An excellent finale to an eye-opening year

The MBA is an experience and adventure filled with high paced twists and turns. No sooner than completing the core programme and electives, it’s time for the final “Business Mastery Project”. 

This project is meant to draw on many elements of the course and tackle a real world business problem. With the help of a dedicated supervisor lecturing in strategy and quantitative methods, I’ve suddenly become a consultant for a start-up business!

I have designed my project around an international e-commerce company looking to gauge their market opportunity, refine their strategy, and secure venture capital funding. The deliverables will be a market feasibility study, a review of relevant strategic frameworks, and a business plan for future fundraising pitches to investors.

During my first meeting with my supervisor, ideas on strategic frameworks, entrepreneurial owners as people, international markets and trade-law, valuation, and sales and marketing are discussed openly and frankly. A straight to the gut and no holds barred dissection of the situation begins and the learnings from several MBA courses flash by. After an hour of what seems like mental gymnastics, the real issue begins to emerge and it’s time to meet the company for the first time.

The next day, entering an office mid-way through the daily conference call between the three founders, I’m instantly transported back in time to “work mode” as if the MBA year had not passed. The same sights and sounds, the same artefacts, the same coffee! But something feels very different inside. I feel calm, I feel in control, confident with my MBA toolkit at the ready. I’m looking forward to working with inspiring entrepreneurs and giving what I can from my MBA perspective in order to help their business succeed. I feel great!

We start the meeting, they are open for help, they want to grow the business but don’t know where the real value lies. Together we can crack it and after a lot of listening from my side, it becomes clear that they like my initial thoughts. This is going to be an excellent finale to an eye-opening year.

Henrik Karlberg

News

Success Stories from Dubai

Three Business Mastery Projects (BMP) from the Executive MBA in Dubai Cohort 2008 were of such a high quality (and incidentally, achieved the highest marks awarded on the Dubai EMBA) that Prof. Rob Melville, Professor of Internal Auditing, recommended to the authors that they develop them as academic papers to be presented at appropriate conferences and for publication.

• Kishore Jaichandani and Neeraj Teckchandani produced a BMP about potential links between governance and performance in the GCC. From this, an abstract was produced for a paper ‘Where Corporate Governance And Better Firm Performance Meet: Empirical Evidence of Public Listed Companies in the GCC Region’. This was submitted to the 9^th Internal Auditing and Corporate Governance conference in London, April 2011 a peer reviewed event with an acceptance rate of only one in three. It was received very positively, and was awarded the conference prize of £500 for best paper. Competition included many experienced academics from internationally recognised universities.
• Tim Travers produced a BMP about Shar’ia law in Islamic financial insitutions. This was developed into a paper that was put forward for the 1st International Conference on Organisational Governance, organised by the Centre for Research into Organisational Governance (CROG) at Leicester Business School, De Montfort University, Leicester, September 2011. This is a peer reviewed conference, and the organisers are very well known in the CSR and governance reseacrh community.
• Thomas Hodgson and Damien Kriteman developed their BMP on corporate governance in sovereign wealth funds. Their paper based on the BMP ‘The Importance of Good Governance and Corporate Governance to the Government Investment Vehicles of the United Arab Emirates’ has also been accepted for the CROG event. Both theirs and Tim’s will have the opportunity to be published in specialist CSR journals as a result. 

Corporate governance and CSR are two of the key strategic issues for many very well known companies, and Islamic finance and governance is among the major areas for research, especially how it is developing in MENA, London and SE Asian locations. These three projects have made a vital contribution to the understanding of governance and show clearly that Cass' MBA students can compete as both extremely effective practitioners and as researchers of the highest quality.