More from Baghdad

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

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

The last lecture

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

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

Beckham sold for £25m?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skeletons in closets

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

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

Meanwhile on the other side of the world

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

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

How not to negotiate

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

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

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

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

Now that's good business

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

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

Arghh doublethink

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

Future plans

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

Samurai Lapin
Parts 2 and 3.

Yes, that's rabbit in French.

Ain't no free riding in this town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Made me laugh

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

So I've decided to try this.

To Whom It May Concern:

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
[Your Name]

Places to be

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

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

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

More Baghdad Blogs

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

Bursting the blogobubble (version 0.1)

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

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

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

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

More on this later.

Amsterdam, part one

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

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

Doh!

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

Back from Amsterdam

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

Trigger happy policing

Business school is definately a good place for getting first hand experience of places. I just finished having lunch with a colleague who served with the British Army in Bosnia and told me about the differences between US and UK peacekeepers. The Americans it seemed continuted to wear helmets, flak jackets and weapons at the ready long after the rest of the troops had switched to berets, shirt sleeves and slung weapons. She thought this probably had something to do with the problems the US was having in Iraq.

I was still thinking about this when I came across this article about John Simpson, a man who has probably spent more time on battlefields than pretty much any serving soldier in the UK or US army. Sadly some of the news coming out of Basra suggests that UK troops haven't been on their best behaviour with regard to prisoners either - but it might be that there's a considerable difference between a culture of shoot first ask later, and a culture that tries not to.

More on case studies

But not from me. Adam is at Harvard where case studies are the order of the day for teaching. He's written a piece on why he likes them, what they're like and what you get out of them. He also makes the very cogent point that this is all about personal preference, different schools teach in different ways.

Just to clear up my earlier posts, we do a fair amount of case work here, but it's not delivered in the same style. It's not the focus of most lectures and it's not generally something that requires a lot of preparation before hand. Exceptions were management accounting - taught by a visiting LBS professor (I dozed through the cases and learned in the lectures) and marketing, which was all about 21 submitted cases. These however were not normal cases, mostly custom written by the professor they were terrifying single side (sometimes more) explanations of what looked like (had to be, surely) simple problems.

We lived in fear of them

I've been Wallied!

For the best part of this term I've been working as a freelance copywriter for the school. The mission? To develop the 2004-5 MBA brochure. Well, after weeks of work crammed in around lectures, coursework and blogging the brochure is nearing completion. One critical test for me was the fact that Wally Olins was going to be checking the copy as a favour to the school. I found out what he thought of it yesterday.

It survived. No ringing praises, but a decided absence of red ink. Much, much better than I expected.

So, if anyone needs some copy writing my rates are as reasonable as my debts are high. As Blackadder once said "how fortunate that your job is also your hobby"

Three years of Hell to become the Devil

A former colleague and good friend has headed to law school. He's blogging the experience at his brand new weblog, tentatively titled "Three years of Hell to become the Devil". For those who find my politics absurd you'll love Tony's. If you agree with mine, you'll probably find he drives you to apoplexy. He's a great guy, mixes a mean drink and plays poker far too well for my taste.

If you're going to be a law student at Columbia next year this man will be your classmate, go say hi.

Taking blogs to Capitol Hill

Having brought weblogs to Parliament Tim has set his sights on Washington, if you're a US citizen you can help him.

Interesting stuff on oil

I've just read this rather long blog entry on oil production, the gist of which is that production is expected to peak in 2008 and then fall steadily. That sounds like scaremongering, but the evidence and argument make interesting reading. (I'm less inclined to believe the politics at the end...) Still I checked a few other figures from the paper

Here are the US oil production figures showing a peak in 1970, exactly when it was supposed to be (production is now below 1954 levels)

Here are the latest figures for OPEC (xls file) which show production as being more or less steady over recent years.

The thrust of the post linked above is not that we're about to run out of oil, just that once global production peaks and future reserves become more expensive to exploit the price of oil will rise and the economics of the market will be fundamentally changed. The fox in the henhouse here is the news last year that the Caspian Oil Fields were a fraction of the size they were expected to be, bringing forward estimated of peak production by some dozen years or so.

Now as with so many things I write about I don't have the information available to make a complete decision on this, but there seems to be a hypothesis worthy of some kind of follow up here.

Son of brand strategy

Second half of our brand strategy lecture today was given by our lecturer's son, who is one of the folks behind a brand planning agency in London. So far so good, indeed the prospect of 90 minutes on brand innovation was quite appealing, and the opening comments that 'there's a lot of stuff in this talk' and 'I'm not going to dumb it down cause you're oxford students' gave cause for optimism. Brand strategy has been by and large a bloody sophisticated class, lots of very good ideas in there.

Shame then that we got a 90 minute sales pitch, stuffed with almost no ideas whatsoever, a signal lack of evidence or case studies and a convincing proof that in the brand space mutton dressed as lamb sells as well now as it ever has.

HTML Typography

Back in the day I was good at HTML, I could do crazy things with table tags, I knew all about blockquotes, nbsp; spacers, single pixel gif tricks and browser bugs from netscapes 2 through 5 along with their corresponding IE flaws. Mac and PC, that's how good I was, serious webmonkey stuff.

But kids today have got shiny new toys that I just don't understand. Man, I've got to get me some skills and do stuff a little more like this...

On Politics and coursework

From a study group member

"kudos to:
martin, for writing some of the most high minded drivel i’ve read so far on this course"

You can rely on me for high minded drivel ;-)

Funny thing, I'm sure there aren't many people who take an MBA and as a result rediscover their preference for left wing economics, state paternalism and all the other political bits and pieces that get me worked up. Not to say that I've veered entirely to the left, in some respects I'm splitting down the middle. Parts of me now hold fairly ruthless views about competition, failing companies and the merits of inflexible work forces. On the other hand, now I've taken a good hard look at neo classical 'chicago' economics I can cheerfully say that I want none of it. And you can take your maximising shareholder value mantra with you as well, none of that for me please. Free trade? It's a mixed bag isn't it... Desirable in the long run, in need of careful and slow introduction in the short run.

I like Oxford, you can come here, challenge the ideas and even find that plenty of people have already challenged them on your behalf. Of course the quid pro quo for this is that they challenge you right back. While the faculty have opinions there's definately not a hint of dogma about the place. Well, maybe in some strategy classes, but they were co-taught by people who didn't agree with each other, so that was OK.

On blogs and the war

I was going to write a longer piece about this, maybe a whole article, something I could send to a paper of note to get attention and make my point to a bigger public. That was a while ago, and since I haven't managed to write any long articles I guess you're going to have to make do with this blog entry about blogs, the war and the persistence of old media.

The war sparked an interest in blogs that largely missed the point. The internet, and blogs in particular were going to make this war different. We'd short circuit the corporate lies and get the inside scoop. People on the ground would offer up information and civilian experts would provide incisive commentary. CNN, Fox, the BBC, Al-Jazeera, all would be outmoded. Bush's war would be our revolution. Like so much else in the overhyped world of blogs this was garbage.

The internet did throw up a few interesting things during the war, almost all served to reinforce the position of old media and supported the propaganda of the various sides. The command-post was probably the biggest blog to look at the war, and rapidly evolved into something that was less blog, more news syndication and bulletin board service. Post war it has become a place to discuss all matters relating to the US military's operations. The command post did not however offer much in the way of original content, just links to stories from the newswires (overwhelmingly US) and patriotic commentary. Mainstream media was repackaged as alternative and the right wing digerati swallowed it whole.

Not that the left wing digerati were much better. Diametrically opposed to the command post was Iraqwar.ru and with one notable exception this site simply took in news from around the world, translated it into English and or Russian and republished it. While the presence of Arab sources was interesting they weren't saying much that wasn't appearing in UK broadsheets like the Times and the Guardian (both appeared regularly on the site). Iraqwar.ru wasn't a blog anymore than the command post was, and it carried equally little fresh information. The bulletin boards and opinion pieces were shot through with anti-american rhetoric, useful if you want to judge the mood in Cairo - but hardly a media revolution.

Iraqwar.ru did have one ace up it's sleeve though. Their daily briefings which appeared throughout the war were allegedly filed by former GRU agents now intent on exploiting old contacts to 'break the west's information blockade'. I've no idea if what they said was true, it fitted most of the facts western media reported and cast a very different complexion on the war as a whole. In the absence of some means of verifying their identity this groups' reporting had to be taken with a pinch of salt. The Guardian reported that clued in city traders were using it to pre-empt news releases from the west, but as I understand it city traders would place trades on the colour of the tie worn by CNN's anchormen if someone told them there was a pattern in it.

All of which brings me to the real blogs, the ones written by people who were actually there. There weren't many.

Lt Smash wrote a blog from a US military camp in (I think) the Saudi Arabian desert. He almost certainly knew an awful lot about what was going on. There was no way on earth he was going to share that information. He writes a good and entertaining blog about what it's like to be a US soldier, under pressure, 7000 miles from home. He gives great insight into the mind of the US soldier and what it is that motivates these guys and keeps them going. He was not however about to revolutionise media coverage of the war.

Kevin Sites is a journalist employed by CNN. He blogged plenty of stuff during the build up to the war, but once things started his corporate masters decided that blogging was not compatible with employment by CNN. Kevin stopped being an independent reporter on the side and focused full time on his day job. I think CNN missed a trick on this one, but I'm sure the situation was much more complex than I can imagine for the people taking the decisions.

Which finally brings me to Salaam Pax, author of the Dear Raed blog. It was his post of today, in response to some redneck idiots that got me to finally write this. Of all the thousands (myself included) who spilled digital ink during the conflict he's the only one I've found who could genuinely say what he felt and tell what he knew about everything. The destruction of the Baghdad phone system cut him off as the war got underway but he kept writing and published as soon as he could. For all that though Salaam is, as he says, just one guy, with one voice and one viewpoint. He doesn't have access to the big picture any more than we do. If we had a hundred folks like Salaam, soldiers, civilians, aid workers, civil servants and reporters of both sides we might just have been able to synthesise it into a coherent picture, but we don't.

Blogging, the internet and communal journalism was overhyped. Worse by building the illusion that there was a mass of independent, sceptical experts ready to pounce on the misdemeanours of big media we simply legitimised them whenever we recycled their stories. Just like last time, what you made of the war came down to who's papers you liked to read. The second Iraq war was a triumph for old media, and we shouldn't forget that.

Soul of a new Machine

If you haven't read this book I'd suggest you correct that right now. I'd also suggest that you don't follow this link to a follow up piece in wired that appeared some twenty years after the events described in the book, it'll spoil all the fun.

I first read the book a long time ago, I guess I was 14, maybe a little older. I had no idea about business at the time, no clue at all as to what went on inside companies, but I liked the book, the story of the struggle, the fact that it was real, the careful descriptions of the in-jokes, rituals and shared culture that drives the IT industry. I'm not sure other industries are like that. Perhaps it's because there are so many IT companies, because the work is so complex and arcane, because it attracts a certain kind of mindset. I'm not sure.

I think I'd feel like a tourist in a real IT company, I guess I can find out when I spend the summer at Cisco. Meanwhile the internet age is still waiting for a pulitzer prize winning novel...

How to buy IT

Its a pretty fair bet that The Register's new content management solution will work, that their site will not suffer unfeasible amounts of downtime during the rebuild and that they've save a fortune by going to an Open Source product. One day big corporations will realise that shelling out hundreds of thousands for the traditional enterprise toolkits is not the way to do this. Find something that works, hire some people who can use it and get on with it.

Web technology is not difficult and for the most part doesn't come close to having high complexity tasks involved. It can and should be done on the cheap whenever possible. I await the Registers case study with interest.

The Matrix Reloaded (some spoilers included)

Since everyone is reviewing this here are my thoughts on what's certainly the most talked about film at the moment. It wasn't that good. Out went ground breaking special effects, in came effects we've all seen before. Out went Keanu Reeves looking confused for a whole film and a plot laced with dubious philosophy and in came... no wait, that stuff was still there.

Somehow this movie just didn't cut it for me. First time round the Matrix involved a poor plot but fantastic special effects, action sequences and a uber-cool look we hadn't seen before. This was just more of the same, and fundamentally there was nothing in the film to make you care about it. Neo is attacked by swarms of agents - we don't care as we know he can handle them, Zion is under threat - who cares, we hardly get to see it and it's not a very sympathetic place. The machines are divided between themselves, who cares, it's hard to see how any of this affects our heroes. Bombs explode, bullets whizz by, Kung Fu is performed and at the end of the day my heartrate barely changed.

They could have done so much better. The ultimate denoument where the workings of the Matrix and meaning of the One are explained was good, but the stuff leading up to it was weak, pseudo intellectualism masquerading as deep philosophy. The society of the machines has fantastic potential for developing characters and groups, but aside from the hugely enjoyable Twins all we get are by the numbers Hollywood henchmen.

In the end the Wachowski brothers have accomplished little more than anyone else with a similar budget and background in directing could have done. There are no claims to genius here, the fight choreography doesn't really open up as well as John Woo's stuff, the panorama's don't compare to the stuff Ridley Scott comes out with and the action sequences were stock Hollywood stuff plus last years special effects. If I was them I'd have worked overtime for a new effect to compare with bullet time, it was the innovation we loved, the newness of it, not the fact that time stood still as things moved around. Nothing new here I'm afraid.

Don't even get me started on the superman sequences and the bloody Merovingian...

Free speech?

Over on the other side of the pond Doc is all up in arms about plans to deregulate the media. The (increasingly political) Register have an even more extreme point of view.

Class war part 32456983

The news that the number of state school pupils coming to Oxford is down this year is sure to hit the headlines again. I've got a few comments on this...

With students already being forced to pay more for their education and carry more debt, wouldn't you expect a migration away from one of the most expensive cities in the UK? Starting with those least able to pay? You can trade in three years of Oxford and brideshead revisited for three years of Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle or Birmingham - party towns with respected universities, and rents that are between 40 and 60% of the Oxford ones.

There is still no evidence that the Oxford selection process for undergraduates is biased in any way about anything. It turns out that if 40% of acceptances are from state schools its because so were 40% of applications, the same goes for women, ethnic minorities, disabled, left wing, right wing... you get the idea. The problem is all in the image.

When the chancellor of the exchequer picks a fight with the university on the grounds that its elitist what people remember is just that. Never mind that he was wrong about that and pretty much everything else he said at the time.

Straight outta the Matrix

Since Tad and Lucky had both taken this quiz I thought I'd give it a go and what do I get?

Neo

So was it told about the long dark coat, shaved head and sunglasses, or did it just know? And all that time I wanted to be Morpheus.

Case teaching

Case teaching at Oxford is a bit of an odd affair. Actually working through a case, start to finish is a bit of an oddity. More often they become topics for discussion, pulled in to illustrate points or show theory being put into practice. It's certainly only the guest lecturers who turn them into the centrepiece of any given lecture.

Today we had a visiting lecturer from LBS, formerly at Wharton and possibly Harvard (I forget) who took us through the Snapple case, on which he is apparently some kind of expert. Now, give the man his due it was entertaining stuff. He was lively, animated, and opinionated. He wrote things on the board and ploughed relentlessly through his notes, he had a gameplan for the next hour and he was not to be deflected. Questions rained down on the class, we quickly realised that all the answers were written on the pages of the case, look at the page, read something off and hey presto, you're in the good books. Hardly any need to think at all.

Post case though and I'm sitting here wondering what I learned. One hour of case study later here is what was taught

1. Market research is a useful starting point when branding a product
2. Most brands get started by accident
3. Its not about brands, its always about a Brand

To take these one at a time I've rarely seen a company that couldn't produce market research to explain it's latest dumb idea, and there was no discussion of what makes research good, bad or indifferent, of the kind of questions you should ask or the manner in which you should interpret the results. Just a maxim, research is good. In fact research often just tells you that what consumers want today they'll want again tomorrow. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff.

While many entrepreneurs do indeed end up with a brand largely by accident. (a powerbrand in this case) plenty of people plan brands very deliberately. Dr Peppers' Raging Cow, Hutchinson Whampoas' 3 and Mercedes / Swatches' Smart Car all spring to mind as recent examples.

The last point is just a nice bit of rhetoric. The case study method, good way to pass the time or intellectually stimulating? Discuss.

Ethical oil?

I'm currently drafting the first couple of sections for my groups project on corporate responsibility. We're supposed to prepare a corporate responsibility plan, a set of implementation recommendations and a description of likely opposition to our ideas and way for overcoming this. My group has chosen to prepare a piece on an oil company, currently going by the name of Exoff.

This is a fairly tricky thing to do. Framing general principles in a manner that means they can't be twisted out of all recognition, but still retain some tangible meaning is hard going. Slightly harder going though is doing this for real. One member of the group worked with a major oil company in China and outlined a series of dilemmas for us that made it easy to see just how easy it is for companies to give into the temptation to do something wrong and why western companies may well feel like their ethical ideals hold them back in developing (and under-regulated markets).

Could be worse though. You could be the British Home Secretary, trying to fight back the overwhelming temptation to introduce ID cards and pander to the knee jerk xenophobia of the 'Great' British Public.

About time too

Looks like US lawmakers are planning to crack down on spam. While this is a good thing in itself I imagine it won't be long before spammers relocate to less well governed nations. Of course if top level ISP's would get their act together and crack down on this we could probably cut the spam problem in half in a matter of months, but as long as there's money in bandwidth...

The Mathematical Bridge

There are many interesting things about travelling with a class full of MBA's. One was the reason our Chinese students got so interested in the Mathematical Bridge in Cambridge. It's claimed this bridge was designed by Newton in a manner that required no bolts, nails, screws or anything else. Later the bridge was taken apart to find out how it worked, but subsequently could not be reassembled and today is held together by bolts. This however was not why the Chinese students were interested.

It turns out that in 1928 one of China's most famous poets, Xu Zhimo, wrote a poem about his time in Cambridge, and it's considered a masterpiece in China. I'm also told this translation doesn't do it justice. Seems nice enough to me...

The Mathematical Bridge

Very quietly I take my leave
As quietly as I came here;
Quietly I wave good-bye
To the rosy clouds in the western sky.

The golden willows by the riverside
Are young brides in the setting sun;
Their reflections on the shimmering waves
Always linger in the depth of my heart.

The floating heart growing in the sludge
Sways leisurely under the water;
In the gentle waves of Cambridge
I would be a water plant!

That pool under the shade of elm trees
Holds not water but the rainbow from the sky;
Shattered to pieces among the duck weeds
Is the sediment of a rainbow-like dream?

To seek a dream?
Just to pole a boat upstream
To where the green grass is more verdant;
Or to have the boat fully loaded with starlight
And sing aloud in the splendour of starlight.

But I cannot sing aloud
Quietness is my farewell music;
Even summer insects keep silence for me
Silent is Cambridge tonight!

Very quietly I take my leave
As quietly as I came here;
Gently I flick my sleeves
Not even a wisp of cloud will I bring away

Blogs at Harvard

So Harvard take on Dave Winer to sort out their thinking about IT and Law or something and lo and behold this happens

Its looking increasingly as if I'll be around in Oxford over the summer and I'd like to lean on a few people to try and get things like this happening. I'd also like to start a project to produce a new kind of case study. One from which you could learn a little more, and which might bear more resemblence to the real world. Which reminds me, on Tuesday we've got a guest lecturer from LBS coming in who apparantly is an expert in both the 'harvard case study method' and 'the snapple case'. Yes, that's right, this man is known for his ability to take a class through a single case study, thirty or so sides of A4 devoted to the manufacture, marketing and distribution of a range of soft drinks. I know Adam Smith said it was good, but isn't this level of specialisation getting a bit much?

Live from Cambridge!

Just a quick note, I'm here at the Judge Institute for Cambridge hanging out after the last football game of the season. Today both sides have given their all in football, tennis, basketball, and cricket. Sad to report Oxford have brought home only the basketball trophy, but we challenged well on alll fronts.

Full report to follow. Right now there is wine to drink and people to talk to ;-)

Arghhh

This is going to really really really spoil football for me. I suppose he could still fail the medical but... Oh, and Freddy Shepherd is the highest paid chairman in football. I swear something is very rotten in the state of newcastle united.

Update

Lots to talk about, but not much time to talk with I'm afraid. Lets see

I've landed a summer business project with a major technology company. I can't say too much about it because we're still negotiating the details of how we're going to work with them and there's a chance it could fall through. More on this as it emerges.

In other news my preparations for the football match against Cambridge business school (Judge) have been thrown into disarray by my managing to badly bruise my right foot, which makes playing football kind of difficult. So I'm facing a fitness test tomorrow and I'm rating myself less than 50/50 for the big match. Still there's a whole festival of sports planned for the day at cambridge so I may manage to play cricket or basketball - anything that doesn't involve kicking things with my feet is still an option.

I really have to get started on the coursework for this term. I'm planning on starting on the ethics case this afternoon, I've got two individual and two group assignments for branding - and I plan to knock out the individual ones soon.

Finally rumours have reached me of an interesting job in warwick. It's hardly ideal locationwise, but the job is interesting and it's near an airport, which is important when your better half will be living in Holland. This is good news, because all the work is seriously impeding my ability to jobhunt.

Life after wartime

Salaam Pax has been out on the road with Raed, touring the south of Iraq and compiling lists of civilian casualties. That's grim enough, but its the emerging fanaticsm he records that scares me. Looters in Basra destroyed off licenses and attacked the owners. Clerics are preaching that those who sell alcohol or show films of 'loose women' (according to Salaam that would include Britney Spears videos) will be given a week to desist or face the consequences.

If the Americans want to avoid radical islamists taking over parts of the country (if not the whole country) they're going to have to stay longer than they expected I think. You can read his report with accompanying photographs at electronic iraq

Term gets serious

The stress is getting to us. Our usual diet of debate, serious discussions of economic policy, views on the efficiency of the market and critiques of the Black Scholes model have been replaced with a viscious email argument as to whether or not Noo Noo the hoover can be considered an honorary tellytubby.

I'm telling you, there's only four of the buggers. Tinky Winky, La La, Dipsy and Po. Don't believe me, look at this from their website.

No No No NO NO NO NO NO

This is terrible news. The signing of Woodgate was bad enough. Adding Bowyer, a man who's past is not so much dodgy as an integral part of footballs heart of darkness is horrible. Never mind that he's been a disaster at West Ham as well. Agressive, unpleasant and probably racist. I don't want Newcastle to become like Leeds were in their 'glory days', a team full of spite and visciousness masquerading as professionalism and fighting spirit.

Lets hope it falls through.

Words of sanity on this from Biffa and Nial.

Joseph Stiglitz, live at the examination schools, part II

OK, all pretence of this being live will have to be abandoned. Not only am I writing about this a day later, I'm writing this having been to part III. Still here is part II, foundations of a new economics. No ambition here then...

The lecture started by covering a number of market imperfections and their consequences. Most of these related to credit and equity rationing. The point of credit is that it lets you draw down future consumption for present use, however as any undergraduate student will testify trying to draw down future (uncertain) income is really rather hard. Since banks often don't know who is credit worthy a market imperfection ensues. While you can argue this causes the price of debt to rise and is otherwise insignificant in fact it makes it hard for investment to be channeled into poorly performing economies, especially when balance sheet effects (see below) are taken into account.

Current Chicago macroeconomic theory assumes that neither credit nor equity rationing will apply if a firm can demonstrate that it is a good investment. In fact the empirical evidence suggests there's plenty of it.

Other imperfections stem from cash flow and balance sheet effects. In particular, when a country devalues its currency debts owed and owing change dramatically. Firms who owe in foreign currency find themselves hugely in debt and unable to invest. This often affects domestic banks and credit rationing ensues.

New monetary ideas
Most transactions now take place on credit, so the cost of holding money and demand for money in the usual sense are actually extremely low. What's important is the supply of credit in the economy which depends heavily on how well informed banks are and how strong their balance sheets are.

It seems my notes aren't as good as I thought, so some of this may be a little garbled. The conclusion however I've written down as follows

"Taken together these theories suggest that markets are not self sdjusting. Fiscal policy can be expansionary"

Work in progress

I'm a bit snowed at the moment, stuff I'll be posting in the next day or so includes the write up of the last two Stiglitz lectures. Joseph took it upon himself to expound what he hopes will be a new economic orthodoxy, so I need to make sure my writeup makes sense or I'll misrepresent him.

There was also a panel discussion on Biotech last night, which was useful because my project for Managing Technology Ventures is about biotech companies. So I've collected the business cards and am now hunting down interview subjects. It also taught me a hell of a lot about an industry of which I knew little. I've been to a couple of these panel discussions, which are primarily about careers, but I wish I'd been to more. Not because I want to work in each and every industry that's appeared, but because its very useful to get an insight into what these different sectors are up to.

More reasons to move to Scotland

Tom Watson, the blogging MP is mad about the introduction of PR in Scotland for local elections. (thats Proportional Representation). I'm on the fence about PR, but now it seems that we're going to get a trial of it in Scotland.

The list of things coming out of the deal reads like a list of good reasons to move to Scotland. Add the better legal system, licensing laws and pensions to that lot and it's clear that devolution is paying off in a country where socialism is not only acceptable, but accepted and practiced.

Three cool things

Cool thing one is the Starwars kid. Cool thing two is the Starwars kid remix. The coolest thing of all though is the bit torrent client you'll need to download to get the videos from this site. One of the niftiest concepts I've seen in ages. Peer to peer just keeps on getting better...

Swarming downloads. Just sounds sooo cool and science fiction doesn't it?

Face to face with Shell

Give them credit, Shell sent along two senior executives (well, one senior and one former senior) to our discussion on Shell's involvement in Nigeria, part of our Corporate Responsibility session. I've been tough on Shell in the past in this blog (murderous organisation, or words to that effect) so I was interested to see what came out. I nearly didn't make it though, since half the lecture clashed with Joseph Stiglitz at the exam schools. Fortunately it was the half about other stuff.

After a discussion of the case it was into a direct Q&A of the shell staff. One was a senior figure from the UK branch, the other a former senior manager from Nigeria. The big questions focused on two things. How can Shell defend its environmental record in the area, and how can they have justified their actions around the trial and execution of Ken Saro Wiwa. On both counts Shell seem to be genuinely contrite. The environmental record seems to be improving and their definition of what counts as political participation is much broader now than it was then. They probably are a much nicer organisation now than they were twenty or even five years ago.

On the case of Ken Saro Wiwa I asked how each of them felt personally when they heard about the death. The guy from the UK talked about the shock Shell employees felt at the following public revulsion. John Major called it judicial murder, people's kids were attacked in school on account of their parent's jobs, dinner party conversation probably got nasty. It seems to have been a genuine wake up call to the company at all levels.

More interesting was the guy from Nigeria. He felt, he said "shocked". Neither he nor anyone else believed that Abacha would carry out the executions without an appeal, or that having got a guilty verdict he'd commute the death sentence. I think the executions genuinely caught the company by surprise, they thought if they kept their mouths shut it would all blow over. Saro Wiwa would be jailed and the corporation forgotten about again.

Shell aren't going to ever be able to fully repair the environmental damage they did. Nigerias political problems go way beyond the activities of one man. I do think though that Shell is now a better company than it was then, primarily as the result of public pressure, outrage and the efforts of thousands of activists impacting on the thousands of individual decision makers within Shell.

As Chris Locke points out in Gonzo Marketing, to suggest that companies have principles or morals in erroneous. No company ever felt anything, no company ever fell in love. It's people that do all that stuff. Behind even the most faceless modern corporation lurk real people, and making a difference is about reaching them.

Something in these blogs

I've just heard about a candidate turning down a business school because of something they read in a blog, and before anyone gets all het up it wasn't this school they turned down and it wasn't because of my blog. Of course they felt the need to explain themselves to the blogger in question and did so in a way that made clear just how unpleasant some people can be.

So just in case the person in question is reading this stuff and recognises themselves, go apologise. There's rarely a good excuse for being unpleasant to strangers.

On the plus side this is what MBA blogging is about, you give a flavour of the institution and people get to decide if they want to go.

Joseph Stiglitz, live from the examination schools (Part I)

OK, it's not live, they don't have network points at the examination schools. But here is what Stiglitz, nobel prize winning economist, former head of the World Bank and outspoken critic of the IMF had to say.

First Keynesianism has been unfairly overlooked in recent times, in favour of an economic orthodoxy based around the free market economics of the Chicago School. This is predicated on a number of ideas which he believes to be innacurate. These are the conceptions of business cycles, the efficiency of the free market and the undesirability of government intervention. I'll try and take each of these in turn, but I'm being brief here, so I guess you should read his books if you want to know more.

Business Cycles
No such thing says Stiglitz. Its important to realise that this isn't denying booms busts or recessions, just the idea that one is necessarily followed by the other. While neo-classical economists like to explain these as caused by the market adjusting itself toward an equilibrium Stiglitz sees them as caused by external shocks such as investment bubbles (internet stocks) or fiscal crises (Asian banking runs). When these things happen the market does not necessarily respond efficiently, often it exacerbates and locks in the problem, at which point some kind of external factor is needed to get things back on track.

Free market efficiency
The argument about the inefficiency of the free market chiefly comes down to information asymetries. Some of these are obvious - the accounting scandals make clear that markets often act on false information. Other evidence comes from the failure of even large corporations to fully exploit the tax system - if the market was efficient they wouldn't be leaving this money on the table. A slightly more complex point is that for most activities we don't know what an efficient use of resources is - how much effort should it take GM to make a car? GM might say they're at the efficient level now, comparison with Japanese factories suggests they're at 50%, and the Japanese think there's plenty of room for improvement.

The (un)desirablility of government intervention
While governments may well do stupid and damaging things from time to time this is largely because they're misguided (and he was quite ready to blame the IMF for providing the poor guidance). However they can intervene for good and because of points one and two above they should do so. This is in direct opposition to the view of the Chicago school which holds that government intervention is what causes market inefficiency in the first place.

There was plenty more of this, with a look at the disconnect in neo classical economics between micro and macro economic evidence, a discussion of price rigidity / flexibility and a look at what deflation does to economies. But there will be more on that tomorrow I'm told, so I guess I'll leave you waiting for it.

Yesterdays papers

Well, this site is now officially old news, but that doesn't seem to have deterred the traffic influx. While a fair chunk of this is due to the blog links I asked for and got yesterday there's been a big upsurge in people coming in from search engines. I guess this could be down to the newspaper coverage - don't recall seeing many people searching for my name before...

Dear Raed is back

Salaam Pax, who runs 'Dear Raed', the blog from Baghdad is back online. The good news is he seems to have come through the war OK and even though he didn't have web access he continued to write posts for release after the war.

You can buy a handgrenade in Baghdad for 25c, armed gangs fight over license plates and abandoned munitions, Fedayeen still snipe at Americans who retaliate by shelling residential areas (including Salaam's), dozens of political parties argue the toss and no one seems to have a good word to say about the USA.

Read about it all here

Coming attractions

While the weblogs versus the newspapers experiment plays itself out below I may as well mention some coming attractions on this blog. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Winning Economist is lecturing at the Exam Schools on whether or not Keynes is Dead. I like Keynes, so I hope the answer is no. I'll be posting my thoughts on his lectures up here, assuming I can get in, I can see him being popular.

Funny thing. Until about a month ago I'd never heard of Stiglitz. Then I saw the lecture title and thought 'cool, I should go'. Then Zaeem read one of my rants about Milton Friedman and suggested Stiglitz as the antidote. Then my sister suggested I buy her a copy of his latest book for her birthday. (she's a much better read left winger than me...)

In other news, Labour may be divided, but when was the last time a tory resigned on principle?

Does anyone read the Times?

You can take a look at today's levels of traffic by going to

http://www.hitslink.com/account.asp

Username : mbaexperience
Password : open

So far there's been no spike in traffic at all. We're certainly within the realms of normal statistical deviation...

So here is your chance to see if you can generate more traffic than the Times. Link to this website and watch the results. I've reproduced the article in here since I can't find it on the Times website.

Update 12:48 and there's been a tiny spike, mostly due to other blogs linking in. However average number of pages per reader is up to 4, and since new readers read more stuff that's probably the folks from the Times.

Update Tad Holbie is now making a bid to deliver more traffic than the Times, 4 or 5 visitors from diverse domains so far...

Update! Since when did Tad become the top link on weblogs of note at blogger? Since midday he's passed me about 60 visitors, it helps that I'm the top link on his site. Meanwhile Doc Searls blogged me a couple of hours ago and has already weighed in with 20 visitors. It looks like the Times may have made a late contribution in the evening, so far I'd say the blogs and the newspaper are neck and neck.

Other links inbound from Lucky Goldstar and Bloggerheads

Hello to all the people from the Times

If you've come here after reading the article in the Times, hello and welcome. If you're not familiar with blogs (web logs) the thing you're reading now is a blog entry. A diary entry if you like. Entries are kept on the front page for seven days and then filed in the archives. On the left and above are links and navigation to other content on the site. Things you may be interested in...

The guide to applying for an MBA
The full blog entries quoted in the article are here about half way down the page
The Frequently Asked Questions

If you want to get in touch please make it easy for me to file my mail and write to times@mba-experience.com

OK : I've been trying to post the Times article but for some wierd reason blogger doesn't like it. Will try again later.

One more blog

Just checked out the links on MBALeague and found French MBA. Now my French is basically non existant these days (shocking I know) but it appears to be by Thibault, and he appears to be at Kellog.

You could always ask the Babel Fish for a machine translation. It's actually quite good.

Updates, experiments and changes

I've decided to play around with Zaeem's media list bit of software. See the results here and in the sidebar. So now you can read about what I'm reading.
I've also written an FAQ. Enjoy!

Exam results just in

Some time after finding out whether you passed the exams or not you get the final list of your actual marks. I have to say I've got no idea what causes the delay, but there is one (in this case two weeks). Still, here are my marks from last term

Finance II : 63.2
Financial Management : 65.3
Macro Economics and Finance : 60.06
Marketing Management : 74.5
Operations Management : 59.0

Marks are out of 100. 50 is a pass, and the average is supposed to be 60. In broad terms 70+ is a distinction (A), 60+ is good (B) and 50+ is ok (C). There's an incredibly tight grouping between my group work scores and my exam results so I guess I've got to be happy with my study groups performance. Well, I was pretty happy with it, so now I have proof...

Bit annoyed about the operations management score though, I thought I wrote a great essay on network diagrams and project management. Ah well...

I'll add course write ups and revision notes to the others when I get a moment.

Scoop!

On Monday there's going to be a piece about little old me and my blog in the Times. I guess I should do some spring cleaning on this thing over the weekend. I guess I should also do something I've been meaning to do for ages and write a FAQ.

Here comes the work

This term we're taking electives which tend to be examined more by project and assignment than exams. My current list of projects is as follows....

Brand Equity Audit : This is the 'Brand it like Beckham' project I mentioned below. 4000 words to be based on original research produced by a group of four.
Brand Essay : Interesting one this, 2000 words on pretty much anything about branding I feel like. Haven't made my mind up yet.
Corporate Responsibility case analysis :3000 words of case study
Corporate Responsibility group project :5000 words to develop a corporate responsibility policy for a company, group of seven
Leadership :5000 word essay on leadership. I'm thinking of returning to my undergraduate degree and writing something on leadership and the crusades
Managing Technology Ventures :2500 word individual case study
Managing Technology Ventures :7500 word group research project, I'm in a team of four looking at new product development in the biotech industry
Nation brand corporation and identity :Individual essay (undefined)
Nation brand corporation and identity :Group project in team of six (undefined)

That's the first time I've written all that down in one place. Geeks among you may wish to note the use of the obsolete blockquote tag to indent the text.

I think I need a stiff drink.

CV Needs work

Thanks to Jenny Brown my CV is now rather more gramatically correct and USA friendly than it was before. It is not however a resume ;-). The online version however needs lots of work. I think online CV's are potentially fantastic ways to communicate much more about yourself than you can get over in bland boring corporate one siders, but I don't think mine does this yet.

Things that make me happy

Its funny what cheers me up. There was a woman in Sainsburys with two kids at the checkout. As we waited in line the kids began to wander and lift things they shouldn't etc. (they were about 5 and 3?) Anyway I was resigining myself to one of those moments where the stressed parent loses control screams, shouts and smacks and the kids then cry for hours. Instead I got to watch fifteen minutes (long queue) of patient, hardworking and creative parenting. No crying, nothing too out of control. I felt like breaking into applause as the checkout was finally cleared...

And then I went running down by the river. A few weeks ago I ran faster than the boats, since the crews spend the first few weeks working hard on technique and less on speed. Now I'm being left behind by hardworking 8's as they push themselves in preparation for the 8s week rowing tournaments. The river is probably the most Oxford thing about Oxford, dozens of crews all trying to get their work in and not hit anything.

Summer is really coming.

Brand it like Beckham

I've successfully convinced my colleagues on my brand strategy study group to undertake the challenge of trying to put a value on the David Beckham brand. It's interesting stuff, what with Beckham possibly off to Real Madrid for a transfer fee (and wages) that will probably have more to do with his marketing potential than with his footballing skills.

The (a) goal is to try and come up with a valuation. What should Real offer for the right to include the Beckham brand in their line up? Loads of interesting questions about valuation here in a space which I think is going to be very interesting in the future. With movie stars, super models, pop musicians and so on all trying to manage, value and exploit their identities it's an interesting subject, and one with lots of room for experiementation.

Things to do this afternoon include contacting his agency to see if they're interested in helping.

No Surrender to the BNP

Tom Watson is putting his position as the first MP to run a blog to good use. Here's a link to his thoughts about the British National Party's candidates. I'd tell you about these human filth, but their record speaks for itself.

Love your colleagues

That was one of the messages from Haakon Overli, Norweigan entrepreneur and founder of self-trade, a share dealing .com that went for a billion euros when it was sold a few years ago. Quiet and unpretentious Haakon was an interesting guy who was in to talk to those of us taking the 'Managing Technology Ventures' class about systems, culture and growth.

Most interesting though was his comment on mission statements, "Anything in there must be a choice. It must make sense with the world not in front of it". So if you set out to maximise shareholder value and write it in your mission statement think, would you write "We will not maximise shareholder value"? Since you wouldn't, bin it. My personal feeling is that if you really mean it don't write the bland every day corporate version write

"THIS COMPANY IS A RELENTLESS MONEY MAKING MACHINE"

Kind of focuses the mind more doesn't it? I remember being very impressed by a localish company called AIT who aimed to be "The best company in the world to work for and the best company in the world to work with". From what I saw they'd come close to achieveing that.

Traditional English Food

I went out for a traditional english meal with my study group last night - curry. The English have been eating curries since the 1800's when spices from India turned out to be perfect for disgusing the taste of badly preserved meat. Curry really took off after WWII when immigrants from India started opening restaurants.

The English curry bears very little resemblence to most Indian food. Due to a lack of ingredients, and the fact that the English didn't like spicy food that much the traditional food distorted. The dozens of culinary varieties that India has to offer were merged, rearranged and eventually became what we know today. I'm told there are now restaurants in India offering English style cooking. The interesting thing about this is that we're at it again with Thai, Vietnamese and all other kinds of food.

Anyway, if you're coming to England from overseas make sure you have a curry while you're here. It's a lot more native than it looks.

Oh, and Richard Branson was in the restaurant. He looks a lot less healthy in real life.

Saturday means football

Well our preparations for the match against Cambridge have continued well. We played the Law Faculty, established a 2-0 lead at half time, made a bunch of substitutions, made it 3-0, made some more substitutions and finished 3-3. The difference was that the team who played in the first half have played many more games together - discipline and cohesion starting to show at last.

Then it's home to listen to the end of Man U Charlton on the radio (those Mancunian swine are going to win it again...) and now West Ham Chelsea as the live commentary while I sweat on the result for Newcastle at St James Park. If we win and Chelsea or Liverpool lose we're fine, and West Ham seem to have come out of the dressing room determined to make Chelsea go home crying...

Update Newcastle won, Chelsea and Liverpool lost. This means Newcastle will finish third in the premiership, regardless of what happens. Meanwhile Chelsea and Liverpool are going to play each other next week (gotta love the fixture computer) with £15m+ at stake. West Ham's victory gives one of the nicest teams in football the chance to hang on in the Premiership, possibly by relegating Leeds United, one of the nastiest. More likely Bolton will be the ones to drop, which is a shame, but its relegation that makes football leagues the fantastic things they are...

Mayday first hand

Now I'm still not convinced about the use of the Mayday protests, but Tim's adventures in London have pretty much convinced me that the police are at least half the problem here. That's not to say that there isn't a hardcore minority determined to smash things, but there definantely is a peaceful majority and as this account makes clear the Police aren't all that interested in them. Neither are the media.

So read this report and as with so many other things wonder how so many people who's hearts are certainly in the right place can end up in such a mess.

The Guardian have a slightly different take on the whole thing, but by and large both sets of reports could easily be accurate. I was in London myself on Thursday visiting the offices of IDEO but aside from a few more socialist worker newspaper sellers than usual I noticed nothing.

Gone to Texas

The business school team at Mootcorp have landed and it sounds like they're having fun. I however am more interested in the fact that had only I been there my tablemanners would have outdone those of my usually better half.

Of course she can't eat peas off the back of her fork either, so I win on both high and low culture. Woohoo!

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.