Catching up with the world

With the summer project almost done the team has voted itself a day or two off. I've just spent half an hour catching up on the baghdad blogs that sprang up after the war, things are getting wierder and wierder over there.

Salaam somehow made it to the funeral of Uday and Qusay, his role as translator / fixer for various journalists and armed forces seems to be sending him in all kinds of directions. I think he's taking his role as 'journalist' rather than diarist these days as well. Audiences will do that to you. Meanwhile he's losing patience with the extremists fighting over his country.

Someone who's probably lost all patience is Salaam's friend Gee who has just had a bag stuck over his head and been beaten up by the US army. Wonder how the hearts and minds campaign is going there. Salaam has promised us a full report. Gee's last entry is about an attempt to appoint a female judge in Baghdad - it didn't go well, but at least they tried.

The whole thing looks like one huge mess. Iraqi's don't believe the Americans are sincere about anything, Americans think they're going to get blown up by children with hand grenades and bandits are ambushing cars on the road to Baghdad. Meanwhile reconstruction is being sabotaged not by 'the resistance' but by the much less sinister but probably far harder to deal with 'criminals'.

This is the kind of situation that demands the USA swallow it's pride and hand the country over to UN peacekeepers until the Iraqi's can sort out a government. Iraq does not have so much oil that it can't join the world list of failed states, and if it does the world will be a far from safer place.

Presents - get it while you can

My much better two thirds is very good at buying presents. Some months ago - I think around January - I read an article about Howard Tate, a legendary soul singer who'd gone off the rails and vanished for twenty years with just a single album to his name (Get it while you can). The more I read the more I wanted to buy his new record - sadly it wasn't out and the release date was many months hence. Displaying a gift for prophecy that comes with experience I said 'I'll never remember to buy this when it comes out' and lo and behold I didn't.

So you can imagine how happy I was when my much better two thirds produced said CD for no reason at all. At this rate she'll be my exceptionally good three quarters soon, especially if I can't come up with a great birthday present. Suggestions to this address...

The increasingly English Mr Lloyd (part 2)

What better way to spend an evening in Oxford than to punt leisurely up and down the Cherwell watching the wildlife and greenery go by in blissful Oxford weather?

That was the plan, and at times it almost seemed like that. When we weren't getting in the way of rowing eights, being threatened by swans (local swans have learned that if you terrorise a boat they may give you food, we had none, but got threatened anyway) and cursing about the aluminium pole (nasty banging noises, heavy) or the fact that the river seems to have developed many inches of thick muddy silt this summer it was indeed fun.

Possibly not as much fun as the post punting beers though.

The increasingly English Mr Lloyd (part 1)

This weekend was a friend of mine's stag do. Forgoing the usual destinations of Dublin or London the chosen destination was Oxford - scene of his juvenile crimes. Well actually it's kind of hard imagining him committing any crimes but that's by the by. A comfortably intoxicated evening occurred followed by the main attraction on Sunday - Cricket.

Now I don't play cricket, indeed it's fair to say that of the twenty odd people there maybe three had ever played cricket, and not recently. As the Pembroke groundsman looked on in amazement we knocked out forty odd overs (in something like 500 balls) with entertaining combinations of underarm, overarm, sidearm and just plain bizarre bowling. The batting and fielding wasn't up to much either. Still a great time was had by all and it felt terrible authentic to decamp to the pavillion for tea and sandwiches, almost as if we knew what we were doing.

Summer project right on schedule

I can only assume we're heading toward a cliff at speed on this project, because so far absolutely nothing has gone wrong. The only other alternative is that somehow during the course of this year the four of us have developed a godlike ability to organise large projects and run them to time.

By this afternoon we will have a complete version 0.1 of the final report, all the sections, all the words - enough to hand in. And we've still got two weeks to go. If it wasn't so hot, and if we weren't feeling so lethargic I imagine we'd be feeling quite smug at this stage.

Must go to HMV

Damnit, nothing like a personal recommendation to sell a CD is there? Although the other person who's told me about this described it as average mopy goth / new metal stuff.

Oh, must do some work too. First recommendations to the client on Friday.

Good Design

This piece on the Register about Konika Minolta's new logo reminded me of something I read a long long time ago. Dmitry Kirsanov's fantastic columns at webreference.com make very clear just how different to art design is. A must read set of essays for anyone who is ever going to work in the design field.

Much to my surprise in Dmitry's latest writing on Logo's he talks about having been a young designer when he wrote the first few columns, and it is easy to see where he's improved. His early writing however remains bloody impressive. His studio at Kirsanov.com looks to be ticking along quite nicely too.

The truth about PAM

PAM, the Pentagon's bizarre market for trading information about terrorist attrocities was even wierder than previously thought. Over at the Register Andrew Orlowski has produced a piece of spectatcularly meandering journalism to explain just where the ideas came from in the first place.

The bottom line on all this is of course that markets don't work half as efficiently as people like to think. Even the stock market, deliberately built to be the most perfect of all markets has plenty of well documented imperfections. If nothing else traders don't work weekends and exchanges close in the evenings - that can't possibly be efficient. The notion that someone could build a market in political futurology and expect it to be more use than (say) assembling a varied panel of regional experts and asking them what was going on on a regular basis is ludicrous.

I think the only real lesson we can learn from this is that as government gets bigger there is more chance that it will spend money on really stupid things.

T3, Rise of the Computer Games

I'm not even sure if there is a computer game to accompany T3, Rise of the Machines, but there should be. Moments in the film come straight out of something like Deus Ex or Halo. How do you fight a flying thing with guns? Stand in a corridor (it can't manouvre) and keep shooting it as it rushes toward you. If you and the game designer have done your job right it'll blow up about ten yards away (so you can see the cool explosion graphics) but not actually hurt you.

The film itself is a full on action extravaganza, plot holes abound but it's good for a bit of light entertainment. However it is striking me that £ for £ playing a decent computer game now offers more plot, more involvement and more heart rate increasing moments. If the films are going to really be more than just marketing vehicles they urgently need to add some emotion back into the mix. It's something that hasn't been lost on Hong Kong cinema, where even amidst the bullets and explosions they manage to work in some genuine emotion and a sense of involvement. John and Catherine holding hands or Neo and Trinity snogging in the Matrix counts for far less than the emotion drenched and bloody mess that ends Bullet in the Head, the kind of thing John Woo made before Hollywood gave him enormous budgets, but far less artistic control.

Just my 2 cents.

update there is a game which looks to be tied very closely to the film.

Pre-emptive book review

Business the Cisco way by David Stauffer. There's a word for rose tinted biography - it's called hagiography. I'm not sure what the equivalent is for business writing, so I'm just going to call it garbage. This book is a badly researched collection of hype and overzealous writing that should have been pulped by the editor to avoid embarrasment.

I know this despite having read only one chapter and the introduction. Chapter 2 is called 'Win the world with e-commerce'. nowhere in it does it explain that you can't go to the Cisco website and buy something more technical than a t-shirt. If you want to buy direct from Cisco you have to be one of their handful of mega-customers (say British Telecom or AT&T) or a reseller. Pretty much all Cisco's sales are indirect, its an oversight equivalent to suggesting Switzerland is flat..

On Markets

Doc Searls has written a piece on markets, and what exactly we mean when we say market, as he points out it's a very flexible word indeed.

This piece also got me thinking. Doc and other business writers like him come up with a lot of very sensible stuff, none of which is considered academically sound by the powers that be. That's fine, the powers that be have a duty to make sure we're not studying fads here. That said the nature of this random punditry is that it's faster than academic research into business - a lot faster. Marketing academics haven't invented anything for years, but they have documented a lot of what switched on marketeers have been doing for years and effectively said 'you're right, this works and here's why'.

The situation isn't as bad in things like finance and economics where you still need the time to do real science / maths but for much of our curriculum academic theory is not the cutting edge - its following on behind, documenting it. I think the business school community needs to work out how to exploit 'non academic thinking' and inject it into the curriculum without ending up in a situation where you're constantly pushing the next fad.

Summer Escape

There really should be a rule against forcing students to spend their lovely summer days labouring over an assignment looking at pictures of fantastic holiday retreats. Sadly there isn't and so I spent Sunday hard at work for i-escape.

Having spent a bit more time on the site I'm still really impressed. I'd guess that as soon as the traffic starts to come in they'll be fine because there is so much to like about it. It's also a good example of how e-commerce can work best. You only need a handful of people and a large body of talented freelancers / part timers to draw on and you can achieve an awful lot.

More lyrics

At the tender age of three
I was hooked to a machine
just to keep my mouth from spouting junk

There are those who think this should have been done to me. Indeed there are probably people who think I still need it.

The brochure has landed

The new brochure has arrived and 10 000 copies are awaiting distribution. You don't have to get one of them to read it though, you can download a pdf of the brochure (2 MB) from the business school website.

The brochure was a pretty serious piece of work, as well as the copy it needed editing and co-ordinating, people needed to pilot it through the SBS management system, photographs needed to be taken and layouts designed. So who did what?

Dr Maike Bohn, can take all the plaudits for making it happen, reigning in my wilder ideas (hey, lets do the whole thing as a fightclub parody...) and co-ordinating everyone on this list.
Paul at Wilson Harvey provided the graphic design skills that have it looking super sexy although he was ably assisted by
Rob Judges, freelance photographer par excellence (almost all the shots are of real students)
Liz Buckle and Jessica McGreesh had the unenviable task of checking the thing was not only accurately spelled, but factually true

and of course all my fellow classmates and students who put up with me trying to get them to say interesting things about the course, asking silly questions and making them write case studies for me.

The brochures are coming, the brochures are coming!

The new MBA brochures should be arriving in the next hour or two. Since this is the biggest bit of copywriting I've ever done (30+ pages) I'm really keen to see the results. The marketing department are already sick of me turning up asking if they're here (they were meant to be here on Tuesday, but there was a delay). It'll also be interesting to see what the current class makes of it.

Money in the bank...

As part of a summer campaign to bring in some funds I'm doing a few bits of freelance work. As well as some more bits and bobs on behalf of the school I'm going to be helping i-escape with their search engine rankings. It's a small piece of work, but you've got to start somewhere.

Incidently if you're planning a holiday you really should take a look at i-escape's site. They've got some fantastic write ups of some really interesting hotels and resorts. I know this sounds like I'm now writing on behalf of the client, but seriously, it's a gorgeous website with some really strong content - only the search engines aren't biting...

Meeting the readers

Yesterday I met up with Rani, who has been reading this website for the last eight months. I'd write more, but she promised to send me a picture of the two of us which she took over coffee and I thought it would be nice to include in the write up. Only it isn't here yet, presumably becuase I imagine she's very busy at the moment. So the write ups on ice for now.

If any other readers want to meet me the current going rate is a big cup of hot chocolate, although I'm susceptible to beer based bribery as well.

Balanced views

There is a moment at which you realise that your bit of the SBP may well revolve around suggesting a balanced scorecard approach. At this point you are confronted with the realisation that this afternoon and tomorrow may well be spent reading about accounting systems and performance metrics.

Its a moment I'd suggest people try to avoid.

Football cancelled

Honestly, just because it's pouring with rain (awful weather for July) tonights game of footie is cancelled. Still, as part of my current health kick I will do some exercise tonight. See, if I write stuff down it will happen...

Amazon on the blink

Worth mentioning only because it's the first time it's ever happened to me in dozens of purchases, but Amazon's server is up and down like a yo-yo at the moment. Have to imagine they've got some kind of back up system that isn't working 100% or an intermittent fault or something.

At this stage I've got enough faith in their customer service that even were my orders to suddenly be completely messed up I'd trust them to sort it out. Still, if this was my first experience of their site I'd be off. As a case in point doc searls has been blogging his problems with Paypal, I agree. I've tried several times to use this service and don't think I've ever succeeded. The hallmark of a system built by a guy who's real ambition was to send a rocket to Mars, from LA? Could be.

Site Updates

I've now finished adding course reviews for Hilary term along with accompanying revision notes. Click on the 'doing the MBA' section in the navigation above.

LOL

It's a long time since anything on the radio has made me laugh out loud. I guess they just don't play enough Billy Bragg. Here's the lyric responsible

She said it was just a figment of speech
And I said you mean 'figure'
And she said no 'figment' because she could never imagine it happening
But it did

When we first met, I played the shy-boy
When she spoke to me for the first time, my nose began to bleed
She guessed the rest
The next day we went on a bus ride to the ferry
And when nobody came to collect our fares, why I knew then this was something special

I couldn't stop thinking about her
And everytime I switched on the radio, there was somebody else singing a song about the two of us
It was just like being on a fast ride at Fun Fair- the sort you want to get off
because it's scary and then, as soon as you're off again, you want to get straight back on again

But oh love is strange

And you have to learn to take the crunchy with the smooth I suppose
She began going out with Mr. Potato Head
It was when I saw her in the car park with his coat around her shoulders I realized
I went home and thought about the two of them together until the bathwater went cold around me

I thought about her eyes and the curve of her breasts and about the point where their bodies met
I confronted her about it
I said 'I'm the most illegible bachelor in town'
And she said 'Yea, that's why I can never understand any of those silly letters you send me'

And then one day it happened
She cut her hair
And I stopped loving her

That's the way to do it

Cheskin have just given most of their top management, and probably everyone else who wants one too a blog. They're a very good marketing research / innovation firm in Silicon Valley. I know this cause I met Davis Masten at the Oxford Business Forum and he was bloody good, and when the guy who used to run the company is good it's reasonable to expect the same of the rest of the firm.

Gaps in the market

There seems to be a gap in the market for a competent search firm for jobhunting. I've called 8 this morning, two small ones actually managed to put me through to a consultant who told me 'when we say we do sales and marketing we actually mean sales'. Of the other six only one has managed to get back to me while the other five have all told me that the person I need to speak to is on the phone, but why don't I send a CV to their email address instead ? Not one of those emails has actually generated a reply.

I'm suppose that if you nail these people to a chair and refuse to leave the room until they help you might get something approaching useful advice, but I'm not sure. Awful industry, ripe for consolidation. Not convinced any of these firms do what they actually say they do.

Update Line two of the 'we might have to do some work' defense consists of asking if your CV is on the system. No, I say. Ah, they say. Send your CV and we'll get right back to you. So far there's a massive 0% response rate to this, maybe I sent the CV in too slowly (you know, a minute or so after getting off the phone)

Nearly there

Don't know the paper by paper marks yet, but I passed all last terms courses. I've now got 19 out of 23 credits toward my MBA. Still to go are two credits for the summer business project, and two credits for the final case study exam. Meanwhile the job hunt goes on.

No longer in Beta

With their usual lack of fuss Google have taken the Beta signs off their Froogle e-commerce service. I imagine that in a few years we'll wonder how we lived without it. I'll try a few tests later, the beta was interesting rather than useful. Be keen to see how much that has changed.

DIY Micropayments

Its not a big VCfunded thingumy, its just a little homemade service I think, but Bitpass is a functioning micropayments service. Worth a look.

First job offer

Apparently some vestiges of my professional reputation are still thrashing about and doing good things on my behalf. I just got approached with a view to 'sounding me out' about a potential position. Sadly it was in London which is something of a no no. I hadn't even applied. Sounded interesting though, so if you can write, know a lot about the internet business in the uk and have a broad understanding of what makes the wired world go round get in touch and I'll tell you the details.

Reminds me, I should probably drop in here again, just to let the industry know I'm not dead.

My big problem now is how to explain to the headhunter who told me yesterday that I wasn't a credible candidate for a senior new media position that I do actually have a reputation - not a big one, but not nothing either. I mean, I can't write it on my CV, lots of people think I'm really quite good at what I do...

Stupid label guy

There's a Dilbert cartoon about ISO 9001 and it's requirement that everything be labelled. The joke is that the guy doing the labelling has a label of his own declaring that he's the 'stupid label guy'. He seems to have started work at the business school.

Apparently everything in the school is to have it's own bar code. These are being attatched to things with little plastic loops. Once everything has one they'll be counted or checked or something, and presumably removed again. It's a huge, mind numbingly dull task and I can't work out for the life of me why they're doing it. Probably some misguided idea about efficiency.

Or perhaps SBS is going to be ISO 9001 compliant. There's a scary thought.

Update the stupid label guys (there's two of them) are labelling our office as I type. They have many many bits of paper to fill in and look every bit as bored as I thought they would...

De Ja Vue

Next years class are starting to get themselves together at their Yahoo! group. They'd got up to about 25 members through networking before the school sent out an email to all the new admissions pointing them to it.

If you're coming to SBS next year follow the link on the left and sign up for the group. They're sorting out accomodation, arranging meet ups and doing all that good networking stuff people should. Last year we didn't have anything like this until a week or two before class started. I reckon by the time this years class arrive they'll already be buzzing with stories, have made a few friends and planned their first few nights out.

Right, I'm going to do something I've been meaning to do for a while now and update the doing the MBA section of this website with revision notes and coursenotes for term 2, or Hilary term as it's known in Oxford (no, I don't know why).

And I so wanted to be dangerous

According to this quiz I'm a morally deficient threat to Bush's America.


Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.


What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Not really the kind of thing I was hoping for.

This is damn good

It's not often I come across a piece of internet marketing and can't work out how to improve it, but the Howard Dean campaign is awesome. No clever technology, whizzy animation or anything else, just killer content, a genuine voice and enough interactivity to get people involved. It's awesome, and we've got to hope he wins the Democrat nomination just so he can refine these techniques for longer. And the brand, no need to piss about with Logos or slogans the Dean brand is stamped straight through everything here like the letters on a stick of rock, just the way it should be.

Regardless of your politics, this is a good thing for democracy.

The website

The blog

It also raises the prospect, should he ever be elected, of a blogging president. Sadly I'm not american, so I can't vote, and it's pretty hard to see Bush losing the next one, but there's a long way to go yet and this looks like a good start.

How open to business is Oxford?

There's been a recent report, followed up by the press suggesting that Oxford isn't sufficiently open to business. I think they're being a bit harsh, Isis, Oxford's arm for spinning out companies has been responsible for firms with a market cap of $2BN and of 40+ spin outs to date none had folded as of January this year. Thats a frankly amazing result for any investment fund.

It is true that there's room for improvement here, but things have been improving and they're continuing to do so. If Oxford needs to sort out one thing in relation to the business world it's its own internal administration. At the college level Oxford is run horrendously badly with innefficiency and waste all over the place - the result is higher rents for students and a system that seems at once ludicrously wealthy while trying to claim a lack of funds. This has nothing to do with how well Oxford interfaces with the wider business world though.

Tough job market?

This article about unemployment suggests that maybe things aren't as tough out there as people thought after all. If a recovery starts soon we'll be building the next business cycle from a very strong base - with all the attendant risks of inflation, but still its better than a nation on the dole.

Back to the drawing board

The Infernal Tony sent me a link to this article a while back through my comments system, but I only just got round to following it up. I'm not sure things are as black for the online job search as this suggests, but the more time I spend on these sites the more I realise that they're badly built and hard to use.

Not to sound like Jacob here, but the first one of these sites to sort out its usability issues and evolve into a top class online service will bury the others. Since I imagine that most of these sites are struggling for funds once things are moving in your direction acquiring the others should be easy - if its worth it at all.

Things to read

If anyone ever tells you there's a more popular, influential or just plain incredible sport than football get them to read this. Then hope that Rwanda can build on this.

Stuff to read

It all started with an attempt to read every single episode of Doonesbury (thwarted only by a few missing years in the online archive) but lately I've been reading *a lot* of online cartoons. I thought I'd post a list here of my current reading.

From the broadsheets

Doonesbury
Dilbert
Boondocks

Online daily reads

Scary go Round
Goats
Wigu
Diesel Sweeties
Somthing Positive

Occasional reads

The comic section of Salon (registration / day pass required)
Redmeat and Pathetic Geek Stories, both linked from the Onion AV Club

Football crazy

Manchester United have signed a goalkeeper with Tourettes syndrome. Bound to make for some interesting post match interviews...

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

This weekend it was time to enjoy the heatwave, hire a car and head into the English countryside. Saturday was a drive to Stonehenge followed by a sightseeing visit to Bath. Sunday was falconry at Batsford (a manor house about 30 miles from Oxford) and then lazing about at Borton on the Wold, which was about as English a village as you can get, icecreams, cream teas, a brass band playing on the village square and a visiting posse of Hells Angels.

OK, so that last bit isn't strictly traditional English, but its true. The Angels had turned up to visit the Bourton motor museum and chat to each other. Quite what their 60's forebears would have made of this I don't know, but when they came to leave, gunning their engines and revving loudly on the side of the road young couples brought their children over for a closer look and people reached for their cameras.

Their museum tour complete the Angels roared off into the distance, presumably taking their own brand of rebellion, intimidation and two wheeled photo opportunity to other quaint little villages where they too might purchase a cream tea or possibly take in a game of cricket. The power of Little England will get to us all in the end.

Chilling out

It has been very hot in Oxford lately. Uncomfortably so at times. So it was with great relief that I finally managed to get myself into Edamame on sushi night. (Edamame keep wierd hours which have thwarted my previous attempts to eat there).

Believe me, when its hot like this there is nothing quite like fresh sushi, cold Ashahi beer in little frosted glasses and chilled Edamame beans. Thursday night is Sushi night at Edamame, I thoroughly recommend it.

To the barricades!

In best Oxford tradition Queens college have just announced rent increases well over the rate of inflation, at the time of year when the students are least well placed to respond. (its summer, and most people are elsewhere). As an undergraduate I was heavily involved in trying to organise rent strikes, demonstrations and other such resistance. Its worth pointing out that it only came to such desperate measures because the college in question (LMH) was extremely reluctant to explain how it worked out its numbers, what else it had considered and so on.

Hopefully Queens will be more accomodating. All I want to see is the business case they've got for these increases and an explanation as to why nothing else they've considered (like cutting costs or raising new funds or selling stuff) is appropriate.

Failing that I guess we'll just have to protest. And I'll be doing it for you kids, since I'll never actually pay any of these new prices. (I've paid my last rent cheque, these are for next year)

SBP picks up steam

Phase one of our SBP is essentially a benchmarking exercise. That means conducting a lot of interviews, and giving people marks across a whole range of criteria. (24 according to the sheet in front of me). We've now finished our first two interviews and we've got another ten in the pipeline. We're targetting 30, so I think we're more or less on track for now.

We're also getting used to Cisco's welter of IT infrastructure. They are very very wired indeed, with everything conducted via outlook exchange, instant messaging services and a few more esoteric bits of kit. The techie in me likes to see this lot in action, the pragmatist is yet to be convinced of it's value.

Job hunt begins in earnest

A month ago I trawled monster.com for marketing jobs and found *none* that were interesting. Yesterday I turned up ten in the right salary / responsibility bracket, and two were ones that really got my attention. I'd reckon that most of the jobs I'm looking at are long shots - 10-1 or worse odds, but those are winnable odds.

I'm also of the opinion that companies find jobs for people who impress them. So even if organisation x decides I'm not the man for the top job I may get offered something else - perhaps with a view to later promotion. Either way its a good way to go at the market.

All I want is a brand, you know, one to look after and call my own. One I can take over the world with. That kind of thing.

Opening thoughts on summer projects

So what's an SBP like? Well so far the summer business project with Cisco has been a lot like doing a consulting job, but with extra academic theory and a less punishing schedule. My groups in favour of a steady 9-5 schedule (or 10-6 when we have to commute to London) and that's working out well.

Can't say too much about the details of the project, but so far it's been pretty interesting and it's an interesting return to the world of work.

Summer Plans

As well as putting in eight weeks of effort for Cisco over the summer there's a whole load of stuff I've got to be getting on with. Here's a summary.

Find a job - I keep putting this off, but I can't put it off much longer
Visit Cornwall for a weekend
Visit the Lake district for a weekend
Read Harry Potter
Learn options - never got them straight in my head, won't feel right till I do
Help the business school with their website
Get back into the habit of going to the gym on a regular basis
Design next years blog

I'm sure there's much much more, but that'll do for a start.

Cisco Day One

Day one of the Cisco Summer Business Project today. I'm not sure how much I can reasonably say about the project, so you're going to have to make do with generalities from here. It went well, Cisco were helpful and provided us with laptops and full employee access to their system.

Their system is very impressive, and really rather large.

Bit like the company really.

Balls

Keble ball was fun, although for those not used to Oxford balls the comment was more 'this is more like a fair for grown ups than a ball' which is fair enough. There was a bouncy castle, there was a ferris wheel, there was a coconut shy. There was also (and I have no explanation for this) a table of plates which people were invited to smash by throwing cricket balls at them.

Now I don't know why this was going on, but it kept several undergraduates occupied for many many hours. They started at 9 and were still going when we left at 2:30 in the morning. Perhaps this was a last minute strategy adopted by the organisers when they realised that a number of clinically insane guests had arrived, or perhaps this is what today's kids do in their spare time - I have no idea.

Plate smashing, it's the next big thing.

Exam surivived

Done and dusted. One hour of Global Comparative Business later and the prevailing thought among the class is 'what was all the fuss about'. I wrote good stuff on the IMF and a general 'what is globalisation' question. I was less convincing on the differences between the GATT and the WTO, but it was good enough.

Time to relax, and tonight, time to party. We've got a drinks reception at the school, a class photo and then a cruise down the river to look forward to. Tomorrow is Keble ball which the MBA class have adopted as their end of term party - about 60 of us are going.

Todays Required Linking

Read this. Then go here.

If this turns out to be illegal something is seriously wrong.

That'll do for now

I started this at 4 o'clock. It's now nearly ten o'clock and five and a half hours is enough for anyone. If anyone's just reaching this blog here's a brief explanation of what's been going on.

I have an exam tomorrow, for which I was underprepared. I've just written up revision notes for six of the eight weeks of the course online, as blog entries. A quick cut and paste into word reveals almost 5000 words worth of effort. If you read the archives they'll make sense if you start here and work up.

Thank you and goodnight.

Back once again with the online revision. We're up to...

Week 6 : Foreign Direct Investment

Questions to think about for this are

What is the difference between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ expropriation and how has the latter been interpreted in recent international investment disputes?
What are international investment treaties and do they matter?

Now I'm not planning on writing any essays on this so what follows is intended to get me marks on one of the short questions I may have to cover on this.

FDI has been growing rapidly lately, about 20% a year since 1980. All kinds of reasons for this, developed countries like being invested in as it's good for unemployment. Developing countries like being invested in as it's good for exports. The opening of the Soviet bloc has also created a load of opportunites for firms who want to invest in educated cheap labour, previously untapped natural resources or just to be near the end market in some very large countries. (Poland is a very big place you know)

There's also what I'm going to call Japanese Car Syndrome. Namely foreign firms tend to be more productive than domestic ones, so you can learn a lot from them.

On the supply side firms have started investing overseas to avoid country of origin clauses, to make use of JIT techniques or to exploit foreign labour (sometimes in a good way). Most FDI has gone to developed countries though, France is much more likely to be investing in Germany or America than it is in Pakistan or Bangladesh. This is partly because the statistics include mergers and large stakeholdings.

How is FDI regulated? Badly is the short answer. There's nothing like the WTO and while direct expropriation (sorry, that's my oil well now, thank's for building it) hasn't happened much lately indirect expropriation (thanks for investing, have you seen next years tax rates / minimum wages) is still a problem.

It hasn't been possible to create something for international investment because there is a lot of entrenched opposition. From labour unions, NGO's, domestic monopolies / oligopolies and NGO's. There are some frameworks though, including Chapter 11 of NAFTA and the Single European Market. WTO members can also agree things called GAT's between themselves,. in NAFTA the equivalent is a BIT (Bilateral Trade Agreement)

It's worth knowing about BITs and GATs cause they work in different directions. A BIT agrees to liberalise everything except named exceptions. A GAT agrees to liberalise only those things it mentions.

Disputes over investment treaties / investments can be settled either through state - state discussion or state - investor discussion. The Ethyl Corporation provides an example of how this works. Ethyl wanted to import MMT (a fuel additive) into Canada. Canada banned the import on health grounds, but didn't ban domestic production. Not surprisingly Ethyl sued for effectice expropriation and Canada both settled and reversed the ban.

Some have seen this as trade treaties overturning good environmental legislation. In this case it's more like trade treaties overturning cack handed Canadian protectionism. If they'd banned it properly and had enough evidence it was bad for your health they'd have been fine.

Now for part II of our exciting look at the Washington Consensus

Week 5 : The Washington Consensus in Action

After seeing off the Latin American crisis the IMF was armed with a new ideology and a one size fits all solution to future crises. In retrospect this should have been alarming, but convergence was the order of the day - if all economies could be made like those of the capitalist west we'd be fine. Sadly the IMF was then presented with a succession of opportunities to demonstrate how not to do it in Russia, East Asia and Africa. I'm going to focus on East Asia here...

In 1997 the Thai Baht was hit by currency speculation and it collapsed. Fear of contagion saw neighbouring currencies start to go the same way as hot money made a 'flight to quality'. (sell Baht, buy $$$). Once again there was the danger that countries with weak currencies would not be able to meet their debts to the west. Enter the IMF.

IMF treatment consisted of short term loans tied to implementation of the Washington Consesus. Governments were told to cut spending and raise taxes. In Indonesia a requirement to cut spending on welfare payments sparked riots and led to deaths - that was reversed shortly afterwards but the cut in investment had long term consequences for the economy.

The IMF considered that it had 'all areas' access to creditor states policy and told the Koreans to dismantle excess capacity in their semi-conductor industry. The Koreans refused arguing that the downturn in semi-conductors was cyclical. Quite why the IMF thought they knew more about the semi-conductor industry than the Koreans is open to debate, in any event the Koreans were proved right and their semi-conductor industry proved vital in leading them out of recession.

Elsewhere the IMF demanded market liberalisation and an end to anything that looked like capital controls. Malaysia refused to go along with this and came through the crisis much better than anywhere else. In Korea long term investment barely dropped despite the crisis, all the damage was being done by 'hot money', capital controls may have forced investors to keep their money wwhere it was and seen off the crisis. This was exactly the kind of thing Keynes had intended when the IMF was set up, but to todays IMF it's anathema.

In Korea problems were caused by market liberalisation. Korea had been pushed into opening it's markets to global capital before they were ready to deal with it. Hence all the problems with Korean banks not being up to scratch and the resulting crisis of confidence. Had the policy been to open Korea up gradually and introduce banking reform / strong institutions as they went this mess might have been avoidable.

The response to this and other problems with the Washington Consensus has been as follows.

1. Sequencing - you have to do things in the right order. Such as not privatising state monopolies before you've got rules to regulate them (Russia)
2. Capital Account Liberalisation - now this should only be attempted in the presence of strong institutions
3. Soverign Debt Workout - a proposal that the IMF should be able to sit down with govts and creditors to restructure their debt. Oddly enough commercial interests are blocking this one.
4. Capital controls - suggestions that these might work after all have sparked *open disagreement* (unheard of in the IMF)
5. Don't mess with what you don't understand - IMF turned out to make a lousy aid agency in Africa

Stiglitz suggests that the culture of the IMF as an institution may be as much at fault as it's economics. IMF economists are not specialists on the countries they're sent to. Rather they're despatched to solve crises at short notice and arrive bearing a briefcase of standard prescriptions. The prevailing attitude is that if the problem state was any good at economics it wouldn't be in the mess it is.

It's worth mentioning what the world bank was doing during all of this. In Africa it's had a much better record since it stopped lending to dictators. In Russia it ran into problems because although it had plenty of money to lend Russia Russia was not well set up to spend it. Russia already had schools, universities, roads and factories and didn't really need more. It also had hyperinflation, inadequate institutions and a massive insurgence of organised crime, but the bank couldn't do much about that. In Asia the bank got caught up in the IMF lending to sustain the currencies that were under pressure from speculators. The immediate result was that the bank, IMF and assorted governments discovered that speculators have an incredible amount of money and can suck up as much as the bank can give out.

Week 4 : The Rise of the Washington Consensus

I'm not going to write too much about this as I'm reasonably confident I can remember this bit, partly because I went and saw Joseph Stiglitz lecture on it, and partly because its something that interests me. Plus it's easy to take up highly opinionated positions which makes life a lot easier. Anyway...

As you may remember from an earlier post in 1982 Mexico nearly went bankrupt in response to high US interest rates and a fall in world trade. This was swiftly followed by similar problems in Brazil and other latin american countries. These states were characterised by poorly performing industry, high levels of debt and governments that had adopted loose monetary policy as a means of postponing difficult decisions. Inflation was rife and no-one had cash to pay the banks.

Many of the banks were in America.

Since the currencies of the Latin American states were under massive pressure this was a job for the IMF. It duly did it's job providing substantial bail outs in exchange for promises of reform from its new debtors. These promises were...

1. Cut government spending
2. Reduce subsidies to domestic industries
3. Broaden the tax base and spend on health, education and infrastructure
4. Raise interest rates
5. Achieve competitive exchange rates

For nations in this position this is reasonably sound advice. However the short term shocks were unpleasant with unemployment soaring and economies entering depression as currency devalution meant firms could not pay back debt in dollars. There were demonstrations against all the governments involved. Almost all the costs were born by the debtor nations, not a single US bank reduced dividends as a result of this. This is despite the fact that the banks new full well how risky these loans had been at the time.

In effect the IMF had bailed out the US banks who's willingness to lend was at least part of the problem. By 1985 it was clear that while these countries weren't in trouble anymore they weren't exactly performing either. Thus another five points were added to the plan, these were cunningly named Phase II : Adjustment for Growth

1. Liberalise trade and minimise tarriffs
2. Encourage FDI
3. Privatise everything that isn't nailed down to improve efficiency
4. Deregulate the economy to stop corrupt / bureaucratic govt inefficiency
5. Enforce property rights

If you think this looks a lot like Reaganite / Thatcherite economics you're right. Although these poor countries saw their trade and tarriffs liberalised a hell of a lot more than we did.

The result of this lot was to put Mexico back on the road to growth, now as a satelite state of the USA. Since joining NAFTA 90% of Mexican trade is with the US, prior to the crisis it had a far broader export base and was a leader among developing nations. Now it's middle classes have been obliterated and there's a lot of ground to make up.

Interestingly the IMF bail out allowed the western banks to shift the debts they'd racked up off their books (the IMF effectively paid them off) but the nations the IMF lent money to are still in debt. The financial community introduced reforms with the Basle I agreement that should prevent them doing the same thing again.

Welcome back to the online revision session. And now for...

Odds and sods about trade

A few things worth mentioning about trade are...

1. In the Uruguay round of GATT the west managed to push for the introduction of trade in services. This was great for them, since it meant they could export the work of their consultants, ad agencies, engineers and so on more easily. It was less good for the developing nations since by and large they don't export services. India may yet have the last laugh on this one though since they're getting very good indeed at IT consultancy.

2. In the 1980's the US imposed 'voluntary quotas' on the Japanese. Since these were voluntary they lay outside the scope of the GATT but by forcing the Japanese not to import more than a certain number of cars they effectively protected the US auto industry. Sort of. The Japanese aren't dumb and promptly went from producing mid range mass market cars to expensive luxury ones (which sell in smaller numbers) and took the most valuable sector of the market away from Detroit.

3. Even within the EU regulations which ostensibly have nothing to do with protectionism form effective barriers. Differing legislation on safety standards has been damaging the efficiency of the automobile industry for decades.

It's getting hot in here

So hot that I'm now revising with my shirt off. Have to put it back on now though, time to go and get some food.

When I return look forward to more on trade and a potted history of the Washington consensus.

Thank god for that

Jeff Pittman, future nobel laureate and current student has just sent me his frameworks for this. As every MBA student and Management Consultant knows you can't go wrong with a good framework.

Fear me exam, for I have a diagram!

Second one looks must more impressive. Right, back to week three.

Welcome to the online revision session. Can I pass Global Coparative Business in a single night?

Week Three : International Trade / GATT and the WTO

For this our questions are...

What were the main consequences for businesses of the Uruguay Round of the GATT?
Does the WTO enforce ‘free trade’?

OK. I don't remember this lecture at all. Not even a little bit. Wonder if I was there.

GATT was set up in 1947 as a temporary measure. One of it's chief goals was to facilitate the reduction of US tarriffs which were up to 100% on somce products and to keep tarriffs low thereafter. There were 23 founding members including such economic giants as Ceylon, Burma, Southern Rhodesia, Luxemburg, the Lebanon and France. Membership fluctuated (in 1949 it was down to 13 countries) but the trend was up. By the Uruguay round (86-94) there were 123 countries.

The basic rules of the GATT are as follows.

1. If you give one member country a break on tarriffs you give all member countries a break on tarriffs.
2. Once it's in your country you have to treat it like any other widget.

This last one is a problem since it makes it impossible to discriminate between dolphin / turtle friendly tuna and non-friendly tuna since according to the rules they're identical product. It's also worth noting that until 2001 when it joined the WTO China's MFN deal with the USA meant the US treated it as a member even though it wasn't.

Free trade or fair? There's a big difference between free trade and fair trade. With free trade things like dumping surpluses on foreign markets, states subsidising domestic industries and so on would be fine. Since the GATT and WTO try to stop this they're more interested in fair trade. But this tends to be fair to big nations with deep pockets.

Article 20 This is the bit that says when you can ignore the rules, and that's basically in time of emergency - to protect lives or the environment. It's the clause that's been used to break patents on AID's drugs. There are a few more get outs for developing countries as well - you can avoid playing by the rules if you've got a balance of payments crisis and you get much longer to implement tarriff reductions.

Importantly GATT doesn't rule out regional trade agreements, so NAFTA and the EU can lower tarriffs internally all they want without having to open the market to the rest of the WTO.

Dispute settlement in the WTO So you've caught Ruritania dumping Ruritanian Marshmallows onto your Ebonian Marshmallow Market, what can you do? Well first you've got to try and reach an agreement with Ruritania. If that fails things go to a panel of lawyers and judges. If you don't like the judges verdict you can go to the Appelate Body and what they say goes. Sadly at this stage there is no automatic punishment, but you are allowed to inflict your own.

Basically if you have a judgement in your favour you can start taxing the imports of the person who upset you as much as you like. This is supposed to go on a carousel method whereby you target their industries in turn. This is fine among nations of similar size, but imagine Bermuda trying to punish America like this - it's not going to work.

That said WTO rulings do tend to get stuck to, especially by the big powers. So far it's been remarkably robust.

Welcome to the online real time revision session

Week Two : Globalisation and it's causes

Sample questions for this week include

1. Is ‘globalization’ different from ‘international economic interdependence’?
2. What causes globalization?
3. Globalize or globalise?

OK, the basic argument here is between those who say that globalisation is nothing new and that we had similar levels of international trade in 1913, (33% of world GDP was trade before WWI buggered everything up) and those who say that a) actually we have got more and b)what we've got is qualitatively different in that it implies much deeper and more complex relationships between states and organisations.

Part of this argument is based around notions of convergence toward a single economic model. The argument says that one day we'll all be like America. Communism failed, European Social Democracy is in financial bother and anyone who wants to have a half way successful economy had better get with the program. Now I didn't do three years of history to fall for this kind of telelogical garbage. People said much the same about Japan in the 80's, Asia in the (pre crisis) 90's and Soviet Russia in the 50's. Anyway, China is too damn big and too damn different for this stuff to hold true.

Now for some figures. Outward Foreign Direct Investment by the USA in 2000 was $1.2trn, little old UK managed $900bn so we're not that far back. France and Germany clock up $500bn and $450bn respectively. This represents a six fold increase for the USA since 1980, but a tenfold one for the UK. For France its about twenty times what it was - for Germany its ten times. To put it another way we're all at it - at least all of us in the west (+Japan).

Here's a scary figure for proponents of US Hegemony. Since 1980 China's share of world production has gone from 3.4 to 12%. The US's share has been a stable 21%. The scary thing is they've only industrialised a fraction of their country. Other useful stats on how real this all is include the fact that 1/3rd of all international trade is intra-firm, that is multinational firms shipping stuff around inside their own organisations. A further 1/3rd is multinational firms selling stuff to each other.

On the other hand, globalisation isn't just about trade. It's about governing on a global scale. Responses to environmental pollution, terrorism, the drugs trade (which is equal to 8% of global trade) and arms dealing (80% of weapons are illegally held) all need to be global in nature. Forums for global government are starting to emerge and as the things that need governing go on getting global we either set up some kind of world government or get buried by them. That's probably over the top but states can no longer do this kind of thing by themselves. That said regionalism may be enough what with NAFTA and the EU.

Works for football doesn't it? You've got CONCACAF, UEFA and all the rest overseen by FIFA. Just a thought.

According to the lecture notes globalisation is caused either by technology, the increased cost of protectionism or the triumph of US neo-conservative ideology. We can probably disregard the last one as a short term blip. Technology has made communication cheaper and the global financial markets couldn't operate the way they do without it. Simply put crises develop too quickly and on too massive a scale for anyone to do anything about it. The costs of staying out argument is more convincing when you see that freight costs are down 70% since the 1970's. The explosion of foreign investment also makes been open to it much more attractive. (However China still regulates FDI heavily - manages to get a lot though)

Welcome to the online real time revision session

Reasons to be cheerful

One : I went to all but one of the lectures
Two : I went to all Stiglitz' lectures when he visited
Three : I can always resort to babbling about Marxism just like when I was an undergraduate

hmm, only two reasons then

Welcome to the online real time revision session

Week One : Introduction to International Political Economy

Big shout out to Andreas Rother for his excellent revision notes. Share and share alike all you b-school people.

Right, following WWII a three legged system was set up to prevent a repeat of the great depression. The three legs were trade, exhange rates and money. Each was the domain of a specific institution. The system was created at the Bretton Woods conference and much of it was the brainchild of John Meynard Keynes. This is important because it means the entire system is predicated on Keynesian lines, namely markets are not efficient and concerted government action at the macro level is needed to correct / prevent market failures.

The GATT was not what was originally planned. Keynes had wanted an international board of trade, but this was watered down to a treaty by the US congress. The GATT never got to be more than a rich man's club with 50 members at its peak and high criteria required for any state joining. GATT never included anything about agriculture which had terrible consequences for the third world.

The IMF was set up to manage a set of fixed exchange rates. A global system of currency pegs was meant to ensure stability. If a country developed a short term balance of payments problem the IMF could intervene with emergency loans. In exchange for these loans the IMF could impose conditions intended to prevent the problem recurring.

The World Bank started life as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development which could raise money cheaply due to it's excellent credit rating and use this money to finance the projects needed to rebuild Europe. It was effectively one big Keynesian investment vehicle intended to inflate economies by injecting investment. In the event it didn't do much in Europe as fear of democratic communism saw the Marshall plan introduced. For want of something else to do the World Bank turned its attention to the developing world.

Changes to the system
As ever events conspired to send the plans of the great and good astray. The cold war led to the institutions listed above being pushed into the front line to defend capitalism. The World Bank and IMF ended up making loans to third world dictatorships to prevent them turning to the soviet bloc. No-one seriously expected this money to end up anywhere other than in swiss bank accounts and the pockets of arms dealers. Such 'odious debt' is now contentious - surely we can't expect people to repay this?

More importantly by the end of the 1960's Vietnam and Johnson's social policies which had been financed by printing money meant the USA could no longer stay inside the fixed currency regime and in 1971 the US suspended convertibility. In 1973 OPEC delivered the mother of all supply side shocks to the western economy and things were looking rough. Industrialised nations led a round of 'new protectionism' as tarriffs were raised and exclusive deals like the Multi-Fibre Agreement (no cheap cotton here thankyou) were signed.

Realising that this was going to be very bad for them indeed the developing world tried to form something called the New International Economic Order, but this effort failed.

By the early 80's the GATT was in ruins, the IMF redundant and the world bank tainted by association with dubious regimes. Then Mexico nearly went bankrupt and everything changed again...

In 1982 Mexico was hit by the US decision to raise interest rates. Trade collapsed and US banks realised that Mexico was about to default on a lot of debt - potentially triggering a global financial crisis. The IMF intervened with a big bail out and imposed strict controls on Mexico. This and future interventions in Brazil and other countries saw the emergence of the Washington Consensus. (see future notes on week 4)

In the 1990's the Washington Consensus which had worked well (ok, maybe just worked) in Latin America was applied to Russia, East Asia and Africa. It didn't work.

In 1995 the GATT was incorporated into the much bigger and much more pluralist Word Trade Organisation. This has much broader membership and is better for developing countries (see future notes on week 3)

Triage

Ed Yourdon's one word advice for project management is going to be handy here.

What we're trying to learn

Here's the rubric from the reading list.

Globalization describes a transformation in the world economy. As economies become more interdependent and more sensitive to global markets, governments and corporations face a wider and more complex set of opportunities and challenges. This course investigates the phenomenon of globalization, its impact and the choices and dilemmas posed for governance at the level of the corporation, the government and the world economy. The approach and method of the course is international political economy—a branch of international relations which applies the tools of political science and economic theories of institutions to explain what drives and explains events in the world economy. Throughout the course there is an alternating attention given to industrialized economies and relations among them, and to emerging market and developing economies and their role and prospects in the global economy.

This course, unlike many other business school courses on international business, does not concern itself with the internal administration of the multinational enterprise. It focuses instead on the external institutional, regulatory and political environment in which firms conduct their business across national borders. The course begins with an introduction to international political economy, the core questions it addresses in respect of globalization and the tools of analysis deployed to answer those questions. Week 2 then looks specifically at globalization: what it is, what drives globalization, and what this means practically for trade, finance and public policy in the world economy. Week 3 focuses on the issue of international trade and explores how governments and other interested groups negotiate trade rules and the opening up of trade markets and with what implications. Weeks 4 and 5 examine the pressures and problems for policy convergence in a globalizing world economy, shifting the focus of the course to the emerging and developing economies. In particular, the rise of the Washington consensus is charted and its impact on several economies is explored in week 4 and in a sequel lecture in week 5 the rewriting or demise of the Washington consensus is examined. In week 6 the course turns to examine investment and the politics, trends and regulatory environment within which global investors operate. Week 7 explores in greater detail the particular impact and challenges raised for corporations by NGOs and the new ‘Global civil society’ revolution. In the final week of the course global economic governance and accountability are examined along with the implications of current ideas for reforming the management of the world economy.

That's what we've got to get through. I've decided to skip the stuff on NGO's as we did a lot of that in Corporate Responsibility and I can bluff my way through a short question on it. Stuff I need to learn includes the latin American crises in the 80's, the structure of the WTO, World Bank and IMF. I've also decided to brush up on Foreign Direct Investment.

Public revision experiment

OK, I've got an exam tomorrow on Global Comparitive Business, but a combination of coursework, apathy, Summer Project distractions and assorted online gubbins has distracted me to the point that I am now in something approaching trouble. Why? because I haven't done enough revision.

Therefore I will be revising online, all night or at least until my will power gives out. If I pass (and we won't find out for a month or so) you can assume that everything you need to know on the subject is here. OK?

Are you a future student?

By my reckoning about 10% of next years MBA class have found their way to this site and sent me an email. If you are part of that class or know anyone who is please point them in this direction, I'm happy to answer questions.

I'm also trying to improve the quality of the information which reaches people before they get here and have floated a few ideas with the schools admin. If you've got thoughts on this, can point me to some best practice elsewhere or anything else let me know. To get in touch just click this link

Delayed blogging

I forgot to link to this magnificent comic when I found it. Check out the Crab City Series from Goats.com . Here's a sample

"I'm on a case, Knowledgeable Pete. The kind of case that takes your very soul and puts it in a tiny box and then puts a hamster on top of that box. And that hamster never moves, Pete. The hamster never moves again."

Crisis Averted

4950 words later, (plus footnotes) and I've got my leadership essay ready to hand in. That leaves tonight or tomorrow (probably tonight) to sort out the groupwork and then two whole days to revise. It's not a huge amount of time, but it's not nothing either.

If anyone feels advertising withdrawl

Here's a little gimmick that shows the adverts which Google would serve here if I carried advertising via their blogspot hosting services.

Click for Adverts

Pretty accurate huh? Link courtesy of Adsense

First ever essay crisis

Essay crises are traditional for Oxford undergraduates. Indeed the ability to knock out 2000 words on any subject in less than three hours, starting at two in the morning and having done no preparation is one of the main qualifications for studying here. Showing a woeful disregard for tradition I got through my entire undergraduate period without ever having one of these.

I may be catching up for lost time this week. A big old piece on leadership to write, a group essay to assemble and an exam to revise for. Global and Comparative business is the course that deals with stuff like the IMF and World Bank. It's one of the most interesting courses I've been to, and now it's going to be the one I'm least well prepared for come exams.

More from Baghdad

What do you do when you are in a car with someone who asks you about the best place to hide a hand grenade? With reality crashing in through the windows Salaam Pax doesn't have much time for US policy these days.

Personally I'm surprised the whole having his street shelled by a US tank didn't radicalise him more.

The last lecture

I'm currently in the last lecture I expect to take as an MBA student. It's on leadership, leaderless groups and Al-Quaeda. Its odd to think that I've now been taught pretty much everything I'm going to be taught. From now on, I teach myself and learn from others. A week of exams (well one exam) assignment writing, an eight week project, then the final exams and I'm finished.

Its a very odd feeling. The real world is suddenly feeling very close indeed.

Beckham sold for £25m?

Following my how not to negotiate post (below) you could be excused for thinking that I might be a little embarrassed that Man Utd got £25m for Beckham after all. However as ever in the crazy world of football finance all is not as it seems. The headline figure is £25m but this is split into two chunks, part compulsary and part dependent on performance in the champions league.

So, its a £18m deal with a £7m bonus clause. Furthermore the £18m is spread over four years - with about £7m coming in here. The Guardian has the lowdown on all this.

Now this isn't all bad news, Man U will have no problem borrowing against their future income. But if we imagine the deal is being paid in five equal chunks with two of them coming together at the start and you discount at 10% the actual value is...

Year 1 : 7.2m
Year 2 : 3.24m
Year 3 : 2.98m
Year 4 : 2.7m

Or about £16m plus the possible bonus'. Wonder what's going to happen to the share price when the markets open.

If you're wondering why I've developed this sudden obsession with Beckham it's not because I'm a Man U fan - quite the opposite. It's because I've just finished a project on Beckham as a brand, how you might value him and what he might be worth. I suspect that Real have got a bargain, but that's all going to depend on the clauses about using the Beckham image rather than whether he's a £25m footballer. (he's certainly a £16m one)

Skeletons in closets

Or Arabs in cages, its all the same. Lock someone away long enough and even the world's media stops caring. Remember when this was front page news? No-one from CNN or Fox is covering this one. Once upon a time finding out what was going on in Guatanamo bay was all the news cared about - now its old hat.

I actually supported the war in Afghanistan (unlike the one in Iraq) but I sure don't support this.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world

LT-Smash is somewhere in a desert in Iraq, although from some of his recent posts he seems to have moved nearer to civilisation lately. I think he's bored.

He's also been thinking, which is interesting cause it gives the rest of us the chance to see what's going on inside a US soldiers head. As far as this US soldier goes it seems to be pretty sophisticated.

How not to negotiate

As the Beckham transfer saga drags on one thing is becoming clear. Manchester United are going to get far less than they could have done had they negotiated right. A few months ago a figure of £38m was doing the rounds as Beckham's likely price. This was the price Real Madrid would have to pay to get Manchester United to release a star player they were committed to keeping.

However Manchester United were not planning on keeping Beckham. Since extending his contract which expires in two years would entail handing out a multi-million pay rise and involve a signing fee that wasn't an option. Especially if Beckham wants to leave himself, letting his contract expire makes him a free agent and he could effectively name his price in the transfer market so instead of paying Manchester United £38m Madrid or someone else would have found themselves paying a healthy share of that money direct to Beckham. Much as they did when they signed Steve McMannaman from Liverpool as a free agent.

Things went wrong when Man U accepted a bid from Barcelona of £25m. Now they must have known that David Beckham was not about to move to Barcelona, since they're not in the Champions League and this season they failed to mount a half way serious challenge for the Spanish title. Not a suitable destination for the world's most glamourous footballer. Accepting the bid made it possible for Beckham to announce that he felt betrayed and make his eventual exit inevitable.

In theory other bidders like Milan or Juventus should be willing to bid, but it seems that either a lack of funds or the fact that they simply don't want Beckham means they're not going to. Madrid are now in the enviable position of being able to force the price down to rock bottom levels - knowing that Manchester will have to accept it. So from £38m to £25m to an eventual fee of £15m plus a player or two? Its probably even worse than this since transfer fees tend to be over-reported and paid in installments, the real value of the transfer could end up being very small indeed.

Now that's good business

Today's brand strategy class included some information about an absolutely fantastic project undertaken by Hindustan Lever Ltd, the Indian arm of Unilever. Most of the information is summarised here, but I love the way the company went out and created a market by doing things differently and exploiting the way things were rather than throwing their hands up and saying 'there is no decent distribution system for Indian villages, lets stick to the cities.'

When I grow up I want to do stuff like this.

Arghh doublethink

I'm not sure my head can cope with this. Rewriting history while accusing others of doing the same. One day someone will write a fantastic book about how the truth about the war (whatever that was) was negotiated between the media, politicians, armies, pressure groups and governments.

Future plans

Over the summer I plan to come up with a design for whatever the next blog will be which should keep me occupied. In the meantime I'll just have to feel bad that my skills don't extend to producing animation as good as this

Samurai Lapin
Parts 2 and 3.

Yes, that's rabbit in French.

Ain't no free riding in this town

Free riding is the phenomenon whereby someone in a study group doesn't pull their weight, and as I understand it it happens at pretty much every business school. The only way to deal with it is for the students who are on the recieving end to get stroppy and cause problems. The ultimate sanction of taking someones' name off a piece of work is so drastic no one ever uses it.

Following a discussion with the course director (who is an economist and felt that some kind of market mechanism would be sufficient to fix this) Maria and I came up with the following :-

At the end of each term (but before any marks are known) all studygroup members submit anonymous marks out of 10 for each of their study group colleagues.

Those students in the bottom 20% are then formed into studygroups by themselves with the normal process being applied to everyone else.

You could set a minimum score for avoiding this, so if the whole class performs well no one need suffer.

The incentive would be to contribute as otherwise next term you would be guaranteed to find yourself in a group of unco-operative free riders. Worse, while it might not be announced which group is which the class is pretty quickly going to work out who comprise the 'plague ship' making finding NBD and SBP teams difficult for them.

Good news is that this proposal is going forward for consideration in some form and may be applied to next years students. If anyone knows of any similar systems at other business schools or has comments on this idea I'd love to hear about them.

Made me laugh

Well the job offers are starting to come in for folks here at SBS. I'm not saying the markets easy or anything but there are definitely more people who know where they're going and what they're doing than before. Of course that doesn't include me...

So I've decided to try this.

To Whom It May Concern:

Thank you for your letter of [date of the rejection letter]. After
careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept
your refusal to offer me employment at this time.

This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually
large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising
field of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals.

Despite [Name of the Company]'s outstanding qualifications and previous
experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not
meet with my current needs.

Therefore, I will initiate employment with your firm immediately. I
look forward to working with you. Best of luck in rejecting future
candidates.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]

Places to be

Tim is at a very interesting conference in Boston about blogs and what they can and can't do, and a bunch of other stuff I'm sure. Wish I was, work here is starting to drive me nuts, although a half hour of sending email and trying to organise seems to have seen off lunchtimes massive frustration attack.

One big effort over the weekend and the end will be in sight I think. Oh, and the idea to try and set up some blog related thingumy for next years class seems to be a goer. Might take a little longer than I thought though. Important point is one Tim makes on his blog, if the school does this it can't control it. You only have to see the strings once and a puppet show will never look the same again.

Finally, Tony has mailed to say that the Oxford brand is playing much better for him in the US than it idid in Europe. Which is nice.

More Baghdad Blogs

G, of dear Raed fame now has a blog of his own. Wonder if the Guardian are going to give him a column too?

Bursting the blogobubble (version 0.1)

Aside from being the kind of right wing whiner who makes me come out all revolutionary Instapundit (better known as Glenn Reynolds) is very very very wrong about blogs. He, along with a few others are quietly crowing that it was their blogs which led to the resignation of Howell Raines at the NY Times.

Now much as I'd like to think I could knock out a few killer headlines and demolish Piers Morgan, Kelvin Mckensie and proably the uber editor Murdoch himself I'm pretty sure I can't. I'm pretty sure this didn't happen to Raines either, especially as the story that did for him began as an exclusive produced by a freelance journalist. Now, the story linked above has a few interesting elements that point to why weblogs aren't about to revolutionise anything... The reporter was a professional, paid to write and paid to research, he checked his facts and conducted interviews. More importantly he's a freelance reporter in New York, ten to one the story was an inside tip off or written as a favour to push a grudge. The equivalent of a journalist ringing up Private Eye in the UK to dish out some gossip on the guy who just scooped him / spilled his pint / nicked his bird.

The semi-professional bloggers who reported on this were doing nothing more than playing pundit, rehashing, reworking and commentating on the story, but not actually adding anything to it.

I've already written about how the blogosphere (blogobubble?) overhyped it's own relevance to the war in Iraq and without wanting to sound like a luddite I think a few deep breaths might be necessary before we kill traditional media. (what, again - that's soooo 1999).

More on this later.

Amsterdam, part one

This is getting blogged in chunks, it's late and I'm busy. However I should take the time to tell you all about Boom Chicago, cause otherwise you might go to Amsterdam and not go to see them - which would be a shame. If anyone reading this has seen 'Who's line is it anyway' it was a bit like that - a group of comediens improvising around things suggested by the audience. Unlike Who's Line there was a theme running through the whole show, the full title of which was 'Boom Chicago Saves The World (sorry about the mess), and half the scenes were scripted rather than pure improvisations.

Most of the show revolved around things Boom Chicago needed to save the world from. George Dubya and Tony featured heavily, but some of the best stuff was less political. Boom Chicago saves the world from American/Pop/whatever Idol was fantastic as was the mobile phone sketch. I'd go on, but it'll only be different if you go, whichI suggest you do.

Doh!

Tony has just done this. Which makes me feel bad for not having thought of it myself. Fear not, I shall ensure that one is called ito existance for next terms MBA class. Probably tomorrow.

Back from Amsterdam

Just back from Amsterdam and a weekend of barbeque, beer and improvised comedy. More later today.

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...