University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program - Operations Management

Just waiting for the company brick to boot again so I'm taking a few minutes to update here on my Operations Management session. While there is no danger of moving into supply chain any time soon, it was a healthy session on various "greatest hits" of Operations Management. Of particular interest were some discussions about processes important in the past that no longer hold value - and how many companies cling to them out of memory.

Can you say " We've always done it this way"?

I had found a similar response to asking my team to give up a monthly report format recently. Everyone was complaining about having to do them yet when I gave them the "out" and streamlined the format - lots of pushback. Seems it was that comfortable yardstick people felt they could measure their performance with. Unfortunately that is like driving through the rear view mirror - always looking in the past.

So the session was a refresh of concepts I learned in graduate school but had a healthy dose of "actual" versus "theoretical" concepts. Funny too were the comparisions to real life where senior managers scream "my people stand around half the time" and how time studies don't always show that is a bad thing.

Enthusiastic professor - did a good job of delivering what could have been very dry content.

University of Dayton Emerging Leader Program - Finance

While I'm waiting for my company brick ( the Dell) to reboot, I'll take a few minutes to catch up on my current program.


Well I had my first session as part of the University of Dayton's Emerging Leader Program. I jumped in on the Finance session. Overall the focus was on Finance for non-financial managers and leads students through the usual parade of balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flows. Usually many managers (myself included) don't need to prepare such statements (finance department does that) but we need to interpret the data.

A key "take away" from the session was the use of financial ratios and a working exercise where we evaluated the effect of certain changes in these and the +/- effects. An example was on inventory turnover ratio and if it improved a slight amount it would clearly have a positive effect on inventory dollars. The fact we ran through many of these and worked it out in our teams allowed us to more completely understand the exercise.

I'm thinking I'll draw up a similar exercise for my work team and see if we can achieve a better understanding of our internal initiatives.

Overall a positive session that reinforced many concepts I've learned before (both in company finance training and my MBA) but a nice, clear, short - format session.

More to come - training session with my mentor next week.