Author Archives: hmteam

Get the Edge with the Nanyang Fellows MBA Programme

  By hmteam • November 3, 2015 ,

When you’re a seasoned professional looking for the right MBA programme for yourself, you also seek new skills and techniques that will let you handle more responsibilities and critical analysis at work. You aim for even better communication skills and a growth in strategic thinking. Are you focusing on leading more people with your vision? Or are you an entrepreneur looking for some nurturing? No matter the results you want, the Nanyang Fellows MBA Programme will enable you to get there.

02_get_the_edge_v2_720

Here’s why:

The Sum of Experience

When you are in an MBA programme where the minimum years of experience of candidates is 8 years, you know that you’ll be bombarded with fresh insights, knowledge and concepts from all over the business globe. Being surrounded by peers from a wide range of career backgrounds is always a plus because you never know what you’ll end up learning. Since you’ll have similar goals, your combined experience can bring a lot to the table. Maybe you’ve never had a long conversation with somebody from the American biomedical engineering industry? Or maybe you had no idea how people in India react to condom ads? Get ready to know a lot more.

International Exposure

The Nanyang Business School is known for its world-class faculty members. The Fellows start their journey in Singapore and progress to the United States to attend courses at top B-schools like Wharton, Georgetown University and University of California at Berkeley. Take this opportunity to soak in practical knowledge and a conceptual foundation of business models that make the best of East and West industry practices. Immerse yourself and understand how business is conducted in a global setting. At the end, you also get a certificate from the American university that you attend.

New Leadership Skills

A good leader needs to be good with people. In order to do that, you need to know what drives people as individuals, as a society and in the environment in question. The Nanyang Fellows MBA Programme makes sure that you learn or improve every hard skill and soft skill required to succeed. That’s accomplished by the hands on, expert faculty at NBS along with the other emerging leaders whom you’ll be sharing your education space with. For example, if you lacked an organisational skill that affected your work in the past, you’ll certainly deal with it here.

An Evolving Thought Process

Fellows from the past years have credited the programme for helping them develop a broader analytical framework and critical thinking that lead them to solve fundamental issues that had been lying untouched. Learning and reflection are priority here. Your curriculum will be supplemented with lots of research, thanks to the school’s reputed research centres. That means that you’ll have access to cutting edge information that can contribute towards your knowledge bank.

In fact, major international publications including The Economist and the Financial Times continue to highly rate the B-school’s academic quality. With networking being the need of the hour, this is one place where you can invest and gain. The eclectic mix of Nanyang Fellows MBA will stand by you whether you need life-long friends, business partners, mentors or powerful role models.

Getting Ready for a Leadership Role

  By hmteam • November 1, 2015 ,

You’ve been there, done that. And now you’re ready to transition into a new role where you’re going to create an even bigger and a better impact. Prep to move up to the C-level and be one of those leaders that you’ve always admired. Are you ready to support your company’s business strategies? Great. But there’s more to the job; a good leader has to offer his/her own insights and contribute in key decision-making. You already know the company’s vision – but what about your vision as a leader? Managing people may come easily to you, but do you know if you can lead them too?

01_Getting_Ready_For_Leadership_Role

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you are eyeing that new title.

Personalise Your Role

Your key to success lies in understanding your company’s vision and values. It is in your hands to make them meaningful on a personal level because the leader is a role model for many. Don’t tie yourself down with ideas about how managers at your level should behave. Focus on maintaining a dedicated work ethic that lets you be true to yourself. Stick to a clear-cut plan and set goals, motivating your team to set their goals too along the way.

Communicate Effectively

Always show people the big picture. Never assume that your team members know what that picture exactly is. Instead, update them on a regular basis so that they are informed of the goals and changes. Take care of your team. Don’t forget to say thank you and praise in front of others. Playing the blame game is a strict no-no. A leader is responsible for team results. Take ownership of both the positives and negatives.

Make Informed Decisions

Today’s business globe is witnessing innovation every day, so a good leader needs to know how to adapt and be well informed at all times. Evaluate situations with the help of multiple resources because a single perspective just won’t do. And then arrive at a decision. A diversity of views shouldn’t confuse you. Just keep an open mind and listen. Learn to leverage your ideas by taking in inputs from your team members. The exchange of new ideas and feedback can lead to great results. Blocking out everybody else would be a mistake.

Be Tech Savvy

An effective leader understands how IT and business strategy, risk management and finance work together. And as you move up the corporate ladder, you’ll need to upgrade your technical knowhow, because a leader’s job involves understanding how the use of technology affects the organisation. More importantly, you’ll need to know how to exploit this technology in your industry.

Tackle Change

Change management is a relatively new area. Businesses are on the search for change drivers who can lead a transformation. It isn’t about leading change throughout the organisation as much as it is about being at ease in a state of constant fluctuation. That basically means that a leader has to keep continuous improvement on his agenda – such as building better processes and increasing the market share of the company.

The MBA as a Stepping Stone

A top class MBA like the Nanyang Fellows MBA is a stepping-stone to your leadership role. An MBA programme focused on candidates with years of experience will encourage lots of application. It will be a makeover for you. You can experience so much during the programme, in terms of work, culture, networking and a foreign business study mission that will add to your list of leadership abilities.

Are you ready to get ahead? You have to work on yourself but don’t forget the support system you’ll get from your B-school. You’ll be a part of a new, supportive community. A business school is a powerful tool for socialising. So make the most of it!

Mentor Your Millennial Squad

  By hmteam • October 30, 2015

Millennials are taking over. They make up a large proportion of most top company offices and are ready to be the change. The old fashioned ways of giving career advice and training are proving to not be enough. Instead, they demand unlimited access to key people in the organisation and industry. They also expect customised advice based on what they want and need.

05_Mentor_Your_Millennial_Squad

If you want to be a successful mentor, here are some points to keep in mind:

  • Provide Constant Feedback

Millennials don’t look at their job as work; they like to make their role a major part of their lives. In other words, they are not focused on achieving a work-life balance as much as they are trying to find a career that is personally fulfilling. A strong sense of purpose rules the millennial agenda, so as a mentor, you need to recognise that. What does that translate to? Constant constructive feedback is a necessity. Be there with your inputs about projects, career development needs, personal growth, and anything else that matters to them.

  • Keep Them Engaged

The millennial generation sets high standards for themselves and everybody around them. They’ve started creating a resume way before their parents did and have grown up eyeing the best schools, colleges and jobs. With that kind of drive, you must make sure that they are engaged at all times. That doesn’t mean overworking them. It just means that you have to keep on throwing them challenges. For this set of employees, one achievement follows the other. Keep the motivation levels high.

  • Try Out Reverse Mentorship

Some companies employ a reverse mentorship programme where the manager and executives mentor each other. You’d be surprised at what you can learn from them with their unique ways of processing life. For instance, you can get insights on how your junior colleagues are responding to your leadership and understand what may be going wrong when problems arise. You will help each other and build a bond that can last a lifetime.

  • Consider Group Mentoring

Another method of mentorship that has worked is group mentoring. It is probably best as an add-on programme because mentoring via a technology platform takes away from the one-on-one aspect. Your organisation will need to invest in software that will bring together employees from different locations according to their skills or roles. There will be community forums, document sharing opportunities and polls. It could be you mentoring a group of people or a group of managers including yourself mentoring certain employees. Conference calls, webcasts and online coaching would keep up the regular communication. You will need to be super organised to make this successful.

A great mentor lets the millennials be emotionally and intellectually forthright with them. He or she is not supposed to be a coach or a boss but a motivator who inspires both within and outside the workspace. The more you invest in them, the higher the chances that they’ll be happier and choose to stick around.

Women in Leadership

  By hmteam • October 28, 2015 ,

04_Women_in_Leadership

Even with MBA statistics pointing towards a gender bias, with a higher percentage of men enrolling in B-schools, lots of women are also choosing to do an MBA. Some experts say that an MBA degree and experience is the answer to building a woman’s confidence in a field of male competitors. Plus, with an advanced degree being a prerequisite for many senior positions, this degree can be the key to success. An MBA can help women break the ‘glass ceiling’ that exists, owing to the vast set of skills they’d acquire.

  • Indra Nooyi

One example of a shining MBA graduate is Indra Nooyi. She is the current Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo. Last year, she was ranked 13 in Forbes’ global list of most powerful women. In addition to an MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, Nooyi earned a master’s degree in management from Yale. She joined PepsiCo in 1994 and was named President and Chief Financial Officer a few years later. She has been the director behind PepsiCo’s global strategy for over one decade and led its restructuring as well. In 2006, she became the company’s fifth CEO in its 44-year-old history.

  • Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the Burmese National League for Democracy and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is an MBA graduate of Oxford University. She returned to Burma in 1988 after years abroad, to see the slaughter of protesters opposing the brutal rule of the dictator U Ne Win. She began a nonviolent movement for achieving democracy and human rights. The government placed Suu Kyi under house arrest, and she spent 15 years in their custody. In 1991, her ongoing efforts won her the Nobel Prize for Peace, and she was finally released from house arrest in 2010. In a speech, Suu Kyi said that her time at Oxford taught her how to respect the best in human civilisation. This is a woman who made an impact on the world while being stuck at home for such a long time!

  • Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, is another example of how a top class MBA can contribute to your career. She earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in the 1990s. Before Facebook, she worked with Google and before that, served as chief of staff for the United States Secretary of the Treasury. Sandberg joined Facebook with the aim to make it more profitable. It did happen. In 2012, she became the eighth member – and the first female member – of Facebook’s board of directors.

In fact, Sandberg’s famous Lean In tips have helped many women build their leadership skills. She advises women to be more open to taking career risks and skip people pleasing. It’s important to be willing to lead and learn as you do new things rather than to not do them at all. Her tips also encourage women to visualise their careers as a jungle gym instead of a ladder because there are obviously so many ways to climb a jungle gym and only one way to climb up a ladder. Let’s face it; everybody can’t have the same, straight path. There will be ups and downs and detours. In another vital tip, Sandberg tells women to allow themselves to fantasise about their careers, focusing on improvement. You can surely think of times when you were afraid to do something because you weren’t really good at it in the first place. She also suggests that women in leadership can gain from a Lean In circle, which consists of a peer group who meet every month to exchange support and ideas.

Business schools around the globe try their bit to contribute to the growth of female leadership. Forums such as The Nanyang Women in Business Club and women-specific recruitment events are just one of many ways in which these schools try to resolve the issue of gender diversity. The more women in a programme, the more other women will want to join. Call it inspiration if you will. If the last decade has seen more women succeed and stand out, the future will hopefully see more.

Managing the Enterprise of Tomorrow

  By hmteam • October 26, 2015

03_Enterprise

Future enterprises will be immersed in an even more digitised economy. Every individual in a company will have a bigger impact on business. Whether you are managing a team of two or five, you will have more influence in your company. Daily working conditions will be different and your day-to-day schedule would be affected by these, but tomorrow’s admin guy is going to learn to be much more versatile than somebody in his current profile. Regardless of job titles, everybody is going to have to throw themselves into the new environment.

More Complexities

Tomorrow’s enterprise is more complex. If you think that knowing fluent English and being able to talk to foreign clients is good enough, think again. In the future, more internationalisation will create a thin line between the global and the local. That means that businesses will need to know when local trends and culture cannot be overshadowed by a globalised view. Imagine starting company operations in a country where the people prefer to lead more traditional lives relying heaving on cultural norms but you try to force an American office environment on them. So sensitivity and the ability to simplify things will be important. If communication is a priority today, it will be the topmost feature distinguishing enterprises in the future. A good manager needs to integrate market strategies, activity and long-term policies with the shareholder expectations, customer aspiration and colleague mindset in focus.

New Profiles

Enterprises in the future will have to rely on their capacity to attract talents and on digital world skills. In other words, the human resources and information technology departments will be highlighted. New job profiles will be created; for example, data scientists – not a description that we are very familiar with. Individuals who are capable of predicting trends and tastes will be in demand because change will be so frequent and solutions so customised.

Leadership Qualities

A changing business environment has brought on a change in expectations of behaviour. The topmost person in an industry has always been known as someone who knows almost everything about everything in his or her field. This will become rare as enterprises start equating authority with attitudes, personalities, charisma, the capacity to make others adhere to ideas, and above all else, the talent to encourage others to work well in collaboration. The new leaders will be mobilisers and facilitators. You have certainly already seen things moving in this direction.

Vital Responsibilities

Digitisation brings with it new forms of competition and risk, so future company leaders will have to focus on corporate strategy and cost reduction. Decisions will be taken to comply with the need to differentiate a business from its competitors. You need divergent strategic plans to achieve this and cost reduction. The management will still have to continuously demonstrate to shareholders that the decisions taken are increasing the value of their assets. That happens today as well, but the future will see such decisions being made more frequently.

Training Needs

Costs for training associates will increase. Enterprises will want technically qualified employees who are fully operational on day one. Earlier, companies would spend a lot of time and effort on training new entrants, in hope of retaining them for a long duration.

Today, the global economy is volatile. Escalating costs, changing technologies, complex regulations, unpredictable markets and record deficits are affecting businesses around the world and have created new challenges in meeting expectations. Enterprises that possess the ability to anticipate needs, will adapt more easily to change. A business needs to be globally effective in terms of addressing various markets and running operations optimally. It also needs to be innovative, adaptive and ready to face certainty and uncertainty.

Making Sense of the Global Workplace

  By hmteam • October 25, 2015 ,

 

 

 

02_Global_Workplace

Businesses have been tackling an evolving scenario post the 2008 market crash and the subsequent economic downturns. You’ve probably confronted some of those changes yourself whilst being part of a team. The demand for sales and trading roles isn’t as high as before. Mergers & acquisitions roles have gained popularity. With the jobs market being more stable now, a lot of people are interested in financial training as a key to switch roles or move to a different kind of a company. Reflecting on the globalised nature of the industry, top business schools are welcoming more and more students from around the world. There’s clearly been a rise in internationalisation.

Ethics and responsibility

The effects of economic ups and downs have not stopped impacting world financial centres. That is why there is a big emphasis on risk management, with B-schools updating their regulations curriculum consistently. Ethics is another area of interest that scores high on importance. Sustainability doesn’t lie far behind. What started as a small module in many business schools has become a core subject for many. A good knowledge of mathematical tools, plus a confident grasp of world financial markets, and IT techniques, is your recipe for success here. In fact, your current role has certainly exposed you to these aspects in some degree already. But even if you know it all, you need to know how to use it. An MBA programme such as the Nanyang Fellows MBA aims to create managers who are able to reflect on and look at the implications of their action AND their inaction.

Internal Collaboration

Collaboration and teamwork characterise today’s professional life, regardless of your location. Businesses want their employees to work together and create results even if they are thousands of miles apart. The global workspace now demands that you work together remotely, so a greater focus is given to international teamwork. If a business has teams collaborating efficiently, problem solving and the creation of positive results will come easily.

Knowing how to effectively collaborate is a skill you can nurture every day. Just always be open to spending time with all kinds of people even if you have a language or cultural barrier. Think of the executive who had coffee with a visiting colleague and how he found out that India doesn’t allow people to find out their unborn baby’s gender. That would definitely help him when he’s working on a campaign involving pregnant women in India.

Cultural understanding and agility

Global employers value cultural awareness and agility. You need to be ready to take care of yourself and business irrespective of your surroundings. That means that you could be sent off to live in a remote country for three months and you would have to deliver results while you are sitting there with the local people, eating their local food, speaking their language, and joining them for festive occasions. You may have already spent some time outside your home country, but did you stay there as a mere tourist? Next time you go somewhere, venture to spots that are not traditionally touristy. Who knows? You could find out something that the people don’t like and never repeat it again with clients from that country.

Leadership, consulting and entrepreneurship

Everybody wants to be a leader. The evolution of business and management careers has brought entrepreneurship and consulting to the limelight. It isn’t always about creating great products – it could also be about delivering unparalleled service that impacts multiple countries and thousands of people. The business industry sees people breaking away from the corporate ladder to start their ventures every day. When you choose to do an MBA, you get the opportunity to rethink your career path. Some successful start-ups have started from a college dorm room. So what are you waiting for with your years of experience? Build your business plan and take it from there. See how it goes. If consulting is your passion, then go for it. Once you are into it, you’ll know what is going right and what is going wrong.

The Nanyang Fellows MBA is for seasoned professionals like you, who are ready to embrace these challenges head on. The evolving business world needs well-trained professionals who can combine their experience with top class knowledge. That’s how leaders are born.

Kickstart Your Managerial Career

  By hmteam • October 22, 2015 ,

01_kickstart

When you decide to begin your MBA journey after a few years in the corporate world, you should know that you are taking a major leap. Everybody knows that there’s a huge difference between a junior level manager and a senior manager armed with a top class MBA Fellowship degree. Making the choice of applying for the programme is your first step. But there is a lot more you can do to kickstart your managerial career. The more proactive you are, the better chances of success. Build your career strategy with your eye on the next phase of your work life. In other words, you need to do your research and figure out where your future lies and what you can do to go in that direction. Start planning and get moving!

Discover Opportunities

You’ll have lots of opportunities to take advantage of, but sometimes you can’t pinpoint them. Sometimes, you’ll need to create those opportunities as well. Compare your current role to the managerial role that you aspire for. Have coffee or dinner with seniors you know in that role already. Get the inner story about what happens every day in that job. Compare your current role to that role and take notes. Admit your strengths and weaknesses to yourself. Ask yourself if you are running after it all just for a huge pay hike. Once you are done answering your own questions, you’ll know if you are ready to get on the managerial bandwagon. Then you can step up things at work and put in that extra effort. For example, you could be a manager with two people managing you, but why not offer to take up additional responsibility? You’ll learn on the job and earn respect in the field as well.

Plan Ahead

You’ve been here a few years. You’ve seen companies grow and business go up and down. A place that looks good right now, may not be that great once you get there post the MBA fellowship. Industries change rapidly and the ‘next big thing’ alters frequently. So, you should do chalk out a plan. Why do you want to spend a year in this programme? Maybe it is because you feel like you aren’t growing in your current job. Or it could be that you are ready to specialise in what you know you are best at. Whatever the reason, you need to be able to visualise your future when you are armed with this degree. Yes, you could be a manager already, but there are more of them at the top. How will you contribute to the industry in ways that you haven’t already?

Make Networking a Habit

You can’t be a manager if you stay stuck inside your office alone all day. You already know that a manager’s career involves using people skills on a daily basis. As you aim higher, communication is more important. If you are an introvert, push yourself. If you can talk to more people, they will know more about your accomplishments and interests. Networking is all about selling what you have. There is no point having a boss who loves you if nobody else in your industry knows about your good work. At this stage in your career, you’ve already built a reputation – so spread it. Use social media, events and get-togethers to let people know you’re ready to move forward.

The Nanyang MBA Fellow Programme

Once you get things rolling, you’ll need to work on your B-school applications. Some top MBA programmes require hardly any work experience from its candidates, while others require a significant amount. The Nanyang Fellows MBA Programme is one year long. The typical Fellow has about eight years of work experience and is in the middle of his career. The combined experience in the classroom brings great expertise to the table. The programme also includes a month’s residency at a top United States business school, which will help you understand how things and people function globally.

Once your application is submitted, don’t put your managerial career on hold. Keep moving. Keep talking. And keep learning!