The End

So the MBA is over
We graduated on Friday, celebrated, said our goodbyes and people are starting to take off to their lives and careers in all corners of the world. After a busy first year and a long second year, it all seemed to end too suddenly and it left me with a sense of nostalgia and with a -frankly unexpected- sense of pride for being a London Business School MBA 2008.



Was it worth it?
A lot of people ask me these days. I ask myself too. The answer is clearly "Yes". However, as I reflect on the last 22 months, I realise that the MBA really was really a transformational experience, and as such it is not easy to weigh its value straight out of it. The magnitude of my "Yes" will probably only become clear in the next 5-10 years or so.

Have I achieved my goals?
(1) Like most of us, I came into the MBA with a decent career track, albeit limited to a very specific functional area. My first objective was to improve my understanding of business and general management. No question that the objective has been completely achieved, 100%, dead in the middle. LBS gave me the opportunity to study some fundamentals (finance, accounting, strategy, OB, ...) which I lacked, and many great electives. To all applicants reading this blog: if your goal is also to broaden your business understanding, an MBA is the right thing to do.

(2) My second objective was to advance my career, in terms of role, responsibility and salary. I guess most applicants have the same objective. As far as I am concerned, it has been partly achieved. Off course I am now off to a fantastic job, which I would only have dreamed about before, but the process of advancing career, role and salary is an ongoing one, and this is where it will take 10 years to evaluate success or failure of the MBA. The main learning I guess, and a word of warning to the applicants, was that there is a lot of hype surrounding business schools: salaries are not not likely to double the day you graduate and you are not likely to become CEO straight out of school. It takes time, and a lot of effort.

What was the hardest bit?
Without any doubt, the job search process, and particularly the amount of rejection that I had to deal with. A few numbers: In the second year I interviewed with approximately 28 companies. An average of 2 interviews per company. 56 interviews! Eventually, I received 4 offers. That means I was rejected 24 times over a period of about 10 months, or 2.4 rejections per month. I had never been turned down so much before, and I guess I am no exception compared to the rest of the class. In the end of the day, most of us have found fantastic jobs, but it was such hard work. So back to my advice to applicants: don't believe the hype and prepare to be turned down, battered, criticized, offended, ...

What was the best bit?
The people. Some of the class mates, with so many different backgrounds and so many different things to say. It has been a true privilege to share the past 22 months, they have added so much value to the whole experience, and I leave now confident that they will be happy to pick up the phone in the future when I will call. I guess this is probably where London Business School gets it so right with their emphasis on internationality and diversity.

What happens next (to fran and to this blog)?
Fran is leaving the UK after 4 years. I am off to the Netherlands, to work for one of my favorite brands in the world and to achieve extraordinary things. I am not sure I can disclose which brand on this blog (haven't told them about it yet), but there are clues here and there for those readers who really pay attention.

Franonmba (the blog) ends here. I thought about keeping it alive, but the truth is that the MBA is over and so should be the blog. I hope it was useful to someone reading. At least it was useful to me writing it, as it helped me reflect on what was happening and to crystallize a few ideas. So there will be a new blog coming soon, dedicated to the next experience. Check these pages every now and then: I will post directions.

farewell.

nr.2

so it looks like LBS is the second best MBA in the world.
wow! we must have done something good!
http://rankings.ft.com/global-mba-rankings

MBAs: not just after money

I received from Hill&Knowlton (big PR agency) a copy of their report "Reputation & the War for Talent"*. It is a very interesting survey of 527 MBA students and their career priorities.

The main message seems to be that MBAs will consider the 'reputation' of an employee as an important factor determining its attractiveness. Hence, according to H&K, building a strong corporate reputation is important in order to attract and retain talent.

Off course the big assumption, I would argue, is MBAs=talent (:-)), but apart from that it is a very interesting perspective. More can be found here.
--

* by the way: I appreciated that they first asked for permission and then emailed the report. Shows an uncommon appreciation of some basic netiquette principles. well done.

LBS Media Club careers evening

The following is the invite to a Media Club event that we are organising. I'll post it here in case there are any media companies reading, who might be interested in attending. Drop me an email if so.

LBS Media Club careers evening, 20th feb 2008, 17.00 – 20.00

We are the London Business School media club.

We are a student-led organization, grouping some 300 MBA students with a professional interest in the media industry, including advertising, tv, publishing, film, content, gaming, etc.

We have on average 6 years work-experience. We are young, talented, international, and mad enough to leave good jobs to be trained at one of the world leading business schools for 22 months.

About half of us are first year students: currently looking for a 2-3 months work assignment during the summer, to get to know a new employer and apply MBA-learnings to a real-life business situation, before going back to class in autumn.

The rest of us are second year students, graduating in spring-summer 2008, and looking for a full-time job in media.

Our goal

We would like to invite a selection of the best media companies and head-hunters on campus February 20th 2008. We would like to meet them for a career chat, in a relaxed and informal context, and hopefully start a fruitful relationship.

The evening

We aim to start at 5.00 and finish around 8.00

Not all our company guests are familiar with the MBA programme, so we have invited Diane Morgan, Director of Career Services at London Business School, to open the event with a short explanation of what the London Business School MBA programme is about.

We will then quickly move to our cocktail bar, where we hope to get to know each other better over a drink or two.

We are aware that your time is valuable, so we will also provide a quiet area, with coffee tables and comfy chairs, for one-to-one meetings with the students that you are most interested in. In order to help you decide who you would like to meet, we will set-up a database of CVs from which you will be able to cherry pick.

We hope that this will be the beginning of many fruitful relationships.

home alone

I am at home alone tonight and am finally finding some time to blog down a few interesting things that happened last week.

The first was the Brand Management course at LBS, which sadly has gone by very quickly. Absolutely ex-tra-or-di-nary: 30 hours of class to get branding like I never did before, and to realize the job of a brand managemer, providing it's on the right brand, can actually be rather exciting.
The credit goes entirely to the professor, Mark Ritson, who is an incredibly experienced, talented and entertaining teacher. It would be a tragedy if LBS, for whatever reason, was to loose this man.

The second interesting thing was actually part of the Brand Management course, but it was so special to me that it deserves a mention on its own: on Thursday evening we had Emily Richards as a guest speaker.



Emily is an alumna of LBS, currently brand manager on Cadbury Dairy Milk. She told us the story of how the best piece of advertising in 2007 came about, thanks to a very good brand strategy and an extraordinary creative idea. Without going into too much detail, I had literally goosebumps when she told us how close the campaign came to be killed off, and how hard the team had to fight to keep it alive. Chapeau.

Finally, the third interesting thing, at least to me, is that the recruitment season has started again on a positive note. There was an important interview last week, there will be one this Friday and there will be one next Tuesday. All of them with different, super interesting agencies. December was a hard and long month and I was really tired of interviewing, but for the first time in a long while I now am actually quite looking forward to it.

back again. not long to go

It was a good holiday. chilled. relaxing.
Term starts tomorrow. Three courses: Brand Management, Financing the Enterpreneurial Business, Managing the Growing Business. Then management report on Jaycut, then done!
(ah ... I should also find a job).

Paths to power, and end of term

So, Friday was for me the end of a fantastic block week course (Paths to power) as well as the end of the term.

Paths to Power is a bad name for a very good course about power and influence in organisations. It touches on the ethics of power, the dynamics of power, the mechanisms of influence, the dangers of power. Main learnings for me: (1) Power is necessary to get things done. It is better to have it than not to have it (because otherwise someone else will take it). (2) Having power necessarily means having to make difficult choices. Being naive about it does not help. (3) Power flows from the people that are around you in an organisation. So being powerful is pretty much about being very good at managing your relationships with people. Without their support, you can not have power. The course book is very interesting, although it will make you look a bit like a looser if you read it in the tube. Patxi says a bit more about it here.



Overall the term has gone well. For me it has been largely about deciding which job I want to do after my MBA, and finding it. I have been meeting about a dozen of companies, interviewed with about seven, of which 2 (possibly 3) have developed into very interesting conversations. There have also been a couple of disappointments, with a couple of companies showing commitment and then backing off. ah well!
The process of interviewing is all in all a highly stressful experience, but I guess on the upside it forced me to really clarify what I am really after and what my strengths are. Hopefully the new year will bring some proper closure on that front. For now I am looking forward to a nice break.

Happy Christmas everyone!

why do the brits grill tomatoes?

We had Russell at LBS last night, showing us some interesting ads and trying to tell us what makes a good ad. One of my goals in organising the event was to see what happens when you bring a very good advertising person in a business school environment.
It turned out to be a bit of a clash of cultures for me, at least semantically: on the one hand we had Russell talking about 'interesting', 'negative emotions', 'cultural phenomena'. On the other hand, you had an LBS professor arguing about 'strategic alignment', 'effectiveness', 'positioning'. On the third hand ( :-) ), you had the students who pretty much wanted to see some ads and have a laugh.
I suspect all parties left slightly annoyed, and I pretty much spent all night thinking about it.



I woke up this morning and I was still thinking about it. I left home to go for an interview with a very intelligent woman at one of my favourite advertising agencies. It was more of a chat rather than an interview, as we both new that they don't have openings at the moment.
It turned out to be a very pleasant experience. We talked a bit about what an MBA is and how it might help in an advertising agency. Also we talked about how advertising is a discipline caught in between art and business (i.e. about the clash of cultures), and how exciting this is.

After leaving the building I got caught in 'severe tube delays on the circle, district, hammersmith and Godknowswhatother line'. It was pounding with rain, so I found shelter in a very British cafe and spent a good half-hour there, meditating over a lovely English breakfast. why the hell do the Brits grill tomatoes?

good luck waxwave!

A few months back I had the pleasure of meeting a super clever, super nice LBS alumna, who took some of her time to share the tales of her post-LBS experience with me, and to provide advice. Today I learn her project is about to launch: www.waxwawe.com

"Waxwave is a new social venture. Our unique online fundraising product energises people to promote their favourite causes and helps charities promote themselves on the web in an entirely new way. For charities it means they get an innovative way to increase awareness and collect funds cost-effectively. For ordinary people, it means they get to have a bit of fun while telling the world what they believe in".

I guess it is still to early to understand quite how it will work, but if you look at their website you get the gist of it. Best of luck!

things that numbers can not capture. or not?

I am studying for one of those super-useful-mega-boring courses these days: Analysis for Marketing Planning and Decision Making (dubbed Anal Marketing). Currently focusing on measuring the effect of advertising on sales.



On the one hand it's amazing to see how much you can figure out with regression analysis, cluster analysis, conjoint, etc... On the other hand, there is a feeling that there are things that this number-crunching will never manage to capture, i.e. the infitite subtleties of how the human mind responds to persuasion. Or perhaps it can? Is advertising an art, or is it a science?

I am writing an article. Comments appreciated.

I am currently writing an article to support my own job search in advertising.

In it I argue that an MBA education is very valuable for people who want to work in the advertising industry, because advertising ultimately deals with business problems.

Normally i wouldn't need to write an article to find a job (my cv would be enough). Trouble is that the advertising industry is not used to dealing with MBA candidates, so a bit of explaining is necessary.

The article is currently in draft version, so any comment is appreciated. Have a look.

Strategy is a pattern in a series of decisions

There are two kinds of courses in an MBA: the technical ones, in which you learn a specific set of knowledge (concepts, frameworks, techniques, formulas) and the non-technical ones, where you reflect on a certain topic or business problem, but you are not necessarily given a ready-made answer.

I think the first type of courses are a waste of money (go to the library, buy a book, save 40 grand). The second type are more interesting, because to learn you need a good professor, a good class and a good discussion. For me, this type of courses are what the MBA is really about.

This week I have been busy in Strategies For Growth, a "type II course" and in my opinion the best course so far at LBS (see also a review from Karlitos here). The course is "is about how to create a growing firm", and is taught by the excellent prof Freek Vermeulen, who has put an enormous amount of work, research and professionalism in it.

There has been so much interesting stuff going on in the course that it would be impossible to capture it all in one post.

The most eye-opening thing for me has been understanding that strategy is not necessarily something that is designed upfront, but often emerges from the interactions between luck, the environment, the organisational culture and the manager's personality.

We have seen maybe ten case studies to prove the point, and this has left me with a pragmatic and reassuring approach to strategy making. Making strategy looking at the future is certainly a daunting prospect (and perhaps a pointless exercise, because you'll never get it right), but doing it whilst looking at the present (luck, the environment, the organisation, your personality) is certainly much more reassuring and effective.

To say it with Henry Mintzberg, perhaps "strategy is a pattern in a series of decisions".

Leading teams, organizations and media club

Back from holiday. Two very interesting things happening this week:

One: the LBS media club has 'opened' up again after the summer break. We had our kick-off meeting this week about 90 first year students showing up (it's a lot for the media club), followed by free drinks (which probably explains why so many people showed up). There is a lot of enthusiasm for the club from the new class, so it looks like thanks to them we will do great things this year.

Two: I started my first course of the year. It's a block-week course on "Leading teams and organizations". It's taught by a brilliant professor, and I am sitting with some truly brilliant classmates (in the picture Scott in the tower-building exercise). Main take-aways so far: a) there are different leadership styles which are appropriate to different situations. One needs to be conversant in most of them and I need to improve on a few. In particular I need to be more authoritative, which requires a vision (note to self: start posting about vision). b) My emotional intelligence is quite possibly rubbish. I need to be more aware of other people sensitivities when in a team situation (this is a long story, but I really mean it).

All in all ... good to be back.

my ideal job (work in progress list)

When you start making lists ... then you are really bored.

I made list of characteristics that my ideal job should have.

It's work in progress.

Here you go:

Must have:

1. The job allows me to be at home with my family most nights.
(My family are the reason why I work, not vice versa. I am not prepared to take on a job that makes me travel several days a week, but I am prepared to relocate my family abroad or to undertake a reasonable amount of travel)

2. It offers a general management challenge.
(in other words, I am not looking for a functional job, but for a general management role instead. To me that means having people and P&L responsibility as early as possible)

3. The company encourages people to become their best.

(I have been in companies where career progression is deliberately slow, where people are paid as little as possible, and where following the procedures is more important than coming up with great ideas. I think this produces average people. I want to work in a company where people are paid as much as possible, they are promoted as often as possible and they are encouraged to become as good as it gets at their work).

4. The initial salary should be at least +50% over my last salary.
(no need to explain)

Nice to have:

1. I’d like to have the opportunity for future share of equity/ partnership
2. I’d like it to be a small-ish company (max 200 people)
3. I’d like it to be a creative business (advertising, marketing consultancy, internet, etc)

almost time to be a student again

Two weeks to go and the interniship will be over. From what I can read on portal the 09's are already there and going through induction. I am getting with my mind back to being a student: need to organise media club kick off meeting for mid september, need to recruit people to help with the media summit organisation, need to get binders for the first block weeks, need to go to the windsor, need to find flat for the big move back to London .... cool!

No new experience is time wasted

If there is one big lesson I am learning with this internship is that no new experience is time wasted. I spent the last day travelling around the country with a sales representative, meeting doctors and learning what pharmaceutical sales are all about. Now, becoming a sales rep is probably not going to be my lifetime career ambition, but that is probably why it has been a such a rare and interesting opportunity. Now that I think about it, this has been a bit the common thread of this summer experience: having the once in a lifetime opportunity to learn about things that otherwise I would have never come across. Whether or not I get offered and decide to accept a job here, this opportunity alone is worth a two-years MBA as opposed to a one-year. (I shall write more about this in a couple of weeks time).

Last terms' grades and front derailler

This term's grades have finally arrived. Pretty disappointing overall. Funny because I really enjoyed a lot of the subjects, but hey ... that's life. Year one of the MBA is officially over now.

I could spend time complaining about the courses, the grading and all that stuff. Instead, I think I'll go try and fix my front derailler. http://www.bikewebsite.com/ftder.htm

bugger!