May has been a magnificent month of meeting and mixing
meaningfully with other MBA’ers. We
started off with a trip to Paris for the annual MBA sports tournament (MBAT)
hosted by HEC. It was a fantastic
experience and a must do as an MBA student if you get the chance. There were 14 schools from across Europe and
the UK and one school from the USA – Harvard.
A plethora of sports were covered: swimming, cross country, rugby,
football, cricket, beach volley ball, tennis, golf, dodge ball, salsa dancing,
baby-foot (foosball) badminton, basketball squash, billiards and go-karting, as
well as the more cerebral sports of chess and poker and finally pétanque which falls
into its own special category. It was a great
opportunity to meet fellow MBA’ers from all parts of the globe and all walks of
life.
Back at Cranfield we hosted the infamous MCL tournament (MBA
Cricket league – not quite IPL standard but with similar passion). Saïd, Manchester and Lancaster competed in
fifteen overs a side matches. The combination
of the warmth of the sun, the smell of freshly mown fields, the sight of cricket
whites and the sound of leather on willow made it feel like summer had arrived. It has given a nice taster for the pending
Ashes series starting in July (Go the Aussies!)
Finally we visited Saïd
Business School in Oxford for the annual Pears Business Schools Partnership
lecture. The Pears Business Partnership is
collaboration between Cranfield School of Management, London Business School, Saïd
Business School and the Pears Foundation to promote sustainable and responsible
business in society. This year Jessica
Jackley, Co-founder of Kiva and ProFounder gave a rousing talk entitled ‘An Entrepreneurial
Journey: Thriving on the Unexpected’. Previous
speakers have been Stephen Green, Chairman at the time of HSBC and Sir Andrew
Witty CEO of GlaxoSmithKline. Cranfield itself has been a leader in the
Corporate Responsibility space, particularly following the establishment of the
Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility headed by Professor David Grayson
CBE. In 2012 they published ‘Cranfield
on Corporate Sustainability’, a manifesto on the approach to corporate
sustainability management education with contributions from more than thirty
Cranfield faculty and associates. More
details can be found here.
Of course it hasn’t all been sports and talks – we have been
doing as much work as ever but everyone has become more adept at either balancing
the work load or temporarily delaying it, only to face it at a later stage. The next ‘later stage’ arrives in June as we
finish term three and move into our final term.
There is no rest between terms this time as we are all head off overseas
in different directions for the much anticipated International Business trip. A full report on that in the next post of course…….
