Hi again guys,
We're now in the 5th teaching block (out of a total 6 blocks) and i guess it is now a time to look back and review what we've been through so far. having completed 2/3rd of the course work we have now seen various professors, events and courses. So i will share my views on them in this series of posts. Today's post covers block 1.

Block #1: (Sep -Oct 07)

1. International Management (Winfried Ruigrok): My key take away from the course was an understanding of the cultural differences between international organisations and the most significant tool i learnt was the Hofstede's index. which gives u a fair idea of what to expect when going to a new international business environment. also got to know the various organisational structures and found the matrix to be quite interesting.

Winfried is a pleasing personality and tries different ways (like fun exercises) to get his points across. But the course had every possible assessment (research paper, exam, presentation blah blah..) making it too much of hardwork not all of which was useful.

2. Finance and Accounting (Fleming Ruud): My key take aways were an understanding of the balance sheet, some tricks of the trade that are used to play with balance sheet figures. What i really learnt was to look at numbers from a CEO perspective.

Fleming has the ability to make problems and discussions very simple and uses a basic table format to analyse and evaluate balance sheets. For a guy like me with no accounting background this was a big help! Fleming also has a fine sense of humour.

The course however is too intensive and covers 25+ chapters of the Needles accounting book in a course of just 30 hours!!! roughly 1.2 hours per chapter!!!! As a result u kill urself reading the book and dealing with the coursework the big exam and presentations. Huh! I went out of breadth trying to keep up with the pace of the course.

3. Marketing Management (Marcus Shoegel): The key takeaway from this course was STP (segmenting, targetting and positioning). We did a BMW case study (Warning: but so did our predecessors!!). I liked the two sessions by Andreas Herrmann which brought in some metrics for analysing consumer preferences.

Marcus as i have mentioned earlier is quite animated with his teaching and keeps u wide awake with his antics. He is an impressive lecturer with great showmanship. However, besides STP, I didn't find much substance in the course which was laden with too many european examples of brand names and hence was not international enough.

While marketing might be very vague or difficult to quantify, what i did not learn (and wanted to) was how would I as a CEO devise metrics to gauge whether the marketing initiatives planned would be effective or not. Also, what factors should govern the channel and media for advertising campaigns and product retail. If I am putting in money, I need to know whether it is going to be spent well!

In my opinion the best course in block #1 was clearly Finance and accounting. Lets see what the verdict of the next and coming intakes will be.