Vlerick Full-time MBA Blog

What is the difference between a job and an MBA? For the first you get paid, you sometime are required to do overtime and you complain a lot for it, while for the MBA you pay, do lots of overtime work (practically hardly find the time to sleep) and you’re so happy about it!

If one expects that business life is boring in an academic environment, with no real touch with the real world, better think twice – during a normal day you most surely go from analyzing marketing strategy for projectors, to potential development of an hypothetical RFID refrigerator business, to making survey for your own business plan and discussing the strategy for worldwide known companies.

And besides from the purely technical meetings and courses, there are lots of instances when we extend the heated discussions from the class around subjects like ‘how valid is the carrot-and-stick HR management approach?’ or ‘is marketing’s ultimate purpose to sell or to create value?’.

No matter how busy your agenda however is, somehow magically you find the time to read the bedtime story to your children and of course, there is always time to update your facebook status, to post some great links, to chat a little bit with your friends from home and meet new people doing amazing things around the world.

Curiously enough, when you do things with passion and belief, even time seems to expand and somehow you find the energy to get it all done. And I think this is the most important lesson learnt here, that passion is the fuel that makes you function at full speed while belief gives you the focus and clarity of the meaningful purpose.

Got to run now back to work! Strategy group assignment shouts for me!

Okay, looks like this is the first blog post from Vlerick Full-time MBA for this year and what better way to start off than to have one about inspiration.

The year 2012 has been marked by many in various infamous ways. Some say it will be the year the Euro crumbles. Some say nothing matters anymore because the world is going to come to an end in 2012. As an optimist and a strong advocate of optimism, I would like to advocate the tag line of Nike for 2012 and that is to ‘Make it Count’. No matter what you do, no matter where you are, no matter who you are… give this year your all. We owe it to this world and we can only make it better by being sincere to our own beliefs and honest in our efforts.

As a MBA student, this year is turning out to be very challenging. In fact, it is being so challenging that I have actually forgotten what it feels like to be bored. I hate it when the clock strikes 5:30 pm because it means the classes are over for the day and I just cannot wait for 9 am the next day to sit once amongst the bright minds in my class and indulge in some thought provoking views introduced by the professor. Each lesson learned each day is a lesson for life and I intend to live it out for the rest of my life.

2012 make it work, make it count.

It has been some time since i last posted, to be exact 6 weeks, jeepers time can move fast!

So what has been happening, the in company project (ICP) literally tested the whole of my MBA… from the all the social skills we gathered over our social skills seminar, technical skills from all the classes, time management from the time management courses we got from school to energy required to go through two months at full speed! Explains why the ICP is 20% of the final MBA score!

Did the presentation to the final presentation to the board of the company and to the school and all were happy with our work. Worked with two interesting MBA, Henry Soediarko and Kylie Ang… interesting Singaporeans, learnt lots from the two of them, and yes Kungfu was part of the learning points. We had some major intellectual fights and what can i say… At the end of the day in any group the chemistry sorts you out in those stressful moment, we had good chemistry in the group and that did help… Lots!

So what next now, two more presentations and we are done with the MBA, China two weeks for classes on Doing business in China and some touring of the giant of Asia, can’t wait for this! Will be traveling earlier than the rest of the class, going to Shanghai for 3 days then join the rest of the class in Beijing for the two weeks course. Should be am amazing experience.

After this i cross the globe once again… all the way till Peru in South America, yep am going to really jetlagged, will tell you all about it. China is +6hrs from Belgian time while Peru is -6Hrs and yes on opposite corners of the globe, i hear also that the cultures could not be further apart. Peru is also part of the school, am working with an NGO there – Giving something back project. So i land from China and after 1 day am off again. Will fill you in on how this two trips go. The Vlerick MBA does have its moments of rocking… and this is definitely one of them!

Well job searches are also on now, all the MBA crowd has their Antennas scanning the environment seriously, at least its not in the middle of the crisis!

Just wanted to check in and say hello and give you a little re-direct.  I have been profiling the current students on my personal blog and I thought you would be interested in checking out the current batch from a current students perspective.  Additionally, there are some posts on there regarding the past couple weeks.  Feel free to browse and connect!

Feels weird to be back in an office, all through I seem to be thinking about how am thinking, almost waiting for a kick in brain power… If you have watched Limitless, the movie, you could relate. The guy takes this drug that gives you the rest of your brain, that part that you have not been accessing, apparently 80% of it and all of a sudden you can see options where none existed, you just get this rush that only comes about when you are using your brain to the full.

Back to my rush, am almost expecting the same rush, am working on a management accounting project in the Netherlands, still trying to define the approach my team and I are going to take to sort out the challenge we have in hand. After being in class for seven months or something like that am really looking forward the rush, when I will just look at the problem and see some options that ordinarily in my prior life I would not have seen, If only life was that simple!

One week into the project still trying to define it, I must say I love this part, I feel like I have changed in three ways at least as a result of the MBA. One I feel like am more confident, I mean management accounting is not exactly my forte, but the MBA gives you this confidence that if there is a solution then you definitely will find it… I hope! Second am able to work through a maze of information/data call it whatever you want to call it, and figure out what the key thing to be deduced from the information is. This is interesting for me, I feel like I have a new power J. Third I love the bird’s eye view I now have, am able to zoom into a problem’s nitty gritties, look at the problem and when I feel that is not going as I would want it to go I just zoom out and look at the problem at hand and see if  am overlooking some other options that may be good to look to solve the problem… Ok maybe am over exaggerating it just a bit… it’s good to just experience these thoughts and emotions.

Over to week two and let’s see how it goes!

Two weeks ago as the last deliverable for the fulltime MBA we played a management game that is meant to serve as an integration of all that we have learnt during the MBA… 6 days of hard thinking and serious competition, if I was asked for one characteristic that defines MBA’s, I think I would go for competitive!
So how does the game go, you are in groups of five or six people, you choose your team so this means you do not an excuse that it was because of the team, at least that is what you imagine when the game starts. You allocate yourself into different roles, CEO (If you have someone who really is not up to working ), HR manager, Finance Manager, Purchasing manager, Productions Manager, and Marketing Manager. You are then given a company that is basically on its knees, all the groups at the same time, the same company and you compete over 12 quarters, being evaluated on three indices, people index – How happy are your employees, planet index – How environmental conscious you are and Share price – Profitability and all other factors linked to it!
For each period you have a number of deliverables, the key are what do you expect to sell, do you hire people, train them, how much do you purchase etc Further you are expected to come up with adhoc reports like a strategic plan for your business, marketing plan to launch new products into the market and so forth. Since the game is a simulation and is played in a virtual world they try to make it interesting by adding some real world stuff, for instance you do marketing via all social media and there are some judges who decide which team had the best marketing campaign who are able to sell all they produce, you have a quarterly meeting with the banker, some meetings with suppliers etc, all these have an effect on the company you have. The best part you have some really messed up labour negotiations with the unions, these are structured in a such a way that you just cannot afford to have your employees go on strike… let’s just say that whoever came up with the structure of the negotiations is a genius! I cannot divulge more on this just in case you are planning to come to Vlerick next year 
Any way I played the Finance Manager in our team and this was really exciting, what made it even more interesting is how everybody in the group assumed their role, let’s just say I had constant fights with HR and Sales and Marketing. We run one of the best marketing campaigns, if interested in seeing our marketing all you need to do is to have a look at these videos

http://youtu.be/b5he9cD4QZU

Also see my group members in the photo attached, awesome experience at least for me. Unfortunately my team did not win, but we definitely had a blast and did learn lots from the whole game. As would be expected we did have some tuffs for some of the groups one week in the same room did not exactly live up to the dream we all expected the game would at the beginning, working in teams is after all not easy however much you practice it!
After playing finance director in a virtual world for three years, am I allowed to put this in my CV and have some footnote saying ‘pls be advised that three years in IMEX world is equal to 6 days in the actual world ’, I wonder?

I had an interesting experience over the past one month or so… Was participating in this competition called Cleantech, it is basically a competition which requires students from Belgium to come up with innovations with a clean technology theme that should be commercialized.
The idea is that the students compete on which is most innovative and develop business models on how they would be able to commercialize their ideas.

I entered the competition together with some of my co-students in the MBA, as you may imagine we did not develop a new product, rather we decided to market or sell a pre-existing product, a solar lamp, see link http://www.dlightdesign.com/home_global.php
the competitors were mostly PhD students with pretty good and innovative ideas. They were making their products and the MBA team was just selling.

To cut the long story short, we came in 3rd position, our strengths were that we created a very good business model, the Grameen bank mode, had really good slides and a powerful presentation. So why do i say the MBA works, one of the jokes one of our professors gave us at the beginning of the MBA was that if we don’t teach you anything else we shall at least teach you how to prepare power point slides and to make powerful presentations!

Perspectives: Inge Geerdens shares her thoughts on celebrating diversity in an SME setting.

11 April 2011.  This marks a special day for the Vlerick Women in Business and Society Club as we organized our first panel discussion.  The talks centered on “Women in Leadership Roles: The Power of Diversity”.  We were honored and delighted to have in our roster of speakers the following:

1) Martine Van den Poel – Program Director and Executive Coach at INSEAD

2) Marc Bihain - Corporate HR Director and General Secretary at ING Belgium

3) Inge Geerdens - Female entrepreneur of the year in 2006 and founder of CV Warehouse

The diversity even in the profile of these speakers perfectly complemented each other as they engaged in friendly debate and meaningful discussion with each other.  Students regardless of gender were also open enough to share their experiences regarding the related challenges that they encountered both in and out of the workplace.

A lot of things were said during the evening that allow for some reflection.  Most important, I believe, is that as the future generation, we collectively hold the power to change mindsets and take the steps to celebrating diversity in both the workplace and society at large.  It is also up to us to challenge the notion of traditional societal roles and open our perspectives by focusing more on what both men and women can do – instead of boxing people into categories.

Each generation gets better and better, they say.  It’s time to take our part, then, in making this real.

It’s April Fools.  And one would certainly be a fool to not enjoy the beauty of Spring, especially now that lectures are officially over.  We now have the opportunity to eat lunch in the park, enjoy our favorite Belgian beers in Oude Markt, and just relax to the warmth of sun.

After spending most of our time in the Athena and Minerva auditoriums, we’re now looking forward to more “action” – starting with next week’s IMEX game.  That will surely capture the competitive bug hidden (or much manifested) in each of us.  But despite the intensity of the game, one’s stress can be easily melted by just watching the sun’s rays reflect through the glass of our break-out rooms.

This time of the school year also brings with it a lot of time for self-reflection, as we continue exploring career opportunities that would best match our needs and wants.  We’re also learning a lot from peer coaching sessions.  It’s surely nice to know that we have a support group willing to give objective feedback and lots of encouragement.

The weather forecast says that it will be sunny and warm next week… I hope it’s not an April Fool’s joke.  Enjoy the best of Spring (or Summer, if you’re in a tropical country)!

The times seems to have flown by as classes near their end.  It was only 6/7 months ago that we started in the program and now we are facing down the barrel of projects and exams (again).  Vlerick planned the school year somewhat well, with the heavy work load peaking in the dark, cold winter months when you don’t want to be outside anyway and then closing the flood gates as it became Spring.

Spring in Leuven is wonderful.  The sun shines more often, fewer rainshowers and generally temperate weather make this place special.  I’ve found a new passion for the rooftop terrace, that’s for sure.  Soon we begin our In-Company Project which will leave me in Brussels working for a Large Private Equity firm, and I couldn’t be happier with the project.  Sometimes life gives you the lemonade without needing to squeeze the lemon too hard, I suppose.

For those of you wondering what travelling is like living in Belgium, I write a separate, personal blog (www.michaelgino.com) that can show you some pictures of travels and times around Leuven, but I didn’t want to leave this post high and dry, so just know that it is in your best interest to get out of Leuven on short trips as much as your budget can afford.  Also, in regard to budgeting…you get really creative when you’re poor and your life takes a pretty dramatic change in regard to cash management when you are unemployed, so don’t think that you’ll need to spend as much as you are spending now.  Vlerick has a way of making sure you don’t have too much free time to blow all of your cash.

Anyway, Just wanted to say hello and give you a little taste of what has been going on.  Back to writing papers and studying for exams!