aaron's blog

One of the greatest things about The Fisher College of Business is the level of engagement with the greater business community. One unique way Fisher brings the community into the graduate experience is the W. Arthur Cullman Executive Luncheon Series: giving graduate students an opportunity to interact in an intimate setting (lunches are capped at 10-14 students) with entrepreneurs and business leaders.

This Wednesday I attended my first Cullman Lunch with Jim Katzenberger currently an executive at Profit Performance Advisors, in Philadelphia. His consultancy focuses on helping business overcome their “growth inhibitors” and quickly growing businesses for exit events.

Jim’s varied experience includes stints at IBM, Razorfish/i-Cube, Cambridge Technology Partners, Bristlecone, Catalyst and being one of the first hundred employees at SAP. At SAP he saw the business grow from less to 100 employees to 2,000+ in less than two years. When asked what growth inhibitors SAP (now a $10 billion company with 50,000 employees) had at this stage, Jim cited the culture shift needed (particularly among the earliest employees) to move from a midsized to a large, flexible firm.

Finally, the signature “formula for growth” printed on the back on of Jim’s card is worth noting.

A(K + S) + GOALS = PBC => IR

Translated, this means Attitudes times Knowledge and Skills plus Goals equals Positive Behavioral Change leading to Improved Results.

Thanks again for coming to Jim for coming to visit Fisher this week. I have another Cullman lunch this week; look for a blog later in the week.

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life Blog.

A

This Wednesday my Managerial Economics class took our shot at the Wharton OPEQ simulation. OPEQ (a play on the Organization of Oil Producing Countries or OPEC) is a web-based economics simulation meant to demonstrate competition in cartels and game theory.

The concept is relatively simple. As a group, you compete against several other peer groups. Each group represents an oil-producing country in a mythical world. Each year (or round in this case), your country chooses how much oil to produce. The total profit your country makes in a year is a function of quantity and price; however, price has an inverse relationship to quantity available in your world (i.e. if you get too greedy, you end up making oil price very cheap and consequently cause everyone to make less money).

The only chance at winning is to try to get all the countries in the world to cooperate and restrain production. However, as we saw is almost every case, cooperation was impossible. The constricted communication (only a few emails back a forth) and forced anonymity made little incentive for cooperation. Even though our group started with good intentions, we ultimately finished in the bottom third of the class.

If you played OPEQ this week or have in the past, let me know what you thought? Find any winning strategies? (I am pretty convinced there aren’t any.)

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life Blog.

A

I spent the day yesterday in the “Careers in Marketing Boot Camp” at The Fisher College of Business. The Career Management Office organizes several boot camps throughout the fall covering the various careers that MBAs typically seek including: consulting, operations and logistics, marketing, finance, sustainability and real estate. The Marketing Boot Camp, which was generously sponsored by Nationwide Insurance, was a day-long seminar focused on career paths in marketing, networking strategies and interviewing techniques. Several alumni and marketers from local firms came to Fisher to share their experiences and take questions on their careers and firms.

The keynote speaker, Mr. Brad Davis, Vice President Nationwide Financial Individual Investments, gave an engaging (and sometimes humorous) but certainly informative presentation covering his experience in branding in the CPG (consumer packaged goods) industry and how that brought him to his position at Nationwide. The topics he covered were too numerous to summarize completely, but some of the highlights included:

• The balance between the science and art of marketing
• The concepts of “misattribution” and “consideration sets”
• The marketing cycle
• Marketing is Business and Business is Marketing: everyone owns a piece of establishing and nurturing a relationship with the customer

Once again thanks to Brad Davis, Nationwide, Jenny Heckscher, the Fisher Office of Career Management and everyone else that took the time to attend and answer questions: The Scotts Miracle-Grow Company, dunnhumbyUSA, Nestlé, Cardinal Health, Resource Interactive, Greif, Sterling Commerce, The Columbus Chapter of the American Marketing Association, The Fisher College of Business Marketing Faculty and second-year MBA students.

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life Blog.

A