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The Telfer School of Management is proud to announce that it has been ranked 31st of the Top 40 MBAs in the Corporate Knights 2016 Better World MBA Ranking, and is one of only 9 Canadian schools to make the ranking.
The Corporate Knights Better World MBA Ranking is the only major global ranking to evaluate graduate business programs on their integration of sustainability into the education of future business leaders.
“We’re very pleased to be ranked by Corporate Knights for our efforts to infuse social responsibility into our program”, says Greg Richards, MBA Director. “The Canadian MBA Oath that was developed here by our MBA students and the fact that we continually integrate material on governance and sustainability into our courses attest to the work we’ve been doing. The objective is to raise awareness that managerial decisions should place equal emphasis on people and on the planet, as well as on organizational success.”
Compared to traditional MBA rankings, the Better World MBA ranking is designed to help students and corporate leaders identify solid programs that have the infrastructure to support sustainability skills and knowledge. The rules-based ranking also recognizes those programs which best prepare graduates to solve business problems that intersect with larger social problems, such as climate change and inequality. The Better World MBA ranking evaluates the top 100 programs on the 2016 FT Global MBA ranking, and invites all other accredited (AMBA, AACSB, EQUIS) programs to opt-in. This year, Corporate Knights evaluated 123 programs in total.
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With this prize, Al is being recognized for his extensive work experience in the minerals industry and his strong academic achievements. Since 2006, Al has worked for Ottawa-based Sander Geophysics Ltd., presently in the area of Operations Management. He brings this technical experience in mineral exploration and development to his current MBA studies.
Al cites his early interest in natural resources to having grown up in Thunder Bay, Ontario. His vision essay on the future of Canada’s mining industry focused on the opportunities that the Ring of Fire presents to his hometown and throughout the region of Northern Ontario. He has a particular interest in the socio-economic benefits responsible mineral activity can bring to Aboriginal communities in the area and how it can lead to deeper, long-lasting relationships between mining companies and Aboriginal peoples.
Congratulations Al!
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Why do good people do bad things?
This is the question posed by Robert Prentice at a recent conference where he talked about Behavioural Ethics. The interesting point is that some studies have shown that business education increases rather than decreases unethical behaviour. Why might this be?
Behavioural ethics suggests that even the most well-meaning people can behave unethically in certain situations. This happens, according to Prentice, because of a few cognitive biases that include the following:
- Over-confidence bias - “I always behave ethically”;
- Conformity bias -“Everyone else is doing it”; and
- Respect for authority - “The boss says I have to”.
Business education might encourage unethical behaviour if the emphasis is placed on profitability above all. In other words, the MBA program might stimulate some of the biases mentioned above. Most MBA programs nowadays focus on a balance of results: people, profit and planet. In addition, many have introduced courses on ethics. The Telfer 2009 MBA grads went one step further to create an MBA Oath that outlines a set of values for how our MBAs will conduct themselves in the workplace.
All Telfer MBA grads sign off on the Oath prior to graduation, and many years later, Telfer MBA alumni can recall the ceremony that surrounds the signing and the commitment they made to ethical conduct. Harley Finkelstein, a member of the 2009 graduating class and a key proponent of the Oath points out that “other such Oaths were created in a number of American universities after the 2008 financial meltdown, but we wanted to create an Oath that would reflect Canadian values”. The focus is on “doing good” of course, but also on realizing that good people can do bad things if they are put in situations in which the ethical aspects are perhaps nebulous. Attaching one’s signature to a set of values instills a framework for making ethical decisions when faced with ambiguous situations.
MBA Director Greg Richards notes: “With the rapid changes in organizations these days, the proliferation of data, Internet of Things, and continual global connectivity, most of us now work in pretty fast-moving, complex environments. Sometimes, it’s not easy to maintain a focus on values in these situations. I think talking about ethics and values regularly and providing a framework, such as the MBA Oath, to help people focus their decision-making is a useful approach.”
Daina Mazutis, author of a number of papers on Ethical Decision Making and Endowed Professor of Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability at the Telfer School of Management adds: “Many research studies have shown that making a public commitment to an issue can have a profound effect on individual behaviour. On top of anticipating, practicing and scripting responses in advance to the ethical dilemmas future managers are bound to face in the work place, the MBA Oath can serve as a sort of trip-wire that augments the moral intensity of the situation at the time a decision has to be made, especially if a visible reminder of the Oath is kept nearby.”
For more information on ethics in business, take a look at some of Professor Mazutis’s work in the Journal of Business Ethics or in Academy of Management Learning & Education.
Robert Prince and his colleagues at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin have created a series of videos and other educational resources at Ethics Unwrapped.
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Kevin Smiley is a full-time MBA student at the Telfer School of Management and a strong believer in social entrepreneurship. This year, he founded SuraiTea Inc., a social enterprise tea shop which employs mostly Syrian refugees in order to provide them with job opportunities in Canada, all while also raising money for settlement efforts.
Being in the Right Place at the Right Time
Having previously studied in environmental engineering at Queen's University and worked in renewable power and sustainable real estate development, and being actively engaged with the Professional Engineers Ontario / Ontario Society of Professional Engineers' Engineering Innovation Ecosystem, Kevin was inspired to create a sustainable business model which would benefit all parties involved.
In early February 2016, Stephen Daze, Telfer’s Dom Herrick Entrepreneur in Residence, informed Kevin about uOttawa’s Start-Up Weekend which carried the theme of refugee resettling. It was then that he shifted his focus to creating a business that would help with the Syrian resettling effort in Canada. “After seeing and reading many stories about the enormous strain on limited resources which not-for-profit organizations were experiencing, I began to think that there may be something that I could do to help,” he says.
The Project
SuraiTea Inc. is a corporation that uses the power of the markets to create positive change for the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Canada. It hopes to create high value employment for refugees and establish a sustainable source of corporate donations to the organizations that are active in the refugee resettling effort in Canada. SuraiTea Inc. is a social enterprise and a ‘Pending B Corp’ (start‐up) with B Lab Canada.
Why tea? Jasmine is the unofficial national flower of Syria and Damascus, the capital city of Syria, is also known as ‘The City of Jasmine’.
Kevin contacted a wholesale tea supplier in Toronto, which uses 100% USDA and Canada Organic certified organic ingredients and Ecocert certified facilities. He then reached out to World Skills Employment Centre, an Ottawa organization that finds jobs for recently-arrived immigrants and refugees and then put the two together. So far, SuraiTea Inc. has 20 Syrian refugees working on the project. “The more our customers support us by signing on to our online store and purchasing our teas, the more positive social change for refugees we can create,” he says.
Sustainability and Business
Kevin’s long term goal for SuraiTea Inc. is to eventually grow the corporation and add additional lines of teas from other areas of the world which have humanitarian issues, such as East-Africa, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. “The areas which produce some of the best teas, also unfortunately have some of the worst problems,” he says, “Syria has over 20 million refugees currently but there are actually over 55 million total refugees in the world so it’s not just a Syrian problem.”
Kevin says that the Telfer MBA program has helped him gain the knowledge needed in order to create his business from the ground up. “Telfer has truly been a transformational experience for me,” he says, “Telfer is where I learned about B Corps, where I learned that the truly successful business are the ones that solve problems, where I learned about intrinsic motivation and where the entrepreneurial fire was lit inside me.”
CBC News has covered SuraiTea Inc.’s story. Read the news article, or watch the TV clip (starts at 43:30 minutes).
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The Francophone MBA team from the Telfer School of Management has won first place in the 2016 HEC Montréal Sustainability Challenge. The competition was held on Friday, March 18, 2016 at HEC Montréal.
The Telfer team consisted of Jean-François Claveau, Mathieu Daoust, Majid Fassi Fehri, Hala Migahed and their coach, Mathias Kouassi.
This was the seventh time HEC Montréal has organized this event. The Sustainability Challenge is an international case competition that affords MBA students from across Canada and abroad a unique opportunity to put their managerial and analytical skills to the test, as well as expand their professional networks.
The objective for each team is to develop concrete solutions that apply to a current issue and present them to a jury made up of executives from large international corporations.
"I am very proud of this accomplishment by the Telfer MBA Team", says Mathias Kouassi, the team's coach. "This is a high level competition that includes many MBA programs from Canada and around the world, in which participants are invited to show originality and analytical thought to ponder emerging issues on sustainability and offer concrete solutions to these issues."
He adds: "Thank you to our champions for being such great ambassadors of our MBA program and to our professors and staff who contribute to students' well being and to the Telfer MBA program on a daily basis."
Congratulations to our team on this win!
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(From left to right: Carl Burlock, Export Development Canada; HEC team, Ben Mansoura, Amandine Michaud, Niki Parassidis, Abdelghani Zniber; Michel Brazeau, Deloitte)
On March 4th and 5th 2016, the Telfer School of Management, in partnership with Export Development Canada and Deloitte, hosted the first annual Diversity and Inclusion MBA Case Competition.
The rationale for this event, which addressed a topic not often found in typical MBA case competitions, was that despite the advances being made in promoting and integrating diversity in organizations, the fear of being different is still a common occurrence. This case competition was conceived to highlight and explore current issues and potential solutions related to Diversity and Inclusion in contemporary organizations.
The MBA case competition included the following teams:
- DeGroote School of Business McMaster University
- HEC Université de Montreal
- John Molson School of Busines Concordia University
- Lazaridis School of Business & Economics Wilfrid Laurier
- Odette School of Business University of Windsor
- Ted Rogers School of Management Ryerson University
- Telfer School of Management University of Ottawa
The team from HEC Montreal took home first place (pictured). Wilfred Laurier’s Lazaridis School of Business & Economics came in second and McMaster’s DeGroote School of Business third.
“Given our global mandate, having a diverse and representative workforce is a strategic business advantage that is critical to EDC's success – now and in the future,” says Justine Hendricks, Vice President Loans Value Stream Transformation, EDC. “Sponsoring this competition provides an opportunity to demonstrate to future business leaders that diversity is critical for a trading nation like Canada, and therefore critical for its companies.”
Kate Morican, Partner, Ontario Lead for Human Capital Services and National Lead for Strategic Transformation and Change Services at Deloitte, adds: “At Deloitte, our vision is to lead by building a culture through commitment and mutual accountability. A culture where all our people feel like they belong, feel free to live and work openly and understand that inclusion is core to who we are. Our Diversity and Inclusion journey is key to achieving this vision, and developing inclusive leaders is a key component of our journey. We commend our partners, Export Development Canada and the University of Ottawa for recognizing the importance of Diversity and Inclusion and taking the steps required to create a more inclusive and diverse community within their own organizations, while taking the time to educate others on diversity and inclusion and the tangible benefits which can be realized when one adopts a diverse and inclusive culture."
Abdelghani Zniber, member of the winning team from HEC Montréal, says: “This competition deals with a subject that has been getting traction recently. A competition on diversity and inclusion is a great initiative to further raise awareness about a topic that is unfortunately not taught in schools, but that MBA students will surely have to manage during their career.” Amandine Michaud adds: “The Diversity & Inclusion case competition hosted by the Telfer School of Management is one of its kind. It focuses on a strategic aspect of management that is oft forgotten and it prepares tomorrow’s leaders to help companies to survive and thrive in an increasingly competitive environment.”
In addition to the team competition, the event included a workshop on Unconscious Bias and a keynote by Bank of Montreal Senior Vice-President Justine Fedak on the practical issues along with her personal reflections related to Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace.
We thank all the schools for sending along excellent representatives for this competition.
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The Telfer School of Management sent two students to the Instituto Panamericano de Alta Dirección de Empresa (IPADE) case competitions held in Mexico City on February 5-6, 2016. Sponsored by Deloitte and Novartis, this competition is unlike any other. Students from a number of universities around the world are invited and placed onto teams. MBA students Mark Stuckless and Tavis Weigand were the Telfer representatives.
According to Mark Stuckless (second from the right), a member of this year’s winning team: “It was a wonderful experience in Mexico City. The campus was beautiful, the students were friendly and the sun was shining! Working with such a diverse group proved challenging, but interesting. Learning about different school's approaches to solving problems really opened my eyes and widened my perspective. Winning topped off an incredible couple of days and I am grateful for this opportunity to have come my way.”
It’s the second year in a row that our MBA students have done well in this international competition. Last year, MBA students Germain Aoun and Scott Bridgeman also took first place honours.
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This year’s MBA Games were held from January 2 to 4, 2016 in Toronto. Fifteen of Telfer’s finest MBA and MHA students travelled to York University to participate in academic case competitions focused around finance, entrepreneurship, marketing, and strategy. They also participated in sports, cultural and spirit activities, displaying excellence in teamwork, leadership, and engagement in every division.
"Being part of the MBA Games was a unique experience that none of us will ever forget,” comments the Marketing Team. “It was an honour representing Telfer and going head to head against some remarkably talented people. Bringing the trophy back home with us was the icing on the cake!"
Other achievements at this year’s Games:
- The Spirit Team (Mariam Iqbal, Abeer Sami, Michelle Navarro) won one of the spirit events, in which they had to build a maze out of cardboard boxes with the theme of Outer Space for kids from the Ronald McDonald House Charity.
- The Dodgeball Team (Ella Cooper, Lianne Davies, Uyen Ta, John Lachapelle, Ihor Brydun) made it to the quarter finals.
“The MBA games is an annual competition of some 500 MBA students from across the country,” says Greg Richards, Director of the MBA program at the Telfer School. “I'm incredibly proud of the MBAs and MHAs who participated this year. We were a small team but made up in spirit what we lacked in size. Congratulations to all students who participated and to the marketing team for a great performance.”
Meet some of the members of this year’s delegation:
Mariam Iqbal was Telfer’s team captain for the MBA Games, which is her main task as one of the MBA Coordinators on the MBA Student Association (MBASA). She says she decided to participate in the sport section of the MBA Games because to her, it represented a great opportunity to meet and network with students from other universities. “It also allows us to display the skills we have learned, representing Telfer,” she says. Mariam says she chose to study at the Telfer School of Management because: “the faculty comprises of experts and well versed professors and mentors, allowing for maximum growth of [her] network and learning beyond classrooms.”
Julio Cam is also one of the MBA Coordinators on the MBASA. He wanted to take part of the MBA Games because he likes to take advantage of every opportunity he gets during his MBA experience to meet new people, to learn new skills and to have fun. Julio says his most memorable experience at Telfer so far has been taking a Marketing class with Professor Michael Mulvey as he says that his classes were not only interesting, but that he always tried to bridge the gap between theory and practice by giving students real life examples.
Uyen Phuong Ta joined the MBA Games to represent her team and school but most importantly, she says that she wanted “to make new connections, think critically and start the new year with a BANG!” Uyen’s five year goal is to work in the healthcare industry as an administrator and making a difference to Canadians by improving the system delivery.
This year is Michelle Navarro’s second year competing in the MBA Games. She says she signed up again, in the Strategy Case Competition, because she had so much fun competing last year. Michelle says that what matters to her is being able to conduct business in an ethical way, and in a way that benefits all stakeholders and employees: “Telfer has managed to show me that you can have a successful business or segment of the public service and maintain moral and ethical integrity at the same time!”
Hala Migahed took part of the MBA Games because she wanted to learn from and share ideas with other students across Canada with similar aspirations. She chose to do her MBA at Telfer because it is offered in French, because teachers have the practical and theoretical knowledge, and the schedule allows her to maintain her full time job. What matters most to Hala is learning from experience to improve herself on a personal and professional level. She says: “The school has helped me learn not just from a book but from real people with real stories and priceless experience.”
Congratulations to whole team for their determination and valiant efforts throughout the MBA Games!
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The Telfer uOttawa team took first place in the Social Media contest at the Degroote Case Competition, which was held November 13 and 14 at McMaster University in Burlington.
The DeGroote Case Competition, which was inaugurated in 2015, is an event focused around business transformation and digital innovation. MBA students from top Canadian business schools are challenged to adapt, collaborate and innovate in different ways, including a video contest, a unique competition and a formal business case.
Team member John Lachapelle notes that, "Our experience at the Degroote Case Competition was fantastic. The theme of Transformation in Business truly applies to the ever-changing landscape of business today. Innovation is rendering proven business models obsolete, while entire industries are being forced to transform due to disruptive technologies such as Uber and Air BnB. The Telfer MBA promotes understanding of this new paradigm in business and our team feels proud to have represented Telfer in Burlington."
The Telfer team had been practicing under the supervision of case competition professor Hantz Prosper.
Students (left to right)
Ihor Brydun (MBA Intensive program)
Sara Lag (MBA-JD Intensive program)
Hala Migahed (MBA professional program, French cohort)
John Lachapelle (MBA Intensive program)
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The CPA Ontario Intopia Strategy Simulation is an exciting and integrative learning opportunity for BCom students, as part of their 4th year Strategic Management class, and for MBA students.
From November 11 – 15, 2015, 39 BCom teams and 9 MBA teams participated in this simulation at the Telfer School of Management’s Desmarais Building.
Congratulations to the members of the winning BCom team
- Brandon Brown
- Euan Smith
- Kelsie Throop
- Andrea Howland
- Filipus Tjong
Congratulations to the members of the winning MBA team
- Alexandre Beaudoin
- Wendy Hopkins
The CPA Ontario Intopia Strategy Simulation has been a component of the BCom’s 4th year strategy course for close to 20 years. It aims to teach students the concepts of strategic management in a simulated online world known as Intopia. The simulation allows students to practice their skills in a concentrated amount of time where they can get immediate feedback on their decisions.
This capstone activity has recently been renamed to recognize CPA Ontario’s comprehensive contribution of $370,000 to the Telfer School to support students, teaching and research.
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For more information on the subject, we invite you to attend our next Telfer MBA Conference on November 21, 2015.
Register at telfer.uOttawa.ca
Gregory Richards, MBA, PhD, FCMC
Director, Telfer School of Management MBA Program & the Centre for Business Analytics and Performance.
A recent study by McKinsey Global Institute suggests that governments around the world can unlock $3 trillion in economic value by leveraging data more effectively. But most government organizations will tell you that they struggle with sharing data, with working through privacy issues, and with finding the time and skills to actually use data effectively. In this short article, I will address some of the successes and challenges facing public sector organizations. I’ll conclude with a brief overview of a case study demonstrating how to solve one of the core problems: integrating analytics into the “way we do business” in a public sector organization.
In terms of successes, some organizations have established analytic offices to crunch through data. In Canada, many organizations such as the Canada Revenue Agency and Service Canada for example, have fairly strong analytic practices in place. In the US, a variety of organizations have developed analytic approaches that improve program effectiveness and efficiency. The IBM Centre for the Business of Government in Washington has chronicled many of these efforts. These organizations have managed to solve data sharing issues and have been able to partner with universities and other analytic institutions to leverage data in new and interesting ways.
Despite these pockets of success, one of the key challenges is to mainstream analytics as a core process within organizations. Cultural resistance is still strong. Part of the issue of course, is that it is difficult to trust data if we are not sure of the source, and if we don’t understand how the data have been transformed. Furthermore, books such as How to Lie with Statistics have demonstrated that it is possible to confuse analysis with interpretation and tell almost any story with a particular data set.
So how might an organization overcome cultural resistance to integrate analytics as a core operational process? One provincial organization accomplished this task long before the term Big Data become popular. Here’s the important point: they did not set out to launch a Big Data program; they set out to improve program effectiveness and efficiency and found that evidence-based decision making helped. There were three keys to success. First, the organization had a clear mandate from the deputy head who insisted on measurable strategic goals. Second, the organization had reams of data with which to make informed decisions, but they made a significant investment in getting the data right. Third, the focus was on learning not on finger pointing.
The organization in question (who asked not to be named), was able to weed through the mission statements and other required planning documentation to focus on 3 high-level measureable goals. Clearly, a number of subordinate targets contributed to these goals, so the first step was development of a clear network of measures for each responsibility centre across the organization.
The next step was a bit of stumbling around realizing that the data they had were either not up-to-date and often contradictory. An investment of millions of dollars over a 12-month time frame helped to clean the data and install practices and procedures for managing data quality and data validation. Along the way, decision makers were provided education on the data stores, the use of data, and some of the analytic techniques. The organization was not naive enough to think that they could or should transform managers into analysts. But they knew enough to provide basic information so that their managers became data savvy. The managers understood enough to know how to critically examine reports and when to call in experts.
Finally, and this is a most important point because it speaks to the human aspect of the organization, the outputs of all this number crunching was used to stimulate learning and change. When a problem or opportunity was noted, managers would commission studies, conduct benchmarking exercises, and disseminate learning widely throughout the organization so that any action to be taken was fully understood by those who had to take it. It is easy to create toxic environments if we use analytics programs to point fingers at things that are going wrong. People will feel that they are always under scrutiny. They can become fearful of making mistakes and therefore, the analytics program could have the opposite effect of what was intended. When the program is focused on learning, however, the spirit of the organization emerges as a group intent on making things better and not being afraid to own up to mistakes and to learn from them. This does not mean that accountability is compromised, but it does mean that the hard number crunching side of these programs is wrapped within a more humanistic context.
In this brief article, I’ve highlighted some of the challenges, but I’ve also pointed out some of the successes being noted in the use of analytics in government organizations. Many departments and agencies have pockets of analytics, but it’s now time to think about embedding evidence-based decision making across the organization. The keys to success include a strong mandate from the top, ensuring high data quality, and wrapping analytics within an appropriate culture that balances accountability with learning and growth.
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The Telfer MBA has been ranked in second place in the 2016 Canadian Business Value Ranking, which ranks the ten best MBAs in the country on the value they offer and the return on investment they provide. Programs included in the ranking combine a few key traits: a recognizable brand name on your degree; a diverse mix of bright people in the classroom; affordable tuition; and a shorter duration so that you're not out of the workforce for long.
“This ranking attests to the hard work of a lot of people at Telfer who are focused on delivering exceptional value to our MBA students. We’ll continue this tradition as we add even more features to our program over the next few years,” says Greg Richards, Director of the Telfer MBA.
The Canadian Business Value Ranking’s methodology is based on a point system that awards points to schools based on a weighted ranking, including: 33.5% reputation, 20.5% classroom experience, 13% average GMAT scores, 13% tuition, 13% required work experience and 7% program length. The ranking only includes full-time MBA programs.
For full ranking, head over to the Canadian Business website
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Harley Finkelstein, JD-MBA 2009, will join the cast of the CBC’s Next Gen Den, as one of their new Dragons. Next Gen Den is an online show spun off from CBC’s Dragon’s Den, which looks to invest in young, up-and-coming entrepreneurs pitching start-ups and early-stage businesses. The new season that will feature Harley Finklestein premieres online on October 7 alongside the broadcast premiere of season 10 of Dragons’ Den.
Harley is an entrepreneur, lawyer, and the Chief Platform Officer (CPO) at Shopify. He started his first company when he was 17 and has been building startups ever since. Harley completed his law degree as well as his MBA at the University of Ottawa, where he co-founded the JD/MBA Student Society and the Canadian MBA Oath. Harley serves as a mentor and advisor to a number of accelerators of startup organizations, including FounderFuel, ExtremeStartups, InvestOttawa & CIPPIC.
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The following article was written by a member of our student community. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Telfer School of Management. For more information or to flag inappropriate content, please
