What happened to June?

We're a little over six weeks through our summer semester on campus. It's been said many times before (by others), but man, does this go by fast! It seems like we just got started. Seriously, where did June go?

We started June 1st with a one-week program called Universe Within which kicks off the leadership curriculum of the program. It was a self-contained week of leadership frameworks, role plays, observation, reflection and introspection. Leadership aside, it was a great ice breaker

and bonding experience for the class. Within a week we broke down most walls and started interacting as a cohesive group. A highlight of the week was a one day adventure to Outward Bound; a ropes course and teambuilding exercise. An added benefit was watching selected movie clips... wax on, wax off to reflect on leadership styles. Mr. Miagi is clearly a great leader deserving of further study. BTW, Did you hear they're doing a remake of Karate Kid? Blasphemous.

After UW wrapped up we got started on our LGO core classes. It started off nice and gentle, and then sometime around mid-to-late June a wave of intensity rolled through and has kept us moving at a pretty incredible rate. I certainly don't mind it, that's what I expected from MIT. Here's our course load for the summer:

Operations Management - Little's Law, use it early and often

Ops is a great review of the common techniques and methods of opeartions management. We review product/operations design choices of price, value, quality and time and then get into Little's law, inventory management, plenty of case studies, and most recently a simulation on running a manufacturing facility.

High Velocity Organizations (Lean/Six Sigma) - Finding our inner rabbits

High Velocity Organizations, or what was formerly called the Lean/Six Sigma course is largely based on our professor Steven Spear's book, "Chasing the Rabbit." While most lean/six sigma classes I've taken focus on the tools and frameworks, we're focusing more on the why. Too often organizations get caught up in the toools themselves and forget the overall thought process of continuous improvement.

Leadership - WWBD, What would Bono do?

Our leadership class explores a number of techniques and leadership styles. We debated situational vs. trait based leadership (yes, including Bono) and reviewed a number of cases where leadership decisions played a key role. The key takeaway from this class so far to make time for reflection, it is critical in the growth process.

Engineering Probability and Statistics - 60% of the time it works every time

Although I minored in Statistics in my undergrad days I definitely needed this class to get back into the flow of things. The class is split up to two halves; the first half, probability, went over you basic probability laws, a heavy dose of Bayes theorem, game theory, a variety of distributions and hypothesis testing. Having just wrapped that portion up with a mid term we are now starting our statistics portion. More to come on that one.

Systems Optimization and Analysis - Optimizing optimal optimization techniques

Systems is heavy on Operations Research, or more specifically linear programming. I may be weird, but I really enjoy this stuff. We spend our time trying to optimize transportation networks, assignment problems and integer programs.

I had a version of most of these classes in my undergraduate program but I still find them highly valueable. I certainly didn't get to use all of the skills in my typical day-to-day operations, so they got fuzzy over the last few years. Being well grounded in the various techniques is going to be critical for understanding the rest of the courses we'll be undertaking.