MBA EXPERIENCES

Some years ago i completed a masters in business administration course – it turned out to be a very interesting experience but there were some moments.

The course was part time – sessions were four day blocks of training per month for each module. In the first few months of the programme it was exhausting: I slept every night early during the first two modules. I had to get my head around all of that business language from the likes of Ivan Ansoff, Ohmae, Michael Porter: value chain, return on investment, benchmarking, balanced scorecard, competitive advantage, etc.  There were several modules, covering subjects like international business, operations management, business strategy, entrepreneurship and enterprise, marketing, human resource management, leadership/management, knowledge and information management, business ethics, organizational learning and changing, finance and accounting. We had to do assignments and in some cases examinations.  There were group assessments of consulting, one to a British based firm, and the other to an international firm that was conducted overseas.  The international consultancy to Zensar Technologies of  Pune in India was developed with other students, by this time there were nine students left on the course. On the international trip we did different assignments with different departments of the same global firm: an Indian Giant call Zensar Technologies. We all travelled together and stayed at the same hotel.

Then there were the other students. We were a small intake, about twelve began the course. There was a combination of overseas students and British managers, professionals and would-be entrepreneurs. Initially, I felt social isolation,  most of the students would not talk to me or even sit with me during lunch and tea breaks for the first three months. During one course exercise the lecturer –one of the professors – had to bark at some of the other students to “work with this man!” as three out of the group of four had their backs turned to me whilst they attempted the exercise even though they were told to work “as a group”. By this stage in my life I was used to the silly psychological antics that supposedly “well educated” White British people partake in when they feel that you are not one of them and thus are not important enough to be considered for an opinion.  Also, at the time  I was working in the third sector, in visual arts, which hardly has an international global reach and a multimillion dollar portfolio.  In addition people tend to talk to and relate more quickly with people who look like themselves or look like people they grew up with. Nevertheless though I felt like an outsider, I was confident in my abilities and my personality to affect a change and to eventually negotiate a working relationship with these people.  I also knew that at the end of the course I was going my own way.   A few MBA students very smug and self-interested: one guy boasted about the  public school he attended and his father’s share options in ICI. He ironically, had to do the most re-sits of failed exams and module assignments and was last seen on the plane back from India arguing with a customs official who told him that he had to get back on to the plane to collect his boarding card which he had left under his seat on the plane. It was satisfying to see his come-uppance via the “jobsworth” official at Heathrow airport.  Another pair of students could usually be heard discussing and comparing  the merits of their BMWs, again it was satisfying to find that in spite of their BMWs they both dropped off the course for different reasons: one due to failure of an assignment, and the other due to the withdrawal of his business partners to support his professional development.

There was a lack of career coaching from the business school, even though there were guest slots from real business people – these slots were often the most interesting, you would learn a lot about the real business world. But formal coaching as in how to market your skills, and links with consulting recruiters such as Accenture were non-existent.

There were some bad modules and assignments – The finance module was conducted by one lecturer who liked to boast about her family – she had a spot of B.O. and had one perspective “creating shareholder value, we have to view businesses as a portfolio of assets to be bought and sold”. She marked down my assignment at 54% about a Primary Care Trust hospital’s financial performance. I had gone to great lengths to get the insider confidential information.  During the taught part of the module she would refuse to talk to me unless it was in one or two syllables, she spent most of her time looking at and talking to the White males of the course, she would not explain the concepts, you were expected to keep up, during problem solving sessions she would sit with the same males in the group. During this module no one would talk to me as it was finance, they assumed that i would not be able to do the work.  The men did not also talk to the three women remaining on the course also during this module. I got 70% in the exam just to spite the bitch and her puppies.

The organisational learning module was a riot: the lead lecturer JF used the group as a social experiment and split them into two groups and students were encouraged to develop their own learning contracts and to take a greater responsibility for their own learning and studying. This went okay with the odd grumble until the final submission of assignments where the same lecturer, JF said that he had not planned a session for the last afternoon of the week (a Saturday afternoon) only that students would peer review and mark each others’ assignments! There was a tacit agreement that no students failed another student’s work. I smelled trouble as i had seen groups of students going off together earlier in the week to have coffee, and I was left on my own a lot of the time outside of lectures. I said that i was not comfortable with this as a process and that there would be potential repercussions. It soon became apparent that the lecturer JF was using this session to assert his authority, his mark was to be seen as final, and in the process some students would fail. JF would let the students talk and discuss their marks for a fellow student’s assignment before coming in at the end with his final verdict: his marks were final. This did not sit well with the group who became  more resentful as the afternoon wore on. My assignment was to be the final one to be discussed. At this point  a student (who was the son of another student) proposed  an argument that I had created an unfair advantage or myself as my work was submitted too close to the official deadline  to be reviewed  and thus should be penalised. It was true that most students had submitted their assignments for review a week before the official deadline, but I had not as there was no assignment but I had emailed all of the students to stop submitting assignments to me as i would not read them and I did not want them to prejudice my work.  The second lecturer on the course cross checked the rules and gruffly said “Akin has acted lawfully, well that settles it”. At this point about three students said that they had not the time to read my assignment and so were unable to allocate a mark. The father-and-son pair said that they had not read the assignment in protest. The public school student said that he had read the assignment, and felt that it was too long – I was getting no favours from him. The remaining two students felt that it was a good assignment. The lecturer JF read it and said gruffly “it is skilfully written – 61 per cent”.  At this point the father of the family pair exploded and accused JF of “having lost the plot” and expressed his anger that he was paying for a course module where the lecturer had not even turned up with a session plan.  The session ended with the other lecturer attempting to cool things off and the other students hurriedly leaving. The two students who had marked my work positively   walked with me to the city centre, but i was cautious with my words to them. Later that evening e-mails of apologies were sent from father-and-son.  JF was removed from participating further on the MBA  course, and the assignments were remarked. My mark was upgraded to 63%. I quite liked JF and arranged for a one-to-one review over a coffee which he duly delivered and gave very detailed feedback about the assignment. The assignment is my favourite of all the work that I submitted over the course.

The international business was split into two parts: part one was a taught module with an assignment, this  first assignment was a nightmare for me – I couldn’t do it and had by then taken to drinking whiskey and port just to get to sleep at night, as my work pressures, personnel life issues and course pressures were by then taking their  toll. My first attempt was a shambling draft version, submitted just to avoid the 50% penalty for late submission. During the taught part of this module I also got into an argument with one of the international business lecturers who was using his slot as a lecturer to broadcast his political opinions on Zimbabwe, which I challenged. “you can tell us about the business world and international models of working but your views on Zimbabwe are not welcome here” were some of my words during one angry exchange.  My resubmission got a bare pass – the marker was a very compassionate and helpful man who supported me with academic articles and help to complete it.  After this i was playing catch-up and struggling with burnout, not firing on all cylinders and having late submissions of assignments: the university were very understanding of my problems and granted me time extensions to three elective studies.

The International consulting trip to India with other students went smoothly. We had to do a market penetration strategy for three European countries for the products of the Indian based firm. I was very impressed with the Indian professionals. Whilst in India I did a spot of shopping myself, getting meditation whites made by a tailor: what was most impressive about this was that the tailor sent a man round to the hotel with a moped to take me to his shop for the final fitting. I saw the other students jealously eyeballing me whilst I held on to the back of this vehicle in my colonial brown suit. One student hated India and Indians – they reminded her of Gypsies back in her native Romania, and she was especially put out by Indian men shouting and whistling at her wearing a boob tube in Bombay at night. She complained from start to finish, even on the plane to Britain – the other students sat her next to me, and I told her that I am sick of hearing complaints about Indians and Indian practices. She apologized and kept quiet for the rest of the journey.

Elective botch jobs.  There were three electives on the course. Electives were opportunities to study an area of interest further, the course leadership had to have a critical mass of students for the electives to be economically viable, and so they made students choose from a range of ten subjects their three most desired topics.  The other students got together and decided which topics we should all study. I chose my favourite topics anyway, an the majority on the course, which by now had dwindled from twelve to nine, got their way. We studied entrepreneurship, constraints management, and human resource management. I attended all of the taught sessions and submitted all of the assignments behind the time schedule, but my marks were surprisingly good: 61% on entrepreneurship – I did an interpretivist study on businesswomen; 64% on human resources – I did a study of downsizing in the third sector with my employing organisation as a case study; 72% in my hated subject of constraints management – I did a study on the Theory Of Constraints Thinking Tools and related this to Senge’s Fifth Discipline and  Covey’s Seven Habits Of Successful People,  I also related the theory of constraints thinking tools to a real problem: the dilemma of loss of funding for a small visual arts organisation – EMACA Visual Arts and their strategic options.  Most of my marks were due to a brilliant book called “Thinking For A Change” by Lisa Scheinkopf, which explained weird concepts such as Necessary Condition Thinking, Evaporating Clouds, Current Reality Tree, Future Reality Tree, etc.  Determined to make the lecturer look an idiot, I painstakingly read the book from end to end with a view to critique it to death and shoot his enthusiastic philosophy down in flames.  It had the opposite effect – I became a convert to his “evaporating clouds” as a problem solving tool – especially after scoring 72%

The dissertation. Doing the dissertation was the hardest thing that I have done in my life. It was a period where I was suffering from executive burnout and I had developed some very bad habits such as smoking menthol cigarettes, drinking whiskey, port and the odd spliff to get to sleep. The taught part of the dissertation I found confusing – it was focused on deductive research and towards SPSS software for undertaking quantitative analysis.  The supervision that I had was nearing on the incompetent – the supervisor was like a harassed GP – whilst his patients depended upon his advice to save their lives, his mind was on other things, such as becoming the Vice Dean of the university and his attitude like theirs (GPs) was “ hurry up and get on with it, I have a host of other things to do… next patient please!” .  He was a minimalist and it was not until the eleventh hour after six months of bullshit (three months before the deadline) that he advised me to undertake inductive research. Inductive research involves research where you are building theory from scratch as there is a lack of academic stuff on your chosen subject matter. So I was left to fend for myself finding academic articles and wading through a host of materials which was time consuming and exhausting.  I did the research eventually with the help of faithful friends and family submitting a 21,500 word piece on “Turnarounds In Non-Profit Organizations”. I came up with a theory and conceptual framework from all the work and research that I had done: case studies and interviews with experienced professionals and executives. Writing up all of this with a tight deadline and timescale  took all I had emotionally, physically and intellectually – I spent the next two months in bed after the submission, thankfully I had taken a “career break” to do this. I graduated a year later than all the other students – the university were very understanding of my burnout issues.

Finding my  literary voice. The amount of writing on the course enabled me to experiment with some of my ideas about management and leadership and I was encouraged to be reflexive – write about my experiences from my own point of view, recognising its limitations and identifying myself and taking ownership for my viewpoint. It was thus I found my own voice and learned that it was valid to write in this way, which I doing for a long time privately. This was one of the hidden benefits in doing such a course and i did discover from the other students who were positive about my assignments, that i had a valid and unique voice and a unique way of involving the reader in the subject concerned.

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Tags: academic survival, alcohol, bad whiskey, constraints management, consulting, group psychology, incompetence, India, inductive research, interpretivism, isolation, lecturers, literrary voice, mba, public school people, reflexivity, research, social experimentation, thinking tools, turnarounds, voluntary sector research