Sumantra Ghoshal dies

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I went to a lecture by Sumantra Ghoshal at Leeds. This morning the news came through that he’d died in London, aged 55. A real loss.

More Sumantra Ghoshal notes

Here’s some more notes that I made during the Sumantra Ghoshal lecture last week. I still haven’t found looked for the reference, but he attributed it to Rosemary Stewart (Stuart?) during the lecture itself…

Overcoming traps of overwhelming demands

* develop an explicit personal agenda, then start to link up short/medium/longterm goals
* slow down: reduce, prioritise, organise demands
* structure contact time
* manage expectations
* conciously build social networks

Sumnatra Ghoshal and purposeful action

I went over to Leeds University Business School last night to see a lecture by Prof Sumantra Ghohsal of London Business School (and Harvard Business School and MIT and so on and so on…) - it was part of the AIM research programme which some of the LUBS faculty are involved in.

If he’s typical of the LBS and Harvard and MIT faculty, I can see why their MBA courses cost so much. The subject of the lecture was ‘Developing a bias for action’, which doesn’t sound like the most wildly exciting of subjects - but in actual fact it was fascinating stuff. Deceptively simple, which made it very easy to find yourself thinking “yup, that’s a bit like me” when given an example of why most managers actually actively avoid making decision and taking action. His style of lecturing was far more energetic than I’d become used to on the MBA, so he managed to keep my attention for the whole 90 minutes.

I made a load of very rough notes during the lecture - there were quite a few diagrams, so I’ll probably end up scanning those. In the meantime, a bullet-point summary:

Eight lessons of purposeful action

* Only 10% of managers take purposeful action
* Business is the central hazard to purposeful action
* Purposeful action requires active management of demands, choices and constraints
* Willpower, not motivation, drives purposeful action
* The foremost task of leaders is to engage their own willpower
* Willpower is not a personality trait
* Organisational energy drives collective action
* To unleash purposeful action in an organisation, leaders need to do some very different things

Strategic management exam - resources

I’m still getting googled for ’strategic management exam’, which makes me wonder how many soon-to-be-MBAs are hitting these pages in the hope of finding something useful.

I’m not sure whether this lot will count as useful, but here goes. It’s based on the semester two Strategic Management core module run by this gentleman as part of the full-time MBA at Leeds Uni Business School. His module is based around two core texts - de Wit & Mayer’s Strategy - Process, Content, Context and Hill & Jones’ Strategic Management: An integrated approach, so that’s what these documents take as their starting point.

The Strategy Planning Model attempts to pull together a complete overview of the strategic planning process, while the other Strategy model tries to pull together all the various models and views and show how they inter-relate. Points being the things that won prizes, the idea was to come up with a set of models that would a) be possible to remember in the stress of the exam room and b) act as a way of building up an essay answer that could tie together various models in a comparative way and so gain as much credit as possible. They’re not designed as last-minute cramming aids - if there’s one thing I learned on the MBA it’s that it’s a course where last-minute cramming doesn’t work.

For what it’s worth, this approach seemed to work - those of us who worked together on these models got high marks (I haven’t got my grading sheet to hand, but from memory I think I picked up a low-80s mark, which anecdotally at least was pretty good for the cohort) How much sense they’ll make out of context, I’m not sure, but if in doubt email me, and I’ll try to explain.

There’s also a lot more where this came on that covers other modules - Operations Management in particular, so if the name Nigel Slack rings any bells, ping me an email and the OM models can be yours.

Strategic Management exam

Well, I suppose you’ve got to be (in)famous for something - checking my referrer logs this evening, I discovered that I’ve googledanced my way to being the top hit for ‘strategic management exam‘. Which must be a bit of a disappointment for anyone arriving here expecting helpful hints, and leaves me completely mystified as to how it gets to the top of the Google results.

Still, I have got a shed-load of SM resources that got me through the exam in the first place (75%, in case you were interested) so I’ll post that as and when I remember which CD it got burnt onto…

A test

A test post from the new w.bloggar client…

End of the affair

Yesterday was the MBA graduation, so I spent the afternoon dressed in robes that made me look like an extra from the Hogwarts set prior to climbing onto the stage to get my certificate from the Vice-Chancellor. All of which means I’m now a graduate rather than a graduand, and it’s the end of the line as far as the MBA is concerned - that’s it, game over, finished, over and done with. It’s a bit bizarre to think of it like that - this has been such a major part of life for the last 15 months or so, and now it’s all over. And the only tangible sign is an A4 certificate and a photo of me dressed up.

Results

Finally the Semester 2 results have been released. Only at least three weeks late, and with the usual amount of cockups - including a half-hour queue outside the office before they deigned to hand over the paperwork. British Rail at their finest couldn’t have been more disorganised and less customer-focussed.

Having said all that, the results themselves were roughly as I’d expected - although the distribution of marks made for interesting reading, and make me wonder if there hadn’t been some exam board-adjustment going on. I pulled off a 75 in Strategic Management, which means either that a) I completely misread my performance in the multiple-choice section and did better than I realised; b) crashed and burned in the MC section but then produced two Oscar-winning performances in the essay questions; or c) did as well as I thought I had in the essay questions and the MC scores mysteriously disappeared. Draw your own conclusions, I know which one I suspect.

So overall, I’m pleased - I’m still on-target for a distinction, and should have maintained my #2 position in the cohort as far as I’m aware. It takes the pressure off to an extent as far as the dissertation is concerned, which has to be good news if recent progress is anything to go by.

Politics and poisson distributions

Another day at the Large Retailer, trying to make headway on the project. Some progress, but if change in this organisation is like turning around a supertanker, then trying to get hold of the people you need to talk to in order to get the information that you need is like wading through the treacle that the supertanker is sailing through. While having nicely delineated channels of communications and business account relationships makes for great organograms, it doesn’t half get in the way when you simply want to cut across the silos in the business and get answers from people…

In the periods between meetings I started downloading some of the background papers - the ones with all the equations. Suddenly a highly-quantitative project doesn’t start to look like quite such a good idea - I can’t remember ever having met a Poisson distribution before, let alone understanding it. Something tells me I’ll know a whole lot more about them by the time this has all finished…

Nights in Nottingham

So here I am in Nottingham, halfway through a couple of days working on the Large Retailer’s project - the first time I’ve been onsite for more than a couple of hours at a time, and the first opportunity to try and get to grips with what it is I’m supposed to be looking at. First impressions were somewhat mixed - the physical environment was pure California,all break-out zones and a Starbucks in the atrium; while the culture and the processes give every impression of having been distilled from a combination of the Civil Service and Marks and Spencers circa-1997. It’s a pretty strange mixture for a retailer - very top-down, very complex and surprisingly non customer-centric.

Which could make the project very difficult, or alternatively very interesting. Getting access to the information that I’m after could prove to be tricky, if only because finding the right person in the right functional silo doesn’t look like it will be straight-forward. But the flip side to that is the scope could be much more rewarding, because the areas that I’m supposed to looking at don’t seem to have been looked at before. The bottom line is that I feel happier about the scope of what the project is going to involve - for the first time for a while there seems to be some structure to things.