A good MBA reference site in Germany

I just received another newsletter from the http://www.mba-channel.com/ website. It is a relatively new website, started this year, and it has developed nicely.
What I like most in that website are the reports they write about different topics with a very critical view. From time to time they actually critic or put some school in check, which I think is very healthy.

One of the things that I found out during the MBA is that there is MBA reality and what I call the MBA "media hype". MBA schools are very clever in using the media for publicity. Of course. Positive reports go hand-in-hand with paid advertisements, as is usual in any industry. This gives MBA candidates a skewed impression of how an MBA develops, what one can expect of it, the job market reality afterwards. This gets reinforced by the fact that those owning an MBA title, like myself, will very seldomly critique the title and its institutions in a negative way. After all, we don't want to diminish the value of our degrees, do we? We have to care for our brand.
I continue to be extremely happy with my MBA experience, don't get me wrong. I met a lot of great people, visited interesting places, learned a lot, had lots of fun and, all going well, will double my salary in February.

Anyway, I just though of writing quickly to endorse the mba-channel.com website, which has also an English version.

Ah, they also tried to build an MBA community, which is commendable, but it hasn't really picked up yet. Maybe it is because they are offering features like blogs, photo albums, polls, etc., that people already use in other sites which are not MBA-specific. Maybe, instead of trying to create a whole new community environment, they might focus on getting content from elsewhere together, or focusing user interaction around their best features: their specialised stories and information.

The MBS Facebook network

Thanks to Sascha, MBS FTMBA08, now there is a network for the Mannheim Business School on Facebook.

If you have an e-mail @mba-mannheim.com, you can join. 

Go to:

• Settings
• Networks
• Type "Mannheim Business School" in the "Newtork name:" field
• Fill in the details
• Click on "join network"
• Check your MBS e-mail for a confirmation link

That's it. 

BTW, I highly recommend you to send an e-mail to the IT guys and ask them to forward your MBS e-mail to your personal account. I use it with Gmail, it works like a charm.

Disqus comments

I have been reading about Disqus for some time now and tried to give it a shot.

Disqus is a comment system for blogs which should make commenting here more interesting.

Please, try it out and let me know what you think. From this post on, new posts will use Dis qus.

Blogger is back, will I be back too?

Since mid-August I had been locked out of blogger.com. Today, after almost a week without posting, I found out that my login at blogger.com works again. No idea why, no word from the not so nice people at blogger.com.

Funny that this happens now, because I have been thinking about this blog and its future. What is its purpose and who my audience is or should be.

When I first started blogging, it was a way to keep friends and family informed, and it was relatively private. I had a robots.txt file which prevented google to list it. It was written in Portuguese. And I passed the link to selected friends and family.

The MBA changed the aim of this blog. It certainly changed the audience I had in mind for it. I still wanted to keep family and friends informed. Luckily, they are all smart and well educated, so it was possible to change the language to English ;-) This was necessary to include three additional groups of readers: future MBA colleagues,  potential employers and future MBA candidates.

I am happy with the results. My MBA colleagues, their relatives and members of the 2009 class of the Mannheim MBA told me they read this. My family and friends certainly do. And, if your google "Fernando Bresslau" you find this blog followed by my LinkedIn and Xing profiles.

But soon I will be definitely employed. And I have been far from the MBA life for a couple of months already. So the audience of my blog will revert to what it was before: family and friends. With one big change: more of my friends now don't speak Portuguese, so the language will continue to be English.

I will certainly blog about my new job, the industry and the trends. But this will be on a blog separate from my personal blog. I could be blogging, starting in February 2009, about the chemical, automotive or wind power, depending where I'll land. And I would then blog with the interests of the company in mind. But this is the future, let's see.

I was also thinking about the declining frequency of my posts here. Sure, I have a project at DHL Brussels which keeps me busy 8 hours a day, job search and career decisions get another chunk of my attention and other beautiful things in life also captivate me, Brussels is an interesting city.

I certainly have transfered much of my broadcasting to a new tool, twitter. Actually, twitter linked to my Facebook status, through which I reach most of my MBA colleagues. Interestingly enough, Luli Radfharer, a professor at the arts and communication school at the University of São Paulo, whose courses I took in 2002 and 2003, twittered about an article stating that blogging was passé. I kept in touch with Luli over all these years through our blogs at first, and now through twitter. And I can see where Paul Boutin, the article's author, is going. He has good observations on how blogging has emerged and developed, and what we can expect from personal communication (or broadcasting) in the near future.

I will continue to blog. But I suggest you to follow me on twitter or on facebook. I will certainly be more present there.

And if this article is a bit confusing, please excuse me. It has been a long day, a long week, a long month and a long year. Can't wait to go to Brazil on Christmas and take the whole month of January off.