Ricky’s Online Business Blog

This is the original version of my article sent to be published in MBA Edge Quarterly magazine January 2011 issue. The edited version published in magazine might be a little different. Your feedback is much welcome.

May Lee and Muralee parted as MBA coursemates as they graduated from business school. May Lee continued working for her employer and sponsor. Muralee applied for Cradle Investment Programme (CIP) to set up his own multimedia production house. Now armed with MBA qualification, both graduates hope high for better life to come. However, the reality is not as rosy as they dreamed of.

Far from becoming a capable manager, team leader and player in the company as expected by her company, May Lee does not seem to have improved in these capacities except an increase in head knowledge. Her China-man boss starts to wonder what kind of “shit paper” she has acquired in her MBA certificate sponsored out of employee development fund.

No doubt May Lee’s paper qualification shows her straight A results. But her performance is not up to the mark at all. Her MBA course was conducted in English, but her English does not seem to have improved. She may have spoken in many class presentations, but she still reads from the slides and her presentation does not excite the audience at all.

She may have completed piles of assignments and case studies, but she does not seem to have any clue when asked to comment on the strategic direction of her company. She may have worked in teams and groups, but she still does not seem to be able to work independently, much less handle tough negotiations with clients competently.

Muralee is in no better situation. In order to apply for pre-seed grant from the Cradle fund, he needed to draw up a business plan for his new proposed business. However, he does not remember having learned about business plan in his MBA course. Well, he did write a marketing plan in Marketing Management class. He also submitted one assignment on financial projections in Financial Management class. But there is no one single class or project requiring him to combine all these individual pieces into one complete business plan!

Moreover, Muralee never learned how to pitch his idea to judges who must pick the best business ideas out of so many. He has never been taught to communicate and sell his ideas to venture capitalists and angel investors. His MBA did not even talk about venture capital! Of course, the judges rejected his application in favour of much better ideas and pitches by non-MBAs who know the trade better. To them whether they have MBA or not does not really matter. In fact, the higher qualification you have, the better piece of work you are expected to produce.

What went wrong with May Lee and Muralee? Well, they may have thought MBA qualification is the panacea that makes us better person at work and in business. They were once convinced that MBA is the passport towards higher salary, promotion and prosperous future. After all, business schools tout slogans like “Shaping Business Leader of 21st Century”. But is this the truth? Has MBA failed to address the real needs in the marketplace?

Read on here…

My MBA study in UPM got more interesting and exciting as it came to the third semester from March to June 2010. In this semester, I took up Business Law and Marketing Management. I was also allowed into the Consumer Behavior class by one good lecturer as sit-in student.

Initially, I considered the law subject boring and very tough. Indeed it could be. But luckily our good lecturer taught it in a very easy-to-understand way that most of us got A in final grade.

But I knew knowledge in law is very important in business. In business, I have had disputes with customers and companies before. If not handled well, those issues could have been escalated into legal cases. By knowing the law, now I feel more confident in making deals and avoid being cheated by others.

In the subject, we needed to understand various laws applicable to business, such as law of contract, agency, partnership, sale of goods and hire purchase. We were presented with situations and were required to draw on legal principles and past cases we learned to solve the problems.

The study on law was very practical. I found much use in what I learned. However, one thing I was not good in doing was remembering the case law. In fact, in order to save time, I chose not to memorize any case but focus on the principles and applications instead (yet I still got A!)

But there was one principle I learned well, not only for law, but also for study of any subject. I know law can be boring. It can be tough and can drive us crazy. I could read many people complaining about it on Facebook. But don’t hate a subject that we don’t like. Choose to like it.

Do you believe in law of attraction? If you keep saying negative things about something, like you don’t like something, it will really get disgusting. You will have attracted negative energy about the subject to yourself.

But choose to like it. Choose to develop an interest in it. Choose to understand how it could relate to our life. Start to appreciate it. Then slowly we attract positive energy around the subject, start to develop an interest and like it.

My study of business law was one good testimonial. Do you know any business student so passionately read up law books, even those not related to his study? I was one of them. Business law was something I could not catch up at the start, but at the end I started to complain I had not learned enough!

One of the most memorable experiences in my MBA study was my involvement in a mock court drama called The Revenge of Tara in our business law class. In the drama, we played out a real case in the 80s Tara Rajaratnam v Jaginder Singh, where a poor woman sued a group of lawyers for cheating her land.

It was an eye-opening experience to me as I was tasked to write up the script for the drama and act as Jaginder’s lawyer. Thanks to everyone’s good acting, multimedia effects, and various entertaining enhancements, the drama turned out to be very successful! I’m so proud to be part of it

Tara (acted by Kashturi) and Cullen (acted by Ricky), lawyer of Datuk Jaginder Singh, accusing each another in court

Credits go to our directors Leanne and Liza, all actors and actresses, and all who worked behind the scene. Of course, our dear lecturer Dr Rozanah too!

Cullen with his client, Datuk Jaginder Singh (acted by Muni)

Besides the satisfying experience with business law, I also learned from the Marketing Management class especially in presentations. It was so arranged in the class that every week two groups competed with each other in the same presentation topic. The bar was raised very high because of this. Up to now, this was still the class with the highest level of presentation quality I’ve seen so far.

In the marketing class, our group made two presentations, one on an US company on industrial branding, and another on Marriott Hotel. We even go to the hotel itself and took pictures!  We also submitted a marketing plan based on a real service in human resource outsourcing (HRO) by one of my customers.

This was the time I started to use mind mapping to take note for quick revision before exam.  I once sent my mind maps on business law to a few students. But I didn’t know who started the forwarding, that my mind maps got circulated around MBA students here.  Since there were “demand” for the maps, I also created a special page for their benefit to download all mind maps I created.

In this semester, I also faced various people problems working in team, both in the business law drama team, and also the marketing management team. I can’t detail the issues here, but I was culpable for many things and I learned many lessons for my own improvement.

One people lesson was that I could not expect people to do things my way because they had different circumstances and resources from me. As a weird student who took only 2 subjects per semester compared to 4 subjects by others, I had a little more time to delve into more depths in my study and make every piece of work more perfect.

But I didn’t understand that others did not have such luxury to spend much time on a single task. Instead, I imposed my own expectations on others and made their life difficult. Two marketing management team members even left me and formed their own group. I heard they didn’t know what I wanted from them.

These people issues had made me review myself. The lessons had also inspired me to write an article on the different motives by different types of MBA students in the inaugural issue of MBA Edge magazine, in the next semester, the 4th semester.

This is a sequel to one previous post on my study in MBA course. I had promised before to put down my experience being back to school for each semester.

I completed the second semester from November 2009 to February 2010. Like the first semester before, I took only 2 subjects, that is, Financial Management and Human Resource Management.

But this semester #2 was most remembered for some personal problems and two memorable presentations. The first problem was a personal one which I can’t share online.

The second problem was lack of time due to a web development project. I was not in web design business, but I undertook that project to develop a web site for an event due to personal reason.

However, it affected my timetable so much that I lacked time to study and complete the project itself. End result – I didn’t get very good results this time, and I also delivered the web site late. Lesson learned – Don’t get involved in too many commitments. Being busy does not mean being competent.

Anyway, I did enjoy the second semester because two of my best and most memorable presentations were made in this semester, or more specifically, in HRM class under Dato’ Dr. Zulkifli Idris.

Dato’ Zul was one most inspiring and respectable lecturer. Instead of spoonfeeding us with information, he let students take over the class and present from the textbook to cover the whole course. Then he would chip in from time to time to elaborate on important points. Not everyone may be used to this student-led teaching style. But I liked it, and I believe all of us in class too!

Then came my turn to “teach”, I chose a topic not directly from the textbook but related to selection of employees. The presentation “Background Check Using Social Media” was on the issue of employers using social media like Facebook and LinkedIn to check job applicants.

It was one most satisfying experience delivering this presentation, partly because the topic was very much related to all students in the class, who used social media like Facebook (including the lecturer!). I believe the audience of a presentation will get interested and engaged if the topic presented becomes their topic.

The second memorable presentation was a group presentation. We interviewed my customer, an expatriate from UK and founder of one MSC-status software house, on international human resource management. We presented the findings after the interview.

Our presentation was the very last of five groups presenting on that day. We needed to keep the audience awake and engage them in two-way communication. Some people even expected and challenged us to do well, especially after Kak Liza’s group (Transformers) had set a very high benchmark in their good presentation one week before.

Group Presentation in HRM Class

To cut short a long story, we did manage to keep people awake and arouse interest in the topic. Among the tricks used included branding ourselves as Decepticons, interesting content, quiz time with prizes, giving out mandarin oranges (it was just before Chinese New Year), making fun of certain people, keeping people in suspense, and even generating curiosity on Facebook for a few days before the presentation.

Classmates Enjoying Mandarin Oranges

I also enjoyed the Financial Management class. The topic was foreign and tough to me as I was not well versed in this area. But the very experienced lecturer Dr Shamsher had developed my interest in finance. I got more interested especially after my group researched on one PN17 company and came out with a term paper on the company. I even considered taking a major in finance.

Moreover, I came to recognize the leading role of finance in a business. All the while, I had been thinking that marketing always plays the leading function. Not entirely wrong, but I found ultimately a business is evaluated on its finance, not marketing.

So, what drives a business? Marketing or finance? Finance sets the goals and drives a business. Once the goal is set, it’s marketing’s job to deliver the results. Agreeable?