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UND

Summer Class is a Go!

It appears that I am all set to take my final MBA class after my incident last Friday. I spoke to the instructor, Dr. Duane Helleloid, this morning and received the syllabus via email. The title of the class is Management of Technology, and it sounds like it will be very interesting (in a business geek sort of way). There are two books we’ll be using in addition to case material, neither of which are text books (yay!). The first is Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation by James M. Utterback, first published back in 1994. The other is a new book that was actually on my Amazon wishlist: Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, and Scott D. Anthony.

Because I’m on a short timeline, I ended up getting the first book at UND’s campus bookstore. Amazon must not have the book in stock, as they’re shipping it in 7 to 9 days – a bit too long for this situation. Clayton Christensen’s book was in stock and ready to ship however, so I took the occasion to signup for Amazon’s new Amazon Prime express shipping option. For $79, my wife and I get one year of free 2-day shipping and $3.99 next-day shipping on pretty much anything that is eligible for Amazon’s super saver shipping option. In a few months I’ll give you an update to let you know whether or not we think Prime is worth it. I’ve already heard of it changing the way some people shop online. We’ll see if it does the same for us!

Anyway, I’m looking forward to tonight’s class, although not to it being four hours. It will be the first IVN (video conferenced) class of my college career which will be interesting after working with the video technology for a number of years and even teaching some classes over it. It’ll also be nice to have some high quality discussion and debate – something that was a bit lacking in the accounting courses I took this year (no fault of the professors – the students were pretty shy). I’ll let you know how it goes.