Football : Mission Accomplished

We ran our socks off, we talked and chattered, and despite being a man short in the second half and having to field a player who could barely walk in the second we turned in a much better performance than on Tuesday. It may have been 13 - 0 but I don't care, and neither did anyone else. We played better, we could all see the progress and morale is good. Our attitude and effort even impressed our opponents - so hats off to Linacre college, they played well, they kept it fair and they did their job. Good stuff all round.

Said slips in the rankings, I couldn't care less

The FT rankings came out today and we've slipped to fourth in the UK, 35th in the world. Am I bothered? Not really, most of the UK schools slipped down the rankings, of the top school all were audited this year and lets be clear, these tables are not much more than vague indicators. Sure the schools at the top are good, but what for? The survey ranks employment prospects and average salary which skews everything toward financial based schools who churn out city traders. Then there's the question of entrepreneurs, as more and more of SBS alumni decide to start companies its hardly surprising that our average earnings figures take a knock.

The real influence is the involvement of recruiters and students in these surveys. SBS is a new school and teething problems are inevitable, likewise as the economy suffers on campus recruiters have been focusing on the big schools - that's my best guess. The real point, as I've said many times before is that my future job depends not on the school, but on me. So all in all the fact that I missed todays interview training to play football will probably have a bigger impact on my future career than anything the FT comes up with.

Marketing Preparation

Marketing Management is being taught by case study. Not in the kind of here's a lecture, now discuss the case study kind of way, but in the 100% of your mark depends on your performance in 21 submitted case studies. No case study submission may be more than a single typed side of A4 and lectures will consist of discussions of the work you've just handed in kind of way.

Three thoughts on this. First, its going to be tough for a lot of people. Secondly, a lot of people are going to learn a lot more about marketing than they would have any other way. Finally, you really really really don't want to find yourself resitting this one. I've read, done and thought about marketing a lot in the last few years. I've just done the first case study, wrote down a bunch of ideas, threw out the ones I thought looked mediocre and still ran out of space. I think I'm going to like this.

Still dreaming

There's a lot of thinking going on in the dreaming spires. This morning we had a talk on technology transfer at Oxford, the folks looking after this are Isis Innovation, and in the past six years they've spun out 34 companies - none of which have failed. More impressive was the £208 million Oxford gets through supporting its 4500 researchers every year.

I didn't know you could get that angry

That's what the captain of the football team said after our 15 - 0 (sadly we weren't playing rugby) thrashing at the hands of St Anthony's college. Odd thing is I didn't think I got nearly angry enough. If I hadn't been playing with the kind of hangover that made running difficult I might have been more use, screamed at the back four earlier and just maybe we'd have learned to push out in a straight line before the eighty minute mark...

Oh, and it would have been nice if eleven players had turned out for us, saving us from asking the lads on the pitch before us if anyone fancied a game...

Still, much credit for one of the best half time team talks I've heard "It doesn't matter if they score twenty, we've only got one thing to do and that's score a goal this half" which brought about ten minutes of confident, aggressive attacking football, hassle and running. If we'd scored then we might have kept it going, but we didn't and well that was that.

The problem is still communication. Football pitches should be noisy places filled with shouts of "man on", "push up", "I'll have", "so and so wants" and the rest. Perhaps its because so many of us are playing in foreign languages, perhaps its because so many of us haven't played for so long. In some cases players feel they can't tell better players what to do (not a problem I've ever had, being the gobbiest awful player I know). I don't know, but there are a few things we can work on and get right. We can work harder than our opponents, and we can talk more. If we get stuffed twenty nil on Satuday I won't care - so long as we work our socks off and keep talking.

Of course, as every schoolboy of my generation knows what we really need is a charismatic geordie manager, a former england international who was forced out of the game prematurely by injury. Do you know who it is yet? (256kb download)

Learning to upload

On arriving here in Oxford I found that for some reason I hadn't got my ftp client set up right and so couldn't make changes to anything other than the front page of the site. I resolved to fix this at some stage, and promptly forgot all about it as I drowned in work.

I've just downloaded CyD FTP Client and things seem to be progressing much better, in that I can see directories and move files. So things you've got to look forward to in the next few days include

• My revision notes
  
• Write ups of each course completed
  
• Previews of this terms courses
  
• Some general housekeeping on the out of date areas of the site
  

I'm also planning to upgrade to blogger pro which should make things a little more interactive around here, allowing you to pillory me for my poor spelling, lack of apostrophes, understanding and ability to run a decent blog. It may also let those of you wondering about doing an MBA ask some questions - which would be nice.

Learning to talk

I was fairly harsh on the company doing our speaker training after their last session which was a three hour presentation about giving presentations (containing the advice to keep things short). So it was with some trepidation that most of us turned up for the followup sessions, small group presentation workshops. These however turned out to be much better and pretty much everyone said they found them useful.

I need to learn to stand still (or at least not stand there doing a soft shoe shuffle) when presenting, other than that I've still got it ;-)

The Homeless Guy

Somewhere in Nashville there's a guy writing a blog about being on the streets. He's intelligent, articulate, writes well and generally runs a good blog. He's not on drugs or alcohol and he's getting off the streets as we speak. I don't know how he got there in the first place, but he talks a lot about homelessness as a recidivist thing, about how people get off and go back, about all kinds of things. Someone really should give this guy a job formulating policy somewhere.

Oxford has a lot of homeless folk. Some sell the Big Issue and after a few months they're not on the streets anymore, or not in Oxford anyway. They tend to be the ones like this guy, able to function, able to make a difference, the kind of people you can imagine getting sorted and being OK. Then there are the ones who've been around here forever, who sit about drinking or shooting up, who swear at passers by and who've clearly lost the plot big time. I'm not sure how you deal with them it really is a case of give them money and they'll turn it into alcohol or drugs. They need social services, but social services are probably at breaking point already.

We're a rich country. How the hell did this happen?

Oh, and they're a couple of teenagers hanging round the main bus station begging and doing no-one any favours. Their story is that they've run out of money for the bus home and need a few quid to back safe and sound, odd then that they're there on such a regular basis. They open with a lot of "I'm sorry, this is really bad, but I'm not on drugs or anything". No you're not, you're not even begging, you're sodding con artists and sooner or later some wideboy coming out of a pub will turn you into con artists with broken faces. Oxford really isn't the kind of place to try this on, late on a Friday night.

Soon we'll be able to use Z scores

Once you have a sample of more than 30 there is next to no difference between statistics calculated on T-stats and statistics calculated on Z-scores. Since Tad has unearthed two more MBA bloggers (both at the applicant stage) we're that bit closer to being able to use the much easier Z-score method for analysing ourselves.

Sorry, desperate attempt to use last terms knowledge there

Anyway, welcome to the blogroll to...

Treeman at MBA-Admit

and

Modz Speranto at Modz Blog

Incidently both Tad and Modz are taking steps to conceal their true identity online to avoid having their blogs interfere with their application process. At the time I was applying theb blog component of this site didn't exist and my other site was much more up to date. Have to say I went out of my way to get these noticed by the tutors handling the admissions (with next to no success). If I was assessing applicants I'd be impressed by this kind of extra-curricular stuff, If nothing else it shows that you see the MBA as an important part of your life, gives you a chance to showboat your written English (snide comments to this address please) and demonstrate some kind of community spirit.

A better reason for keeping quiet might be not wanting your classmates to read what you're writing or attribute it to you. In all honesty that hasn't been an issue either - aside from the occasional "that was interesting" or "I don't agree" my class are entirely chilled out about this.

MBA Blogging becomes statistically significant

I've been told that answering 50/50 questions such as boy / girl with any statistical accuracy requires five samples. So I can say with some confidence that the addition of Robert Black to the list of MBA bloggers means we are statistically likely to me men doing full time courses. Robert only fits half of this, being a man doing a part time MBA at Edinburgh.

I thought about part time courses long enough to decide the stress would kill me, but seriously considered Edinburgh which is a fantastic place to live. Many friends did their degrees there and my sister liked it so much she lives there. So, best of luck Robert, I'm sure it'll be great.

Back to school

I've been back in Oxford for a week now. Apologies for the lack of new year accounts, I went to Cornwall for a fancy dress party with some old mates from university. Good stuff all round.

Anyway, business school is starting to gear up nicely. Many of us are trying to get some of the course reading done before things kick off in earnest. I've made some progress on that front, but in all honesty I've not been massively productive. Unless you count social productivity, Oxford is full of people I know, but don't have time to meet up with in term time. So I've been out and about seeing friends and remembering my old life.

I went in to my old company as well. Aside from one or two new faces it's like I never left, but then it has only been a few months. Well, five or six.

About time too

There will now be a brief burst of politics. Todays Daily Mirror has a fantastic cover, The story is here. Now I don't believe the prospective war is just about oil. On the other hand, if there wasn't any oil we sure as hell wouldn't be going to war, so maybe there isn't that much difference anyway. Still, that's not my point.

My point is that this may be what it takes to finally start a serious debate in this country. As the article says 20 000 UK troops will be sent into battle in mid January - possibly, and nobodies discussed this. Global politics is carrying on an absolute farce whereby they pretend the inspections matter while lining up the tanks. The only problem at the moment is that the inspections haven't done their job in turning up the much needed causus belli.

ps : how do the Americans know Saddams got weapons of mass destruction? They sold them to him. I think Cheney was even on the board of a company that sold dual use material that could be used to manufacture chemical weapons...

Creative Commons

This is the most intelligent thing I've seen in ages on copyright. One of those things which is so simple you wonder why nobodies done it before... The Creative Commons (CC) alternative to Copyright. See their fantastic multimedia presentation here or visit their main website.

This is a very nice extension of some copyleft ideas and as soon as I get round to publishing my revision notes I'll be putting some kind of cc copyright on them. These things only work if you use them.

Merry Christmas Joe

when johnny comes marching home again
Hurrah! Hurrah!
he's coming by bus or underground
Hurrah! Hurrah!
a woman's eye will shed a tear
to see his face so beaten in fear
an' it was just around the corner in the english civil war

it was still at the stage of clubs and fists
Hurrah! Hurrah!
when that well-known face got beaten to bits
Hurrah! Hurrah!
your face was blue in the light of the screen
as we watched the speech of an animal scream
the new party army was marching right over our heads

alright

there you are, ha ha, i told you so
Hurrah! Hurrah!
says everybody that we know
Hurrah! Hurrah!
but who hid a radio under the stairs
an' who got caught out on their unawares?
when that new party army came marching right up the stairs

when johnny comes marching home again
Hurrah! Hurrah!
nobody understands it can happen again
Hurrah! Hurrah!
the sun is shining an' the kids are shouting loud
but you gotta know it's shining through a crack in the cloud
and the shadows keep falling when johnny comes marching home

Joe Strummer, 1952 - 2002.

We could have done with someone like you right about now.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear

Part of the Iraqi's 12000 page dossier has been leaked, the part saying which corporations sold them equipment. Full story here. This is of course old news, but its rather odd that the US press has pretty much avoided this one, are they really censoring themselves so heavily in the name of patriotism?

Round up

Lots to cover in this entry, since its a while since I blogged and I've been a busy boy, so here we go.

I left the last entry in Arnhem, and heading for Delft. On arrival Delf was great, great pancakes, great market town, what I'm assured is a fantastic museum and the Prinshof, where William of Orange lived and was eventually assassinated. These days its an art gallery - home to many old masters and well worth a visit. We ended the evening at Maria's old student fraternity, home to many, many, many cheap beers. Mercifully some wiser heads talked me out of my plan to drink every variety of beer I hadn't tried before....

The next day featured many things, including a relocation back to Amsterdamn and shopping for Christmas presents, but is notable chiefly for the amount of raw meat I was forced to ingest. Starting in the morning with the breakfast of fillet americain (raw beef paste) on bread, served with raw onions, salt and pepper and including a brief encounter with one of Amsterdamn's rare 'non excellent' snack foods - raw herring. This is not sushi folks, you take a fish, you gut a fish and then you eat it. There might have been some salting involved in the mean time, but all that nice wrapped in seaweed, choice cuts, beds of rice and wasabi stuff that makes sushi fantastic was missing. raw herring is in my humble opinion, just as bad an idea as it sounds.

The final full day in Amsterdamn was all about art. We headed into the massive Rijksmuseum which is home to many of the best paintings ever produced in Holland. That means wall to wall Rembrandts and Rubens. A while ago I waded my way through 1000 pages of the Phaidon History of Art, and in the Reijksmuseum I got to see an awful lot of the paintings it had mentioned. Compelling, fantastic stuff.

After that it was time to board the ferry and head back to Newcastle, for a nice family christmas and a chance to catch up with old friends.

Holland is flat!

OK, so there are some things about Holland which you know before you arrive. Like the stuff about the country being flat, and the dykes and the whole windmill thing. None of which means its not nice to actually go and see these things yourself. I mean, it's one thing to know that large parts of Holland are below sea level, its another thing to be driving around an entire man made province, looking at the dykes that turned it from being a big chunk of sea into a big chunk of land.

Tuesday was spent taking our Easy Rent a Car around some of the old fishing villages near Amsterdam, aside from the above mentioned waterworks and flatness I got to see a lot of the old sailboats they use to fish the big lakes that make up so much of Northern Holland, and which eventually turn into the sea after passing through a few locks and dykes. We got back to find our hosts attempting Holland's annual educational challenge, ''Het Groot Dictee'' (spelling?) whereby the entire nation watches TV and attempts to take a dictation class. The aim is to encourage proper use of grammar and spelling, adapt to new words and new ways of doing things. (a few years ago the dutch revised a lot of their grammar) the whole thing is conducted from the Dutch first chamber, equivalent to the House of Lords or the Senate and as well as the nation taking part by TV some celebrities and more formal contestants are inivited in to compete. This year the first ever perfect score among the contestants was achieved. By a Belgian. Apparently the Belgians think it's great fun to outdo the Dutch at their own language.

Yesterday was all about the Kroller Mueller Museum which is one of the most famous art galleries in Holland. The permanent collection included over 50 Van Gogh's, as well as stuff by Mondrian and a fantastic painter called Fernand? Leger who's done some really great stuff. They also had a number of portraits from the sixteenth century which were exceptional for their detail and realism. What little I remember of the history of art suggests that this style both began in Holland and was perfected here.

The museum is set in the middle of a national park and is inaccessible by car, you have to borrow a bicycle to get there, or walk it. (its about 1.5 miles from the nearest car park). Around the museum is a sculpture garden containing more great stuff to look at, although yesterday our stroll around the garden was punctuated by the sound of machine gun fire and the thump of heavy mortars. Turns out the army use the nearby woodland for practice.

We ended the day in Arnhem, which is lovely, and today will head for Delft...

Why I'm in Holland

This is being written from Holland. The reason being that when you go to business school you meet lots of people, and they're nice, and you like them. Turns out some of them like you too, which is how I ended up with a dutch girlfriend and thats the short explanation of why I'm writing this from Holland. The plan is to spend a week here (we're based in Amsterdam, staying with her brother and his girlfriend who so far have been fantastic hosts) and then head back to Newcastle for Chirstmas and New Year. Top stuff.

So far Holland has contained many fantastic things, including the local delicacy Croquete (I'm sure they don't spell it like that) and some really really nice dark beer. There's also been a chance to wander round Amsterdam and the inevitable visit to the red light district. Having seen it I can confirm that one area full of hookers and drug dealers is much like any other, even if there are windows involved. Quite why this is a tourist trap kind of escapes me when most major cities have had similar attractions 'en plein air' for a while now.

The best thing to date has been the Theatre Tuschinsky, which has been converted into a cinema. It is without doubt one of the most fantastic buildings I've ever been in. Lots of glorious art deco? design and the whole thing is absolutely gorgeous, from the amazing ceiling decorations to the feet of the furniture. Apparently they restored it to its former glories a few years ago, so if you saw it before and weren't that impressed go again. There is also the small matter of being able to buy beer at the cinema, things really are that much more civilised in Holland.

ps : I am now informed that Croquete should in fact be spelled kroketten, (don't pronounce the n)

And then it was over

Finished exams on Friday at 12:30 and promptly headed for the Kings Arms, I haven't really had the chance to blog much since then so there's a lot to catch up on. Suffice to say that beer was drunk, then more beer was drunk and then we went to Frueds where... You've guessed it.

So I've survived the first term more or less intact. No results yet, (probably not till January) but I'm pretty sure things went ok.

Clockwatching

The clocks in the examination schools are great. They're these big wooden affairs with lots of decoration, and when the hands move they kind of jerk, lunging forward from one minute to the next, before wobbling a bit and settling down. You can almost hear the clockwork.

The exams themselves are going pretty well. If eight weeks ago you'd have told me that I'd have come through accounting, finance 1 and decision science exams without turning into a gibbering ball of stress, or collapsing on the floor of the examination hall in a sobbing bundle I'd have been surprised to say the least. This may be rampant overconfidence and self delusion but I think they went quite well. I won't know till Januray though.

Tomorrow is Industrial Organisations, People and Organisations and Strategic Management. In theory these are my kind of thing, nice essay based subjects with lots of room for waffle. (hint, the trick is to waffle as little as possible). Anyway, I've spent so much time revising the quantitative side of the course I'm woefully underprepared. This is where three years of Oxford tutorials should come into their own. I may or may not know my stuff, but I should sure be able to sound like I do... Fingers crossed.