Seriously

I had a chat with a fellow Sternie before my morning class yesterday. One of the things we touched on was the non-Sternies out class.

It's a small class, fewer than a dozen people. I call it the Breakfast Club because we meet Saturday mornings. What's different about it is that a fair proportion are from other schools within NYU. There is representation from the Law school, Wagoner (public policy) and Steinhardt (social work, I think).

What is so funny is that they are all so serious. I don't mean to say Sternies aren't serious - we are all very competitive MBA students, after all - but these guys sound like they're auditioning for Meet the Press. The way they phrase their questions, it's like they want to show off their own knowledge. They ask about issues that are far out of scope for the class. Example: it's an econ class, and the lawyer quotes chapter and section from antitrust law. He's my partner on our class project.

Funny, he and I had a conversation. He realized that unlike his law papers, this one was not going to be 50% footnotes.

Funny for me, since my original ambition was law school. Funny for him because now he can concentrate his analytical eye on his LLM classwork.

Contrasting Quotes

I came across this for an internal newsletter I send out:

"You can never plan the future by the past." - Edmund Burke.

"The best of prophets of the future is the past." - Lord Byron


Note the distinction between planning and predicting.  It's easy to contrast these quotes, but I'm not sure they're in opposition. I would argue that both can be correct, in that Burke says, you can't define your future goal state in terms of the past state, while Byron is stating the a future state, left untouched by our own hands, will be best defined by the past; that is, if we do nothing, nothing will be changed.

In fact this is my own synthesis, and knowing what I know about these two figures, they probably would disagree. It's a philosophical question that everyone deals with, whether they put it in these terms or not: can we create our own future, or not? Do things stay the same no matter what we do?

Even businesspeople are conflicted. They stereotypical B-school grad says, yes, I can change the world, past performance is not indicator of present or future performance. On the other hand, the more conservative voices use all kinds of mathematical models to take historical data - even recent history - to predict a likely outcome of events. So which is it? A synthesis: here is what I believe will happen, and here is what I will do in order to affect that outcome.