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.

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.

klogs, blogs and accelerating industry

You turn your back for a minute and the whole damn thing changes. If I'm not careful I'm going to stumble back into the realm of new media looking like some out of touch, out of date refugee from the early 2000's - which is of course exactly what I will be. Seems the adoption of Blogs is accelerating - first up, Klogs or Knowledge Weblogs - kind of internal enterprise repositories of knowledge, or maybe just online places to think. Phill Wolff is the place to start your reading on this.

Hmm, if I get five minutes to think I'll see if I can work out what the class could do to aid this - communal reading blogs for classes. Oh, all you MBA's and future MBA's reading this take a look at this. Its Doc Searls weblog, you read it, you follow the links, you hunt out the interesting stuff. Its part of a public, private conversation - an in club thats open to all. In this case the club is for thinking very hard about the internet, new media and how to get value out of technology. Thanks to this same technology the velocity of the conversation is fast, and thanks to it being public anyone can keep up to speed by reading along. By the time McKinsey or PWC or IBM publish their whitepaper on enterprise blogging these guys will be onto something else, despite the fact that there's probably someone in IBM joining in this conversation right now.

Can you distribute knowledge, information and debate between your offices at the same pace this conversation happens between individuals spread out across the world?

The Oxford Business Forum

Some time yesterday afternoon Nico and Eric got on stage to talk to us. Now, we didn't know who they were at the time, although if I'd thought about it I may have recognised Nico from the press photos. About this time last year Nico was badgering the school and his fellow students about an idea he'd had. He wanted to invite world class business leaders to the school to mentor students, not to stand up and talk, but to sit with us in small groups and chat. Now it turns out that Nico must be a pretty incredible guy because he made it happen.

Likewise last years Oxford Business Forum must have been a pretty incredible event. It would have been even more incredible if Romano Prodi and Bill Clinton hadn't dropped out at the last minute. It happened because Nico, Eric and a bunch of other students made it happen. Nico, Eric and the school were so pleased with it they wanted it to continue, and that's why they wanted to talk to us. The OBF is organised by students, for students and if its going to happen this time its going to happen in February, sixteen weeks from now, and a big chunk of organisation needs to be done in the next four weeks.

So, in best Oxford tradition we were invited to the pub to talk about it, and like all the best things in Oxford the pub of choice was the Turf Tavern. Of course in best business school tradition there was also a meeting - at 9AM this morning. Now nothing is set in stone yet, but I put my hand up for the sales and marketing team. A couple other folks did too, so I'm not alone, but even so it could be a lot to take on.

And that's had me thinking, if you read the post below you'll see that there are plenty of people in this class who've done incredible things, and unless I start turning up to these meetings, raising my hand and putting in the hours well, I may never be one of them. So thats one of my things for the year, learn to raise my hand, step forward and make something happen. Job one, live up to something one of my old colleagues told me, and make a product famous. The Oxford Business Forum 2003 is going to be awesome, and you read about it here first.

Induction day 2

Day two was much like day one, we were told things, we wrote them down and listened attentively. So, we can now access all the business databases and market research the school has available (and that's a lot), we know even more about job hunting and we've been thoroughly intimidated by the business of exams, assessment, pass marks and so on.

There were however a few interesting bits. One was the chance for everyone to say sixty seconds worth of material about themselves. I think its fair to say that there are one or two special people here. Things my classmates have done that I haven't include :- winning olympic silver medals (round of applause), serving as bodyguard to the Israeli President (collective intake of breath), flown jet fighters (general - cool thoughts circulate), and founding companies. You got the impression that as we filed out of the hall more than a few of us were wondering what such an exceptional bunch could do if we put our minds to it - sod the MBA, lets all start a company and get rich...

Then they told us about the Oxford Business Forum, and I think I became a whole lot busier.

Induction day one

No time to write a lot, but after our first days induction and following drinks reception I can tell you :

• We have loads of support staff, which allows us to focus on the learning stuff and not worry so much about tracking down obscure books
  
• The food is pretty good, and the orange juicing machine is really cool to watch
  
• The careers service has a big financial services bias
  
• Many of my new friends have wives, kids and mortgages. My old friends tended to have partners, pets and landlords. I think they call this growing up.
  
• our study packs are *really* big, thats a lot of reading to get through.
  

And apparently McKinsey are the biggest employer of SBS graduates taking 5% of the total. Always said they had more taste than the other consultancies. Oh, and crack-gmat is apparently a fine product which I can cheerfully recommend. Expect some blatant merchandising soon. (well, as soon as my FTP client starts working properly so I can update things other than the front page)

Jenkinson shows his class as SBS make unbeaten start to the season

A raft of new signings and foreign imports saw SBS start the season with a completely new lineup, but it was left to course director Tim Jenkinson, the only man with first team experience, to come off the bench and earn a well deserved draw. A pre match conference had revealed that while the side may have lacked match fitness there was enough talent to be confident of taking something against an under strength St Antony's eleven. (well, nine, SBS lending them two players to fill out the numbers)

Early play though was dominated by St Antony's, as SBS attempted to get on first name terms with each other, a well worked St Antony's move seeing them take the lead after ten minutes. By now though SBS were starting to gel and with Matt Dagget and Per Stenvall providing a physical presence up front that few sides in Oxford will be able to match pressure on St Antony's started to build. The deserved equaliser came from a corner, Stenvall heading in past the unsighted keeper. Antony's hit back quickly, and ten minutes before half time Jenkinson was brought on, his introduction nearly had an immediate effect as his throughball sent Martin Lloyd clear, but he shot wide from twelve yards with just the keeper to beat.

A half time team talk and a quick reminder of everyones' names saw SBS make a strong start to the second half. Up front Dagget and Jenkinson proved a handful, a reshaped Asian / Argentine midfield provided an immediate improvement in passing. An equaliser duly arrived - Hernan Enriquez despatching an exquisite volley on the turn from ten yards. St Antony's though refused to die and restored their lead through another well worked passing move, the finish squeezed in at the near post.

This proved the cue for more pressure from SBS, but with St Antony's defending well it was left to Jenkinson to provide the breakthrough. Collecting the ball on the edge of the area he rode two challenges before turning and lashing home a rocket strike from the corner of the area. Without doubt the goal of the game. By now St Antony's were reduced to attacks on the break, SBS survived a late claim for a penalty, but moments later another break out brought Antony's their fourth goal. With time running out SBS pressed on in search of yet another equaliser. It arrived late in the day, the St Antony's defence unable to do anything but divert Jenkinson's driven cross shot into their own goal.

So, plenty to look forward to in the new season, and while FIFA / Oxford bureaucracy may yet keep SBS out of Michaelmas term's MCR league there's a guarantee of more games and plenty of goals from the new look Said XI.

Final result : SBS 4, St Antony's 4

The Oxford Challenge

Yesterday was all about meeting the rest of the class, and doing some teambuilding stuff. The format was pretty simple, divide into groups of 14 (two study groups each) and then answer 60 cryptic clues about Oxford, mostly by going to places and looking at stuff. I think my team was feeling pretty confident early on, not only did we have me, with eight years of living in Oxford knowledge, we had another guy who'd lived here for six. This though meant that we spent a very long time planning and maybe not quite long enough running around.

We were also victims of the fact that yesterday Oxford decided to change just a little bit. Only a little bit, but enough to mean many of my time saving ideas weren't. For instance

> It usually takes seconds to get a cab from the train station, yesterday it would have taken fifteen minutes
> Graduation ceremonies meant some buildings were closed at unusual times (like when we needed to be in them)
> There were no tour guides standing round trying to sell tours (who could have answered our questions)

Still, we did pretty well. What we didn't do was come up with brilliant ideas like getting the answers from guidebooks and postcards, or hammering google for the answers. (all legitimate tactics) Ah well, a creditable finish apparently, but not in the top two. Unlike several teams we didn't find time for a quick half anywhere either, which suggests that British culture is really starting to take hold.

Still, I've now met the class - and they're all lovely people. The predominant accent is American - but there are loads of folk from Asia and Europe here, and the local Brits probably less than 20% of the class. After the tour we went for drinks and food, my attempt to introduce the class to some of Oxford's curryhouses was then stalled by Chutneys being full, and the ever reliable Shemons being shut - on a saturday night!! Fortunately someone else knew where we were going and top notch curry followed. Although it took me a while to realise that "this is a baby jesus vindaloo" is a compliment...

"The diary guy right?"

That's what people say when they meet someone who's writing a blog about their course (I'd already told the class this project was happening). So my online chronicle is good for something - it's a handy icebreaker.

Wish I'd thought of that

One of Adam's classmates at Harvard has just had his piece on writing MBA admissions essays published in the Wall Street Journal. Its short but sweet, and as far as I can tell pretty much on the money. Now, maybe its time to tell some of the UK press about this project...

Oh, met some of my classmates for the first time in the pub last night. So far they're all lovely people, which is good as I'm no longer quite so intimidated by them. Today is the Oxford Challenge, a teambuilding game in which we will learn all about Oxford, and get to meet each other some more.

Meet the class of 2002/3 (sort of)

Todays 'set up your network connections' session provided the chance to meet some of the class, but there wasn't much socialising beyond chatting to the folks in the next seat over. I think the real meet and greet is tomorrow. However since then I've been able to browse peoples profiles on the intranet, which made for interesting reading.

This class is packed with talent, experience and skills. I am now genuinely confused as to how I got in. There are folks here who have founded and run successful companies, managed big chunks of enormous companies and well, done stuff. I'd guess about half have some kind of finance background, with the rest being mostly operations or consultants. Nationalities are varied, my work group will include me, an Armenian, an Indian, a Korean, and a few more Europeans, and this global view may turn out to be one of the best things about being here.

Tonight I'm intending to try a dangerous piece of social engineering and fuse two pub crawls into one. Some of the MBA class are meeting for drinks and the college MCR is planning something similar. If I can get everything in the right place at the right time I won't have to make any decisions about which group I should be spending time with ;-)

Laptop armed and ready

This morning was the laptop installation session for anyone with Windows XP Pro, it was also my first chance to meet future MBA classmates. The Laptop stuff was a long process, made longer by the IT managers decision to explain basic networking protocol to us as we went. Still, I now have access to the SBS intranet, network drives and associated stuff.

Sadly none of the IT staff had realised that adding new users to laptops would make it look as if old information had been lost. In my case this meant the unexpected misplacement of my .pst file. For non techies that means my email, calendar and contacts all vanished. Fortunately I'm a technical boy and got it back after fifteen minutes of trawling Google for suggestions. Next I've got to restore IE favourites, wallpaper and desktop shortcuts...

The good news is that the online information is top notch and some sensible thought seems to have gone into designing the networking environment we're using. Some of it may look a little clunky, but it all works and there's plenty of quality information there to get stuck into.

I swear, I didn't ask for one

While checking my network connections I discovered that despite me not ordering one Dell have sent me a laptop with an integrated 10/100 modem, about £100 worth of kit. Of course the rucksack I ordered to carry said laptop around in hasn't arrived, but its nice to be a bit ahead of the game. In the meantime, I've now got a PCI network card that needs a good home...

From the time I spent working with PC manufacturers I'm guessing this is actually 'deliberate' on Dell's part. They probably found themselves with too many laptop chassis and just randomly upgraded a few orders to clear the backlog. It's more common for this to happen with chips, Intel tries to force chip speeds up by manipulating supply to the manufacturers, the result being that your P3 700 may actually have turned into an 800 by the time it's delivered.

The Incredible Optimism of Text Books

"As this book was going to press the Dow had just passed the 9300 mark for the first time, (perhaps it has reached the magical 10000 mark as you are now reading)" from my statistics textbook. In fact its at 7753 as I'm reading, following another week of falls.

There's a definite sense of satisfaction in realising that the people who write textbooks don't know it all. I particularly like the accounting texts which reassure me that companies today are transparent and held accountable by their auditors - any problems with the system are both minor and in hand... Its like reading the smuggest whig history imaginable.

On a completely different note I've bought an orthopaedic back chair, the kind you kneel on. It's got wheels, wheeeeee!

Meeting and greeting / Its not networking now...

Last night was coffee and chocolate in the MCR. Tonight is a trip to Jongleurs comedy cafe, Friday is a pubcrawl... This week I've got clashes with two birthday parties that I'd have wanted to be at, plus numerous informal drinks things some of the MBA class have been arranging. Suffice to say that while classes don't start till the fourteenth I've got plenty to be getting on with.

Oh, and I'm remembering the nice thing about Oxford, you get to hang out with all kinds of people, archaeologists, quantum physicists, egyptologists, chemists, mathematicians, theologians, musicians, historians. I'd forgotten quite how much fun this can be. Now, if only I was a real academic instead of a new breed of cash cow.

Not that I'll have time to talk to my new friends after the fourteenth. A quick view of my calendar reveals 40+ lectures, fifteen assignments, six exams and *a lot* of reading to be got through by mid December, and then its straight into the New Business Development Project. I however have a secret plan - I'm sharing a kitchen with a couple of mathematicians and they've agreed to help with my homework...

Teaching the teachers

There's some good stuff in this article on learning, importantly the stuff which isn't about technology (about half way down). One of my pet projects this year is to try and push Oxford into committing to better training for both students and teachers - or Dons as they're known here.

Reginae erunt nutrices tuae

That, apparently is my new college motto, which according to the website means "queens shall be thy nursing mothers". I found this out having dinner with some of the my fellow MCR students. There's an explanation of this here.

Other stuff I learned, Queens has a fantastic chapel, and the library - which isn't yet open for term, is also a bit special architecturally, and contains a number of rather impressive books - including first edition Shakespeare Folios and that kind of stuff. I also found out that Queens college are the possessors of the oldest drinking horn in active service in the world. I can't find a picture online, but apparently its a massive thing, covered in gold ornamentation and there's some kind of old fashioned drinking game to be gone through on special occasions involving it.

It looks like I'm going to have no shortage of things to do this week, with various comedy nights, and pub crawls planned for me. (Drinking in Oxford pubs, how novel for me...) I've also got one or two textbooks to track down, and yet more reading to get through before things kick off properly on Monday.

Oh, this is the college Tim Berners Lee was at when he studied in Oxford. I knew there was a reason I ended up here.

The Geordie has landed

Well, I've arrived. No time to write a long entry but in short the amount of stuff that fills a small hire car is not enough to fill a largeish room. Of course I still need to reclaim my stereo, PC and CD collection, but there's going to be plenty of space to play with. I can run my very own version of changing rooms in the next two days.... Maybe not.

Time to go and meet few new faces I feel, and I've got to see a man about some software.

Last weekend of rest

Well, off to Oxford tomorrow, but in the mean time I spent the weekend (well Saturday) in the Lake District. The occassion was the annual walking trip undertaken by my Dad's computing department - I've been doing these since I was three, and while I've missed a few recently it was nice to be up in the hills again. Oxford sadly is at the flat end of the country, and while some locals claim that the Cotswolds are just as good they're wrong. The Cotswolds are small, twee little hills that look good on postcards. The Lake District is full of big majestic hills that look best from the top.

So, a day of packing, shopping and arranging looms...

Opinion poll

I've just been asked whether I want to promote Crack-GMAT revision guides through this site. So, I want to know if they're any good since I didn't use them and there's no way on God's earth I'm retaking the GMAT to investigate. If you used the Crack-GMAT guides let me know, were they good, were they bad? Assuming the news is good this will cover the (low) cost of my servers, site logging and maybe a few beers so I'd hope my reliability will be unaffected. Mail your answers to affiliatepoll@mba-experience.com

Oh, the next piece is very long and has *nothing* to do with MBA's. Just a warning.

Why everyone should try weight training

My shoulders are numb, and tomorrow my arms and chest will feel stiff, as if my sinews have been replaced with rusted steel wire. I know this because I've been here, or somewhere like it before. The first day is always the hardest.

I've had a lot of first days. When I was eight I ran cross country races at school, struggling round the playing field with a few other lads - getting in shape for the one big race of the term. I think I liked it, I wasn't much good at football, but I'd come second or third in school cross country races, and a respectable middle of the field at big events. So if you trace it right back my occasional bursts of athletic activity probably go back to those windy october nights running round the playing field, desperately trying to make sure I finished ahead of John Wight, while Jonathan Sunderland disappeared into the distance. (he later played football for Blackpool and Scarbrough, the only professional athelete I've ever really known)

My next brush with serious sport came at middle school aged eleven. I got into an argument with another boy and decided that whatever happened I was not going to lose to him in the four hundred meters. Maybe he'd thought something similar because we tore round the track, but he blew up around 300 meters and I stumbled home first. Mr Slipper the games teacher was sufficiently impressed that three hours later I was running for my school in an athletics meeting. Convinced 400m was a middle distance event I completely misjudged the pace and finished well down the field. It didn't matter though, I was in the team.

The rest of that athletics season was fairly short and our small team did its best with limited training. Dan Bradley turned out to be our star 400m runner, but each school got to enter two runners in what were effectively two races. Dan always won the first one, I won the second one and in the mean time learned to throw the discus. I was starting to like this athletics stuff.

Meanwhile Mr Slipper had plans. Next season he announced that the school would be taking athletics seriously, all boys were asked if they wanted to report for fitness training, three times a week after school. The first session was packed, practically every boy of the right age turned up vague thoughts of body building and playground celebrity in their heads, and I'm sure, the notion that we may well impress the girls. At the time I don't think any of us knew what circuit training was.

An hour later we knew. Half of us could barely stand. Two friends and I resorted to the most desperate measures we could think of and bought a bottle of milk to revive ourselves. The walk home was agony, every underdeveloped pre teen muscle hurt. We'd bench-pressed, press-upped, step-upped and rope-climbed our way to oblivion. I'd just had my introduction to lactic acid, Dave Slipper explaining the science as we exhausted ourselves around him.

The next session was attended by just over half the lads who'd been to the first one, with most of the school's tough guys the first to drop out. By the session after that we were down to eighteen, and those of us who were still there were on the way to something good. That year, following a punishing training schedule of track work, technique and more circuits than we'd have ever believed possible we finished tenth in the country. A massive achievement for a school like ours. I even got my head around the idea that the 400m is a sprint.

That summer, in a cunning sleight of hand Dave Slipper delivered this team lock stock and barrel into the welcoming arms of the legendary Jarrow Harriers. We spent the summer training with athletes like Steve Cram and David Sharp, who'd coach the kids before doing their own murderous evening training runs. Once, I even ended up borrowing the spikes Steve Cram wore when he ran the Golden Mile in Oslo and set the world record. I can tell you now, that man's success owed nothing to his shoes.

The next year Jarrow's under 14 team won promotion to the top division - a fusion of their own talent and Dave Slipper's Gosforth based ringers providing the personnel. (by rights we should all have been running for other clubs) We won every single meeting we went to, bar one, sometimes by massive margins. We even instituted a lap of honor which would end with us collapsing into the water jump. The week we came second was the week we clinched promotion so we did the lap and the dunkings anyway while the bemused winners wondered if we knew the score.

More seasons with Jarrow followed, but the going was harder in the top division and I was spending more time on my schoolwork. I didn't train enough, and when I did I didn't train hard enough. Fortnightly races became ordeals and to make up for under-training I learned to run through the pain barrier. I'd stumble across the line then collapse, my jelly legs needing to recover before they could take me in search of somewhere to quietly throw up. It paid off though, I managed respectable results and finally, after running 60.01 twice achieved my goal of the sub 60 second lap. By the end of the season I'd run 58.8, but it wasn't fun anymore and I stopped - ostensibly to concentrate on my exams.

And that was it for a while. I went jogging occassionally, and continued to swim and coach at the local pool but I wasn't training. No weekly ritual workouts, no targets to attain and no team to keep me going. The new goals were academic, and individual, A-levels and Oxford entrance exams. In my head I was still fit, still healthy, but the decline had started.

When I got to university I made a half hearted attempt at regular exercise, but from the age of 19-23 I let myself decay. One term I did press-ups and sit-ups daily, but I now know that that's almost useless as exercise. Sometimes in the holidays I'd swim, but occasionally is never enough. There was a gradual realisation that I was out of shape, that my body no longer matched the picture in my head, that hours sat at desks and in front of PC's were taking their toll, but I didn't do anything about it.

A few years ago I began trying to fix this and made myself go running. I'd go out a few times a week, then once the next week and then stop. Eventually I moved house and a nearby friend with more willpower than me invited me to join his runs. The first one was murder, the second one better and in the following months we gradually improved our times. Then houses were moved again and once more decline set in - till last year.

Last year was the year I decided - on new years eve - that I was going to run the Great North Run. I borrowed books on distance running, set a training schedule and went to work. Fixed goals clear aims and a knowledge of what I was doing were enough. A month before the race I ran eleven miles in a hundred minutes, well on course for my target of sub 2 hours for a half marathon. A week later I tore a muscle in my hip and that was that, they sent me a T-shirt in the post but I've never worn it.

This year I've been trying again, with a more holistic resolution. No race to get ready for, just a goal to get fit. I bought some dumbells and a book called the 90 day fitness program. This was the introduction to weight training - and it hurt. The pain after that first workout was familiar and I knew I was on the right track.

The 90 day program also called for a fair amount of running, so it was back on the roads - this time by myself. Too cheap to join a gym I made the most of my dumbells, improvising exercises where necessary and finally (120 days later) I finished the program. About six weeks later I finished work, came back to Newcastle and joined a gym. Which is really where this story was meant to start.

For the last five weeks I've been working my way round the lifestyle fitness section of the gym. Don't get me wrong, this is a good workout, tougher than anything I've done before except maybe those early circuit sessions with Dave Slipper. Today though, after fifteen sessions I'd booked myself in for a program review.

They made me say it often enough. I want to 'bulk up', 'I want to develop muscle', you've got to be clear about this stuff. That's because most people who walk into gyms say things like that, and if they put them through what I've just been through most of them wouldn't come back. You can get damn fit without doing this stuff - lose weight, tone up, look good - the real reasons people go to gyms. I want to be bigger, is something plenty say but most don't mean. Well, I want to be bigger, maybe not on the human collossus scale, but I've been skinny for twenty six years and its getting kind of dull.

So I spent today learning to lift heavy weights - something I thought I'd already been doing for five weeks.

My new training program requires me to do an exercise twelve times at about 60% of my maximum lift, and then six times with as much as I can manage. Its a method that drives your muscles to total exhaustion while making them do as much work as possible. Its the reason why, three hours later I still can't feel my shoulders properly.

So you do your set of twelve and its tough. You feel like maybe you could do fifteen if you really tried. By the end your arms are trembling under the weight, and your breathing is getting ragged. Already you can feel the lactic acid washing over your muscles, sapping away your strength, starting to poison. It's the bodies emergency reserve, a devil's bargain. It gives you the energy to work without oxygen, the most potent form of fuel your body's got, but you pay for lactic acid. It really is poison, use it for too long and it kills the muscle - which is why when your muscles have been exposed to it they stop working, to carry on is to die.

Runners talk about going into oxygen debt, because oxygen is what your muscles need to recover from lactic acid. So they plan their training to build their tolerance to lactic acid, flooding their limbs with it and taking just enough rest to go again. I've done a lot of this stuff, and thats just what this first set of twelve is about, its about taking away your reserves, its about ensuring that the next set of six delivers you straight into oxygen debt, your starved muscles ready to give in from the start.

I worked this stuff out quickly. Chest pressing a 50 kilo weight is hard work. Even on the first lift I could feel my strength going, my pace slacking. You're supposed to lift explosively and then slowly return to the start. I wrestled that weight up and then wondered how to stop it crushing me on the way down.

For a while the count is everything. One. Two. Three. Then the weight tells. You don't get to four, you get to three and an inch, three and two inches, you force it up and down and the idea of another lift disappears. By yourself you fail.

But gyms don't let you do this by yourself. So Dave the trainer is telling you he wants one more. Pushing you harder, and because he knows what he's doing you trust him, so you make it to four and start on five. Then he's spotting for you, taking a tiny fraction of the weight, just enough to keep you going - just enough that your shattered arms can push up another inch or two. Now your heart is pounding, and you have to remember to breathe. You can't feel your muscles anymore, they're gone. There's you, and a weight and if you think hard enough, if you dig deep enough inside and make it move some more it will.

But it doesn't. Like Yeats on his deathbed the provinces of your body rebel, and it doesn't matter what you want or how badly. Your non-existent, invisible arms that ceased to matter a few seconds ago are no longer capable of defying gravity and thats it. Five and a bit repetitions.

Time for the next exercise.

While I was working my way round, Dave introducing me to new forms of exercise and their attendent forms of pain one of the gyms' big guys came in. I guess most gyms have these folks, shaven head, tattoos and a physique that belongs in a comic book. For most of these guys the rest of the gym and the people in it don't exist. They look at you then go and lift something heavy. You're just part of the furniture.

Today though, as Dave was systematically breaking me apart I got a spark of acknowlegement. Not so much as a nod of the head and an 'aareet mate' but a definite progression. I'd stopped being part of the furniture and in some small way decided that I wanted in to his world. Maybe this is like some kind of crossing over, once you've been there, lifted the weight, felt the exhaustion, tried again, and then failed you're allowed to exist for them.

Or maybe I'm just knackered. Off to Oxford next week, join the university gym and keep this up. I've got a goal, take a nice wide grip - way out past my shoulders and pull up my own bodyweight. I was hanging there today, feeling my shoulders burn and my biceps melt away knowing that I'd lifted myself maybe an inch - and that its going to feel bloody good when I make it.

Chronotopia

Chronotopia is the name of an exhibition of photography from Afghanistan by Simon Norfolk. The word is based on the idea of a chronotope, a landscape which permits you to move through time as well as space. By looking at the destruction wrought, the manner of the destruction and the way buildings layer themselves onto each other Simon Norfolk aims to convey something about the history of Afghanistan and its 24 years of war.

So much for the theory. The important thing is the photography, currently on show at the Side Gallery in Newcastle. Its stunning, enormous prints showing incredible detail and despite the devastation shown oddly nice to look at. One of the best things I've seen in ages and head and shoulders above the stuff currently in the Baltic Art Gallery (although the new exhibition which opens in a week or so may have potential)

Chatting to the guy manning the desk in the gallery I discovered that they own the archives of Weegee's work. If you're not familiar with this incredible photographer you can see some of his stuff here. You should probably take the time to read this brief overveiw of weegee's life as well.

Culture sighted in Newcastle

They f*** you up, your club
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were f***ked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and eyepatches
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And watch it on telly down the boozer

From NUFC.com. As one of the 40 000 who did turn up last night to watch us lose to Feyenoord I'd just add this. Gutted, but watching Robert's wing play from 5 yards away was an absolute pleasure.

The business of meta capabilities

I've just bought a book on how to think. Now this may strike you as an odd thing to do, after all I've come a long way so far and have rarely felt the need to learn how to think. But the purchase was the offshoot of my healthy body healthy mind approach to things. I've just spent an awful long time at the gym getting in shape, not for anything in particular, just in shape. Because the nice thing about being fit is that it makes stuff easier, everything from playing football to carrying heavy shopping, to staying awake through lectures. General fitness - strength, stamina, speed, flexibility, these are the things that make all other physical activity easy.

So I got thinking about how I could make learning easier - which is why I now own a book on how to learn to think better. After all, if I can learn to think better pretty much everything becomes easier right?

On the way back from the bookstore I extended this thought. What other meta capabilities are there, which ones do businesses need, and how can they go about developing them? My basic list came back as leadership, creativity, thinking and communication. Doesn't matter what kind of business you are, if your staff are good leaders, think creatively, communicate clearly and have plenty of good ideas you're on the road to success.

I'm sufficiently pleased with this idea that I'm going to try and develop it, and maybe look for case studies. Companies like GE have worked hard on leadership, some like Apple on creativity and I'm sure others have put time into communication and thinking. The question is, have any companies tried to develop all four of these competencies and what happened to them? I think its time to find out, and at some point in the future write it up as a book and become a management guru.

Final phone calls

I've been on the phone this morning, sorting out a few final things. Turned out Dell had forgotten that I'd ordered a backpack to go with my laptop, and its now touch and go whether it arrives before I leave. I've also (finally) arranged for a new mobile phone to be delivered, so no more ringing people up because I couldn't read the text message they'd sent me on my increasingly illegibile mobile screen. Add to that calls to insurance companies and an attempt (so far unsucccessful) to get through to college to tell them I'm coming and ask about parking when I'm dropping stuff off. Oh, and to ask for a book shelf, I'm a bit confused that there are PHD students who don't need bookshelves.

Hmm, so departure time is fast approaching. I've already been reminded that I'm a bit older than the average student when all the insurance companies I spoke to assumed I was my own father. A 'very mature voice' apparently.

The web goes on forever

When Yahoo! finally started working again I had a message from my hosting providers asking me to change my A-record since they're making changes to their networks. This meant remembering who I'd actually registered the domain with, I eventually had to resort to whois'ing myself which led me to Enom.com Only I didn't register with Enom.com, I registered with one of their affiliates - or possibly an affiliate of an affiliate it all goes on forever...

Anyway, I've changed the A-record. Depending on how clever your DNS Servers are it may take a while for them to notice. As a result this site may not change as often as you'd like. But just this once, it's not me, it's you...

In the meantime I'm probably going to write a final extended piece on MBA preparation (two weeks to go, off to Oxford at the start of next week...)

The death of free?

Yahoo!'s email service seems to be knackered and has been for days. Guess they can't be bothered to fix their free services. That's the last time I click on one of those ads. (but wait, you don't click on them anyway...)

Taking haggis to another level

Blogger has just ignored my last post. In short form. Went to Edinburgh, met sisters boyfriend, top bloke judging from music collection. Ate lunch at Howies - top haggis. Went to art gallery, metal giants rule!

The Boss gets it right

Writing CD reviews should be the easy part of running this web site, its documenting my life thats meant to be hard. Not today, two of yesterdays purchases were run of the mill indie stuff, and one, well. Lets do the easy ones first.

Master, Yeah Yeah Yeahs If the Yeah Yeah Yeahs didn't come from New York then they should have done. Jangly punk pop complete with aggressive girly singer. Perfect for CBGB's. Master is their first recording as far as I know and its basically a five song EP. Lots to like, especially the lovely shouty Bang, and the fantastic bitchiness of Art Star. Kind of reminds me of early Blondie.

B.R.M.C. Black Rebel Motorcylcle Club There's something wonderfully old fashioned about the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Something kind of Led Zeppelinish, its like they want to pretend the whole Brit-Pop, Blur, Oasis thing never happened and just grind out big noisy rock songs. This is a bloody good thing, because while it gets a bit one paced in places and you sometimes find yourself wishing they'd vary the tempo or the everpresent wall of sound approach there are some fine fine songs in here. Love Burns, and Red Eyes and Tears provide a solid opening, and Spread Your Love makes me think of bands like Mudd as it thumps along on a heavy bassline. Top billing though has to go to the fantastic 'Whatever Happened to My Rock N Roll?'

I fell in love with a sweet sensation
I gave my heart to a simple chord
I gave my soul to a new religion
Whatever happened to you?

Couldn't have said it better myself.

The Rising, Bruce Springsteen

I'm not sure I can do this one justice, but then I'm not convinced anyone writing at the NME could either. This record is Springsteen's response to the events of September 11th and it is positively majestic in its integrity, honesty and vision. While the music may not quite be up to the same standards as the lyrics thats not the point. I can't think of anything except Marvin Gayes 'Whats' Goin On?' that compares to this in the scale of its subject matter, and the intimacy of the result. If there was ever a danger that one day the Boss would only be remembered as a straightforward rocker, with big muscles and a few hit records this is the record that puts that danger to bed. No other artist anywhere has come close to providing such a passionate, human and above all balanced response to what happened.

Its strong stuff this, and it isn't cheerful. Hometown heroes can only contemplate suicide to cope with what they've seen, the bereaved suffer the anguish of lost loved ones, and suicide bombers seek their own terrible resolution. In amongst all this though is a sense of redemption, of a realisation that life must go on, and that the quiet day to day struggle of trying to balance grief and rage is where the real heroism lies. "I want a kiss from your lips, I want an eye for an eye, I woke up this morning to an empty sky"

Its always been this way with Springsteen though. City of Ruins was written before September 11th, and the ruined city could be anything, rust belt economy or broken heart it doesn't matter. The desolation and need to carry on are the same, all you can do is what the song urges, rise up. The Boss has been saying the same thing ever since his 'broken heroes' were born to run, desperately trying to escape the lives that had been made for them. We will not go quietly, we will not lose sight of what makes us human because there is greatness in all of us.

There's more of it than usual in Springsteen though.

More reasons to like the internet

#1 : The fantastic Niall and Biffa at NUFC.com have just got back from Kiev and have penned a fascinating little piece on how far its come in the last five years, and how badly the English sports press failed to notice this when writing about this weeks Newcastle Kiev game. So, thanks to football and the internet there may just be a few more Geordies staying in Ukranian hotels this year. Good stuff. Its the piece titled 'owed an apology' on their homepage.

#2 : Just found this fantastic service at text-image.com. So through the wonders of modern technology here is my new self portrait. (200+k)

Shopping for last seasons model

Since I'm going to be playing my football on grass this season it was time to go shopping for new boots today. Now, part of me knows that you can get an entirely adequate pair of boots for about £25, and when like me you've got the skills of a one legged centipede spending £110 on a pair of boots is not going to make a difference. On the other hand, the new Nike boots look damn fine.

So, hoping to justify forking out large sums of cash I went in search of professional sports shops where I could be reassured that I was buying exactly the right boots. Footlocker was my first port of call, back when I was a kid and seriously into athletics Footlocker was where you went for spikes, (long / middle distance or sprint sir?) and specialist stuff like discus shoes. Today Footlocker is where you buy fashion shoes. Incidently if you're in the market for fashion trainers this years' Pumas look the business. I saw a documentary on their design and those folks were good - unlike Levis who were the next weeks' subject - their designers were talentless posers.

Anyway Footlocker being a dead end I tried the usual suspects but JJB, JD, AllSport and co need to learn that just sticking a £130 shoe in the window is not going to sell it. I need some pretty serious justification for spending £100 over the odds. So I went off in search of a shop that could reassure me, I was envisaging somewhere that really knew its stuff, like Footlocker used to. Well, if such a place exists in Newcastle I didn't find it. I did however find StartFitness, who were selling last years' Nike boots for £30 in their 'massive football boot sale', bargain!

So, I wisely banked my savings right? Well, you could believe that, but then you'd have to skip tomorrows reviews of all the CD's I've just bought.

Business School Blues

Adrian is scaring me again, 80 hour weeks?! I wonder if there's a slackers option.

Also got me thinking. Oxford has a tradition of fifth week blues, its half way through term, the ends not in sight, you need to go home and you're drowning in work, burnout looms large. Attendance at lectures and takings in student bars both slump. Now since the business school operates longer terms do I get my fifth week blues in fourth week this time? Or as a seasoned veteran of the real world am I now immune?

Ethical Strategy?

I've been starting in on my strategy textbook and while I'm sure its a fine read there are a few things I have to take issue with. Its fine to suggest that ethical business is good business, but when you then give as examples of ethical businesses Shell and McDonalds you're heading into deep water with concrete waterwings.

Shell are an evil oil company (the clues in the adjective) who with the collaboration of the Nigerian government have systematically raped and pillaged large chunks of that country. Back when I was doing my first degree one of the demonstrations I didn't go on was about Shell's refusal to intervene in the case of Ken Saro Wiwa, a man who was hung for his opposition to Shell's activities. Shell is a murderous corporation which should be hauled before a court somewhere. To call them ethical is not so much ignorant as offensive. When companies get to be the size of countries do we need to regulate them in the similar way? An International Criminal Court for corporations?

As for McDonalds, does the company behind the McLibel case really rate the tag ethical?

Anyway, aside from the ethical thing there was an introduction to various ways of evaluating companies. You see the goal of all companies it to maximise the return on shareholders capital. Of course throughout continental Europe companies have legal obligations to pursue broader aims, and some companies just might not have the right kind of capitalist ethics to let poets hang rather than diminish their shareholder value (its the right thing to do kids). Anyway, all companies try to maximise shareholder value (except for the ones that don't) which is good, because if they didn't some of this strategic theory might not work too well and then where would we be?

I think I'm going to like strategy.

Holding Tony Blair Hostage

At Bloggerheads Manic has temporarily abandoned his attempts to make the trains run on time, and decided instead that its time to make Tony Blair check his email more often. Can Weblogs Make a Politician Keep a Promise is a cracker, take a read and then do what the man says, contact your local journo. Come on, it'll be fun.

Its also a fine example of just how much fun could be had in the early days of the web, when few people understood exactly what was going on. Didn't stop them legislating about it though.

Fixture list piling up

Hurrah, a current student at the Said has just mailed the class list explaining that we need to sort out a football team, and that the Business School fields a team in the MCR league. A quick hunt around on Google revealed evidence of a previous 10 - 0 hammering at the hands of Keble College, so it looks like I may fit the bill. You see I may have gone to the same schools as Alan Shearer, and as a youngster I may have even had the same coach but there's a reason I never came close to threatening his goalscoring record at Grange First School (under 10's)...

Still, one flash of an authentic Geordie Accent "Haway man thats wor bal", coupled with my freshly shaven head and I should be in.

Busiest day to date

Yup, over 130 of you have visited the site today, clocking up an impressive 570 page impressions, which since till today the average visitor read 3-4 pages means you've all found the content more interesting than usual as well. Much of this seems to be down to the folks from MBA wire (hi guys) which is passing through a significant chunk of traffic (thanks Tad). But there are many folk visiting direct as well, could it be I'm developing one or two regular readers? That is a wierd feeling.

So, any feedback or comments let me know. In some bizarre exhibistionist manner I am after all here to serve...

Its not really like that folks honest

If anyone saw College Girls tonight, about the lives of undergraduates at St Hildas College I promise, it's not really like that. Well, the Oxford Union really is like that, all shallow and backbiting, but the rest of Oxford isn't, and you can ignore the union really easily.

Which is a shame because the union puts on some great stuff (recent speakers have included OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, Yasser Arafat...), membership is for life and there's something on most nights. Its just the fact that hanging around the union means being exposed to union hacks - all trying to cultivate the moral standards needed to succeed in today's Conservative party through a series of fraudulent elections and terribly insular 'scandals'. Pitiful really.

Fresh Content

Decided to spend the afternoon working on the site. New links include Tad Holbie who's running a similar project to this one over at MBAwire. Of particular interest was his list of the essay questions for all the schools he's considering. That makes, me at Oxford, Adam at Harvard and Adrian at Melbourne / Columbia. Oh, and the soon to be linked (when I get permission) Lisa at Wharton. Tad is still applying so he doesn't know where he's going. Surely there are some more MBA bloggers out there?

Also new is the piece on Professional MBA Essay Editing. I'm the #6 result on Google for 'mba essay' and this piece is a deliberate attempt to grab traffic on its way to professional editors who in Billy Connoly's phrase are probably 'lower than a snakes belly'. So don't worry if the opening paragraph or two read slightly oddly, its all a cunning attempt at keyword arming...

Finally I've got the archives up and running. According to Blogger this should have been a doddle, however Blogger's help files weren't displaying images, so it looks like I wasn't the only one who forgot to write the full directory path in an important box somewhere.

Old jokes, new laughs

Friday night being a night for drinking, dancing and singing in Newcastle I went to see a performance of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.The company, 1399, have previously performed The Tempest at Tynemouth Priory and Macbeth at Newcastle Keep. This time the venue was Blackfriars Monastary, which is tucked away in the centre of Newcastle. Once upon a time it was behind the Mayfair Rock Club (home of the legendary and terrifying Whitesnake Half Hour), nowadays its one big building site, because what Newcastle really needs is a new shopping centre... Anyway, back to the venue - the monastary's open courtyard was perfect for this, suitably perked up with stage lights, a wooden stage and pavilions for the audience. The whole thing felt like a sanitised medieval courtyard - except for the portaloos, I'd have taken a medieval garderobe over them anyday.

The play was a reworking of the Knight's Tale, Priest's Nun's Tale, Cook's Tale, Reeve's Tale, Pardoner's Tale and Miller's Tale, which basically boils down to one romance a couple of moral stories and two 'medieval mucky stories' as the cast called them. While significant chunks of Chaucer were left in the business of trimming the tales down to twenty minutes and making them comprehensible necessitated a fair bit of reworking and the addition of plenty of slapstick comedy. Whether Chaucer ever envisaged the Priest's Nun's Tale as involving a hillbilly and an Elvis impersonating rooster is unlikely.

The cast were six strong, one for each tale and the whole thing presented as the conclusion of a medieval story telling contest presided over by the Reeve. The acting was strong throughout, with plenty of song and dance worked in for good measure. Occassionally the slightly amateur nature of the piece came through, but in all honesty that worked in their favour, I can't really imagine anyone delivering Chaucer the way the RSC delivers Shakespeare, Chaucer belongs outdoors with a enthusiastic crowd, audience participation and plenty of mulled wine.

So, Friday night, drinking, dancing and singing. Top stuff. Next week, wenching!

Smile ;-)

Apparently the world's first smiley was this one. Now all they need to find is the world's first 411 fraud, the world's first chain email, the world's first pyramid marketing email... Still, its nice that things like this have histories, and that someone will always be able to say, those smiley things? That was me. Now that is an achievement.

Can weblogs make the trains run on time?

Over at Bloggerheads Manic has realised that complaining about late trains will only get you so far. He's got a plan to make those responsible for the problems of the privatised public transport system more accountable, but he's not sure he's got the right audience. So, if you suffer daily on the UK's trains or buses take yourself over to Bloggerheads and offer to help. Otherwise next time you're stuck on the train, and its late, and you're thinking 'why doesn't somebody do something about this?' you'll know the answer. Its because you're too damn lazy ;-)

Incidently the buses in Newcastle are reliable and staffed by friendly drivers. The buses in Oxford are all over the place and staffed by some of the most miserable, cantankerous sods known to man (with the exception of Mad Mick). This is worth mentioning because they're run by the same company. Maybe the new textbooks which have just arrived (including one on company culture) can explain this. Or maybe folks are just nicer up here.

Old economy still broke

At least Seth Godin says it is (second entry), nice to see he hasn't let the end of the new economy get to him. To be fair, when I saw him back at Internet World 99 he opened by saying someting along the lines of 'the net is not TV and the dot coms who think it is are doomed'. The current solution? Quit and become an entrepreneur...

He also namechecks SherpaBlog, a quick look round didn't reveal whether or not this is the same Anne Holland who used to edit Clickz, but I think it is.

Scratch one lucky charm

Well, until last night I'd never seen Newcastle lose a match in the flesh. Now this is partly because I haven't been to that many games, a combination of finances, ticket demand and living 300 miles away put paid to that. Even so, eight unbeaten games was a good run, and now its over. This mornings papers lifted my gloom somewhat, heaping praise on the Leeds keeper, but truth be told we may have had plenty of chances but we rarely tested him - and when he was beaten we missed the target.

For my money I thought Gary Speed had a shocker, and Viduka and Kewel caused us far too many problems just by being big and quick and skillfull - its not like Leeds had the possession to give them great service. Not a disaster, but until someone learns to dominate at the back we're going to continue to leak goals.

On a more MBA related note I'm making progress with the reading material and starting to think I might be ok at this finance stuff after all, just as long as we can stick to abstract discussions. When it comes to practitioning, I'll call an accountant.

Portrait of a business student

"The 2002-03 MBA Class is made up of students from 32 countries, with 21% of the class being female. The average GMAT score is 688, with the average age being 29. The average number of years of work experience is 6 years." That is a whole lot of countries. It also means I'm going to be (on average) young and inexperienced.

It also means (I think) that the average GMAT has gone down slightly from last years. Now in a round about way this is a good thing, since it probably means they're paying less attention to the innaccurate monopolistic excuse for an intelligence test that is the GMAT and focusing on candidates actual skills...

In another world

Would Al Gore have been pursuing a foreign policy something like this one outlined by Bill Clinton?

I'm an Advanced Student

According to the lovely folks in the graduate office at Queens I'm entitled to wear an advanced student gown for the MBA. This adds to the commoners and scholars gown I needed as an undergrad. For the record you need gowns for exams along with sub-fusc - which is dark suit and white bow tie. You also need them for matriculation and formal hall - which is where you get to eat lovely food for little money on a regular basis. It's really just part of Oxford's traditional silliness, but aside from the expense I kind of like it.

See some of the gown wearing regulations, or buy a gown online.

It tolls for thee

Finally got to sleep at 3AM last night after what sounded like a car alarm went off somewhere down the road. However as far as I know car alarms are supposed to stop after twenty minutes at the most. This one was still going at 8 AM. I tried sleeping in the back room (could still hear it), wearing headphones (not comfortable at all) and ended up stuffing my ears with tissue paper. As as result I'm absolutely knackered.

On a brighter note I have tickets for the Leeds game. Last time I saw Newcastle play a Terry Venables side we won 3-1 despite Shay Given being sent off. Even Gullit said the crowd made up for the extra man, and an atmosphere like that on Wednesday will be welcome indeed.

Finally Adam's wife Jenny Brown is concerned that her blog gets less traffic than he does. So I've added her to the MBA links. If anyone's interested in what effect an MBA is likely to have on your significant other you could do worse than read this. Plus the stuff on the Harvard social scene for partners is hilarious. Blogs by professional writers - now there's an idea...

If you succeed in everything you do

You're not pushing yourself. Doesn't make me feel any better about the treadmill's victory at the gym today. Still, I now have a goal for the rest of the holidays. Oh, and the pec dec machine won as well, guess this is the point at which self improvement really starts :-)

Hmm the Onion's horoscope for me this week "Aries : Every day, in every way, you're getting better and better. But at this rate, you won't be good enough for 64 more years." Shucks, what will I be good enough for aged 90?