Week 28: Finance Strategy, Managing IT, Negotiations&Conflict Management, International Business and Strategic Implementation (Module 6 cont.)

Week 28. Classes are pretty much at an end for this module except for a few days next week. Then the final exams and final papers. I can't believe it is still so warm here. It was actually raining yesterday. Registration for specialization courses after Christmas was this week and the Business Week rankings came out.

Without further ado, here is what went on this week:

MBA 853 Strategic Implementation & Change:

• Lectures on culture change levers, influence and persuasion
• All day change simulation. Check it out at http://www.experiencepoint.com/. A lot of business schools use this simulation. It was pretty cool. You read the "change model" and "players guide" then, as a team, we planned out our change strategy and which "tools/tactics" to use to implement them. Each tactic required money and time. We had $500,000 and 78 weeks to reach a better than 60% buy-in for our changes strategy.
• Team assignment based on learnings from the simulation. In addition each team must create their own framework for change.
• Individual assignments returned
• Our prof was a little disappointed that the class didn't prep the case for one of our lectures, but we are just loaded to the hilt and it couldn't be helped
• The books used for this course were " The Heart of Change" by John Kotter and "Execution" by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan

MBA 840 IT Strategy:

• Lectures on delivering IT solutions and developing IT leaders
• More team presentations on a emerging technologies. Every class we have 2 of these presentations. The topics covered by the end next week will be: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Mashups, Web 2.0, Blogs, Location-aware technologies, Grid Computing, VoIP, Social Computing, Electronic Ink/Digital Paper, Paper Batteries, Speech Recognition, Biometrics and Wearable Computing.
• Every class has a mini-case associated with it that must be equal to or less than 250 words

MBA 851 Negotiations & Conflict Management:

• Lecture on the Cuban Missile Crisis Negotiations
• Another "live" negotiation assignment. Everyone received an envelope a few days prior and had to prep their side. Then we are given 40 minutes to negotiate with a pre-arranged partner to see what we come up with. This time we weren't supposed to get a settlement, but almost the entire class did, meaning they didn't honour their client's wishes.
• Session where each team presented the business negotiation styles and practices of a country of their choice. Countries discussed were: South Africa, Japan, Israel, China, Switzerland, South Korea, Russian, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Iran, Germany, Turkey, and Spain.
• Text for this is "getting to yes" and "essentials of negotiation, 4th edition"
• Submission of topics for the final paper where each student must analyse a past negotiation with the concepts and methods taught in the class

MBA 854 International Business:

• Lecture that had a team present the "Life, Death, and Property Rights: The Pharmaceutical Industry Faces AIDS in Africa (HBS 9-702-049)" case and whether IP rights should be changed. Every lecture a team presents the case assigned and frames the topics the professor wishes to be discussed.
• Students should have chosen a country to write their final paper on by next week. This research intensive paper is on how the student thinks the country will be effected by the current economic crisis and what will be the future ramifications.

MBA 822 Finance Strategy:

• No more lectures, but there is a tutorial session next week that Dr. Wang has been kind enough to put on
• Final next week.

This weekend there is an internal case competition to decide the team that will represent Queen's at the John Molson Strategy Case Competition in January 2009. In addition there are various working sessions for team work. Of course everyone will be starting to study for exams and beginning their final papers.