Mental Preparation

Well it's December 28th, just a few days after Christmas. Christmas tree is coming down, garbage men are picking up dozens of empty toy boxes. And I am getting ready for my 3rd semester in this MBA program with Ole Miss. You may remember from a previous post that I received two B's in the Fall Semester and I am thus COMMITTED to getting two A's this Spring. The classes this time around are:

MBA 613: Mobilizing Technology: The role of information and computer technology in the modern business enterprise. Emphasizes practical application of computer and information technology to real-world problems and decision environments. Requires development of an advanced end-use application involving process reengineering.
MBA 621: Statistical Analysis: A critical examination of the theory and assumptions underlying the major multivariate statistical techniques.

A mouthful by any measure. Needless to say, if I'm going to get better performance this time around, I will HAVE to do things differently. I think the idea my wife and I came up with involving me getting study time in AWAY from home twice a week was a brilliant introduction toward the end of the fall. Backing that up with increased usage of the online textbook tools should bring things around to my favor. Here we go!!

Are you LinkedIn?

I am, finally. It's a funny thing for a guy who swore off all social media and at one time was proud of little to no web presence, now I'm all over the place. I guess I was just turned off at how sophmoric MySpace became in no time. Linkedin seems different. It comes across as a much more mature social networking site than some of the others. I have made some productive connections in university alumni groups and with former coworkers and friends. For those interested, here I am on the web:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/lawrence-lockhart/17/58b/227

http://mbafortheoldguy.blogspot.com/

http://www.youtube.com/user/onesirian

 

Fall 2009 Grades And More

First fall semester is finished and the grades are in (rather promptly I might add). Despite a sure measure of unassuredness (is that a word?), I logged in to the university internal portal site and checked my grades just last Monday. 2B's...yes two B's. I predict my New Year's resolution will begin with the resolve to shrug off all remaining vestiges of mediocrity and embrace superior performance to the point of achieving A's. And with that, my graduate school transcript looks like so:

MBA 601 Managerial Communication A-Excellent 3 credits

MBA 614 Business Environment B-Good 3 credits

MBA 623 Integrative Business Analysis B-Good 3 credits

Semester	GPA: 3.33 Points: 30.00 Attempted Hours: 9.00 Earned Hours: 9.00 Graded Hours: 9.00
Resident	GPA: 3.33 Points: 30.00 Attempted Hours: 9.00 Earned Hours: 9.00 Graded Hours: 9.00

MBA 611 Financial Analysis B-Good 3 credits

MBA 617 Managerial Accounting B-Good 3 credits

Semester	GPA: 3.00 Points: 18.00 Attempted Hours: 6.00 Earned Hours: 6.00 Graded Hours: 6.00
Resident	GPA: 3.20 Points: 48.00 Attempted Hours: 15.00 Earned Hours: 15.00 Graded Hours: 15.00

On Productivity

As a good friend and I used to muse, it is totally possible and often found that people do things the right way without doing the right things. The problem with this scenario is that gives the "doer" of said tasks the unearned satisfaction of having done a good job while from a meta-perspective the question remains if the good job done was the one that most needed to be done. In other words is the person doing what needs to be done or just doing what they can most easily do. What we find in studies of productivity is that people are always doing something; even quiet moments of reflection hold great value. In such a constant go mode, there surely must be some guidelines to help direct one's task flow, specifically in workplace scenarios.

Fortunately, Brian Tracy has shared some guidelines of this very nature. For those that do not know, Mr Tracy is a top shelf business strategist, success coach, and prolific author. In his book Eat That Frog, Brian shares among other strategies that on each day you go to work, you should identify all of the relevant tasks you have to accomplish on that day. Then, he advises picking the most difficult and least liked task from the list to accomplish first. The metaphor is that if the first thing you do each day is eat a live frog, the rest of your day has to get better from there. Similarly, by accomplishing your most difficult duties first, you

1. Put them behind you
2. Build upon the momentum of success
3. Deliver great value to your organization early.

#3 is particularly helpful in safeguarding against the dreaded unproductive day eminating from useless distractions, unproductive meetings, and fire after endless fires. When approached from the big-picture thinking of a VP or C-suite level position, this aids you in accomplishing high value-added tasks more often and becoming a person that both does things right AND does the right things.