MBA Day 2

After a great start to our Mannheim course on the 14th of September, Day II was where we really started to get to know our class mates. Our class is made up of 58 people from over 20 countries. The diversity is striking and will make for fantastic social and learning opportunities. Like my time at St Mark's the first week is a very intense "people" experience. Perhaps that is more of a reflection on me but meeting so many people is always a big task. My favourite part of today, slightly more enjoyable than taking part, was watching everything today! People watching is a passion!! From all the backgrounds, from all the difference work experiences, from all the different ages and egos and ambitions, it was fascinating to watch us join in groups and attempt to solve difference, somewhat trivial problems. Our first attempt in Team Orange (no coincidence to Fat Club at all!) was pretty ordinary. We had far too many chiefs and even then the chiefs were fighting for group supremecy not just fighting over the problem. It wasn't long before we were able to break some of this personal styles down allowing for later problems to be solved much more efficiently. Even then our last task of the day was to create a group celebration move. With 56 (two have already left to Warwick Uni) people trying to work this out, forgetting how we had spoken about group team dynamics, our leader for the day Will Smail must have been thinking he had really failed. We had been discussing the importance of creating a chair or speaker for each group, defining the tasks, defining group rules and then working out a plan to implement it. Although we used that successfully in earlier tasks, the last task of the day was ironically the biggest failure! Nevermind. It was a great day and I think we learnt a huge amount allbeit having to do this via clique team building things.

This evening we received a great company presentation from AT Kearney. They are a multi discipline global management consulting firm. They were clearly prepared for the bombardment of the general consensus critiscism of management consulting firms. The usual critiscism of 'work-life balance', 'advice is no good without implementation', 'burnout rate' of consultants and financial crisis issues were all covered. I think they would have been expecting it but in any case they answered things very well. My limited experience working in a management consulting firm but more speaking with former McKinsey-ites, BCG and Bain consultants all ring true with what was discussed tonight. It's still on my target list for many of the positives so we'll see. The active recruitment process was very impressive and meeting the five consultants was most enjoyable.