Learning through humour

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

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

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

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

First week survived

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

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

Targetted

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

THE WEB IS NOT LIKE TELEVISION

And the beat goes on

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

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

Thats enough, lectures will start again in five minutes

I'm board

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

"Make the Oxford Business Forum famous"

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

How to answer a case study

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

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

Day one

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

There was also a joke worth repeating...

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

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

The reading begins

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

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

klogs, blogs and accelerating industry

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

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

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

The Oxford Business Forum

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

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

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

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

Induction day 2

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

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

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

Induction day one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final result : SBS 4, St Antony's 4

The Oxford Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

"The diary guy right?"

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

Wish I'd thought of that

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

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

Meet the class of 2002/3 (sort of)

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

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

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

Laptop armed and ready

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

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

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

I swear, I didn't ask for one

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

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

The Incredible Optimism of Text Books

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

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

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