finishing line

One day, you wake up with an idea; you are going to grab your backpack, your best pair of shoes and you’re going to leave the house for a 2 year walkabout. You are not exactly sure where you are going but you have a map. You do not really know what you need to put in the backpack but hope to figure it out along the way. You had briefly discussed the project with your spouse but nobody really knows what will happen during those tortuturous months ahead. It seems very promising and full of challenges, so why not get an MBA?

MBA definition:

MBA are three letters that your manager hopes to achieve. Master of Business Administration. It does sound nice, doesn’t it? This is the kind of title you want beside your name on a business card. Or at least, some people do. Unfortunately, I have another way of seeing things. According to me, it is just three letters and another piece of paper to put on my wall. It wasn’t easy; don’t get me wrong, I earned those three letters through hard work and many a sacrifice. But in the end, has it really made me a better manager (to be?) or a superb employee? I am not quite sure about that.

So why did you do an MBA?

I have always believed in plan B. When things go wrong, you need to move to plan B easily and keep on truckin’. You can’t afford to simply wait, depressed and balling your eyes out if you lose your job. It is my responsibility as a husband and father to help ensure my family has all the necessities. This is why I have felt the need for a plan B.

I had decided to do an MBA before I became a financial planner (doing my CFP exams was actually my plan B back then ). At that time, I was the senior on my team in our department at the bank and was promised a great career there. The management team saw, in me, their next manager. Since I didn’t want to miss my chance, I decided to register in the MBA program. It was to further my interest in joining the management ranks (I really felt this way back then) and the bank was willing to pay my tuition in the meantime. This was a win-win situation.

In the middle of the MBA, I decided to change career paths and become a financial planner. Nonetheless, I had decided to finish the MBA since I rarely quit projects once having started them! In addition to that, the famous 3 letters were to give me additional credibility in front of clients. They were more inclined to listen to my advice knowing I was getting an MBA in financial services (I guess this is due to my relatively young age. As who was I to tell them what to do with their money ).

This week, our team finally submitted our the latest version of the final paper. This is actually the 3^rd time and I expect to not invest another single minute on this paper. Hopefully, the 3^rd attempt will be the one! So, now that I have completed the program, here is my own definition of the MBA program:

Achieving an MBA is rewarding as people usually give it great credibility.

It is also working on your stuff on a Friday night or Saturday morning while your kids are playing with your spouse. It is entire spending weekends in class or taking vacation days to study.

Having an MBA assures you of a certain employability if anything goes wrong at your current job.

It is also rushing like a fool in a gold mine to succeed at work while trying to get good marks at the same time.

Getting an MBA helps develop a huge network with the “right” people.

It is also being disappointed in humanity when some of your class mates cannot ever arrive to class on time or make presentations without obvious typographical errors. Not everyone in the class deserves the recognition that comes with the MBA but all of them will get it anyways.

Completing an MBA ensures you learn from your classmates and gives you the opportunity to build true friendships.

It is also a pain to manage people, supposedly on your team, that you don’t get along with and try to survive deadlines with these people when they don’t really care about the effort required.

Finally, finishing an MBA takes only a few seconds as time zooms by at the speed of light.

But every single moment seems to last an eternity at the same time!

In the end, I would say that the most important thing is to make sure your spouse and children understand. Getting an MBA is a full body experience and can take over your life and their lives too! It is a great experience but like any step in life where you learn something, it is not easy.

I have received several individual questions about the MBA program so far. I am always glad to answer your questions Just drop me an email at thefinancialblogger at gmail dot com.

***final edit***

I GOT AN “A” IN MY LAST PAPER AND I AM OFFICIALLY DONE AS OF THIS MORNING…YEAH BABY!!!!!!

image source : Kevan

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This is probably the most exciting part of 2009: my first vacation after completing an MBA! We actually just finished our last paper this week and it was quite painful. We are celebrating my daughter’s birthday tomorrow, packing for our road trip (we leave on Sunday morning) and I spent Monday night on a boat with clients/friends… I had to find the courage to cut into my few hours of sleep to finish this darn paper on top of that…

For those who think of doing an MBA, I have one thing to say: be prepared to pay the price. In all honesty, this wasn’t the most difficult academic program I have followed. It was actually quite easy to achieve good results. It didn’t necessarily require a lot of brain power either, for the most part (I can only imagine these posts being read by a few of my classmates …. Some of them are smiling,,others are cursing ).

Doing a MBA is like running a Marathon

While I have never run a marathon (I’m still not in such good shape ), I think we can make at least one comparison: the need for endurance. Running a marathon doesn’t require you to be the fastest runner or best sprinter. It requires that you be the model of perseverance and work ethic in order to train regularly and achieve a long term goal.

Well doing an MBA is very similar. It doesn’t require you be the smartest cookie of all. There are so many different fields of study (human resources, psychology, productivity, finance, marketing, accounting, etc.), you can’t just be the best in each of them. However, during 2 years, you have a steady flow of work to accomplish, day after day, week after week, month after month. If you stop and take a break, the amount of work will simply pile up until you get going again. This becomes quite discouraging at some point; there is no rest for the wicked.

The hardest part is the last 6 months. As you can see the finish line and are almost done, you realize how much it cost to complete your MBA. You have to sacrifice family time, meet your friends quarterly, you can’t work as hard at work and get the bonus otherwise achieved and you become terribly tired. These are the real costs of doing an MBA full time while working.

Some may say I didn’t help myself since I have started a company and switched careers at the same time. Well, I must admit that you are right! However, I am getting quite close to where I wanted to be at the age of 30 and I still have 2 more years to realize my goals. It’s all a matter of be willing to pay the price or not.

But beware; the price might be higher than you thought! I have seen people losing their family over the MBA or disconnecting completely from their friends. Remember, the one you love and friendships are something too valuable to lose for a piece of paper with 3 letters on it. Just be careful when entering this program

So now that I am packing up and taking my first real vacation in the past 2 years, I can finally rest ;-D I have some great guest posts for next week so you won’t be missing me too much

Enjoy your summer and I’ll be back shortly!

image source: joiseyshowaa

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Picture this: You are young and pretty and you meet your perfect match (she is young and pretty ). You get along pretty well, you both work, make money and after a while, you decide to live together. Life is great, you get married, buy your first house and… oh my god; she gets pregnant! You are living the perfect love, get a second child, and buy a bigger house: your life is perfect! And then, one day, you discover that your life is far from being perfect; you guys realize that you don’t love each other anymore. You both decide to split and keep going with you life. But wait! You were making 75K/year and she was making 25K… Somebody is going to get fooled…..

Myth #1 You have to give 50% of your pay cheque to your ex-wife

A few decades ago, divorce measures were made to punish people because they were breaking their engagement. Therefore, several people stayed together simply because they couldn’t afford to divorce. However, we are far from this situation in the 21^st century. If you don’t live with your spouse anymore, she can ask you alimony but it might be refuted as well.

The alimony to the ex-spouse has been created in order to protect the spouse with the lowest income to keep a certain lifestyle. However, if she is making enough money to live a decent live and pay her bills, you won’t have to pay for alimony! So in the case where you make 75K and she makes 25K, you might have to pay a small one but definitely not 30K per year!

Myth #2 You have to give the other 50% of your pay cheque to your ex-wife as child alimony

Then again, we all heard nightmare stories about that poor guy who lost his wife, his house, his car and finally his job during a deep depression where he had to give every single penny earned to his ex-wife as alimony.

There is actually a chart where you can determine how much you will have to pay in child alimony. The chart first determine the family income (each person take out the first 10K before calculation) and then consider the number of children.

This will give you the amount necessary for the kids to keep their lifestyle. Then, that number is prorated according to the importance of your income in the family income (in our situation 75%). Technically, you would have to pay 75% of the amount in the chart.

However, you have the possibility to prorate this amount according to the number of days that you take care of the children. Therefore, if you take care of them 50% of the time, you will be able to drop this number by 50%. Then, if you pay for daycare, private school, etc. you have the possibility to take off those amounts from the alimony.

Keep in mind that the money send to the spouse as children alimony is disposable as the spouse’s wishes (yeah, that sucks!).

Myth #3 Once the alimony is set, you can’t change it

The alimony can be reviewed in court every year. This is quite a pain but you can request a revision if you financial situation has changed and you can’t afford to pay the alimony anymore. On the other side, if you are making a bigger income, there is nothing stopping your ex-wife to ask you for more money

If you get to this point, I would suggest that you try as much as possible to get along with an agreement between you and your ex-spouse. Getting lawyers and court into your story might not be a good solutions for everyone.

image source: clarism

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I’m shortly starting the month of July, my very first month as a free man! Ok, I am ignoring the fact that I still have to write a final paper but it doesn’t matter; I got my weekend back, I got my life back. So what’s next? Where is my promotion, my bigger office and my new BMW? Huh… not quite there yet apparently!

Will I change job?

Funny enough, spending 2 years with managers and learning how to become one gave me all the reasons in the world to not become one! Ok… I am exaggerating a bit. However, looking at the number of hours worked by manager around me makes me wonder why do accept such responsibilities if it’s to be paid per hour as a burger flipper? Is it for power? Is it because they just love their company? Or maybe they would love to own their own business and this is the closest they found with a (virtual) “guaranteed income”. So will I change job after my MBA to become a manager? Hell no!

However, I have built a hell of a network and I can easily get myself better employment conditions as a financial planner . I have made great friends and I also learned how to “play” their game. If you know how a manager thinks before he hires you, you can get much more (Fred, please ignore this line ;-0 ).

What is my next big project?

NONE! Huh… then again, a little bit of exaggeration from my evil me. I actually have 3 huge projects in mind:

- Taking care of my wife and my family (which is by far the most important thing I will do!)

- Keep losing weight and getting in shape (this is definitely happening already so I should succeed by the end of the summer by weighting 170-180lbs and get rid of all my fat!).

- Bring my business to another level. I really would like to wonder if I keep working or if I can simply live from my online income… I think that by putting more effort into it, I’ll be able to achieve this goal within the next 2 years…. This would be amazing!

If I had to do it again, would I do it anyway?

If I had the power to go back in time in August 2007, I would still come to my first class and do my MBA. This was a painful experience where I almost lost my sanity and my family. However, this brought me where I am, this helped me become who I am today and this will surely be helpful in the future. So I would still do it, knowing what was coming for me!

What is the next step once you have done your MBA?

Take a deep breath and relax!!!! I am actually considering taking more days off and going on vacation… I’ll see if I can manage something with my manager

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I finish this small series about surviving to a MBA with a few more tricks to improve your efficiency and your overall experience while during the programs.

Don’t bother reading everything

You may start your MBA with great intentions and motivation. However, the level of reading required by each teachers is ridiculous. They give you a 800 pages books, note, powerpoints and articles to read for each class. If you do everything, trust me, you will spend the next two years of your life only doing the MBA. I don’t think it’s worth it.

Based on the Paretto Principle (this is my motto!), you should use 20% of your time to create 80% of the results. Therefore, listen to the teach in class (you are stuck on that chair anyway, so you rather listen to what he says) and then, identify the important part to read in the book according to what he says and what he spends the most time. Be careful, this method can be misleading if you are not use to “read between the lines”. But if the teacher spends some time on a concept, that you find it again in your notes and you have a chapter on it in the book, I would bet that it will be at the exam

The key is not to know everything and I think it is one of the goal of the MBA; to make sure you can manage a inhuman amount of information and still get what is important out of it. Do you think that VP’s and Presidents of this world know everything single details of their company, their market and the economy? They don’t, but they have this amazing power of synthesis!

Make a lot of friends

The MBA is also about cooperation. If you make friends among and outside your team, you will not only build a strong network for your career but you will also benefit from the experience of several people while studying, making your researches and writing your papers. Be careful of not benchmarking too much as the best team always sets the rule and don’t really care about what the others say or do. However, when you have a question, it is interesting to validate with more than one source.

Work with leaders in each project

When we started our first session, we decided to try the following model: Each of us took the lead for a class where he has strong points. The team leader of each project would decide and define the project for the session. He would determine what needs to be done and by whom. Finally, he was responsible to put all parts together and make sure it makes sense at the end. While putting all parts together, he was able to add more knowledge and details to the paper since he was working on his strength. This saved us a lot of time because we didn’t argue much about what should be done and we got excellent marks for all our projects.

Don’t meet when it is not necessary

You will always have people that are fans about team meeting. They just love it! They want to meet every week and believe that they will be better / more productive by doing so. We completely did the opposite. We rarely meet off class. We actually meet once or twice per session and we determine why we meet and what needs to be done in team before we attend to the meeting. For some weird reasons, we always managed to put the less number of hours in our project than the other teams but we were always able to get in the top marks. You don’t have to work hard to get good results; you only have to work smart

To see the other post of this series, click on the following links:

- Surviving to the program

- Surviving to your job

- Surviving WITH your family

If you have any other questions about my MBA program, don’t hesitate to send me an email at thefinancialblogger (at) gmail (dot) com. I’ll be happy to share a piece of my experience with you!

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Doing a MBA is certainly a challenge in term of time management as you also have the rest of your life going around you. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t stop turning when you sign off your application to the program! From my own experience, your biggest challenge while doing a MBA is to take care of your wife and kids.

Make sure everybody knows what is coming for you

When you do a MBA with a family, you are not the only one doing a master in the household. Everybody does! Kids will have to understand that you are studying on Saturday morning while they are watching cartoons and want you to play with them.

Your spouse will probably be the person who will be the most affected by it. She will have to take care of the children by her own and occupy most of her weekend (I was in class a weekend every 3 weeks) by her own. This could create a distance between you and your spouse. As you might miss a few diners or other activities, this won’t help to get yourselves together.

I always said that my wife was doing 25% of my MBA by her own. She is not only taking care of the house and the children but she also brings me support and motivation. She is the one who tells me that I should keep working and studying when I don’t feel like it. This was a really big part during my MBA.

Make sure to create nice moments

You will need, once in a while to more present with your family and create special moments with them. Take them to activities; take your wife out for a nice dinner just the two of you. You will feel burnt sometimes, but the routine will kill much more than the energy that you will burn organizing a few things.

The important part is to keep doing stuff outside work and outside your MBA. And if you can travel in order to disconnect completely, this would probably the best thing you could ever do. I consider that you can probably spend more than usual as you will make more with a MBA hahaha! Seriously, I am not convinced about that so don’t take my word for it .

If you start, don’t quit

I won’t lie, doing a MBA is really hard on a couple. You will be tempted to quit at one point or another. But if you do, you will have done all those efforts for nothing. Keep working and go through it. I am thinking of quitting this program for the past 6 months! Nonetheless, I keep doing it because I don’t want to have done all of this for nothing. Today, I am 1 class away (that is starting this weekend L ) to finish my MBA. I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. No more reading, no more researches, no more teamwork…. No more weekends away from the one I love. The good news about the MBA is that it has an end

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Last Friday, I wrote about surviving your MBA and gave a few tricks to get through the program without having to pulling out your hair, and 5 years or life expectancy. I have found the trick for the hair though; I didn’t have any when I started so I didn’t have to care about them! More seriously if you:

#1 Work efficiently

#2 Choose your team mates

#3 Ask what teachers expect

#4 Choose your battle

You will do the MBA program just well. However, while surviving your MBA is important, you have other part of your life that needs to follow the train as well. One of them that is really important is your day job. What is the point of doing a MBA if you can’t make it at your day job? So here’s a few trick how I survived it.

Get support from your employer

From my own experience, this is probably the most important part of your MBA in regards to your day job. People that didn’t have full support from their direct manager either quit or had a really hard time going through this experience.

Your manager should understand the level of work it will require and try to not put too much pressure on your back at work. If you actually finish your MBA and keep working at the same place, it is in his best interest that you evolve within the same company. It is not a matter of having a free ride but letting the employee takes his vacation or studying day whenever he wants will certainly give him a break and help him out.

Another way to get support from your employer is to get access to more “confidential information” and access to superior management level when you have paper to write. This was a great help I received from all my managers as they were are willing to help and provide me with information that is more specific to our department. Unfortunately, several employers or managers are reluctant to provide such information. This will obviously make your MBA harder.

Take vacation on a periodic basis

I must admit I didn’t travel too much for the past two weeks. However, I have taken a week of vacation during each session to make sure I don’t blow a gasket. It is a matter a calculating your vacation days and combining them with holidays to make sure you have enough vacation. Last summer, we also rented a vacation property for a week where I didn’t do any work. This is really important to disconnect from your MBA and work once in a while. Several employers will grant additional vacation days when you are studying. I was granted a day per course so it gave me the opportunity to take several breaks. I didn’t always study, in fact, sometimes playing golf is much better for mental health than getting your nose stuck in a book!

Choose the right timing

If you are currently fighting for a promotion, wait until you get it before applying for your MBA! I actually changed job and had to learn about a whole new world while doing my MBA and it was the best decision I made career wise, but I paid the price with my health and my life quality with my family big time! In my class, we had people who were 25 and were 40… there is no age to do a MBA, but there is certainly good and bad timing in your career path! Burning yourself down is not a good way to climb the ladder!

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I’m now down to my final class of my MBA program. After June, I won’t have classes anymore, just a filthy 100 pages to write with my colleagues for our final project . This series is for those of you thinking about doing the same crazy project as I did I decided to write a survival guide to a MBA in 3 parts: Surviving the MBA itself, Surviving your Job and finally (the most important part), surviving with your family.

Surviving your MBA

The very first thing to remember while doing your MBA is that 20% of your work will give you 80% of your mark. Whatever you do, make sure that you are being effective while doing it. If you want to read everything, get further information, work extra hours over night; you will probably learn more than me, but you will probably lose yourself along the way as well. A MBA could be fun but it could also become the only thing you do for 2 years. Make sure you don’t fall in the second category

Choose your colleague and don’t hesitate to change

During our first session, we made everything clear among our team. Everybody expressed their feeling about the MBA and how they intend to go through it. This obviously didn’t solve all our problems but you can detect BS quite easily when you get to the end of the session. As a team, we knew what we wanted to accomplish and we told some people in our team that we would not continue to work this way. They would not be happy with us and we would not be happy with them. It’s not a matter of being mean or kicking people out. In the end, everybody finds its best interest.

There is no point of carrying people on your back in the hope of seeing them change their implication. People don’t change. So you might want to change them for other persons . Carrying people will burn a lot of your time and energy and, most importantly, will feed frustration all along your MBA. Why would you become frustrated for 2 years of your life? Life is too short to be this way

Identify what the teacher is looking for

The quality of your work is a perception of others. Most importantly, it is the teacher’s perception. Make sure you validate with him about what he expects and what he wants to read. I remember having a teacher requesting a “2 pages per topic” paper and when he received our work, he said he was expecting at the very least 10 pages (there were 2 topics in the paper we wrote). The problem with teachers is that it doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong, they are the teacher and they have “absolute power” in their class. Instead of fighting with them, find out what they want and it will be much easier this way.

Choose your battle

As I said with teachers, instead of fighting, go around it . This is valid with your MBA colleagues too. I have a tendency of fighting at any occasion. I can now say that I have burnt a lot of my resources trying to win stupid battles. Sometimes when you win, you are the biggest looser!

Next week, I’ll keep writing about how to survive your job and with your family while doing the MBA. I’ll be back with financial ramblings tomorrow morning, I promise ;-D

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Since there are 35 people in my class, I will obviously not talk about everyone (on the other side, this would give me a hell of a series to write!). So today will be my final post about my MBA Colleagues along with a few “famous quotes”.

Mommy

Mommy is actually the incarnation of nice. She is always thinking about the others, having great comments for everybody, she is Misses kindness. I have learned from her that being nice with people and really care about them requires a lot of time and effort but comes with great rewards as well. You easily gain the respect from others and they are also willing to help at any time. She is a wonderful person and I wish she will gain more confident through her MBA as she tends to underestimate herself. I guess this is typical from humble person… Maybe one day I will learn to be humble LOL!

I’m more important than you

When you get a bunch of managers and professionals together, you can be assured of one thing: there are a few pains that will come in the group. I have met a few people who think that their schedule is impossible, who think that they have so much to do that they arrange the schedule of everybody. They always have a good reason for being late, for giving work last minute or for forgetting their appointment. It is up to the others to readjust as they really can’t help it as “it’s not their fault”. In fact, it never is . These people usually come as strong character and will try to establish their credibility through power and affirmation. In general… they don’t last long around me . More seriously, these people will go through a lot of stuff but most people won’t really like them. So to all the “I’m more important than you”, I suggest you go back read about Mommy and try to act like her .

No Worries

I guess this is the kind of people that piss me off the most: they don’t know what their doing, they don’t know what they are talking about, but they do it with such confidence and BS and they have the guts to tell you “don’t worry, I’m on it”. When you don’t know what you are talking about, please don’t pretend that you know! Once, we were at 24 hours to give our final paper that worth 50% of our marks. The girl sends the “final version” by email (in the middle of the afternoon) with the following comment: “here’s the final version, I’m going to print it in 30 minutes”. I was the only one who took a week of vacation before the exams so I was the first one to open the file. The girl copied twice my part inside the paper and accidentally erased 10 pages of the document (10 pages who were actually crucial to our paper). That was her meaning of a “final version”. When I emailed her back in a great hurry (remember, she was going to print everything within 30 minutes) telling her about her mistakes, she replied:

“Relax Mike, there are no worries”.

As we didn’t want any worries, we kicked her out after this “incident”. What I really hate about those people is that they always have something to say. There are always right, even when they are deadly wrong.

So to end this series, here are some famous quotes from our MBA:

- The good is the enemy of improvement.

- I’m on it – no worries (yeah, right! Now I start to worry!).

- I couldn’t make it to the class this Sunday morning because of the snowstorm. I was stuck at my vacation property down the snow hill (this was from a teacher that couldn’t make it back to Montreal because she went skiing all day and didn’t feel like coming back to the city during the evening even though the snowstorm alert forecast was on for a few days already).

- The quintescence of the patente (this is not French, nor English, this is Frenglish!).

- You know what impresses me? A dog that can li… himself! (that is coming from Conspiracy Theory man).

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Miss “Y”

Just by the name of that person, I know that some people (Genius) will have a good laugh! The fun part about this series is there are actually some people in my MBA reading my blog Since it became a great part of my life, I decided to talk about it in a few conversations. People actually like it and I really don’t mind if people know that I am The Financial Blogger or not.

I didn’t think it would be possible, but I encountered my feminine alter ego in this class; young, fearful and ready to get what she wants. I rarely meet people that are direct and will speak their mind up without thinking if it could hurt people feelings or not. While I try to become more diplomatic over time, it is good to see that I am not alone in this situation

Pareto principle

Miss “Y” is a perfectionist. She will always deliver very high quality work. She is smart and she is not afraid to work like a crazy animal. However, she was the perfect example of where I should draw the line of not. While she is having all the A+, she is working so hard and putting so many hours into it that I really wonder if it’s worth it. I prefer to use the Pareto Principle where 20% of my effort will give me 80% of my result. Therefore, I can use very few energy and get what I really want out of it. I used Miss “Y” to benchmark the work/reward trade off we both have. I realized that I was happy with A’s and didn’t need A+ to feel good. Anyway, MBA grades don’t really matter It is just nice when you give your marks to your VP so he can sign off and pay for your classes!

Synonym of excellence

We “recruited” Miss “Y” 2 sessions ago. I’m glad we did it because she brings expectation up in our team. We were already working hard and trying to deliver high quality material. However, with her on the team, I feel like I have to deliver something even better. Therefore, we learn more while doing our researches and writing our papers. We push a little bit more to understand key theories and apply them in our day-to-day work. Since I would not feel comfortable to send her “okay” work, I now push a little bit more. Don’t get me wrong, she would not say anything, but since I respect her implication, I feel like I should deliver something good as well.

She is not rough with people, she just want them to work

We get along pretty well because we have a strong point in common: we do not accept lazy people. Those people will always have a good excuse to not meet the deadlines to be late at class or at a meeting. They don’t work, but they believe that they do and that pisses me off. It is nice to see someone else being ticked off by the same kind of person. The point is not to be an ass when we talk to those “lazy people”. We don’t mean to be mean, we just want them to respect other teammates and respect their engagement

So here are the 3 things I learned from this person:

- Use the Pareto principle and quit working hard for the extra 5%… this will require too much effort for nothing.

- When you need to deliver something, do it right the very first time. What you deliver is the picture of yourself!

- When people are lazy, this may be not the best way around, but you are aloud to tell them and smack their head (it’s only an image ).

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