The other Oxford

As you head out of the business school past our 'local', Antiquity Hall there's a lad begging. Well, not really begging. I've not seen him ask for money, he just says hello, wishes you a good day, that kind of thing as he sits in his sleeping bag trying not to freeze. Today his persistence paid off, like everyone who walks around the city I get hassled by Oxford's homeless pretty much everyday, so for him not hassling people is such a worthwhile tactic that I figured it deserved a payoff. I also stopped for a chat.

The good news is this lad is on his way to being off the streets. Reading between the lines I think he's got a habit to forget about first, but he seems to be on the right track. The less good news was that the two kids who've been begging round Oxford are exactly what I thought they were, professional beggers. Their pitch is always the same "Scuuuuuse me, I'm not a begger or anything, I just need some help with... " Sometimes its cabfare home, sometimes its money for the youth hostel. Doesn't matter, I'm told they're not homeless, they commute from London. Apparently they think they're friends to the rest of the homeless. The homeless don't agree.

Oxford, thanks to its large number of tourists, moneyed student population and near to London location has a terrible homeless problem. Or at any rate it has a homeless problem on behalf of everywhere within about fifty miles. As I've said before, how did a nation as rich as ours end up in this mess?

I don't know.

Marching for Mayday

I've noticed a few of my fellow business school bloggers have taken time to comment on Europes May Day celebrations / protests. My personal view is that the groups who march are so internally divided and lacking in long term goals that there's not much point going. I've been on enough demos that got hijacked by extremists thankyou.

I was chatting with a classmate yesterday who commented that it would be impossible for him to turn up to a demo if he thought that far right opinions were likely to be voiced in any capacity. The problem is that these demos aren't for a specific cause, so the loudest, nastiest and most pointless elements come to the fore. Which is a shame.

Tim feels differently though, and with his most creative activist hat on he came up with a number of cool things to try while demonstrating.

Read about them here.

It's sad

Luck Goldstar thinks I've been on a tear lately. He doesn't know the half of it. Today was depressing. We had our first class on corporate responsibility. We watched a panorama report on Nike and Gap's use of third world (Cambodian) labour in 2000. Then we discussed it. Never mind that 12 year olds had been pressed into work by family and social pressure, never mind that workers were on 16 hour shifts without a break for slave wages. Never mind that these poor people are living in a shanty town.

To see some of my colleagues find the justifications, to parrot out the corporate line. It turned my stomach. I'm convinced that not one of the people in that room would have run the factory in the video the way it was run. If instead of sloping off to our pretty jobs in corporateville we took a job running a factory in Cambodia we wouldn't be like this. We wouldn't allow staff to beat the workers for asking for time off. We wouldn't enforce overtime or insist on sixteen hour shifts. We'd find a way to pay more than the minimum wage. We wouldn't hire 12 year olds who look like 12 year olds. We'd be better than that. But ask us in the abstract, ask us if it might be ok, ask us about the unreal world of rhetoric...

You see its not real, its in Cambodia, which if any of us have been there at all is a place you go on holiday. Pass through travelling and look at the temples. Smoke something interesting and don't tread on the landmines. Nike and Gap outsourced their morals and exported ours. Can we have absoloute morals, yeah, don't hit your workforce. Can we tell the age of a worker, yeah, don't employ kids with puppy fat. Can we do anything about the Nike shoes and Gap clothes in our wardrobe? Yeah, justify the company in class. Salve your conscience.

My football boots are Nike (see above). My music is from paid up members of the RIAA (assaults on privacy and civil liberty), my laptop is Dell (God knows what's inside). We've gotta get out of this place, but they sold the exit signs while we weren't looking.

Meanwhile, if like Lucky you're forming your opinions of No Logo from the pages of the Economist take a moment to read this. Personally I'd suggest you read the book. Naomi is by no means perfect, plenty of her evidence is open to challenge and badly handled, but don't buy second hand opinions kids, you don't know where they've been.

Happy days

My old college Junior Common Room have a top notch website. For a glimpse of undergraduate life in oxford you could do much worse than the LMH JCR. Nice to see the darts team finally won a match. One of my earliest memories of college is being hauled down to Merton because they were on the verge of recording their first victory in five years. When we got there they were still in front. We bought beer, we sang. We bought our team beer, they lost. C'est la vie.

Business hits football, again

Leeds united, last season one of the biggest clubs in the English league are not fighting not relegation, but bankruptcy. Thing is, with the transfer market so far depressed a handful of clubs with decent amounts of money are going to be able to snap up quality players for a pittance and the management will have to agree, in part because of the astronomical wages these players are on. Their market capitalisation is down to an meagre £12m, a fraction of the value of their playing squad. Their debts however are £78m.

Its a bit early, but could they be relegation favourites this time next year? I doubt it, but the glory days are long gone from Elland Road.

All the more reason to hope my team Newcastle make it into the champions league where, at least for another two seasons, money more or less grows on trees.

Editing time

Some of my classmates have raised valid concerns about some of my recent posts. There will be some editing. Apologies if this confuses anyone.

That said this should be a no holds barred, warts and all look at what goes on inside the business school, and to a lesser extent my head. Several people have taken issue (in detail) with my views on Friedman and Klein (below). Well they're my views and make what you will of them.

Other concerns have been related chiefly to privacy and the image of the school. It's fair to say that my policy of never naming anyone without their express permission slipped in relation to faculty which probably wasn't legitimate. (Have to find out if Oxford lectures are public). I am trying to achieve what I hope will be a consensus with integrity.

when I feel with my heart, I know in my mind
I should say with my lips
but does that make you feel upset?

World of Blogs

Check this out. Credit to Lucky Goldstar for finding the link

In other news, Iraq looks more like the West Bank every day Credit to CNN for giving this much better coverage than some earlier instances of US troops firing on protesters.

What went on in marketing

Its fair to say marketing was controversial in the way it was taught and the reception it recieved. I've decided to email the professor who gave the course to ask for his thoughts on what went on. If they're not forthcoming I will try and write something balanced about it. (I thought I had, others thought not...)

Milton Friedman must be stopped!

In contrast to my views on Naomi Klein (see below) I think Milton Friedman is a dangerous extremist. I've just read his 1970 article 'The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase it's Profits' which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 1970. I think it's a particularly nasty bit of polemic. Here's a flavour

"Businessmen who talk this way (advocate social responsibility) are unwitting puppets of intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society for these past decades"

"the businessman... is to be simultaneously legislator, executive and, jurist"

Aside from anything else the piece suggests that Milton never took the time to read anyone elses political philosophy, he just wrote down the first few things that popped into his red scare addled mind. So here's a question for Milton.

As a socially responsible individual I don't play loud music at 3 in the morning even when I want to. My neighbours would be pissed off. I voluntarily choose to limit my actions in the name of social responsibility. This is an instance of 'negative responsibility' I choose not to do something.

Now if I am managing a construction company I may discover that the cheapest time to do road maintenance is in the middle of the night, and that doing so would be legal. It'll wake up the neighbourhood, but thanks to the country I'm in I can't be sued or prosecuted.

As moral people neither I nor any of my employees would want to wake up the neighbourhood. But as employees Friedman argues that we should. Thanks to the miracle of incorporation we are now resolved of all moral responsibility which has been transferred to the shareholders. Moreover, since shareholders hold a 'universal portfolio' (or they would if they were rational) it seems every one in the world has a say in whether or not I wake up the neighbors. At any rate this will have to go to a board meeting and be voted on.

Clearly not all decisions like this should go to the board. Imagine the weekly list of neighbourhoods which may or may not be disturbed or the endless requests as to whether this or that garbage dump should be used. My construction company will set a policy. I imagine it will tell me to be socially responsible, trust my own judgement, do what they would do. After all, the shareholders are by and large moral folk who don't believe in waking people up at night, were each and every one of them in my shoes a clear majority would choose not to dig up the road. Since they have no interest in adjudicating separately each and every moral dilemma faced by their employees they choose to set a policy. They choose to be socially responsible.

Alternatively the shareholders, who as individuals can exercise their own moral choices choose to maximise profits. People are woken up. Garbage is placed in less than ideal places. Every company everywhere suddenly loses its moral compass. There will be protests, governments will intervene. Regulations are enacted and enforcement officers recruited. The state balloons out of all proportion in an attempt to impose the morals of it's constituents on its coroporate bodies. Taxes rise.

What I'm trying to get at is a conception that social responsibility is necessary to the smooth functioning of an economy. By adopting a set of social conventions we avoid the costs of regular decision making or constant supervision and regulation. We also allow each and every one of us to own shares in the knowledge that our investments are moral ones that we would choose to make on an individual case by case basis.

Now this doesn't work either, but that's because companies fail to be responsible - not because they try at all.

Who's afraid of Naomi Klein?

Naomi Klein has come in for a bit of a battering this week. Both my brand lecturers have taken a moment to knock her work, not in a direct manner, more in a 'very nice in its own way but misguided, poor girl' kind of way. The class then smirks and laughs in its best manner and a few more students decide not to bother reading the book.

Which is a shame.

You see at its heart No Logo is not an attack on brands, it's a history of them and an analysis of what they've been up to lately. It is oddly non-judgemental about the advance of brands into public spaces and the growing influence of corporations. What Naomi Klein objects to is things like the exploitation of child labour, the abysmal treatment of some employees and the failure of our society to protect things like the classroom from outside influence. These by and large are not contentious positions, companies should not exploit children, abuse their staff or turn classrooms into advertising sessions. These things are bad. Naomi would like us to do something about this.

In particular Naomi would like us to target a number of high profile successful companies and in a kind of judo-protest turn the power of their advertising against them. Brands aren't bad per se, its just that several of the companies with big brands are doing bad things, and the one point of weakness that people can get at is their brand. Make enough noice about Nike's labour practices and its news, target a dozen garment factories in Thailand that no-one has ever heard of and who cares?

So is No Logo really anti-corporate, anti-brand or even anti-globalisation? I don't think so. I think no logo is an attempt to identify a connected set of issues and document the way a new protest movement has sought to combat them through brand subversion.

On the other hand, by the time 'Fences and Windows' came out Naomi really had joined the revolution, which was a bit of a shame. She's not very good revolutionary, but she was bloody good at documenting, analysing and making sense of stuff, a task that is necessary if we're going to manage our new global marketplace in a way that lets us go shopping without feeling guilty.

Search rankings take a hammering

Hmm, seems I've been dropping off the lists at Google and Yahoo. I stopped monitoring traffic on this site about four months ago. I've just started again for the homepage only and it seems I'm getting almost no search engine traffic at all. On the other hand I had around 80 visitors over the weekend which is about what I used to get.

So I guess the gradual accumulation of links is bringing me traffic - as well as the odd member of class choosing to read this, but otherwise no. Fortunately I have some major publicity coming my way soon - more when it happens.

Back to work

Term starts properly tomorrow which means I've spent some of the weekend getting on with the reading. One thing that is very noticable this term is the willingness of faculty to recommend their own work on reading lists. My experience as an undergraduate was that Dons (Oxford Tutors) didn't like doing this, even when they were the world experts on the subject. This term though there seems to be no such restraint, I don't think its a good or a bad thing, I just think it's different.

One thing doesn't change though. Harvard Business School case studies remain the worst form of fiction known to man. Dull, formulaic and laboured. I really think that the alleged benefits of case studies (you learn from an examination of the real world) are being taken away by the demands of the genre. My experience of the real world was that the biggest problem was selection of appropriate evidence, a ten page case study however has already pre-selected an enormous amount of data, as well as a particular moment in time for examination. Facts are effortlessly rearranged to present the everyday randomness of things as a coherent story. I'm sure this makes the subjects of the case studies feel all lovely and warm but I'm unsure as to it's usefullness.

We don't actually do that many case studies here, at least not in the classic sense of ploughing through these god awful documents as a substitute for thinking, but we do get a few. Maybe two or three a week.

Lessons with Wally

Today was the first session in Wally Olins Nation Brand and Identity course. Wally is in his own words 'abraisive and confrontational' he also has a solution to the long running 'should students be allowed to use laptops in class' dilemma. He doesn't think they should, so he makes people turn them off. He doesn't like people being late either. I'd been tipped off in advance and avoided both problems.

In many ways this pretty much sums up Wally's approach. No messing about just sort things out. We've had plenty of lecturers who get annoyed at late comers but none ever had the sense to say 'I don't like latecomers, so don't be late'. Some don't like laptops, so rather than ask students not to use them in their lectures they try and get them removed from all lectures.

Anyway, as you'd expect from one of the biggest names in the branding business Wally was brilliant. Which was good, because in many ways him teaching here, about this kind of stuff and at this kind of level is why I applied to Said in the first place. Wally is currently branding Poland. Which kind of says it all really.

Words from the Dean

Its been pointed out that what the Dean said may well have been said in private. They have a point. I'll talk to the Dean about this.

Directory

Someone out there is running MBA League, linking to all the MBA Blogs in existance. Odd, I usually expect people to email when they set up links but they never do. I usually do. (sorry Modz). Few links at the moment, but I'm sure they'll develop.

SBP Briefing

We're now being briefed on how we should go about undertaking our summer business projects. First of all this means a talk on client management from a senior consultant at PA Consulting. He started off with a quick dose of who they are and the fact that they're hiring. Pitch over he moved onto client management.

I once saw a great session by Kyle Shannon of Agency.com on how to manage big money clients. This is a bit more nuts and bolts than that was, covering stuff like 'dress appropriately', 'negotiate the brief closely', 'manage the changes' and so on. I've done loads of client management and a little bit of crisis client management in my time, but I can imagine that for those who've never been in this situation this is useful stuff. Odd to think about the stuff that some people do and don't know when they get here. There's a sort of tendency to assume that we've all got a core set of basic skills on arrival, but each of us expects those skills to be different. I for instance have little gift for the kind of basic maths that the quantitative side of the course takes for granted.

Useful as this is this is another man who needs to do some presentation skills training. Enthuse!, Inspire!, Illustrate! Or don't. The choice is yours.

Don't get me wrong by the way, this is turning into a genuinely useful session. Some good content here, in particular a focus on not doing all the little things that it is so easy to do when managing clients (mostly the simple dictum, "tell them the truth regularly" covers this.

>> Hmm, back with the faculty now. Apparently there is a list of things not to do that have been done by MBA students out on projects and we can look at it. Don't accrue £4000 of speeding fines on the company car you've borrowed is wise advice indeed. Don't try and negotiate for unlimited access to the mini-bar either. Somewhere in this room I am sure someone is seeing all this as a challenge rather than a warning. If only this was the 1980's, we could be lauded for this kind of behaviour ;-)

Update Apparently a combination of SARS, the Iraq War and the downturn is making it hard for people to commit to agreeing projects with the business school. This is worrying since SBP's are critical to the MBA - you can't pass if you don't get through one. On the other hand we've got eight weeks to sort this out and only half the needed briefs are in place. Odd thing is this is a great deal for the companies involved.

I just talked with a fellow MBA who's been trying to convince Swiss companies to commit to an MBA and their most common response has been "What's the catch?" it seems the fact that companies can handpick teams of four from this exceptional class to work for eight weeks on a project of their choice is just too hard for them to believe.

More fun stories. Apparantly one group once tried to carry out a project for a fictional company. They got busted and I'm not sure I want to know what happened to them.

New Careers Appointment

The school have just appointed a specialist on technology recruitment to go alongside their financial specialist in the careers office. I find this very encouraging since my job search needs some direction at the moment. I'm trying to push myself toward the technology focused summer business projects at the moment as well, but I missed the deadline for Intel, which looked like one of the more interesting ones...

Me and my lips

Modz Speranto, who's in the middle of getting ready to go to Michigan to start his MBA has found his way to this website. Apparently on learning that I was British the first thing that popped into his mind was this.

It should be noted that I am much more Michael Caine than Lord Nelson. At least in my own rather warped mind

"You're a big man but you're in bad shape, and for me it's a full time job."

Modz has been slogging his way through Warren Buffets letters to investors, and making me think I should do the same some time.

Update Modz is probably going to Anderson not Michigan. He is a man with choices it seems

The Course Changes

I've just been made privy to the shape of the future MBA course. While next years students will do more or less what I've done this year, the year after will get the revised version with more flexibility and a different way of approaching the projects. It will still be possible to do exactly what I've done, but it will also be possible to make things a little more flexible and customise the MBA more closely to your personal interests.

I need to know this stuff because I'm writing the recruitment brochure for 2004-5 applicants. On the other hand it's hardly confidential, as the course director said 'I've been trying to tell people about this stuff for weeks'. Other things that are happening include extending the term to eleven weeks instead of the current ten. At the moment we have...

1 week preparation
8 week term
1 week exams

this would give us

1 week preparation
8 week term
1 week revision / assignments
1 week exams

Although lecturers may have some scope to teach for four weeks, give a week for the assignment, teach for four more, or whatever...

Broadly speaking I think these are all positive steps and reflect a lot of the student feedback the schools been recieving. Still, there is always more to be done, and with that in mind I'll be running for course representative (again) so I can aim to make this place even better. I tried to get elected for this post last term and failed, must try harder...

One more blog...

Slowly taking shape on the other sside of cyberspace is the newest SBS related blog. OxfordatMOOTCorp which will chronicle the adventures of five sexy young MBA's as they take on the Superbowl of all business plan competitions. It's gonna be great folks.

Just as soon as we finish setting it up.

Archives back

At some point I did something that meant the first ten weeks archives vanished from the site. I've just republished them, so now you can see where all this started. Click the archives button on the left.

Just because a jobs worth doing doesn't mean it's worth doing well

That is the only quote I can remember from 'The Soul of the New Machine'. However since I read it at least ten years ago that's pretty good going. It's a fantastic book, and it's on the reading list for the managing technology ventures course. Sadly Microserfs isn't, but that would be pushing it a bit.

Getting organised

Having characteristically failed to get things moving earlier I'm spending today evaluating the summer business projects on offer. I want to work with (in order) marketing, strategy and technology issues. I want to work overseas, and I want a chance to network like crazy. And it's got to be important. I don't want to be working on no side projects here...

Should have done something sooner. Really.

I also need to check which of the electives I'm doing require study groups and start assembling them in an A-team, best of the best kind of way. I need two awe inspiring branding groups and something similar for the technology management course, just as soon as its reading list arrives. Hopefully I'll have got somewhere by the end of the day.

Milton Friedman is a big fat idiot

OK, so I've only read the first page of Capitalism and Freedom but it was so horrifyingly, deliberately wrong, so riddled with polemic and prejudice that I'm not sure I want to read the rest. What got my goat? The mindnumbingly crass statement that social democrats are unable to see the connection between politics and economics.

??????

Is this man seriously contending that a group of politicians who trace their beliefs back to Marx, who care about things like class and the redistribution of income, a political movement which is in many ways underpinned by economics fails to make the connection between politics and economics? Its wrong, just plain wrong. Ignorant polemical garbage. The economics in here may be fantastic, but if that's how he sees the world then there are some serious gaps in the understanding of this nobel prize winning economist.

I guess this is what happens when you get a nobel prize. You can spout your mouth off and no editor will say 'Milt, you couldn't take a moment to check your facts could you?'.

A big hello to all the successful applicants

I've had emails from a few of next years successful candidates, but today I got the details of my student mentees. Here's how it works, each student here is assigned a student from next years class. We're then available to answer questions, provide advice and generally be useful. This time last year I surprised my mentor by living in Oxford and trying to take him to the pub - most people just exchange email.

Anyway, since I imagine they'll be dropping in today welcome to the MBA Experience to my two mentees. I promise, you're gonna love it here.

Random thought... Maybe I could redesign this blog like the cover of Are you experienced? Or maybe I should get on with the jobhunt.

Top notch comics

I found Scary go Round from the links on the Something Positive website. It's fantastically English, set in what's probably Yorkshire and has just the right amount of surrealism, wierdness all round good stuff to keep me reading. I also love the artwork and fact that each and every character clearly has a fantastic taste in music. Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Mark and Lard. In a dark alley. Somewhere near Doncaster. Probably. Good stuff.

It's predecessor Bobbins looks pretty good too.

New Material, New Look

OK, this blog has now been coverted into a big HIRE ME PLEASE sign. Well, that's not quite true. I plan on being incredibly picky about my future employers. So if you're a fantastic company, with a great working environment and an ambition that includes the words 'world', 'leading', 'beating', 'domination', 'unrivaled', 'exceptional' or anything else of that ilk I may be interested.

Gone to Texas

Well, not yet. But in a few weeks my better half (much better two thirds?) will be off to Austin Texas. Her New Business Development Team's business plan has been selected to represent the Said Business School at Mootcorp. I think they've got a chance of winning. This opinion is based on nothing more than the number of 0's in the business plan, the incredible return and the fact that, as they keep saying "This is real, it exists"

I'll tell you more once its ready to be public knowledge. In the mean time my own teams' business plan for Heritage Theatre is pretty much there. Plan is to submit on Tuesday. Meanwhile if you've got a few hundred thousand pounds and would like to turn it into many more through an investment in not just a great business, but something of cultural significance get in touch.

Read my Online CV!

Go on, you know you want to.

Martin Lloyd's CV

OK, now thats finished it's time to see what the slave traders have to offer me.

Ten (thousand?) strong and counting

Jenny Brown may not be a Hah-vahd socialite, but as online doyenne of the MBA bloggers she has unearthed another addition to our ranks. Michael Rutner is at Wharton, and he knows what irony is, so we have to take his claims to be an American with a pinch of salt ;-) Michael is a second generation MBA blogger

"Before starting this blog, I learned a great deal about the life of an MBA applicant / student by reading blogs like these."

and since that was the point of me writing this blog in the first place the emergence of a new set of blogs for the next academic year makes me very happy indeed. Go check out Michaels stuff and see what happens when an innocent lawyer is thrust into the hectic world of Wharton.

Now, any of you Said accepts out there feel like having a go? I promise its not as much work as it looks like...

Jobhunting

My jobhunt starts today. First emails to all those people I can think of who might be useful, and then updates to this site to create an online resume. From that comprehensive document I'll produce cut down .doc's tailored to particular jobs. Before I do that though I have to find the jobs. What am I looking for?

New MBA WLTM stimulating, exciting job in the brand / technology / marketing space for mutual learning, exchange of ideas and the chance to achieve some really cool stuff. Investment banks need not apply

News from the front?

Iraqwar.ru is a very interesting organisation. All anyone seems to know for sure about them is what's available on their 'about us' section. There have been some newsgroup discussions about it, most of which seem to agree that it is more or less what it claims to be with most objectors being broadly disbelieving for no reason, and most proponents cautiously positive. It's not helped that its English translation is by a Russian guy called Venik, who while not responsible for any of the content has a reputation for trolling newsgroups.

So these are the caveats. After an hour of looking through this I can't find a conclusive piece of evidence that the Russian Intelligence Briefings from this site are what they claim to be, namely transcripts of GRU intelligence briefings. On the other hand, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that points towards them being at least partially accurate. Several times the updates predate western media sources by several days, and they successfully predict several Anglo-US offensives. (They are however completely foxed on day 1 when the ground assault co-incides with the air one)

The quotes from soldiers, journalists and others seem reasonable, and their reporting seems to parallel the general pattern of the war emerging through western media. Its also worth noting that while they make Anglo-US casualties sound far higher than has been reported here, they describe the losses as 'militarily insignificant' , while the Iraqi army has lost 8-10% of its fighting power (as of 2 days ago).

So, if we believe the breifings are what they say they are does this mean they're true? Of course not. First Russian intelligence has its own axe to grind. Secondly Russian Intelligence may not be accurate, radio intercepts, spy planes and so on all require interpretation and are easily confused, even by experts. I imagine it's easy to 'hear' the same event repeated times in radio traffic and then imagine (say) multiple reports of a tank being lost. So, read the reports starting on day one, and make up your own mind. But there's no denying that this is more compelling than CNN and if accurate far more detailed information.

Oh, I'm back from holiday. Next things to do, get a job and get on with a freelance copywriting job I've picked up. More on that later.

UPDATE This has just appeared. Whoever the people producing those updates were they weren't the GRU. They may have been ex GRU. They may have been Russian embassy staff, they may even have been Iraqi intelligence, but I very much doubt that. They seem to be claiming to be ex-GRU who wrote reports for the good of mankind. They also seem to have fallen foul of whichever government it is they operate on behalf of. I'm off to archive their material before its removed, and for the purposes of checking it after the war.

There will now be a brief hiatus

Time to pack my bags and abandon this wet and windy island. Well, thats what I thought I'd be doing when I booked a holiday in Madeira, but no. Since discovering that I'm leaving Britain has decided to recreate some kind of arcadian springtime. Oxford is looking truly lovely, the sun has been shining for days and I just hope that Madeira is as nice as this.

I'm logging off. See you in a week or so.

One to read

I made the mistake of picking up the Sunday papers today and found in the Times one of the most harrowing reports yet of what is going on in Iraq. A while ago I wrote that jumpy US marines might kill civilians, and was soundly told that it wouldn't happen, that the war was about liberating Iraq, not killing civilians. Sadly war is hell, and intentions are quickly forgotten and soldiers do things they would not have thought themselves capable of for reasons no one will ever be able to explain.

From the Sunday Times US Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of death Registration required to read this.

Lets hope we're closer to victory when I get back from Holiday. Now we've started I believe we have to win, but I wish we hadn't started.

Must be my birthday

At least, I can't think of what else I did to deserve champagne breakfast, smoked salmon, cream cheese, bagels, strawberries and cream. So far twenty seven is a good age to be.

Going back to Brandsville

I don't remember leaving Brandsville anymore than I remember the first time I arrived. I suppose I wandered in slowly through the outskirts and the suburbs. Soaking up the scenery until one day I was surrounded by the skyscrapers and it seemed as natural as the green fields where I'd started out. Years of thinking about, working with and commenting on brands had brought me to a place where although I saw them everywhere it never struck me as odd. In store displays were loaded with meaning about product strength, positioning and the latest trends in graphic design. Phone companies banks, cosmetics, cars, whatever. I saw them all. Always.

Then I left. Packed up my bags, went to business school and forgot about the meanings in the marques and the hidden messages in logotype and straplines. Leaving was a lot like arriving, I sauntered out, barely noticing the transition. I'd given up my citizenship of Brandsville and become a consumer again. If the world was emptier I didn't notice.

Last Thursday I had a meeting in London, and since its a long way on the bus I packed a book from next terms reading lists. 'The New Guide to Identity' by Wolff Olins. I read it, the bus rumbled on and at somepoint it arrived in London. Along the way I'd revised logos, identities, image and projection. I'd been reminded that everything from the lines of a BMW to the smile of a receptionist are there to be loaded with meaning, then aimed at the passers by and the interested with a delivery mechanism so stealthy they'll never even know they've been hit.

When I looked out of the window I realised I'd taken an express train straight to the heart of Brandsville. From the Golden Arches, to the Virgin V and the home brewed efforts of the Feng Sushi diner the world was alive and buzzing with messages and signs and meaning. The words of some new prophet flyposted on a subway wall.

Brandsville. It's been a while.

New MBA Blog found!

While checking to see who links to me (can you tell I'm avoiding doing all this writing) I found a new MBA Blog. Lucky Goldstar (surely another pseudonym?) is at Insead where among other things he has fallen asleep in finance class. Hell, if we'd spent thirty seconds longer on stripped bonds I'd have fallen asleep in finance class too.

Welcome to the blogroll lucky.

MBA Goon

I feel like I'm in Archers Goon. Archer wants his words by Friday. Only in my case Archer is the rest of my NBD team (words needed today) and the business school (many many words needed by the end of the week). Stuff I've promised to write includes pieces for the next school magazine and copy for forthcoming recruitment brochures. (In an earlier life I was an occasional copywriter)

So coming your way are

The final write up of the Oxford Business Forum
The write up of Herman Hauser on why the future is wet
The big write up on Synesthesia

The thing I'm working on at the moment is the job skills needed for Heritage Theatres new marketing manager. What I want to say is "The ideal candidate will have several years experience of marketing for publishing companies, preferably in the education sector. Key skills will include the ability to screw distributors and media sellers alike to the floor while maintaining good enough relationships that they want to work with you again." and when I was allowed to write recruitment ads I occasionally got away with this kind of thing. (nothing as good as Ogilvy's legendary "Wanted, Trumpeter Swans" ad though). Sadly this is a business plan, and you can't say things like that, .
time to break out the dictionary of marketese and weasel speak.

But only after I get over my first jogging expedition of the year. I really should remember that if you stop it gets harder again.

Things get grim in Baghdad

Salaam Pax is providing better coverage of whats going on in Baghdad than any of the media channels. Worrying things to come out of his latest report are the failure of the Iraqi authorities to properly sound air raid alerts and the definition of targets adopted by the west. He seems to think that so stealthy and frequent are western attacks that the authorities are having trouble knowing when to sound alarms and all clears, I guess this means people are getting caught outside when the bombs start to fall.

The fact that we bombed an officers club is scary too. Sure its a legitimate target since our strategy is to go after the Iraqi leadership, but he says it was in a residential area, and that we missed it, but hit surrounding areas. Since our precision munitions are precise to 35m (admittedly bloody good from 30 000 feet up) its not hard to see how we could start hitting civilians in large numbers when we go after things like this.

This war is grim and getting grimmer, but unless we're very lucky it'll get a lot lot worse before its over. I think our military expected that, but I'm not sure the western public has been prepared for this at all.

Crunch Time

So what happens if you lock five MBA students in a room, during the first *really* nice weather of the year and tell them to write a business plan? Well, they do it, but all of them wish they were elsewhere. To be fair the school becomes absolutely lovely in summer, all light and space, and the rather harsh stone quad becomes surprisingly attractive. Just waiting for the trees on it to develop leaves, and all that climbing ivy to get done climbing.

Anyway, a couple of days have gone by and we've thrashed out a lot of the detail for Heritage Theatre's future plans. Along the way we've discovered that even a rigourous process of 'does this number look right' for each and every assumption in the model still leaves you with an incredibly optimistic result which needs revising to handle the demands of reality. Still, many spreadsheets later we're all happy and tomorrow is the all singing, all dancing presentation, complete with video footage. (anyone know of good DVD ripping software? Answers by midnight or not at all please)

After that its just a case of write the business plan up nice and tidy and this term will finally be over.

What, you were expecting more from me about the war? Sorry, too busy to watch the CNN /BBC/Fox websites and blog. Take yourselves to Technorati's current events material and find more opinion than I can muster written by bloggers with a lot more time on their hands than I have right now.

OK, just the two links. Dear Raed is the weblog of an Iraqi man calling himself Salaam Pax, he's in Baghdad writing as it all happens. Some people aren't convinced he's real, obviously if he is he doesn't want a visit from the Baath party. So he can't provide evidence. After a bit of research Paul Boutin has concluded that he's probably real. Sooner or later weblogs will produce their own Anne Frank. For now though add Dear Raed to blogs like the UN worker in Afghanistan and the Homeless Guy in Nashville. Showing you lives you can't imagine living.

Decision points

Nothing to do now but watch the news and wait for the next decision point. The thousand or so demonstrators on the streets of Oxford last night may have been a little late to the party, but the start of the war doesn't mean the end of the protests. The question of course is not whether the war can be stopped, but whether the decisions taken by the politicians can be altered. Right now the war is on autopilot and the two armies are being left to sort things out among themselves.

But at some point there will be decisions to be made, and they'll be decisions that go beyond the theatre of war. Perhaps that might not happen till Saddam is gone and the regime broken, or they might come sooner. Wars are too unpredictable for predicitions. Of course the one decision we know we have to make in the UK will come at the local elections. How will we vote, will those who took to the streets take to the ballot box, or will a significant number of British people continue to claim that there's no point voting cause politics is too detatched from reality?

I hope not.

Explain (in one paragraph) the following concepts

1. M1 to M4
2. Total Factor Productivity
3. Purchasing Power Parity
4. The Gold Standard

A few people were foxed by the in one paragraph thing. (it meant a paragraph each) and much email resulted. Jeff Pittman set the tone for last nights discussion

"Hmm, maybe I wasn't supposed to write just one paragraph. Here's the gist of what I wrote:
"1M represents is the liquidity of one bloody Mary, 2M represents Modigliani and Miller who took away my dividends and terrorized my dreams last night, 3M represents an example of my overreaction to stock prices and 4M represents the money supply on steriods. TFP is the residual of the factors which made me feel so low last night, aka two f*ing pints over the convergence of accumulation and depreciation. The gold standard is what I hold my socks' toes to, and purchasing power normalization is what happened when I moved to Oxford and bought into this program.""

As you can tell, we're taking the exams very seriously this time around.

Exams underway

In fact exams nearly over. Only four this term, sat in three papers. Today was a two hour paper on Macroeconomics and Finance II and a one and a half hour paper on Management Accounting. The first and last went pretty well, the Finance paper was, well, tough. Fortunately I spent most of yesterday with my quantitatively gifted girlfriend who patiently explained many of the things I didn't understand, while simultaneously discovering just how little I really know about maths.

How I ever got good marks on last terms finance paper is beyond me. In the unlikely event of it happening again I'll be convinced that our marks are assigned by examiners throwing darts, blindfold at a roulette wheel and have nothing to do with what we actually know. Tomorrow is Operations Management. I reckon passing won't be too hard (hey, fortune, have a hostage) but doing well will be extremely difficult.

Commons debate in real time

Don't worry, I have done plenty of revision for tomorrows exams. This is all a bit more interesting though.

Back later, Jack Straw is summing up and he's showing everything that's wrong with the parliamentary culture. What should be a serious debate loaded with gravitas is turning into a shouting match, a public school boys contest of one upmanship and a frankly obnoxious display. How the hell people are supposed to take us serioiusly after watching this is beyond me.

He's summing up by saying that he 'cannot impune the intentions of anyone in this house' which given that half his speech has comprised character attacks on those who disagree with him and pathetic party political comments has knocked him back even further in my esteem.

hmm, biggest rebellion in modern british political history, biggest demonstration ever and what do we get, nothing. 250 000 countryside alliance supporters was all it took to derail Labours long standing commitment to abolish bloodsports. 1 million suggest killing people is wrong and ... nada

In other news the US published a list of nations it has successfully bribed. "Boucher said the 30 countries on the list are Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Britain, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador (news - web sites), Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea (news - web sites), Spain, Turkey and Uzbekistan. "

Sorry, that's the 30 countries who support it. We know Turkey have been promised $16 bn and places like Columbia and Afghanistan are in no position to say no. I'm a little skeptical personally.

Now go here and ask about civil disobedience

Baghdad is big

"The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforseeable and uncontrollable events" - Winston Churchill. (credit for the quote)

Reading CNN I've just discovered that Baghdad contains five million people. That's about 2/3rds the size of London. London is very very big indeed. When Churchill was contemplating a German invasion of Britain he consoled himself with the thought that at least London would swallow an entire German division before being broken. Popular resistance, he thought, would make an occupation impossible. Up till now I've imagined Baghdad as a kind of town, in a desert, the kind of thing you could walk through in an hour or two, not an enormous, sprawling metropolis, thousands of streets, a million houses.

In comparison the US has 250 000 troops in the region, including only 120 000 combat troops, the rest are support personnel for the Army and Navy. The UK adds another 30 000 or so combat effectives. Regardless of whether Saddam goes or not if Baghdad doesn't welcome our forces with open arms, but instead sees them as an occupying power could this city swallow the entire invasion force? There are other cities to occupy, supply lines to guard and all the rest. What if the Iraqi regime survives the initial onslaught, what if the Iraqi people oppose invasion more than they loath Saddam?

What if Baghdad is to become the Arab Sarajevo, beseiged for months, bombarded and surrounded. Starved into submission by the 'liberating' troops? Even worse, what if it becomes the next Stalingrad, plenty of people have proved willing to die for obnoxious regimes before now.

Perhaps this is why Stormin Norman turned back at the approach to Baghdad, perhaps this is why so few US generals think this is a good idea. Perhaps this is why the US army wanted so many more troops before they went into action. For a year there have been suggestions that the US military is not happy with the plan it is being asked to follow, is this why? I don't know where I'm going with all this. I oppose the war, I don't think we need it. On the other hand, if it has to come lets hope Bush is right. Lets hope Saddam goes, the Iraqi's elect a benign government, the Kurds are happy with whatever they get, the Shia's and the Sunni live in peace and the monstrous Ba'ath party is consigned to history.

Lets hope Baghdad doesn't swallow all our hopes.

That Robin Cook Speech in full

I never quite got what people meant when they talked about Robin Cook as an impressive politician and a prime ministerial candidate. Well, his resignation speech made that, and a whole lot of other things very clear indeed.

Told you so

Worth some friendly coverage in the Guardian. Thats what I said would be the minimum payoff for the first MP to get a blog. Actually I think his payoff will be several hundred constituents who feel they have a relationship with him, talk to him and promote him. Expect this mans majority to be unassailable by the next election.

Can weblogs get a good man a great job

Well Tim seems to think so. Read all about the latest attempt to expoit networked blogs for the benefit of mankind here
Can Weblogs Get a Good Man a Great Job?

[update] Hmm, #17 on Blogdex and rising. If the usual rules hold and each step up the results ladder doubles the traffic a few more links will see this generate loads of traffic. Not sure its going to result in a job offer though. I am of course ready to be proved wrong.

Maybe he should try Phill Wolff's bloggers for hire page instead.

Pages not big enough

My theory that Finance II is the toughest course going has just received a boost. With the exception of a single lecture in Finance I I've been able to compress the content of any lecture to a single side of A4 for revision purposes. Obviously you lose most of the meaning, inflection and nuances of the stuff, but you've got the mechanics down. (you can get last terms revision notes through the 'doing the mba section'.

Finance II however is blowing this theory out of the water. Well, not the first four classes which dealt with corporate governance, dividend policy and such, but the second half, which dealt with debt, options and currency hedging. Unless I develop a maths degree overnight I'm not going to get anything useful onto a single side of A4 no matter how hard I try. I feel a long and finance shaped weekend coming on here.

In other news the 'everyone chip in with exam notes' section of our shared drive is starting to develop a sense of humour. Latest additions to Macroeconomics include 'why my peso is worthless' (inflation) and 'money is everywhere but not in the bank' (money supply). Cheered me up no end.

Back after these commercials

Elvis Costello sang this when standing in for David Letterman. Who could disagree

As I walk through
This wicked world
Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity.

I ask myself
Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?

And each time I feel like this inside,
There's one thing I wanna know:
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

And as I walked on
Through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.

'Cause each time I feel it slippin' away, just makes me wanna cry.
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?


So where are the strong?
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.

'Cause each time I feel it slippin' away, just makes me wanna cry.
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

Viral Marketing?

It's got nothing to do with Reebok, but this will be doing the rounds of offices all over the world pretty damn soon. I bet someone had to fight very hard indeed to stop Terry Tate, Office Linebacker (big download) turning into a product focused love in.

I'm not sure quite what I make of this. By itself it probably won't sell that many shoes. But if they can turn Terry into some kind of cult figure and build the shoe connection slowly over time. Maybe. Here's a link to the support website. Looks like they're trying to turn this content into permission, but to be honest seems all the budget went on films.

Where are...

The Terry Tate office posters to print out?
The Tate intimidation generator? (press here for twenty intimidating words to scream at your co-workers)
The "what kind of fool are you?" Terry Tate quiz?
The nominate a co-worker for a TT smackdown competition?
Or, the have TT in your office for a day competition?
The Terry Tate Blog?

On this last point... Raging Cow copped a lot of flak for using blogs badly, but here's what I'd do. I'd hire a copywriter, a good one. And I'd pay him to hunt out the best bits of business news and office gossip on the web, and then discuss it Terry Tate style. The content should be good enough that genuine business folk might read it, and the thing should link to real news stories. Just like a real blog.

Terry Tate is a big guy. He could have been a whole lot bigger. Now... must do some revision.....

Seth Godin thinks I'm wasting my time

You can read about his ideas for a New Order Business School here. As for me, I've had my classes on presentation already thanks. Prioritising was this morning, do I embrace change? I had a blog before Seth did, some new economy guru he is.

On a less strident note. I've never been to NYU, but browsing around, reading the inanities that appear on the business week forum and looking at the whole rubber stamp mentality that surfaces from time to time I'm glad I'm here. While things may not always go according to plan the idea is at least to rip the lid off the ideas and get at the guts of things. I don't actually know what the Black Scholes formula is, (I mean, the formula, its a thing for pricing options) although I know what you do with it, and if I plough through my notes I can tell you the good and the bad about it. I hope that the Saids' focus on not just teaching us the jargon, the buzzwords and the latest techniques manages to outlast its startup period.

Operations management concluded today with a brief summary of what we've actually been taught.

How to describe systems so you can tell what you're really looking at
How to treat people well, in particular how to create systems that treat people well
The overwhelming importance of quality
Approaches to managing complexity

Somewhere in there was JIT, MRP, TQM and all the rest. Mixed in though was a clear exhortation to skip the slogans and get to the meat. Seth is of course just flame bating, the guy owes pretty much the whole 'guru' phase of his career to magazines like fast company, the reading material of choice for MBA's and capitalist wannabes the world over.

Examination Apathy

This time last term everyone was panicking about exams. In fact for the two or three weeks prior to the exams lecturers were pressured - what's on the paper, is this examinable, what should an answer be? It was largely fear of the unknown.

Fear of the unknown was fear of failure, of exams in a different style, different language, all that coalesced into one big panic. This time people are laid back, we've been there, done that and while some subjects are tough we know its survivable. So people are knuckling down, getting on with business and while some will pass and some will fail the attitude is less 'oh my god this is the be all and end all' and much more 'lets get this over with and go on holiday'

Journey beginning

Tad has just got admitted to UMBS after a truly marathon exercise in applications. Fifteen drafts for a single set of essays? With that kind of dedication he's going to sail through business school.

Just don't forget to take time out to smell the flowers Tad. No sense spending the whole year working. Whens the next time you'll be your own boss?

Media Watch

Ever since Vietnam when an uncensored press corps wrecked domestic morale governments have been very careful about who says what about their troops. According to this piece from the BBC the present UK philospohy is to pretend they're not really there. By contrast the US army is happy to show off their bombs and bullets - presumably a response to very different domestic public opinion in the two countries.

Eminem versus The Streets

With revision suddenly underway in earnest I took time out yesterday to buy a few new CD's, so I'm now the proud owner of The Eminem Show by Eminem and Original Pirate Material by The Streets. Its all 'white rap music', but while Eminem is straight outta Detroit with raging paranoia and a whole bunch of issues too scary to mention The Streets barely make it out of the door of their London council housing before deciding it looks too much like trouble and they'd best smoke something before going back to bed.

Thats possibly a little harsh on The Streets, who seem to like going to the pub and a bit of cockney duckin' and divin' as well but the contrast is huge. Eminem rants and rages at the world, which is great when you agree with him, and in places its hard not to. Taken with his last album he's turning out one of the most coherent critiques of the problems of fame around. He wants to shout, scream and mouth off, he didn't ask to be a role model, and anyone who believes he's driving kids to violence is missing a whole chunk of other explanations for the problems of ghetto youth. On the other hand when he goes off on one about gays, bitches and ho's again you just wish he'd shut up, see a good psychiatrist, patch things up with his wife and go play with his daughter. (If Eminem has a redeeming feature its his solid commitment to looking after his daughter - I still reckon she'll loath him for his music when she's 16 though.)

In contrast The Streets have no bigger fish to fry than moaning about the governments stance on drugs, and avoiding some of the scary geezers who populate their world. Along the way we have a blokish mixture of women as objects 'don't mug yourself' and romantic heartbreak 'its too late'. Some of the social commentary is a bit grating 'Geezers need excitement' (sometime in the next year some Oxford mockney is going to say something very stupid to me and justify it with "common sense, simple common sense" and I'll go off this record completely)

All in all two very different takes on being a bloke. It makes you think, Detroit isn't that much scarier than the wrong ends of London. Is it just the constant presence of guns that fuels the paranoia of Eminem, Dre and all the rest? Or is it that there's something else in UK culture which has done a better job of standing up to macho posturing in music?

Hey ho, and to think I went out to buy the Miss Dynamite album. Who should in no sense be thought as having anything to do with the cartoon at Miss Dynamite.com which I found by accident and is guaranteed to offend pretty much everyone in equal measure. (the cartoon that proves terrorists have humour too, you have been warned)

Telling stories?

Todays FT carries a piece about Google going public, splashed all across the back page. Its remarkably similar to a piece I read a few weeks ago on the same topic. The basic gist being that Silicon Valley is looking to a Google IPO to restart the money machine. This is wierd becase to my knowledge Google has made no plans to go public and certainly hasn't put out any press to that effect. So what's going on?

Well possibly Google is building support for an IPO by stealth, or more likely perhaps an investment bank is trying to talk Google into letting them handle the IPO.

According to the FT they've got revenue of $500m and a 30% margin. If we assume constant margins and a growth of 25% p/a for five years and then steady performance into the distance (and this is a very conservative estimate) Google is worth $3.8bn, (discounting at an arbitary 10%). That is one enormous pile of money, especially for a firm with only 600 employees.

But Google could have cashed in a while back, any time in the last five years in fact. And if they can hang around long enough to ride the next tech boom instead of trying to start it they'd be worth a lot more. Going public would also expose Google to the rigours of a stock market that simply wouldn't understand them. There would be takeover risks, and a pressure to do something with all that money. I'm not sure Google could spend all that money, I'm not sure its founders would care about it that much. Seqouia Capital would probably love the money, and could probably do great things with it, but they probably appreciate that right now holding makes far more sense than selling.

So, am I wrong and where are all these stories about a flotation coming from? Someone knows, but its not me.

A world of ends

The latest contribution from the cluetrain authors - well two of them - is world of ends, an interpretation of what the internet means, what makes it good and perhaps more importantly what you should do to exploit this. The assortment of recommended reading here is impressive as well.

About time too

Tom Watson is the MP for West Bromich East and he's about to be much better known than he is now. Why? because he's the first MP to run his own blog. Its got to be worth a mention in the Guardian at least.

Just read it, the guys real, he's human. He writes about stuff. Christ, he even posts to newsgroups. Its probably Alistair Campbells worst nightmare, imagine if they all did it. This ladies and gentlemen is good for democracy.

I'm doomed

I've barely got the last one out of my system when they go and bring out not one, but two new versions. I swear if I hadn't spent so much of my youth playing wargames and reading history this might be an easier habit to kick, but its not. In some ways this is the game I've wanted to play ever since I was old enough to run around on Hadrians wall and imagine I was defending it...

Oh well, at least the marketing plan I'm writing for Heritage Theatre is now coming together. They're not DVD's, they're books. Trust me on this, I know they're round, flat and the pictures move but they're books. Once you think of it like that you're onto a winner.

Do blogs have celebrities

Well how you define celebrity is interesting. Yesterday I read Doc Searls on the Raging Cow story. Then I read Tim at Bloggerheads on the same thing, so I speculatively mailed Doc and pointed him to Tim's website. Doc blogged Tim and me, this is Tim's rather restrained response

"Cannot. Cope. Level.. of... coolness.. (*choke*) Rising!"

Odd thing is how approachable bloggers are. Don't think I've ever written to one and not got a reply. I put this down to what I'm going to vaingloriously call Lloyd's first law of networking, which is "If you say something interesting you will get peoples attention". Its recently been suggested that whenever we have a networking event I'm the one who ends up talking to X, Y or Z. This is not entirely luck, the trick is to think of something person X is interested in, tell them what you think of it and invite a response. Compared to the people saying 'I really like your book', 'I'm a huge fan of yours' or 'what did you have for breakfast' this is going to get results.

But getting assigned the seat next to Hermann Hauser last night was just a fluke. One I was subsequently asked to trade to someone who had a real reason to talk to him, so I made do with chatting over drinks and just enjoyed the food instead.

More schmoozing

Dinner with Hermann Hauser last night. Hermann is one of the figures behind the silicon fen phenomenon in Cambridge. In particular he's involved with ARM and most of Cambridges other billion dollar companies. Back in the day he was cofounder of Acorn computer which unleashed the BBC Micro on a generation of school kids.

His goal is to turn Cambridge into a 'first division' hi tech cluster and he seems to be making progress. The business school has much the same idea here, and both sides are making progress. Both have 1500 - 2000 local hi-tech firms, world class research universities and so on. What's missing is the entrepreneurial culture and the money - both of which are slowly starting to appear. Certainly SBS and Judge should go a long way to addressing the entrepreneurial thing.

At the other end of the education spectrum

There's often a tendency to think that people are harking back to some ill remembered good old days when this kind of stuff comes out, but I don't think they are. This is really depressing stuff, in twenty years time will our economy be stuffed not because we messed up some part of basic competitiveness, but because we forgot to teach our children to speak?

Imagine a future nation of bloated illiterates, the fast food uneducated nation, a land blissfully unaware of the contempt in which the rest of the world holds it, and indeed the pace at which the rest of the world is catching it up. If I was Prime Minister I'd worry about this kind of thing far more than pretty much anything else. Will the west lose its dominance through apathy? In fifty years time I reckon that may be exactly what happens.

Bush Administration orders spying on UN delegates

Last one today folks. Honestly, if this had happened in a hotel it would have been a scandal, might have even rated one of those 'gate' extensions, UNGate or diplomatgate or something. Instead it seems noone really cares that UN delegates in New York are subject to aggressive surveillance by the NSA.

I mean, I know its hardly shocking, but now we've caught them shouldn't they at least apologise?

Yet more on Google / Blogger

Shamelessly cadging this link from Tim at Bloggerheads here is the FAQ on the Google / Blogger merger. Now, normally when two companies merge you get a bog standard press release, some waffle about synergies and some statements to the effect that 'our future plans will make us the rulers of the world' or at least 'the darlings of the stock market'. This doesn't read like that, is is also ten times more believable.

One day all companies will be honest, speak like real people and enjoy the trust of their customers. For now though Google and Blogger can make hay while the sun shines.

Letter from my MP

I have to say, this fax your MP service works wonders. Type a quick message and get a reply from your MP within days. This time I've got a standard looking letter about the war with Iraq in return (signed with his own rubber stamp) - which is fair enough as I imagine he's had hundreds of the things to write. On the other hand when I wrote about the extension of the RIP act I got what seemed to be a fairly well researched response which at least suggested I made my point to his researchers.

So, what does the Right Honourable Andrew Smith have to say about the war? Well his letter makes persistent references to both government policy and acting through the UN which may or may not be the same thing. Reading between the lines (he's a diplomatic chap this Andrew) I reckon he's one of those who will be ok with things as long as there's a second resolution, but probably at least considered joining the rebels last week. He's also attatched an FAQ from the Foreign Secretary, which contains this rather interesting entry.

Q. Is not this issue really about control of one of the world's largest oil reserves?
A. In the event of military action, Iraq's oil fields would be protected from environmental terrorism, and the revenue generated would be used to benefit the iraqi people. If oil were the issue, it would be infinitely simpler to cut a deal with Saddam.

Now leaving aside the difficulties of stopping Saddam blowing the oil fields up - how are we going to stop him? Airstrikes? This looks like a pretty sound argument. On the other hand pre Gulf War I Saddam was a signed up member of OPEC, which he got himself chucked out of by invading Kuwait. Since then he's been something of a pariah and even our noble leaders couldn't really have done a deal. Perhaps the real issue is that ever since he fell out with the west its not been possible to do a deal with Saddam, and before that he'd realised that Iraq would make a lot more money from its oil by staying in OPEC. Of course this wasn't necessarily money the Iraqi oil moguls were going to share with their people but still...

Anyway, thats my latest update for the increasingly political MBA Experience website. If you want to know how the course is going well its been work, work, more work and now, revision!

Bloogle, first new service

blogspot is a service offered by blogger for people who don't have hosting set up for their blogs. In exchange for showing banner ads on your material you get free server space. The first side effect of the Google / Blogger takeover to be seen is the appearance of targetted advertising instead of the random stuff Blogspot carried previously.

Take a look at the MBA focused adverts on Tads website or this one to see what I mean.

Its the tip of the iceberg, but its a simple thing that has probably just pushed what used to be Pyra Software into cash positive mode for the first time in its history.

How can I refuse?

"I was expecting to hear about the google-blogger acquisition on your site already. I was hoping for a business slant from you as you know a fair bit about this stuff. For some bizarre reason, I'm actually starting to rely on your blog for commentary :) well not that bizarre; what you say is normally pretty insightful, and you do have the inside track in many respects.

C'mon dude, your public awaits!!"

Oh my god I have a public! Cool. I will now stop looking like some nervous starlet, dazed by the snapping of papparazzi flashbulbs and resume my normal posture of controlled ranting and carefully timed dribbling.

The Blogger thing. For those who don't know Google now own Pyra labs, which is the technology that I use to run this website. This was announced at the Live from the Blogosphere event in a typically blogcentric manner. (Pictures), (Words). There is nothing particularly remarkable about the Blogger technology, the core is probably a dozen lines of ASP that takes what I type into a form and turns it into HTML, its not difficult. Of course what Blogger really has is a big idea and if not a business model then at least its a communication model. Big Ideas are ideas that change the way we behave and for a significant number of people Blogger does that. For some blogging is social discourse, it keeps us in touch with friends down the street or over the water. It puts us in touch with likeminded souls or just people in similar situations.

In a way some blogging is like reality TV, but its a reality shot from inside the protagonists head with themselves as a director. Blogs are used for academic debate, as bully pulpits as seeding grounds for ideas. Journalists use them as sources and leads, clued in readers use them to bypass journalism and pretty much everyone uses them to express opinions. They are the number one illustration of the cluetrains contention that markets are conversations. As you can probably tell I like Blogs, they're cool.

Google is also cool, and Google has a mission. "To catalogue and make usable all the worlds information". That ladies and gentlemen is the biggest mission in the history of the modern corporation. Google is staffed by people who want to use technology to improve the condition of mankind. At any rate thats what Raymond Nasr told me, and he works there, and he has an honest face. So is there a tie in between Google and Blogger? I think so.

A while ago Google changed their search algorhythms in a way that seemed to downplay the importance of links from blogs. Bloggers, who'd had all kinds of fun with Googlebombing and other search engine manipulation up till then were disappointed. Google base their rankings on links, which webpages effectively use to vote for each other. Blogs are absolutely stuffed with links, so they're a great source of fresh information. When Google changed their methods they didn't stop looking at Blogs, I suspect they just worked out how to put a more appropriate weight on them.

So I think there is a huge advantage to Google in having direct access to a few hundred thousand individuals who scour the web for fresh interesting content, link to it and then describe it in a way that by and large tells people what it is. No other search engine has a workforce like this.

That however is probably small potatoes compared to whatever Google have come up with. I know they're hugely interested in looking at all the data they have in aggregate, spotting patterns and trying to understand them. Blogger is in some ways probably a huge reservoir of research material and an experimental lab all in one nice shiny package. Google would have been nuts not to buy it, the genius is in the fact that we only think so after they've done it.

Finally, as Ev, the guy behind Blogger put it. Google, Blogger, just look at the names. There's clearly some shared DNA there.

Why isn't Michael Franti more famous?

If this was the 1960's Michael Franti would be a mega star. On a good day he sings like Marvin Gaye and Raps like Chuck D. He writes articulate lyrics that range from tenderness to fury. His last album had a guest appearance from Woody Harrellson and the cover notes featured quotes from Bono. If this was the 60's he'd be up there on a stage with Hendrix at Woodstock. I've played some of his recent stuff to many of my friends and the general response is 'that's damn fine music'.

Back when ICE T and Dr Dre were urging us to try a little cop killing, or maybe just fuck the police Franti brought out HipHoprisy is the Greatest Luxury, with a band called 'The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy'. It was a blistering condemnation of the first iraq war, environmental standards, the american justice system, racism and the entertainment industry. It went nowhere.

Michael Franti's most recent album is a protest against the death penalty. It's called Stay Human, and its a pretty impressive call for tolerance, brotherly love, the legalisation of marujauna (sp?), an end to genetic manipulation and greater spirituality in life. Its also got some of the best soul and disco tunes laid down in the last ten years. It didn't do that well either.

Of course by now you already know why Michael Franti isn't more famous.

"Being kicked in a closed mouth, or smiling with no teeth,
they're both choices yes, but its impossible to eat"

Digression

My last post about homeland security generated a fairly vitriolic response from one classmate. Here is a chunk of my response, which I hope puts what I have to say in context. It is worth pointing out to my American readers that coming to study in Europe will expose you to opinions far more extreme than mine. (I'm mainstream centre-left here, a good 30% of the nation is to my left). Another American colleague tells me he was approached by demonstrators over the weekend asking him to sign a petition in support of the Intfada (he's Jewish). If dealing with this sort of thing (whatever your political views) is likely to send you off the deep end then European life may not be for you. Anyway, on to the explanation of why I feel justified in having a go at http://www.ready.gov , the US governments paranoia production engine.

>>

Like everyone else in this country of my age I have lived with terrorism all my life, including IRA bombing campaigns and threats from ETA when we go on holiday in Spain. The sad truth is that ninety nine days out of a hundred you forget about it, and on the hundredth day you evacuate your school for a bomb scare, or your tube is abandoned or you hear about another shooting on the news.

Like almost every other UK citizen I was horrified to see terrorism reach the America's in the most terrible way possible. Differing responses does not mean indifference.

Sadly I was also then left to witness one of the world's great nations throwing away so many of its virtues - tolerance, understanding and respect for individual freedoms. These are of course not gone, but as the constitution is swept aside, prisoners detained without trial and military tribunals convened one cannot see anything other than the American soul being tarnished. The administrations call for every American family to duct tape themselves into a coccoon is not about protecting them, it is about sustaining public interest in a coming war.

Its at times like this that I'm glad someone at the Washington Post agrees with me. Hell, if I'm as Anti-American as Aaron McGruder I'm down with that.

Even better. Here's a guy whose American Loving credentials are pretty damn impeccable. Apparently he's seen the Elephant - whatever that means. Anyway, read and think.

Under Control?

At times this term has felt like it had completely got away from me, I'm behind on the reading, the Oxford Business Forum demolished any chance of getting serious work done for my New Business Project in the first month of term and ... well it just mounted up a bit.

Now I'm not so sure. I'm just about OK with the reading (should point out I try to read all the compulsary material, a significant minority of the class reads nothing and makes do with the lecture material), the New Business Project is still suffering, but with the Oxford Business Forum out of the way it's the only thing that's likely to eat time. Of course exams are now only three weeks away, so revision has to start soon.

Oh, and my jobhunt really should start. This was meant to be the term I really made an effort sent out the CV's and lined up the interviews. Maybe next month...

Beyond belief

I really, really, really do not understand the American government. So far the only attacks on American soil were pretty hard to avoid for anyone involved. Now however we have this. Don't be afraid, be ready? Judging from this the American nation looks bloody terrified. How about websites describing how not to get shot in school, how to avoid wearing the wrong colors and getting shot in the street, websites giving health and safety advice for nightclubs and....

It just looks like scaremongering to me

Better idea. How about a website for Iraqi civilians telling them how to avoid becoming collateral damage in the event of a US onslaught. Advice about the kind of buildings they should stay away from and how to say 'don't shoot I'm a civilian' in English for when half a dozen scared, nervous and heavily armed US Marines kick in the door to your home unsure as to whether or not yours was the building they were being fired on from.

Guerilla Politics in Action

Over at Bloggerheads Tim's campaign to get Tony Blair to adopt a publically accessible email address may finally be heading for a breakthrough. He started out with a set of reasonable demands, he got his MP to help him then there was a campaign of hostage taking followed by a massacre of the innocents and finally blackmail.

Now it seems that maybe, just maybe we'll be able to email our dear leader sometime soon, thanks to a direct approach to his wife.... (scroll down for the content)

Ajaz Ahmed is a very nice man

Despite the fact that I was running a temperature and wanted to do nothing more than curl up with a hot water bottle I made it to London for the meeting with Ajaz Ahmed. Things started well, he hadn't managed to book a room, which upgraded us from meeting in an office, to meeting in the Meridian Hotel - as a side effect lunch was upgraded too, from sandwiches to some very fine hotel cooking. So we met up, me Lance, Jeremy and Jennifer and we chatted for a couple of hours. Which was very cool indeed.

There is something nice about being able to shoot the breeze with someone you're interested in. Less of the thrity seconds to say something interesting you get at networking events and more of the 'hey what about this' or 'what did you make of xyz'. We talked about what we wanted out of our careers -I apparently should start my own company, Jeremy has a future in the BBC, Jennifer needs to leave big companies for agencies and Lance, I forget what Lance was supposed to do. Still its nice to be told you should start your own firm. Much more of this and I will...

And we got bought books. This turns out to be something of a theme with Ajaz. He buys books for his managers and he buys them for clients. He even buys them for MBA students who turned up for a day of networking. I like this. Books are fantastic, wonderful things. Back at Domino I always wanted to give our clients books for Christmas, but it never happened. What I like most about the whole book giving thing is that it sends a whole bunch of signals about what a company is not. This is not a company that is scared of new ideas, this is not a company with one way of doing things, this is not a company where experience always outweighs learning.

Looking at that list you'd think every company would want to be like that, but very few are. I got myself a copy of the Economist Style Guide which I've been meaning to get hold of for ages. Expect my writing to improve dramatically in the next few weeks as it wends it's way into my head.

Off to London

I'm off to London today, for the first bit of networking to fall out of the Oxford Business Forum. Ajaz Ahmed of AKQA has invited us to spend some time checking out his offices, which should be nice. Always interested to see the insides of other new media companies - especially successful ones.

In other business forum news one of the mentors has come back to us to talk about taking the event global and running it in partnership with other business schools in the states. All well and good, as long as they call it the OXFORD business forum.

Demoralisation sets in

If you're going to set twenty one case studies for a course you should at least make them the kind of thing where people feel they're making progress. The marketing cases have not been like this. Each has been carefully selected to demonstrate how little we know about a specific subject area, but due to the tutors refusal to set questions, rather 'just tell me what you would do' nobody ever has anything close to what is presented as the answer in class.

Now this may not actually make too much difference to our marks since there is no real answer and the aim is just to show us things we wouldn't have noticed otherwise. However it does grind you down. A lot. By now our study group meetings are more about doing enough to satisfy ourselves that we tried than they are about trying to crack the case. Five weeks, over a dozen cases written and submitted by hand, in triplicate to the examination schools, and no feedback, no suggestion of progress, no nothing.

I'm sure on paper this looked like a great plan. Real, practical hands on teaching stuff. But when you come to address it its not there. You look around in class and see the blank faces, the resignation and the dejection. You can't teach people by telling them they missed the point week after week after week. I still think I'm learning from this, but I definately think I'm in the minority now. There are just too many trees, and we're too deep in to them for anyone to see the wood without making a real effort.

I'm sure this is having knock on effects as well. If you work quickly and care little a case takes 2 or 3 hours. So thats 7.5 hours a week, plus the lecture of 3.5 hours, plus the reading (maybe another hour or two and ) plus the two hour study group meeting to discuss the things. Thats thirteen hours if you're not trying. If you are trying each case could take four or five hours and it all spirals out of hand very quickly. I've got a gut feeling that this term the exam results will be down, too many people have been stressed out by this work, too tired and too jaded to work through the problem sets from finance or the next installment of Macroeconomics.

Still, its all part and parcel of the start up approach to business school. You try new things, sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. This one isn't, but as long as the experiments continue I'm sure we'll be fine...

Feedback is good

Just had an email from a successful applicant to Said who reckoned this site was useful - which makes this all worth while. I've also had some feedback from faculty to the effect that they really like the site, and indeed that those aplicants they've seen this year who've admitted reading the thing have tended to be above average.

So, are the people who do research in advance better candidates, or is reading this site good preparation for the interview ? I have no idea, but I think the best thing I can do is give you some insight into what the place is like. The better informed you are when you decide to apply here or accept an offer from here the more use I'm being.

Victory!

Its interesting what counts for a win in football. But a solid performance, a thirteen goal thrashing and our first goal of the season are definately a victory. Hell the fact we had eleven men, got there before the opposition and put in a good warmup counted. We also added our first booking for foul play Jeff 'Chopper' Pittman doing his best to slice a Pembroke forward in half in a manner that suggested the English game has a certain appeal to the American psyche. Indeed Jeroens rugby induced transformation into SBS's very own Jaap Stam has been a thing to behold.



From left to right (back row)

Neil Chazin, (USA), Daniel Maman (USA), Bryan MacMilan (Canada), Martin Lloyd (Geordie Nation / UK), Wenqi 'you'll never beat the Chinese' Lu (China), Mathew Lawrence (USA?), Serguei 'Russian Madman' Evlanchik (Russia),

Front row

Yimin Jiang (China), Jeff 'Chopper' Pittman (USA), Brent 'foul throw' Hablutzel (USA), Jeroen 'Stam' Ariens (Holland), Narek Harutyunyan (Armenia), Neil 'Skipper' Hunter (UK).

Why was it a win? Aside from all the improvements thanks to our previous outings the opposition needed seventeen goals to go through, and as the second half wore on their increasing frustration and desperation gave the game an edge our previous outings have lacked. As they lost their way we kept our heads up, kept battling and while we finished dead on our feet we went home the happier, not least Brent Hablutzel, scorer of the seasons only goal.

The Business Forum

It was big, we did it and it was a success. Art or Science I don't know but the thing went off with scarcely a hitch, attendees had a great time and a whole bunch of serious business folk turned out to talk to us and they too had a great time. There will at some stage be a big long write up of this , complete with pictutres but for now I'm just coming to terms with the fact that its finished.

They told us about this event on day one of the course and those of us who decided then and there to take part have never known what it's like to be at business school without the pressure to put this thing together bearing down on us. The constant worry that we haven't got enough mentors lined up (by January we had six and thought seriously about cancelling, two weeks later we had twelve which vindicated an awful lot of us)

Oh, and I did the closing toast at the evening dinner, raising a glass to next years forum. It's the start of a tradition, and I was in from the beginning. One of those things that makes it worth coming to school in the first place.

Catch Up

Stuff I've forgotten to blog about in the past few weeks includes...

Cambridge Day - we thrashed them at Rugby, they thrashed us at cricket. More worrying was that despite this being an event organised here in Oxford they then thrashed us at 'turning up for a beer' with ninety of the light blues making the trip and winding up in the Kings Arms. How many could we muster - football team, Rugby team and a handful of others - that was it.

Football vs Linacre / Corpus. With SBS fielding a team reducded to nine men this turned into the usual rout, but as the goals rained in I swear you could see us getting better. We played a disciplined offside trap - and had the linesman existed we'd have done a damn sight better. We got in among them and put ourselves about and while we never stood a chance with reduced numbers and an injured goalie we are definantely makling progress....

Oh, talked to the ref. Apparently when he started doing sunday football there were forty referees on the circuit. Now its down to eleven with people dropping out after abuse, assaults and a general lack of support. All that grass roots football the FA says its supporting may not really be there.

Intermission

The Oxford Business Forum is now occupying most of my waking thoughts. In the mean time here is some politics.

* To the tune of "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands"...

If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq.
If the markets are a drama, bomb Iraq.
If the terrorists are frisky, Pakistan is looking shifty, North Korea is
too risky, Bomb Iraq.

If we have no allies with us, bomb Iraq.
If we think someone has dissed us, bomb Iraq.
So to hell with the inspections, Let's look tough for the elections,
Close your mind and take directions, Bomb Iraq.

It's "pre-emptive non-aggression", bomb Iraq.
Let's prevent this mass destruction, bomb Iraq.
They've got weapons we can't see, And that's good enough for me 'Cos
it's all the proof I need to Bomb Iraq.

If you never were elected, bomb Iraq.
If your mood is quite dejected, bomb Iraq.
If you think Saddam's gone mad, With the weapons that he had, (And he
tried to kill your dad), Bomb Iraq.

If your corporate fraud is growin', bomb Iraq.
If your ties to it are showin', bomb Iraq.
If your politics are sleazy, And hiding that ain't easy, And your
manhood's getting queasy, Bomb Iraq.

Fall in line and follow orders, bomb Iraq.
For our might knows not our borders, bomb Iraq.
Disagree? We'll call it treason, Let's make war not love this season,
Even if we have no reason, Bomb Iraq.

Now, take yourself over here for the gulf war game.

How hard can it be?

Round the corner is a G&D's icecream parlour. As well as ice cream they do coffee, hot chocolate and pizza bagels - bagels cut in half and used as pizza dough. Over the last few months one of my standard run out of food again fixes has been to go to G&D's for a hot chocolate and pizza bagel.

Now this should be easy, first you make a hot chocolate, then you charge me, then I go and read the paper somewhere while you make the pizza. Then you call me and tell me the pizza is ready and I collect it and take it back to my table. Easy right?

So far this has *never* happened. I've seen all other possible variations though, make pizza, then hot chocoalte, then charge (takes ages), make hot chocoalte, then pizza then charge (at least I get the hot chocolate quickly). Today I got make hot chocolate, charge, make pizza. It was looking good. Till they forgot to turn the microwave on....

Lots of other stuff to write about but I've got to get some work done this evening.