Learning through humour

Its amazing what a few jokes can do. I've just got back from football practice and as we waited for people to turn up we managed to make jokes about normal distributions, bell curves, and decision making bias'. That seems to me to suggest that people (me included) are starting to feel comfortable with some of the stuff we've been taught. Comfortable enough to play with the ideas, kick them around and use them as joke fodder.

On the other hand I've now had three different lecturers tell *exactly* the same joke. I'm going to repeat it here so you can use it to impress your friends, or bluff your way in executive circles.

"Milton Friedman and his wife are walking down the street when they see a ten dollar bill lying on the pavement. Milton walks straight by, his wife asks "why didn't you pick that up?" he replies "Its fake, if it was real the market would have picked it up"

No wonder we're trying to invent our own jokes.

First week survived

Six three hour lectures, assorted extra classes and workshops, one written submission (not quite finished but under control) and I may have got through the week in one piece. I now believe I can pass this course, not the same as saying that I will, and there's this big caveat called 'Finance 1' that needs to be bolted on to that but we're getting there. If only my brain would work today, aside from a few hours on the case study today has been an exercise in trying to focus. Must concentrate, must work, must not burn out.... Must do stuff...

Plus points, study group working well. When your academic fate is in the hands of five total strangers it helps when they turn out to know their stuff. Also helps when they cease being strangers and start being friends. Which is a point, I've been with this class two weeks, and already its starting to feel friendly. Not just folks being nice to each other, but genuine friends type stuff. This is a good thing.

Targetted

Yahoo have worked out I'm on broadband. I'm now getting even more annoying adverts. Todays number one intrusive media annoyance - Chevrolet. One more time for those who slept through the last couple of years

THE WEB IS NOT LIKE TELEVISION

And the beat goes on

Day 4 and I'm starting to get tired. Get up, go to school, lectures. Go home, read, work. Tomorrow is Friday, I have no lectures on Friday. This is good because in the next three days (Friday and the weekend) I have at least twenty hours of reading and writing to get through. Yesterday I had half a day of lectures and tried to go to the gym *and* watch the football in the evening. As a result I'm now well behind and am looking at a mountain of work to get through tonight.

Its tough stuff this business school lark. On the other hand, I'm definately learning. In the four days to date I've learned a bundle of stuff, am thinking about some things slightly differently and am starting to really relish the challenge. I can feel my head starting to adapt to new concepts and pretty soon I'll be able to work with them properly - new ideas to use as tools, new evidence to use in argument, new ways to look at things. Just so long as I don't end up believing any of it too much. If one thing is emerging as a theme it's that business theory is an elaborate construct, a system of best guesses and estimates. Even the ultra-analysed capital markets are irrational at the edges.

Thats enough, lectures will start again in five minutes

I'm board

I'm someone on the board. Well, sales and marketing team leader for the Oxford Business Forum anyway. The good news is I got to write my own brief

"Make the Oxford Business Forum famous"

the bad news is I've got to deliver against it. Ah well, we have leaders, we have ideas, we have motivation. We need speakers. Are you the CEO of a fortune 500 company or an individual who has somehow changed the way the world works? If you are drop me a line on obf@mba-experience.com It'll make all our jobs easier.

How to answer a case study

The afternoon was given over to the complicated business of responding to a case study, my group did a decent job preparing the case, but it was interesting to see just how rigourously a case can be taken apart and how many distinct areas can be explored from a fairly simple set of information. (a case is 6-10 sides of A4 describing a business problem). Todays' case was about events at Ogilvy and Mather after Charlotte Beers took over - things seemed to be going OK, but I felt things were getting a little hagiographic and in best Oxford Tutorial Style (TM) launched a big old broadside attack on the womans' management style. It would have worked too, except I got some of my facts wrong. Hey ho, learn by doing and all that kind of thing, balanced opinions never got anyone anywhere.

We now have a bunch of slides on how to do case studies which I've tried to distil even further. My thoughts are.... Establish a context for the case, establish a chronology for the case, identify the key events within that chronology, identify the drivers behind the events, look at the results, suggest actions. Doubtless this needs refining, but we've got a lot of these to do and if I can get a 'mental assembly line' in place for this stuff things will go a lot quicker.

Day one

First lecture today was Industrial Organisation, or the study of market power, or micro-economics and imperfect competiton, or... it had a lot of definitions. It also had a good lecturer (I'm a sucker for cartoons) and some refreshingly comprehensible material - basic economics and an extended discussion of rational decision making. I said stuff, asked questions and generally felt not dumb - that was left for later in the day.

There was also a joke worth repeating...

How many MBA students does it take to change a lightbulb?
Only one, if you hire me. I can actually change the lightbulb myself. As you can see from my resume I've had extensive lightbulb changing experience in my previous positions. I've also been named to the Oxford lightbulb list and am currently teaching assistant for light bulb management 666. My only weakness is that I'm compulsive about changing lightbulbs in my spare time.

Apologies to anyone in group A who have now had the best part of the lecture spoiled. You had to be there...

The reading begins

Courses start tomorrow and the class finally seems to have realised that 'do the reading in advance' means 'do the reading in advance' and that there's a lot of reading to be done. I was expecting this, so a lot of my reading is done, but even so there have been one or two extras thrown in to keep us on our toes and make sure our social lives don't start taking more than an hour or two of any given day...

So, I've been looking at case studies on Ogilvy and Mather and the collapse of Barings Bank. I've also read a really interesting piece on the challenger shuttle crash; at first I thought this might be a little macabre, but as the author points out how often does a management decision generate 200 000 pages of evidence? Monday is Industrial Organisation and a study class on how to do case studies properly. Then its right down to brass tacks.