UCD Smurfit MBA Blog

Posts Tagged ‘PPD Programme’

Coaching has been one of the most beneficial aspects of the UCD Smurfit MBA Personal Development Programme in my experience. It is something I was offered in the past, but did not take up at the time due to time pressures.

In Year 2 of the EMBA, there are three coaching sessions offered to every single EMBA student.  In these one-on-one sessions, I set out my goals and my plans for achieving them. In my case, this was my business plan. My coach acted as a sounding board and through the coach’s skilful questions, it challenged certain assumptions I held and encouraged me to tease out certain issues – challenges that I envisaged and how I planned to overcome them. The coach helped me pin down my preferences on the options that were before me.

Managers can sometimes get caught up in the day-to-day operational aspects of the business and neglect to come up for air and look at the big picture and where they should be heading.  Have the goalposts changed?  A few sessions with a professional business coach can help you to take stock and review your position and focus on getting to where you want to go next.

Kate Healy, EMBA 2010-12

One of the things that attracted me to the UCD Smurfit MBA over other post graduate business courses was the emphasis on personal development (PPD). Above all else, I wanted to find a course that stimulated me, challenged me and gave me new perspectives on the challenges we face in business.

We had the opportunity to do some personality tests back in SEM1 of YR1. I have done exercises like this in the past, which I did not find particularly enlightening. However, this was a whole different ball game. While I consider myself to be quite self-aware, I was surprised by some of the findings that arose from this period of personal discovery that occurs in the first phase of PPD.

Following one of the personality tests called Strength Deployment Inventory, we were put into groups with other individuals with similar personality types. I remember the group members looking at each other with quizzical expressions. We felt we were quite a diverse group and we were surprised that we shared similar traits. The facilitator went through the typical personality traits with us – our strengths, how those strengths could become weaknesses and how we tend to respond under pressure. He outlined factors to watch out for in terms of our interactions with other personality types.

Certain personality types have different preferences in terms of styles of communicating and making decisions. Some people like to have only high level information – they are the types of people who only want the key information in bullet points in an email. Others like to have much greater detail about the process of how something will work.

This type of knowledge about yourself and the people around you is very valuable in terms of how you work together effectively in managing Highly Effective Teams and progress issues.

Kate Healy, EMBA 2010-12

I learned of the passing of Steve Jobs at 1:32am IST. An email was sent out by one of my classmates stating “RIP Steve Jobs” with a YouTube video of his famous One More Thing tagline. Sadly, there will be no more “things” from Steve Jobs, but his legacy will live on for decades to come.

As an MBA student, Apple and Steve Jobs are regular players in many of our classroom discussions. I have only been in the program for a little over 4 weeks and am already at a loss to count how many times he has been used an example. Whether we are discussing the attributes of a good presenter, strategy in supply chain management, or innovative thinking, he can be used to illustrate any of these points, for better or worse.

The irony that he never actually completed more than a semester of college while we are all spending thousands of Euro/Dollars/Rupees, etc. is not lost on us. It seems to be in line within the pattern that the greatest innovative thinkers of today (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg) are not born in a classroom. Perhaps even, arguably the opposite.

Last week one of my MBA colleagues sent out the famous Stanford graduation speech as motivational reminder of the strength of perseverance (most likely in the face of our first group paper for Corporate Financial Reporting which had many of us rethinking our decision to pursue an MBA). This speech got me thinking about the leadership style of Steve Jobs, and how it both hurt and helped him in his professional journey. Read the rest of this entry »

Networking is one of those words that started out sounding interesting and catchy and came to mean the soulless pursuit of people you can manipulate into thinking you like them and use to achieve your own objectives. Nowadays, only people with fangs and razor-sharp claws participate in ‘networking’.  Even in an MBA programme that is ranked in the Financial Times as one of the world’s best, networking started as a bad word, whispered only in dark corners of hidden corridors.

A wise man (my dad) once told me that he thought that out of all of his clients built up over his more than 20 year career, the ones that ended up staying with him were the ones that, had he just met them in the street, would have ended up being his friends anyway.  After spending several years in marketing, sales and PR, that’s how I see networking.  It’s just meeting as many people as you can to find out with which you might share a connection.  You meet a person, you like them, you might even become friends, and then they are in your network.  It’s easy.  It’s fun.  If you do it right, it will make your life better and happier.  Why then, does the term ‘networking’ get such bad reactions? Read the rest of this entry »