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.