Because I'm worth it

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

"L'Oreal believe in MBA's"

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

L'Oreal, worth a CV?

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

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

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

Much to talk about

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

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

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

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

Right, time to go and play football.

Too much too young!

Manic is such a nice guy he gives money to young offenders, and now he wants your help. Michael Carroll needs more money!

And I thought I was the first

Seems this whole mba blog for Oxford thing has been done before...

Surfing for fun

Right, we've had a lecture cancelled today due to the tutor being ill, so its time to do something I have't done in a while and wander the web randomly.

First up, whatever happened to peace love and understanding? America's youth are the new war generation

I first heard of Corporate Storytelling just before I left work, if I was still there I'd be trying to sell it, and playing with enterprise blogs. It's nice when people aren't scared of being obviously acedemic at work.

Pixie dust keeps Moores law intact for a few more years

I'm more worried than usual about Rageboy's state of mind. Although since I've never met him I'm only really worried that I won't have such a convenient source of provocative song lyrics anymore.

If I read Phill Wolff regulary the people and organisations class will be even easier. Must build that MBA resource section, blogs are a fantastic source of ideas and more importantly quality critical discussion. All CEO's should be forced to blog...

Radio 5 had a long report on Zimbabwe this morning. Seems Muagabe's wholesale theft under the banner of land reform has created a famine as farms go untended. The result, he's trying to endure aid only goes to areas that support him, millions face death. One thing about business school, its easy to stop reading the news.

Oh, this weekend the girls on our course have organised a trip to have a 'post modern feminist conversation' in the pub, apparantly they can't do this with men around. Perhaps they should invite Terrifica to make sure they don't fall prey to any evil men while they're at it. No prizes for guessing which nations women came up with the idea...

Stepping into the light

This week has been the thoughest yet. All our lecturers on Monday and Tuesday commented on how tired the class looked. I think its fifth week blues, ok, its only fourth week, but we started a week sooner than most students so Oxford's traditional depression came early. Today though, after days of late nights and barely understood lectures I found myself in sight of the end. I have one lot of reading to do for tomorrow's finance class and I'm back on top of the work. Hardly bears thinking about.

So, what to do with the weekend? well if I can have a relaxed, productive weekend (just 10-12 hours work) I reckon I'll be set fair for next week... Now though I'm going to answser all those emails I've been ignoring since Saturday...

Update Adam is knackered too, and so is Adrian. I think we're all starting to feel the pace. (Although Adrian's had more practice at this than Adam and I)

Born under a bad sign with a blue moon in your eyes

The First Presbyterian Church of Elvis the Divine rolled into Cowley last night to bring the gospel message to the sinners of East Oxford through the only medium they truly understand, sweet country acid house music. Headed up by Larry Love, ably supported by the very Reverand D Wayne Love and dressed like something out of a Garth Ennis novel the Alabama 3 (all 8 of them) set about shaking the town to its very roots.

Sadly though the Alabama 3 aren't quite the revivalist experience you'd hope for, more a pub band with a good joke who got lucky; and the new stuff isn't a patch on the Exile on Cold Harbour Lane material. (although the Devil went down to Ibiza is a fine name for a song). Still, in Woke up this Morning, Mao Tse Tung said and U Dont Dance 2 Techno they had the material to keep the crowd happy and there was plenty to like. You just get this nagging feeling that on the right night and with a little more effort they could be so much better.

Economist offer MBA Advice

The Economist have produced an online special about MBA's which contains loads of useful background for anyone thinking of taking an MBA. It also contains a piece on Jeffrey Pfeffer who has come to the conclusion that MBA's aren't worth very much.

Now this is an opinion you can hear in any bar, but Pfeffer isn't some tanked up middle manager (well he might be but...) he's a professor at Stanford and something of an expert on working practices. So expert in fact that his book 'The Human Equation' is forming the bedrock of my people and organisations course. His big argument is that MBA's don't seem to progress faster in their careers than other non MBA executives. Evidence from this is drawn mostly from consultancies and banks who conduct internal surveys about career progress.

Now I've not read the full piece on account of it being available only in a shiny new journal who presumably wanted a nice controversial piece to get themselves some press when they launched, but if that's the best evidence he's got I don't buy it. You see, if you walk out of business school and into Accentus or KPMG, or Goldman Sachs you're walking away from most of what you were taught. Your new found knowledge of marketing and brands isn't going to help you broker mergers anymore than your financial insight is going to help you design a new ERP system for someone. The best place to learn to be a consultant is in a consultancy and the best place to learn to be a banker is in a bank...

So what am I doing here? Well there are a bunch of answers, I could be learning to be an entrpreneur which is something I'd rather not learn through trial and error. I could be learning to be a CEO which will require an understanding of all of a company and a load of disciplines, something It'll take decades to learn through hands on experience. You see the point I'm making (badly) is that this is a generalist subject and most graduates then waste their breadth of education by plunging into a narrow career path where breadth of vision and understanding comes a distant second to being very good at whatever it is you spend 80% of your time doing.

But like I said earlier. I didn't come here to walk into a mediocre job at a big five consultancy or a big desk in a large bank. Of course, I'm still not sure what it is I am trying to learn but there you go...

Finance gets ridiculous

Only at Oxford would they expect you to get your head round three nobel prize winning theories about finance in a single lecture. Did I succeed? Of course not, that's why I'm about to spend most of the weekend with a finance text book.

Strategy gets serious

After last weeks moaning about strategy Thursday was a much needed restoration of faith. The course is being taught by two professors and in place of last weeks reductionist Porter view of the world which gets everything onto one diagram so you can sell it to time pressed managers came some rather more sophisticated models. David Faulkner introduced us to consumer and producer matrices, which is nice because he came up with the things in the first place and they're damn complicated.

It was also the most 'oxford' lecture I've been to so far. He started by admitting he was likely to forget to cold call, and in any case couldn't read the names of people at the back of the class so what would be the point? Then we got a clearly constructed lecture that cruised along at pace and left us all with the impression that an awful lot of knowledge had just been dumped directly into our heads. Good stuff, especially as strategy is the subject I'm most interested in.

Changes at Amazon

Adam has pointed out the new Supertabs at Amazon. First reaction, "Oh my god, yet more really bad invasive advertising". Then I realised it wasn't, I've just developed a knee jerk reaction that assumes any large logo on a screen has been put there to annoy users in the name of advertising. This I quite like, it doesn't break the medium, it tells me where I am and it makes sense.

So does Amazon's creation of virtual 'concessions' selling other people's products to their own audience, smart man that Bezos guy.

Oh my god my head hurts

Hadn't previously realised just how much alcohol could be imbibed in the name of Halloween. Fortunately no lectures for me today. I feel a quiet Friday night coming on.

Hitching a ride on the cluetrain

Way back in the day it was suggested that markets were conversations. So radical was this idea that the authors nailed their 95 theses to the newborn world wide web and invited the world to talk to them. Fortunately they did this at a time when such ideas were fashionable - if not understood - and so avoided the brutal execution that may have been their fate in earlier times. Instead they were encouraged to inscribe their ideas on the carcasses of millions of dead trees. Rather surprisingly people read it. I wasn't one of them - after reading the theses I was far too busy talking.

All of which is a long way of introducing the following

$200 000 gets you 40 million banner impressions * 0.2% conversion rate = 80 000 page impressions

Leaving aside the difficulty of finding 40m page impressions to put your banners on, a place that will sell at $5 per thousand or a banner that will perform as well as a 0.2% click through rate $200 000 is still a lot of money. A great deal more money in fact than Nick from Magdalen could have raised to publicise his views on digital music. One conversation on Slashdot though and he's got 80 000 people wandering around his website, every last one of them interested in the same subjects he is. So the moral of this little story is that if you're a marketeer looking to take out some online advertising, THINK, would it be easier to just say something your audience is interested in hearing?

Anyone would think there was something in this conversation thing.

Of course the chaps with the theses weren't the only ones

Soul of a new institution

Well, its been an interesting few days, what with being on the edges of a Slashdotting and right in the middle of an NTK'ing - traffic soaring to a healthy 3000 visitors on Sunday. I hope you all found it interesting. Anyway, three days is plenty long enough without a comment, so back to the blogging...

Today was trundling along quite nicely, but at lunchtime a theme emerged. The theme was "What is Said Business School all about?" and all and sundry had opinions. Those of us who know a bit about other business schools quickly worked out that whatever we're about we're different. The class profile here is much less traditional, fewer investment bankers, consultants and accountants, more marketeers, salesmen, entrepreneurs and random mavericks. We're also I think much more international than most business schools, 143 people and 31 nationalities is good going. Other folk pointed out that life here is both more academic (more whys and less whats when it comes to questions) while others pointed to the new / summer business projects as evidence that we're supposed to be practical, hands on and entrpreneurial.

The truth is of course that we don't know. When I came here for interview I said that I wanted a chance to make my mark on a young school, and I very much think that the future identity of SBS is up for grabs. The theme continued into our financial accounting class when our professor led a discussion of why we actually study financial reports. It's about being good citizens he said, never mind when you're a CEO what you need to take away from here is an understanding of where all these numbers come from and what they mean, since they have so large an impact on the world that not to understand them would render you ignorant. Too few people - even analysts - actually know what the numbers mean, so its important that we learn to develop our critical faculties and understanding of what lies behind them. Oxford it seems wants to develop some higher purpose for its business school, and that's fine with me.

Update Seems the debate got Registered too, must be the most coverage the Union's had in years. Wonder if they've even noticed.

Talkin' 'bout my g g g generation

"This house believes that 'the free music mentality' is a threat to the future of music", was tonights' debate at the Oxford Union. Now somewhere along the line I'd got all excited about the prospect of seeing Chuck D and Bruce Dickinson in some kind of celebrity death match showdown over digital music. You know, The Trooper vs Terminator X or something, but never mind, they both cancelled, leaving us with a number of record industry bigwigs to do the talking on both sides. Here's a quick rundown of the speakers...

In reverse order..
Ronnie Gurr, Founder of Richard Branson's V2 label (Against)
Jay Berman, President of the Federation of Phonographic Industries (For)
Doug D'arcy, Chrysalis (Against)
Chris Wright, Chairman, Chrysalis Media (For)
Nick King President of Nielsen Entertainment (Against)
Hilary Rosen, Chairman and CEO of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) (For)
Will Harris, Student, Keble College, (Against)
Nick Pacheco, Student, Christchurch College (For)

Now, my original plan was to assemble some kind of coherent summary of the whole debate, notes about each speakers performance and so on. However I forgot to take a notepad, and to be honest, most of what was said has already been said plenty of times. For the record though Nick Pacheco may have come second in some world debating contest but until he learns to speak slowly, breathe between sentences and deliver his arguments in a manner that makes them somehow listenable he's never going to come first.

Fortunately the industry figures were up to snuff, presumably years in business provides an ability to talk that the Oxford tutorial system hasn't quite replicated yet and they were clear and cogent across the board. Both sides wasted no time in proving that they'd heard of Napster, Morpheus, Gnutella and co, but the technical debate got no further than that. Indeed aside from Hilary Rosen's insistance that no copy protected CD has been issued in America there was no desire to talk - or even mention tech in anything but the most general terms. So, what did they talk about?

On the for side was an impassioned plea to spare the music business, after all - without them who would find, distribute and publish the new music? Do we know, we were asked, just how long record companies back artists? It could be years, three, maybe four albums before they turn a profit, and as was quite sensibly pointed out, just because you can make money in the music business doesn't mean you can't lose it. I should say that I believe these people when they say they care about music, that much did come through. Its easy to say that the music industry is what pays their wages, but I'm pretty sure that at some level they believe that what they're doing is right. They have of course made huge emotional, financial and personal investments in the companies they run. You'd be surprised if they hadn't, but one or two cynics may have realised that at least to the managers (if not the shareholders) its not all about the money.

Against the motion was a combination of lambasting the industry for stifling creativity, foisting pop-stars, pop-idol and co onto the unsuspecting public, profiteering at the expense of the artists and - one of the more common words of the evening - 'incompetence'. It seems pretty clear that there is some commercial interest in embracing new ideas - maybe not at the level of the big five, but music distribution is on the agenda at some places. Doug D'arcy of Chrysalis even made a plea for a return to the 60's when musicians had to choose between playing free gigs (he assured us they wanted to) and playing paid gigs (they too had to pay the man...). The suggestion was a simple one, copy protection for those who want it, and the right to distribute for those who don't.

Now the last two speakers get their own write up - cause they were worth it.

Jay Berman is one of those old American businessmen who exude charisma just by opening their mouths. Make no mistake, the guy may have known he was on a losing side but he was a damn fine speaker. He didn't say much, probably the shortest speech of the night, and when he pointed out that everything that could be said had pretty much been said you got the feeling he wasn't so much talking about the night - as the last few years. He's heard it all and he's standing his ground, period. His one message though was this

"Each generation has had their own music. For your generation it's filesharing. And I think thats a pretty terrible thing"

I may be misquoting slightly, but thats the sentiment, we're going to be defined by our theft of intellectual property. It was powerful stuff, delivered with plenty of bombast, but to the audience it was just be a sign of how far the music industry has gone from its roots. This years kids? they're not cool anymore.

Ronnie Gurr summed up against with a pretty long speech, and while he took his time getting started (a mild scottish mumble of an accent didn't help the first minute or so) he turned it round in the end. Its all about the "Whats that?!" moment he said. That point where you hear a tune and have to have it. He said nice things, he told us we weren't criminals for downloading music and he had enough command of the evidence to make his case well. He also had the ace in his sleeve, Howard Berman's bill to legitimise hacking by copyright holders and the massive donations he's recieved from the music industry. 'Pure coincidence' he assured us. Given that Berman had opened by telling us that "the music industry never hacked anyones computer" the introduction of the evidence that it was just waiting till it could purchase the required legislation pretty much ended the debate.

There was a final kick of defiance as Ronnie Gurr summed up with what was one too many assaults on the record industry's management, 'personal and offensive' was the gist of what Chris Wright was trying to say before some student shouted him down on a point of order. It didn't matter, most of the audience had gone to the bar, the result had been decided before the debate started, and whatever Bruce and Chuck had done with their evening off, they probably weren't regretting it.

Further coverage...
Need to Know
Nick at Magdalen

Always end with a quote

Imagine no possesions,
I wonder if you can,
No need for greed or hunger,
A brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

Speak MBA

Strategy class today. Now I don't have too much of a problem with what we're being taught - Porters Five Forces model, Levett's Customer Defined Markets, this kind of thing. The main thrust of it all is the creation of sustainable competitive advantage which is pretty much the unchallenged paradigm within which strategy discussion takes place - a robust enough concept on which to build a discipline. All in all, what you'd expect.

However a few things came out today which I was less happy about. One was the notion that we should develop our rhetorical skills so we can deploy and use these theories on future potential clients. The phrase for this? "Learn to Speak MBA" Strategy is after all open to a lot of interpretation and its going to be a tough sell. Well, OK, rhetoric is an important part of any non-scientific subject. But to suggest that these theories can be presented as nothing more than temporary con-tricks, fashionable ideas that can be manipulated to win business or alter stock prices is crass. What we need is to be provided with an intellectual model within which we can evaluate, criticise and create theories, and if the end result is theories that are difficult to apply or understand well so be it. You don't find sociologists and historians trying to explain capitalism with single powerpoint slides.

At the end of the day though the market in strategy is messing up not just implementation (probably unavoidable) but the teaching of the subject. If things are complex or demanding then tell me so and give me the tools to understand them. Don't fob me off with a simplified version and an assurance that combined with a little rhetorical flourish this is all I'll need to make my way in the world. I don't want to know when an idea is fashionable, I want to know when an idea is right.

An American Dream?!

Yesterday was People and Organisations, which I pretty much think of as the class on how to make people happy and productive, or at least productive (and most enlightened theory seems to say that happy people are productive). Anyway, we had a discussion of Nordstrom's labour difficulties which opened with the rather theatrical question :-

"Is Nordstrom the American Dream or the American Nightmare"

and about hallf the class said dream. Now, maybe its my left leaning upbringing, but in the late 80's there was a culture of systematic employee abuse by middle management at Nordstrom. Can bloggers be sued? I'll say it again "there was a culture of systematic employee abuse by middle management at Nordstrom". Now frankly once you've got that I don't care about Earnings Per Share, or whether some employees had massive opportunities to earn, because the only way to get them was to trample over the rest of the labour force.

Fortunately in this case the courts agreed with me, but I do wonder. Do some of my classmates think Nordstrom's only mistake was to get caught?

In other news

Quick roundup. This Thursday I'm planning on going to see Chuck D and Bruce Dickinson duke it out at the Oxford Union over whether digital music and file swapping a la Napster is a good thing. For a number of reasons I'm getting seriously interested in this - and much as I like Maiden, I'm coming down with Chuck D on this one, either the record companies get with the program or its welcome to the terrordome...

Todays recommended reading is this, on technology, progress and economic revival. It's also the best treatment of the now hackneyed 'internet as railroad' analogy that first emerged sometime last year.

Food at the business school continues to be good stuff. Don't remember getting served chilli prawns and linguini when I was an undergraduate. And last week we had polish day in the cafeteria - complete with shots of Vodka (no wonder I can't remember the finance lecture).

Finally >Jenny Brown thinks I'm an OK MBA. I'm guessing this is progress - certainly makes me feel a little better about having crashed her blog with random comments...

And just when are you going to do your revision?

That was the challenge from our revision professor for finance. As he put it, most of us sat through last weeks lecture thinking, this is cool, I understand this, no worries. So today he gave us a pop quiz. What is the meaning of accrual? How much dividend can a company legally pay? And while we kind of knew the answers we weren't providing the word perfect exam standard answers we're going to need. Revision required - starting tonight. You see we've got eight weeks of lectures - then the exams, no break, no chance to write notes. You know it then - or you fail.

CV Writing, ludicrous laws and ambition

We've been working on our one page CV's this week. Apparently there is a standard, one page CV format that all MBA recruiters will expect to recieve our CV in. On Friday we had an hour brief on this format, half an hour of which came down to whining. Turns out that in the US firms can be sued for asking about your age, race or origin. It also turns out that firms are now so paranoid about this that they will turn down any CV applications that might provide them with this evidence, so the Americans on the course were worried that the schools file of MBA CV's might be binned by US firms as just too damn revealing.

I'd like to start by saying that this is pathetic, on behalf of the firms, the overblown political correctness that got to this situation and an entire culture that thinks the courts are the answer to anything. One day someone will work out how much damage lawyers do to the American economy, they may even notice how dumb this stuff is. Anyway, it might be a good point and it might be worth changing the CV's but it wasn't worth thirty minutes of tarting about.

The real point though is this. Those of us with MBA's are supposed to be special. We're supposed to be achievers, we're supposed to be the ones who are going to make things happen in the next twenty years. We are not supposed to be sending STANDARD CVs to the USUAL recruiters, to get the SAME jobs that everyone else has. I do not want to be in Investment Banking, Management Consultancy, Finance, Strategic Consultancy or any of this other hum drum boring crap. I want to **do** something, build a brand, found a company, launch an idea, develop a product. I want to contribute, and when I need a financier, an investment banker, a management consultant or some strategic guidance these folks can damn well realise that they're working for me. (even if they are making ten times as much money)

The only famous consultants are the ones with their names over the door.