Angus Blair

View whole presentation here
Today class was certainly eventful. After having a presentation dropped on us yesterday, I spent the latter parts of last night preparing it and gave it this morning to a no doubt sleepy class. People tend to be a bit shocked the first time they see me present and I get a stream of people asking how they can make totally sweet slides and whether they should get a mac (The answer is yes, you should). Anyway, the majority of people in the MIB department have got pretty used to my presenting style and thus are a bit over it I'm sure. In a discussion following class it would seem I haven't improved my speaking too much this year (one of my goals) but I think I've just got a lot better at doing it with less preparation, thanks Toastmasters. Following everyone's haphazard, made in the morning night before presentations. We got into my favourite case study "Icebreaker: The China Entry Decision", but I guess I only really like it because it was the case from the national competition last year. As usual, there is a lot to learn from Icebreaker but I was amazed to see just how few people knew about the brand. This of course is kind of awkward when your talking about what a great marketing company they are. I thought I'd take some time today to talk about why I write about this paper. I never intended on doing this but as my lecturers stumbled upon the blog I found myself explaining to Darl why it is I do it so I thought I may as well do the same here. Really it comes down to three things (so far); first it is the reflexivity I gain by writing about something that I think we take for granted as mundane, secondly it is a demonstration of the unknowable pervasiveness that has come about from the entire new media revolution, and finally it is about experimenting with transparency. My final point on transparency I think is key, organisations gained a lot when they started to allow employees to write about the company. Suddenly people were criticising the company from the inside, talking about what works, what doesn't, why they love their job, why they hate and so on and so forth. I think to many people, this sounds like a scary thing to let people do and perhaps it's generational, but to me this is exciting. This kind of transparency made organisations more human, more fallible and in the end, more trustworthy. Companies stopped being like giant boxes that shoot out product and started being collections of people that struggle and fail just like the rest of us. Now the classroom isn't a company, but I think introducing some transparency to it can be beneficial. Everything I write might not be shining glory upon all that is postgraduate studies at Auckland University, but it is that honesty that makes what I do say about the class credible. One hope that I do have is that someone who is thinking about doing Postgrad studies will read some of these stories and get a real understanding for what it's all about, more than any prospectus could offer them anyway.