Mission Accomplished!

I had a great time today because my parents and wife came to the HKUST 2008 Congregation to celebrate the finish of my MBA studies.

Thanks my parents and my wife for all your support throughout my MBA study life. Without you, I cannot accomplish this goal!

Another startup lessons from the net.

Very interesting discussion and advices from the founder of the Gridjit site.

I like his discussion on the business model, where he is saying that you may not have all the business model figure out yet.

"So, I’m not saying you have to figure out your business model right away. I certainly don’t have mine completely figured out...What I am saying is that, given the direction things are going, you’ll want to do everything you can to make your business self-sustaining along the way. But only do that if it doesn’t compromise the quality of your product. Embrace constraints, as they say, and deliver a quality product that people want."

I think it also means that you should still give it a shot and figure it out later, if you believe your service is valuable. That's kind of true, Google didn't figure out his real business model until later on.

The key is to make it self-sustaining so you are still ok if it doesn't work out.

Lessons Learned from Business Simulation Class

Just finished the 4 full-days intensive (8:30AM-9PM) Business Simulation Class. This class is about Retail and Manufacturer relationship and how to do business in a win-win situation. Even though our team didn't win the game. I learned quite a lot from this class.

Lessons learned:
- Our strategy is valid, but the execution could be much better.
- Advertising is important, but we need to really understand the effect and the return.
- Need to spend more time on the financial data by doing a more detail analysis.
- When the company is in crisis, focus on the fundamental.
- Need to prepare better for negotiation. What is your bottom line? Don't just give discount, ask for something!
- Challenge your assumption. If the assumption is wrong, you will make a fatal mistake.

Also got a chance to meet some old friends from the original KxCracker Team. I am glad that they are doing well.

Overall, it was a lot of fun.

More FREE courses from UC Berkery and MIT.

Great news to those who want to learn on their own! UC Berkery releases a set of videos and podcasts for some of their classes. I am particular interested in the Intro to Statistics class. I never thought Statistics is that useful until I started my MBA study. I will probably go through some of those video to refresh my memory in the subject.


On a related note, MIT will offer 1,800 of their courses free online by the end of the year for people to self-study.

Come and join HKUST MBA Intake 2006 Group!

If you are one of the HKUST MBA Intake 2006 student, come and join us in the new Yahoo! Group that I setup for better communicate between all of us. Please help to spread the word about this group so we could build a better community!

Click to join hkust_mba_intake_2006

Free Business School Podcasts

I am a podcast listener. To me, I mostly listen to two kind of podcasts: Technology and Business. Here is a list of free podcasts from famous B. Schools. However, I still have difficulty to fully listen to them because sometimes business related talks are quite boring....

There is no HKUST business school podcast. But if you have time you could listen to a HKUST podcast called Campus Beat.

Apple and US GAAP

Thanks to my MBA study, I could understand what this article is talking about! It is a breakthrough to me!

Software idea and MBA works...

Have a new software idea since last week and I am still thinking a lot on the possibility of turning it into a real thing. Unfortunately, there are too many MBA works at this moment that I cannot spend too much time working on it.

Next week is going to be real~~ fun...... one Econ homework, two Acct homeworks and a Managerial Accounting EXAM!

I am still reading one of the required book, "The Goal". So far I only finished around 80 pages.

HKUST RP and ELP completed!

Finally finished both UST's Residential and Experience Learning Program (Total 5 days). I certainly learned a lot from the last two weeks. Especially in team work and management issues because I usually work alone in my company.

In RP, we were asked to work on many different assignments and presentations within three days. We learned things like better decision, team work, etc. We worked so hard that we didn't even get enough sleep at all.

In ELP, we learned through experience. I think we should better call it situational simulation. We need to push our limit by performing physical and psychological demanding activities. It made us think more on personal potential and risk taking. We found out that time management and role definition are very very important for every tasks.

The RLP and ELP definitely help because I am taking on a more leadership role in some of the coming work assignments and I believe I am more equipped to handle them.

If you want to see some photos of our team and us, please go to our team blog! Thanks Joseph for putting that up.

Finally, I would like to thank every single one in our team for their effort and support. Without you we cannot made it. I really value their feedbacks because only through feedbacks I could know what to improve. THANKS!!