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Week One
Day 5 - First day of Executive MBA Class
Hot Water!!! We finally got hot water! I feel so refreshed after a good shower and shave. The hot water heater in our apartment hadn't been working since we moved in on Saturday, so we had had to satisfy ourselves with cold sponge-baths until Monday morning. Let me tell you, after 40 hours on the road, I was dying for a hot shower, and when I found out it wasn't to be, I was none too happy. We happened to run into our landlord on the streets a couple of times over the course of the weekend, and when we complained about the lack of hot water, we were informed that we needed to learn how Ukrainian hot water heaters work. Rrrriiight. When we told him that our fridge was not working, he tapped his forehead and said "you must be smart about these things. Don't buy food that needs to be kept cold." Rrrriiight.
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Monday was the first teaching day for me, Gary and our Executive MBA students, so Gary and I spent the afternoon preparing our lesson plan. With a complete lack of information about the knowledge level of our students, we were kind of preparing blind, so we decided to have an easy introductory day, followed by a week of finance cases. We arrived at the school around 5 PM to rearrange the tables in the classroom and set up the case packs for the students, who arrived between 6:10 and 6:30 - LATE! Not only were they late, but 6 of the 16 students didn't even show up.
After an introduction to Ivey and the LEADER project, we went through the personal introductions; I was surprised to hear that most of the students had graduated from university in the late 90's. They're definitely younger than Executive MBA students in North America, which means I may actually have something to teach them. Hooray!
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The introductions out of the way, I started the Learning With Cases module, using the Lockhurst Hotels case as a tool. This case is less than a page long and describes a situation in which a senior manager is faced with a middle manager wanting to leave for more money; the senior manager needs to decide whether to offer him more, or hire one of two other people. Needless to say, our students were not impressed with the case. Slavko - who turned out to be the class joker - put up his hand and proceeded to try to "crack the case", giving a 2-minute analysis and recommendation based on what he felt was the key success factor for a hotel. I just stood there, thinking "damn, that was a decent analysis, what the hell do I do now?!" But, I had to soldier on, so I just started questioning him on how and why he came to the conclusions he did, then redirecting his responses to other students for their input.
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Thank god a couple of students mentioned that there might be other factors that lead to success in the hotel business; using this, I was able to show Slavko that although his analysis was good, he had jumped to conclusions too quickly and missed potentially important factors. Phew! From that point on, the discussion became quite lively; although they wanted to skip over the formal case analysis process and jump to the answer, another incident came up in which it was apparent that they weren't even all trying to answer the same question! So I was able to step the class back yet another step, all the way to the beginning, and have them fully define the problem and agree on it before proceeding. By the end of our alloted time, I told them I would have to just quickly describe what we would do next since we had to move on to the next case, and Katryna put up her hand and said "but we want to go through the rest of the process!". Yes! We've got them now.
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After the break, Gary ran the Hovey & Beard case - all 6 parts! It went quite well, although the students still kept wanting to jump to the answer and were insisting that the case was silly because they would never have gotten themselves into this situation. All in all, I'd say it was a great first day of teaching.
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At the end of class, Gary and I joined our fellow LEADERites at an outdoor patio for drinks; the other were rather plastered by the time we got there, especially Joanne, who kept talking about Porter's 5 Forces being a bunch of SERBS. After about an hour, the girls broke into a very rambunctious rendition of "Yesterday", followed by various folks songs and ad-libbed, improvised songs about the guys in the group (not a clue). Seeing the fun they were having, Dev and Akash broke into some classics from the Beastie Boys.
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Our second session with the class went very well. Our students are in the second year of an Executive MBA program at Lviv Institute of Management, but they're a lot younger than Exec MBA's in North America. Most of them graduated from undergrad sometime in the late 90's. They're all very bright and come out with really good comments in class, but their education to date has been entirely theoretical, so they seem to be really enjoying getting to apply their knowledge to real world cases. Yesterday I led them in a discussion about opening an internet cafe in an eastern Ukrainian city (since there are already more than enough here in Lviv). I broke them into two groups of six each and had them come up with a mini-business plan in 30 minutes, then present it to the class. They absolutely loved it and had a great time with it, so we'll probably do the same sort of thing in the next two class sessions.
Day 5 - Executive MBA Continues >>>
©2004-2005 Kamal Gautam