Best. Game. Ever.

Well, maybe not that good, but Wednesday's fantastic victory for Newcastle United over the forces of Feyenoord definately ranks up there. From Bellamy's first half opener, to the nerve wracking equalisers to the last ditch winner, all mixed up with the equally vital news from Kiev it had everything. I mean, after that lot who would want to support one of those boring teams who win things comfortably? Certainly not me, and as the goals rained in and my nerves jangled I did the patriotic thing and got stuck into a bottle of brown ale. Or two.

So there was no posting on Thursday on account of my hangover, and then there was a pub crawl on Thursday, and then after that there was last weeks cancelled lecture instead of the usual chance to get stuff done on Friday and well, its all been a bit busy. Still, I've finally managed a solid nights sleep and so far this weekend's been pretty productive. This is good, because tomorrow we play football against LBS and I'm not going to be good for anything after the match.

New bright idea required

A while ago I made a post about meta core competences and decided that if I could develop this idea I'd have a career as a management guru. My strategic management lectuerer who is a genuine strategic guru has just used the phrase "meta core competences" without even feeling the need to explain it.

Back to the drawing board.

Because I'm worth it

L'Oreal careers gig this evening. Come work for us, big brands, career structure, freedom to pursue your goals, varied roles, responsibility as soon as you want it. One day I'll go to one of these and a company will say something interesting, something that makes me bounce up in my chair and go 'Wow! give me a job, pay me peanuts, just let me into your offices!' but it wasn't L'Oreal. Very slick though, and you can't fault the commitment, the MD UK and half his head honchos were down here, and give them their due, they were an impressively young bunch, as one told me..

"L'Oreal believe in MBA's"

which is nice. So there I was, thinking of awkward questions to ask and I thought, no, I'll just ask them about online marketing - it's in their brochure, only nobody knew anything. Well, that's kind of harsh, their head of HR guy knew enough to talk about it for five minutes, long enough for me to realise that L'Oreal just aren't taking it seriously enough. They're starting to make the right noises though, relationships, closeness, intimacy, its just you and a screen online, just like putting on makeup I guess, you and a mirror. Sit down, look for yourself in the reflection - who knows. Anyway, L'Oreal don't get the web yet, I mean, the effort that must have gone into this, and yet no one's watching. Ah well. Still, double digit profit growth for seventeen years, you can't knock the rest of the business.

L'Oreal, worth a CV?

Oh, and they have this e-strat game. Which looks like a genuine attempt to do something cool, in fact, it looks like it could be a fine and exciting game. It also looks like a time killer, and the prize for not winning is four days in Paris and an MP3 player, assuming you come close. After that it's t-shirts. I'm guessing that winning this is a lot of effort, say 100+ productive hours between three people. Easily enough time for an MBA student to earn enough to buy their own damn MP3 player and a week in Paris. Today's big idea :-

Don't sell the prizes, sell the game, it's all most of us will get.

Besides, until I can compete one on one (or team on team) rather than trying to rack up a score against a machine I'm not interested. We all know algorythms aren't as clever as we are, but other people, well now you're talking.

Much to talk about

The end of the week brought a flurry of decision making and cool stuff. First up was having to choose who I wanted to go and see at the 'Silicon Valley comes to Oxford' event. In a similar way to the Oxford Business Forum a number of top names are being brought in for panel discussions and small group tutorials. Among the names on the list are founders from Paypal and Ebay, Directors from Google and big names from Cisco, as well as a bunch of venture capitalists and such.

I've asked to have my group tutorials with Raymand Nasr, who is director of Executive Communications at Google and Jeff Skoll, not so much for the Ebay stuff, but for the Skoll foundation. So, hopefully there'll be plenty to blog about there.

Next up was the announcement of the external opportunities for the New Business Development Projects. These projects require us to write a businessplan for a new business and to hand it in before the third term. In effect most of the work takes place in the second term, but right now we need to organise our groups and choose our projects. Choosing groups was a fairly organic process and most people seem to have found one by now. Some of these groups were formed by people who arrived with their own ideas for new businesses and fairly impressive aims. Its probably not a good idea to talk about this too much, but a couple of folk are looking to develop some interesting patents, and one group seems to have found a giant gap in a large market. Every year a couple of companies come out of the NBD projects and its easy to see why.

Anyway, my group doesn't have a cool idea and so we're going down the alternative route, by which the school invites people who have ideas and need business plans to make suggestions. To choose from we have a number of technology transfer ideas, half a dozen ideas for .com's (most of which I think will get fairly short shrift) and one or two oddball projects. Again I don't want to say too much right now, because if multiple groups want the same project there'll be a competitive pitch, and many of the projects are under confidentiality agreements. Suffice to say I'm confident we'll end up with something interesting to work on.

Right, time to go and play football.