Getting Started

Introductions

My name is Dr. Oliver Gottschall. I am a lecturer at the Faculty of Commerce & Accountancy at Chulalongkorn University. In my full-time job I am Chief Strategy Officer at one of the major Retailers and Shopping Mall Developers here in Thailand.

The subjects I teach are Business Strategy and International Business, mostly to undergraduate students in their third and forth year. I also teach Human Resource Management in the Master of Arts in Business Economics (MABE) Program at the Faculty of Economics, as well as Organizational Behaviour and Business Ethics in one of the Executive MBA programs at Ho Chi Minh University of Technology (Bach Khoa) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Those who are familiar with Thailand and Thai culture will know that “Ajarn” is the Thai title for "lecturer" or "professor", and students have been calling me “Ajarn Olli” ever since I started teaching – hence the name of the blog.

This is my very first blog post (ever), and I would like to start by outlining my story and my motivation for starting this blog. So here it goes…

Teaching = Learning

A bit more than eleven years ago, I started teaching my very first class at Chulalongkorn University. What was supposed to be a one-year stint during my sabbatical year to write up my PhD thesis turned into a hobby and then into a true passion. I LOVE teaching, because I love learning with and from my students.

When I started off eleven years ago, my teaching methods were very basic, I would even say boring. I mostly rattled down PowerPoint slides, which I had pulled together in consulting style (small print, complicated graphs) – admittedly not very “user-friendly” for my audience of second and third year undergraduate students. Looking back, I feel sorry for the groups of students, who had to suffer through my not-very-engaging lectures during my first two years of teaching.

One thing, however, that I have always done is listening to students’ feedback. (I have a method of collecting students’ feedback, but more about this in a later blog). Over time, and with the great help of hundreds of individual pieces of feedback, I have been constantly adjusting to the demands and needs of my audience. For example, Facebook Groups (and lately Line Groups) replaced the old intranet-hosted “Blackboard”; I occasionally record short “video lectures” when I feel the point might not have come across in class or if I suddenly can think of a better way to explain something; absent students can dial in via video calls.

In short, more than anything, teaching has become a learning journey for me.

Why this blog?

There are three reasons for me to start this blog:

Firstly, I received feedback from my students that they would prefer the option of additional readings about the stories, the case studies and the materials I share in class. I had thought about writing a text book to accompany my classes. However, (1) text books are very “static” and the case studies, etc. expire relatively quickly as the world moves on; and (2) I do not think that people actually enjoy reading text books – well, I never did, and during the few attempts I made to actually sit down and write, I quickly became bored with my own writing and gave up. I think a blog is a much more agile and flexible way to write and also more suitable for Gen Y and Gen Z students.

Secondly, I hope that this blog will open up the things I like to teach, the topics I am passionate about and my personal learnings to a wider audience – to former and future students, and to basically anyone who is interested to listen in. I do not think that I can measure up to geniuses like Michael Porter or teaching legends like Aswath Damodaran, but there are a few things I picked up during my time as a consultant and business executive that I wished I had known before, so I take this as an opportunity to share these with the world.

Finally, I love learning as much as I love teaching, and I hope that at least some of my posts will trigger debates and bring out some new aspects that I might not have thought about. I love getting feedback, so I am very much looking forward to any comments to the blog posts. It is another reason why I think a blog that facilitates two-way communication is a better fit for me than writing a book (which by nature is a one-way means of communication).

About this blog

My personal and academic interests are very wide, spanning economics, business, strategy, investment, music, sports, literature, and many other things. However, this blog will mostly focus on two topics of my professional life that I am very passionate about: Strategy and Transformation. Transforming businesses has been my full-time job over the past 15 years or so, and (as I do in class) I intend to share some of the lessons I learned in this blog.  

A new experience for me, so let’s see how it goes!