It had to come to an end. A month of glorious holidays: meeting friends I’d neglected since last September; reading magazines, Christmas bestsellers, anything but case studies; and watching oodles of box-sets and movies. To ease myself back into MBA mode for Semester 2 – which according to cruel rumours was going to be even tougher than Semester 1 – the last cinema trip was to see ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.’ I’m not sure that much of the film would tally with our previous Business and Society module but it definitely sparked my interest for the upcoming Competitive Strategy and Corporate Finance modules!
Semester 2 kicked off at 9am on a rainy Saturday morning with a personal development seminar. We were presented with the results of survey No. 734* and I discovered that I’d been a lone ‘blue’ (altruistic – nurturing leadership style) in a team with three ‘reds’ (assertive-directing leadership style). On paper that combination shouldn’t work but somehow, in reality, it did. If I was to hypothesize, I’d say my team mates brought out my latent competitive streak, whereas I kept them from trying to outdo each other! However I think it’s mostly due to the fact that my former team mates are very hard working, smart, encouraging people, and good fun to be around.
One of the reasons I wanted to do an MBA was to see if – having worked in the non-profit sector for 10 years – I was up to the challenge of working with people from completely different professional backgrounds and mindsets. Being arbitrarily assigned to teams of people who you’ve never met before and being dependent on the team for a significant percentage of your overall results lets you meet that challenge head on. I was sorry that after getting on so well with my team in Semester 1 that we would now have to go our separate ways. All too abruptly we were assigned our new teams for the next 12 weeks. Nothing like an MBA for keeping you on your toes.
This time our new team have the benefit of knowing each other a little bit in advance. We’ve sussed each other out in class and we all implicitly know that working together is essential to success. We can get down to business quickly. Which is just as well as those rumours have proven correct: Semester 2 is tough. Brilliant, but tough. We’re less than a month in and all of us EMBA-ers are juggling work, multiple assignments, and a rainforest’s worth of readings. Not to mention the surveys. It’s a bit overwhelming, but luckily I’ve got another great team around me, a strong Wolf Pack.
*Possibly an exaggeration, but only a slight one.
EMBA Midweek 2015