MBA 850: Leadership
Letter from Peter R. Richardson welcoming us and explaining that MBA 850 Leadership is one of a quite a few courses on "the role of the general manager". Although it sounds as though he will be involved with us in this aspect, MBA 850 will be taught by Bill Blake. He refers to the selected reading that have been sent.
MBAS 876: The Role of the General Manager
Course outline from Professor Peter Richardson. He refers specifically to a few of the selected readings while outlining the course and discussing the topic at some length. This outline goes on to specify the first assignment and it's due date of May 14th! I haven't even started and I feel behind, but it is exciting that this is ACTUALLY happening!
The selected reading that were sent for both of these courses are:
- The Manager's Job: Folklore and Fact (by Henry Mintzberg. Published by Hardvard Business Review ("HBR"))
- What Leaders Really Do (by John P. Kotter. Published by HBR)
- Blue Ocean Strategy (by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Published by HBR)
- Strategy as Revolution (by Gary Hamel. Published by HBR)
A brief memo detailing "preparing of the first accounting course" and the "Finance and Accounting Workbook: 6th edition" from Queen's Executive Development Centre were sent. The memo, from Professor John Moore, discusses how to use the workbook and the specific chapters that should be focused on. At the moment I am about half way through the workbook and plan to complete all of it. After my discussions with the candidates I chose to have lunch with during my interview trip, one of their two suggestions of what they would do differently was to, "complete all the prep material in advance." The other suggestion was show up a week in advance of classes to get settled since the program starts off at an aggressive pace right from day one.
The workbook is excellent since it starts with the assumption that the reader knows absolutely nothing about accounting. Although parts of the first chapter are obvious to the point of being boring, I know that it is covering everything I need to know so that the professor can assume all the students have this basic knowledge level and can build off of it.
One criticismI have is that there are quite a few obvious typo's that simply reading the workbook, prior to publishing, would have found. It doesn't affect the clarity of the information or my ability to understand it, but it is annoying. Someone should suggest they have a graduate English student read it and circle all the items that could be fixed. That way it would be someone totally unfamiliar with the text and the mistakes would stick out!
The later chapters quickly become more interesting as tools, techniques and more complicated topics are introduced. My biggest struggle so far has been adapting to the "accounting speak" given my engineering background. Being an engineer I expect a certain type of logic, but the wording of certain accounting actions sometimes seems to contradict this logic. I'm sure it is just a matter of getting a better understanding of accounting and the language used to describe it so that I can correctly interpret the various transactions in the practice quizzes.
Enough! Back to the books!
