Thinking about doing an MBA - any recommendations?

Further update, everyone (I know you've been waiting with baited breath).

I started the course on Monday. The campus is ridiculous - it's like they've taken a National Trust park and dropped a little bit of uni in there (https://www.henley.ac.uk/why/campuses/greenlands). We stayed on site for two nights in "student accomodation", which were basically hotel rooms. We got three cooked meals a day (I would have liked a bloody sandwich, but there you go). And the room we were in was air conditioned.

My cohort is great. There are 28 of us, split into four teams of seven each.

We had a fantastic icebreaker. As far as I remember, there were four parts (and I'm writing this down because it was so much better than the usual crap, in case anyone wants to use it):

  1. In the room, we were asked to see it as a map of the world and with that in mind, go and stand somewhere meaningful to you and talk to whoever was also stood there about their place. I chose Canterbury, Kent, where my wife went to uni. We spent a lot of time there in the first few years of our relationship. So, I went east obviously. The guy next to me had chosen Singapore...so that was funny. Funny enough that I remember it though.
  2. Then we had to go round and find people with similar jobs to ourselves. Best category was people who couldn't find anything in common with anyone else.
  3. Then it was finding similar industries. I ended up in construction.
  4. On the rope again, we had to order ourselves in terms of birthday (year excluded) without speaking. We could only do sign language. That was pretty entertaining as you had a few people who completely ****** it up.
  5. Last was bingo. We had a bingo box thing of 12 things about people like, "has a famous friend" or "plays an instrument" and you had to go around collecting people's names who fitted those boxes.
Honestly, this worked brilliantly. We got a lot of names, and knew a lot about each other very quickly. And it was just not awkward in any sense of the word. There's also a general rule that it's OK to forget people's names, though I did learn most of them in the end.

Then it was three days of learning study skills and an introduction to personal development / managing systems and processes. The personal development module is incredibly exciting. I would honestly recommend anyone just do this part if they get the opportunity. It's all about reflecting and understanding yourself.

I left with a hell of a lot to think about. Mainly about my team and my leadership skills, and I've already sort of started to implement a few changes; I want to lead. I don't want to be a product specialist like I am now. Fortunately, my work are incredibly supportive of this and I'm sure they've put me where I am so that I can be a future leader. So that's bloody exciting.

I'm feeling like I made a fantastic decision. Absolutely buzzing from it. What I want to work out how to do next week is how to set my team up each week to feel empowered and to feel the same buzz I'm feeling now, because I think it can be done.

Sadly, one of my guys called today and let me know he's got a new job. I'm pretty gutted; he's a great guy and losing him is a real blow to my department and to the company. He is going to a friendly consultancy who spec my product all the tie and therefore I expect to hear from him regularly. I just hope he's the advocate I think he'll be!

Random closing thought: the professional development module asks you to journal about work. I've done it the past three days and it has been great for getting my thoughts in order about how I want to do things at work. It will also then contribute to the assignments I'll have to do on personal development.
 
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For Icebreaker #4, were you able to speak beforehand to agree how you would sign it? Or did you have to non-verbally communicate and agree on a 'system' for communication?

I guess the way I would do it is partition by month first (everyone hold up number of fingers for their birth month, with 11 and 12 doing some different signal like waving their arms or whatever), to gather into small monthly cohorts, in order of month number. And then within the month cohorts (which can't be that big if it's 28 people total) you could just take it in turn to communicate what day your birthday is by flashing up fingers, and the others move before or after you based on that.

Obviously might need to tweak this if there were people with physical disabilities (something I think is often overlooked when planning icebreakers).
 
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HangTime said:
For Icebreaker #4, were you able to speak beforehand to agree how you would sign it? Or did you have to non-verbally communicate and agree on a 'system' for communication?

I guess the way I would do it is partition by month first (everyone hold up number of fingers for their birth month, with 11 and 12 doing some different signal like waving their arms or whatever), to gather into small monthly cohorts, in order of month number. And then within the month cohorts (which can't be that big if it's 28 people total) you could just take it in turn to communicate what day your birthday is by flashing up fingers, and the others move before or after you based on that.

Obviously might need to tweak this if there were people with physical disabilities (something I think is often overlooked when planning icebreakers).
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There was no talking, no. I did exactly what you said - month first and then day once we'd got month sorted out.

You're right about disabilities. I don't know what we would have done in that case. But they would have known in advance had anyone been disabled. As a uni, I think they're pretty hot on that sort of thing. I saw a couple of people there at the time who had obvious physical disabliities - I think they were staff.
 
Heh, if there's no prep time where you can discuss approach I can see that being difficult to get 28 people all on the same page about what system you are using to communicate. Even if most arrive at the same system there could easily be a couple who have a different approach in mind. In their minds it's probably the rest of you that ****ed up, not them :)
 
So the first lesson is communication.. :)

I did look at henley MBA too but at the time I was looking for a job after being made redundant. Now well it would be nice but unlikely the place I’m at now would even stoop so low to fund some real career progression.

Maybe when the house is paid off..
 
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HangTime said:
Heh, if there's no prep time where you can discuss approach I can see that being difficult to get 28 people all on the same page about what system you are using to communicate. Even if most arrive at the same system there could easily be a couple who have a different approach in mind. In their minds it's probably the rest of you that ****ed up, not them :)
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It became really obvious immediately what people were doing. Flash up the numbers on your fingers...you've got 12 potentials initially. Then flash up the next bit.

To be fair, of 28 people only about 3 were in the wrong place.

NickK said:
So the first lesson is communication.. :)

I did look at henley MBA too but at the time I was looking for a job after being made redundant. Now well it would be nice but unlikely the place I’m at now would even stoop so low to fund some real career progression.

Maybe when the house is paid off..
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Good luck :)

dowie said:
It does sound pretty cool, I like how it used to be the civil service equivalent of the military Staff Colleges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henley_Business_School

@dirtychinchilla I assume the MBA course run at that "Greenlands" campus where the former staff college used to be?
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It is at Greenlands, and it's bloody lovely. I think the staff college is still there and they've added modern extensions to it.
 
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