MBA Spotlight

This is a page dedicated to highlights from my MBA coursework at UConn.

Leadership & Management

• Motivational speech on philosophy, ambition, hard work and perseverance

“Randolph Frederick “Randy” Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of computer science and human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pausch learned that he had a terminal case of pancreatic cancer in September 2006. He gave an upbeat lecture entitled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the same theme, which became a New York Times best-seller. Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch

YouTube Video of Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

In this assignment, our class was challenged with answering essay questions based on Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture.”  Rather than submitting the assignment on paper, and in the spirit of Randy Pausch, I decided to take a more creative approach in responding to the assignment by creating an interactive Flash project.

Final Project on “The Last Lecture”

• Interviews of top management scholars and executive leaders on organizational design flaws

The interactive menu below is a collection of insights by contemporary thinkers.   They were asked what design flaws hamper organizations and offer innovative solutions.  My personal favorite is Linda Hill’s (Harvard Business School)  response on the role of the leader: they are the “… person that creates the context in which you can unleash and then harness the talents of diverse others, and that action means creating space, which often means you being someone who gets out of the way even though you’re very capable, potentially, of being in the front and leading from the front”  …”the role of the leader as a social architect as opposed to the one who sets the direction and the vision and pulls and pushes people along.”

Source: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/What_are_the_design_flaws_in_your_organization_2230?pagenum=1#interactive_mlab

Insights of Leadership by Contemporary Thinkers:

• Technology strategy framework

This slide is the result of applying a technology strategy framework to a Harvard Business School case study on Intel.  The slide illustrates the mechanisms that influence strategy.  I’ve since used this framework to demonstrate and communicate technology strategy within my organization.

Marketing

• Marketing Strategy

This presentation was the collective effort of a group I was part of for a marketing class.  Our objective was to present a marketing strategy for Abolut Raspberri.  There were four of us in this group, including myself, and the presentation took a full semester to assemble.