term 2 has flown by!

Term 2 has flown by! Originally I had titled this post "term 2 is flying by!" sometime in mid-April... And I never got around to finishing it unfortunately until now, in the airport waiting for my flight home to Madrid from a perfect post-finals weekend in Mallorca. Little side note here: Ryanair flights around Europe are super cheap, especially if you have a prepaid MasterCard (only card they don't charge a commission for), so if you can get a rechargeable one like you can in the US in the supermarket before you come, it will save you some $$$. So, back to term 2. It definitely went by faster than term 1! What kept me so busy? First of all, a whole new set of teachers and more number-heavy courses. New term 2 courses were: cost accounting, creative management thinking, financial management, managerial economics: policy making and the global context, operations management, and strategic management. Carried over from term 1, we still had: entrepreneurial management and marketing fundamentals. Talking to the students that came before us, everyone told us that term 2 was the worst, that after surviving term 2 everything was a breeze... I found term 2 very challenging and busy because of the group work and the material, but for me personally term 1 was more difficult. Perhaps because term 1 I was still getting used to the program and to group dynamics. I found my term 2 group more seasoned, a was I with te program, and so despite the large load of work, we were able to plow through it with leads stress than term 1. (haha easy to say now after speniding the weekend on a beach!)anyways, I feel like even though term 2 goes by fast and throws a whole bunch of new material at you, you need to be careful to absorbbit all because I feel several of the courses provide a lot of the core knowledge we all came to get from an MBA.

Speaking about the knowledge I want to get from this MBA, the electives bidding process is currently being carried out for terms 4 and 5, and I am not too happy with the knowledge being permitted to learn. It seems like all the classes I want to take are incompatible schedule wise (even though in the mock schedule some of the incompatible
classes don't overlap at all or only overlap one day). In the end, I bid for two classes that I actually wanted and two that were 3r or 4th choice options. IE does not allow auditing. Hopefully, I and others in my situation can with our final bids find a combination that merits what we paid for. If not, I'll leave myself more free time to research on my own...

Tomorrow begins another week of the Accelerate program. This time it's called "Making Change Happen." More on that this week. I figured out how to blog on my phone so hopefully that will help me to not put it off again for so long!

term 1 ends and right on to term 2

And the marathon continues! I can’t believe I’m done with 1 term already of the 5 term program! It went by fast, I learned a lot, and I am exhausted! 

logo of my group’s solution

The day after my last final was due we started one of the Accelerate modules called “Change in Action.” The first Accelerate module, called “Launch" was at the beginning of the program and was about personal change. This second one was about global change, and the last will be about organization change. IE focused this year’s Change in Action program on the “bottom of the pyramid,” i.e. the roughly 4 billion people in the world that still live in relative poverty. IE partnered with French NGO blueEnergy and German energy product and service company Schneider to present the Nov. 2010 IMBA intake students a business case challenge focused on a poor community needing innovative technologies to generate revenue in order to pay for their energy usage in Nicaragua. My group had fun, but didn’t end up winning the challenge. Congrats to those who did, because your presentations today were truly great.

While I was glad we finally touched on the social responsibility side of business, I think most students were too tired to really be fully engaged. We finished today, and tomorrow we start the supposedly hardest term of the MBA. I’ll be getting up shortly to go get in line to get a seat in the front for the next three months. Our theme and strategy for the year is to encourage everyone to be his/her own “paradigm shifter.” We threw a strategy launch party to spread the word and promote this idea, and will be reviewing it at every meeting. Our Social Responsibility Forum in the fall will also focus on paradigm shifting by inviting speakers who we believe are paradigm shifters and by highlighting the many ways each of us, by identifying our own passions and the current paradigms in which they operate, can be paradigm shifters as well.


And tomorrow, myself, a lot of the Net Impact team and several other IE students are off to Barcelona for IESE Business School’s Doing Good, Doing Well social responsibly conference. I’m looking forward to a good roster of speakers, the career fair, another flavor of Spanish nightlife, and finally seeing the ocean again!

Entrepreneurial Management

Last week we made the first presentation of the business plan we are developing throughout terms 1 and 2 for our class titled Entrepreneurial Management. As the first group started its Q&A part of the presentation, we all started sweating bullets, wondering if we’d be able to answer the same questions about our business idea.

While I don’t plan on being entrepreneur for awhile, I am really enjoying the process we are completing in this class, and all the additional resources available at IE for fostering the skills to be an entrepreneur or intrapreneur. IE is really able to attract not only quality speakers, but also quality collaborators. I could list names, but that would take too many paragraphs to include in this blog.

Yesterday afternoon, for example, IE put on a speaker event featuring successful investors and entrepreneurs. I liked that the group of speakers included a mix of backgrounds and a mix of businesses.  The IE professors moderating the event noted how successful entrepreneurs often become successful investors, showing how the potential career path of a future entrepreneur might develop.

Here’s a few quotes from the speakers I found inspiring and/or useful:

“They (entrepreneurs) have the greatest potential to drive, change, and positively influence economies and societies.”

- Christopher Pommerening, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Active Venture Partners

“When you’re starting a business, you need everyone to be committed 150%, and to do that, you need them to be happy.”

- Joshua Novikk. CEO & Founder of Antevenio

“Where are we going and why do we want to get there?”

- Jose María Castillejo. CEO & Founder of Zinkia Entertainment

The last quote refers to motivation. It may seem obvious or easy to determine, but as I’m sending out my resume to companies for summer internship opportunities, I am constantly asking myself, what is my mission? What exactly do I want to achieve? And how can I do so with this company? One might be tempted to say that this is even more important when you’re risking your capital and future on your own venture, but to make change, become a leader, having a mission and motivation is key to develop your strategy. I am finding that the more I learn in the MBA, and the more subject matters I explore, and the more people I meet, it is becoming harder to define my specific mission as my brain is stimulated by all the different options. What I’m trying to do now as I prepare for an eventual internship interview is to remember my story, my background, and how I can leverage that to be productive in the business world.

Right now, I’m sitting in an event put on by the Entrepreneurship Club called “Pitch to Your Peers.” The club is hosting a series of events that mirrors the process every entrepreneur goes through. Again, I am inspired. And again, I am eager to figure myself out and to be on the stage.

Happy New Years!

I don't have much to say this morning as I rush to get ready for a big country feast tonight at a friend's house, just Happy New Years! 

2010 has been a busy year - I already knew before Christmas 2009 I was coming to IE, so the GMAT and applications were over with, but all the preparations started this past January. I finished my three years with the Tampep Association in Torino in May, and went back over to the other side of the pond to visit my family in the States for three months. And then I moved to Madrid! 

2011 will be my IE year, and from the last two months of 2010, I know it will be a good one. Term 1 will finish in February, term 2 in May, then hopefully I'll be off on an internship, I'll come back to term 3 in September, and finish with term 4 and graduate Dec. 16. It's going to go by fast, so before 2011 begins, this is a little reminder to myself to enjoy it! 

See you next year!