Have an Opinion!

I must say the highlight of my orientation weekend was becoming the very first EWMBA student in the class of 2011 to be cold called by a professor in class.

It was a friday evening and I checked into the Doubletree Hotel at Berkeley Marina. Over the next three days, I would be participating in the new student orientation, for the 2011 class of Evening and Weekend MBA students at UC Berkeley's Haas school of business. Soon after checkin, we were each handed a packet with reading material and told to prepare for a case study to be discussed the next day in the classroom.

Fortunately, I had recently re-acquainted myself with the rigors of classroom learning experience. One of the entrance requirements to Haas was to complete a pre-requisite course in Statistics, which I satisfied through UC Berkeley's extension. I had to complete the course and receive a passing grade prior to the start of orientation. I had planned my study such that I was completing each of the 12 course units every week. As a result, my schedule over the past three months had been crazy. Good, I thought; a 5-page business case study to read overnight, no problem!

Friday night's event was a welcome dinner, interspersed with addresses by the dean, associate director and an alumnus's address, followed by informal networking with classmates. My day had started early in preparation to fly down to Oakland from Seattle. My wife dropped me at the airport and after the 2-hour flight, a shuttle ride on AirBART to the Oakland Coliseum station, a ride on the BART to Downtown Berkeley station, a shuttle ride to the hotel and finally a dinner reception, I was ready to put off the case study on Robert Mondavi's winemaking business until the next morning.

Students were up by 8AM the next day for breakfast and after an hour-long talk on leading through innovation, we headed to the hotel's parking lot for a team-building exercise. We were divided into 20 teams and each of us were given identical set of materials and an hour to design and construct a structure that would withstand the assault of really fast-flying tennis balls. The team whose structure has the most number of intact eggs within the structure, ranked by the height of the eggs above the ground, would be the winners. This was our first taste of team collaboration among the students. It was clear within a few minutes who were the doers and managers, visionaries and risk-takers, cautious and impatient types...and those commenting from the peanut gallery. No, the goal of the exercise was not to segment students but I can't help mention. What really stood out was everyone's creative energies, ability to disagree but commit, scramble as a team to win and still cheer competitors.

We then boarded a shuttle to Haas and, after what seemed like an eternity before the photographer snapped a few group photos of the entering class, headed to a 90-minute case discussion in the classroom. As prof.Maria Nandorff discussed the use of a case study as a teaching method, I remembered my recent meeting with a senior leader at amazon.com who had remarked, "always have an opinion on everything, take sides and be able to defend your position". Thankfully I had heeded that advice while reading the case earlier that morning and I wasn't at a loss when prof.Nandorff cold called me to discuss the key issues in the Mondavi case. It is not without reason that the senior leader offered me that advice. Successful leaders are those that make good judgements quickly even in an ambiguous situation. Quality of judgements can only be improved via experiential learning whereby one makes a judgement (takes a stand), evaluates the quality of its outcome and applies the learning into the next judgement. While this feedback loop can take a long time in a real-world situation, a case study discussion short-circuits the timeframe by offering nearly instant feedback on the possible outcomes of one's judgement and alternate possibilities.

The rest of the afternoon was spent touring in and around Haas, followed by a rock-n-roll themed costume party dinner and karaoke. By sunday morning we checked out of our rooms and after a couple of hours of talks from the career services and the alumni association, we temporarily parted ways, with a plan to re-unite during the following weeks as classes get underway.