Category: Reflection

Our team Love Designs 2 has just completed our negotiations with Andersons 1 Team. There were quite a number of key takeaways as well as reflection points.

Preparation is key. With reliance on team members to complete their individual preparations, it is still prominent that the more effort and consideration put into preparing for a meeting like this, the more smoothly the meeting will go. Some key takeaways include:

• Scenario management is key, coming prepared for plausible scenarios will allow for ease of agility and faster agreement timelines.
  • For example, being prepared for a scenario where the buyer wants to buy multiple colours of one style, rather than all unique styles across the range.
  • As well, preparing Excel templates that allow for those scenarios would also be crucial for tight meeting timelines as such. Thankfully, if given an extra 20 minutes, it was still possible to flush those numbers out completely, so we weren’t too far off.

In hindsight, I hadn’t thought about taking this negotiation as an opportunity to grow the business. I was focused on meeting the minimums and ensuring the deal was reasonable and securing Andersons as a continuous customer. There was opportunity for us as a supplier to overtake Andersons’ supplier base and grow the order values significantly for the reasonable terms we were offering, such as lower than minimum average quantities and minimum supplier margins.

In reality, if the values we offered were advantageous for Andersons, they would slowly migrate their orders with us. It would simply take a little while, and securing higher stakes at earlier times would be more financially beneficial for us as a supplier for cash flow purposes.

Lots of learning today, good day.

Upon a class vote, the class decided that our lead professor should only present us with external opportunities that are beneficial and reasonable on time investment. I felt that I didn’t want to miss out on information, in case there was something I’m actually interested in and want to invest time and energy into it. Opportunities are presented to everyone but not everything is taken up by me. For example, I choose not to sign up for the Graduate Mentorship Program. I signed up for the LVMH course instead.

At the time of writing this blog, it’s been more than a week since the first LVMH module was released. I have not had the time to take a look. These instances has got me wondering; what am I looking for, or looking to achieve, or looking to learn during my extracurricular time here at the MBA? I must be reasonable with my own capacity. Learning is exciting, and unfortunately fortunately, I’m quite greedy when it comes to learning. But perhaps, I should be realistic with myself. Going forward, I really need to decide whether something will be truly beneficial towards my future goals and own business. Time is perhaps the currency I don’t have enough of at this moment.

After spending days and hours completing the mood boards, our class was compared within each other, the best ones were identified, and feedback was given based on that.

Although content wise, I was able to takeaway what my work was missing and areas where I could work on. At the end of the day, it came down to further research to be able to pin point the prevailing trends.

However, something didn’t quite sit well with me, and I’m not exactly sure how. I’m taking this blog as an opportunity to reflect on this experience.

Perhaps it was the amount of time spend on the work, although professor did look at everyone’s and offered individual feedback at the end of the session, I felt that my work was for nothing. I don’t think I would blame the professor for my experience, but I am struggling to understand why I feel this way. Would I have felt better if our work was collected? Would I feel better if professor made individual comments on our work? I believe so. Although feedback content wise, I have no issues. I just feel rather disappointed. I think I would feel just a bit better if the professor had their own answer key that I could compare myself against.

Extrapolating these thoughts for the future when I have my own staff, how would I avoid making people feel the way I felt? Certainly, I should not compare all of their work, highlight who did the best, and turn back all the work that was done by everyone else. I would highlight good points of each of their work, making sure each of them feels recognized for the work they put in. It’s ok to learn from each other, but it’s not ok for everyone to learn from one or two people, it makes everyone else feel worthless.

I wonder how this reflects on my personal psychology. I’m not sure I’m able to answer this question for myself today. Do I feel worthless if my work has no good points to be identified or shown off? Perhaps so. All I know is, I felt that my work was for nothing that day.

For a number of our Formative Assessments, we are tasked with conducting research on macro and micro environments for businesses. This makes me wonder; when I eventually go onto developing my own business, will I be conducting this research as well? I rather not spend that time if I’m completely honest. However, I wonder how awfully things will fail if this research isn’t being completed. I question the usefulness of it for a small business.

13 October 2023

The process which I took to complete the Knitwear Range Plan exercise would call upon some reflection. On Wednesday evening after the exercise was assigned, my group mates pretty much had things figured out and we were almost complete. But then, I spent the entire evening at school trying to understand how the store level budget was decided. I reworked the calculation example provided by Julie in the morning lecture, understood the process, and tried to work out the math for Sarah’s exercise. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep that hindered my ability to think clearly. I knew it was a simple calculation but just couldn’t make sense of it for the longest time. My question was: how was the budget % by grade decided? Eventually at around 11pm when all the math finally worked out, I realized budget was probably just set based on sales and traffic data.

The next day, while sitting with another group of classmates and accompanying them in their attempts at the Range Plan, I began to question: how do we adhere to grade level budgets during our purchase plan? Wouldn’t we need to figure out how many units go to each store level? I then proceeded to spend hours laying out the distribution plan by grade by store. Eventually, I figured that out too.

However, this entire process was almost unnecessary. My group had essentially completed the exercise. I did end up correcting some of the numbers so that it would adhere to budget better, but the main point of the exercise was simply to choose the styles and justify quantities purchased. It was never a calculation exercise. It was simply the fact that I was bothered by not making sense of the calculation and distribution behind it. Perhaps that was not a great use of time. I was advised to email the professor to get my questions answered. However, I felt so strongly that it was a simple calculation and that I should be able to figure it out myself, that I insisted in spending that time to figure things out for myself.

I think the moral of this story is that I should be mindful of how much time I’m investing into matters, whether that is truly beneficial to my learning, and how I can expedite that process to avoid future occurrences.

Academic Session with Kieron Devlin on 9th of October 2023

SWOT analysis on self

• Strength – networking capabilities 
• Weakness – academic writing skills
• Opportunities – self mediation to reduce stress and anxiety levels 
• Threats – anxiety over workload and inability to maintain regular sleeping schedule will have negative effects on concentration, learning capacity, and constructive thinking