Archive for MBA

John Molson Cup

// January 3rd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // MBA

Tomorrow I’m taking the train to Montreal to compete in the John Molson MBA International Case Competition. It’s a week long competition that draws teams of MBA students from all over the world. Each team is made up of only four students from each school.

Each day, your team is put in a room and given a case to analyze that could present a variety of business challenges including HR, PR, marketing, finance, corporate social responsibility, expansion issues, etc. You’re given three hours total to read the case, analyze it and form recommendations. You have to do this without the aid of any computer, research materials or internet devices — you have only the knowledge that you bring into the room to aid you.

After three hours is up, you present your case to business executives and answer their questions. The judges rank your analysis and presentation and you accumulate points to win your division or maybe the entire competition.

Okay, so maybe that’s not the most relaxing way to spend a week off work, but it’s a challenge I’ll only have one chance in my life to do (you can only compete once) and I wasn’t going to pass it up.

Wish our team luck! We are: myself, Susan, Liz, Haran and coach Dale Carl.

Jan. 10, 2010 UPDATE
I’m back in Toronto after a week in Montreal for the John Molson International Case Competition. Our team did very well, finishing second in our division. We were one teeny point away from semi-finals, but I’m SO pleased with how well our team worked under pressure and presented, that I’m very happy with our performance.

My favourite case from the competition was the live case, which this year was a marketing/strategy case on the Montreal Canadiens hockey team. Canadiens owner John Molson was there to present the case to us, so it had significant press coverage (see a video news clip about it here). We did extremely well in this case with a 9 to 2 win, tying the team from University of Calgary, who won the entire competition (they were awesome, and deserved to win).

It was such a great experience, I’m blown away at how awesome it was, how great my teammates were, how great the people were from the schools from all around the world and how challenging the competition was. It was like an MBA crash course in a week. I’m SO happy that I was selected to be on the team and compete. If anyone reading this is thinking of going next year, I highly encourage it.

MBA class in a post: International Marketing

// January 2nd, 2010 // 3 Comments » // MBA

In my part time MBA program, I take two classes a semester. The first was Financial Accounting in an International Environment and the second was International Marketing. Here’s what we studied in our International Marketing class.

This class was structured to be entirely group based work. Everything was done in a group, including writing essays. In business, you collaborate on documents all the time, but collaborating on essays was a new challenge I hadn’t done before. I enjoyed this approach as it best represents how the business world works — you almost never work autonomously in business and I appreciated that the assignments were applicable to the world outside of academia in that way. Our group work assignments were usually marketing case studies, with written assignments and in-person presentations with slide (usually Powerpoint) accompaniments.


Our textbook: Marketing by Grewal, Levy, Persaud, Lichti.

This class also focused heavily on improving presentation skills with the philosophy that every good manager should be able to present well. For this, we were taught public presentation skills, body language and corporate dress.

Other marketing concepts we studied:

  • Marketing mix (4Ps)
  • Porter’s 5 Forces
  • PEST (marketing is FULL of acronyms)
  • Marketplace assessment
  • Developing marketing strategies
  • Socially responsible marketing
  • Analyzing marketing environments
  • Marketing research
  • Consumer behaviour
  • B2B marketing
  • Targeting markets (segmentation, targeting and positioning)
  • Value creation (including product, branding and packaging decisions)
  • Developing new products
  • Marketing services vs products
  • Establishing value and pricing concepts
  • Value delivery (marketing channels and distribution strategies)
  • Value communication
  • Advertising, sales, promotion
  • Global marketing (this part was fascinating)

This class was not only interesting, it added a lot of applicable value to my work right now. I also really enjoyed the challenges of case studies — it was a quick way to learn about industries I knew little about before.

Check out the MBA program in Ryerson if you find this interesting. No — they didn’t tell me to write that. ;)

MBA Class in a post: Financial Accounting

// January 2nd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // MBA

I’ve been super busy the past few months working full time and taking an MBA part time. I’m now done my first semester (the program will be three years part time), and start my second semester in the second week of January. For those also interested in taking an MBA, I’m going to post some of the concepts covered in classes I’ve completed. Hopefully you’re curious about a topic or better yet the program and you’ll join me in the MBA program at Ryerson.

First, here are the topics we studied in our Financial Accounting in an International Environment class.


Our textbook: Financial Accounting authored by Libby, Libby, Short, Kanaan and Gowing.
  • Analyzing and interpreting the four financial statements
    1. Balance sheet
    2. Income statement
    3. Statement of retained earnings
    4. Cash flow statement
  • Other information in financial statements such as Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A), notes, etc.)
  • Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)
  • International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)
  • Accounting cycles
  • Accrual accounting tasks including: trial balances, journal entries, general ledger, adjusting entries and closing entries
  • Accounting ratios — there are a TON of ratios, but here’s a list of about 25 of the most common ones
  • Investment decisions
  • Securities Regulators
  • Qualitative accounting information (relevance, reliability, comparability, consistency)
  • Sales considerations including: returns and allowances, terms, discounts, exchange, classification of receivables, etc.
  • Control systems, management responsibility and ethics
  • Inventory
  • Depreciation and amortization
  • Bonds, retirement liabilities
  • Present and future values
  • Equity — stocks, retained earnings, etc
  • Stocks including types of stocks and stock splits
  • Dividends, annuities
  • Types of businesses, although we focused mainly on incorporated companies

One of the biggest values from this class was that I can now comfortably read financial statements released by corporations and understand what information is to be taken at face value and what can be influenced by managerial decisions. Financial accounting isn’t as cut and dry as one might think.

Next post: international marketing.