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TMMBA Faculty Spill the Beans on their Favorite Resources

Saturday, October 27th, 2012
By Sara Jones, TMMBA Assistant Director

There are so many books, websites, and resources for business professionals that it can be hard to find the golden nuggets in the mix. I recently caught up with two TMMBA faculty members and asked for a list of favorite resources they would recommend to students and alums. Here’s what they said:

Debra Glassman, Senior Lecturer in Business EconomicsProfessor Debra Glassman

Glassman has been at the Foster School since 1992 and began teaching Domestic & International Economic Conditions in TMMBA in 2011. Her specialties include international finance, global macroeconomics, international trade policy and institutions, and European business. When I asked for her recommendation, she suggested publications from the Federal Reserve. Here’s why:

Publications from regional Federal Reserve banks have articles that are short, timely, and accessible to the general business reader.  Examples include (but are not limited to) the “Chicago Fed Letter,”, the Cleveland Fed’s “Forefront,” and “The Region” from the Minneapolis Fed.   You can search topics across all Federal Reserve publications using http://fedinprint.org.

Warren Boeker, Professor of ManagementProfessor Warren Boeker

Professor Boeker teaches Strategic Management of Technology & Innovation during the fourth quarter of the TMMBA Program. He specializes in competition, corporate strategy, entrepreneurship, and international business. He has seven go-to websites and blogs on his list:

Boeker also recommends the book Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson.

What are your favorite business resources?

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Sneak Preview: TMMBA Leadership Immersion

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

Mikaela Houck, Manager of Academic & Student Services

What’s your role as a leader? How do you grow and motivate your team? How do you lead in different situations?

TMMBA students will evaluate these questions (and more!) at the TMMBA Leadership Immersion, which kicks off this weekend at the Eastside Executive Center. The Leadership Immersion marks the start of the 2nd half of the TMMBA Program experience and is a 3-day intensive course that examines the obligations and responsibilities of effective leadership. Led by Foster School Senior Lecturer, Pat Bettin, the Leadership Immersion is one of the most impactful courses in the TMMBA Program as it challenges students to reflect on and grow their own leadership style as well as explore the dynamic leadership issues facing today’s complex organizations.

 “(After the course) I began to understand how I can change and grow my personal leadership style. The decision making and collaboration aspects of the leadership classes were invaluable. It was helpful to learn other ways and different styles of decision making as well as how to evolve ones style of decision making. I’ve begun to use these key learnings immediately in the workplace.”
- Kathy Alexion, TMMBA Class of 2011

Get a sneak peek of Pat Bettin sharing his insights on leadership effectiveness and teaching in the TMMBA Program in this video:

Hats off to Class 12 for completing the 1st half of the Program and onwards to the 2nd!

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Building Effective Teams

Friday, August 10th, 2012

Professor Greg Bigley has taught in the TMMBA Program since its inception in 2001. He teaches Building Effective Work Teams at the start of the program and Leading Organization Change during the fifth quarter.  Bigley is a high-energy instructor and his classes are fast-paced, challenging, and extremely relevant. As a result, he has been recognized by students several times for his excellence in teaching.

In his classes, Bigley focuses on the relationship of people, structure, and culture on organizational and team performance. In this short video, he shares more about building effective teams.

 

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TMMBA welcomes 6 new faculty

Thursday, May 24th, 2012
Sara Jones, TMMBA Assistant Director & Class of 2012

In the past year we have seen the addition of six faculty to the TMMBA teaching team.  Many of them have been repeat recipients of teaching awards and have published well-renowned research in their fields.  We’re very excited to have them as part of the TMMBA experience!  Here’s a little bit on each of our new faculty members and the courses they teach.

Jeff Barden, Assistant Professor of Management

Jeff BardenWhy do some organizations succeed while others fail?  One fundamental answer is strategy.  Students address this question during their second quarter in Competitive Strategy. Starting this year the course is taught by Jeff Barden, who has been at the Foster School since 2005.  Barden leads students through an examination of how managerial action can reinvent competition within existing industries and how the creation and implementation of strategy drives the success of business.  Check out this article for highlights from his paper on the impact of corporate acquisitions on technology adoption.

Edward Rice, Associate Professor of Finance & Business EconomicsEd Rice

Students dive into microeconomic issues their first quarter in TMMBA. Ed Rice began teaching the TMMBA Microeconomics course last quarter. He sees the course as dual purpose. First, it explains the fundamental principles of microeconomics, a theory of how agents interact in individual markets. Second, it shows students how these principles are applied to managerial decisions and firm optimization. Rice has won numerous teaching awards from his students at Foster.

Lance Young, Assistant Professor

Lance YoungLance Young takes students into the world of finance in the TMMBA Corporate Financial Strategy course. Finance deals with how individuals make consumption and saving decisions and how firms make investment and financing decisions. Through his course, Young shares interesting and useful frameworks and techniques that help students develop a competitive advantage over their peers as they progress in their careers. In 2011, Young won the PACCAR Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Debra Glassman, Senior Lecturer in Business Economics

Debra GlassmanDebra Glassman helps students understand the complex global macroeconomic environment in her TMMBA course, Domestic and International Economic Conditions.  Students discuss economic growth, inflation, unemployment, business cycles, fiscal policy and monetary policy. They also get a global perspective through exploration of national business systems, trade policy, the political economy of trade, and regional economic integration.  After just one quarter teaching in TMMBA, Glassman was recognized by students with the Faculty of the Quarter award.

Rebecca Lovell

Rebecca LovellLovell is a Foster alum, Chief Business Officer at GeekWire, and also teaches TMMBA’s new Venture Capital Investment Practicum. This two-day course synthesizes the TMMBA curricula with a refresher of marketing, finance, and management through the lens of venture capital investing.  The output is an all-day competition where teams analyze two businesses and present their analysis and investment decision to a panel of entrepreneur judges.

Andy Boyer

Andy BoyerAndy Boyer is also a Foster alum and co-founder of Social3i, a social media and online marketing consulting firm.  This quarter he taught a new Social Media for Managers course in TMMBA. The course familiarized students with successful social media programs and took a broad look at social media – from tactics and tools to how to use social in their business strategy.  Boyer had students contribute to a blog to share what they were learning and the progress of their class projects.

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How TMMBA curriculum ties into the International Study Tour

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

Guest post by Roann Lubang, Class of 2012

The following courses came to mind during my visit at both Singapore and Beijing (in no particular order of priority):

Global Strategy

Because I had no real background knowledge of Singapore, I was extremely amazed with the westernization and development of the country. I remember glancing at the hotel newspaper and reading that Singapore is 3rd most competitive city in the world (New York being #1 and London being #2).

Geographically, Singapore was definitely in a perfect location to serve as the “Asian Hub” to globalize any business in the Asian countries nearby. As we’ve learned in Global Strategy class, when it comes to selecting a centralized location for a company’s headquarters, geographic location is key, especially when exporting/importing goods into easily accessible ports.

Professional Communications (Nonverbal)

Unlike in Singapore, our interactions with the local people in Beijing were more challenging because not everyone spoke English. Often times, we had to rely on body language and other nonverbal cues to understand what someone was trying to communicate.

When we were trying to negotiate with vendors at the Great Wall of China and/or other local markets, I sure was glad that numbers are quite universal. It was easy for both us and the vendors to write and or enter in the calculator the price we were willing to pay for their goods.

Negotiations

Though we haven’t taken this specific class until this spring quarter, I’d say we experienced a lot of negotiating with the street vendors at both Singapore and Beijing. Negotiating is all about making a collective decision on something, such as a price for a good.

As we’ve learned from our pre-meeting trip regarding shopping at Beijing, vendors actually enjoy negotiating with their buyers. If you don’t like their price and walk away, the vendors will actually follow you and ask, “Okay, how much then?” to get a feel for how much you are actually willing to pay and then there could be a bit of back and forth or meeting in the middle or else you can try walking away again to see if they really aren’t willing to budge on their price. I thought this experience was quite exciting too, but it sure does become costly once all the little things start adding up.

Operations and Supply Chain Management/Statistics

I’d say the airport experience to and from Asia reminded me so much of both Kamran and Martha’s classes. Because I was traveling to and from different countries, there were multiple lines I had to line up through: getting off and on the airplane, security screening, customs/declaration, etc. I couldn’t help and joke around with my classmates about M/M/1 lines and M/M/C lines and “jocking” for the what-seemed-like shorter and faster lines.

And because I personally have this paranoia about checking in my luggage, I couldn’t help but wonder the probability of the airlines losing my luggage. Come to find out, by the time we arrived in Singapore, both Tom and Tsun’s luggages were lost somewhere between Washington, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Singapore. I didn’t think that 2 out of 22 people (almost 10%) were that likely to experience such frustration – especially when we had company meetings the next days where we had to be dressed in business suits.

Strategic Marketing Management

I think that the last company we visited in China was the most interesting and fascinating. We visited Motorola and were expecting to hear about supply chain management, but instead heard a presentation on marketing in China.
I learned that working in marketing in China involves three parties: the government, the people, and the media. Unlike the United States where we are blessed with the freedom of speech, everyone involved in media experience a lot more pressure from both the government and the people. It sounds like both Chinese businesses and external businesses in other countries have to be extra careful how they portray the key players in the Chinese government and its people. Otherwise, they’ll have to be prepared to apologize publicly and find a way to re-establish a harmonious relationship with the Chinese.

Other classes that came to mind during our trip to Asia included the following, but my blog would get too long in explaining how they were all relevant:

  • Entrepreneurship
  • Leading Organizational Change
  • Competitive Strategy
  • Domestic and International Economic Conditions

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Advocacy and engagement through social media

Monday, March 26th, 2012

Sara Jones, Class of 2012

Tonight was the second session of our Social Media for Managers course. This is a new class in the TMMBA Program and one I was looking forward to. It’s both relevant to the work I do and a personal topic of interest. Our instructor is Andy Boyer, a Principle at Social3i Consulting and Co-Founder of Relaborate. He’s also a Foster Alum!

TMMBA guest speaker, Alonso Chehade

Alonso Chehade talking to the TMMBA Class of '12

Our first class on Saturday was an initial overview of our class project, basic social media strategies, and what platforms are out there. The class project is for each study group to pick a non-profit, small business, or cause and build a social media campaign around it. The idea is to teach by doing. It was harder than I thought to come up with a topic. My group finally settled on encouraging individuals to volunteer through a focus on more trivial benefits of volunteering such as free swag, free knowledge, free concert tickets ,etc. The hope is to reach an audience that hasn’t volunteered much in the past while being a bit humorous and lighthearted.

Each class session we are focusing on a different aspect of social media management and building that out for our projects. Tonight we talked about tools and strategies for blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and a few other platforms. We also had a guest speaker, Alonso Chehade, who talked about creating engagement.

Here are a few takeaways from class so far:

  • Social media needs to be tied to organizational goals and the bottom line. Have metrics to measure success of a campaign. It’s easy to get caught up in getting likes, follows, etc, but there need to be other measurements to ensure that your time and dollars are going to the right efforts.
  • Create engagement by being passionate, including people’s names in posts, responding to others, and asking questions to create a conversation.
  • People are motivated by Selfish Altruism. If we’re trying to get people to care about our cause, we need to think about what’s in it for them. What about our story will appeal to them? We shouldn’t just ask them to help, like our page, etc.
  • We can use the basic principles of Dale Carnegie to find success in social media engagement.
  • Find your social media superheros like Bill Sleeper, a 96 year old tech enthusiast who made headlines after he attended a local social media event, or Dan Dewey who was featured during Starbuck’s #everylove campaign.
  • A neat tool that I wasn’t aware of: www.followerwonk.com. I’ll definitely be using this one at work!

Over the next two weeks our groups are supposed to build content and launch our campaigns so that we have some data to work with during our next session on analytics. Now it’s time to create some engagement of our own.

What organizations or groups do you think have done a great job of using social media to support their cause?

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Professor Ali Tarhouni’s Last lecture- 2/26

Sunday, June 19th, 2011

Wei Huang, TMMBA Class 11

On Feb 26, 2011, Professor Ali Tarhouni taught the first of his two final Microeconomics classes.  The Wednesday section was the first class during the morning.  Prof. Ali started off stating the topics for the lectures: Monopoly, competitive markets and showing that competitive markets are the way to go instead of monopoly and the expression of monopoly power and price discrimination.

As any typical Prof. Ali lecture, he asks for microeconomics news.   He warned he was losing his voice.  A fellow student mentioned baseball salary was evaluated using marginal analysis, which Prof. Ali stated when he hears “marginal” his heart beats.  Moments later, he jokingly states everyone wants to talk about Libya.  He stated he spent a good part of his life trying to bring democracy to Libya and was sentenced to death from the Libya government and the FBI told him he was on a hit list in 1980-81.  He later states that it was great seeing the new movement striving for democracy and freedom.  He describes the current Libya government as being ruled by thugs for centuries whether it was by fear or by a King and the country was suppress and blundered and never reaching the country’s potential.  He describes Gadaffi as a ‘killer clown’ who doesn’t want to go peacefully and wants to take as many people down as he can.   He stated he was going back to Libya due to family.    Joy and sadness were described about the situation in Libya.  He stated never anticipated the people trying to overthrow the Libya government.  Later he states he was usually on TV and was asked about the which country was going to be overthrown by the people and he said Egypt was the only country not going to be overthrown.  Later he admits that he is not good a predicting major events.  During the first four days of the movement, Prof Ali assisted in sending the pictures to media.  He goes on answering why the movement has started and describes Gadaffi as a thug, dictator for 42 years and destroying the infrastructure and not providing any political expression to the country.  He goes on saying that there is not government budget and the oil money all goes the Gadaffi and his kids.

Prof Ali’s classes were always entertaining.  He had a love for frozen pizza as he used it in many of his examples.  He blended his experience to class material so students could better understand the material.  During the lectures, he would always seem to make the class laugh.  It was never a dull moment.  Hearing the news he would go back to Libya was shocking especially know he was on Gadaffi’s hit list.  I thought he was going back to visit family.  It was surprising to hear he was going back for bigger things as he was later become the transitional government’s finance minister.  It was an honor to being the last class Prof Ali would teach and it’s an amazing story I can tell my children that my professor at UW TMMBA program became the Finance minister of Libya.  Now I regret not getting his autograph.

Here’s to wishing Prof Ali the best in bring democracy to Libya.

Good luck Prof Ali!!

- Wei

 

 

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There’s an equation for that?

Friday, June 17th, 2011

Jared McInelly, TMMBA Class 11

That was my first thought when Prof. Karpoff first wrote the equation for NPV (Net Present Value) on the whiteboard.  I was fascinated that there, right in front of me, was a way to calculate the present value, in today’s dollars, of a project that would last in to the future.  There was even a way to include the risk!

Finance has been one of my favorite classes so for in the TMMBA program.  The case studies were challenging yet interesting.  And the final exam was actually fun.  Being able to value a company using information from their income statement and balance sheet is cool.

And forevermore, whenever I see one of those hats with a propeller on top I’m going to think “CAPM.”

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Use It or Lose it! Speaking Skills in the Digital Universe

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Guest Blogger: Lorraine Howell, TMMBA Instructor of Professional Communications

The more we are connected electronically, it seems the less we have to say to each other, at least in person! That’s my non-scientific observation, based on what I hear from people I work with and the people I meet in business settings. With so many communication tools available, people still struggle with their old fashioned verbal communication skills, whether it’s public speaking, networking, or other business conversations.

 However, after teaching TMMBA students during Winter Quarter I’m encouraged and very excited by how many of them wanted more opportunity to practice the skills and strategies they are learning in our new Professional Communications course. There will be more opportunities to practice and get feedback throughout the TMMBA Program.

There are other ways to work on your speaking skills. Consider looking for every opportunity to present at work or in any volunteer activities. Run meetings as often as possible. Ask for feedback from trusted colleagues or friends. As you build skills work on one or two elements at time, like strong opens and closes or gestures and body language. Changes in behavior take time and practice, so take it easy and break it down into smaller goals. Another low cost option is join a Toastmaster’s group. That’s a great way to get regular practice and supportive feedback.

There is no question that communication is a fundamental skill for success as a leader in business. In fact, your skill as leader is dependent on your ability to persuade people to follow you or embrace your ideas and vision. TMMBA students will be taking a deeper dive into the art of persuasion as part of the Professional Communications course.

For now, observe effective communications skills in others, make progress with slow and steady small changes. Developing speaking skills is like a fitness program…use it, or lose it!!!

Lorraine Howell is an instructor in the UW Foster School of Business. After a 12 year career in television production, she started her own communications coaching and consulting company called Media Skills Training. Her book, Give Your Elevator Speech a Lift! is a step-by-step guide through her prove process for eliminating the verbal clutter and creating and engaging and memorable “elevator speech.”

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Fostering Leadership the Foster Way

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Bruce Avolio, Professor of Management & Executive Director of Foster Center for Leadership

bavolio_smallA year ago, the Foster School decided to get into show business. In partnership with UW TV, we set out to produce a show that would inform viewers about the very best things we know about effective leadership, and to do so in a way that conveys rigor (what we say works, has been proven to work) and relevance (it really looks like something you can use).  Each of six pilot shows is broken down into nine 3 minute segments covering different topics, from different vantage points for different reasons. The people who we have included in the show range from entrepreneurs, to senior executives of Fortune 500 companies to faculty and our own MBA students and alum.Take a look at this new show produced by our Foster community for our Foster community.

By the way, over a million viewers have seen this show in its pilot season and it won out the gate the prestigious Telly Award!

Bruce Avolio is teaching Leadership Development with the TMMBA Program this Spring Quarter. The focus of this course is on understanding the dynamics of leaders and leadership ranging from self leadership through global strategic leadership. Bruce is one of the top scholars on transformational leadership and has devised evidence-based models and methods to accelerate the development of authentic, ethical and transformational leadership.

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