MIT Sloan students speak: MBA class of 2012

Boston, I love you

I returned to the U.S. this past Sunday after four weeks away in Peru working on a G-Lab project.  INCREDIBLE experience (truly) but I'm very excited to be back home.  It has taken me a few days to acclimate, but I'm already getting into my course work groove again.  My semester isn't too heavy course-wise, which is giving me some room to play.

My four weeks in Peru gave me a taste of the great things I can do with the experience and skillsets I've built up in the past year and a half at Sloan.  Of course, I came in with a lot to offer, but I very much feel that I've learned a great deal during my MBA experience here and have been exposed to some projects I couldn't have experienced in quite the same way elsewhere.  The focus on action-learning here has been particularly important.  In all of my job interviews, I've spoken to those projects in great detail and the people across the table have been impressed and enthused by those learnings.  

Looking forward and considering that my semester won't be too heavy, I've got two part-time projects in the pipeline that I am very much looking forward to pursuing and learning more from.  One actually involves continuing efforts in my G-Lab host client.  Another is market research for a start-up on a niche space in a city I know well...Boston!

Excited about all that the next few weeks hold for me and look forward to sharing more with you as I jump in head first. :)

GLAB Wrap Up

I want to spend some time talking about my GLAB experiences, as we just got back and are about to kick off the second semester.

To set the background for GLAB:  most teams are picked towards the end of second semester as first years are in the process of bidding for classes. Traditionally GLAB is the most expensive class (from a bidding perspective, which is how we get into classes at MIT Sloan), so it’s important for people to feel like their points won’t be wasted. As part of this rush of a process, people team up very virally and sporadically during the bidding period.

As a result many teams seem to form out of convenience, rather than as thoughtful constructions of strengths/weaknesses/personalities. I wasn’t even planning to do GLAB, but when offered the opportunity to work with 3 people I really wanted to get to know better, I jumped at it. In many ways, my team is a very random collection compared to many others.

 A few random observations on different team configurations I’ve seen that are common:

 -All people from one social clique

-Core team rehash from first year

-Friends from cohort/ocean

-Homogenous cultural group (Caucasian americans, mainland Chinese, etc)

When you think about it, there is a lot of volatility in the system broadly – what country you end up in, which project you end up working on, how involved the executives at the company are, your living conditions, etc. Really the one thing you can control is who navigate all these with – similar to a personal relationship.

 With that in mind I’d offer up the following guidelines for optimal GLAB team choice:

1)   Choose people you want to get to know better

2)   Choose people you already know at least casually

3)   Choose people with a mix of modes they use to interface with the world – extravert/introvert, planner/cowboy, starter/finisher, serious/laid back

4)   Choose people you trust above all other heuristics

5)   Choose people who are flexible – outside of the G7 markets, things are more chaotic across the board

6)   Choose people who are aligned on their goals for GLAB – whether it’s just to have fun, to learn more about specific geography or industry

7)   Choose people from a breadth of cultures/professional backgrounds

Obviously even our own team might not fit everyone of these suggestions, but the reason I stress the importance of diversity is that these people are the ones who will be your learning partners – about language, food, culture, in addition to business.

The most rewarding conversations my team has had on this entire trip has been the discussion triggered when we compare and contrast personal and business cultures that we are observing and participating daily with our own myriad backgrounds/experiences. In the end not everything will go as planned, but if you are with a great group of people it won’t really matter and you will have a GLAB experience you will remember for the rest of your life!

 

Africa Trek 2012

After delivering the final presentation for my G-Lab project in Lagos, Nigeria, I headed to Eastern Africa to join more than 30 Sloanies for the MIT Sloan Africa Trek. Student-planned treks are one of my favorite things about MIT Sloan and the Africa Trek, planned by my classmate, David Ly, proved to be an amazing way to explore Eastern Africa with a combination of work and play. We kicked off the trek with a two-day Safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara National Park - a beautiful game reserve filled with lions, elephants, hippos, and other wildlife.

After the Safari, we traveled to Nairobi to learn more about doing business in Africa. Over the course of two days we visited six Kenyan-based companies in small groups. During one particular visit, the CEO of Safaricom, the leading mobile network operator in Kenya, joined our group to discuss the growth and success of M-PESA. This service allows Kenyans to transfer money vis SMS. To date, M-PESA is the most successful mobile money service in the world. Other company visits included Virtual City, I-Hub, Craft Silicon, and InMobi.

Next, our group traveled to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to visit the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), which is a national body responsible for the promotion of science and technology in the country. We spent the day meeting with various entrepreneurs and students to learn about the challenges of starting a business in a developing country. After the conference, we traveled to the island of Zanzibar to finish up the trek with a few days of R&R on the beach. Africa Trek was an excellent opportunity to explore two beautiful countries, learn more about Africa's economic momentum, and kick-off my final semester at Sloan.

Leadership lessons from the military

Unfortunately, I am not able to write a tale of my travels to one of the world‘s most exciting places like many of my fellow students. I spent this year‘s IAP in the two places I currently call home, Iceland and Cambridge. Both places exhibited extreme weather, albeit in different directions. Iceland has not had as much snow since the winter of 1984 and the winter in Boston has so far been extraordinarily mild. After all the snow in Iceland, I am very thankful for the nice weather in Cambridge.

Last week I took advantage of one of the many interesting courses offered during IAP. The course I chose is called Leadership Lessons Learned from the Military. Besides contributing towards the Sloan leadership requirement, I chose this course because I come from Iceland which has no military at all and I wanted to gain an insight into such an organization. The course more than fulfilled my expectations, for the following reasons:

1. The course organization itself was a great lesson in leadership. It was completely organized and run by students under the supervision of Pr.Leigh Hafrey. A fellow 2nd year MBA, Mr. Jason Chen, assembled a team and did a superb job in organizing one of the most fulfilling courses I have attended at MIT. Sloan should encourage more student run courses, as the student body itself has a lot of lessons to share.
2. We had a good introduction to the structure of the military organization and speakers from all levels within the military which shared their experiences and leadership lessons learned throughout their careers. Many of the stories told were inspiring and I am sure the lessons learned through the storytelling will stick with me for a long while.
3. The class had its own little boot camp with a 7am PE session during the 2nd day of the course. The drills were a lot of fun and I‘m proud to report that my team of 7 was the only team that had 100% participation in the session, torn ACL‘s and all. Go squad 6.
4. Finally, I liked Pr. Hafrey conclusion very much. He put the leadership approaches and tools we had heard about during the course into perspective by bringing up the example of the situation of the UN peace keeping officer in Rwanda prior to and during the genocide in 1994. How could he have gotten the UN to act on the situation in a timely manner, other than by reporting the gravity of the situation to them as he did? Could other leaders have stepped in?

As you can tell, I appreciated the course. The plan is to repeat the course next year and I highly recommend it to anyone that is at MIT during IAP at that time.

With that I’ll continue reading the blogs of my fellow students about their visits to the Antarctica, Galapagos, Rio De Janeiro etc. and looking forward to meeting them when our last semester starts next week.

G-Lab from a Brazilian Perspective 5/5 @ MIT Sloan

THE thing!

In these last few days I’ve been thinking how I could define my G-Lab experience or how I could compare it to other professional past experiences from my career. When doing so I realized that THE thing that most distinguished this experience to previous ones was working with smart and confident people.

Not that I haven’t work with these kind of people before, but in this case, we all felt safe among each other and I never doubted that we would hand in a great job in the end. Normally there is always one in the team that needs to understand all the slides to back them up. In our case, when we defined our strategy “divide and conquer” before brainstorming and discussing together, we all felt very safe and supportive on our individual parts knowing that the information was accurate – even if we had different styles to go after it and present it. This is THE thing I found amazing about this project: MIT Sloan students.

And this is the last message I have for my reflections on G-Lab 2012. I’ll leave you with pictures and images from my last days and my scuba diving experience in Koh Phi Phi, Thailand. Cheers,

Tiago

For more information on Action Learning at MIT Sloan click here.

 

After one month working closely with four teammates and the client in a foreigner country, I missed home. I just wanted to go back to my bed, my hot shower, my food, my school. I left Turkey one week ago, and I took the time to think about my learnings from this period. I concluded that I have learned a lot during gLab. I have changed some of my perspective of Muslim countries, especially Turkey; I have learned that flexibility and open conversations are crucial to keep intense relationships healthy; I learned a lot about the benefits and drawbacks of exchange programs; and I learned that unusual experiences are the ones that teach me more than any other.

Back soon! But in the meantime, read the G-Lab blog!

For the past few weeks, I have been in Peru working on a project for one of MIT Sloan's flagship courses, G-Lab.  Many of us in the course have been keeping up with blog posts on our individual projects.  Here'sa a link!

http://mitsloanblog.typepad.com/g-lab_2012/

Incredible experience so far.  I return to Boston February 5th and then classes (my last semester!) kicks off shortly thereafter!

After we arrived in Istanbul, our unusual, sometimes fun, sometimes not fun, experiences continued. We…:
1) shared a lovely apartment with the best view from Istanbul
2) cooked many meals together. Anna specialized in mulled wine, Viv in chicken with pesto, and Om in cutting onions and downloading movies for the after-dinner (I just didn’t specialized)
3) attended an Entrepreneur open house party full of interesting people
4) froze many times unprepared for the Istanbul cold weather and snow
5) learned four words in Turkish
6) worked REAAAAALLY hard to deliver a good project to our client
7) took team pictures to show-off in facebook and in the Istanbul newspaper ;-)
8) attended a fancy alumni dinner in which we met an MIT pHD in Physics who might win the next Nobel prize
9) gave each other a looooooooooooooooooot of feedback! when we were tired of feedback, we had another feedback session!
10) had a fun time together
to be continued.
Barbara

G-Lab from a Brazilian Perspective 4/5 @ MIT Sloan

Week 3, D-Day, time to show all the work!

Time goes fast… especially with holidays in between – Gong Xi Fa Cai by the way! After three weeks of work, today, 5pm, we have our final presentation to the C-level group. The 100 slides final report was cut and compressed for a 1-hour presentation. Hopefully everything goes smoothly and, from the feedbacks received so far on our partial work, we believe we can add some value to this US$ 1 billion revenue company – it would be great if they keep the partnership with MIT Sloan for future projects.

Although the project took a path unexpected – different from the G-Lab goal to help entrepreneurs and small ideas to come true – it was a great learning experience for us all. Being able to work in a big company in Asia with smart people to address strategic issues that will impact the future of media in Malaysia was an unforgettable experience.

Tomorrow, I head back to Ko Phi Phi in Thailand, the paradise island, to reflect upon all this experience – and also for some diving! In a week I’ll be back to the place I miss and learned to call home for this past year and a half… Until next week with my last update on my G-Lab experience.

Cheers,

Tiago

(no pictures this week… a lot of work to finish!)

For more information on Action Learning at MIT Sloan click here.

 

In our last week in Turkey, I started to analyze our experience. In fact, we have been through a lot together, which brought us very close and left many good memories. From the first day of our trip to our first day at work, we have:
1) ate Tajines countless times in Morroco;
2) cheered for a good New Year in a small French hotel with a splendid dinner;
3) frozen in the desert and saw one of the most beautiful sunrise somewhere in the Sahara
4) met a crazy Belgian group at 3am under the Eiffel tower
5) shared, among 5 of us, a room with only a double and a single bed in Paris (I slept on the floor)
6) made it to Istanbul safely to work in a very interesting G-Lab project
to be continued.
Barbara