Welcome to WEMBA world...

For those incoming WEMBA’s (class of 2006), I thought I would post a couple of my own thoughts and reflections as you prepare for your own personal Fuqua “journey of discovery” over the next couple of years…

Dress nice for your first day – pictures will be taken and posted on the class board…if you are having a bad hair day that day, you will have to live with that picture for the next two years. Because it had snowed heavily (by NC standards anyway) the night before orientation last year, I dressed casually in jeans and a rugby shirt. As a result, I came across looking like a precocious 20 year-old college student in my class photo.

Try to meet and remember as many people’s names in the first few weeks. They gave us handsome Duke MBA lanyards and nametags, but those got chucked after a few weeks into term one.

If you haven’t taken classes in a while, make sure you have a designated study area in your house where you can spend uninterrupted study time. Prepare your spouse, children, pets, etc. for the fact that you’re not going to be able to spend as much time with them as they (or you) would like. The first term is tough not because the material is hard, but because it moves so quickly and it takes time to adjust to the pace while trying to balance a full-time work load.

In the first class on the first day, choose wisely where you sit– it will be your place for all classes for the next 2 terms. If you want to keep a low profile, sit in the middle rows. If you are looking to be a class stand-out, the aisle seats and front rows are for you.

Get a fully-functional laptop computer that is running Windows XP, and make sure it isn’t one of those 8 pound desktop replacements. You will be shouldering enough weight with all the lecture notes and reading material you will have to carry around.

Most important – enjoy yourself! You will be challenged and stretched in ways you didn’t think you could challenge/stretch yourself. Don’t be afraid of saying the wrong thing or asking dumb questions in class or talking to people outside your comfort zone. The environment is very collegial and set up in such a way that is is very difficult to fail out of the program. Good luck!

Jargon Bugaboo

After a long four week break, Term 3 is a distant memory, like that vague feeling you get thinking of an ex-girlfriend, a bittersweet remembrance of having learned something about life and about oneself, but overall not an experience to repeat again soon…

So, here it is January 2005, and I am back at Duke and jumping right into Term 4. This term journeys from the land of quantitative deterministic thinking (finance, econ, accounting) in the last term and crosses into that more nebulous region of stochastic models, the “it depends” school-of-thought. Corporate Strategy, Organizational Design and Operations Management are the flavor this season. And as such, the jargon also changes...no more simple terms like options and futures, or neat little acronyms like ROI and EVA. We are now in the realm of concepts and multi-word, multi-syllabic descriptors, such as “social complexity”, “causal ambiguity” and “time compression diseconomies.” (When I was in grad school, we used to call this "hand-waving”, when you use big words to speculate on the less tangible conclusions of scientific data – little did I know that much of business theory is like this).

Some initial thoughts… despite my pooh-poohing the jargon, I have high hopes for Corporate Strategy – Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM, and Rick Goings, CEO of Tupperware, are scheduled to be guest speakers this term, and judging from the syllabus it looks like we will delve much into the business of doing business. The aim of Organizational Design is a bit less clear to me right now. It seems to be a hybrid of Managerial Effectiveness from the first term, with a bit of analytical modeling thrown into the mix (to the extent one can analyze and model an “effective” organization). Operations Management should prove useful as my little company scales up production and takes on the supply chain “bugaboo” (that’s my jargon for one big hairy audacious mess).