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(tags: entrepreneurship)
Archive for May, 2006
31
May
links for 2006-05-31
30
May
links for 2006-05-30
29
May
links for 2006-05-29
26
May
links for 2006-05-26
So this term I’m taking on three subjects
- Leadership and Change with Amanda Sinclair
- Negotiations with Mara Olekalns and
- Organisational Strategy with Charles Snow (HyperIntensive – held over a couple of weekends)
Leadership and Change appears to be the most challenging of this lot, although I can’t speak of Organisational Strategy as I haven’t started it yet.
Setting the scene: The class sits around in a circle and talks about an open ended question about Leadership, with no guidance or instruction from the Lecturer and three facilitators strategically poised in various positions around the circle dutifully taking notes…
After an awkward hour or so, A deconstruction from the Lecturer and facilitators.
There was an accusation of a faction appearing between full time and part time students during the conversation.
In some ways, this is just a microcosm of overall life at the business school. It seems to me that full timers feel inferior to part timers simply because of the fact that part timers have a job and full timers hope to get one at the end of the course. It’s an aspiration for full timers – a clear goal or right of passage that is supposed to the end of the MBA for a full timer.
Maybe they forget that most people do a part time MBA because they hate their day job and are looking for a career change either up, sideways or down a completely different path altogether.
22
May
links for 2006-05-22
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(tags: hardware)
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I think everyone would agree that Google’s Web Toolkit announcement stole the limelight from all others. Developers were jazzed by the prospect of AJAX made trivial for Java developers. The message they received was “write a Java app, and we’ll conver(tags: java SoftwareDevelopment)
21
May
Balanced Time Management
Perhaps the greatest challenge I have faced thus far doing this course is trying to juggle competing demands on my work, uni and home lives. I decided pretty early on that University education would sit 2nd in my priority queue, after my home life. Work would be third – so during planning for an upcoming week, I would try and fit work around my home and uni life. Work is a fixed period of my time – conservatively, pretty much 8-5 every day, with some opportunity to break for study. So its difficult to have the flexibility needed as the weekly planning session needs to work around this fixed variable.
The hardest bit of all is not taking on extra projects or tasks…at Work. Opportunties inevitably present themselves in every organisation, and the one I currently work for is no different. However I know if I choose to take on more than I do, my uni and home life will suffer, which I don’t want.
Its incredibly frustrating though as you know things could be run better, and the MBA learning amplifies the identification of opportunties to improve, but you can’t take on the extra load without something else suffering.
There comes a time in every technologist, programmer, nerd, geek, propellerheads, whatever career when he/she has to work out what he/she wants to do next . Do I try and get more technical and become a technical architect of some kind and catch the message bus to some technical promised land where there are fields of server farms and polymorphic sheep ? Or do I enter general management and become obsessed with margins, MER’s and sucking arse? Or is it something else entirely?
I think the Information Technology technologist community is more or less broken down into the following camps:
Lifers: These people love programming and its all they want to do. They are happy rolling in at 9, programming all day, eating junk food, and leaving at 5. These people go home and play world of warcraft and prefer little if any social contact.
Butterflys: These people come into the industry thinking there is money somewhere within it, flit around pretending they know something or care about technology, all the while drawn to the cash and nothing else. These people wear nice clothes and tell all their friends they are in IT management. All the while their colleagues completely disrespect them.
Believers: These people care about technology. And want to be more. But don’t like politics or sucking arse.So they spend their time whingeing about how they hate management.
CashKids: This lot do it for the money. Nothing else. They roll in, may or may not know anything about IT. Pick up the pay check and go home to play soccer or whatever else gives them their real life meaning.
19
May
Its about the people…
Without a doubt, the best part of doing an MBA is the people you meet. From a diverse array of backgrounds and experiences, opportunity develops from brilliant people who care about their education.
