Make the Most of Your Internship (or first post-MBA job)

Credit goes to a friend at Kellogg who passed this one along to me...there are some interesting thoughts on the technology sector (Hot Trends) from Kellogg's Technology Marketing guru below. There are also some "Must Reads" with links. The internship comments probably won't be as relevant to most of you.

-Chairman P

How to make the most of your internship (or first post-MBA job)

Interview with Professor Sawhney

By Emma Blaylock & Bergen Moe-Fishman

The summer is approaching fast, so we spent 30 minutes speaking to Professor Sawhney, Kellogg’s Technology Marketing guru, to get his tips on making the most of a Marketing or High-Tech internship.

“How can we get the most out of our internship?”

One thing you need to realize is that if you sit under the tree the apple is not going to fall on your head. You have to be proactive. The best type of internship is where the project is ill-defined and ambiguous – where you have the opportunity to scope and structure it to say “this is what I am interested in and what I can deliver”. Think about it – I am a manager and I’ve written a requisition for an intern and I just want a good person to work for me. They turn up and treat it as gospel and I’ve spent 5 minutes writing it. So don’t be shy in going to your manager even if they present you with a project and say “do you mind if I re-scope this or re-frame this in a way that I think would add more value to the firm and be a better learning experience for me?”

But you can’t do that unless you know the company and the context. So take your time and do your homework. Spend a few days getting the lay of the land and sucking up as much information as you can and then make a counter proposal. If possible, don’t join a running stream where you join in the middle and leave before it finishes and have no sense of closure. It is much better to do a piece of work that you can drive to completion. Which might mean you end up taking on something less ambitious but that you can work on and finish and your contribution can be uniquely identified. Get some sense of ownership over a deliverable or product.

And one final thing is to network, network, network, network. Resolve that you will have lunch with a different person each week or you are going to reach out to people. That’s how you learn and build relationships in particular if you want to work there full-time.

“What should our objective be in an internship?”

For internships where you want to explore an industry and use the internship as a stepping stone for something else, really understand how product management or marketing works inside of a well-known, reputable company—especially if you want to work for a smallish company [after your internship]. For internships where you want to stay with that company, the best thing you can do for yourself is to navigate the landscape and find the appropriate position and manager to work with inside that company. One thing people need to realize as they think about any large company setting is that you don’t work for a company, you work for a manager. Within the same company you can have a disastrous situation or a wonderful situation depending on who you work for and how good they are as mentors. In that setting, make as many connections as possible. Try to get out there and get in front of as many people as possible. Look for projects that give you high visibility that get you exposed to senior managers. Get as much of a birds eye view of the organization and places you could see yourself working in.

What are some of the mistakes that people make on the internships and how can we avoid them?

People sometimes find themselves spinning their wheels quite a bit or they get lost inside of a big company. Don’t just put your hands up – see what else you can do with your time.

And not networking enough – understanding that this is about building relationships just as much as building knowledge. One person once told me a great formula - your value is what you know raised to the power of who you know. So it is not just your knowledge but your knowledge leveraged through your relationships.

What hot trends we should read up on?

Mobility – video becoming mobile, devices becoming mobile, content becoming mobile so we have to translate everything we know about media, advertising, brands, user interface design, search (Google says this is their biggest opportunity) and the way search on devices can now be really local to the mobile environment.

The connected and converged home – (IP TV, content streamed over the internet, Voice Over IP). Convergence and mobility come together – moving music around the house through WiFi. The other thing I’m seeing companies really get better at (e.g. Intel, Microsoft) is beating commoditization through better segmentation. Designing products around end-users and specific scenarios rather than just talking about specific products and price. I talk about it as the emergence of experiences – creating experiences rather than products you just want to push.

Software as a Service – this is the biggest trend in the enterprise world the biggest trend and the new model for Web 2.0 (which has a consumer side and an enterprise side). How Google is going to get into the enterprise is going to be very interesting to watch and how Salesforce.com is changing the model for deploying software and Microsoft’s whole “Live initiative”. The internet becomes the platform. I believe that enterprise applications are dead in the long run – it will all be services. Another thing with enterprise technology is communication and the whole collaboration space which is undergoing a revolution. There is big investment in this area. How we work today with IM will evolve to the next generation working in global, virtual, distributed teams.

Platform Consolidation – There will be just five platform players in this world – Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and LAMP (a Linux stack) and everything is going to converge into these platforms. And related to that is network centric innovation – using the power of the network (community) to connect people to product development, innovation and so on.

Modularization – The value chain is fragmenting. So the back-end is getting separated from the front-end, the devices from the infrastructure and everything breaks down into different layers. You have to really think about where you want to play in the value chain.

Remote everything – remote monitoring (RFID, remote sensors), deployment, services. How you can really play with time and space – both are becoming more valuable (Tivo, off-shoring, follow the clock).

Professor Sawhney’s Must-reads

• CNN (what’s current)
• Wall Street Journal
• Business Week
• Fortune Magazine (David Kirkpatrick, in particular)
• Business 2.0 (combination of marketing and technology trends)
• Gizmodo.com (gadgets)
• Amazon.com (to see what’s new in electronics and read product reviews)
• Customer World blog (the world of new media and consumer empowerment)
• Brandchannel.com (for brand management)
• Technorati (which scans other blogs)
• Emergic blog (IT in emerging countries)
• Trendwatch.com (trends)
• Springwise.com (database of 8000 people who spot the hottest trends)- their report this month is “Customer-made” talking about customers are getting involved in the whole marketing process