This semester I have a total of five classes. Three are required (Strategy, Leadership and Change and Research Methods) and two are electives. I chose Entrepreneurial Decisions and Global Financial Management. The electives are in a ‘short course’ format – an intensive one week class. This week was my Entrepreneurship elective. On the first day, we took a field trip to the Jaguar production facility in Birmingham. The entire trip took about seven hours and four of those seven hours we spent on a bus. Good times.
We arrived at Jaguar around 12:30 and went through a brief introduction of what we would be seeing on the nearly three hour tour (Gilligan jokes were actually made).
The goal of the visit to Jaguar was to determine the entrepreneurial spirit of the company. As many of you probably know Jaguar portray themselves as being innovative and highly entrepreneurial. We’d thought they would take us through how they started the business and how it has evolved through the ownership by the British Motor Company, Ford, and now Tata. However during the tour we really didn’t witness much of that spirit or discuss the different management styles. Our professor even commented on the discrepancy throughout the following day’s class. A bit disappointing. Also disappointing…they weren’t giving out souvenirs off the production line.
The rest of the week was spent in group discussion and listening to guest speakers discuss how they developed their organizations from the ground up.
This week I started my core classes which run through April with exams the first part of May. After that I'll have a 4-6 month consultancy project with a real business where I’m supposed to design a 'solution to a business problem' to which I have to write a dissertation over and submit by end of January 2013. I think I’m more interested in this semester because it’s starting to feel more real and the topics are more what I would like to do someday…you know when I’m a grown-up.
