my EMBA Chronicle

Loyola

+

Starbucks

=

greatness

Loyola recently announced a new direction for the EMBA program. While I am very pleased with the format of my program, I’m a bit jealous of Loyola’s EMBA class of 2011 as they’ll get to benefit from new innovations in the executive MBA curriculum. Based on informal conversations with my instructors and others at the college, I know that much thought and planning has gone into the design of the new program and it will be an exciting direction for the college.

Almost as much as I enjoy watching how Loyola is positioning itself in the EMBA market, I love the fact that the graduate campuses are well positioned around coffee. Attending a statistics review session at the Columbia campus gave me an opportunity to discover that the Columbia campus is a) quite impressive and b) a mere .7 miles away from Starbucks. Coincidentally (or not), the Timonium graduate campus is also .7 miles away from Starbucks.

Inspired by this module’s classes, I’m tempted to create a regression model about the relationship between Loyola and Starbucks — if only there wasn’t plenty of other homework to do this week. Congrats to Loyola and for innovation in the EMBA curriculum and for the strategic locations of the graduate campuses.

Now that we’ve started the second module I can really see the building blocks of Loyola’s EMBA program.  Some connections are more obvious — economics parallelling and expanding on the lessons in accounting.  While others take less obvious path to connectivity like the ways data warehouse and analysis tools support strategy planning and assessment.

This week’s reading for economics class had a focus on pricing strategies took me right back the days of the residency in September.  As part of the residency, we participated in BSG — the Business Strategy Simulation.  With our class divided into teams, we used this web-based tool to execute production and business plans for a fictitious company.  After each BSG session, results were tallied and we were able to see our company rise (or fall) based on the actions of competitors.  It was intense, challenging and fun.  And at the time, I realized just how much learning I had ahead of me.

As I read this week’s economics assignments, I understand more fully the flaws in my team’s BSG strategies — if only I had taken economics before the residency!

http://www.sodahead.com/question/148143/its-a-block-party/