Stupid label guy

There's a Dilbert cartoon about ISO 9001 and it's requirement that everything be labelled. The joke is that the guy doing the labelling has a label of his own declaring that he's the 'stupid label guy'. He seems to have started work at the business school.

Apparently everything in the school is to have it's own bar code. These are being attatched to things with little plastic loops. Once everything has one they'll be counted or checked or something, and presumably removed again. It's a huge, mind numbingly dull task and I can't work out for the life of me why they're doing it. Probably some misguided idea about efficiency.

Or perhaps SBS is going to be ISO 9001 compliant. There's a scary thought.

Update the stupid label guys (there's two of them) are labelling our office as I type. They have many many bits of paper to fill in and look every bit as bored as I thought they would...

De Ja Vue

Next years class are starting to get themselves together at their Yahoo! group. They'd got up to about 25 members through networking before the school sent out an email to all the new admissions pointing them to it.

If you're coming to SBS next year follow the link on the left and sign up for the group. They're sorting out accomodation, arranging meet ups and doing all that good networking stuff people should. Last year we didn't have anything like this until a week or two before class started. I reckon by the time this years class arrive they'll already be buzzing with stories, have made a few friends and planned their first few nights out.

Right, I'm going to do something I've been meaning to do for a while now and update the doing the MBA section of this website with revision notes and coursenotes for term 2, or Hilary term as it's known in Oxford (no, I don't know why).

And I so wanted to be dangerous

According to this quiz I'm a morally deficient threat to Bush's America.


Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.


What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Not really the kind of thing I was hoping for.

This is damn good

It's not often I come across a piece of internet marketing and can't work out how to improve it, but the Howard Dean campaign is awesome. No clever technology, whizzy animation or anything else, just killer content, a genuine voice and enough interactivity to get people involved. It's awesome, and we've got to hope he wins the Democrat nomination just so he can refine these techniques for longer. And the brand, no need to piss about with Logos or slogans the Dean brand is stamped straight through everything here like the letters on a stick of rock, just the way it should be.

Regardless of your politics, this is a good thing for democracy.

The website

The blog

It also raises the prospect, should he ever be elected, of a blogging president. Sadly I'm not american, so I can't vote, and it's pretty hard to see Bush losing the next one, but there's a long way to go yet and this looks like a good start.

How open to business is Oxford?

There's been a recent report, followed up by the press suggesting that Oxford isn't sufficiently open to business. I think they're being a bit harsh, Isis, Oxford's arm for spinning out companies has been responsible for firms with a market cap of $2BN and of 40+ spin outs to date none had folded as of January this year. Thats a frankly amazing result for any investment fund.

It is true that there's room for improvement here, but things have been improving and they're continuing to do so. If Oxford needs to sort out one thing in relation to the business world it's its own internal administration. At the college level Oxford is run horrendously badly with innefficiency and waste all over the place - the result is higher rents for students and a system that seems at once ludicrously wealthy while trying to claim a lack of funds. This has nothing to do with how well Oxford interfaces with the wider business world though.

Tough job market?

This article about unemployment suggests that maybe things aren't as tough out there as people thought after all. If a recovery starts soon we'll be building the next business cycle from a very strong base - with all the attendant risks of inflation, but still its better than a nation on the dole.

Back to the drawing board

The Infernal Tony sent me a link to this article a while back through my comments system, but I only just got round to following it up. I'm not sure things are as black for the online job search as this suggests, but the more time I spend on these sites the more I realise that they're badly built and hard to use.

Not to sound like Jacob here, but the first one of these sites to sort out its usability issues and evolve into a top class online service will bury the others. Since I imagine that most of these sites are struggling for funds once things are moving in your direction acquiring the others should be easy - if its worth it at all.

Things to read

If anyone ever tells you there's a more popular, influential or just plain incredible sport than football get them to read this. Then hope that Rwanda can build on this.

Stuff to read

It all started with an attempt to read every single episode of Doonesbury (thwarted only by a few missing years in the online archive) but lately I've been reading *a lot* of online cartoons. I thought I'd post a list here of my current reading.

From the broadsheets

Doonesbury
Dilbert
Boondocks

Online daily reads

Scary go Round
Goats
Wigu
Diesel Sweeties
Somthing Positive

Occasional reads

The comic section of Salon (registration / day pass required)
Redmeat and Pathetic Geek Stories, both linked from the Onion AV Club

Football crazy

Manchester United have signed a goalkeeper with Tourettes syndrome. Bound to make for some interesting post match interviews...

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

This weekend it was time to enjoy the heatwave, hire a car and head into the English countryside. Saturday was a drive to Stonehenge followed by a sightseeing visit to Bath. Sunday was falconry at Batsford (a manor house about 30 miles from Oxford) and then lazing about at Borton on the Wold, which was about as English a village as you can get, icecreams, cream teas, a brass band playing on the village square and a visiting posse of Hells Angels.

OK, so that last bit isn't strictly traditional English, but its true. The Angels had turned up to visit the Bourton motor museum and chat to each other. Quite what their 60's forebears would have made of this I don't know, but when they came to leave, gunning their engines and revving loudly on the side of the road young couples brought their children over for a closer look and people reached for their cameras.

Their museum tour complete the Angels roared off into the distance, presumably taking their own brand of rebellion, intimidation and two wheeled photo opportunity to other quaint little villages where they too might purchase a cream tea or possibly take in a game of cricket. The power of Little England will get to us all in the end.

Chilling out

It has been very hot in Oxford lately. Uncomfortably so at times. So it was with great relief that I finally managed to get myself into Edamame on sushi night. (Edamame keep wierd hours which have thwarted my previous attempts to eat there).

Believe me, when its hot like this there is nothing quite like fresh sushi, cold Ashahi beer in little frosted glasses and chilled Edamame beans. Thursday night is Sushi night at Edamame, I thoroughly recommend it.

To the barricades!

In best Oxford tradition Queens college have just announced rent increases well over the rate of inflation, at the time of year when the students are least well placed to respond. (its summer, and most people are elsewhere). As an undergraduate I was heavily involved in trying to organise rent strikes, demonstrations and other such resistance. Its worth pointing out that it only came to such desperate measures because the college in question (LMH) was extremely reluctant to explain how it worked out its numbers, what else it had considered and so on.

Hopefully Queens will be more accomodating. All I want to see is the business case they've got for these increases and an explanation as to why nothing else they've considered (like cutting costs or raising new funds or selling stuff) is appropriate.

Failing that I guess we'll just have to protest. And I'll be doing it for you kids, since I'll never actually pay any of these new prices. (I've paid my last rent cheque, these are for next year)

SBP picks up steam

Phase one of our SBP is essentially a benchmarking exercise. That means conducting a lot of interviews, and giving people marks across a whole range of criteria. (24 according to the sheet in front of me). We've now finished our first two interviews and we've got another ten in the pipeline. We're targetting 30, so I think we're more or less on track for now.

We're also getting used to Cisco's welter of IT infrastructure. They are very very wired indeed, with everything conducted via outlook exchange, instant messaging services and a few more esoteric bits of kit. The techie in me likes to see this lot in action, the pragmatist is yet to be convinced of it's value.

Job hunt begins in earnest

A month ago I trawled monster.com for marketing jobs and found *none* that were interesting. Yesterday I turned up ten in the right salary / responsibility bracket, and two were ones that really got my attention. I'd reckon that most of the jobs I'm looking at are long shots - 10-1 or worse odds, but those are winnable odds.

I'm also of the opinion that companies find jobs for people who impress them. So even if organisation x decides I'm not the man for the top job I may get offered something else - perhaps with a view to later promotion. Either way its a good way to go at the market.

All I want is a brand, you know, one to look after and call my own. One I can take over the world with. That kind of thing.

Opening thoughts on summer projects

So what's an SBP like? Well so far the summer business project with Cisco has been a lot like doing a consulting job, but with extra academic theory and a less punishing schedule. My groups in favour of a steady 9-5 schedule (or 10-6 when we have to commute to London) and that's working out well.

Can't say too much about the details of the project, but so far it's been pretty interesting and it's an interesting return to the world of work.

Summer Plans

As well as putting in eight weeks of effort for Cisco over the summer there's a whole load of stuff I've got to be getting on with. Here's a summary.

Find a job - I keep putting this off, but I can't put it off much longer
Visit Cornwall for a weekend
Visit the Lake district for a weekend
Read Harry Potter
Learn options - never got them straight in my head, won't feel right till I do
Help the business school with their website
Get back into the habit of going to the gym on a regular basis
Design next years blog

I'm sure there's much much more, but that'll do for a start.

Cisco Day One

Day one of the Cisco Summer Business Project today. I'm not sure how much I can reasonably say about the project, so you're going to have to make do with generalities from here. It went well, Cisco were helpful and provided us with laptops and full employee access to their system.

Their system is very impressive, and really rather large.

Bit like the company really.

Balls

Keble ball was fun, although for those not used to Oxford balls the comment was more 'this is more like a fair for grown ups than a ball' which is fair enough. There was a bouncy castle, there was a ferris wheel, there was a coconut shy. There was also (and I have no explanation for this) a table of plates which people were invited to smash by throwing cricket balls at them.

Now I don't know why this was going on, but it kept several undergraduates occupied for many many hours. They started at 9 and were still going when we left at 2:30 in the morning. Perhaps this was a last minute strategy adopted by the organisers when they realised that a number of clinically insane guests had arrived, or perhaps this is what today's kids do in their spare time - I have no idea.

Plate smashing, it's the next big thing.

Exam surivived

Done and dusted. One hour of Global Comparative Business later and the prevailing thought among the class is 'what was all the fuss about'. I wrote good stuff on the IMF and a general 'what is globalisation' question. I was less convincing on the differences between the GATT and the WTO, but it was good enough.

Time to relax, and tonight, time to party. We've got a drinks reception at the school, a class photo and then a cruise down the river to look forward to. Tomorrow is Keble ball which the MBA class have adopted as their end of term party - about 60 of us are going.