Grad School Adventures: "Learn By Doing"

Week 11:

Lesson of the Week: “Learn By Doing”

*1/3 of what we learn is from University, the other 2/3 are from doing, from living, from making mistakes, and from having success. Our professor who was delivering a lesson on Self Marketing started off with this perspective. We can learn a lot from books, and we should always be learning, but we learn more from doing that reading. 

Over the last week we had some good discussions around Change Management, Drivers, and the Okay Corral Theory. We also competed in week long Business Game Simulator where we competed over 6 quarters to run an airline and make decisions regarding pricing, flight offerings, promotions, and marketing communication. Then after making decisions we prepared a presentation to our “shareholders” to show our results and how we can sustain and grow our business in the following years. The topics discussed and the simulator made for an intense and competitive week on campus.

Change Management: this is an important topic in todays business place as companies are aligning themselves to be more global, or to be online, etc. Many mergers and acquisitions are taking place and the market is ever-changing and companies need to change with it. When going through Change Management whether it is on a full scale company level or at the team level it is important understand your team. You can impose strategy, procedures, and process, but you can not impose culture. Culture must be changed through transition and acceptance of culture shift and be done over time. 

There are 5 drivers of people:

1. Hurry Up!- These are people like me, we move fast, all the time. Sometimes too fast. These are the people who say yes to a plan without checking their calendar because there is “no time” to check it, only to find out they have prior commitments.
2. Make the Effort!- These are the people who make unnecessary efforts to get from A to B. They are the ones who have a test a month out, and through the process of studying go way out of their way and are the ones who are still studying until 5 am the day of the test to be unnecessarily tired to take the test. They tend to overcomplicate things.
3. Be Strong!- These are the people who ignore all messages to stay where you are and move forward. They tend to have to “be strong” and do things even when they are emotionally and/or physically to exhausted to do so. This tends to have a negative effect as they tend to lose sensitivity to their internal warning systems.
4. Be Perfect!- This one speaks for themselves, the ones who have to always be right, and be perfect at no expense.
5. Try to Please!- These are the people who will always say yes, and will please everyone, even when they do not have the time or capability to do so because they are too afraid to disappoint.

All of these drivers are activated by stress. A good manager will understand their team and try and balance work based on drivers as not to over-stress and activate drivers.

The other main focus was on the Okay Corral Theory:

Now this is on the basis of 4 mental states.

Quadrant 1- I am okay, you are okay

Quadrant 2- I am okay, you are not okay

Quadrant 3- I am not okay, you are okay

Quadrant 4- No one is okay

This was a very unique and intriguing experience. As someone who has worked in B2B Sales and Marketing I was able to think back to meeting many people that fit into these different categories, as well as thinking about how I was able to partner with people in the different quadrants and with different drivers to obtain objectives and goals. I know there are many different theories and styles in regards to these topics but this is one we had an in depth lesson on that provided some great insight to evaluating myself and knowing what I am good at. It also provided a chance for me to look at how to best identity and partner with individuals that fall into different categories.

Business Game:

This was a wonderful experience! I was teamed out with classmates from France, Germany, Italy, and China. We decided that our airline was going to offer the most flights destinations and provide high quality service.

There were 4 Segments: 

• Long Haul/Intercontinental
• Short Haul
• Charter
• Service Offerings (Hotel, Car Rental, etc)

Within these 4 segments were 4 target groups:

• Business Travelers (least price sensitive and not price elastic)
• Tourist (very price elastic)
• Incentive Travelers (very price sensitive)
• Groups (price sensitive and elastic)

We focused heavily on Short Haul Business and Tourist as this was the most profitable segment with our 2nd are of focus on Long Haul as it offered the Highest Margins.

Our strategy was extremely successful, we made an early mistake on pricing but ended up winning by earning over $900,000,000 in profit!

It was a fantastic competition as we were able to “learn by doing” in a simulation of real life scenarios and decisions to be made. Experiences like this definitely help prepare us for the marketplace. 

As always I hope that there is a takeaway or two in here for everyone. If you have any questions or would like to discuss some of these issue more in depth feel free to write a comment or shoot me a note at robbynap87@gmail.com. You can also follow me on Twitter @RobbyNap and connect with me on LinkedIn at https://it.linkedin.com/in/robert-napoli-a5839119

Ciao Ciao!