Business school is challenging, and attending part-time while working full-time is even tougher. Don’t get me wrong, each assignment is reasonable and the tests and exams aren’t too difficult, it’s the cumulative effect of case studies and textbooks and textpacks and optional (read: not optional) readings and group projects and homework and tests and quizzes and exams.

After twelve classes in six quarters I can report that most of my classmates are feeling the burn. We spend our lunch and dinner hours talking about free time, about vacations we want to take, about hobbies we’re neglecting. Some of us took only one course last summer, others didn’t take any! I guess the slackers are planning on finishing in 2012 instead of 2011.

At the same time I can also report that what I’ve been learning has been incredibly relevant for my job. Most of the material we cover is detailed enough to be relevant, but abstract enough such that we can wrap our heads around a case study every two weeks. It’s practical too! I wrote an IRR/NPV calculator that Centellax uses to determine which projects should be staffed. I’ve written ERP analysis reports for our CEO and CFO. We’ve used regression tools to predict which customers are more likely to respond to marketing efforts.

But I think the most valuable thing I’m learning in b-skool is how to quickly analyze business problems. We are presented with so many challenging scenarios in each class, each designed to exercise a specific skillset, that make dealing with new challenges at work so much easier.

March concluded the Winter 2010 quarter. I took two courses: Technology Competition and Strategy and Executive Leadership Seminar. Real life clobbered me early in the term, and I must send shout-outs to my strategy group partners Christian, Jose, and Brad for helping me survive.

MGB 290: Executive Leadership Seminar with Jim Wunderman

Date evaluated: Winter 2010 at the Bay Area Working Professional San Ramon campus.

Official course description: Launched in 2007, this seminar brings successful corporate leaders to the Bay Area MBA program to teach important lessons from the frontlines of industry. Executives share their first-hand experiences of the complexities of today’s business world, inspiring students to seek new ways to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

The real course description: CEOs and VPs come to class and talk to us. Lots of discussion regarding their perspectives. Fluffy textbook from a self-help consultant intent on helping you overcome your inner demons.

The professor: Jim seems to know everyone in the SF bay area based on his position as CEO of the Bay Area Council, a business lobby group that has links to most medium- and large-size firms in the area. He is an excellent presenter and one of the best talks we had was when he told us the very personal story of the Constitutional Challenge failure, the evening it happened! He brought excellent visitors, drove the in-class discussion with skill, and made the course as successful as it was.

The course: The visitors were excellent. David Cush, CEO of Virgin America. Andy Ball, CEO of Webcor Builders. Larry Baer, President of the SF Giants. Mark Edmunds, vice-chairman of Deloitte. Nancy McFadden, SVP at PG&E. Rhonda Zygocki, VP at Chevron. SK Gupta, VP Ops at Lockheed Martin. Ray Arata, life coach. Steve Buster, CEO of Mechanics Bank. The open-forum discussions we had with them were amazing. You wouldn’t believe it, but “Mobility” was consistently a top reason they gave for their success. The work/life balance was incredibly different between the presenters: we knew Mark Edmunds’ kid’s names five minutes into the talk, while others didn’t mention their families at all.

I have one gripe. We were graded on assignments we completed with no feedback on why we received a particular grade. I don’t like that.

The grade: I got an A-. I was surprised, I was hoping for an A. Thus my gripe. I give Jim and the class an A+.

MGB 296: Technology Competition and Strategy with Hemant Bhargava

Date evaluated: Winter 2010 at the Bay Area Working Professional San Ramon campus.

Official course description: Why is software typically so defective? What justifies “ladies nights” at nightclubs? Why do so many firms in the IT industry give away their best products free? This course helps you analyze questions such as these by modeling competition and strategy in the network, technology, and information industries, including the Internet, telecommunications, computing, consumer electronics, entertainment and media, online information goods, services, biotechnology, and transportation. We discuss factors distinctive to these industries, and how they affect strategic interactions among firms as well as consumers’ choices of products and services. You will learn to analyze pricing strategies including versioning and bundling; product standardization decisions; managing product complements; exploiting network effects; managing systems competition; and business (revenue) models for information and network goods. Students should be comfortable with economics, data analysis and mathematical notation.

The real course description: Price discrimination through versioning and bundling. Network effects on products and pricing. Two-sided market strategy. Internet, telecom, software, and network product pricing strategies.

The professor: Hemant is intimately familiar with the subject material. He presents the material well, but his research interests are obviously more advanced than the material the course covers. I occasionally struggled with my classroom focus, probably based on his presentation style.

The course: The lectures were occasionally dry. I liked the assignments, they made me think outside the box. The take-home 72hr exam was challenging and fun, I spent four or five hours on it over the three days and still wasn’t sure about one answer when I finished. That was interesting, but unfortunately we didn’t do any post-test analysis. The group project was good, I worked with Jose, Christian, and Brad, better teammates are hard to find.

The grade: I got an A. I give the instructor and the class an A-.

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 recommend.

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.

MGB 246: Negotiation in Organizations with Barry Miller

Date evaluated: Fall 2009 at the Bay Area Working Professional San Ramon campus.

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-.

MGB 248: Marketing Strategies with Olivier Rubel

Date evaluated: Fall 2009 at the Bay Area Working Professional San Ramon campus.

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.

During the Summer 2009 quarter I took two classes: Forecasting and Managerial Research Methods, and Product Management.

Neither course covered material that matched the course title, they should have been called Regression Statistics and Product Marketing Management. Actually, that’s a recurring theme for the courses we’ve taken so far, the official title is often not what the instructors informally call the course, and doesn’t at all match the material taught.

After four glorious weeks off, everything kicks off again in October. Our friend group is splitting up. Brad is moving up near UC Davis and is switching to either the day program or the weekend David program. Half of the clique is taking classes starting on Sept 25th, me and a few others (Jillian and maybe Erika) start on October 2nd. That’s kinda sad, but I know our core group will keep in touch, there’s still seven more quarters to go!

For the first time the classes will be one per day, so I’ll be taking Marketing Strategies – hopefully not a third SWOT/strategy/positioning/segmentation marketing course, this one looks like a decision-making course – all day on Friday, and Negotiation in Organizations (yeah!!!) all day on Saturday.