and build a strategy that includes your competitive advantage to succeed in reaching where you want to go. It´s all about strategy: Strategy as a subject, strategy within the group, strategy at home, strategy for oneself and for life! You better make sure to think about that one again. The better you do, the better you most likely will you succeed. I´m glad to have the LEAD course mentioned before. I consider this to be my way to think about my personal strategy again, sharpen and maybe readjust is. More to come for sure!
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P.S.: Allow me to give you as reader of these lines an additional reading strategy and advice: An amazing classmate of mine, Morgan, who has a BA degree in literature, regularly writes outstanding and most creative blogs about her experiences in Barcelona and during the MBA. Go to http://morgans-musings.blogspot.com/ and see for yourself why she bets that elephants taste like mushrooms!
