Purdue Krannert photo 1021278904646528
You "DONUT" want to miss #PurdueDayofGiving at #PurdueKrannert! Faculty & Staff: Show your Krannert pride by giving during the Faculty/Staff hour now till 10:00 a.m. And, get your free coffee and donuts in the Drawing Room!
What are the benefits of taking an online summer classe? Senior Rachel Knies explains
What are your plans for this summer? I know the last thing you want to hear is advice to take summer classes. Summer is supposed to be for relaxing in the sun and having fun with friends or getting that dream internship, right? But there are also many benefits of taking summer classes.
Evening and weekend MBA student Shuai Jiang has come up with a better way to receive, track, return, and manage online packages.
With a small team of fellow students and additional support from his part-time MBA cohort and the MBA curriculum, Jiang founded Enchantin Inc. and created the uCella Smart Mailbox, which secures packages when they are delivered or returned and can be managed through a mobile app. The startup already has $1 million in investments and several hundred pre-orders through its Indiegogo campaign.
The company has also begun discussions with major couriers and e-retailers, not only in the U.S., but also in Canada, Korea, and Turkey, to form potential partnerships. Jiang hopes that this product will become the norm for e-commerce in the future.
Says Jiang, “My vision is that uCella will be outside every house in the U.S and will become an essential package platform in the worldwide e-commerce ecosystem.”
In the Evening & Weekend Berkeley MBA Program, innovation is experiential. As part of the core curriculum, students take Applied Innovation, a course culminating in the Mid-Program Academic Retreat (MPAR), also known as WE Innovate.
In this deeply rigorous weekend for the part-time MBA program, students draw upon the business knowledge they've built through core coursework and their growing innovation skills to take on a current challenge faced by a top company, such as McDonald's, WalMart, and American Experess Labs.
260 students, 41 teams, and 26 corporate challenges. It all adds up to learning, reflection, innovation, and impact. Take a look at what goes on during the evening and weekend MBA program's WE Innovate weekend:
Friday afternoon and evening
Each team of four or five students is also meeting with its corporate partner. Participating in MPAR gives the companies “fresh ideas, new perspectives, and access to a great pool of potential employees,” says Eric Davis of corporate client Abbot Diabetes Care.
After dinner, the teams reconvene to frame a series of “how might we?” questions that launch their work. Building on the work already done in Applied Innovation and on input from their corporate partner, they generate five ideas to pursue. Work continues as late into the evening as the teams’ enthusiasm and energy permit.
Saturday morning, teams and partners revisit their earlier work and choose one idea to refine and present that afternoon. They gather in teams around flip charts in different corners of Napa's Silverado resort. Rainbows of Post-It® notes arc across the walls. The energy is high; the volume mounts as one idea builds on another. Teams focus on the user experience, crafting a customer story and figuring out how to tell it with precision and power. They refine their business models and identify next steps, checking in often with their corporate partners.
“I used to think innovation was something people were born with, a spark. Now I know better,” says Dominus Suen (above, center), a project manager with construction giant Syserco. “Classes like AI and Problem Finding Problem Solving have taught me how to bring up new topics and show my co-workers why new ideas are so important.”
Early Saturday AfternoonA working lunch gives teams more time to polish their presentations—no PowerPoint allowed! Instead, teams use their eight minutes (plus two minutes for questions) to make an authentic connection with their audience.
Haas Executive-in-Residence and former Yahoo Marketing VP David Riemer coaches teams on honing their stories for maximum impact. “Come back to the customer” is a frequent and critical piece of advice. For example, The Gap team has good ideas about recycling worn T-shirts—“Imagine them being remade into a brand-new tablecloth”—but needs to get closer to the customer who would buy the tablecloth. The students, accustomed to receiving feedback, pivot easily.
Later Saturday AfternoonEach team presents its story, solution, and business model to a small group of students and faculty members, who give both qualitative and quantitative feedback. The best presentations then go head-to-head in front of the entire audience, vying for the coveted MPAR Cup.
But even better than taking home the trophy is what students bring back to their jobs. Richa Gujarati (right), for example, has done a lot of design thinking on the job as a product manager at St. Jude Medical, but was excited to apply the new frameworks learned at Berkeley-Haas to a new product development concept at St. Jude—and to share them with co-workers.
“People really tuned in and were very creative,” she says. “I’ve realized there’s a lot of value in going out of your comfort zone.”
Chicago Booth students claim another top prize, this one in a stock-picking competition. oak.ctx.ly/r/4l0g5
For the second year in a row a team from a Chicago-based business school has taken top prize at the Ivey Business School’s Ben Graham Centre International Stock Picking Competition.
"This year, 47 of the 63 countries had participated in Passport Day. We had amazing performances from a variety of countries, including dances from India, Azerbaijan, and Morocco."
MBA student Virginia Wei shares her experience at Passport Day 2016:
Passport Day Posted on April 25, 2016 by Virginia Wei Hi Everyone! One of the main reasons that I decided to matriculate at Stern, and a factor that really sets Stern apart, is just how diverse our student body is and more importantly how we embrace that diversity. But first, I should really start w…
“When we are looking at issues relating to the emerging world, we are trying to look for the ‘next practices', says Professor Rajendra Srivastava, Dean, #ISB in an interview to Businessline. http://goo.gl/TlwS1J
Looking forward to the Centennial Symposium today! #cbs100
Bain & Co. Worldwide Managing Director Bob Bechek
It’s easy to forget that leaders were once like everyone else. Bob Bechek is a case in point. Today, he is the worldwide managing director of Bain & Company. Back to 1985, he was another first-year at Harvard Business School. An engineer by trade, the 25-year-old Bechek came to Boston after holding the job that many of his classmates coveted – the general manager of an up-and-coming robotics firm. As well as things were going, Bechek could see the need for a change emerging – and he wanted to round out his skill set with an MBA. Well, that along with an equally important motive.
“My dad was on my back because I’d put it off for two years in a row,” Bechek tells Poets&Quants. “So, I applied.”
DRAWN TO BAIN’S RESULTS-DRIVEN AND PEOPLE-ORIENTED CULTURE
Like many MBAs, Bechek intended to return to his pre-MBA industry. However, his path was altered from being exposed to different classmates and disciplines. At HBS, he immersed himself in economics and entrepreneurship. He was always looking for ways to enhance his communication skills. When it came time for his internship, Bechek – who’d spent his youth doing a host of different jobs – was looking to experience “business with a suit on.”
Sure enough, Bechek started his internship at Bain & Company 30 years ago this summer. Back then, Bain was considered an upstart that challenged the stuffy and zero sum conventions of consulting. For “Bainies,” the mission was to unlock potential and maximize value. Here, every client was a collaborative partner and every solution was custom-tailored. Internally, the firm was celebrated for prizing authenticity, bedrock values, and meritocracy. More than that, Bain was known for its camaraderie among partners and associates.
Not surprising, the firm’s focus on outcomes and fun appealed to Bechek during his internship. “What attracted me to Bain,” he explains, “was that I felt like I found a hot firm that was focused entirely and passionately on results or impact rather than reports (in the language of the time) and did so within an extraordinarily people-oriented culture that I thought would be very good for me, given my particular nature.”
A 30 YEAR COMPANY VETERAN WHO LEADS BY EXAMPLE
Bechek has certainly made a difference during his long tenure at Bain. After serving as the co-head of Bain’s Global Telecom, Media and Technology practice, he led the firm’s northeast region before taking the company reins in 2012. Known for his modesty and self-deprecating wit, he endured the same learning curve as any young consultant, particularly in recognizing just how much there is to master. Despite his title and tenure, Bechek understands that his ability to lead rests more on the example he sets – a key lesson for any MBA to absorb.
“I think the reality of power and influence and getting things done is overwhelmingly about informal authority nowadays,” he argues. “New MBAs should be focused on how to develop the skills associated with that. But the reality is, even in my current role, the vast majority of what I do is exerted through informal and not formal authority. If you’re involved in trying to get people galvanized around a particular course of action – or to feel inspired about what we’re trying to do or feel appreciated, motivated and valued – that has almost nothing to do with formal authority.”
As he nears his 30-year anniversary with Bain, it is immediately evident that Bechek has played an essential part in helping to build Bain into the premier institution it is today.
“[I’ve] had a chance to help build a strong and very distinctive firm from relatively early in its life. And I’ve played some role in that – and I’m proud of that. That’s very out of step with what many [do]. My son is a first-year student in an MBA program, for example, and we joke about this because it’s not common nowadays. So my advice is don’t be afraid necessarily to stay in one place and build something significant.”
Recently, Poets&Quants sat down with Bechek to learn the lessons he gained as an MBA at Harvard Business School and the advice he would give today’s students. Here are his thoughts.
What was your favorite class at Harvard Business School and what was the big lesson(s) you gained from it that you still apply today?
The first one that occurs to me is a class that was called Law and the Corporate Manager, which (in theory) was meant to expose us to all of the 1L law school curriculum that was relevant to an executive. And it was taught by a guy named Joe Auerbach, who made a difference in my life. He had a very distinguished career securities lawyer and one of the original guys at the SEC [who was] invited late in his career to become a professor at HBS.
The reason this is relevant is that he indulged me in a debate about the role of the corporation and how to measure success. Be mindful, I graduated from business school in 1987 and this was early in the wave of corporate control battles and new thinking about the importance of maximizing shareholder value, which of course the legal system is anchored in the rights of property owners and shareholders. I was very passionate as a young man about the importance of creating value for customers and employees and in communities in order to create long-term value for shareholders. That debate has always stuck with me in my client work all of these years and what management teams are actually trying to do to build long-term value.
There are others. There was a second year class on real estate taught by a legendary developer named Bill Poorvu. This guy wrote a book on real estate that subsequently became very popular. Here was real world experience mixed with street smarts and stories about real characters in the industry. That made it fun in a gritty, real world way. It had so much of the richness of life and the business world and it all came out in this course about making money in the real estate industry.
The third one was a course called Business, Government and the International Economy. It was not taught by an experienced business executive, but by a cerebral academic by the name of Joe Badaracco, who is a senior guy at HBS still. This was basically a broad survey of macroeconomic issues and the role of national governments, corporations and other actors in the global economy. You have to remember, I was an engineer who’d been in business – but never had any macro. I absolutely loved it! I admired the professor very highly. And it stuck with me. These topics are highly relevant in my current role, deepened obviously by a lot of experience in these types of issues.
Here’s what I mean. The years of my client work [included] doing a lot of manufacturing turnaround work in the 80s. This is when U.S. manufacturers were battling the rise of Japanese manufacturing excellence and the kind of high impact, results-oriented work that included, for example at the time, working with a U.S. consumer durable manufacturer. The loss of engineering manufacturing expertise relative to Japanese led to a variety of currency hedging issues, sourcing internationally, joint ventures with Japanese companies, reinvesting in innovation – the overall context of what was going on between Japan and the U.S. in that era was highly relevant to what I was trying to do in just the microcosm of my particular client work.
Bain Office in Chicago
There was a period of my career where I spent six years working with a bank gobbling up other banks following the deregulation of interstate banking in the United States. There again, government regulation and the role of banks in the economy were core issues and the change in the U.S. banking system to become more like other countries was highly relevant to the chess game that I was working with my client to create quite a significant business success story. The regulatory context was very, very relevant.
Most of my career was in the high tech industry. Software, in particular, was the thing I really knew. At one point, I was head of our global tech practice. At the time, China was trying to join the WTO and then became the workshop of the world. Obviously, the supply chains for the tech industry globalized. And it became extraordinarily relevant to all of the hardware industries…as those layers increasingly moved to China.
So those are three examples where macro, in terms of the role of government, central banks, and international trade, was absolutely relevant to what I was working on.
Before you entered business school, you’d earned a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and were a manager at a robotics firm. What was your motivation behind taking two years away from business and earning an MBA?
I was a general manager at a young age. After working in France for a couple of years, I started the U.S. subsidiary. I was a leading a small, (maybe $5-$6 million in revenue), high growth business in a sexy industry. Robotics was on the cover of Time magazine at the time and so forth.
Here’s a little anecdote about when I applied to business school. HBS, at the time, did not interview applicants, yet they asked me to fly to Cambridge. I didn’t think that was a good thing. When I came in for the interview, it actually seemed like a softball interview, but they said to me, ‘You have the job most of our students are trying to get when they graduate. Why do you want to come to business school?’ [It was] a little bit like the question you’re asking me.
From my recollection, there were three things that I believe were on my mind. First, I worried that if I keep doing what I’m doing, will I regret it when I’m 40? I could feel that the success I was having then and the income I was making was not actually going to set up well. Basically, I wanted a broader foundation for my career in business. Back then, I intended fully to return to the high tech venture community. That was the main reason.
Second, while we were doing really well – our product was a decade ahead of the market and we were the only profitable player – I didn’t think it would end well. It was basically going to be a scale game and we were a small player.
And the third, parenthetically, was that my dad was on my back because I’d put it off for two years in a row, so I applied.
Many times, MBA students have an epiphany or a defining moment. For example, they may come into a program looking to become a product manager and end up thriving in corporate finance and leave as an investment banker. Tell us about the process (or that moment) when you realized, ‘I want to work in consulting.’
Understand a little bit where I was coming from when I was in b-school. I was a kid who had more odd jobs than a lot of people going back to when I was a boy – from home construction to a steel factory UAW job. I was a technician in a nuclear reactor facility. I delivered pizzas and newspapers and mowed lawns. I did different MIT high tech jobs, such as one of the first word processing and computer typesetting companies. I was on a shopping center maintenance crew. I’d done a lot of that and I’d also had this experience that we were talking about earlier, some real management experience with the painting robot business mostly selling to the auto industry. So I’d been in more auto plants than a lot of 25 year-olds.
Given all that, it may sound odd to say, but I had an appetite to try what I called, ‘business with a suit on.’ That is, working with some really talented and educated people in a different kind of environment. I wanted to at least try that. In addition, one of my earliest mentors suggested that would be the best learning experience for the summer.
Bain consultants in Antarctica — the only continent without a Bain office.
Now, I wanted to try that for the summer. I was skeptical that I would want to do that for full-time. And I was very candid in my interviews with recruiters. I had a phenomenal internship at Bain. I was very surprised during my summer experience at the quality of the people that I would have the opportunity to learn from, in particular Royce Yudkoff who ultimately recruited me.
I was a slow poke in accepting my offer [from Bain]. In my second year at HBS, I organized a conference on entrepreneurship on behalf of (what was called then) the Small Business and New Enterprise Club. And this conference, in February or March of my second year, I invited a lot of entrepreneurs to come to campus and talk to the students. It was important to me because business school at that time was pretty oriented to careers in big business. The conference was very well-attended. I think it was a huge success. I felt proud of having led it. And the next day, I accepted my Bain offer. It was a very entrepreneurial firm and I felt it was consistent and had those ingredients. Rather than returning to the tech venture community, I went to a professional services firm.
30 years ago next month, I started my internship with Bain & Company. If I hadn’t been a consultant] I probably would’ve gone back to the MIT high tech orbit in some sort. Not robotics in particular, but there was a lot going on at the time. I remember a firm called Kleiner-Perkins kept trying to get me to interview with them and I wasn’t going to go out to the Bay Area. Had I not been married, I think sales and trading in New York for the summer would’ve had appeal. There is just a lot of opportunity that you get exposed to through the MBA students and their experiences. I found that very rich and I was interested in a lot of things. The narrow answer to your question is the high tech venture community is what I almost certainly would’ve done.
You started at Bain & Company in 1987 right after you graduated from Harvard Business School. During your years at Harvard, what attracted you to Bain? What did you do during your two years in business school that gave you an edge over other candidates looking to get into Bain?
What attracted me to Bain was that I felt like I found a hot firm that was focused entirely and passionately on results or impact rather than reports (in the language of the time) and did so within an extraordinarily people-oriented culture that I thought would be very good for me, given my particular nature.
As I was referring to earlier, I found a little bit to my surprise that it was an amazing group of people to learn from. More generally, apart from the attraction of Bain, why did I pivot to thinking consulting would be a good step for me versus high tech? My thinking at the time on that front was my desire to improve my communication skills. And I wanted more broadening, more even given my particular background than what I picked up in my MBA experience. And I thought consulting offered an opportunity to learn at the fastest clip possible while drawing upon my strengths…a combination of problem-solving and interpersonal skills. That remained to be seen, but that was my hunch that I could be strong enough on each of those fronts to be good at it.
[As far as what attracted Bain to me], it certainly wasn’t my good looks. This may sound banal, but I did something valuable that’s basic and available to every one of your readers. Believe it or not, I went to the placement office and filled out the career questionnaire. And I did so honestly. That is, writing it out only for myself. And my answers about the obvious kinds of things: My strengths and weaknesses; why do I want to do such-and-such; [and] why do I think I would be good at it. I thought about it literally the night before and [being authentic] served me very well in the interview.
Bain consultants gathered to talk about solutions.
Every organization has “unwritten rules” that new hires must heed to be considered part of the team and move up in their careers. Imagine you were counseling a newly-graduated MBA. In your experience, what are a few of the biggest unwritten rules that they must master to gain the confidence of their superiors, clients, and peers?
I think it is very, very helpful to join a culture that values what you value – or at least what you aspire to. If you’re able to do that, I think then it is enormously helpful to be what I call inner directed, something close to being what the French say, ‘comfortable in your own skin’ – while also being able to empathize with and listen to other people. If you have those qualities, I think you’re in a position, in the kind of firm culture that has you in a good place, to then drive hard to make good things happen for the team that you’re a part of. If you’re inner directed, but you’re not very good at listening or empathizing with other people, then it can become very difficult to pick up the unwritten rules of a culture that you jump into.
If the opposite is true, if you’re a Zelig-type [and] very attuned to the clues that are going around and what people care about but you don’t have a kind of rootedness that comes from being inner directed, then you can get lost and get used by others and get into trouble that way.
Finally, if you have both of things but you’re in a culture that doesn’t come close to valuing what you value or aspire to, then you can always have this kind of energy loss because at the end of the day you’re just not going with the grain because people are all passionate about things that you don’t really care about (or vice versa).
You had some amazing classmates when you attended Harvard. [i.e. Ann Sarnoff – COO of BBC Americas; Carla Harris – Morgan Stanley Vice Chairman; Michael Lynton – CEO of Sony, David Nelms – CEO of Discover Financial Services]. Basically, all of you have achieved the dream and reached the mountaintop, so to speak. When you look over your 30 year journey at Bain – and those of your peers – what do you see as the main reasons why you were able to be successful?
I might begin by offering the caveat that success in life is not equal to professional success – and professional success is not equal to the title or the formal role implied in your question.
I’d start by saying there’s no summit. This may sound a little philosophical, but there is only a journey that hopefully leads to higher places and views. But I think the reality is that there is always another rise or dip right over the next place. When you realize when you get to our age (I’m a little bit older than you are) is that whatever you think is the summit of the mountain, there is always a higher peak right behind it infinitum. In any journey, you have downs, even if the journey, over time, leads upward…Nobody has a straight march upwards.
Nevertheless, I feel very privileged to work for what I call a mission-driven organization. I’ve happened to have stayed in one organization for nearly 30 years now and have had a chance to help build a strong and very distinctive firm from relatively early in its life. And I’ve played some role in that – and I’m proud of that. That’s very out of step with what many [do]. My son is a first-year student in an MBA program, for example, and we joke about this because it’s not common nowadays. So my advice is don’t be afraid necessarily to stay in one place and build something significant.
When MBAs start at a firm like Bain & Company, they really aren’t a decision-maker. While they work in teams and have ideas and expertise, they don’t make the final choices. In your experience as both the leader and a follower (during your early career), what works in influencing decisions where you don’t have the final say?
Bob Bechek
I think organizations and the world of business generally are dramatically less hierarchical today. And I think the reality of power and influence and getting things done is overwhelmingly about informal authority nowadays. New MBAs should be focused on how to develop the skills associated with that. But the reality is, even in my current role, the vast majority of what I do is exerted through informal and not formal authority. If you’re involved in trying to get people galvanized around a particular course of action – or to feel inspired about what we’re trying to do or feel appreciated, motivated and valued – that has almost nothing to do with formal authority. That’s just become dramatically more so over the last 30 years.
It’s quite an essential skill that people learn in a variety of roles. In the client services business, young MBAs learn that skill very, very rapidly. At a place like Bain & Company, we feel good about the way we collaborate with clients and how clients can feel that they’re in the lead and making the decisions and yet they have our people feel like they’re creating enormous amounts of value and impact for our clients. And it’s all done through informal authority.
What should MBA students know about consulting that you think they may misunderstand about the profession now?
I think people do generally appreciate that there’s a great deal and a very rapid pace of learning. Nevertheless, people cannot – and I was not able to early in my career –appreciate just how much there is to be learned…In particular, our people learn how to make significant change happen…In a competitive industry, [how to] develop insight and then build consensus across a management team about a hopefully transformative course of action – and how to carry that through to results.
Learning how to make significant change happen is an extraordinarily valuable skill. While people develop a knowledge of particular functional topics and industries, that’s more easily appreciated than just the underlying value of learning how to make significant change happen.
I talked earlier about what I had hoped to get out of my time in consulting. I had a very formal three year set of goals. I had intended to spend three years in consulting. I surprised myself by then signing up for, in my own mind, another three years with a different set of goals. There were a whole different set of things to learn as a manager at Bain & Company that I just didn’t appreciate when I was coming in. And then I surprised myself again with a third three year plan, and very different set of goals in turn. It became different because I felt like I was building a significant business. There is more to learn – and different dimensions – of that than people might appreciate coming into a company like Bain & Company.
What pieces of advice would you give to first or second year MBA students to help them make the most of their experience?
There are two qualities that I believe are essential in getting the most out of the experience and then using the experience to have a very successful career. They are empathy and perseverance. My three kids would probably say I probably sound like a preacher on this. The first is empathy for others, the ability to put yourself in another’s shoes is the rootstock of good character. And I think the reality is perseverance makes me sound like a Midwesterner (which I am) from an earlier era. But nothing worthwhile comes to you in life as easily as we want them to. It just takes tremendous perseverance [to make things happen].
So those two qualities [empathy and perseverance] – and the way they work together – are critical to long-term success. People can’t change whether they have a good head on their shoulders. If you have those two qualities – and a good head on your shoulders – I think good things will happen more often than not in whatever company or field that they choose to jump into. Hopefully it is jumping into some fertile soil where the culture and the objectives of the organization are things that you are passionate about and you feel like you’re part of the tribe and provides a very rich learning environment.
DON’T MISS: WHAT BAIN & COMPANY SEEKS IN MBAs
The post Executive Q&A: Bain’s Bob Bechek appeared first on Poets and Quants.
“You can’t expect customers to tune in only when you have a product to launch. You need to have a constant presence.” Prof. Mohan Sawhney on the power of advertising as a service, not an interruption: http://kell.gg/1qGcRJq
Hint: “Ask not how you can sell, but how you can help.”
Come & Live the IESE Executive Education Experience! AMP Open Day, April 8: http://bit.ly/1UU9aMm
PLD Open Day, April 29: http://bit.ly/1MAPivd
An average of 22 veterans commit suicide each day. Armed forces alumni at HBS participated in the 22 Pushups Challenge to honor those who serve and raise awareness for veteran suicide prevention.Are Stanford Graduate School of Business and The Wharton School up for the challenge? #22Pushups
#RiceMBA Julian Duncan ('06) leads the #global #marketing effort for one of the most influential figures in sport and culture, LeBron James.Read the FULL STORY in the new issue of #JonesJournal ---> http://bit.ly/JJSpring2016
The VIP Reception is underway at Heinz Field.
Who is headed to Cupid's Cup today to cheer on Javazen? Javazen is operated by Eric Golman ’15 (economics and environmental science), Ryan Schueler ’14 (marketing), Aaron Wallach ’14 (kinesiology and exercise science), and Yoni Razin ’14 (communication). Join the conversation at #CupidsCup. Details: http://ow.ly/10oFKp
A “superfood coffee blend” developed and sold by University of Maryland graduates is one of six finalists vying for more than $100,000 in total...
Key members of the MBA Women in Leadership Club discuss women in business and their experiences so far:
Comments
Post a Comment