Thank you very much. I am absolutely delighted and honored to be here with all of you for this commencement.
I especially want to thank our iMBA office, but most of all I am here to say congratulations to you graduates. I am so proud to be among the very first to wish you well as you leave this campus.
Such excitement really reminds me the moment of my MBA graduation. And I would like to share my story as well as my lessons with you here. It’s a story about my Dad’s bookshelf.
I graduated from an equivalent MBA program in 2009. I was so thrilled at that time and eager to show my professional muscles. I came home, pointed to my Dad’s bookshelf and said “Hi Dad! You shouldn’t load your books like this. That’s wrong. The accessibility score is very low. This is the calculation formula of accessibility as … That’s science, you know? You should re-organize your entire book shelf like this ...” My Dad’s re-action was: “Hey! I’m 60 years old! And I don’t know how to manage my bookshelf?! Young lady, don’t over-estimate your two-years’ study, OK?” … But, shouldn’t further studies improve life quality? Why it destroyed my Father-daughter relationship here?! Honestly, I was quite confused at that time.
After graduation, I entered a PhD program to pursue my academic life, with some confusion, anyway. My school required us to learn all management fields in our first two years, like Organizational Behavior (we call it OB for sake of simplicity), HR, Operation, Strategy, etc. Then, after getting the general understanding of management, we chose one specific field of interest to do PhD dissertation, as our own field. Of course, you know, my field is OB. In the first two years, that’s 2009-2010, I studied OB and operation again. Suddenly, I realized the problem on my Dad’s bookshelf. I was trying to lead an organizational change on an operation issue, but didn’t follow the right OB theories. It would be much better If - first, I talked with my Dad how necessary it was to re-organize the bookshelf. Second, tried to let my Dad believe I was the very best person of re-organizing it and fully support me. If so, the landscape of my Dad’s room would be very different. These steps were well-documented in OB textbook and the accessibility calculation was well- documented in Operation textbook, but at my master stage, I didn’t know how to integrate them.
After the first two years’ general study, I started to go further in OB in 2011 and read many related theories. One of the cutting-edge theories was called “work-family enrichment theory”. What does it mean? Traditionally, we believe work naturally brings us into conflict with family life. Everyone only has 24 hours per day. However, “work-family enrichment theory” suggests that what you learned from work, those skills help you better manage your work, can also help you better manage family life. It truly opened another window to me on this bookshelf case. Even all these MBA textbooks are based on workplace context and business/management-oriented, they can be very helpful to my family life as well. At least, I can professionally organize my Dad’s bookshelf in a smooth way. The theory was well-demonstrated in articles, but at my master stage, I didn’t know how to look at things in this enrichment perspective.
Now, the bookshelf story is more than 7 years’ old but I still keep using it to remind myself on continuous learning –the exciting beauties of integration and enrichment of MBA studies would be impossible to me if I stopped at the graduation moment.
We spent our savings, efforts and youth in this MBA learning –it’s not only a charging station for our career, but also a serious commitment to our meaningful lives. Please keep exploring the learning beauties and I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you all, very much.
项目简介
上海财经大学-美国韦伯斯特大学合作举办工商管理专业(MBA)硕士学位项目，即上财中欧平台国际MBA项目，创办于1996年，是最早获教育部批准的中外合作学位教育项目之一，已连续20年招生。采用美式申请制，项目自主招生，无需参加全国联考，全面考核学员的综合素质，管理经验及英语应用能力，择优录取。 毕业后获美国硕士学位，中国教育部学历学位认证。
【2017第一批次入学考试】2017年3月12日
【招生电话】021-55968289 / 65443025