Trigger happy policing

Business school is definately a good place for getting first hand experience of places. I just finished having lunch with a colleague who served with the British Army in Bosnia and told me about the differences between US and UK peacekeepers. The Americans it seemed continuted to wear helmets, flak jackets and weapons at the ready long after the rest of the troops had switched to berets, shirt sleeves and slung weapons. She thought this probably had something to do with the problems the US was having in Iraq.

I was still thinking about this when I came across this article about John Simpson, a man who has probably spent more time on battlefields than pretty much any serving soldier in the UK or US army. Sadly some of the news coming out of Basra suggests that UK troops haven't been on their best behaviour with regard to prisoners either - but it might be that there's a considerable difference between a culture of shoot first ask later, and a culture that tries not to.

More on case studies

But not from me. Adam is at Harvard where case studies are the order of the day for teaching. He's written a piece on why he likes them, what they're like and what you get out of them. He also makes the very cogent point that this is all about personal preference, different schools teach in different ways.

Just to clear up my earlier posts, we do a fair amount of case work here, but it's not delivered in the same style. It's not the focus of most lectures and it's not generally something that requires a lot of preparation before hand. Exceptions were management accounting - taught by a visiting LBS professor (I dozed through the cases and learned in the lectures) and marketing, which was all about 21 submitted cases. These however were not normal cases, mostly custom written by the professor they were terrifying single side (sometimes more) explanations of what looked like (had to be, surely) simple problems.

We lived in fear of them

I've been Wallied!

For the best part of this term I've been working as a freelance copywriter for the school. The mission? To develop the 2004-5 MBA brochure. Well, after weeks of work crammed in around lectures, coursework and blogging the brochure is nearing completion. One critical test for me was the fact that Wally Olins was going to be checking the copy as a favour to the school. I found out what he thought of it yesterday.

It survived. No ringing praises, but a decided absence of red ink. Much, much better than I expected.

So, if anyone needs some copy writing my rates are as reasonable as my debts are high. As Blackadder once said "how fortunate that your job is also your hobby"

Three years of Hell to become the Devil

A former colleague and good friend has headed to law school. He's blogging the experience at his brand new weblog, tentatively titled "Three years of Hell to become the Devil". For those who find my politics absurd you'll love Tony's. If you agree with mine, you'll probably find he drives you to apoplexy. He's a great guy, mixes a mean drink and plays poker far too well for my taste.

If you're going to be a law student at Columbia next year this man will be your classmate, go say hi.

Taking blogs to Capitol Hill

Having brought weblogs to Parliament Tim has set his sights on Washington, if you're a US citizen you can help him.

Interesting stuff on oil

I've just read this rather long blog entry on oil production, the gist of which is that production is expected to peak in 2008 and then fall steadily. That sounds like scaremongering, but the evidence and argument make interesting reading. (I'm less inclined to believe the politics at the end...) Still I checked a few other figures from the paper

Here are the US oil production figures showing a peak in 1970, exactly when it was supposed to be (production is now below 1954 levels)

Here are the latest figures for OPEC (xls file) which show production as being more or less steady over recent years.

The thrust of the post linked above is not that we're about to run out of oil, just that once global production peaks and future reserves become more expensive to exploit the price of oil will rise and the economics of the market will be fundamentally changed. The fox in the henhouse here is the news last year that the Caspian Oil Fields were a fraction of the size they were expected to be, bringing forward estimated of peak production by some dozen years or so.

Now as with so many things I write about I don't have the information available to make a complete decision on this, but there seems to be a hypothesis worthy of some kind of follow up here.

Son of brand strategy

Second half of our brand strategy lecture today was given by our lecturer's son, who is one of the folks behind a brand planning agency in London. So far so good, indeed the prospect of 90 minutes on brand innovation was quite appealing, and the opening comments that 'there's a lot of stuff in this talk' and 'I'm not going to dumb it down cause you're oxford students' gave cause for optimism. Brand strategy has been by and large a bloody sophisticated class, lots of very good ideas in there.

Shame then that we got a 90 minute sales pitch, stuffed with almost no ideas whatsoever, a signal lack of evidence or case studies and a convincing proof that in the brand space mutton dressed as lamb sells as well now as it ever has.

HTML Typography

Back in the day I was good at HTML, I could do crazy things with table tags, I knew all about blockquotes, nbsp; spacers, single pixel gif tricks and browser bugs from netscapes 2 through 5 along with their corresponding IE flaws. Mac and PC, that's how good I was, serious webmonkey stuff.

But kids today have got shiny new toys that I just don't understand. Man, I've got to get me some skills and do stuff a little more like this...

On Politics and coursework

From a study group member

"kudos to:
martin, for writing some of the most high minded drivel i’ve read so far on this course"

You can rely on me for high minded drivel ;-)

Funny thing, I'm sure there aren't many people who take an MBA and as a result rediscover their preference for left wing economics, state paternalism and all the other political bits and pieces that get me worked up. Not to say that I've veered entirely to the left, in some respects I'm splitting down the middle. Parts of me now hold fairly ruthless views about competition, failing companies and the merits of inflexible work forces. On the other hand, now I've taken a good hard look at neo classical 'chicago' economics I can cheerfully say that I want none of it. And you can take your maximising shareholder value mantra with you as well, none of that for me please. Free trade? It's a mixed bag isn't it... Desirable in the long run, in need of careful and slow introduction in the short run.

I like Oxford, you can come here, challenge the ideas and even find that plenty of people have already challenged them on your behalf. Of course the quid pro quo for this is that they challenge you right back. While the faculty have opinions there's definately not a hint of dogma about the place. Well, maybe in some strategy classes, but they were co-taught by people who didn't agree with each other, so that was OK.

On blogs and the war

I was going to write a longer piece about this, maybe a whole article, something I could send to a paper of note to get attention and make my point to a bigger public. That was a while ago, and since I haven't managed to write any long articles I guess you're going to have to make do with this blog entry about blogs, the war and the persistence of old media.

The war sparked an interest in blogs that largely missed the point. The internet, and blogs in particular were going to make this war different. We'd short circuit the corporate lies and get the inside scoop. People on the ground would offer up information and civilian experts would provide incisive commentary. CNN, Fox, the BBC, Al-Jazeera, all would be outmoded. Bush's war would be our revolution. Like so much else in the overhyped world of blogs this was garbage.

The internet did throw up a few interesting things during the war, almost all served to reinforce the position of old media and supported the propaganda of the various sides. The command-post was probably the biggest blog to look at the war, and rapidly evolved into something that was less blog, more news syndication and bulletin board service. Post war it has become a place to discuss all matters relating to the US military's operations. The command post did not however offer much in the way of original content, just links to stories from the newswires (overwhelmingly US) and patriotic commentary. Mainstream media was repackaged as alternative and the right wing digerati swallowed it whole.

Not that the left wing digerati were much better. Diametrically opposed to the command post was Iraqwar.ru and with one notable exception this site simply took in news from around the world, translated it into English and or Russian and republished it. While the presence of Arab sources was interesting they weren't saying much that wasn't appearing in UK broadsheets like the Times and the Guardian (both appeared regularly on the site). Iraqwar.ru wasn't a blog anymore than the command post was, and it carried equally little fresh information. The bulletin boards and opinion pieces were shot through with anti-american rhetoric, useful if you want to judge the mood in Cairo - but hardly a media revolution.

Iraqwar.ru did have one ace up it's sleeve though. Their daily briefings which appeared throughout the war were allegedly filed by former GRU agents now intent on exploiting old contacts to 'break the west's information blockade'. I've no idea if what they said was true, it fitted most of the facts western media reported and cast a very different complexion on the war as a whole. In the absence of some means of verifying their identity this groups' reporting had to be taken with a pinch of salt. The Guardian reported that clued in city traders were using it to pre-empt news releases from the west, but as I understand it city traders would place trades on the colour of the tie worn by CNN's anchormen if someone told them there was a pattern in it.

All of which brings me to the real blogs, the ones written by people who were actually there. There weren't many.

Lt Smash wrote a blog from a US military camp in (I think) the Saudi Arabian desert. He almost certainly knew an awful lot about what was going on. There was no way on earth he was going to share that information. He writes a good and entertaining blog about what it's like to be a US soldier, under pressure, 7000 miles from home. He gives great insight into the mind of the US soldier and what it is that motivates these guys and keeps them going. He was not however about to revolutionise media coverage of the war.

Kevin Sites is a journalist employed by CNN. He blogged plenty of stuff during the build up to the war, but once things started his corporate masters decided that blogging was not compatible with employment by CNN. Kevin stopped being an independent reporter on the side and focused full time on his day job. I think CNN missed a trick on this one, but I'm sure the situation was much more complex than I can imagine for the people taking the decisions.

Which finally brings me to Salaam Pax, author of the Dear Raed blog. It was his post of today, in response to some redneck idiots that got me to finally write this. Of all the thousands (myself included) who spilled digital ink during the conflict he's the only one I've found who could genuinely say what he felt and tell what he knew about everything. The destruction of the Baghdad phone system cut him off as the war got underway but he kept writing and published as soon as he could. For all that though Salaam is, as he says, just one guy, with one voice and one viewpoint. He doesn't have access to the big picture any more than we do. If we had a hundred folks like Salaam, soldiers, civilians, aid workers, civil servants and reporters of both sides we might just have been able to synthesise it into a coherent picture, but we don't.

Blogging, the internet and communal journalism was overhyped. Worse by building the illusion that there was a mass of independent, sceptical experts ready to pounce on the misdemeanours of big media we simply legitimised them whenever we recycled their stories. Just like last time, what you made of the war came down to who's papers you liked to read. The second Iraq war was a triumph for old media, and we shouldn't forget that.

Soul of a new Machine

If you haven't read this book I'd suggest you correct that right now. I'd also suggest that you don't follow this link to a follow up piece in wired that appeared some twenty years after the events described in the book, it'll spoil all the fun.

I first read the book a long time ago, I guess I was 14, maybe a little older. I had no idea about business at the time, no clue at all as to what went on inside companies, but I liked the book, the story of the struggle, the fact that it was real, the careful descriptions of the in-jokes, rituals and shared culture that drives the IT industry. I'm not sure other industries are like that. Perhaps it's because there are so many IT companies, because the work is so complex and arcane, because it attracts a certain kind of mindset. I'm not sure.

I think I'd feel like a tourist in a real IT company, I guess I can find out when I spend the summer at Cisco. Meanwhile the internet age is still waiting for a pulitzer prize winning novel...