Mr. Shulich writes “in general, I would avoid:

• airlines
• auto parts
• retailing
• biotechnology
• grocery stores
• chemicals
• wholesaling
• machinery manufacturing
• paper and forest products
• auto manufacturing
• restaurants
• appliance manufacturing
• trucking
• any manufacturing that competes with China
• telecom services”

I am looking at the list, and I see that I personally may need to re-think the path I chose two years ago.

See larger image Get Smarter: Life and Business Lessons (Hardcover) By (author) Seymour Schulich List Price: $24.95 USD New From: $0.40 In Stock Used from: $0.40 In Stock

In the Art of War, Sun Tzu summarized the fundamental principles for an MBA application strategy in a very eloquent and surprisingly up-to-date verse:

故曰：知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆。

i.e. “So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.”

If you want to get very strategic about your use of all the tools that the application form gives you, you could—for a sophisticated and targeted application—use the following approach:

1. Outline your professional and personal goals. Your goals are a fundamental thing that define everything.
2.  Define strengths that make you unique, or as Paul Bodine calls them in his wonderful book, which you should definitely buy,—your marketing handles. Think of them as supporting pillars of your application, or these can also be defined as short overarching themes of the application, i.e. “International Experience”, “Well-rounded”, “Animal Lover”, “Turnaround specialist”, “World Champion”, “From Rags To Riches” etc. This is where you place your bets, and it is important to market your candidature using the strongest marketing handles you got in your arsenal.
3. Define other details that help you stand out, these are grouped in different categories such as hobbies, family background, special talents, i.e. “Hot Air Baloons” in hobbies, or “Brazilian Asian” in family background.
4. Define strong stories from both personal and professional life that illustrate the #2 and #3. Then decide which of them tie into #1 and how.
5. Analyze Wharton’s application form and process.
6. Draw up a goals matrix based on analysis in #5. What is a goals matrix? —It is a table that maps your goals to the tools in the application. Download my generic example of the matrix so you can edit and expand it in all directions to suit a particular school. It gets really comprehensive when you add sub-goals, entries from #3 above, tactical approaches, stories, sketches, etc. You get the point.
7. Write.
8. Edit
9. Collect all the 3-rd party inputs, i.e. exam scores for GMAT, OPI, TOEFL, school transcripts, notarized copies of all important documents, certified translations of foreign documents, follow up with your recommenders to make sure they are on schedule, etc.
10. Repeat #7, #8, and #9 until you have reached all the goals in your matrix so that your application portrays you in a comprehensive and compelling way.
11. Review and submit application to Wharton.

The point is—the first and very important step in applying to a top business school like Wharton is to analyze yourself and your target school. After that you absolutely need to have a plan.  If you are as talented as Sun Tze (at Wharton you will meet quite a few people who are on par with him intellectually) you may do all the planning in your head, alternatively, you may find or devise a planning tool that is effective and suits your personality and work preferences.

There is a lot to gain, stakes are high, and people from all over the world spare no effort or expense to get into Wharton.  They take the GMAT over and over until they enter the much coveted 700 points club, they hire very expensive consultants to hold their hand and “improve their profiles”, sacrifice vacation time to visit campus, schmooze with current students, try to befriend the professors, and write hundreds and hundreds of emails to the adcom with questions about the wonderful school life at Wharton.  They also spend days and days in front of the computer on the wonderfully informative GMAT Club forum (I am a regular contributor) and a competing resource on BusinessWeek.com (not a fan at all) in hopes of getting that tiny bit of information, if only a hint, a slight glimpse into the future and what awaits.

However most applicants fail to gain acceptance, and the failure tastes very bitter. There is a number of reasons why this happens, and one of them is bad luck, but everything else being equal, it is the quality of application itself and a lack of the overall application strategy that prevent the email-spewing “profile improvers” from getting in the door.

Below is my attempt at painting a picture of an applicant who will never get in:

Five main traits of an applicant who will never get admitted to Wharton

1. Cluelessness

My experience with dozens of applicants shows that the absolute majority of these people are clueless kittens.  Often people approach me after they have submitted an application to Wharton, and after a few minutes of conversation it becomes clear they have absolutely no clue about the application process or the components of the application itself. Most importantly, they lack any substantial understanding of themselves, and so their applications most certainly revealed that.  Without this understanding they cannot really tell the world who they are and why they are unique in any detail.

Despite the fact that absolutely every book on the topic of MBA admissions out there stresses the importance of self-reflection before you sit down and start writing, few people do it in a systematic way. Most applicants assume they have all the information about themselves stored in their heads anyway, and all that examination of self is for someone else to do.

A very thorough examination of one’s weaknesses, strengths, dreams, aspirations, sins and merits is an absolute must if you want in at Wharton.

2. Low scale

Many candidates are afraid to think big or pursue mega goals. Mega scale scares the living soul out of them, and so they settle on tiny tactical goals, which they pronounce “realistic” and therefore “believable” and “comfortable” when they explain why they need the education. Quite often applicants conceal their true goals and claim other “more interesting” goals in their blind quest for the non-existing magic recipe to get in (many people mistakenly think that candidates with certain goals have a better chance than others). This is exactly the opposite of “change the world” type of aspirations—true and sincere aspirations—one would meet among the Wharton MBAs.

Dream big, aim high if you want in.

3. Fear

The miniscule scale breeds a lot of fear.  I must admit fear is what paralyses most applicants at some point, and I—too—fell prey to that feeling when I was an applicant myself, but I overcame that emotion because I clearly understood its crippling effects. However most applicants just do not get rid of the chills. Looking at the above paragraph, I must say that it is a chicken and egg problem as fear is probably what makes them aspire for the “realistic” and the “comfortable” in the first place.

They are afraid that there is no cure for their lowish GPA in undergrad, that their community contributions were tiny (so they urgently start teaching math to unsuspecting inner-city kids or helping the equally unsuspecting homeless guys hold their bowls at the soup kitchen). They repeatedly ask themselves questions about “the true cost of MBA” and map put “opportunity costs”, i.e. they are afraid to make changes in their “comfortable” and predictable lives, take drastic and powerful turns to change themselves and the world along the way, and continue with the penny counting. These people are scared that their unpaid speeding and parking tickets from five years ago will be a major obstacle, and they also think that deviating from a one-page format of the CV will be a major roadblock on the way in.

A Wharton MBA applicant just like any good businessman or a warrior has to be fearless to succeed.

And by the way, one must actually truly care about community contributions, it comes naturally, and cannot be faked.

4. Lack of strategy

Most applicants that I have had the pleasure of communicating with did not even bother constructing the big picture. At best they just looked at the application process as a recovering alcoholic looks at his life, i.e. “one day at a time”.  In most cases, they discover what exactly the application form contains the moment they decide to populate it with information. Needless to say most of these guys and gals end up on the curb. You can spot these characters early on: they usually post questions on GMAT Club that sound similar to “Do you know what we should write in Section A?” or “My GPA was 3.456, is it OK to round it up to 3.5?” This type of comments just reveals that the candidate has not followed an organized, disciplined approach to the application.

What one really needs is a very detailed strategy, an aggressive and multidimensional plan, and a clear understanding what kind of tools the school gives you to deliver the message you want the school to hear. Of course, this rides on the premise that you do not have Cluelessness (see #1 above) or Fear (see #3).

The better the strategy the higher the chances at acceptance at Wharton.

5. Poor execution

Most people mistakenly think that the application is limited to writing, photocopying undergrad transcripts and performing other types paper shuffling.  Some go as far as writing a blog about how the stapling and the trips to the FedEx office, and some even manage to damage their submitted applications beyond repair by blogging about how the paper shuffling was done in their particular case (yeah, I am looking at you, Chris). This is just one example of poor execution.

I am convinced that visiting the school has a huge impact on the quality of the application. Now, there is visiting and there’s visiting.  Remember, most candidates who visit the school have no plan and are Clueless (see #4 and #1 respectively above) and so they just show up in Huntsman Hall, bounce around from wall to wall, sometimes they sit on classes and generally have the facade of what “should be done”. Of course, they take a tour of campus in a group of equally unprepared applicants, and leave thinking that the “Campus visit” check box is now filled and they have gained advantage over everyone else. Wrong.

Poor execution permeates every step an unsuccessful applicant makes: from misspellings on essays (one female applicant in 2011 wrote about her experience in conSLuting” for example) to using smiley faces as punctuation   These people spend hours thinking about the color and brand of the suit to wear for the interview instead of actually preparing for the high-stakes conversation itself, and so on.

Good strategy has to be executed to perfection if you are seeking admissions at Wharton. The color and brand of your suit add absolutely nothing to your success.

So if anything above, my dear reader, describes you in some way, your chances of getting in at Wharton are zero. No need to fret about the seeming unfairness of the admissions process if you have been denied this year. It should help if you can regroup and start from the beginning, i.e. get rid of the Cluelessness, Low Scale, Fear, Lack of Strategy and Poor Execution, and the world might smile at you with its happy Wharton MBA smile.

HuliHealth’s objective is to help you to obtain the best possible medical treatment – based on your own personal criteria – wherever that may be; in your same city, another state or even in another country.  In short, our goal is to connect any person to any doctor in the world, while creating transparency around quality and cost in the global healthcare industry.

We are currently in the initial stages of testing our website and things are definitely starting to come together.  In very basic terms, our product strategy is to do the following:

1) launch a “minimum viable product” website that only a few patients/doctors can see
2) learn and improve
3) launch a slightly less minimal website that is open to the public
4) learn and improve
5) repeat cycle

For those who aren’t familiar with the term minimum viable product, the basic concept describes a product which has the least amount of features necessary to solve the customer’s need.

Our plan has always been to launch a prototype of our website as quickly as possible. But why would we launch an “imperfect” website? 90% of startup companies fail because they run out of resources (time or money) before they figure out what customers really need. Their biggest mistake is taking too much time to create the “perfect” product based on assumptions that have never been fully tested by real customers. By the time the startup realizes that they need to make changes to the product, it is simply too late.

Although we have designed our website around patient/doctor feedback, we know that our website will not be perfect from day one. Therefore, our goal is to learn (and improve) as quickly as we can to ensure that we achieve the “perfect” website before our money runs out. We are extremely excited and are looking forward to sharing the website with all of you in the coming weeks/months. Any and all feedback (upon website launch and in the future) is much appreciated!

PS: There is a lot of content out there discussing the minimum viable product and lean startup concepts, but this short article (http://mashable.com/2012/01/13/user-feedback/) highlights their importance.

This post echoes Paul Hynek’s view (see previous post) that entrepreneurs with the Wharton MBA are much better positioned to succeed:

http://thewalnutstreetjournal.blogspot.com/2011/10/value-of-mba-for-entrepreneurs.html

What’s the magic recipe behind the positive force of the program?  How does one harness the great potential and take advantage of the many opportunities that come with it?  Here’s what Paul thinks about it:

DENIS: Paul, you graduated from Wharton/Lauder a while ago, and back then it was a different program in many ways. Did the program meet your expectations? Did it enable you to achieve all the goals that you had set when you were applying?

PAUL: I have always been a huge fan of the Wharton/Lauder program.

DENIS:  You mentioned in the speech you gave during the [Lauder] graduation ceremony in 2010 that you saw yourself as a Penn student more than anything…

PAUL:   Yes, that’s right. Benjamin Franklin has always been my hero and Penn has such a variety of outstanding schools:  Business, Engineering, Law, Medical, Dental, etc. It is a fascinating place!

DENIS: What was the particular appeal of the Lauder Institute and why did it shape your choice of a graduate school?

PAUL: I had been a French major in college, and my view of the world changed radically when I left my comfortable suburban Chicago and went off to live in France for a year.  It really taught me to think much more from a global point of view, and I loved learning the language, I loved being in a different culture, being challenged.  And I wanted more of that, I thought it would just be a tremendous way to enhance what I would learn in a more traditional MBA program.

DENIS: In retrospect, what aspect of that education has proved to be most useful and valuable?

PAUL: The combination of what I got from both Wharton and Lauder. Wharton taught me to arbitrage basically anything I come across:  how to find opportunities for financial [gain], information, product or service delivery, how to recognize opportunities to do something more efficiently or provide something in a better way—it’s just to sort of have my antennae out all the time to spot opportunities that may not be obvious had I not gone to Wharton.

And from Lauder:   it did fulfill the promise to give me a much more global point of view of the world and the ability to not just see data points behinds the events going on around the world, but because I have some of the underlying cultural context, I could see the trends that are driving them.  And that could be more important—it is one thing to know where something is, but to have an idea of where it might be going is much more valuable.

DENIS: When you were going through the program, do you remember what were your favorite subjects at Lauder?

PAUL: My favorite subjects? I ate it all up!  I actually saw myself as more of a Lauder student than Wharton.  I really prioritized [Lauder] and I was a very diligent student in all my Lauder classes, I did not skip out of them for interviews and things like that…

DENIS: What was the influence of the Wharton MBA experience on your professional life?

PAUL: I can speak to the extent of that influence:  it is complete and fundamental in terms of how it transformed my career, every single thing I have done since graduation. Most of the things I have been involved with are directly because of Wharton or Lauder, and the ones that aren’t have all been significantly enhanced because of it:  either a better position, a higher salary, and always just better and more fulfilling responsibility.

DENIS:  Can you give an example?

PAUL: Sure, I really see myself as a high-tech software type guy, and I got into that because I was Vice President of the Princeton Review of Japan living in Tokyo, and a very good friend of mine, Richard Sprague, Lauder ’91, was working for Apple Japan, and he introduced to this whole new world of software technology.

DENIS: I know you eventually became a tech entrepreneur. Was your MBA degree of any value there? Was it at all applicable?

PAUL: I’ve had people ask me: “Well, why would you go to business school if you are just going to be an entrepreneur?” And I see it exactly the opposite way—especially for me, I really would not want to be an entrepreneur without the benefit of having gone to Wharton/Lauder.   Apart from the classes specifically devoted to entrepreneurship, which are great, virtually every single class, every person I met, and every event I went to is helpful to me.

DENIS: In what way?

PAUL: Learning some new technique, or another pattern that somebody’s gone through that I can apply in my entrepreneurial career.  Then there are just the basic things; but the most important thing I got out of the program in relation to entrepreneurship is confidence.   I think we are all a pretty confident lot who get into Wharton/Lauder, and you can’t help but leave with a whole lot more confidence.  Next to passion, I think confidence is the most important thing you can have in entrepreneurship. So any program that jacks up your confidence is worth far more than you pay both in terms of the tuition and the opportunity cost for the time that you spend there. Another one is the ability to break down highly complex dynamic situations where you have incomplete information that tend to stall a lot of people into kind of a paralysis.  The program gives you the ability to prioritize and coordinate, to break down these situations into bite-sized actions that you can work on immediately regardless on how the other parts may not lend themselves to action right away, and so that you can keep moving towards your goals.  It is a really nice skill to be able to break these things down into things that you can work on right now.

And then another thing that I got out of it is the rich vein of patterns that you can learn in class, from your classmates and case studies. You can map that knowledge back to your specific problem.  For example, I was getting some funny business from my first Chinese factory.  The problem I had that they sent me $80,000 worth of electronic items that did not work.  Since it was my first factory, I had no experience, and had no experience to draw on, and it was such a foreign situation to me:  the culture, or the subculture of Chinese factory owners that I have not learned yet about. So I have loosened up the definition in my mind of Chinese factory owners screwing me over, and redefined it as overdependence on a single supplier, which is classical MBA speak. By looking at it that way, at that higher abstract layer, I was able to pattern match it to examples that I had heard on campus. Then I shipped it back down to my specific level, and mapped some of these best practices and tips to my particular situation, and I was able to resolve the matter.  First, I fixed the faulty product myself by gearing up an ad-hoc production line in my fulfillment center in the States.  I negotiated a better deal with the factory owner, and lined up a backup factory as well.

It did not hurt that because of Lauder I was completely prepared, and I had my ticket to go to China and tell him that he’d have to tell me in my face that he was not going to make good, and so he knew that, and he did not want me to come there.  As a footnote, he has since become a trusted friend of mine. The first time I went to visit him, I learned a bit of Mandarin, but not only did he not understand my Mandarin, he did not even realize I was trying to speak the language. But being the good Lauder boy that I am, undaunted I went back on my own, and the next time I went back, I was able to make out a conversation in their Ningbo dialect what prices another factory owner was giving my factory rep, and from that I was able to determine what commission percentage my factory rep was charging me.  Because of Lauder I was able to understand the factory owner, and befriend him, and then learn without committing them myself probably the top 100 mistakes that people make in dealing with Chinese factory owners.

DENIS: You are now actively involved with the Lauder Institute Alumni Association. Can you tell us a little about the goals of your involvement?

PAUL: I am the President of the LIAA.  It serves to keep bringing ongoing benefits and enable communication between alums.

We were building on the great foundation that was made before our time (hats off to Norm Savoie and company) and we have just recently started a monthly newsletter, called “The Lauder Times,” and there is a section that is called Lauder Love, where we want to spread discounts on products, job postings, all the kind of things like that. As the first one I offered my software for free, and about fifty people downloaded it so far.

Our goal is to have a whole lot of events; so we are going to have our Global Forum in 2013 and other events… but the challenge with our alumni is because they are spread all around the world, a lot of them just cannot go to various events. We want to come up with things that will be of benefit to people that cannot attend something; and we have several other initiatives we are working on that will be coming up in the subsequent editions of the newsletter.

I am also an admissions interviewer for Lauder, and I enjoy that very much.  It is fun! Wharton interviews shifted to the more behavioral style, whereas Lauder is more classical, and I like it:  I like meeting people.  I go to lots of admissions events as well—for both Wharton and Lauder—and I will be the sort of a Lauder guy at the Wharton admission events, and I’d tell people about why I chose Wharton and Lauder.  I enjoy that quite a lot.

Basically, not a day goes by where I don’t have some form of interaction from somebody from Lauder.

DENIS: What advice would you give the new graduates from the program?

PAUL: The main thing I would say is:  stay involved. It is not a two-year program.  Think of the two years on campus as orientation for the life-long program; I encourage people to adopt that point of reference.

A friend of mine—and I agree with him—said that in the years right after graduation he saw the benefits that he got out of the program split roughly equally between these three things:   one third for classroom learning, one third for Wharton and Lauder relationships that he made at school, and then one third for Wharton and Lauder relationships he made after school.  As time goes by the importance shifts from classroom learning to emphasize more the relationships you made at school and then in particular—the relationships you made after school.  It’s really not enough to just keep in touch with the buddies you have from school, but you have to keep growing your circle and staying active, and meeting more people.   That’s exactly what we want to help people do at LIAA.

DENIS: What would be your advice to those who have just started the program and joined our large family?  What should they be concentrating on and what would help them have a better experience at school?

PAUL: There are two lessons I learned when I got there that nobody had told me about before, and I wish I had know going in:

One was that it is a game, and you have to realize that you will be given more work than you can possibly do.  And if you are a type-A person, an overachiever, it is a difficult realization to understand that you cannot do all the work, and that you have to develop strategies to maximize your coverage.

Do they still have study groups or is there a different term for that?

DENIS: They call them “learning teams” these days.

PAUL: So you need to have a good learning team, efficient time management and the ability to get the tells (you know that poker term: the tells) from the professors to know what’s really going to be on the tests. But that’s just part of the game.

Two: you also have to let the unimportant stuff go, and eventually if you understand that it is a game, that they are giving you too much stuff, and that you have to prioritize, you’ll get on top of it. You will see that you will have time to prepare and be able to do well on the tests, but also to learn things that aren’t test-related just because they interest you.

You are in an Ivy League school, and there a lot of things that you can get involved with.  Perhaps, in a class you take a tangent from a chapter to something else just because it is interesting to you, but you have to get to the point where you feel comfortable playing the game of having what you have to get done—done, and not worrying about the stuff that you can’t get done.  The benefit of this, the nice thing that I learned is that because of the nature of business school, and Wharton/Lauder in particular, you may well find that blowing off reading a chapter from a class that you have to read by the next day to go have a beer with a classmate could actually be more beneficial to you in the long term than reading that chapter.

Striking up that relationship with somebody you do not know that well could pay off much better than just reading some chapter that you’re going to forget in a year.

You know, I was eating breakfast and dinner in the Law School cafeteria, and I met tons of law students: compared to us, they were a somewhat miserable bunch.  You could tell that we were happy about our situation, and one time they asked us what kind of social things we had coming up, and we listed about ten of them. They said, “No, no. Not for the rest of the semester, just this weekend.” And we said, “No, that’s just tonight!”   We had so many things going on that they weren’t used to!  When I got to the point where I could manage my time effectively, and understood the importance of those events, I was a very happy guy indeed!

DENIS: Thank you, Paul!

Lauder Culture Quest took place on May 19- 31 and took us, 50+ adventurous Lauderites from the classes of 2011 and 2012 across 7 different countries in Central America. Most of us first met in Belize City Airport and took a bus across the border to Tikal in Guatemala.

We faced our first team challenge at the other side of the border, trying to collect all the group members without losing anyone after the crossing process that took around 3 hours. We also ran into a circus that was also crossing the border and one of us (whose name will not be told) had a random encounter with a lion suffering from a weak-bladder.

After many hours, we finally made it to Tikal, Guatemala but not before stopping to see the magnificent sunset over the Laguna Yaxja.

In Tikal, we were greeted by our heroic Kim Norton (Program Manager for Research Projects & External Affairs) who did so much of the planning and organization to make it happen and Professor Mauro Guillen, the man thanks to whom this adventure has come to life. The student organizers, Greg, Davis, Amaya, Amy, Dan, Devon, Johnathan, Joon and Porter, took us through the details of the trip and some important safety precautions and communication requirements and finished by handing out something we will learn to really appreciate in the next several days – bug repellant.

The following day we had a tour around the historical relics of the ancient Tikal city. The place was beautiful and some of the braver among us climbed the pyramids in the scorching heat. I only made it to Tower IV, where we could get phone reception (can someone say Crackberry?).

After the Tikal, it was time to split into our trip groups and venture into the unknown. Most of us headed first to Antigua, Guatemala, a beautiful colonial city, surrounded by active volcanoes. Many more adventures followed across the landscapes of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. These included climbing and sand boarding down volcanoes, riding chicken buses and staying in shady motels in remote towns, visiting local schools, eating local street food, getting in trouble with immigration police, visiting museums, navigating in the middle of the night in unknown surroundings, sailing the waters, interviewing local entrepreneurs about their supply chain and inventory management practices, meeting famous Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran and much more. You can read about all of these in the individual blogs that each team wrote.

Overall, the Culture Quest has been an incredible experience for all of us. We learned a great deal about the cultural, economic and political differences in this fascinating region of the world. We improved our leadership and teamwork skills, having to pass through 7 countries in only 10 days. Some of us got to perfect our Spanish skills, while others had to learn basic communication skills in a new language. We also got to appreciate the wealth and luxury we are accustomed to in our part of the world, while others have only access to basic education and have to rebuild their houses and communities every time a natural disaster hits. It is one thing to read about a place on Wikipedia, but it’s a whole different thing to immerse oneself in the country’s culture through conversation with locals, visiting institutions, eating according to the local diet and listening to local music. Let’s hope we can continue this tradition in Lauder and explore other regions of the world together while applying the cross-cultural skills we already have and the ones the Lauder Institute teaches us every day.

Interview:

Me: Mauro, there has been quite a bit of change in the Wharton approach to its curriculum, and I wonder how Lauder has been involved?

Prof. Mauro Guillen: Lauder is embracing change and constantly evolving into a more flexible, stronger, up-to-date program. We have recently published a 3-year report on our website, where I summarized some of the progress that has been made between 2007 and 2010 (The report is available in English, and Spanish.)

We are expanding our academic program. This year, we added the Hindi track, and admitted 5 students. There was a lot of interest in the new program so I am very optimistic about its prospects.

Next, we are thinking about an Africa track. Right now, the discussions we have had leads to a new type of a program as this might be not a traditional language-focused track. That would make us the first top business school in the world to focus on Africa.

Lauder is adding more cross-cultural stuff on a selection basis. For example, the Culture Quest. We plan on doing this once or twice a year in different parts of the world. The idea is to have a race across a multicultural region — and this year it will be in Latin America. The goal is for the Cuture Quest to be an educational activity: there is a plan to throw in a mix of lectures on campus, all sorts of visits on the ground, and ultimately getting from point A to point B that way. I see this as a very important step: in a sense, we are taking a step away from country focuses, and helping participants dissect a whole region getting a condensed view of the communities, and problems they are facing.

We are organizing big conferences with academics. One was just last week: big open event for all Wharton in Huntsman Hall. It was funded by the Institute, and these events are not a small thing. The budget was $180K – expensive, but we think it is important to lead the academic activities this way, and it is a beginning of a series of key academic events. We will take the conference to other cities, i.e. Dubai, Shanghai, etc. For example, we want to get more involved in policy making debate, and it is important to make it an international discussion.

All of these will take Lauder to the next level.

Me: Language instruction has always been in the center of the Institute’s attention. What is the school doing in that domain?

Prof. Mauro Guillen: We continue to strengthen our language programs as our core focus on international communication has not changed. We are hiring new people for some tracks; all of them are OPI certified. We have introduced a more seamless curriculum.
We have changed the benchmark away from strictly OPI-based graduation

Over the last three years, student language performance has improved dramatically, and a substantially higher proportion of students achieve 3 and above on OPI on exit. At the same time, we are more flexible with the students who have made the progress, but have not quite reached the level of 3 on OPI. I want to say that we are not changing the graduation requirements when it comes to language standards, but at the same time we are more flexible and look at such students on a case-by-case basis.

Overall, our language program is constantly evolving.

Me: My year (2010) was the pioneer of the Global Knowledge Lab. What has the feedback been so far?

Prof. Mauro Guillen: Two years now have done the GKL. We kept the model of the Lab, and expanded the number of projects. At the same time, we increased support of the projects. The results have been mostly positive. Students have done an outstanding work so far: some of the student research will be published… there soon will be a book with some of our students’ work.

Me: Lauder Summer Immersion is when the excitement really starts. Any developments there?

Prof. Mauro Guillen:This year, there are few changes. Because of the earthquake and the tsunami, Japan track is getting moved to the Honshu area. Spanish track is going to Colombia this year. Indian track is new, and they are doing everything for the first time. Chinese track’s schedule is not drastically different from last year.

Me: during the crisis summer of 2009, the Lauder Institute went out of its way to help students with summer internship placements, and as far as I know, the Institute continues to focus on helping students find jobs that suit their career goals. What progress has been done in this area?

Prof. Mauro Guillen: We continue to focus on career development. This year we have made a lot of progress with internships, so this remains unchanged. However, we are now going to offer career coaching to our students. One senior fellow with help students with advice on their careers; he is someone who has a lot of experience in Private Equity, Venture Captial and Investment Banking. He lives in DC, teaches a class at Stanford. We are very excited to have the ability to offer this assistance to our students. The project became possible through a donation by a Lauder alum, who is a business associate of the career coach we are so fortunate to have.

Me: Thank you, Mauro! All this activity proves that our school remains very much alive and vibrant as ever. Good luck with all these wonderful initiatives you are working on!

Here is a first-hand video report from inside the flagship store:

Interview

Paul, please introduce yourself:

Grew up in suburbs of New York, went to Penn (College of Arts and Sciences and Wharton) undergrad, where my studies revolved around the modern history and political economy of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Why did you choose Wharton/Lauder?

After studying and spending time living, working and doing research in Spanish-speaking Latin America during my undergraduate studies, I realized that there was no way to fully understand Latin America without understanding Brazil. So Lauder was an opportunity to gain a more holistic understanding of Brazil before fully embarking on my professional journey, while at the same time completing my MBA.

Did the program meet your expectations?

Hands down. Lauder was one of the most important experiences of my life, and the summer immersion was the cornerstone of the Lauder experience. During our summer immersion, our group gained an amazing understanding of Brazil, and, more importantly, developed a unique bond that would probably not be possible under any other set of circumstances. Our entire group had a very similar goal, which was to gain a better understanding of the cultural, business and sociopolitical environment of Brazil to better aid us in pursuing our professional dreams. The places we visited, the people we met, and the projects we worked on together were once in a lifetime experiences.

How did your experience at Wharton/Lauder shape your career and personal life?

Lauder totally shaped my career and personal life. After Lauder, because of my newly gained Portuguese language ability, and through a Lauder introduction, I was able to find a job opportunity with Bunge (a global agribusiness company with Latin American roots), working first in Brazil, then Argentina, followed by China. If it were not for Lauder, I would not have started my career in Brazil, and probably would not have had such a rich multicultural professional experience to date.

How would you describe the concept of your new business venture in China?

The Freshary is China’s first and only certified organic ice cream and baked goods producer and retailer.

Our goal is to create yummy, wholesome treats that taste great and that people would choose to eat even if our products were not healthy.

Our vegan ice cream and vegan baked goods use the highest quality organic ingredients, crafted through a production process that is best defined as “truly fresh”. At our store, our culinary specialists mill our unique blend of organic grains and seeds from scratch every day, creating the freshest, most nutritious, whole grain flours and dairy-free milks for our ice cream and baked goods.

Ultimately, our vision is to build a holistically socially conscious business in China, from organic food ingredients, to “truly fresh” production, eco-friendly packaging, green store design and construction.

In that respect, The Freshary also marked a major achievement by becoming the first and only Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) Green Building certified Gold retail and food production space in China. This means we are constantly striving to limit excessive water usage, conserve energy, and use the most eco-friendly building materials through our commitment to green design and construction.

Do you find that the knowledge, skills and network that you acquired at Wharton gives you a competitive advantage?

Yes, for sure. The Wharton network is always available to call on when looking for ideas or support.

The business leaders and companies we met while at Wharton and Lauder also provided enormous exposure to the endless possibilities that exist if one dreams big and works hard.

More importantly, my fellow classmates are all doing amazing things around the world, and we are able to share ideas and update each other on our career progress, which provides a great deal of collective motivation and encouragement in our respective career endeavors.

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs who aspire to start a business?

It is largely about the 3Ps: patience, persistence and passion. Don’t think any entrepreneur can succeed without all of these, especially persistence!

Also, as my Wharton professor and late mentor Dr. Edward B. Shils always emphasized, any business leader, and particularly an entrepreneur, must have “tolerance for ambiguity”. We all have our goals, but the road towards our goals is never a straight line, and we must be ready to face and accept the many many changes and obstacles that come our way.

What advice would you give to business school applicants?

Do as much as possible while at business school, meet as many people as possible, participate in as many projects as possible, visit as many countries, cities and companies as possible, try to meet as many business leaders as possible… exposure, exposure, exposure.

Take advantage of this once in a lifetime platform to meet people and visit places by leveraging your business school’s name, as this type of exposure may only be possible again in the distant future after reaching a senior position within a very reputable organization.

Thanks!

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Porter and I decided that we should seize the opportunity to run a Lauder Spotlight interview featuring a graduating second-year student before they all slip back into the real world.  Given recent events in the Middle East and North Africa, our choice was pretty simple.  So, as promised, we recently sat down with Matt Axelrod (Arabic Track, Class of 2011).  Matt was the Director for Egypt and North Africa at the Pentagon, worked in the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, and spent two years as a Presidential Management Fellow and eighteen months as a Fulbright Fellow studying US-Egypt relations.  Not only does he have a very interesting pre-Lauder background, but he has been contacted by several well-known media organizations for articles and interviews while a student at Lauder (see links below).

Click here for a recent interview with the BBC.

Click here for a recent interview with PBS.

Click here for an article he wrote for Foreign Policy magazine.

We caught up with Matt at the hip Elixr café right off of Rittenhouse square to get his latest thoughts on current events as well as to look back at his time in the Lauder program.

Quick Facts about Matt:

Hometown: Short Hills, NJ

Undergraduate Institution & Major: Georgetown University – BA in Foreign Service, MA in Arab Studies

Hobbies: Planning Cohort I social events, going to dinner with friends, reading

Favorite Lauder Class to Date: Independent Study about Economic Constructions with Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde – Notable works studied include John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, and Raghuram Rajan’s Fault Lines

Favorite Wharton Class to Date: Either Stuart Diamond’s Negotiations or Nikolaj Siggelkow’s Competitive Strategy  [Note: Wharton students bid on electives in an online auction system and usually don’t have enough points to take both of these extremely popular courses.  Matt won Siggelkow’s class in a fluke round when it sold for only 100 points as opposed to its usual price of 5,000 points or more, so he was lucky enough to take both!]

Favorite Penn Class to Date: Kenwyn Smith’s Group Dynamics & Organizational Politics (i.e. The “Power Labs” Course) – this highly unconventional course is offered by invitation only to students who are able to pass a few mental “readiness” hurdles.  The chosen students spend entire weekends doing experiential group psychology experiments similar to, although not quite as extreme as, the now infamous Stanford Prison experiment of 1971.  Matt says the course changed his outlook on life!

Wharton Major: Business Development (interdisciplinary major created by Matt along with Department Chairs)

Leadership Positions at Wharton: Chair of the General Management Conference, Social Chair for Cohort I, Non-Profit Board Leadership Fellow

Favorite Movies: The Godfather; Stardust Memories

Favorite Books: Game of Nations by Miles Copeland; Chrome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

Favorite Food: Cheeseburger from Jose Pistola’s

Favorite Middle Eastern Food: Tarb – essentially it is ground meat wrapped in thick lamb fat (yum!)

Favorite Middle Eastern Beverage: Raki – a liquor similar to Ouzo or Sambuca

Primary News Source: Probably Twitter feeds of The Arabist, Michael Walid Hanna, Stephen Cook, and Mark Lynch.  Other sources include NYTimes, Washington Post, Academic Journals.

Post-Graduation Full-time Career Plans: Management Consulting for McKinsey in Washington, D.C.  First job in the private sector!

GKL Topic: Middle East customer segmentation, brand consolidation, and pricing strategies for a large multinational company

In His Own Words:

How did you first become interested in government work and the public sector?

I remember while in high school reading about President Bill Clinton in the New York Times and learning that he had graduated from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown in 1968, which kick-started his career in politics, even giving him the opportunity to intern for Senator William Fulbright.  I applied to the program, because it ranks the best program for government and international affairs.  At that time, I knew I wanted to work in international affairs and be involved in U.S. policy-making.  It is funny to think now that I actually used a typewriter to write my college essays and physically mailed them to Georgetown.

At Georgetown you earned a Masters in Arab Studies.  What initially drew you to studying the Middle East and Arabic?

Well, choosing a region of study was a pretty easy decision for me.  I come from a Jewish family, and my grandfather is an Israeli Zionist.  I even had the opportunity to participate in the Birthright Israel Program.  As a result, whenever there is news relating to the Arab world, it is always of particular interest to me. The Arab Studies program at Georgetown complicated and enhanced my understanding of the region.

Speaking of the Arab world, what are your thoughts on the Arab uprisings of recent months?

What has happened in Egypt is absolutely incredible.  The fact that until recently Egyptians have been labeled as apathetic about politics has been shown to be patently untrue.   The truth is that they were being realistic and weary of physical repression. What they have achieved has been empowering and what is most interesting to me, and in direct contrast with Iraq, is the fact that, in Egypt, the revolution sprung directly from the people and was not instigated by external Western powers.  It seems to me that imposing democracy upon Middle Eastern nations does nothing but to emasculate them.  The Egyptian model is a far better example of the people empowering themselves.

What would you say to the fear that the next regime might be worse than Mubarak?

I think it is misplaced and inaccurate.  Even if Mubarak happened to be sympathetic to Western ideals and peaceful toward Israel, isn’t it in everyone’s best interest to have a leader who is the voice of the Egyptian people?  It is my personal belief that every country should have a leader who commands the respect and trust of its own people first.  Then, we can go around worrying about strategic alliances.

What about Libya?

To be honest, I’m actually conflicted on the state of affairs in Libya.  Of course I believe that humanitarianism is a good thing, but at the same time, I also fear that NATO is getting a little too mixed up in places it doesn’t belong.  I’ve been to Libya and I can say without a doubt that they don’t want outside powers there.  Not to mention, the West is currently entangled in plenty of other wars and crises.  I’m afraid we might be stretching ourselves too thin.

What is your reaction to the news about Osama Bin Laden?

I think the end of Bin Laden is a victory for the United States, and further validates the painstaking intelligence work that it takes to counter extremist groups, as opposed to large-scale military action.

Changing gears, if you could re-live your Lauder experience, would you do anything differently?

Not too much.  One thing that really helped me was to ask for advice.  So, I would tell incoming or current students that before you do anything ask advice from as many people as possible.  Also, don’t over-commit to too many things and really choose carefully what you want to do and how you want to spend your time.  That way you don’t miss out on anything.  Another piece of advice I would give for those seeking careers in consulting: prepare, prepare, and prepare some more for the case interviews!  I received quite a few rejections throughout the process. I learned that practicing is crucial to building up confidence and having that experience is vital to doing well in the interview process.

Where do you think we might we find you in 10 years?

I might very well be back in government in D.C.

To cap off our interview we tried to stump Matt with some ancient Egyptian history.  We showed him the following two images and asked him to name that pharaoh.  Despite the centuries of wear and tear, he had no trouble.  Take your best shot for next time!

And of course, the trivia responses to Erica’s quandary: Hawaiian roll (left), Philadelphia roll (right).