NANYANG FELLOWS MBA

Getting Ready for a Leadership Role

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?

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!

NANYANG FELLOWS MBA

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.

NANYANG FELLOWS MBA

Managing the Enterprise of Tomorrow

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.

NANYANG FELLOWS MBA

Making Sense of the 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.

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NANYANG MBA

The Importance of Organizational Culture

It’s the quality that binds the organization together, and prevents it from falling apart; a quality that gives the organization the strength to deal with difficult challenges; a quality that makes it stand out from the rest.

Like individuals, organizations too have a unique personality that we refer to as ‘culture’. It’s an invisible yet powerful force that drives the thoughts and actions of each of its members. It’s a system of shared values, beliefs, and goals.

Organizational culture has a huge impact on the company’s ability to succeed and make it big in the competitive world that we live in today. A company without a tangible culture finds it difficult to tap into the full potential of its employees, and to keep them happy. And, that puts both the organization’s and its people’s well being at risk.

Here are some of the reasons why organizational culture plays such an important role in the success of any business:

• Unity

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” Mark Twain had said in one of his famous quotes. An organization, irrespective of its actual size – whether it’s a start-up with 10-15 employees or an organization with a bigger workforce, is strengthened by its unity. The unity results from a solid organizational culture – a set of shared values and principles that the members abide by in every decision that they take. The similarity of thought and action enables the employees of a company to work synergistically, to help each other in their goals, and to stay strong as a group in order to fight against the rival forces.

• Business Success

One organization that has a palpable organizational culture is Google Inc. One look at the Google products and campuses across the globe, few interactions with its employees, and we would know what the company stands for – Creativity and Innovativeness. Building and maintaining Google’s culture requires relentless effort, as Google’s Developer Advocate Don Dodge explains in this blog post. But, the company very well knows that the secret to its success is its people and the culture they create and maintain.

• Stability

Author Daniel H Pink in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us talks about the role of ‘Purpose’ in improving the performance of people in the workplace. Lack of purpose and motivation is one of the major reasons why people are often dissatisfied at work and why they quit their jobs and look for greener pastures.

Organizational culture, by its very nature, ensures that the purpose of its members are aligned with the purpose of the organization. And, this compatibility of goals and way of thinking drives the members to perform well, be self-directed, and be loyal to the organization they belong to.

• Sense of Direction

When an organization has laid out its values, beliefs and goals, its employees have a clear direction to work towards. They can discern between right and wrong, important and unimportant and this clarity ensures a focused approach to work, and a productive use of the organization’s time and resources.

• Identity

‘Identity’ and ‘brand image’ emerge from an organization’s culture and its people. Apple’s products wouldn’t be known for their ‘perfection’ and ‘enduring beauty’, had it not been for Steve Jobs’ unique way of approaching the technology business, his emphasis on creating products that weren’t just efficient, but also aesthetically pleasing and immaculately designed. It’s the people who create the organization and it’s the organization that creates the ‘brand image’. And, we know what a big role the identity of the brand plays in how well it’s received by the market and how far it goes.

Interested in exploring the topic of ‘culture’ and ‘group behaviour’ in depth? Nanyang Technological University’s Culture Science Institute (CSI) holistically investigates cultural issues of national and global importance, from brain-based, cognitive, evolutionary, behavioural and life science perspectives. To know more, visit http://www.culturescienceinstitute.com/.

Additionally, the Nanyang MBA at NBS offers a compulsory module on Leading People Globally. Designed to help you with theoretical and a practical understanding of what is required to lead people in organizations, it provides you with detailed insights on an organization’s perspective on talent management.

The programme’s Business Study Missions (local or overseas) also help build a candidate’s cultural intelligence, exposing them to different business, cultural, economic and political environments. It prepares individuals for the global workplace by honing their skills in managing business in different environments.

Have thoughts on the role of organizational culture? Don’t forget to share them in the comments below!

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