I’ve been neglecting this latest school update for too long!
In December I finished the two classes I was taking in the Fall 2009 quarter: Marketing Strategies and Negotiation in Organizations. Both were excellent courses I highly recommend, lets dig into the details.
MGB 248: Marketing Strategies with Olivier Rubel
Official course description: Covers strategic marketing decisions, those that have a long-term impact on the organization and are difficult and costly to reverse. These include selecting product markets and customers; developing and communicating main benefit propositions for the chosen customers, including product features, quality, services; and developing competitive and cooperative strategies to successfully market products and services. The focus will be on the entire decision-making process, which starts by collecting and analyzing information about the external and internal environment of the organization.
The real course description: Strategy analysis from a quantitative perspective. Entry/exit, innovation, diffusion. Lots of game theory and “what would the competitors do if you do this?”
The professor: Olivier is refreshingly blunt and to the point. He cares about the students and how they learn, and if that means interrupting someone who has been talking for too long, he’ll do it. He is obviously passionate about the subject matter, and there were a few times in class he delivered some serious breakthroughs – pulling together concepts we’ve been learning all along into specific teachable moments.
The course: The course was numerically based – awesome when compared to all the other ’soft’ marketing courses – and some classmates found it difficult. I really enjoyed taking a math-based approach to marketing efforts. The two cases we did were very interesting and the in-class discussion was extensive. There was a team project component that was interesting, but seemed like it was ‘tacked on’ to the course.
Marketing strategies was a lot of work. The readings alone measured more than an inch think, and when coupled with the textbook and the cases it was a lot to digest. The amount of material we were required to have read for each class was sometimes a little overwhelming.
The grade: I got an A+. I give the instructor and the class an A+. Highly recommended.
MGB 246: Negotiation in Organizations with Barry Miller
Official course description: This course is designed to help students develop the ability to effectively negotiate in a competitive business environment. It focuses on negotiation skill-building in the areas of individual conflict management, team management, performance appraisal, corporate impression management and inter-organizational project management. The course will be taught largely through in-class simulations to provide an opportunity for experiential learning. The simulations will also allow students to develop a personal style of negotiation by discovering what works best for them in different situations.
The real course description: Analysis of negotiation skills. Negotiation exercises. A lot of insightful journal-keeping and analysis of personal negotiation events.
The professor: Barry has a warm personality and was generally a passive observer of our exercises. Much of his feedback was about the grammatical content of the journals we kept, and I felt like I would have liked a little more thorough examination of negotiation strategies. While we dissected several negotiations and examined the individual components, weighted the value attributed to them by each party, and discussed the cases, we were not as thorough as I would have liked.
I was hoping that the negotiation exercises we did in class would have had more post-exercise analysis applied to them. I think it would have been valuable to identify the tactics that worked, and to figure out how to overcome some of the stumbling blocks that some groups found themselves trapped by.
The grade: I got an A. I give Barry and the class an A-.
Winter 2010:
While December should have been super relaxing, Sara and I spent our free time buying a house. We actually were in escrow on two properties at the same time, and through sheer determination and some excellent negotiation, we got the house we wanted at a fantastic price. I’m happy to report that I even negotiated a price reduction from Bank of America on a bank-owned property! No one believed it was possible, but maybe Barry’s Negotiation course was better than I thought. I should give it an “A” instead.
In the Winter 2010 quarter I’ll be taking an Executive Leadership Seminar course and a class on Technology Competition and Strategy.
