MBET Blog
River
They say you can never step in the same river twice.
UW doesn't seem to be the same school I attended all those years ago. I always thought the Economics department taught economics. Odd assumption that - although I never took an econ course, so perhaps I didn't really have the appropriate data. But somehow they slipped in
'Principles of Entrepreneurship' and
'Business Finance'. Hm. I thought the science department turned out... well, you get the idea. But they've got
Science & Business,
Biotechnology & Economics and the oddest pairing of all
Biotechnology & Chartered Accountancy. There's a business school hidden here underneath the more well-known programs like Engineering & Computer Science. Is this academic entrepreneurship? Where's this school going to be in another ten years? This should be interesting to watch.
World's Worst Blogger
So, last night I'm reading
The Ingenuity Gap, which is a great book - at least the first 20 or so pages. And I'm thinking all these deep thoughts. They needed to get blogged. Much like when you eat a lot of red meat you have to do something with all that stuff inside you.
But, unlike eating red meat, when I awoke in the morning, the bowels of my mind were empty. Damn. I don't have easy internet access where I live so I can't blog all my deep thoughts immediately. Anyone know a good off-line tool that's compatible with Blogger? There should be lots - right? Mail me if you know.
Reality
So here's the idea: It's For
Love or Money but with one entrepreneur and fifteen venture capitalists. Or maybe the other way around - maybe fifteen people with business plans and one VC. Anyway, they'd date, live in the mansion, everything. But in the end - only one person gets to fund (or get the funding). Too bad reality TV didn't get big before the dot-com crash. Man, what a match.
Pimpin'
So, I wonder how many hits I can get of I start linking to other blogs that track backlinks. Like
David's.
Blojsom is a pretty cool blogging server, but for those of us without the patience to set everything up ourselves, there's always Blogspot.
Free Stuff
So Pyra/Google is giving everyone
Blogger Pro now. Which includes spell check. And their dictionary doesn't contain "Pyra" "Google" or "Blogger". Hm. Might want to check that out guys.
Time
Three days into the program I've come to a conclusion. The most important skill that I'm going to need to master - time management. It's not the big projects that are going to sink you in this program, it's the dozen or so small ones.
Pick a company that IPO'ed in the last 12 months, do a very short presentation on why it's interesting and we'll follow everyone's picks all year. Summarize a chapter from "
Entrepreneurship as Strategy" - which is no mean feat. Do your vison and objectives for yourself in the course. Analyze a local (K/W-Guelph-Cambridge) technology company. Do a bajillion accounting exercises, deconstructing & constructing balance sheets.
Prof. Armitage did the "
big rocks" demo for the class in orientation week to remind us that we'll need to keep our priorities in order during this year. Me, I plan to work all week and take the weekends off to hang with my shorties (and wife of course). Which is probably do-able. The problem - it's not that I didn't put the big rocks in first. It's that the sand keeps getting poured down my throat.
*hack*
Learning to Learn
One of the very first speakers we had, the CEO of
Konvergeandknow, spoke about "learning to learn". He's apparently also the MBET "Executive in Residence". Maybe we'll catch him shuffling around the CBET offices in his fuzzy bunny slippers. I'm not sure exactly what "in residence" means.
One of the key elements of "learning to learn" is processing your learning experiences. So that's what I'll try to do here.
The Structure
So I might as well write something actually about the MBET program. You can check at the
CBET website to see the
structure of the program, but it still may not seem all that clear.
There are 10
courses, 3 modules and a bunch of projects. The courses are (with shortened names):
- Strategic Management
- Marketing
- Operations
- Management
- Accounting
- finance
- Law
- Tax
- E-Business
- Applications of IT
The modules are sort of catch-all sessions which cover presentation skills, business plan writing and "business skills", which includes negotiation and some other things.
The prjects are where the rubber meets the road though and it's through these projects that the MBET program is trying to distinguish itself from all the other MBA schools out there - even the ones with a technology focus like
Queen's. The 3 4-month terms are organized along the lines of a growing company - seed/concept, product development and market expansion. So the business planning will expand as the year passes, encompassing more and more. Which is cool.
It's hard to compare the MBET program to an MBA, at least from a student's on-the-ground perspective. I have an ex-co-worker who's at
Schulich and started this fall (Sept 2003) as well, so maybe we can compare notes.
SnipSnap
SnipSnap is an awesome group blogging tool. Sort of blog meets wiki. Well, maybe more wiki. Anyway, one of the other MBET students set up a group site using SnipSnap and it's pretty slick.
Buy My Book
Amazon.com: Books: Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4 Bible
I worked on this book along with a a great author team. I just gotta plug it. Working in Java? J2EE? Using Weblogic or WebSphere? Tomcat? Buy this book. Buy buy buy.
The Big O
Man, do they keep you busy around this place. Last week was orientation week. I hadn't expected much, as my
undergrad engineering orientation consisted primarily of getting a t-shirt which I wore non-stop for a week, getting oatmeal dumped on me at about 10 AM the very first morning and a lot of beer drinking. But that was along time ago.
Here at MBET, we got to go through about the same number of team building exercises that it took me a few years to get at a real job. We learned about learning to learn and heard from a handful of speakers from local businesses. We learned about protecting our intellectual property.
All in all it was a good week but way too busy. I nearly went through a whole pad of paper - for orientation week! This week will be the real example of how the rest of the term is going to shape up.
I Hate Blogs
Why write a blog? Normally I hate blogs. They're often self-absorbed, navel-gazing exercises in bad
writing. Some are good. Some people are as good as professional journalists (
who are by no means a golden standard) and have insightful things to say. Some blogs are exercises in
bizzare minimalism. Some are just about
life.
The one positive thing I can say about blogs is that the process of creating them is useful, even if actually have them isn't. It's a good way to learn to write. I hope. And that's why I have my blog. Not to really tell anyone about what I've done - as I don't have any pretensions that anyone cares whatsoever - but as a record for me. And not just me writing for myself, but potentially for an audience. You can do as many dry runs as you want but, in speaking, nothing compares to being in front of an audience. So it is with writing. So I have a blog. May god have mercy on my soul.
What is MBET?
The
Master’s of Business, Entrepreneurship & Technology is a new program at the
University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It’s run by the new
Center for Business, Entrepreneurship & Technology. Smart people but perhaps a bit repetitive in their naming. And no, contrary to the opinion of some of my friends, the MBET has nothing to do with the slightly more well known
BET. The MBET program is sort of a one-year technology MBA program, sort of. The MBET faculty has been fairly clear that they want to differentiate this program from traditional MBA programs. I won’t repeat all their points here, you can go
read them yourself. But after one day of orientation I can say that the structure is interesting and non-traditional. Non-traditional doesn’t automatically equate with being good but at least it shows that there’s been a lot of thought put into that the program does and doesn’t need. What do people want to get out of an MBET? Enough knowledge to go and start a business, specifically in the work of technology. Unlike a lot of MBA students (or at least what I perceive of MBA students) no one here wants to go into investment banking or any of the “traditional” MBA careers. Anyway, for me, MBET is the next year of my life. I think I’ll know what MBET is in about 12 months.
