Management Tip - 5

Take Responsibility for Your Own Professional Development

Responsibility for your professional development lies squarely on your shoulders; but learning and development budgets are being cut and fewer resources are available. No matter your situation — employed or not — use these tips to keep sharp professionally.

1.Meet with two former co-workers each month. Talk about your industry and where it is headed. This will keep you tapped into the community.
2.Have one major learning experience each quarter. If your work isn't giving you the necessary challenges, seek out other opportunities. Volunteer for a non-profit, attend a conference, or take a class.
3.Give yourself a performance review. Reflect on your growth and performance, whether through a formal process or not. Be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses and what you should focus on in the coming year.

Adapted from "A Freelancer's Recipe for Professional Development" by Steven DeMaio

Management Tip - 4

How to Combine Creativity and Results

In academia, critical thinking is the norm and asking questions is required. On most campuses, questioning ideas is the first step and the second is questioning the question. Because of this, academia has a reputation for being too open-ended and sluggish. In industry, we prefer to set a deadline, get things done, focus on execution. We worry that thinking about an idea could hold up progress. Combine these two approaches to be sure you are both thinking creatively and getting results. Ask lots of questions but don't let the questions impede movement. The questions should drive you toward a clear, defensible outcome.

Management Tip - 3

Don't Assume They Won't Understand

Strategic decisions can be tough to make, especially in a time of limited resources; but communicating those decisions is often a tougher challenge. One of the most common communication mistakes leaders make is to assume their audience won't grasp the complex reasoning behind a decision. Instead of presuming "people won't understand," find ways to explain the details even to those who may not have the same organizational or financial sophistication as you. If your people don't understand, it's your job to find a way to explain it to them. All employees deserve to know where the company is headed and the rationale behind key decisions. They will be happier and more productive when they are clued into, and on board with, the company strategy.

Management Tip - 2

Know Exactly Where The Money Comes From

Companies often focus on profitability without much regard for where exactly the profit is coming from. Slicing and dicing your company's income to understand how income breaks down by product line can help you make better decisions about how to price products, where to invest resources, and perhaps when to cut costs. Identify the profit-leading products and be sure you're making the right ongoing investments. Find out which products aren't making you money and why. Smaller companies can do this by approximation if their systems aren't yet sophisticated enough to cut the data. If your company has numerous products, batch them into categories that will make this type of measurement easier.

Management Tips

Being a management student, I always had affinity towards reading some good management practices whenever I came across any. I thought it'll be a good idea to have a collection of them here in my blog.Hope they will be a good read for the visitors of my blog as well :) So here's the first one...

Forego the Relay Race

In large organizations, processes can be handled like a relay race. R&D starts with the baton and passes it on to Manufacturing, who in turn passes it on Marketing and so on. This baton passing is an efficient way to move a process forward across a siloed organization. However, these linear processes lack collaboration, which is key to innovation.

Find ways to bring teams together to collaborate on specific projects rather than simply checking and reviewing each other's work. Coordinated processes are efficient — collaborative processes are innovative.

Textbook Economics - Business Schools Not Needed In New World

When King Henry VIII broke with the church in Rome, he shut England’s monasteries. When Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, he did the same with Havana’s casinos.

So let’s close down business schools to get into the spirit of the new financial order.

In the past 20 years, the master of business administration (MBA) factories have created the conditions that helped land the global economy in the current mess. They legitimized a pseudo-scientific approach to finance that turned out to be bogus; they promoted a management style that was too mechanistic; and they formed a managerial elite more interested in rewards than producing lasting wealth for the economies they operate in.

There is little mistaking the growth of business schools, especially as the economy contracts and jobless bankers seek to boost their qualifications. Applications to MBA programmes in 2008 rose at the fastest pace on record, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council in McLean, Virginia. The trouble is, the last batch of MBA graduates who rose to the top made such a hash of things it is hard to believe the next will do much better.

The people who steered the global economy onto the rocks in the past year all benefited from the finest management education that money can buy.

Richard Fuld, chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. when it collapsed, has an MBA from New York University. John Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch and Co., is a graduate of Harvard Business School. Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has an MBA from Harvard University.

And so does former US president George W. Bush.

The record isn’t much better in Europe. Andy Hornby, the chief executive officer of British bank HBOS Plc. is another Harvard Business School alumnus. HBOS had to be bailed out in a merger with Lloyds Banking Group Plc. and then both had to be rescued by the UK government. Peter Wuffli, who as chief executive officer presided over the huge losses that took Zurich-based UBS AG to the brink of disaster, studied management at Switzerland’s University of St Gallen. Of course, it is unfair to assign all blame to business schools.

Over the last three decades, taking an MBA has become just another qualification, a hoop to be jumped through on your way to getting a good job on Wall Street, or in London or Zurich’s financial centres. If we studied the records, we would probably find that most of the chief executives who led us into the crisis also did finger painting at kindergarten—and it would be wrong to pin the credit crunch on that.

Still, it raises the issue of what business schools are teaching, and how they managed to create leaders who were so unable to spot the flaws in the companies they were running. If a flight-training school produced this number of crashes, we would be asking some questions. There is no reason that business studies should be exempt from the same kind of scrutiny.

The schools should be called to account for several things.

First, they encouraged a quasi-scientific approach to business, sermonizing that everything could be nailed down in a textbook. By preaching a set series of formulas, they encouraged students to believe that running a company could be mastered by anyone. The entire private-equity industry is founded on that principle. So are mergers and acquisitions.

In reality, management is a skill that is acquired through experience, judgement and flair. Billions are about to be wasted relearning a simple fact that should never have been forgotten.

Second, the intellectual tools that led us into the financial meltdown were largely invented within academia. Complex models for pricing risk created the market for the options and derivatives contracts that have caused so much trouble in the past year.

The business schools took something that was mysterious and unknowable—risk—and tried to make it as easy to count as peas in a pod. By doing so, they encouraged a whole generation of young men and women to go into investment banking armed with the belief that they had mastered risk, that it had been tamed and brought under control. The truth, of course, turned out to be different. Bankers can no more tame risk than sailors can tame the oceans. All they can hope to do is steer a safe course through it.

Third, the schools created a managerial elite that acted like a caste apart. One reason the bonus culture ran out of control was that many of the people involved were trapped in a bubble. They thought guaranteed bonuses, private jets and multimillion-dollar pay-offs were normal. That process started in business schools. No doubt, we will hear a lot in the next year about how the schools are reorganizing themselves. We will see lots of papers and proposals, and probably a few equations, explaining how to stop the credit crunch from happening again.

But as Henry VIII and Castro both concluded, for different reasons, sometimes an institution is beyond redemption. It can’t be fixed, simply because it is the problem.

Just shut them down.

- MATTHEW LYNN

My First Post...

I am very excited to write for the first time in a blog. Somehow I'm amused that I've created not one but two blogs of my own. I always wondered why people are so crazy about blogging. But it's a cool way of encouraging people to think and write.Thanks to Pyra Labs and Google!! Let me see how well and how long I can write and make it interesting for people to read.