Brainstorming - Richard Branson style....

I came to IE with the intention of moving into Strategy Consulting and I viewed the Entrepreneurial Management subject as a subject that I had to do. While I am still 100% focused on Consulting (and I will write a post about the Consulting Club elections shortly), the Entrepreneurial Management subject has perhaps become my favourite subject. The idea here is to create a business, the better the business idea and the more realistic the business plan, the better your chances of getting a good grade.

In the MBA, we are divided into workgroups of 6 or 7 people. Each workgroup was given free reign on choosing whatever idea they wished. So we decided that each person in the group would come up with an idea and we would then discuss the merits of each idea and then choose the best one - little did we know this what an explosive cocktail our idea discussing method would be !!!

4 out of the 6 of us (including me) are reasonably similar in terms of personality. We are a bunch ambitious, driven, hard-headed and strong minded guys, and each of us fell in love with their own idea. And discussing the ideas caused a tremendous amount of friction in the team.......and the team meetings seemed to drag on forever as we discussed and re-discussed the merits of our ideas. Finally after about one and a half weeks of intense discussions we came to a semi-forced consensus. Pretty much because we had to. However, a couple of people in the group did not have belief in the idea and each criticism of the idea almost seemed like a personal attack on the idea's champion. This atmosphere of skepticism and lack of belief continued to be detrimental to the workings of the team, until last night........

Last night (Friday night) we decided to have a casual meeting on the topic at the pub "Lateral". We decided that despite the amount of time we have spent discussing/debating about ideas and the amount of time we spent working on the chosen idea the best of our options available was to start again. And this time we decided to come up with an idea "together". In my mind, this session was an outstanding success !!!! I reminded the group that Richard Branson came up with his first idea of the Virgin Business in a pub and wrote it down on a beer mat. Just like we were about to.

It was fascinating to see the group brainstorming about an idea together. I think we came up with some fantastic ideas. One person would mention a thought, someone would add to it, a third person would continue adding to it and eventually we would get the package of a strong idea....!!! We were working as one cohesive unit and we were leveraging on the strengths of each other - it was fascinating. At IE they said we will "Form, Storm, Norm and Perform"....Well we definitely had the Form and Storm.....and now we're Performing ....I'm delighted !!

I have come to view EM as a subject that pretty much ties together the concepts of all the different subjects. (In the 1st term we have 7 of them). We will be using concepts of quantitative analysis for forecasting sales and decision making, accounting for measuring profitability, marketing for understanding and reaching out to our customers, Organisational Systems for group cohesion and efficiency, Information Systems for making us visible and Economics for Market Sizing and testing demand. Im loving this.

I was extremely excited when I came home and I could not stop telling my housemate about what a fantastic session we had just had !!! Our pitch is due in less than a week - so I will let you know how our feasibility report and pitch presentation turns out.......but now its time to get back to the crunch...

By the way our next Information Systems assignment is to write a blog on Google, so you will be hearing for me pretty soon.

Till next time....