Do You Know Where Your Time Goes?This question surfaced during a recent radical collaboration group meeting hosted by the MBA News Digest Academy and facilitated by me. We were meeting to talk about how each program handles GME student advising and the advising challenges programs must address. During the meeting, one program manager described a process she was using to identify what she and her advising team do daily so they could justify additional staffing. Paraphrasing, she said the advising team wanted to know how they were spending their time, what activities were taking the most time, and what student needs were going unmet. Her team wanted to know where their time was going, which is something Peter Drucker said was the starting point for becoming an effective executive. In this...

Are You Ready to Take Control of Your Calendar Scheduling Experience? When I launched the MBA News Digest Academy last year, I started meeting with many people. Scheduling took time. I would receive an email asking to meet. I would reply with two or three available times, and sometimes it would take four or five emails to get a meeting scheduled. While I was looking forward to the meeting, scheduling was not something I looked forward to. I knew there had to be a better way of scheduling time on my calendar. So, I started searching for that better way. Here’s my better way. My Scheduling Solution I found an automated scheduling application called Calendly. This application helped me take ownership of my scheduling. Here are a few things I can do with Calendly: Share customized meeting...

Are You Managing Alligators or Value Chain Activities? Graduate program leaders, team members, and faculty often find themselves up to their necks in program alligators – participating in program information sessions, meeting with students, reviewing applications, reviewing and revising website content, reviewing reports, attending faculty meetings, etc. These same program alligators are necessary, but they can cause a loss of focus and forgetting that the program swamp they are trying to drain is the education and development of graduate business students. Regaining and then maintaining the big picture focus is a challenge, but is more easily done when a well-defined program value chain is available as a reminder. What’s an Academic Unit Value Chain? Harvard Professor Michael Porter...