Deep Inside the Core

Welcome to the Sauder MBA blog! My name is Chris, and I’ll be one of your regular bloggers here.

I think it’s indicative of how challenging and all-involving the Sauder Core has been so far that our MBA class blog presence has been basically non-existent… The professors have the entire class of 120 working non-stop — I know because every time I try to book a group study room in the library, I pass by room after room full of my MBA classmates. Not that there haven’t been social events, although these were much more frequent before school got started in earnest. Mercifully, we don’t have to choose between an open bar and our accounting homework.

A brief intro, since I’ll be blogging about my MBA experience at Sauder over the next 15 months:

I recently returned to North America from two years in India. There, I lived in Mumbai and worked as head of strategy for the Centre for Development Finance, an organization focused on public and private infrastructure financing in India.

My background is in strategy consulting — I worked for five years for a division of Monitor Group called Global Business Network, where we specialized in scenario planning, long-term strategy, and horizon scanning.

My wife and I just moved to Vancouver and are loving it so far. I’m actually looking forward to the rain – although I grew up in Seattle, I haven’t lived in the Pacific Northwest for thirteen years!

Back to the Integrated Core: the Sauder plan of bombarding new MBA students with twelve subjects simultaneously in their first semester appears to be working. I’m recognizing principal-agent problems when they crop up in finance and again in ethics, and transferring insights from supply chain management into IT management. The discrete silos of management are all starting to blur together…either that or I’m not getting enough sleep.