To get us students ready for the Lagos Business School (LBS) Masters of Business (MBA) program, the school offered some preparatory concepts and courses. These concepts and courses stretched for a two week duration and included accounting, communication, decision making, and statistics and excel. Allow me to share some more detail on some of these concepts and courses.
Before diving into our courses we touched on a few important concepts on LBS and our MBA. These concepts included an overview of LBS, how to navigate our e-learn platform, plagiarism, about Opus Dei, emotional intelligence, time management, Administrative policies and procedures, BGS Career, Entrepreneurship Development Programme, Networking Activities & Initiatives for Class Bonding while away from Campus.
In addition to the concepts stated above, we covered social skills such as general etiquette, dining decorum, and grooming. We discussed etiquette as the science of good manners. These items within our general etiquette session included some meeting and greeting etiquette in Nigeria such as rushing a greeting is seen as extremely rude; spend time inquiring about the other person’s general well-being; Titles are important. Use the honorific title and any academic or professional title and the surname; Wait until invited before moving to a first-name basis. Nigerian culture is generally not a first name culture, although that may be changing with people under the age of 35.
An interesting aspect of our brush up was learning and practicing dining decorum. The class talked about a wide range of dining concepts including understanding the dining set up and navigating the table. We discussed a typical menu pattern as Appetizers to start, a main course, and a dessert to conclude. We also learnt about the use of dining utensils, a buffet set up, different meal courses, and one’s role while at table. A fun part of this session was the opportunity to practice what we learnt at lunch. All students present attempted various style of dining and while some of us struggled a bit with keeping up, others effortlessly had their lunch with the new learning. Regardless, we all had a good time applying our learnings.
Our accounting brush up covered a variety of core accounting basics. We discussed financial statements such as the balance sheet (statement of financial position), the income statement (statement of profit or loss), cash flow statement, statement of change in equity, and the accompanying notes financial statements. We also discussed core elements of financial statements such as assets, liability, owners equity, revenue, and expenses. We talked about not making investment decisions based on emotions but rather completing due diligence and/ or a feasibility study as required. A key financial ratio we discussed in class was the Asset Turnover Ratio. This ratio is defined as Turnover(revenue) divided by Assets. It essentially asked the question “Are they [the business] sweating the assets enough”. Moving on to the cash flow, we aligned on the general flow of cash as cash flow from financing activities, then cash flow from investing activities, to cash flow from operating activities.
Moving on from accounting to communication, we spent two sessions on important communication concepts. These concepts included committing to becoming masters of the English Language to express oneself effectively; Know that in communication the ‘surrounding noise’ and ‘frame of reference’ play a role in our understating; The audience should always be in the centre of communication; You can identify gaps in understanding when they say things in their own words; Using the same words over and over again can disengage your audience and could be ineffective; Be consistent with UK or American spelling form; Incorrect spelling is unacceptable and show a bad impression of you; Give enough time to plan for a speech or writing; Punctuations give meanings. It’s important to punctuate properly. e.g. (Let’s eat grandpa. Let’s eat, grandpa).
In conclusion, the Brush up programme was a comprehensive approach to getting ready for the complete programme to start as it covered concepts and topics that would prove relevant not only for the MBA programme but for our development as future managers.
MBA Coffee: Brewing Success One Cup at a Time. #MMBA 5