Trip round Scotland

Last week when Stephan was visiting me we were traveling a bit round to visit some places:

Glasgow


St.Andrews famous golf court
St Andrews ruin of the cathedral
North Berwick

Inverness Castle
Somewhere on the drive along the West Coast

E-Day

It's done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I just finished my last exam of my MBA and again I'm confident that I passed this one as well so I'll go to celebrate tonight ... there might be drinks with plenty of alcohol included :)

After this 9 month it feels good to know that I finished this and it feels good to know to finish it good and so all the effort was it worth! Now I'm looking forward to some friends coming over to visit me and enjoy a few days of Scotland without thinking or touching any black book :)

... will still post some stuff here the next weeks, my way to the MBA here at this Blog will finish with my Graduation on November the 20th 2008 !!!

sun!

For the first time in days there was a period of about 2 hours of sunshine!! :)
I just used it and went jogging and now my tiredness is gone and I feel much better then before!
I should have done this a few days ago before :( ... whatever, now I study and do my best to perform great tomorrow! ... 11:30 hours till exam starts ...

22 hours till exam

What a nice study day, it's raining outside and so there is no thread of being distracted from studying SRM ...

I got up in the morning, had a cup of coffee, was practicing a bit of SRM like doing a test answer for strategic drift and now having a break. Later I practice scenario planning and the risk interdependency field and for the end I do a risk analysis for the different risk types ...

E-Day

I'm getting crazy!!!

In every exam I get the cases which I find the most difficult ones :(
I think I did the exam well, but the case was so difficult that I spent over two hours just on question one and was running out of time at the end :(

Now I'm eating a pizza, relax a bit and then study SRM to be prepared for Friday.

Preparing for MSW

Today I enjoyed sleeping longer after a short night yesterday :)
Had my cup of coffee and was reading some online newspapers about what's happening on the surface of this crazy planet and now I go back to study MSW ...

Won't write a lot because I already did 4 complete past paper tests last week, will just easy revise the stuff and get sure that I have the models in place so that I can draw them with closed eyes :)

4 days to go ...

E-day

Was studying the last weekend again like almost all weekends so fair here in Scotland and prepared for my last exam week.

Today was then the start of the exam week with my first exam in Strategic Planning.

The exam was good, think I passed, just don't know how good it was ...

Now I'm watching a bit tv, relax and start maybe later with looking at MSW. Tomorrow I'll then prepare for my exam on Wednesday.

Feel tired

I don't know why but I feel really tired since the last days...
...but the good news is that I have just 3 days left till exams begin and 7 days till it's over and I have time to relax :)

The last days I was studying a mix of all subjects in random order because they are related in some parts anyway... I was writing a bunch of past papers for all subjects and tried to increase my efficiency in timing myselfe to write faster and practice writing at the same time ...

Today my plan is to start with SRM, doing a bit of review and then writing a past paper. Then I do the same for MSW and think that will take all my time till 10pm when I leave EBS...

Changing Company Structure

"We trained hard to meet our challenges but it seemed as if every time we were
beginning to form into teams we would be re-organised.

I was to learn later that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a
wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of prgress while producing
confusion, ineffectiveness and demoralisation."

- Gaius Petronius Arbitor, Roman Governor of Bithynia

Last EBS-Seminar of my MBA!!!

Last weekend we had the revision seminar for Strategic Planning which were at the same time my last seminar days for my MBA :) Sounds good, but it's still strange to realise that the year of my studies is going to an end and there are many moments where I do things around here probably the last time ...

Since Monday I'm now studying to get ready for the exams next week. Started with SP / SRM, today I did a bit of SP and more in MSW ... tomorrow probably again MSW and SP ...

Strategic Risk Management Details

Just realised that I didn't really tell you guys what SRM is really about and what we learned in classes :)

The EBS-Book devides Risk in 4 main categories:

- Strategic Risk
- Change / Project Risk
- Operational Risk
- Unforseen / Unforseeable Risk

The main aim is to identify the risks of each category and how they can influence your organisation. Important here is to know the Mission / Highest level objectives of the company to have a context to search.

After identifying the different risks they are plotted on a risk map which has the two axes "Impact" / "Likelyhood".

Then you can plan what you wanna do with these risks: Mitigate, Transfer, Accept, Avoid and so on... here it is important to recognise that there will always be a residual risk left after taking actions. The aim here is to bring the risk to an acceptabel level for the organisation.

Another big part of SRM was scenario planning where we made different scenarios how the risks might influence our strategy. Here it doesn't really matter how realistic the different scenarios might be. The important step is to recognise different outcomes and at least thaught of it instead of being taken by surprise.

And the last part was Risk interdependeny which is plotted on a matrix called "Risk interdependency field (RIF)". This matrix visualises the different risks and shows how they are related to each other in the context of different functions in the organisaion.

In classes we had different case studies to each of the different main parts and had good fun during the group works.

Two weeks to go!

Today in two weeks the first exam is done and two ahead :)
Which means that my inner unrest is increasing and I'm getting more and more tensed about my knowledge or even worse the holes in this knowledge ... I'm convinced that I can do a good job for all of the three missing exams, but to reach the big goal to graduate with distinction I have to go back to power-studying like I did it in any other term so far... today was the last day where I was lazy and relaxing a bit... will do my study plan for the coming weeks and then it's time to get focused on studies and forget about the world outside...

Strategic Risk Management

The last three days and tomorrow I enjoy the Strategic Risk Management classes. The group is unfortunately not as dynamic and mature as the group we had at Making Strategies Work but it's still good. Just the evenings are pretty boring, nobody wants to go out and so I'm already at home on this nice Saturday at 22:30 without any drink in town ... just don't wanna go out alone because that's pointless, too ... Next weekend is the revision seminar for Strategic Planning and then it's over, this will me my last tow days of lectures at EBS for my MBA :)