MBA Rankings

The FT rankings were out yesterday and it was cool to see JBS leap in to league of the Top 10 MBAs in the world. Pretty cool for us.

I hope this influences employer perceptions and rake in more opportunities and moolah for the JBS students/alumni :).

Here is a list of recent international MBA rankings :

FT 2008- (JBS rank - 10)
Economist 2007- (JBS rank -7)
Forbes 2007 - (JBS Rank - 3, among 1 year non-US schools)

It is now time to hit the bed. Today, as part of the Operations Management course, a few of us went to the Leyland Truck factory to view their production process and operations. It was a great learning exercise. I will post more about this visit later in the week.

The new learning group

The new term started out with a few reading marathons. There is so much pre and post session reading to do. Not that I'm complaining, just imagine reading about 100 odd pages every day before and after class (on top of all the other activities). Wow !!! Hope I can keep up with the reading.

This term seems much more interesting and engaging than the last term. The first term was more of a foundation and basic reinforcement term, this term is more about practice and current market learning(s).

I'm now part of a new learning group. We have a great diverse group.

1) Sandie from Singapore - she was a Tax consultant at E&Y
2) Will from UK - he was a Plastic Surgeon
3) Natalie from Russia - she was working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
4) Johnny from China - he was working in the advertisement industry and was a presenter on MTV

I believe I can learn a lot from the experiences of the people in my learning group.

By the by, I'm back on my Salsa classes and enjoying the vibe.

The beginning of a new term (Lent Term)

We had the Michaelmas term final exams during the last week. The final exams are old fashioned closed book exams (quite an effort to write pages on pages of what is on our mind). Starting from Monday, we step in to the Lent term.

After the long Christmas break, I'm looking forward to be in class again and enjoy the company of my friends. By the by, the first round of interviews for this years MBA class will start on Monday. There are about 30 prospective students who will be interviewed on Monday in Cambridge.

From a careers perspective, this term will focus more on careers in consulting. As of now, we know that McKinsey, Bain, ATKearney, Accenture and Oliver Wyman are coming to the school for recruitment.

The holiday season

This holiday season was a wonderful one for Aidah and I. We had a great time with our new friends in Cambridge (especially Christmas and New Year's eve). Here are a few pictures from the Christmas day and New Year party.

The Christmas Party at Sir Paul Judge's house

We had a bash of a Christmas party at Sir Paul Judge's house in London. It was a great place (a penthouse overlooking the Thames river). Almost everyone from the MBA class was there for the party.

A few pictures from that event.

Leadership seminar with Lord Swaraj Paul

Lord Swaraj Paul did a talk about Leadership and Innovation at JBS on the 5th of December. He was more of an old style speaker and read most of his speech. However, it was a very punchy and influential talk. It was about the lessons he learnt on his journey establishing a company that has a revenue of over £600 million. He started his first company in Cambridge with a sum of £5,000, which he had borrowed.

One of the important things he did (and the best in his 16 years in his business career) was the de-listing of his company from the stock-exchanges. His view is that once the company is listed, it becomes essential to please the city and the short-term goals of the business takes priority. It is much easier to borrow money from the banks and the borrowing also ensures that you get a free consultant on board who gives free advice and ensures that money is efficiently spent. His company is going gaga about India and China and are setting up a number of plants in both countries.

The Christmas Party

We had our Christmas Party at the Business School hosted by Cisco. It was a lot of fun. Yours truly was the Santa Claus. In the afternoon there was a special event for kids and partners.

Leadership Seminar by John Fraser

On the 26th of November we had a Leadership Seminar by John Faser (Chairman and CEO of UBS Global Asset Management).

He talked about financial markets, the weak dollar, asset management business, sovereign funds and leadership.

It was a plain straight and frank talk. It was very useful for me to understand the way the asset management business worked.

The key take-away was that the dollar might not see much of a down-side now and might appreciate in the future.

For more information check this out
http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/news/spotlight/2007/0712_speaker_fraser.html

Learning in and outside the class-room

Cambridge provides a safe environment to learn and experiment new things. One thing I really enjoyed learning during this term was Cuban Salsa. This has been a unique experience for me as I had never before tried any form of dance. Every Tuesday at Darwin we have a Salsa session and it is really cool.

In the class-room I learn as much from my fellow class-mates as I do from the lecturers. For example when we were talking of Japanese Business Culture, our Japanese friends were a greater source of information than any text-book written on the subject.

Outside the class-room, we have so many guest lectures and leaders from the industry providing insights. Most of them are inspirational and practical in nature. A few of them turned out to be a bit boring. However, it is a good practice to attend these sessions as there is always some information that is interesting in all these session.

Moving on to the teaching quality in JBS. The quality and the involvement of the lecturers/professors has been great. They are quite open to ideas and spend a lot of time to get the basics right. During this term we had 11 lecturers teaching us.
In terms of the quality of the lecturers/professors, I would like to classify them in the following categories
1) Excellent - 20% (I would love to attend any class on any subject conducted by these folks)
2) Good - 20% (Subject Matter experts who can give good practical examples and capture the audience)
3) Meet Expectation - 55% (Real cool folks who have great knowledge and can teach in a very systematic and nice way. They are folks who are great teachers and meet my expectations).
4) Below Expectation - 5% (Folks who are subject matter experts but cannot entice their audience for a long time)
5) Poor - 0% (Have not come across anybody who fall in this category)

This opinion and classification is purely based on my observations and may be different from the opinion of my other class-mates.

On-line social networking - what does this mean for big businesses (Jeff Patmore)

The Business Technology Special Interest Group organized a talk by Jeff Patmore (Head of Strategic University Research at BT) about Online Social Networking and its impact on big businesses.

It was a very delightful and insightful talk about Web 2.0. I learnt more about the latest trends and fashions in the networked world. Jeff brings along a lot of enthusiasm and experience in his interaction and I should say it was contagious.

Please find below a few links that I found very useful.

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE (Web 2.0 ... The Machine is US/ing US)

2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o (A vision of students today)
3) http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/ (The most successful online daily news capsule)

The world is changing all around and it is very essential to learn and collaborate in the Web 2.0 world.