Introduction

I am currently studying management at the Open University Business School. Starting with the Certificate in Management, which I finished in January 2002, and the Diploma in Management, a post graduate level course which I finished in January 2003, I am now continuing with an MBA program.

The special thing about studying at the Open University is that it is layed out to be done next to your work, full-time work that is, which is something I wanted to do when looking for a new way to study. I just didn’t want to do this full time and needed the option to follow through on other fields of interests, which proved very valuable. I soon learned that summing up the books that you have to read is very valuable and it was so in the Certificate. It soon became apparent that it is even more important in the Diploma course as there is a lot more content and with a total of 60 booklets (around 20–40 pages each) that all need to be in your head for the test after 9 months (the last 3 months are a 15000 word project on improving performance). With the summaries I can boil down the number of characters that need to reside in my brain considerably and on top of that the method I used for the summaries, putting them online, provided for the option to search through all of the pages which helps a lot to find things you are looking for.

I will soon try to add all my summaries in here for everyone to search. This will provide a good way for fellow students and other people who are interested in the material to quickly look something up.