What is an MBA

In the early days of Google, the company got rid of all their managers. They assumed that as they hired the brightest and most driven engineers, they did not need layers of bureaucracy stopping people from doing their job. The Google founders believed if you get intelligent people, you could give them pretty much any problem to solve, and they would work out how to do it. Within a short period, Google brought management roles back and started the ‘re:Work‘ programme to find the best scientific management methods.

Fredrick Taylor introduced scientific management in the 1880s, and the theory’s ideas of economic efficiency and labour productivity formed the basis of the first Master’s of Business Administration at Harvard in 1908. Taylorism was one of the first attempts to apply scientific ideas like analysis, empiricism, and standardisation of best practices to process management and the move from craft, to production, to mass production made famous by Ford and the Model T.

Thankfully, management science quickly evolved to include social ideas like behavioural science and care for employees as people. Still, the basic idea of applying the scientific method to increase productivity forms the basis of management in most fields. The MBA is where people go to learn this science.

It is possible to learn everything you find on an MBA curriculum in books and on the job, particularly if you join a graduate scheme and the places you work have strong internal development programmes. Most companies do not provide a rounded leadership and management training and support offer, so bright-minded individuals either end up not meeting their potential or seeking degree courses.

Peter principle…people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their “level of incompetence”: employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Wikipidia

There are two strong reasons to do an MBA; the first is that if you want to progress to senior positions with a major corporation, it is a requirement, the second is that you want to learn a scientific approach to managing effectively.

An MBA curriculum should teach the fundamentals of management. It will cover the core functional areas, including accounting and finance, human resources, marketing, operations. A good programme will also cover leadership ideas such as strategy, law, and ethics. Most MBA courses will provide optional modules that cover entrepreneurship, digital transformation and global trade.

Many tech entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, have talked down the need for an MBA favouring people gaining technical skills. But good managers are essential, and the skill set is different from just being good at the technical parts of a job. The best MBA courses are highly selective and expect people to have gained technical proficiency in their specialist area and have ample experience in their field before joining.

First, get good at the technical parts of your field, and then, if you choose to move up in an organisation and manage people, get an MBA.

Character

The following is taken from the author’s foreword of Middle Distance Running by Percy Cerutty published in 1964.

I teach:
It is not important that we merely compete: that it is important that we endeavour to excel. That means, we do with all our ‘heart and soul’ that which we find at hand to do.
That we leave ‘no stone unturn’d’: no page unread: nothing frustrates us – since with the difficulty is the means of overcoming – and this once we have resolved upon a course of action.
There are much more priceless things than winning especially, if the victories be ‘unearned’ or ‘cheap’.
It is the ‘training’: the ‘way’, that is valuable. That winning is only evidence of something and may be valuable, or not.
That ‘value’ is only ‘earned’ when there has been self-discipline: exhaustive effort and the development of intelligence through experience and thought.
That without these factors preceding ‘winning’ – winning itself, rather than be an advantageous experience, can stultify the personality – not add to it.
I hold:
That suffering and dedication is the only way to understanding, compassion and courage.
That these three add up to a lovable personality, true withal, and the most priceless of all – character.
Percy Cerutty

Learning as a habit

I have signed up for an MBA. After a three year break, I am ready to get back to formal study. An executive MBA seemed to be the logical option at 37 and for the current stage in my career. Since graduating, I have enjoyed unstructured learning, reading around my interests and focusing my intellectual energy on work. I have made significant progress on my journey to expertise, and I am building something at work to create disruptive change. To take my output to the next level, I need to learn more.

A part-time Masters degree is a big commitment, and making the most of the opportunity can take up to fifteen hours per week. Formal courses are designing to help students find this time with the accountability of regular deadlines, the curated path through content, and a community of peers for support. However, Fifteen hours is a significant addition on top of working forty to fifty-hour per week, training for at least 10, and spending an hour publishing 500 words per day. Finding those fifteen hours is going to require a conscious effort to make learning a daily habit.

I read an article today from John Coleman on the Harvard Business Review website that suggested five ways in which you can cultivate a learning habit:

Have a clear outcome
Set goals to achieve your outcome
Build a community around your learning
Develop your ability to focus
Use technology to support your learning

I have a clear outcome of improving my performance at work by completing an MBA and applying what I learn to my career. I have a realistic goal of committing fifteen hours per week or around two hours per day to study, writing, and apply what I learn to work. The time commitment is made more accessible while I am not commuting to and from work, and I have built up a habit of writing each day.

The MBA as a format is unique because it is built around community learning, making my role contributing to the pre-made community rather than having to create my own. The skill to focus for two hours per day over eighteen months will be the biggest challenge, but it is something that I have been working on for a while with daily blogging and in elements of my work. Finally, working in EdTech, the use of technology to support my learning should be easy.

I will dedicate a future post to each of these habits but is a formal course something you are interested in doing? Are you able to cultivate your learning habit using Coleman’s five suggestions?

Contact me on Twitter if you want to discuss building a learning habit or starting a new course of formal study.

The four stages of changing a VLE

Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) are web-based platforms for the online elements of courses. Over the past year, they have been essential tools in the delivery of learning as most teaching has gone remote, and their role is likely to remain a crucial part of courses in the future. With this dramatic increase in prominence, many universities are likely to evaluate the tools they currently have and begin to assess what is missing and how their platforms can be improved.

The big question is should we invest in our current platform or spend the next two years and considerable resource moving to a different one?

Moving VLE is a two-year project. It can be broken down into two broad areas; year one is completing the tender process to select a new platform, and year two is for implementing that chosen solution. You can further break these two areas down into four six month stages for changing your VLE:

Writing the tender
Selecting a vendor
Technical implementation and pilot
User implementation

Writing a tender

The first stage starts with a review of the current platform’s strengths and weaknesses and a collection of requirements for the future of teaching and learning at the institution. You may choose to bring in selected vendors, including your current provider, to present their software’s latest features and future roadmaps as a soft market test before the decision to stay or move are finally made. The information collected at this stage is documented in the tender paperwork and sent to vendors for a written response. This final step and the next stage are likely to be through a formal procurement process that your finance team will support your through.

Selecting a vendor

The vendors will formally respond in writing to your tender documents, and the university will need to go through each scoring the responses against the requirements. The top-scoring vendors can then be invited in to present how their software will meet the stated needs. Getting as many academics involved in these sessions is crucial to selecting the best fit for the university. Once the successful VLE provider is specified, the contract negotiations and procurement checks start. Do not underestimate how long this process might take – I would suggest leaving a minimum of three months from when you have selected the successful provider for all the contract details to be agreed upon and data protection and legal checks to be processed.

Technical implementation

You now have a new shiny VLE! It needs to be integrated into the Universities systems, the single sign-on, the student record system, and other teaching and learning platforms. The platform will also have to be configured with the options that best suit the way it will be used. The better you have captured the requirements in stage one, the easier this stage will be. Getting the VLE set up and ready to use by the whole university can be challenging. A large scale pilot, moving over a department or school during the technical implementation, can be an effective way to identify and fix any minor oversights or fine-tune settings. Make sure you select courses that are happy to get the new shiny toy in the understanding that it will have bugs.

User implimentation

You have collected requirements in a tender document, you have selected the best provider to meet these requirements with a great deal, and you have integrated it into your systems; you now need to manage the change. The final stage can be the most disruptive; most academics will not have been involved in selecting the tool and will be unforgiving if the move over is not smooth. Communication, automated processes, well-planned training and support, and a much better system will help the user implementation but do not underestimate the resource requirements for this stage; it might cost in time and effort multiples of the contracts first-year costs.

There is some excellent information on the internet on how to manage the four stages introduced here successfully. Most countries have HE specific learning technology networks that can provide a lot of help and guidance. If in doubt, get the VLE vendors in as early as possible to start the conversation and ask many questions, it is a highly competitive market between the top three providers, so the quality of the customer service can be outstanding.

Please feel free to get in touch on Twitter if you are going through the process and have any questions. I am happy to pass on the excellent help I have received during reviews and tenders in the past.

Have a plan to get lean, to get fast

Getting to a healthy race weight is a crucial part of performing well in endurance events. You need to have a target weight, a plan to get there, and then weigh yourself each day, adjusting the programme when required based on your weekly average weight. A simple strategy is to eat better and move more, but what if you need more guidance?

Researchers at the University of Oxford have created a list of 53 weight loss actions as part of their PREVAIL programme to help people make daily action plans. The weight loss actions are divided into seven categories:

Eat in a structured way
Avoiding or swapping specific foods
Changing what you drink
Creating a healthier diet
Meal-time tactics
Burn more calories
Be more active as part of your daily life

The Oxford researchers carried out a study measuring the effectiveness of self-regulation on weight loss, allow individuals to weigh themselves daily in the morning and then create an action plan from the list for the day based on the result. At the end of the week, they evaluated the effectiveness of the actions chosen and their effect on weight change. Over an eight week study, participants, all starting with a BMI of over 30, lost an average of 4.18kg, 3.2kg less than the control group.

How to create a self-regulation intervention plan for weight loss

Find your A: Weight yourself first thing in the morning
Find your B: Set a target weight
Weigh yourself first thing each morning
Choose one or more actions from the list for the day
Perform the planned action(s)
Reflect on the effectiveness of the actions weekly
Repeat until you reach your target weight

Aim for no more than 0.5kg per week, increase your protein intake, and do regular resistance training to avoid muscle loss. If you are continuing to train hard while losing weight, make sure you have a clear plan for fueling pre, during, and post workouts to ensure you have the energy to perform the planned activity and feed your body with what it needs to recover. This fueling plan should be differentiated for the various intensities and durations of your workout; fuel long and intense workouts but perhaps do some of the shorter, less intense workouts fasted.

My plan

My current average weekly weight 83.7kg, according to my Withings Body+ scale weekly email. I have a target race weight this season of 78kg based on the Stillman height/weight ratio table and my current body fat percentage. I have signed up for the Maderia Skyrun, so I aim to hit my race weight for the 8th of October. This goal gives me just under 24 weeks to lose 5.7kg or 0.24kg per week.

Each day this week, I will weigh myself immediately after waking up and pick at least one action from the PREVAIL study to focus on that day. My Witherings email summarising my weekly weight is sent on Mondays, so I will use that day to evaluate my progress. I prefer the positive actions where you add things rather than remove them. I will focus on these actions first, including burning more calories, drinking at least a litre of water a day or a pint of water before each meal, and using fruit and veg or a protein shake as snacks.

Physiological measures of fitness

There are three critical physiological metrics for endurance athletes in measuring improvements in fitness; aerobic capacity, anaerobic threshold, and efficiency. Performance increases come from improving one or more of these.

Aerobic capacity: The maximum amount of O2 in ml an athlete can use in one minute/kg of body weight.
The medical dictionary

Anaerobic threshold: The level above which pyruvate—an intermediate product of anaerobic metabolism—is produced faster than it can be used aerobically. Unused pyruvate splits into lactate (lactic acid) and hydrogen ions; continued exercise above the anaerobic threshold results in accumulation of these ions (acidosis), causing exhaustion and intramuscular pain.
The medical dictionary

Efficiency: A measure of effectiveness; specifically, the useful work output divided by the energy input.
The medical dictionary

Training can improve aerobic capacity by as much as 20% through structured training over time—lots of volume at a low intensity and spending time at your current V02 Max intensity through intervals. Aerobic capacity is measured as a factor of body weight, so losing excess fat to reduce weight is a quick way to improve this factor of fitness.

The anaerobic threshold, measured as a percentage of your aerobic capacity, can be improved significantly but is sport-specific. Most endurance athletes focus their training on this element. Your anaerobic threshold can be raised to a higher percentage of your aerobic capacity through increasingly higher volume training and frequent long intervals at or around your current threshold.

Efficiency is less well understood by current science, but improvements to this metric can produce significant performance gains in longer events. Many elements of efficiency are genetic such as the percentage of slow-twitch muscle fibres and body proportions. Your technique, body weight, mobility, and strength affect efficiency. Training with frequent and intensity in your sport, strength training, and technique drills will improve efficiency.

eCommerce Benchmarks

I have been following Dynamic Yield since it was purchased by McDonald’s in March 2019. Dynamic Yield works with over 350 global brands developing online customer personalisation. The tech firm has an excellent newsletter covering marketing, data analytics, and digital personalisation. It offers several free services on its website, including case studies, a learning centre, and an eCommerce benchmarking tool.

Dynamic Yield provides monthly eCommerce benchmark data for seven key markers. The data can help companies keep track of what is going on in their industries, identify strengths and weaknesses in their eCommerce platforms performance, and aid the creation of marketing plans. The data is aggregated from over 200 million monthly users and 300 million sessions from Dynamic Yield’s customer base.

The benchmarks and their 12-month global averages:

Device Usage – % of traffic per device: 65% mobile, 32.17% desktop, and 2.83% tablet
Conversion Rate – % of completed purchases by visitors: 3.21%
Add-to-Cart Rate – % of items added to cart after product page view(s) by visitors: 7.16%
Cart Abandonment Rate – % of items left in carts and not purchased by visitors: 70.83%
Average Order Value (AOVs) – Average dollar amount per order: $130
Units per Transaction (UPTs) – Average number of products bought per order by visitors: 2.87
Average Transaction per User (ATPU) – Average number of transactions made per visitor: 0.09

Each benchmark can be filtered by device, region and one of eight industries. The data is updated monthly and includes the last twelve months worth of averages for identifying trends. The Conversation rate and Cart abandonment rate KPIs also have detailed explanations, strategies for improvement, and additional resources.

You can find Dynamic Yield’s benchmark tool on their website.

Earth Day

Earth Day is observed annually on the 22nd of April to support environmental protection and as a reminder to live more sustainably.

Sustainability is the capacity to endure in a relatively ongoing way across various domains of life. In the 21st century, it refers generally to the capacity for Earth’s biosphere and human civilisation to co-exist.
Wikipedia

Earthday.org has set this year’s theme as ‘Restore our Earth’ and focuses on five key programmes:

Canopy project: is committed to reforestation and plants trees across the globe.
Food and environment: support farmers to adopt the latest techniques for regenerative agriculture and sustainable food practices.
Climate literacy: provides education to students across the world to make them informed and engaged in environmental issues.
Global earth challenge: is a coordinated citizen science campaign using a mobile app to collect observations from across the world and connect small scale science projects.
Great global clean up: helps individuals and communities clean up public spaces and reduce pollution and waste.

To recognise Earth Day this year, I am committing to improving my climate literacy. I have started to read Bill Gates new book How to avoid a climate disaster. The book is written by an engineer and takes that approach to solve the problem of getting from our current levels of 5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year to net-zero by 2050. Gates suggest that most people are not prepared to change their lifestyles dramatically in time to fix the problem and so collects the best science and solutions to make our lifestyles more sustainable.

After this book I am also interested in reading wider on the subject of sustainable living to some of the more extream solutions, starting a vegetable patch in my garden and watching some more episodes of The Good Life.

Will you join me in committing to improve your climate literacy?

Theory in use; how to be a better learning designer

You have beliefs about what creates good learning, and what doesn’t. This is called your ‘theory in use’. It is your personal construct, and is almost certainly not exactly the same as that of the very best expert teachers – yet! Your ‘theory in use’ decides pretty much everything you do in the classroom, so it is worth improving!
Geoff Petty

During my teacher training, my tutors used Geoff Petting’s ‘Teaching Today‘ as a core text. It is a great book full of practical advice on how to be a great teacher. His other popular book, ‘Evidence-based teaching‘, based mainly on John Hattie’s meta-analysis on the effect sizes of different teaching methods, is even better.

The book suggests that the way you teach or design learning is based on two things:

Theory in use – your principles of learning and teaching
Teaching strategies – processes and practices for delivering teaching

Petty argues that the closer your theory in use reflects reality, the better you are as a teacher. He says that both your theory in use and your teaching strategies can be improved by constant research, experimentation, and reflection.

How well do you understand your theory in use and teaching strategies? Are they written down? How often do you add and adapt them based on student outcomes and feedback?

What is your theory in use?

Have a go at writing your theory in use down on a blank piece of paper with the Feynman technique to test yourself. Set a timer for around 20 minutes and start to write your underlying principles of learning and teaching as if you were explaining them to someone. Once you have everything out of your head, use books and the internet to fill in any gaps.

Try to evaluate how well you have tested your principles and how closely you feel they reflect reality. Spend the next few days reading up on the principles of expert teachers you respect, is there anything you can add to your list?

If you are serious about being the best learning designer you can be and provide students with a great learning experience, you need to improve your theory of use and teaching strategies. First, make sure you know what both of these are, then spend some time adding to it from great teachers who share their knowledge and finally use a learning cycle to add to and adjust them as you gain experience. The world needs better teachers, and reflective practice is the first step to creating more of them.

Kolb’s Learning Cycle

David Kolb published the book Experimental Learning: Experience as the source of learning and development in 1984 that introduced his learning cycle. The basic idea is that people learn from experience and that a structure can be put in place to support this learning.

Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.
David Kolb

The cycle has four stages:

Do: Concrete learning – encounter a new experience
Review: Reflective observation – study and reflect on the experience
Learn: Abstract conceptualisation – form new ideas or adapt existing ones based on reflections
Apply: Active experimentation – apply new ideas to a unique situation

Kolb argues that all four stages must be present for effective learning to happen. A learning experience can start at any of the four stages but should move through the stages logically. The active experimentation forms the concreate learning for the next cycle allowing the process to repeat.

You might review something that happens at work, thinking about what worked and what didn’t and suggest why, using any data available to you. You can then create some general principles based on your reflections that can be applied in other situations. You can then plan another situation where you can apply these general principles. Finally, you can carry out your planned experiment and repeat the cycle, generating new or more robust general principles with each iteration.

This process can also be used as the basis for planning learning experiences for other people. At University, the learn stage would represent the lecture in a traditional course where existing theories help conceptualise a set of general principles. The additional steps might take place as either independent study, small group seminars, tutorials or labs.

When designing online learning that uses technology to reimagine the learning experience, these four stages can form a framework for the student’s interactions with materials, collaboration, and active learning. Students could work through the cycle each day, each week, each month, or the course could be designed as just one repetition of the process with the expectation that the student continues iterations once the course has finished.

Kolb’s Learning cycle is a simple introduction to structured learning that you can expand on with other approaches. Next time you are designing learning, think about if all four stages are present and experienced in a logical order for a more effective learning experience.