Spring Eternal

What's an MBA Candidate supposed to write about? Certainly not existential questions such as that. It's been quite a while since I posted here. Spring midterms are next week; Winter intensives seem to be forever ago.

So, math is hard. I am enjoying my courses conceptually, but the math itself is hard. Perhaps not hard, but detailed. Initially I found statistics to be more difficult, if only because it is more rigorous, but both classes are demanding. When your professor says "There are two ways to do this, one for those who like calculus and one for those who did not" . . .well, maybe that's a sign that I should have just taken the LSAT again instead of the GMAT.

In the meantime, real world lessons learned: one cannot hang up the phone in impatience, and when a business manager talks shit about one's service offering, one shan't sass back.

The Spring of Things

I'm back in class. This semester, Statistics, and Firms & Markets, which I am told is macroeconomics.

The Winter Intensives were aptly named. I don't know that I could run on that schedule year-round, not effectively anyway. Also, while I am glad that I took Strategy I and Strategy II together, I see the wisdom of spacing them apart. I will probably forget most of what I learned by this time next year.

It is nice to have the weather warming, even if just for a little while. marching downtown through the ice and the wind was not conducive to learning.

Winter of Discontent

So, it's been a long winter.

I got Bs in my first classes; one was a B+ and one was a B-. Now I'm in Winter Intensive Strategy classes. I love them, maybe because they're all about concept and there's no real responsibility. I'm not sure I'd love strategy so much if I had a stake in whether or not my strategy would work.

Our instructors for Strategy I and Strategy II are very different from each other. Our Strat II prof is very real and blunt about the motivations and goals of firms. It's nothing I disagree with; I've always thought firms were about making money, and ultimately, innovating ways to make money. Certainly, the firms we've studied have been very innovative (DeBeers, Pepsi, Google).

It is a dismal time to be eying the corporate world though. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and firms can't get capital to float their projects. Now the debate is turning to the mass bonuses certain financiers received; hand-in-hand with that is the observation that Bank of America overpaid for Merril Lynch because the top talent left the firm with their bonuses.

So that was interesting. 

This week we finish up Strategy II, and next week start regular Spring term classes: Firms and Markets, and Statistics.

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.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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.

Blogged with the Flock Browser