UIC MBA Chicago Entrepreneur Blog Past, present, and future plans in the life of an entrepreneur and former Chicago UIC MBA student.

One of my projects for Organizational Behavior Management class was to do a resource brief on anything of interest.  Since “Think and Grow Rich” is one of my favorite books, I figured I would share it with everyone.  

Think and Grow Rich

(Refer the picture above, my powerpoint presentation)

Page 1 - Napoleon Hill grew up poor.  He worked as a reporter during college to help pay for his education.  One of his first interviews was with Andrew Carnegie.  Andrew Carnegie, at this time, was one of the most powerful and richest businessmen in the world.  Carnegie commissioned Napoleon Hill to write a new philosophy.  The philosophy of success and riches.  Carnegie offered NO PAY to Hill to write this new philosophy and offered him only introductions.

Page 2 - These are the chapters of the book as well as the 12 Laws of Riches.  I’m not going to go through any of these subject as this is merely a resource to entice you to read the book but notice that money comes LAST in the 12 Laws of Riches.  

Page 3 - If you look at this list, this is a who’s who of American history.  Many of the companies you work for or want to work for were founded by these outstanding individuals.  

Page 4 - These are a few of my favorite quotes and stories from the book.  

• Merchants of Chicago - After the Great Chicago Fire, a bunch of merchant had a meeting.  Their stores had burned down and it seemed easier to leave than rebuild.  One man left the meeting and pointed to a spot on State Street and proclaimed “on this site here, I will build the greatest store ever”.  All the other merchants left and that man fulfilled his promise by building Marshall Field’s.  Today, it’s Macy’s but you get the point.
• “Opinions are the cheapest commodities on Earth”.  Everyone has a ton of them.  It’s up to you to figure out what you want to do.
• “Keep on keeping on”  Thomas Eddison said he failed 10,000 times.  He didn’t understand why people didn’t keep on keeping on.  He failed so many times that he RAN OUT of things to fail at.
• “Building alibis with which to explain failure is a national pasttime”  Some people are afraid of failure more than success.  I never understood that.  The timing will never be perfect.  The moon will not align.  Sometimes you just have to take a chance. 
• “Life is a checkerboard and the player opposite you is time”  Time runs out fast.  At the end of the game, are you going to be happy with your moves and outcome?

Posted under UIC MBA Liautaud

I realized lately that goals without a defined outcome are too hard to follow.  They must be quantified or very descriptive in order to be achieved.  For example, today, I set the goal to run 3 miles.  If I had not set that exact goal and just started running, I definitely would have stopped short of that.  I was getting very tired at 1.5 mile and would definitely have given up at 2 - MAX!  Because I set the goal at 3, I pushed myself to finish up the last mile.

Here were my goals for 2007 with outcomes:

-get real estate license (I didn’t accomplish this and realize there is no need to)
-buy a property ( I ended up buying a house with my gf in 2008 at a very good value)
-increase net worth by over 10k (my net worth decreased dramatically due to the stock market)
-keep ecommerce website up and running (website has been running great)
-go back to school (attending UIC MBA full time)
-run 5 miles (I was able to achieve this)
-run 10 miles (definitely did not get close to this)
-get body fat under 12% (body fat has probably gone up a little since then)
-travel outside the country (took a couple trips to China, Thailand, and Vietnam since then)
-take more pictures (should remember this for this years goals)
-volunteer (Sponsored child #2 Christian Children Fund.. but did not do much other than this)

A few of my goals were very vague and difficult to achieve.  On the otherhand, I was able to achieve a great deal of my 2007 goals (althought it took me 2007 and 2008 to achieve- better late than never!).  So here are my goals for 2009.

Jay 2009 Personal Goals-

School:

• Obtain a 3.5 out of 4.0 average for both spring and fall semester
• Attend at least 4 school related functions (socials, volunteer work, meetings)

Business:

• Double revenue from ecommerce website
• Increase net worth by 10k
• Attend two business related events (Berkshire meeting, etc…)

Health:

• Run 3 miles once every other week
• Workout 3x a week

Personal:

• Have dinner with my family at least once every other month

I really feel like I can achieve a good percentage of these goals this year.  Wish me luck!

Posted under UIC MBA Liautaud

Here’s some updates on the MBA program at UIC from the dean Stefanie Lenway:

The following are a sampling of some of the CBA’s outstanding achievements from the past few months.

• Entrepreneur magazine and The Princeton Review named our graduate entrepreneurship program sixth in the nation.

• Crain’s Chicago Business ranked the Liautaud MBA program fourth on its annual list of the area’s AACSB-accredited MBA programs.

• Liautaud MBA alumna Caralynn Nowinski-Chenoweth, the co-founder and acting CEO of Sanogene Therapeutics Inc., was named to the 2008 Crain’s Chicago Business “40 under 40” list, which is an annual snapshot “of the area’s up-and-comers from a wide range of industries.” In addition to this honor, Sanogene obtained the exclusive license to the worldwide patent for its core technology, received a strategic equity investment from Cato BioVentures, and entered into a partnership with Cato Research Ltd.

• Alter EatGo, founded by Eric Meredith ‘94, won the 2008 City Treasurer’s Business Plan Competition. This is the second consecutive year a business founded by a CBA alumnus took first place in the competition. (Sanogene Therapeutics won in 2007).

• The Crain’s Chicago Business list of Who’s Who in the Chicago business community featured several CBA alumni.

• The College of Business Administration received an “Above and Beyond” award from Junior Achievement in recognition of its efforts to assist the organization in providing important economic educational programs to young people in grades K-12. Last year, CBA student volunteers reached more than 8,600 students throughout the Chicagoland area, which represented a 277 percent increase in JA volunteer support from the previous year’s commitment.

It’s nice to see that the many people in the program are doing more than just classwork.  I’d like to get involved with more organizations, community services, and competitions in the new year.

Posted under UIC MBA Liautaud

UIC IPD

My first review will be about the IPD - Interdisciplinary Product Development class (IPD Website). While I can’t go into specific details (confidentiality agreement), I will talk about the class a little bit.

The class is run by three professors, Albert Page (Business), Michael Scott (Engineering), and Stephen Melamed (Design). In a perfect world, there would be equal number of students from each of those three colleges. In reality, there are more Design and Engineer students than MBA students. The class is broken down into 5 teams, comprised of 2-3 Design students, 2-3 Engineer students, and 1-2 MBA student in each group.

IPD is actually a very interesting concept. Instead of going through all the regular channels in product development (ie. Marketing–> Design–>Engineer–>Marketing), the team works together throughout the whole process. This eliminates some of the potential problems that may arise from each department and also shortens the time that a product can reach market. If the benefits are so obvious, why isn’t everyone doing this? Well, there are many potential problems that arise within each team. Since the groups are made up of students from three different colleges, different backgrounds, different experiences, it makes it difficult to have an instant bond.

The three professors try to solve this problem through the first few weeks of the class. There are team building events, seminar speakers, and group projects in which you analyze your own group. This all helps a lot but it is up to each individual group to improve itself.

The way the class is run and taught is a little unconventional. The syllabus is a rough guide and project and assignments are constantly being dropped and added. Deadlines and pushed back and forth and it is difficult to follow along with sometimes. I believe Professor Melamed described it best by saying that, all our majors teach us to be problem solvers. We intellectually want to solve the problem but we don’t actually know what the problem is yet. It takes one whole semester to try and figure out the problem and another semester to come up with the solution. We won’t actually know what the problem is until we start analyzing and researching more. The sponsor company doesn’t know the problem, the professors don’t know and we sure as hell don’t know. This feeling we have of uncertainty is often confused with a feeling of frustration.

To sum up, IPD is a pretty interesting class. We work on a real-life problem for a fortune 500 company. As of now, we are trying to identify the problem. The class is definitely unconventional. The classroom is pretty upbeat and unique. You’ll definitely feel out of place because of the mix of students and there is a lot of work outside of class. Besides all this, I am still interested to see where this class is heading. In the real world, you’re not always given a problem and there is not always a solution. We just live and learn.

By the way, for MBA student, you do not need to take Mktg500 before taking this class. You can take it concurrent with it. This is my first semester at UIC and I’m taking both classes. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Posted under UIC MBA Liautaud

Published by Jay on August 16, 2008 01:01 am

Thanks to everyone who left comments and wrote e-mails. It’s nice to see that people with similar interest appreciate what I write. In return, I would like to teach you some money saving tips. Here goes:

• Charge everything! I carry three credit cards in my wallet.

-Chase Gas Reward Card: (My card isn’t open to new customers anymore but it’s 5% cashback on gas. You can research card online and find one that gives 5% on gas.)

-HSBC 2% Reward Card (I use this to charge everything else. 2% BACK ON EVERYTHING. I charge all utilities, online purchases, etc…It all adds up. Below is the referral free link)

http://www.householdbank.com/

-American Express Card (I only use these for places that don’t accept VISA/MC, such as Costco)

• Buy textbooks from Half.com or Abebooks.com Abebooks.com is amazing. Some of the textbooks they sell are not original versions but they are full color copies that sell for half the price. Usually textbooks run around $100. I buy the generic version for $50 on abebooks.com and sell them for $25 after I finish the class. The end cost is about $25-$50 for a book I’ll never read again anyways. <!–more–>

• Use StudentUniverse.com to book airline tickets. You usually save $10-$20 off the same tickets from Orbitz or Expedia. Another option is to use Orbitz to look up flights and then go to the airline’s website direct and save about $10 off booking through the airline.

• Craigslist.org or ebay.com for buying and selling misc purchases. Many times, people will tell themselves that they cannot afford a product. The correct way of approaching this is, “HOW can I afford this product?” I recently sold my two year old laptop for $450 through craigslist and purchased a brand new, higher spec laptop for $500. Better specs and new warranty with just a few hours of work.

• Purchase items through Amazon.com. Free shipping on orders over $25 and it’s tax free. In Chicago, they’re raising the sales tax to 11.5%. If I’m not in a hurry to get a product, that’s 11.5% percent I save automatically on top of their low prices.

• Slickdeals.net is a site I frequent daily. There are new deals everyday and you’ll be able to purchase some items for amazing prices. Warning: (I am guilty of purchasing misc items through this website just because the prices were so low.) Don’t let this happen to you! Buy only what you need!

I hope you guys use some of these money saving tips. I can honestly say that they save me thousands of dollars a year. Best of luck!

Posted under UIC MBA Liautaud