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Because you are thinking about pursuing consulting, you read ‘House of Lies,’ by Martin Kihn, which was marketed as a tell-all expose on the vile evilness of consulting firms. It was a good book, and wildly entertaining; so entertaining, in fact, that after you finished it for the third time, you who usually read books only once before placing them on imaginary bookshelves before they collect mountains of dust, you decided to write the author a quick thank-you e-mail.
You usually do not do this. In fact, after the hundreds of books you have read in your lifetime, which do not include the mountainous texts you finished during your first term of business school, this is only the second time you have ever done this; the other time, you wrote Po Bronson, because his book helped you confront your utter confusion regarding What You Should Do With Your Life. Now, you think you should do consulting, and Marty Kihn’s book opened up your eyes like nothing else could have. And you thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
What you liked most about the book, however, was not the plot, or the sarcastic humor, though as already mentioned, you found it quite enlightening and funny. No, the best part about the book, was that it was not necessarily about Marty. It was about you. In second person. And it was much, much, more powerful.
So, you decide to apply this lesson to your blog, at least for a couple of months. Not because you are purposely stealing ideas from Marty Kihn (who in turn probably stole his ideas from William Faulkner or Nathaniel Hawthorne), but because you think that writing this way would make your blog infinitely more fun to write, and quite possibly give it that extra punch you think is still missing. The punch that will knock your blog into the next stratosphere, where it will be not only informative, but also wildly entertaining to read.
Besides, there is no downside. Marty Kihn’s most recent book is entitled, “A$$hole.” Even if you are stealing his idea, you are sure that he will understand.
^_^
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas! Happy holidays! Hope you’re having good ones.
So back when I started seriously posting and telling friends about this blog, some of you gave me a tough time because the blog is so lo-frills. This means all sorts of things, from no pictures to no ‘about me’ section to an invisible profile page. I mean, it’s hard to get more ‘lo-frills’ than this. There is text… and that’s it. Did I mention, no pictures??!!
Well, no-frills no-longer. ^_^
There’s a reason for this: A random gchat. Here it is:
your blog is just talking!
Um… yeah, it’s no-frills
its just bla bla bla
interesting bla bla bla
but bla bla bla
no frills! no worries! no problem! :)
no u need pics
if anyone reads
you need more stuff
but… what if no one reads?
frills take too much time
you are ronjon
people will read
and when they do
they will stop
if there is only bla bla bla
After more back-and-forth, we agreed that 1000 hits would be an initial gauge of interest… if this site got 1000 hits, I promised to get off my sorry butt and include pictures, which probably should have been done since day one. That would be the target; the number that would say that people didn't just stumble upon this site by accident, that yes, these postings are not going unnoticed… :)
Can you see where this is going? We’re not quite at 1000… but the very next hit will be! :)
So, thank you for visiting! Hopefully you've found this interesting... I am very humbled that so many of you decided to stop by. :) Never would have thought that this would get so much traffic in such a short time.
That being said, this has become a responsibility of sorts, and I’ll do what I can to increase the blog's quality, which means… within the next few weeks, this site is getting a few frills. They’ll be backdated to July so they don’t crowd out the New Year… and hopefully not your reader either. Hopefully it works that way; if it doesn’t, my apologies for such a belated introduction... by now, you probably don’t need it. :)
In the meantime, Merry Christmas, happy holidays, or happy Solstice. It’s a good time of the year :) Very good… even the tennis players are singing.
^_^
P.S. One of the reasons Melbourne is the best place to live… the above photos were an envelope that snuck into my mailbox today. The card itself is below. Adorable!
Keep in mind that this is completely unexpected… and keep in mind that these schoolkids sent one of these to every unit in my building (about 300). Also keep in mind that the school writing these is about 2k away from this building, which is pretty centrally located in the city. Can you imagine this happening in New York? Schoolkids spending class time writing Christmas cards to hundreds of internationals? Me neither. Seems like people here actually do take care of each other :) And so, in Christmas spirit, I think I have to write this girl back... to let her know that her card did not go unnoticed. :)P.P.S. Thank you gchat, for being so easy to use (and so easily copy-and-paste-able).
Monday, December 22, 2008
sifting through memories
Merry Christmas! Soon. Not yet.
Been spending time unwinding since classes ended, and after roughly 3 weeks, I am officially unwound. Maybe a little too unwound… the highlight of most days is going running or meeting a friend for coffee. Pete Sampras said it pretty well in a recent interview... and if Pete Sampras is wondering what he’s doing with his life… well, I’ll happily overthink for a couple of days. :)
There was a cause for this... spent most of the last few days organizing my miscellaneous trinkets to get the apartment nice. Long overdue, since I moved pretty much at the beginning of November.
Sifting through memories, though, can be dangerous… sometimes things are buried for a reason. I generally tend not to save a lot of stuff, so most things I keep are emotionally charged in some way. My trinkets include five years of Navy ups and downs, old music CDs, and, of course, presents from ex-girlfriends, originally given with love in another place and time. Needless to say, these emotions need time to digest, and I feel fortunate to have the foresight to be doing this now, without impending finals. Or impending anything, for that matter :)
Of note is that there are relatively few trinkets from the first term of B-school. Part of me thinks that in the relative busyness, I may have lost perspective, even though I’ve learned so much these last three months. They say that first term of B-school is one of the most intense experiences we’ll ever have in our lives, and that’s certainly been true. But the raw emotion I’ve felt today is more than I felt all term combined.
Aren’t intense experiences supposed to generate intense feelings? Because intense memories… the character forming ones… that’s part of the reason I signed up for this. We grow by experiencing life, by making mistakes, falling hard, and figuring out how to get up again. Most of the life-changing events in my life would be called failures by most others, and thinking about them brings up emotions of all kinds. But here… here I’ve been so single-minded that I haven’t taken many risks. So, I haven’t really failed, at least not in any significant way… not since coming to Oz. I don’t think it’s a good thing.
They say that the magnitude of mistakes goes up exponentially as we get older… Madoff might be able to empathize with that. Even Bill Gates would agree to that… he got caught stealing computer time while he was in high school. No big deal… in high school.
Here in Business School… I think this is the last, best chance we have to make mistakes before we get pounded in real life. I’m not talking about stealing billions of dollars, but I am talking about the other things; maybe misjudging character (done), or underpreparing for a presentation (done by someone else). Something we can learn from to become more effective in the future. Because making these mistakes later in life will be much more painful than they will be now.
I guess we’ll see what happens next term… short-term pain is always worth the long term learning. To those of you in currently in business school or applying to start, I encourage you to take risks... screwing up here is still ok, because people will give the benefit of the doubt, and there's ample time to win back friends even if a reputation is completely lost. Out in the workplace, that may not be the case, because mistakes may lead to missed promotions or even getting fired... especially in a turbulent economy.
^_^
Been spending time unwinding since classes ended, and after roughly 3 weeks, I am officially unwound. Maybe a little too unwound… the highlight of most days is going running or meeting a friend for coffee. Pete Sampras said it pretty well in a recent interview... and if Pete Sampras is wondering what he’s doing with his life… well, I’ll happily overthink for a couple of days. :)
There was a cause for this... spent most of the last few days organizing my miscellaneous trinkets to get the apartment nice. Long overdue, since I moved pretty much at the beginning of November.
Sifting through memories, though, can be dangerous… sometimes things are buried for a reason. I generally tend not to save a lot of stuff, so most things I keep are emotionally charged in some way. My trinkets include five years of Navy ups and downs, old music CDs, and, of course, presents from ex-girlfriends, originally given with love in another place and time. Needless to say, these emotions need time to digest, and I feel fortunate to have the foresight to be doing this now, without impending finals. Or impending anything, for that matter :)
Of note is that there are relatively few trinkets from the first term of B-school. Part of me thinks that in the relative busyness, I may have lost perspective, even though I’ve learned so much these last three months. They say that first term of B-school is one of the most intense experiences we’ll ever have in our lives, and that’s certainly been true. But the raw emotion I’ve felt today is more than I felt all term combined.
Aren’t intense experiences supposed to generate intense feelings? Because intense memories… the character forming ones… that’s part of the reason I signed up for this. We grow by experiencing life, by making mistakes, falling hard, and figuring out how to get up again. Most of the life-changing events in my life would be called failures by most others, and thinking about them brings up emotions of all kinds. But here… here I’ve been so single-minded that I haven’t taken many risks. So, I haven’t really failed, at least not in any significant way… not since coming to Oz. I don’t think it’s a good thing.
They say that the magnitude of mistakes goes up exponentially as we get older… Madoff might be able to empathize with that. Even Bill Gates would agree to that… he got caught stealing computer time while he was in high school. No big deal… in high school.
Here in Business School… I think this is the last, best chance we have to make mistakes before we get pounded in real life. I’m not talking about stealing billions of dollars, but I am talking about the other things; maybe misjudging character (done), or underpreparing for a presentation (done by someone else). Something we can learn from to become more effective in the future. Because making these mistakes later in life will be much more painful than they will be now.
I guess we’ll see what happens next term… short-term pain is always worth the long term learning. To those of you in currently in business school or applying to start, I encourage you to take risks... screwing up here is still ok, because people will give the benefit of the doubt, and there's ample time to win back friends even if a reputation is completely lost. Out in the workplace, that may not be the case, because mistakes may lead to missed promotions or even getting fired... especially in a turbulent economy.
^_^
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Damn, it feels good to be...
Need a laugh? Check out this video from FuquaVision…
Maybe this is only funny to B-schoolers… but man, this is good. Very well done – props to this Rami Jabaji guy. Check out the shadow dancing during the brander part… he perfectly spliced the shadow dance to the “3Cs, 4Ps” (1:56). But do people actually call them, ‘branders’? Is this a real term??
No idea. Melbourne Business School definitely exists in its own little shell… For one thing, we don’t emphasis finance, but we graduate a heck of a lot of consultants and marketers – last year, 55% went into consulting, which as you know is somewhat ridiculous. Hopefully these opportunities will stay strong in this bludgeoned worldwide economy.
In the meantime, it’s summer break. Yes, summer. Only in the southern hemisphere :) Doing my best to experience as much of the city as possible, while of course spending significant time hitting the case books in prep for consulting interviews. First rounds, at least, will probably come! Awesome. I'm extremely humbled by this, and feel extremely fortunate to have a good chance to interview with the companies I'm targeting... we have an extremely bright class, and there simply are not enough H1s to go around. Somehow I came out on the good side of it.
But through the stress that the grades produce, their beauty is that they give total transparency during recruiting. In other words, if the grades are above a certain cutoff, we will probably get interviews from any firm we apply to, and if not… the most selective firms will probably decline an interview. This is certainly harsh… but I would argue that it’s better to know where we stand instead of being confused when recruiting rolls around. At least in Melbourne, if our grades are bad, we've had the time to adjust our expectations and apply to less selective firms as well. That knowledge is absolutely priceless.
Other than that, life is pretty chill... getting back into running, but I think I’ll leave that for another post. Maybe after a little more improvement… I had started, but put it off for about the last two months because of schoolwork and the job. Was it worth it? Probably. But right now, I am sucking wind... slowly. Rather, slowly running and quickly sucking air :) But plenty of time to get fit...
Damn it feels good to be a student…
^_^
Maybe this is only funny to B-schoolers… but man, this is good. Very well done – props to this Rami Jabaji guy. Check out the shadow dancing during the brander part… he perfectly spliced the shadow dance to the “3Cs, 4Ps” (1:56). But do people actually call them, ‘branders’? Is this a real term??
No idea. Melbourne Business School definitely exists in its own little shell… For one thing, we don’t emphasis finance, but we graduate a heck of a lot of consultants and marketers – last year, 55% went into consulting, which as you know is somewhat ridiculous. Hopefully these opportunities will stay strong in this bludgeoned worldwide economy.
In the meantime, it’s summer break. Yes, summer. Only in the southern hemisphere :) Doing my best to experience as much of the city as possible, while of course spending significant time hitting the case books in prep for consulting interviews. First rounds, at least, will probably come! Awesome. I'm extremely humbled by this, and feel extremely fortunate to have a good chance to interview with the companies I'm targeting... we have an extremely bright class, and there simply are not enough H1s to go around. Somehow I came out on the good side of it.
But through the stress that the grades produce, their beauty is that they give total transparency during recruiting. In other words, if the grades are above a certain cutoff, we will probably get interviews from any firm we apply to, and if not… the most selective firms will probably decline an interview. This is certainly harsh… but I would argue that it’s better to know where we stand instead of being confused when recruiting rolls around. At least in Melbourne, if our grades are bad, we've had the time to adjust our expectations and apply to less selective firms as well. That knowledge is absolutely priceless.
Other than that, life is pretty chill... getting back into running, but I think I’ll leave that for another post. Maybe after a little more improvement… I had started, but put it off for about the last two months because of schoolwork and the job. Was it worth it? Probably. But right now, I am sucking wind... slowly. Rather, slowly running and quickly sucking air :) But plenty of time to get fit...
Damn it feels good to be a student…
^_^
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Life is good
So, finals finished, and grades are back. :)
Waiting was an experience… after doing the best I could, would it have made sense to agonize over something so completely out of my control? Of course not. So, I spent the better part of a week trying to NOT think about the marks, spending the days doing mundane activities like… cleaning… running… playing video games… anything that would keep any thought of MBS or the marks away from my head. It worked pretty well, as did forcibly reminding myself as needed that no matter what happened academically, I did the best I could given the limited time available.
Marks, by the way, are the Aussie term for grades. Aussies have their own terms for EVERYTHING.
Ha ha.
While I was trying to not think about my grades, I spontaneously realized that, without a doubt, I should have found a consulting job during the break instead of during term. I’m not sure where this thought came from; it was unbidden -- no context. It's like a song melody that somehow starts looping in a brain. One second, putting away Navy medals, and the next, BAM! Why’d I take that job during term? Of course, the experience was awesome; learned a great deal, most importantly that I truly enjoy consulting… but second-years and Careers have been telling us from day one that grades matter for internships, and Melbourne Business School’s first-term is tough enough without throwing on an additional 20 hours a week (plus the mental energy of working with a billion dollar client). If I’d instead gotten a similar job during the break, all of the positives would have been the same, and there would have been no potential downside... The lesson learned here reared its head in Finance when we talked about diversifying risk; here, we should minimize it instead. It’s the same basic idea. If the reward is the same, why expose yourself to additional risk?
Ha ha. Yet another example of business school learnings coming up in real life. And yet another example of my analytical mind going into overdrive. Marks were good, so it’s a moot point, but the mind keeps churning nonetheless. But even though I learned such a valuable lesson from Finance, it wasn’t my best class. Can you guess what was?
Economics. I kid you not. Gotta love the mean-based scoring. :)
Apologies for pounding on grades so much. Obviously, there is more, much more, to MBS life than academics. Around finals time, though, it’s easy to forget about the Wednesday Night Drinking Clubs, the Salsa Mondays… and the newly formed Thursday Night… eating club? It’s so newly formed it still needs a name. Sam thought of “Live To Eat”, or LTE, but the name was quickly vetoed as it sounded too much like LeT. Not a comparison we’d like to encourage.
Basically, the idea is sound; it’s a group of semi-foodies (so far… 5) who are setting aside one day a week to try new Melbourne restaurants. We’re armed with a sense of adventure… and a copy of 2008 Cheap Eats, Oz’s Zagat equivalent that’s unfortunately graded by newspaper critics instead of by other wannabe foodies. One advantage of Cheap Eats, though, is that it’s all inexpensive! Very student friendly. Of course this has some interesting consequences… for instance, the full-page restaurant ads in the beginning of the book describe restaurants not featured in the guide, probably because they’re too expensive… which is probably why they have the money to spend on marketing in the first place. Being high quality, maybe they can differentiate themselves and escape from Betrand competition, which means setting their optimal markup much higher than ordinary perfect competition would allow, therefore ensuring that economic profit is greater than zero.
Yikes. Did I just write that? More importantly, is that the way I would choose to describe a full-page ad in Cheap Eats?
There's another 'benefit' to an MBA... ubernerdiness...
^_^
Waiting was an experience… after doing the best I could, would it have made sense to agonize over something so completely out of my control? Of course not. So, I spent the better part of a week trying to NOT think about the marks, spending the days doing mundane activities like… cleaning… running… playing video games… anything that would keep any thought of MBS or the marks away from my head. It worked pretty well, as did forcibly reminding myself as needed that no matter what happened academically, I did the best I could given the limited time available.
Marks, by the way, are the Aussie term for grades. Aussies have their own terms for EVERYTHING.
Ha ha.
While I was trying to not think about my grades, I spontaneously realized that, without a doubt, I should have found a consulting job during the break instead of during term. I’m not sure where this thought came from; it was unbidden -- no context. It's like a song melody that somehow starts looping in a brain. One second, putting away Navy medals, and the next, BAM! Why’d I take that job during term? Of course, the experience was awesome; learned a great deal, most importantly that I truly enjoy consulting… but second-years and Careers have been telling us from day one that grades matter for internships, and Melbourne Business School’s first-term is tough enough without throwing on an additional 20 hours a week (plus the mental energy of working with a billion dollar client). If I’d instead gotten a similar job during the break, all of the positives would have been the same, and there would have been no potential downside... The lesson learned here reared its head in Finance when we talked about diversifying risk; here, we should minimize it instead. It’s the same basic idea. If the reward is the same, why expose yourself to additional risk?
Ha ha. Yet another example of business school learnings coming up in real life. And yet another example of my analytical mind going into overdrive. Marks were good, so it’s a moot point, but the mind keeps churning nonetheless. But even though I learned such a valuable lesson from Finance, it wasn’t my best class. Can you guess what was?
Economics. I kid you not. Gotta love the mean-based scoring. :)
Apologies for pounding on grades so much. Obviously, there is more, much more, to MBS life than academics. Around finals time, though, it’s easy to forget about the Wednesday Night Drinking Clubs, the Salsa Mondays… and the newly formed Thursday Night… eating club? It’s so newly formed it still needs a name. Sam thought of “Live To Eat”, or LTE, but the name was quickly vetoed as it sounded too much like LeT. Not a comparison we’d like to encourage.
Basically, the idea is sound; it’s a group of semi-foodies (so far… 5) who are setting aside one day a week to try new Melbourne restaurants. We’re armed with a sense of adventure… and a copy of 2008 Cheap Eats, Oz’s Zagat equivalent that’s unfortunately graded by newspaper critics instead of by other wannabe foodies. One advantage of Cheap Eats, though, is that it’s all inexpensive! Very student friendly. Of course this has some interesting consequences… for instance, the full-page restaurant ads in the beginning of the book describe restaurants not featured in the guide, probably because they’re too expensive… which is probably why they have the money to spend on marketing in the first place. Being high quality, maybe they can differentiate themselves and escape from Betrand competition, which means setting their optimal markup much higher than ordinary perfect competition would allow, therefore ensuring that economic profit is greater than zero.
Yikes. Did I just write that? More importantly, is that the way I would choose to describe a full-page ad in Cheap Eats?
There's another 'benefit' to an MBA... ubernerdiness...
^_^
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Finals!
Yikes. It’s December already. How did this happen?
We’re in the middle of Finals… three down and two to go. The schedule’s something I’ve never seen before – most of us are taking five classes, and the ¾ of us taking Finance have had exactly one final per day. So after the three hours of an adrenaline rush from a test (or lack of adrenaline; during today’s Econ, I was feeling sluggish and was forced to chug a Red Bull), we go home and polish off material for the next day. No rest for the weary.
Tomorrow is my big day; accounting. That class has been my nemesis. Not quite ready yet and am deciding how much time to stay awake tonight in order to fully pound the half-formed concepts into the brain. There’s some point where diminishing marginal returns actually become negative… ha ha. Been surrounded by B-school so much that I actually think like this now. What a life. :) You too can think in debt/equity ratios, and unconsciously wonder whether your life exhibits congruence with the outside environment! :)
But before that, been requested by some MBSers to blog about the Economics test. So here goes…
The test was hard. Not sure if it was supposed to be hard, but it was. Ridiculously so. The questions were all a little bit… not tricky, but they tested understanding in a way that none of us had seen before. Very few questions were completely straightforward… except for question 1, where 'competitive range' made a staggering comeback :)
But the question is… is the difficulty necessarily a bad thing? I mean, on the one hand, if we spent hours a day reviewing basic normal form Nash equilibriums, we may have felt we wasted our time… but on the other hand, if we had truly mastered the material, we would have probably been able to figure out what our Prof was trying to get at, or at least, what he was trying to find out.
So for right now, I’m going to reserve judgment. Yes, the test was difficult. Yes, the answers to some of the questions may have been odd or confusing. But was it fundamentally unfair? I don’t necessarily think so. All I know is that the mean will be devastatingly low, so probably anyone with a 70% on the final will probably be getting an H1 in the course. And if you knew enough to get a 70% on THAT test, then I think it’d be fair to say that you pretty much know your stuff and you deserve the highest grade possible.
In the end, Melbourne Business School is still graded on a mean… and the spread will be the spread whether the average test score is an 85 or a 55. And since that spread is the only thing that determines our grade, I think in the end… it all evens out.
Anyway, time for accounting. Depreciation! Inventory! Re-valuation! Goodwill! Consolidation! Maybe being excited about it will help it stick in the brain? :)
^_^
We’re in the middle of Finals… three down and two to go. The schedule’s something I’ve never seen before – most of us are taking five classes, and the ¾ of us taking Finance have had exactly one final per day. So after the three hours of an adrenaline rush from a test (or lack of adrenaline; during today’s Econ, I was feeling sluggish and was forced to chug a Red Bull), we go home and polish off material for the next day. No rest for the weary.
Tomorrow is my big day; accounting. That class has been my nemesis. Not quite ready yet and am deciding how much time to stay awake tonight in order to fully pound the half-formed concepts into the brain. There’s some point where diminishing marginal returns actually become negative… ha ha. Been surrounded by B-school so much that I actually think like this now. What a life. :) You too can think in debt/equity ratios, and unconsciously wonder whether your life exhibits congruence with the outside environment! :)
But before that, been requested by some MBSers to blog about the Economics test. So here goes…
The test was hard. Not sure if it was supposed to be hard, but it was. Ridiculously so. The questions were all a little bit… not tricky, but they tested understanding in a way that none of us had seen before. Very few questions were completely straightforward… except for question 1, where 'competitive range' made a staggering comeback :)
But the question is… is the difficulty necessarily a bad thing? I mean, on the one hand, if we spent hours a day reviewing basic normal form Nash equilibriums, we may have felt we wasted our time… but on the other hand, if we had truly mastered the material, we would have probably been able to figure out what our Prof was trying to get at, or at least, what he was trying to find out.
So for right now, I’m going to reserve judgment. Yes, the test was difficult. Yes, the answers to some of the questions may have been odd or confusing. But was it fundamentally unfair? I don’t necessarily think so. All I know is that the mean will be devastatingly low, so probably anyone with a 70% on the final will probably be getting an H1 in the course. And if you knew enough to get a 70% on THAT test, then I think it’d be fair to say that you pretty much know your stuff and you deserve the highest grade possible.
In the end, Melbourne Business School is still graded on a mean… and the spread will be the spread whether the average test score is an 85 or a 55. And since that spread is the only thing that determines our grade, I think in the end… it all evens out.
Anyway, time for accounting. Depreciation! Inventory! Re-valuation! Goodwill! Consolidation! Maybe being excited about it will help it stick in the brain? :)
^_^
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