KWEST: A truly ‘amazing’ experience

Kellogg Worldwide Experience and Service Trip – is an institution among Kellogg MBA students. Each year more than 85% of the school’s incoming class and their significant others (referred to as “Joint Ventures” or “JVs”) embark on a weeklong adventure to countries all over the world. This year’s KWEST kicks off in less than a week, with students departing to a variety of destinations, from China and Portugal to Argentina and the Galapagos Islands, and many places in between.

Free lunch and ping pong don’t make a culture

I never wanted to be one of those people that took pictures of their food and texted it to others. But while interning at LinkedIn this summer, I became one of them. It started slowly … a picture here to my family, a picture there to my classmates. But soon my addiction to culinary-related sharing was out of control. Everyone had to know about the sushi I ate for lunch, all playfully captioned with “did I mention it’s free?”

Such a shameless parading of perks is fun, especially when you work in technology for the summer. But when does the glossy finish of “free” begin to fade? The answer is quickly. Free lunches and ping pong alone do not create a culture — at least not a great one and not by default. I’ll give you three reasons why that’s the case.

Discovering the many faces of innovation

MMM students got a crash course on what innovation looks, feels, tastes, smells and sounds like during a class visit to Doblin’s global innovation firm’s Chicago offices. Doblin Co-Founder Larry Keeley also teaches Innovation Frontiers, a core course in Kellogg’s MMM program.

The topic that afternoon was, quite simply, a crash course on what Innovation looks, feels, tastes, smells, and sounds like.

Warmth and competence | MBA Learnings

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.

Kellogg Executive MBA Global Network: Kellogg-WHU in Germany

Campus profile: Studying at WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany

This post is part of a new series featuring the different partner schools within the Kellogg Executive MBA Global Network. The school:  WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management Location: Vallendar and Düsseldorf, Germany Expertise: European business, luxury goods The basics Consistently regarded as a top business school in Europe, the WHU Otto Beisheim School of… Continue reading

Bringing leadership lessons to life

As a first-quarter student in the One-Year MBA program at Kellogg, we dove into our academics with a course titled “Leadership In Organizations.” The class is designed to enhance our leadership skills.

The coursework for leadership is interesting because it places a lot of importance on practical and conceptual training.

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

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.

Bringing analysis back to data analytics

Joel Shapiro, JD, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Program on Data Analytics (PDAK) at Kellogg. Since joining the school in spring 2015, he has been engaging with students via the Big Data and Analytics Club and developing a new course for the PDAK curriculum. Shapiro helps businesses understand how to better take advantage of data and to improve decision-making across the enterprise. He has served on faculty at Northwestern for 11 years, and in 2010 built the first online degree program in predictive analytics.

In this Q&A, Shapiro talks about big data, his vision for data analytics at Kellogg, and more.