Search Results for: Rohan Rajiv

Reflecting on my summer internship | MBA Learnings

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I was very curious about the graduate student internship experience. After a few years of work experience as a full-timer, I figured it might be a bit strange to go back with the intern badge. I also wondered what elements of my approach to work would be different after a year in business school.

First up, wearing the intern badge wasn’t strange at all. It helped that we had about 25 other MBA interns as part of our intern class this summer at LinkedIn. In fact, it regularly felt like a place of privilege – we were treated incredibly well, and I regularly felt very fortunate to be given the opportunity to do what I was doing.

My approach to work did feel different. Here are three things that stood out:

What should Volkswagen do (Part II)? | MBA Learnings

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I shared a framework we discussed in a crisis management class three weeks ago – a few days after the Volkswagen emissions debacle came out in the press. I thought it was time for Part II.

I recently woke up to the following paragraph as part of my “Economist Espresso:”

“Volkswagen’s boss in America offered a congressional hearing a “sincere apology” for the company’s use of “defeat devices” which helped diesel engines cheat in emissions tests. Stressing that he was not an engineer, Michael Horn blamed “a couple of software engineers” for the modification, of which he said he had no prior knowledge. German prosecutors searched the carmaker’s headquarters.”

What should Volkswagen do? | MBA Learnings

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We started our second year with a one week pre-term course on Leading and Managing Crises. We discussed responses to multiple crises – both good and bad. And, as I was on the lookout for a new crisis to apply my learning, Volkswagen appeared in the news for what has to rank among the dumbest decisions of all time.

How to live a good life takes center stage during orientation (via Clear Admit)

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Before diving into the fray of finance, accounting, operations and marketing, every incoming first-year student at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management first spent an afternoon grappling with the question of how to live a good life.

“What do I value?” “How do I find my personal mission?” “How do I create an action plan to live a life consistent with this mission?” These considerations—not how to cut costs, gain market share or increase profits—were part of a new element introduced this year during Kellogg’s Complete Immersion in Management (CIM) Week, the stretch of days before classes start when incoming students meet each other and the school for the first time.

3 productivity principles | MBA Learnings

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Some of my highest impact learnings as a graduate student have been around productivity. One of my professors in the first couple of weeks described getting your MBA as a two-year course in decision making and trade-offs. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve written about what my process has looked like. And today, I thought I’d attempt to pull out three productivity principles that have become apparent to me in the past year.

A better way to evaluate performance | MBA Learnings

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Incentives drive behavior. Our “Leadership in Organizations” professor repeatedly stated that incentives are among the strongest levers to changing culture.

As we discussed incentive systems, we discussed the issues with the traditional tier-based evaluation systems.

Most companies have some variant of a system that grades people above or below target/expectations relative to their peers. We discussed a couple of issues with this:

Warmth and competence | MBA Learnings

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We discussed the tension between “warmth and competence” in the first week of classes at school. Academics have used this concept in various ways to show how various cultural/demographic/occupational groups are perceived in various parts of the world. As usual, I’m going to gloss over all that and focus on the implications for you and me.

One-line checkouts are better than multiple-line checkouts | MBA Learnings

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about why queues form. The one line answer is that they form because of statistical fluctuations and dependent events. The concept is simple: if your presence at a meeting is dependent on the previous meeting, and the average time in the meeting is variable, it is likely that you’ll have people waiting for you, on average.

There’s a really cool application of this principle when it comes to checkout lines in stores and supermarkets. Multiple line checkouts are woefully inefficient.

A look at conflicting incentives | MBA Learnings

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned about markets, they’re rife with conflicts of interest.”

Let’s now take a look at the life of John Doe. John is an executive at a leading Fortune 500 company headquartered in the US. He gets paid $1 million in cash, $4 million in stock, and $20 million in various incentive related bonuses that are tied to “EPS,” or earnings per share.

Now, let’s think about the many decisions he needs to make as a CEO that impact other constituents: