School

Figured I should probably blog a bit about what I've done at school the last week, since the main reason I'm actually able to spend 4 months in France is because I'm an exchange student.

Last Thursday and Friday were the JESSIE business simulation, which was created by one of Audencia's professors, Emmanuel Dion. The description of JESSIE made it sound very much like the Fisher Tycoon simulation we all had to do with our core teams at the beginning of the MBA at OSU, so the thought of spending two more full days with a business simulation didn't really excite me. However, this simulation started out much more smoothly, probably because I'd already been exposed to some of the concepts we needed to use in order to make the business decisions.

I was on a team with Carlo from Peru, and Xavier-Freddy from France. We all tried to pick teammates that we hadn't talked much with before, and I really hadn't had a chance to get to know either one of these guys. We got along really well, but of course, we all had very different ideas about how we should proceed with our business. We weren't great with our time management, and we really didn't consider some of the scenarios that we should have to make optimal decisions. We lost money in the first few rounds, but we ended up making a profit, and we didn't finish in last place, so for me, it was a good experience overall.

On Monday, we started a team building workshop with a professor from the US, and I finally felt like I was back in my element. We discussed organizational behavior topics for about 3 hours in the morning, including a management assessment tool called LIFO. We were asked a few weeks ago to complete a survey where we had to rank 72 statements in terms of how much they were like us or unlike us. My results were right on the money. I'm a dominant Controlling/Taking personality, which means that I want to be seen as active and competent, and I just want to reach my goals without wasting time. I also scored high on the Conserving/Holding personality, which means that I am very careful and rational with my decisions, and I like to analyze a situation before making any big decisions. My scores in the other two categories were quite a bit lower, which suggests that I need to balance my task-oreintation with my people-orientation. This is also something my manager told me over the summer, and I'm definitely taking it to heart. My professor told me that I'm the type of girl who will "take numbers and kick ass," but I need to be more of a people person if I want to be a great manager. True statement.

In the afternoon and the next morning, we did a couple teamwork exercises. One exercise asked us to assume that we had just crashed a plane into the rainforest, and we had a list of 15 supplies. We had to rank the supplies in order of importance individually, then as a team, and then compare our rankings and our team rankings to that of a survival expert. In all cases, we learned that our team scores were better than our individual scores in terms of how close we were to the expert's rankings. In another exercise, we were paired up with another classmate and walked around campus with one person blindfolded and the other person as a guide. When blindfolded, we all started off walking very slowly, but as time passed and trust was built, we started walking faster and felt much more comfortable that the person guiding us was going to keep us out of harm's way. No one got hit by the tram, so that was a plus. Finally, we built a tower out of card stock and whatever supplies we wanted. Another team created a beautiful Asian-inspired tower, while ours was focused on being an environmentally-friendly, green building (we even covered it with green floral wrapping paper). The third team created a map of sorts with a big Audencia tower connected to all the different countries represented by our classmates. A very fun exercise.

We ended the workshop with a final exam that I thought was very easy. Our prof told us he didn't want the class to be hard for any of us, but that he wanted us to learn from it. That goal was met.

Today we had a 3-hour Human Resources Management class. We talked about the basics of HR, what we were going to learn about in the class, and then spent about an hour talking about a case on Southwest Airlines. I did two or three cases on Southwest last year, so it was rather repetative, but since I'm the only American in class, my classmates and my professor were interested in hearing my viewpoint of Southwest and whether the airline is all that it's cracked up to be.

I should make one more point about my experience as an American exchange student in this program. In general, it's my understanding that the culture here in France is pretty relaxed about time. However, it drove me absolutely nuts that on our first day of the JESSIE simulation, we were supposed to be done at 6 p.m., and we didn't leave until just after 7. During our team exercises, we were given several deadlines to meet, and every team went over the deadlines by at least 15 minutes. We were supposed to have a 2-hour lunch each day, and we decided to cut it by 30 minutes so that we could leave 30 minutes early at the end of the day. Instead, we had a 1.5 hours lunch break and still stayed until 5 p.m. each day. Finally, in HR class today, we got out 15 minutes late because people kept asking questions. I know it's just something I have to get used to, and I'm sure as the weeks pass I will be fine with it, but in a way, I kind of miss the Rudis and Jay Dials of the MBA world who insist on punctuality. Oh well, I'm in France. C'est la vie ici.