Presents - get it while you can

My much better two thirds is very good at buying presents. Some months ago - I think around January - I read an article about Howard Tate, a legendary soul singer who'd gone off the rails and vanished for twenty years with just a single album to his name (Get it while you can). The more I read the more I wanted to buy his new record - sadly it wasn't out and the release date was many months hence. Displaying a gift for prophecy that comes with experience I said 'I'll never remember to buy this when it comes out' and lo and behold I didn't.

So you can imagine how happy I was when my much better two thirds produced said CD for no reason at all. At this rate she'll be my exceptionally good three quarters soon, especially if I can't come up with a great birthday present. Suggestions to this address...

The increasingly English Mr Lloyd (part 2)

What better way to spend an evening in Oxford than to punt leisurely up and down the Cherwell watching the wildlife and greenery go by in blissful Oxford weather?

That was the plan, and at times it almost seemed like that. When we weren't getting in the way of rowing eights, being threatened by swans (local swans have learned that if you terrorise a boat they may give you food, we had none, but got threatened anyway) and cursing about the aluminium pole (nasty banging noises, heavy) or the fact that the river seems to have developed many inches of thick muddy silt this summer it was indeed fun.

Possibly not as much fun as the post punting beers though.

The increasingly English Mr Lloyd (part 1)

This weekend was a friend of mine's stag do. Forgoing the usual destinations of Dublin or London the chosen destination was Oxford - scene of his juvenile crimes. Well actually it's kind of hard imagining him committing any crimes but that's by the by. A comfortably intoxicated evening occurred followed by the main attraction on Sunday - Cricket.

Now I don't play cricket, indeed it's fair to say that of the twenty odd people there maybe three had ever played cricket, and not recently. As the Pembroke groundsman looked on in amazement we knocked out forty odd overs (in something like 500 balls) with entertaining combinations of underarm, overarm, sidearm and just plain bizarre bowling. The batting and fielding wasn't up to much either. Still a great time was had by all and it felt terrible authentic to decamp to the pavillion for tea and sandwiches, almost as if we knew what we were doing.

Summer project right on schedule

I can only assume we're heading toward a cliff at speed on this project, because so far absolutely nothing has gone wrong. The only other alternative is that somehow during the course of this year the four of us have developed a godlike ability to organise large projects and run them to time.

By this afternoon we will have a complete version 0.1 of the final report, all the sections, all the words - enough to hand in. And we've still got two weeks to go. If it wasn't so hot, and if we weren't feeling so lethargic I imagine we'd be feeling quite smug at this stage.

Must go to HMV

Damnit, nothing like a personal recommendation to sell a CD is there? Although the other person who's told me about this described it as average mopy goth / new metal stuff.

Oh, must do some work too. First recommendations to the client on Friday.

Good Design

This piece on the Register about Konika Minolta's new logo reminded me of something I read a long long time ago. Dmitry Kirsanov's fantastic columns at webreference.com make very clear just how different to art design is. A must read set of essays for anyone who is ever going to work in the design field.

Much to my surprise in Dmitry's latest writing on Logo's he talks about having been a young designer when he wrote the first few columns, and it is easy to see where he's improved. His early writing however remains bloody impressive. His studio at Kirsanov.com looks to be ticking along quite nicely too.

The truth about PAM

PAM, the Pentagon's bizarre market for trading information about terrorist attrocities was even wierder than previously thought. Over at the Register Andrew Orlowski has produced a piece of spectatcularly meandering journalism to explain just where the ideas came from in the first place.

The bottom line on all this is of course that markets don't work half as efficiently as people like to think. Even the stock market, deliberately built to be the most perfect of all markets has plenty of well documented imperfections. If nothing else traders don't work weekends and exchanges close in the evenings - that can't possibly be efficient. The notion that someone could build a market in political futurology and expect it to be more use than (say) assembling a varied panel of regional experts and asking them what was going on on a regular basis is ludicrous.

I think the only real lesson we can learn from this is that as government gets bigger there is more chance that it will spend money on really stupid things.

T3, Rise of the Computer Games

I'm not even sure if there is a computer game to accompany T3, Rise of the Machines, but there should be. Moments in the film come straight out of something like Deus Ex or Halo. How do you fight a flying thing with guns? Stand in a corridor (it can't manouvre) and keep shooting it as it rushes toward you. If you and the game designer have done your job right it'll blow up about ten yards away (so you can see the cool explosion graphics) but not actually hurt you.

The film itself is a full on action extravaganza, plot holes abound but it's good for a bit of light entertainment. However it is striking me that £ for £ playing a decent computer game now offers more plot, more involvement and more heart rate increasing moments. If the films are going to really be more than just marketing vehicles they urgently need to add some emotion back into the mix. It's something that hasn't been lost on Hong Kong cinema, where even amidst the bullets and explosions they manage to work in some genuine emotion and a sense of involvement. John and Catherine holding hands or Neo and Trinity snogging in the Matrix counts for far less than the emotion drenched and bloody mess that ends Bullet in the Head, the kind of thing John Woo made before Hollywood gave him enormous budgets, but far less artistic control.

Just my 2 cents.

update there is a game which looks to be tied very closely to the film.

Pre-emptive book review

Business the Cisco way by David Stauffer. There's a word for rose tinted biography - it's called hagiography. I'm not sure what the equivalent is for business writing, so I'm just going to call it garbage. This book is a badly researched collection of hype and overzealous writing that should have been pulped by the editor to avoid embarrasment.

I know this despite having read only one chapter and the introduction. Chapter 2 is called 'Win the world with e-commerce'. nowhere in it does it explain that you can't go to the Cisco website and buy something more technical than a t-shirt. If you want to buy direct from Cisco you have to be one of their handful of mega-customers (say British Telecom or AT&T) or a reseller. Pretty much all Cisco's sales are indirect, its an oversight equivalent to suggesting Switzerland is flat..

On Markets

Doc Searls has written a piece on markets, and what exactly we mean when we say market, as he points out it's a very flexible word indeed.

This piece also got me thinking. Doc and other business writers like him come up with a lot of very sensible stuff, none of which is considered academically sound by the powers that be. That's fine, the powers that be have a duty to make sure we're not studying fads here. That said the nature of this random punditry is that it's faster than academic research into business - a lot faster. Marketing academics haven't invented anything for years, but they have documented a lot of what switched on marketeers have been doing for years and effectively said 'you're right, this works and here's why'.

The situation isn't as bad in things like finance and economics where you still need the time to do real science / maths but for much of our curriculum academic theory is not the cutting edge - its following on behind, documenting it. I think the business school community needs to work out how to exploit 'non academic thinking' and inject it into the curriculum without ending up in a situation where you're constantly pushing the next fad.

Summer Escape

There really should be a rule against forcing students to spend their lovely summer days labouring over an assignment looking at pictures of fantastic holiday retreats. Sadly there isn't and so I spent Sunday hard at work for i-escape.

Having spent a bit more time on the site I'm still really impressed. I'd guess that as soon as the traffic starts to come in they'll be fine because there is so much to like about it. It's also a good example of how e-commerce can work best. You only need a handful of people and a large body of talented freelancers / part timers to draw on and you can achieve an awful lot.

More lyrics

At the tender age of three
I was hooked to a machine
just to keep my mouth from spouting junk

There are those who think this should have been done to me. Indeed there are probably people who think I still need it.

The brochure has landed

The new brochure has arrived and 10 000 copies are awaiting distribution. You don't have to get one of them to read it though, you can download a pdf of the brochure (2 MB) from the business school website.

The brochure was a pretty serious piece of work, as well as the copy it needed editing and co-ordinating, people needed to pilot it through the SBS management system, photographs needed to be taken and layouts designed. So who did what?

Dr Maike Bohn, can take all the plaudits for making it happen, reigning in my wilder ideas (hey, lets do the whole thing as a fightclub parody...) and co-ordinating everyone on this list.
Paul at Wilson Harvey provided the graphic design skills that have it looking super sexy although he was ably assisted by
Rob Judges, freelance photographer par excellence (almost all the shots are of real students)
Liz Buckle and Jessica McGreesh had the unenviable task of checking the thing was not only accurately spelled, but factually true

and of course all my fellow classmates and students who put up with me trying to get them to say interesting things about the course, asking silly questions and making them write case studies for me.

The brochures are coming, the brochures are coming!

The new MBA brochures should be arriving in the next hour or two. Since this is the biggest bit of copywriting I've ever done (30+ pages) I'm really keen to see the results. The marketing department are already sick of me turning up asking if they're here (they were meant to be here on Tuesday, but there was a delay). It'll also be interesting to see what the current class makes of it.

Money in the bank...

As part of a summer campaign to bring in some funds I'm doing a few bits of freelance work. As well as some more bits and bobs on behalf of the school I'm going to be helping i-escape with their search engine rankings. It's a small piece of work, but you've got to start somewhere.

Incidently if you're planning a holiday you really should take a look at i-escape's site. They've got some fantastic write ups of some really interesting hotels and resorts. I know this sounds like I'm now writing on behalf of the client, but seriously, it's a gorgeous website with some really strong content - only the search engines aren't biting...

Meeting the readers

Yesterday I met up with Rani, who has been reading this website for the last eight months. I'd write more, but she promised to send me a picture of the two of us which she took over coffee and I thought it would be nice to include in the write up. Only it isn't here yet, presumably becuase I imagine she's very busy at the moment. So the write ups on ice for now.

If any other readers want to meet me the current going rate is a big cup of hot chocolate, although I'm susceptible to beer based bribery as well.

Balanced views

There is a moment at which you realise that your bit of the SBP may well revolve around suggesting a balanced scorecard approach. At this point you are confronted with the realisation that this afternoon and tomorrow may well be spent reading about accounting systems and performance metrics.

Its a moment I'd suggest people try to avoid.

Football cancelled

Honestly, just because it's pouring with rain (awful weather for July) tonights game of footie is cancelled. Still, as part of my current health kick I will do some exercise tonight. See, if I write stuff down it will happen...

Amazon on the blink

Worth mentioning only because it's the first time it's ever happened to me in dozens of purchases, but Amazon's server is up and down like a yo-yo at the moment. Have to imagine they've got some kind of back up system that isn't working 100% or an intermittent fault or something.

At this stage I've got enough faith in their customer service that even were my orders to suddenly be completely messed up I'd trust them to sort it out. Still, if this was my first experience of their site I'd be off. As a case in point doc searls has been blogging his problems with Paypal, I agree. I've tried several times to use this service and don't think I've ever succeeded. The hallmark of a system built by a guy who's real ambition was to send a rocket to Mars, from LA? Could be.

Site Updates

I've now finished adding course reviews for Hilary term along with accompanying revision notes. Click on the 'doing the MBA' section in the navigation above.