Last Week

After getting back from Kerala Scott and I were right back in the think of things at ISB as we had a ton of assignments to do. Our biggest concern though was the not the amount of work, but rather the fact that we had all these team assignments due throughout the week. Thus far the teamwork at ISB it just not in the same league at all in terms of effectiveness as Queens, mainly a factor of the fact that there is no lead/second structure. After sufferring through this week I got a great appreciation for how good the Queen's program is in the respect, and what a differentiator this will be in the workplace.

Without the lead the decisions are made very ad hoc with little or no planning. Research is done individually as is writing and people don't necessarily come to the same conclusion. For our international marketing final assignment Scott and I had to basically become lead and second on it for the thing to not be an all-nighter session the day before it was due (which is apparently the normal thing here).

As far as the other team member's contributions, grammar wasn't as big a problem as I would suspect, while the actual content was somewhat lacking, another symptom of people just not caring at this point too much. Scott and I for instance were the only ones who really did any in-depth research and had references for our points and pulled in course concepts and readings, while others tended to just write some pretty straight-forward filler material or describe marketing concepts. We were able to get the thing into pretty decent shape through a last night team meeting and ended up getting an above average mark. Managing strategic partnerships was a similar deal, except we were better organized at first. The thing went off the with the content and the consolidation. Again, people did not point out links to the readings, or to course concepts (except for me and Scott :P), the consolidation turned into a disaster when the lead consolidator left campus the day it was due after doing a consolidation that consisted of cutting and pasting everything into one big document twice as long as the professor said was the maximum, and her backup went into town until 11:30PM (due at 11:59PM). Again I had to do a little intervention despite having another assignment due the next day and consolidated the whole thing properly, spiffed it up, added a few minor things etc. we ended up getting over an 80 but we were just behind the class average. My final assignment for greent technology and sustainable enterprise was with two other exchange students (from Wharton and Thunderbird) and this went MUCH more smoothly. We all did research, we all added points relevant to the class etc. and we got the highest mark in the class. I had done the final consolidation and spiffed it up a little - while traveling with Jed, the Wharton student, he asked who did the formatting since it looked totally professional. :P

My last assignment/exam was just a two person assignment with my fried Sunil. After laying out the expectations we were able to work really effective together and got a great score.

With regards to some of the team dynamics I learned later from a colleague there that a lot of what I witnessed is not indicative of the program during the peak time before recruiting. At this point everyone is burned out and grades don't really matter so there is less incentive. While true, I think the lack of an effective structure of lead/second makes a complete collapse

And with that the academics were done and we were off to Goa!