HOW TO MAXIMIZE THE VALUE OF YOUR MBA?

TO: All members
FROM: Dr John Vong

Lets face it. Studying for an MBA demands high financial cost, high emotional stress and a lot of time. However all these costs are relative, if you truly understand the value of your MBA. And that means more than just increasing your income generating ability, deepening your business knowledge or increasing your skills. So what else is an MBA suppose to do? How far can it stretch you? How do you maximize the value of your MBA? All the answers will be unraveled in this seminar.

ABC VALUE OF AN MBA

A FOR ALLIANCES
Studying for an MBA allows you to build alliances, friendships and networks. No person can work alone nowadays.
Gone are the days of having Lone Ranger and his horse named Silver.
As globalisation has gone beyond withdrawal, so is the collaborative efforts that must go hand in hand. Thus its not surprising that your next career move or your next innovation will come from working with an MBA alumni.

B FOR BUSINESS KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION
Biz knowledge means that you must learn the 4 pillars of business:

Pillar 1 is Product./Market/ Customer Alignment
All the 3 pieces must be aligned with each other.
If, not your product cannot sell and wont move the markets and the business is not run effectively. If your product is not aligned with the needs to customer the business is sunk.

Pillar 2 is that of Business Process.
Every business must run with processes (such as policies, legal compliance, IT systems, agreements). Without business processes, the efficiency and productivity that we so much want would not materialise.

Pillar 3 is about Human Resources. Continuous Learning & Development.
Many companies are struggling today, not because they don't have the right products/markets, but because the people are are not managed properly. What do we mean by that? It starts with recruitment (just imagine that the wrong people can recruited into your legal firm). Do you think it will work having people with the wrong attitudes and cannot assimilate culturally? Then its goes to how you reward the people and re-train people. Can an organisation learn from their own mistakes and mistakes of others, if it can't then it won't grow.

Pillar 4 Financial management.
Managing business finance deals with borrowing, raising capital, investing and expending and finally how to pay dividends. If a company cannot juggle those financial activities, it will have a hard time to grow, and may even collapse.

C FOR CHARACTER BUILDING
On studying leadership and strategy, most MBA programs will focus on the science of strategy. We focus on the Art of Leadership. And you know what - actually Leadership starts with character building. Because people can take away your MBA, but they cannot take away your character.
People can bring you to court, slur you and slander you, but they cannot take away your character.

Closely align with character is attitude and behaviour, because good character can only be built upon good behavior and good behavior is derived from good attitude. We show the way to having a good attitude, thereby having good behavior, followed by good character, and ending up with a good destiny.

Come talk to me directly.

Speaker Profile:
Dr. John Vong has worked in 17 countries, advised 2 central banks, managed projects of 3 supra-national bodies (WorldBank/IFC, United Nations, Asian Development Bank), conducted training at 4 global banks (HSBC, Stanchart, ANZ, Westpac) and 5 global technology giants (IBM, Motorola, Seagate, HP, Siemens) and lectured in 6 world-class Masters programs (Nanyang, Emory, Louvain, UC Irvine, Baruch, Virginia). He has a PhD (Bradford), MBA, BA (Economics), CPA (Australia) and undertaken professional development at the Harvard University Public Disputes Program. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to building the new government of Timor-Leste. He founded www.leadershipcorp.com.