Sunday, September 25, 2005

Time-challenged? You are not alone

Business Week has a great cover story on long hours at the office. The article explains some of the reasons why the productivity gains of the last decades did not translate into fewer hours at work and what can you do to reduce the workload.

This article was interesting in the light of my shadowing experience that ended up last week. My manager was clearly experiencing some the of issues listed in the article such as "communications -- voice mail, e-mail, and meetings -- nearly or completely unmanageable". The inbox of my manager had up to 500 unread emails at some point during the day!

The shadowing experience was positive from a networking point of view and gave me some exposure to the inside of an investment bank but from a educative point of view, it was useless. In my opinion, spending 4 days following a manager, not matter how senior he is, is an incredible waste of time and learning management skills by observing is preposterous. You learn this by doing, not observing.

The shadowing project has been highly criticized by the MBA 2006 and the MBA office seems to acknowledge this since the project will be under review. My advice: make this an optional project. Some students with no management experience or strong motivation to discover a new industry or country could still find the project useful. For many others, it's just useless.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home