I had a great time at my MBA graduation yesterday. It was strange visiting Heriot-Watt, the university I’ve been studying with for the last few years and where I had never been before. I had seen photos and pictures so some images rang a bell, but it was great to actually walk through the corridors and see people in the flesh. The ceremony also brought home how truly international the EBS MBA is. There were graduands from all around the world and I was proud to be one of them.

The graduation was pretty inspirational with an honorary doctorate being presented to Douglas Anderson OBE for his outstanding contribution to engineering design and medical instrumentation.

I’ll be uploading some photos soon to show everything, I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts from the day.

(photo at the side is the front-entrance at the university)

photo credit: john curley

Yesterday, I received a letter in the post; a letter I’ve been expecting for a few weeks now. It confirmed that I had all the requirements to get my MBA and that I graduate in November! I was over the moon! It’s nice to know that all the effort I poured into it has paid off and now I can relax properly.

It’s been quite a journey and I must say I’m pleased at how much I’ve picked up along the way. The topic I enjoyed most was probably either Marketing or Influence; but the topic that seems to have impacted me most was Economics. It made me realise how economies are really just big processing systems, with inputs and outputs and processes in the middle. It also made me realise how most politicians have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. It amazes me how people are elected to run a country based primarily on their charisma rather than their understanding how a country should be run. Having said that, I really wouldn’t like to be in a politicians shoes, especially when harsh realities of having to decide who gets what hit home. Still, if politics were as well-defined as IT Process Automation, than anyone could do it I suppose; still .. not my game though.

Anyway, glad my MBA is behind me .. did someone ask about a DBA?

The reality is, I probably wouldn’t have time to use them this much. I’m a bit maxed out at the moment with studying to my MBA final exams, messing around with various websites, juggling things at work and spending time with family.

Still, it’s always nice to dream.

Do you have any kit your dream about owning one day?

We are all familiar, I hope, with how advertisements refer not to ‘low wages’ but always to ‘good prospects’, and how buyers speak not of ‘oneoff low priced orders’ but vaguely of ‘the possibilities of high volume purchases’. The ‘Chinese widget deal’ is an extreme example of the ‘sell cheap, get famous’ ploy. In this version the Chinese buyer places his demand for a low price in the context that there are a billion people in China. True, but the two facts of a low price and a large population are not necessarily connected. My advice is that if you sell yourself and your products cheap, you will get exactly what you demonstrate you think they are worth.

It’s quite interesting I came across this, as someone was talking to a friend of mine this weekend about wanting a special price for a product because he had 700 potential customers lined up. So, how do you deal with a potentially lucrative offer like this? Well, what we did was offer him a deal where he would have made a substantial profit if he really had 700 clients. Turns out he didn’t quite buy into it, which suggests that he didn’t really quite have 700 clients ready to take it on.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes this ploy can help pull in customers in a way where they can try out your service. I can think of a couple of companies that do card printing who offer cheap or free introductory offers to get customers to try out their products. These are more than just ploys though, because they are quite transparent as to how their subsequent services are priced.

In the UK we constantly watch government spokespeople and employers fall into the trap of reinforcing the behaviour of difficult negotiators, though, no doubt, they feel they are undermining it. A strike takes place, for example, and government spokespeople queue up to tell the media just how ‘damaging’ the strike is to the country and to the strikers. They appear to think that the strikers – behaving in just about as difficult a way as they can – will heed these warnings and return to normal working. They have the opposite effect. The strikers interpret the warnings of the ‘damage’ they are doing as confirmation that their behaviour is having some effect: ‘If our strike is causing these important people to notice what we are doing and to inform us of the damaging effects of our actions, then we must be doing the right things to get our grievances addressed’. This usually prompts the pseudo game of passing the blame and responsibility for the alleged damage of the strike to the other side: ‘Increase our wages and we will stop striking and if you don’t do this then you are to blame for the damages caused by the strike’.

However, if the spokespeople were to shut up about the strike itself and were to concentrate instead on the disputed issues, they would weaken the commitment of the strikers to persisting with their actions. Keeping workers on strike is a difficult task for the union and it must continually reinforce the employees’ solidarity with assurances that their actions are having an effect, in order to stop erosion of support for strike action among the employees. Strikes can crumble quickly when their actions have no perceived effects.

I’m glad I took this course. It’s quite insightful and I’m really enjoying Gavin Kennedy (the author)’s writing style.

If we negotiate because we value things differently, it is in the bargaining phase that we focus on the differing valuations. Nothing, absolutely nothing, should be given away, no matter how little it is worth to you. The paradox of bargaining is that those things that are worth little, or less, to you in themselves, could be worth a great deal to you in the bargaining phase if they are worth more to the other negotiators. The form of the bargain is the conditional offer, and the tradables available to the negotiators are the potential content of the conditional offers.

Great paragraph huh?

Now it’s time to turn my sights on my final 2 exams, Influence and Negotiation. I’m planning to do these in June, so there’s even less time to prepare for these. I know it’s tight, almost like doing going on a crash diet without any weight loss pills, but I know that with enough determination and hard work I can do it! Wish me luck, with a generous helping of that I’ll finish my MBA soon!

• Legitimate Power The power your superior has due to his position within the organisation. This is formal power delegated to a particular role.
• Reward Power: The power someone has to allocate rewards. This is normally associated with legitimate power, but other individuals may have this power over you though fulfilling some other desire you may have.
• Coercive Power: The ability to withhold rewards or punish in some way. Often carries negative connotations as can be demoralising and build resentment
• Referent Power: The ability to be charismatic and attract others. This is quite a personal quality rather than based on a person’s role within the organisation
• Expert Power: Power derived from the experience or expert knowledge someone may have. A subtle flavour of this is Information Power, where someone is well-informed or hold important information that may help attain your goals.

Interesting huh?

I think the most interesting section talked about different trends in executive rewards, and how the different components of these rewards are gauged and presented. I don’t know if it’s because it’s so different to most of the reward systems I’ve experienced, but I found it pretty fascinating. Anyway, back to try and and understand better the differences between Scanlon Plans and Rucker Plans ..