Category: Management

A Master of Business administration (MBA) degree can be a valuable career enhancement for people that are already in, or think about switching to, management positions. MBA courses cover various areas of business such as accounting, finance, marketing, and operations. There are various types of MBA programs, including part-time, Executive MBA programs (EMBA), and online programs. EMBA programs are abridged versions of MBA programs tailored to people with work experience.

US News & World Report publishes rankings of the best schools for MBAs (led by Wharton) and EMBAs(Chicago Booth). The cost of very best MBA degrees is $200K, which is steep, but may be a better deal than a $60K degree from an unranked school.

People who already received MBA degrees are certainly very satisfied with the programs they completed. Great majority of them rates the value of the MBA degree as outstanding or excellent, would pursue the degree again knowing what they know now, and would hire alumni from their alma mater.

How do you stack up against students in top schools? Wharton EMBA students have median GMAT score 700, their average age is 35 (with 14% over 40) and have 11 years of work experience.

Of course, first you need to be accepted to an MBA program. All business schools use GMAT to screen applicants. GMAT tests reasoning and writing skills using an adaptive computer program. Tests are administered in test centers around the world. You can take a mini-quiz online to quickly assess your test taking chops. I was disappointed to get 2 out of 8 questions wrong, including a math question 🙂

Recently I discovered re:Work, a website where Google shares its knowledge about human resources and management. In this post I highlight a few of the articles that I found inspiring.

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A thought provoking article “Changing the Change Rules at Google” covers a new approach to reorgs. As a large, fast moving company, Google goes through frequent reorgs that are not always handled well. In some instances, Google found that half the people do not understand the reorg. The new ChangeRules approach is driven by four key broad questions: Why? What? Who? How? The reason behind these questions is to find out what is the goal of this change and how to best implement it. It may actually turn out that the reorg is not needed. One of the aspects that I found surprising is to get stakeholders’ input early, including input from employees affected by the reorg.

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The project I am working on at work is a large undertaking that requires a major shift in the way teams are working. People need to nurture their innovation abilities, atrophied by many years working on legacy projects. These legacy projects needed to be maintained, without making any significant changes. An article “Hacking Your Innovation Mindset” provides tips from an eponymous Stanford d.school class to achieve improvement in innovation. Three main abilities are promoted during the class:

• Learn to navigate ambiguity. I love this quote: “It is not only about problem solving, it is about problem finding”.
• Practice mindful observation.
• Experiment with your ideas.

After completing the Stanford class, the students were significantly more confident in showing their work to others, before it was finished to their satisfaction. Showing unfinished work to provide feedback is one of the major signs of innovative work.

For people wanting to learn more about this fascinating subject, read “Entrepreneur Behaviors, Opportunity Recognition, and the Origins of Innovative Ventures”. This study is based on interviews with dozens of innovative entrepreneurs and hundreds of executives and it posits that innovation differs from management in the patterns by which information is acquired. To my surprise, it is not personal traits, including risk taking, that explain the difference between being innovative and non-innovative.

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Project Chameleon is a project in one of the divisions at Google to provide an internal marketplace where employees are matched to projects and managers, based on their skills and preferences. The project has been running for 2 years and 80% people who participate in it are satisfied, with 90% employees and managers getting one of their top three choices. This project has potential to provide benefit at other larger companies as well.

I read an interesting article “Design Patterns for Managing Up” that discusses four challenging situations at work and approaches to resolve them. It turns out that the author is technologist Kate Matsudaira, previously working at Microsoft, Amazon, and several startups. Kate is currently a director of engineering at Google.

Her personal blog is full of great articles and is well worth reading, because Kate has a unique combination of good technical knowledge and great management skills. I particularly liked her articles on resolving conflicts and managing people and teams. Kate’s personal story is inspiring. She also shares a very comprehensive list of interview questions for CS jobs. From this list I liked converting BST to ordered array, when is a hash map a poor data choice and given the following variables: time, budget, customer happiness and best practices, explain which are the most important in a project.

There are several talks by Kate available online, concentrating on personal growth at work and leadership. I suggest you start with the “Leveling Up” talk that is motivating and fun. Speaking of leadership,
Lighthouse has a nice interview with her.

Kate’s Twitter account seems to be updated regularly and you may want to start 2019 with the planning tools she links to.

I love it when the Internet takes me on a tour like this. I start from an article by an unknown person on Hacker News, liking the article and finding out more articles by the author, all the way to her life story on her blog and seeing that she went to Harvey Mudd College on her LinkedIn profile. Coming back to a game theme from Kate’s talk, it’s like playing different levels in a game:-)

Recently I read several articles on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), a method for setting and tracking the goals leading to better alignment of goals in an organization. OKRs were started by Andy Grove of Intel and first documented in his book “High Output Management” from 1983. The OKRs concept is built on Management By Objectives approach created by Peter Drucker in 50s.

The central principle of OKRs is that each objective (what) is accompanied by several key results (how), that are measurable and can be answered in yes/no format. Great introduction to OKRs is this TED talk by John Doerr, who also wrote a book about it “Measure What Matters”. Doerr has a web site www.whatmatters.com with more content.

OKRs are apparently used by all Google employees. The process of using OKRs at Google is described in the “Startup Lab Workshop” video (over an hour). The video is from 2012 and is considered by some not up to date, but still explains in detail basic concepts.

A web site by one of the proponents of OKRs who makes living teaching companies how to use them is here. It has many interesting articles, including an article about using Shared OKRs from an ex-employee of Google.

2018-01-14: Updated category.