Psych

Yesterday in my management class we watched a short clip on YouTube, a series of experiments with an elevator. Basically, a group of people associated with the experiment would get on with one subject. Typically, they would stand facing the back of the elevator, and within seconds the subject would turn and face the back wall.

In the funniest clip, the group changed facing, took off their hats, then put their hats back on, and the subject did the same. It was uncanny. With all of the subjects, there was an initial moment of confusion, a squinting of the eyebrow, but they all followed the lead.

This was all by way of supporting our study of groups and culture and conformity. It was interesting to me, for with my background, I've always been the subject, looking around me, trying to determine the correct and appropriate behavior.

You're Telling Me Now?

Here are some interesting - and very telling - stats from an article in hte NYT today about Michigan's reaction to the proposed auto industry bailout:


"The unemployment rate is 9.3 percent — tied with Rhode Island’s for the highest in the country — and the safety net of social services is stretched beyond ability to care for all of those in need. The total of Michigan residents who receive some form of public assistance, like food stamps or home heating credits, is now 1.82 million, or close to 20 percent of the population, a record for the state."

Julie the MBAlien

Tonight after class, a get-together at the Torch Club, a storied place with the portable coat racks ushed up near the roaring fireplace. MBAs gathered, and talked, all sponsored by the placement office. Perhaps we were meant to mingle with alumni? We were all new there.

In all, I mixed mostly with my own crowd, the Orange Core, Rick, and Alex Billy, Hannah, Rachel, and Mike, among others. A man from Moody's queried a man from Citibank; I identified the Pfizer mafia, and the Con Edison mafia. I talked about being an engineer, and not being an engineer, and arched a brow at my classmates who dismissed a video of Amy Tan discussing creativity - a process in he own life that has, like so many, been driven by loss and by asking questions.

We shuffled out, wine and beer ingested, a thick mingling of winter coats and scarves and hats, Blackberries and iPhones, plugged in, on the treadmill, mingling home.

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Change Management

My management class continues to really hit home in  ways that I never expected from an MBA class. For a class that focuses on high-level management strategies, it is remarkably personal.

This past week we discussed change management. When I first heard about this topic a few years ago, I imagined it in over-simplified terms based on m IT experience - print out some documentation, engage end users before the change, then walk around the floors and be prepared to answer questions about the new product. Hand-holding, we call it. You can make fun of it, but it's an important part of IT's role within the organization.

What I hadn't fully realized then was how much my background as a military brat has prepared me for the role of change management. I was living in Europe when the Berlin Wall was torn down, and that example is one that our instructor has used repeatedly. What do we do now, she asks, hypothetically, now that forty years of history are no more? The old way of doing things ist vorbei. We must find a new way forward in an unfamiliar landscape.

That was the background against which I graduated high school an entered college, and bearing witness to the transformational power of technology has always been rooted, for me, in the collapse of the Cold War.

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I Asked the Question That Really Got Them Going

Last night I went to a panel discussion on global sourcing, rather, outsourcing and offshoring, featuring a lead guy from IBM and a guy from Citi who used to work for IBM.

It was interesting. They both knew their topics and were able to speak to the pitfalls of outsourcing, as well as the benefits. When asked about political cries for punitive taxation of outsourcing, they pointed out that in some cases operations are outsourced or offshored within the US as part of a larger follow-the-sun service strategy, and that often a company that outsources will create new jobs in-country.

My company outsources, and the company we outsource to turns around and subcontracts part of the service level agreement to another company. It makes communication difficult. I asked about such an arrangement. Their ears perked up and they held forth for at least twenty minutes.

Basically, the answer is to plan ahead of time. Many companies turn to outsourcing because of the savings appeal, and they want to move as quickly as possible to get the labor arbitrage most often associated with outsourcing. As the man from IBM pointed out, however, if the processes being outsourced are broken, outsourcing won't fix them, and can in fact make fixing them more difficult.

It's an interesting topic, it's where my head is right now, but I'm not sure it's the career path I want. One thing is for sure though - there's a lot of work, and a lot of money to be made, in the outsourcing and offshoring market.

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Immelt, Bartiromo

This morning I'm attending a talk with Jeff Immelt, chairman of GE, hosted by Maria Bartiromo.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from this. Networking was promised, and I met some fellow students, as well as a GE recruiter.

I was standing next to a JD/MBA candidate who asked most of the questions. *Sigh* yes in my heart of hearts, I want to be a JD/MBA candidate, but as intense as I can be, this guy was even more intense.

There's a lot of talk at NYU about opportunity, and certainly, it's plain to see that the MBA world can lead into all kinds of directions I could only imagine before. At the same time, one prof has referred to Stern as a school with an inferiority complex (at least wrt Columbia and Wharton).

So, truly, I don't know what to make of this. What will my $80K+ education buy me? I have three years to figure it out.

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Management Theory

Today is a day of heavy reading for my management class. While the class doesn't meet until Thursday, this weekend is the only time I'll have for it, so I'm reading 40+ pages of theory, as well as 30+ pages of case history.

What's refreshing to read is that some of the assumptions about management that I have had are misconceptions. Chiefly, that all institutions are hierarchical, inherently patriarchal, and require being a hard-charging, assertive, bossy jerk. Maybe that comes from being an army brat, or an eighties child; in general that has not been my experience, but then I've always been fortunate enough to be picky about my work environment.

In the case study, the company being scrutinized is a law firm with roots in Philadelphia's Quaker community. The study attributes to this heritage a culture of consensus-based decision-making, collegiality, and thrift. It reminds me of a time, almost ten years ago, when I was dissatisfied with my work environment and changed jobs, ultimately arriving in a small shop where the technicians were collegial and shared knowledge. I would put in a vote for organizations founded on the internal sharing of knowledge.

In the general course reading, there is one chapter that basically says American management theories rarely integrate with the cultures of other nations, especially non-Western nations. The author ascribes to US management theory a focus on assertiveness, hierarchy, and a labor market, where essentially workers are contracting to provide their services. I've always had a quibble with that idea - where's the esprit d'corps? - though I've accepted it as the norm and can see, in hindsight, how it influenced some of my thoughts about my own employment in the past few years.

This is a very mechanical view of the world with no way of accounting for relationships. Perhaps I might continue working for someone even though I could make money working for someone else, based solely on the work relationship. Or, perhaps I might not opt to work for a company that pays more because I know their working conditions are not as nice. Granted, maturity and years of working in NYC have made me a bit jaded on the benefits of always working for the "best fit - I've discovered I will happily put up with circumstances I once imagined to be unbearable - but still, the principle remains - relationships and company culture matter.

I'm interested in today's study materials more for how it accounts for gender. It is generally accepted that women are not as assertive as men (not true, based on some women I've known). I think it's more apt to say that women are assertive in different ways; we compete differently. These different management styles, ascribed mostly to national or geographic location, can be described in gender terms, or more aptly, in terms of regular human diversity.

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Southwest Fails?

No, they didn't. This article caught my eye bc we recently had to study Southwest for class, and the fuel hedging decision was one of the practices that we examined closely.

Southwest is an interesting airline; their practices are summarized nicely in the fourth-from-last paragraph ("The emphasis on . . ."). Fuel hedging isn't a bad practice; Southwest was just caught in a volatile market. Their previous savings based on fuel hedging surpass their loss this quarter.

Thus, Southwest taking a loss this quarter based on a fuel expense is hardly cause for alarm. Their overall business model is sound, and they are doing pretty well considering what's going on in the rest of the marker.

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A Big Day Indeed

I just reviewed the syllabus for one of my classes, and noticed for the first time that I have a midterm on election day.

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Paulson's Power

I find this paragraph from an article on The Big Money to be very telling:

"Mind you, little of Obama's and McCain's posturing actually matters. As evidenced by Obama's newest offerings, asking Congress to affect these changes is no easy task. And trying to force Paulson's hand doesn't necessarily work, either, since he's running an invulnerable monolith. It can't be repeated enough: Paulson is currently accountable to a lame-duck President Bush, two not-in-power presidential candidates, and a not-in-session Congress. He is the only person in this network who actually holds any power."

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Amazon, eBay

There is a very interesting article on the competition between Amazon and eBay. It caught my eye in part because I recently had to study eBay c. 1998 for class.

There's a bit in there about long-term planning, and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is now on John McCain's campaign advisory staff, so I suppose some might read the piece as a partial indictment of Republican political choices. I don't think i goes that far, but some might.

In any case, there is a fair amount of criticism of eBay's strategy, a strategy that even today echoes the case I had to read which was rather dated. Some of their acquisitions were bad fits, and there is an ongoing clash with their original culture, a culture based on the facilitation of peer to peer trading rather than large-scaele e-commerce.

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Shot Down

Last week my team was voted off the island in our Leadership and Management class. We were shocked.

The instructor in that class has instituted a competitive presentation ladder. Each team presents a presentation on the case studied for that week, and the class votes on who is the most effective. The least effective teams are voted out of the competition.

The case was Southwest, focusing on a period in the 1990s then they were very successful but facing increased competition from attempts by the major airlines to replicate the Southwest business model. We were presenting on the challenges and making recommendations.

Our presentation was good. We were able to find some interesting graphics buried on Southwest's site, caricatures of the leadership mixed with the planes and logo. We were short and to the point, and didn't get hung up in the process map we had studied the previous week. This isn't just our collective ego talking; several of our classmates were surprised that we'd been voted out.

So it goes. Our consolation is that now we can focus strictly on papers for that class.

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The New Schedule

It's brutal. I don't like to admit things are brutal; I don't like to complain, I like to just do.

I have two classes that meet one night a week each. However, I also have to meet - however briefly - with my study group, and I have to find time to read. I have some volunteer work eating up my Saturdays for the next three weeks.

On top of that I have my regular workload, which has increased and requires some work at home. Somewhere, I'm supposed to work in a Stern social life (so I can win friends, supposedly the biggest benefit of any grad program) but I also want to keep my old friends.

I've gotten to know the NYU campus very well. Truly it will be home for the next three years.

I am really enjoying my Leadership class. The cases are pretty straightforward so far, and enlightening; I am particularly enamored of the backstory for Southwest AIrlines' CEO. The reading isn't hard, but I do have to make time for it.

Financial Accounting is interesting, and intriguing, but of course very dense. I would probably not engage it if I didn't already have experience reading technical minutiae as part of my career as an engineer. it is certainly well worth reading in the current financial climate.

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First Class

Tonight I had my first official class in the Langone program. I like the professor; she's smart and engaging, but also has curious tangents. The course is on managing organizations, and tonight we talked a lot about globalization. We saw an excerpt of Charlie Rose interviewing Tom Friedman and went over some statistics about the next ten to twenty years. Germany and Japan have aging populations. They are not alone.

It was, honestly, a bit inspiring. My classmates are not the stone-cold rob-drones I always feared B-school people to be; in fact they are warm, engaging, and diverse. What I found inspiring, however, was the focus on change and globalization, esspecially as, towards the end, we talked about identity, whether national, individual, or corporate.

Having grown up overseas, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and feeling like an alien in the US ever since, I raised my hand when we were asked to self-identify as global citizens. This would have been a different experience ten years ago, before I had really begun to figure out how I felt about those experiences and identify the strengths I could draw from them. Essentially, I felt lost, alone, and confused before I realized that I felt that way in large part because I was not raised in this country, and after that, I realized that as a perpetual outsider, I have very specific talents when it comes to interacting with and managing groups.

In this class, we were told that these strengths are what we bring to the table as "global citizens". To see the world outside of the local lens, and to adapt to change. "It's not small thing to move to another country," she said, and she is right. We moved to Germany when I was thirteen, and moved back to the US when I was seventeen (and spent nine months in California, which I might add is practically another country in itself). Ten years ago, I would have been taking this statement in from the outside as something new; as I am now, I heard it as affirming something I already know about myself.

It was good to hear that these ephemeral experiences may have significant value in a career path known for quants and efficiency experts.

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Drinking the Kool-Aid

No branding appropriation is intended by the subject line of this post.

Today was the first day of orientation at my MBA program. I kept a skeptical mind through what I call the kool-aid film, a short industrial video with rights-free music playing over interviews of happy students, intercut with b-roll of classroom discussions and wine-tasting events. The dean's introductory remarks spoke to our concerns about our choice of school. I have to say, I was convinced, but then again, I wanted to believe. I needed to.

As it happens, I went to orientation at the other school I was admitted to, and withdrew from them the next day. I was tormented by that decision for two weeks while I waited for school to start. the other school was much less expensive and, within my company and field, regarded equally well. Going to Stern is going to set me back financially. However, the presentation was much more solid, the professors presenting their curriculum inspired more confidence, and the students I interacted had an easy confidence and life experience that more closely matched what I am looking for in classmates. I really do believe I am making a stronger investment in Stern, if not financially, then in intangibles such as fellow alumni and career options.

So there.

We attended two presentations in the Schiller auditorium. The afternoon was spent in a room in the Kaufman center getting to know our color-coded cohort (I'm an orange, as it turns out, matching my purse and my blouse).

In one of our exercises, we broke into groups by industry and had to come up with a funny anecdote to tell. Despite my technology career, I put myself in the media and entertainment group. There were two guys from cable networks who had very interesting stories, but they were not exactly work-appropriate; one involved an email chain about a girl who got drunk at a party and . . .excreted bodily discharges over a white-lined piece of furniture. Thus, I was elected to tell a story, from my Sundance days.

Basically, the story goes like this: As a manager at the largest venue at Sundance, I rely on a crew of local volunteers, retirees looking to meet people and have fun who are not the urban sophisticates who descend upon the city every year. They are told not to admit people without a ticket or appropriate credential. They take their responsibility very seriously. Furthermore, they are not to admit people who show up more than twenty minutes late, because it disrupts the screening. Film is taken very seriously at Sundance.

Well, one day last year, there was a commotion and I was called to attend. A man in a black coat and his girlfriend were being denied access. I saw his credential and immediately realized he was the head of one of the most powerful movie and television companies in the world, with diverse holdings in local, national and international production and distribution, as well as cable. I took over and offered to find him a seat.

The point of the story is that some people are indeed more important than others, and the rules to dno always apply.

I got a good laugh, especially from other students who knew who the guy was (I used his name in class, though I won't mention it here).

So, I had a good time, and I look forward to tomorrow, and starting classes Thursday. 

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Decision

I did decide, after all. I'll start at Stern in three weeks.

If I were going to Baruch, I'd be starting classes tonight.

Oddly enough, I've been imagining a fantasy life where I am going to Baruch, graduating earlier, with less debt, and enough money to buy a home on my own.

But I could not turn Stern down. It's not the bling factor of the name. I really do think it will be a better program for me.

I just wish it didn't cost so much.

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Another Option

What happens when a better option, previously considered unavailable, opens up?

I received a packet in the mail yesterday welcoming me to Stern's Langone program, NYU's part-time MBA program.

I was late getting my transcripts in, and Stern was my reach school. The day after I applied, I was accepted by CUNY into their program at Baruch, so the past three months have been focused on getting set up with Baruch.

But now, Stern. Is it worth the additional cost? I'm sure it is. Can I bear that cost? That, I'm not so certain about.

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Leadership

I had an interesting object lesson in leadership today. I volunteer with a group that promotes kayaking on the Hudson river, and today I helped lead a public group across the river and down to Liberty State Park. The public, as we refer to them, are people who do not necessarily kayak regularly, and in a sense are our customers even though our services are free. We want to encourage the public to go out on the water and enjoy a natural resource, hoping this will encourage them to protect it.

Our leader was a guy I'll refer to as D. One of the first obstacles that D faced was that a completely different expedition was being assembled at the same time as ours. The other expedition was not for the public; D's was. Members of the public were showing up and not being told where to go, so it took a while to identify them. After that, the public had to be told which boats were theres, where to assemble, and how to get in the boat. Throw in a last minute re-organization of boats, and the setup process alone was already very confusing to the public.

Seeing how D was overwhelmed, I stepped forward to help out. I offered to get the public in to boats and arranged. D said OK, and I started talking about safety and basic paddling skills - on a long trip, proper technique is important. We got everyone out on boats and I got to know the people we were taking across the river.

As we proceeded out, I pointed to D and said he was our leader. Leading a public trip is a serious charge; while it is safe, there are potential safety issues, and the leader is, in a sense, responsible for other peoples' lives. There is river traffic to contend with, changing weather and river conditions, and the ability of inexperienced people to keep up.

D pointed to me and said, "follow Julie". I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea what direction the tide was flowing. I also don't know the riverfront of the Hudson on the Jersey side very well. I resented being put in a leadership position that I was unprepared for. That said, I did my best.

An overcast day on the Hudson river is not a good place for a closed-door conference to talk about leadership issues. You can't schedule a meeting and write up talking points. You' on the water. In this instance, we were also in front of the public, and open dissension between the expedition leaders can be disastrous. I've seen it happen. It lowers morale and leaves a sour taste in the mouths of everyone.

So, we pressed on. I got us across the river, after making a course correction advised by another volunteer. M was invaluable. He is more experienced and could see what was happening. While D stayed in the very end of our flotilla, M and I talked, coordinated our plans, and kept everyone moving. There was almost no ownership of the trip on D's part on the way down. We managed the regular river hazards - the tide, the weather, and water taxis crossing in front and behind us. It was a safe trip.

We did land successfully and got out for about twenty minutes. On the way back, suddenly D was in front. It was as if he could not wait to get home. He did do one thing that we appreciated - he took a very poor paddler out of a single boat and paired him with his son in a double boat. Other than that, though, he mostly raced ahead with two members of the public who did exceptionally well. The rest of us just tried to keep the public together.

What to do in a situation such as this? The dynamics were not specific to kayaking. We had a nominal leader who, when given additional leadership assistance, basically locked himself in a room and said for us to run things. There was no briefing or formal transfer of responsibility. It wasn't clear if M and I were supposed to be making decisions, as we did on the way down, or not, as was the case on the way up. there was no clear communication.

I myself tend to come from a 'respect the office' approach. The systems in place for managing anything - money, government, inexperienced kayakers - really only work if the role of an office is respected. Once that is gone, the affair can easily become a free-for-all. On the water, that can be disastrous.

I won't lead a mutiny, and would rather not be party to one, but this even tested me. I think I came out well in terms of task management. I was only thrown by being given a level of responsibility I was unprepared for (in real terms, i.e. not having charts or tide tables or even a destination, let alone psychological terms).

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Lingo

I've received my first-term schedule and on it is a class in Business Communication. I know better than to take business communication for granted, but I still think it's funny that such a class is required.

I've always done well with language. I do admit my own shortcomings, which are the shortcomings I see the most in the business world. We are so set on firing out the answer, hitting send on the email to respond to the issue at hand, that we just spew verbiage onto the screen and scan for auto-grammar and spell-check flags. We don't always re-read what we're saying for logic, tone, and nuance. We don't stop to consider what assumptions we are making in our thinking process and take in to account that others may not make those same assumptions.

There's also a tendency to throw in words for effect. I've been around long enough to see certain phrases come and go. These are words that serve mostly as filler, and are used by some more than others, generally to pad out conversations and sound more authoritative and convincing. One of my co-workers is currently fond of saying "X, Y, things of that nature" where X and Y may be two totally unrelated concepts, or may in fact be the only two concepts relevant to a particular conversation. In fact, I've seen at least one meeting where someone asked what else might apply besides X and Y, forcing my co-worker to stammer and backpedal, admitting that indeed, X and Y were the only two relevant items.

Some people go for alliteration and repetition. In my line of work, the phrase 'rack and stack' gets used a lot to refer to installing servers in a data center. Half the people I work with can only say 'racked and stacked' instead of 'installed'. It makes for a sense of working with refugees from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Or, they like to say 'whack-whack' instead of 'slash-slash' when giving out URLs. It's confusing to non-techies.

Good communication requires using words with standardized definitions, and applying the correct word to the correct concept. It also requires constructing simple sentences that are easy to follow. Most importantly, however, it requires applying critical analysis to eliminate redundant or unnecessary clauses. Even for those who are experienced and know how to write well, Business Communication is a practice that must be maintained on a regular basis. It cannot simply be set aside and taken for granted.

Julie the MBA Candidate

Last February I took the GMAT and started applying to MBA programs in NYC.I was accepted into CUNY's Accelerated Part-time program at Baruch's Zicklin School of Business. While I already have a blog, I thought I'd start a new one just for my MBA program, partly because I couldn't let a phrase like 'pinstripes and denim' go to waste.

A little about me: liberal arts major, survivor of the first dot.com bubble, lived in NYC for ten years, puttered around the fringes of the film and internet media industries for years. I worked in a private school for six years and finally developed long-range focus and genuine study skills. I have a fair grasp of business and I love learning how individual businesses work, and I'm hoping an MBA will give me the vocabulary and business knowledge to make a formal career out of what's been a somewhat patchwork approach to employment.

I currently work as a computer engineer at a Fortune 500 publishing company. I help develop and deliver the standards for some of our workstations. I've worked in IT since I was in college, after studying the classics, theatre, and multimedia. I have a good head for systems, organization, and critical thinking. Despite these traits, I still occasionally misplace my keys, or freak out when I forget that I left my Metrocard in my other pair of pants.

My program starts in about ten weeks. I hope to blog about once a week through the entire affair. With any luck, in about two and a half years I'll pop out of the oven with an MBA, a better salary, and a sense of accomplishment. I'll settle for the first two.