The AIM Blogger

One of the courses that I've gone to appreciate in the MBA program is Marketing Management (MM) under Prof. Joe Miranda. The Case Method , in my opinion, really brings out the best in our MM classes. We've already covered a lot, such as market research and components to a successful marketing program, but not so much on one specific item that has caught my attention: Viral Marketing . According to Wikipedia, Viral Marketing is defined as "marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses." I highlighted social networks because this blog is part of one-- the Blogosphere . I wouldn't be surprised if this blog would have a"word of mouth" effect on prospective MBA students. As for the Viral Marketing, we did tackle a case before on non-traditional marketing channels such as mobile devices and the web, but o...

The "real" vacation season started for us MBA students last December 14, Friday. We did not have class that day, but we did have a group paper deadline for Quantitative Analysis (QA). From that point, the exodus of students not based in the Philippines began. A lot of Indian students steadily started going out of the dorm with their luggage bags and excitement of going back to India. Students trickling out of AIM is usually see them waiting for cabs in the lobby area, with other classmates bidding adieu, even temporarily. Here's a list of things of things I've been able to do since the vacation: Eat lunch at home Watch TV Sleep Read a book not related to AIM! Shop for Christmas gifts Party hard :D I'm sure other folks have found the time to rest and do stuff. So to the AIM students all over the world, greetings to you and have great Christmas vacation.

(This post could also be called "Eight Hours of Financial Management.") We had our Financial Management 1 (FM 1) final exam yesterday and boy was it a monster exam. The exam was originally from 9 am to 2 pm, and I thought it was more than enough, but, boy, am I glad they changed the schedule to 8:30 am to 5 pm. I'm glad our Asian Business Systems (ABS) professor, Brahm Prakash, was willing to reschedule our classes to next year to give us more time to do our finals. The exam had two parts: Part 1 was a 40-point multiple choice section that focused on capital budgeting, weighted cost of capital (WACC), earnings per share (EPS) and stock prices, and capital structure. Everybody in class thought that part was very challenging. After taking that part of the finals, I felt there was an anvil that fell down from the heavens and dashed my MBA hopes. Part 2 was a case analysis and I think it was harder than any of our Written Analysis of Cases (WAC) where we're given 13 hou...

I remember in one of the meetings with our learning team's mentor where he shared the wisdom of having learning teams or CAN groups-- You can't do everything . That's why you have a team that will roughly have a finance person, a marketing person, a quant guy and operations person. The team composition, hopefully, creates synergy and build on the strengths of the members. However, I do think that a single person can do everything. However, that person has Economics against him or her. There's this thing called The Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns or more popularly known as Diminishing Returns. Applied in our "do everything" situation, hypothetically a person can do everything, but at a steep price-- perhaps putting in an impractical amount of time, or having huge inefficiency in accomplishing the that feat. Doing or being everything is not impossible, but rather impractical. We can also apply another economic concept, Opportunity Cost , into the picture. W...

Last Friday, December 7, AIM held the Student's Christmas Party at the Zen Garden. The very capable Master in Management (MM) folks were the ones in charge of throwing the party and they did a very good job. The party's theme was " Mahiwagang Paskong Pinoy " which roughly translates to "Enchanted Filipino Christmas." As the theme suggests, Filipiniana or Filipino-inspired costumes were encouraged to be worn. It was nice to see non-Filipinos wear the Barong Tagalog and Camiza DeChino for a more casual look. I sported a more contemporary look-- a Magdalo Group -inspired get-up. (I'll post pictures and videos as soon as I get them from our designated photographers). I performed with the band that kicked off the program. While our performance wasn't so perfect, we did have fun playing Christmas songs like "All I Want for Christmas is You" and " Pasko na Sinta Ko ," a Filipino Christmas song. There were lots of giveaways and games. It...

I'm running a social experiment to test a theory I've developed. The theory is called The Six Word Description Theory and it posits that an object's qualitative attributes can be adequately and satisfactorily described using six words . My theory was developed while thinking of how to minimize the responses for an interview and it was inspired by Six Degrees of Separation . I'm developing this theory to extend it to describing abstract ideas and how it would apply to tagging and labeling for items on the web. It's like developing this rule of thumb: A blog post can be adequately described using six tags or labels. I'm validating this theory with a survey that will go through the typical hypothesis testing some theories undergo. The survey has only 10 questions and may be finished in 5 minutes. Please take the survey via the link below: Take the Six Word Description Theory Survey . I'd appreciate your help in validating this endeavor.

AIM had its first AIM Preview today. The AIM Preview is a an event where prospective MBA, MM or MDM students are invited and a brief talk on business and management is given. The talk for today's session was by Prof. Ricky Lim and his topic was "Leading the Swarm," which focused on the wisdom of teams and groups. Although us students were not required to attend the event, a few classmates and myself attended. We even answered questions about life in AIM-- academics, social life and the joys and pains of being in the MBA program. It was like us giving testimonials to encourage prospective folks to attend AIM. Personally, I'm glad I attended the talk. The AIM Preview really showed AIM at its best-- the presentations and the talk highlighted the case method and benefits of being in the MBA program. I've been very weary the past weeks and even I wondered why I'm here in AIM. The talk reminded me of the reasons why I chose AIM and why I attended the MBA program. I...

What do MBA Blog, MBA Blogger and AIM MBA have in common? The three are all phrases in which this blog places well in Google Search. For the key phrase MBA Blog , The AIM Blogger places #7 out of 9,790,000 results. This blog also places #8 for the key phrase MBA Blogger out of 2,210,000 websites found by Google. And finally, searching for the phrase AIM MBA in Google will show this blog at #5 out of 1,750,000. What do those results and rankings mean? The results mean that this blog is in a good position to be read by those looking for a site about MBA's. It's also very likely that someone looking for information about the MBA program in AIM will happen upon my site if they were looking for it in Google. Personally, it's one of my goals for this blog is to place in the top 10 for the key phrase Asian Institute of Management . Currently, it's in the top 80 results and the top 10 will probably happen if a lot of people find this blog relevant when searching for the t...

It's always nice to see fellow students from AIM sharing my liking for blogging. And I'm very pleased to feature Jing Sinay-Ocampo from the Master in Development Management program and her blog.

When I got my feedback from my mentor , I was initially disappointed because he essentially told me that I have been settling for mediocrity. Using Prof. Borromeo's words, my performance has been "blah." OK, I get it. However, I've had the chance to ruminate on that feedback session and I thought that he made a lot of sense-- if I've been settling in my comfort zone, then there's really no point in giving me an impressive feedback. I thought, well, at least that feedback has been relative to what I could do and my potential. Now the nasty part: After a few days, I got wind of some other people's feedback and I'm just dumbfounded. Some classmates who I thought were either so-so or a BS -machine (and I know they aren't really stellar) had a higher watch grade than me. Now, I don't want to sound like a whiner but I share on of my classmate's sentiments that the watch grades ride too much on perception and professor recall. Now, all this has ma...