As I write this update on the couch on Sunday night, it is a good chance to reflect on week 1. We had 5 subjects kick off. I will provide a little summary of what happened.
- Organisational leadership. We had 2x1.5 hour sessions (as we do each week for the ten week term) this week. I call them sessions rather than lectures as they are very interactive rather than being one way. This week we covered the fundementals for Organisational Leadership. The sessions are very applied and already I can see application in my workplace. The sessions are also designed to give us the tools to be better leaders. Key things this week include how much the context - such as social, environmental and economic factors can impact individuals, groups and organisations to make leadership challenging. Also we investigated 'Intelligent Career Theory' which highlighted interrelationship of different types of knowledge: Knowing why; Knowing how and; Knowing who.
- Statistics and decision tools. In our sessions this week we really got into descriptive stats. The delivery of the concepts was good but what was the highlight was teaching us to do the elements in Excel as we go. Very useful and gave us a useful array of templates to utilise in real world situations.
- Investment and global financial markets. I was fearful of this as I have never really done anything like this before, however the sessions really broke the major concepts of the fundamentals of corporate finance such as present value, net present value and perpetuities. It is an area of business that has operated all around me but never really understood it. Interesting stuff as I now know what those VC guys are talking about!
- Economics. Another subject I had little knowledge of however wished I had studied this earlier. The study of decision making where there is scarcity is something I could of used. We kicked this week with all the basic principles to maker good economic decisions. Some of it is common sense but some of it has made me look at the world in a different way. I have begun to look at decisions with an economist's perspective - I am a nerd I know!
- Strategy Implementation. This was a one hour session that introduced a course stream that will run across the entire course. It is all case study based which is great. We investigate a case study and using the information only contained in the case study to make recommendations. Everything is syndicate based - ie we work in teams, (I will explain how the Otago MBA syndicates work in a later post) except the final exams. We chose two case studies to dissect but later in the year we do a live case study on an actual business - looks challenging!
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