Finally, the term 1 of our course is over. This week was primarily a revision week in terms of academic activity. This means that the lecturers review the entire learning and explain the important points that students should remember from their teaching.
In terms of non-academic activity, I got a small start to a proposed project on "Peace Index". More importantly we started a small initiative called MBA Oath in Cranfield, and even though the schools expectation is to get about 10 people to sign the oath, we took the initiative to take it beyond that and get over 30% of the cohort to sign it. At 30% level, Cranfield gets to be recognized as a chapter school in the project and I think personally this will be a significant achievement for NetImpact Club this year (incidentally I am leading the NetImpact effort in Cranfield). We formed a leadership team for this effort and I am quite happy about the progress so far.
As a team we completed the Operations Presentation and Report, OB Report and the Statistics Project and overall we are very happy about the output, we also got some of the results for our group projects and we were at about average, I am not very unhappy but some members of my team were unhappy, but the common lesson from all the projects till now is that we just missed the question, and kept on answering (or responding to) what we thought was the question, this is a significant learning that we need to carry forward.
During the OB session I got 9 positive feedback from members, I am very happy about this because it was time constrained and only 5 of the 9 was compulsory :).
I also attended a "Graduation day" event conducted by the Executive MBA batch and learnt a few things from experienced entrepreneurs and CEOs about leadership. The common theme for me was Leadership is all about forming a strategy, finding the right people to execute the strategy and motivating them, executing the strategy. Looking inward, I am probably walking my hard journey in the second point (people). Having my business model as a framework to understand these concepts is helping me a lot.
I found a lot of interesting articles on entrepreneurship and one article (from twitter) (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-best-startup-fail-stories-of-all-time-2010-10#) gave a lot of insights into typical failures in entrepreneurship. Since most of them are narrated by the founder or co-founder themselves, I think this is a very interesting and thought provoking topic.
I also read the book "Outliers", a very interesting observation into success and how people succeed. Another interesting observation from the book is that the author argues that 10000 hours of effort into anything makes you an expert in it. I somehow agree with him that 10000 hours of proper (with an expert, and a structure) training makes you an expert, but I have personal examples of 10000 wasted hours :) .
Everyone around me is focussed on exams (except a very few). I think examination is just a test of your understanding and if you havent understood the course, you ought to fail, but I think overall I have learnt a lot from this course and as far as using these concepts to decision making is concerned I would do a decent job if not a perfect job at it. This approach makes me take exams in a cool manner. I just dont want to take it too easily.
Many times during the table tennis play sessions, I lost my temper and I think this is a bad trend, I need to take some actions to stop this outburst as for any onlooker it looks as if I cannot keep cool, whereas it is just a venting exercise from my side. I need to work on other means of venting out feelings in any team setting (informal, formal, sport anything).
A major development in my foreseeable future happened during this week, the UK abolished Tier 1 as a category of visa and have also planned to scrap the post study work visa system. This way my chances of staying on in the UK after the education are getting slimmer and slimmer. Even though I am not very keen on staying here for a long time, it would have been a better scenario if the option were to be available and then not take it rather than the chance itself being denied.
Personally, my home loan got repaid this week, a major change in my expense pattern - I dont have to pay mortgage and I also have enough cash now to repay all my educational loan commitments in the bank. This feels good, even though I have decided to sell off the house that I owned (the only real estate that I bought), I am not too worried as we have another "home" in Trivandrum.
Overall a week of mixed feelings, some good news, some bad news, let me hope that the next week is good (after all exams have to be good :) )
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