An MBA Blog

"I've Got Mine Too"

2009-05-19T19:16:00.004-05:00

Getting your MBA is a pretty great accomplishment. After so much hard work and sweat, after awhile you get the feeling that you really are pretty superhuman inside, like you could look any corporate challenge with your steely, educated eyes until it (not you) blinked. This is probably what accounts for so much of the zeal (and hubris) newly-minted graduates (not just MBA's) feel after walking across a big stage and having so many people clap and take pictures of them.

Over time, of course, the zeal becomes tempered by the cold, hard reality that in most cases, your colleagues and managers aren't going to drop to their knees and beg for an audience in your bright shininess. They won't back a truck full of money up onto your front lawn and dump it just because you went back to school. They won't automatically promote you either. Chances are, you will either take a vacation to reward yourself (maybe as short as a day), but when you walk back into the office that next work day, things really won't be all that much different. I went back to work today and I think I experienced just about the best anyone could really ask for: a few colleagues patting me on the back and saying congratulations, and one person asking (probably not totally in jest): "hey, are you walking a little taller today?"

This is where it starts getting a little scary. Where is the fame and fortune promised by the MBA program brochures? Where are all the job opportunities that are supposed to airlift themselves into my e-mail inbox? And, come to think of it, yeah! Where the hell is my truckload of money, anyway?

Truth is, the next part is all up to you. And it's dangerously easy to get pretty complacent with your bigshot new degree and sit in your big shiny palace waiting for people to ask you for an audience. I can really see myself doing that, so I probably need to re-read this blog post at least twice a week just to prevent it from happening.

I'm actually more concerned about the opposite: becoming one of the people who lose faith in their degree, don't use it to its fullest, or don't use it as the stepping stone it was meant to be. Throughout my program, I've been shocked by how many people I work with already have their MBA's (usually earned in some distant past) but have jobs in which they use little if any of their executive skills. I'll reveal a little of my snobbishness here, but I've met sales assistants, junior consultants, even admin assistants who apparently have their MBAs, and every time I meet one of them, it freaks me out a little. One of the maxims I've tried to keep to during my program was that I didn't want to end up with the same job (or even on the same trajectory) I had pre-MBA, yet that's precisely what so many people seem to let happen.

So my real enemy is the "oh, yeah, I've got my MBA too" syndrome. Rather than expecting someone to hoist me up onto a pedestal, it looks like it's up to me to go build my own castle.

Stone by stone.

Now We Are Free

2009-05-19T19:08:00.003-05:00

It all ended so quickly, and really without much fanfare. Sure, there was the big graduation ceremony at the University campus on the brilliant spring day. There was also the marching band, the commencement speakers, the caps & gowns, and the friends and family all gathered to wish us well and tell us how proud they all were of our accomplishments. Because it WAS such a major accomplishment, after all.

All day, I couldn't get the thought out of my head: I'll see that person next week in class. I don't need to say goodbye to them now, because we're sure to have another farewell get-together soon. What didn't really sink in until after everyone had left was: this was the last official time we'd all be together. These 60 or so people who all made the same decision I made more than two years ago, who worked at it every week right there with me, and who I got to know much better than I expected to. Now all of these people were dispersing on the lawn with their families, taking pictures and heading off to celebratory lunches and parties all over the city.

And just like that, I had a masters degree. Or at least a piece of paper inside a very nice-looking degree holder telling me I would receive my degree by mail in 6-8 weeks assuming I met all the requirements of the program. (Does anyone not get the diploma? I wondered)

I have been lax in updating this blog during April and May. So much happened right up to the end, and I plan to write about it in the weeks and months ahead-- not as an account (in real time) but as a reflection. I still think there's value to that, and if I'm lucky, this MBA-esque education won't end when they finally (hopefully) send me that diploma in the mail in 6-8 weeks.

The real question now is: what are you going to do with your shiny new $84,000 degree, mister? That could fill another blog in itself....

By The Numbers

2009-05-19T11:35:00.001-05:00

So what does it take to get your MBA? Now that I'm organizing all the stuff I amassed during my 20-month course of study, I came across these two data points tonight:

A total of 190MB of e-mail
1.68GB of disk space (including 2,981 files and 109 folders)

If only there was some way to track the gallons of coffee.

The Last Day

2009-05-16T21:41:00.000-05:00

Class is over. No more homework. No more panic that I've missed an assignment or fear that God invented accounting simply to torment me. Just like that: we're done, baby.

Of course it didn't all end without some really good theater. Today was the second day of our international team business plan presentations, and it was my team's turn to present for 25 minutes in the mid-morning. The audience today was a bit smaller than yesterday, apparently because all the Poles who presented yesterday started drinking last night and told everyone they had no plans of stopping just to come to class. (you've got to admire that boldness) And it was great watching the Europeans in the class as they ignored the faculty's instructions to pay attention to the presentations-- there were laptops up, Blackberries in use, and even newspapers unfurled in class throughout the morning. It was also amazing to see the sheer megapixels on display as just about every Chinese student had a cellphone camera, SLR, or camcorder running at all times. People up on stage felt like they were being stalked by paparazzi. And the visiting professors from Europe delighted in droning on with 5- and 10- part questions that weren't really questions at all, but rather more a chance for them to speak and be heard. It made me really happy I wasn't part of European Academia.

And then it was our team's turn to present. As I've written elsewhere in this blog, our team was, shall we say, unique, and to see us all up there on stage presenting was a little surreal. After so many months of working alone when we should have been collaborating, after so many 5am Skype calls to accommodate the schedules of the Chinese who never showed up to the calls anyway, after coming together this past Monday with no slides prepared, there we were, all ready to present and be done with this thing.

I do presentations for a living, so I've been in worse situations. I knew my material well enough to know that I could talk for 25 minutes off the cuff if needed, and I knew from experience that people probably wouldn't be able to tell if I did. So I kicked off the presentation, delivered my slides, and handed it over to my teammates for their parts. I also tried to keep things moving so we wouldn't run out of time for our last slides like several other teams had done.

Everything went pretty well-- no disasters, and I really had to give it to my international colleagues for standing up in front of 75 people to speak their second language under the pressure of the clock while also being recorded on video.

Then came the part I'd been waiting for: our Chinese team member, Mr. Delegater, the one who considered himself a Chinese Jerry Seinfeld and who had delivered a 10-minute unsolicited speech to the class on the downfall of capitalism earlier in the week. His assignment was simple: walk through the financials, and close with a story. I knew he wouldn't be able to stick to any of that, so I was excited to see how it all played out.

I wasn't disappointed. He began with a rousing speech on how he was asked to be "the closer," but in reality he was more like "the TERMINATOR." It was brilliant theater, and it was actually cathartic to have my classmates see firsthand what I'd been complaining about since our project began last fall.

For the next 10 minutes, he told stories of rabbits, hotel guests as caged animals, caves, and he even managed to work in a joke about polygamy (that one prompted one of my American classmates to stand up and walk out of the room). I was laughing behind him, because it really couldn't have ended in any more of a surreal fashion. He barely mentioned financials at all, and the feedback from the class was that they would have invested in our venture if only Mr. Delegater hadn't been part of our team.

Oh well, you can't win them all, and this was a pass/fail class anyway so I doubt we'll fail. If anything, I think the faculty may have felt a little sorry for us up there on stage with The Terminator.

What I do know is this: it feels absolutely amazing to be done with school. Bittersweet, to be sure, but only after walking out of that classroom for the final time did I begin to feel the weight fall off my shoulders. As I drove home along the Mississippi River in the brilliant spring afternoon, I let myself dream about untold luxuries like free time, pleasure reading, and reasonable bedtimes.

Diplomacy Cruise

2009-05-15T21:35:00.001-05:00

OK, so we've had a week to get to know our international teammates and we've struggled to assemble what looks like a decent PowerPoint presentation for Saturday. Now it's time to party, right?

Not exactly. Our class had organized a dinner cruise on the Mississippi River for tonight, after a full day of presentations from other teams. At first I didn't want to attend because our team presents tomorrow, and also because I didn't want to spend one more penny on entertaining my Chinese teammates after they left me stranded at my hotel in their home city of Guangzhou in March when I visited.

But, in the end, I am a softie, so despite the fact that the Chinese guys were still perplexing to me (and despite the fact that their contribution to our team project is still sorely lacking), I decided to pay the $36 per person to host them on the cruise. My wife joined me, as did the wife of Mr. Delegater from the Chinese team.

And you know what? It was a really good time. Our class, alone together on the quiet river, cruising, drinking, eating, and sharing stories. And for the first time I could really see the gratitude of my Chinese teammates. That just doesn't come through on Skype or in e-mail. It was a fitting end to this maddening process of developing our team business plan, and it set the stage for what I hope will be a successful presentation tomorrow.

Teamwork?

2009-05-11T21:24:00.000-05:00

So we had our first face-to-face team meeting tonight to work on the presentation we'll deliver this coming Saturday to the class. We've been working on this since Thanksgiving, and as I've written before, our two Chinese members have contributed just about zero to the effort thus far. Not surprisingly, this has produced more than a little intra-team angst, and we all came to tonight's meeting with heightened tensions. Last night's dinner was a good icebreaker so at least we had a little understanding of everyone's quirks and personality, but tonight was where the rubber needed to meet the road. Some of the other teams already had their presentations complete, but our team had yet to even start.

So we gathered in one of the breakout rooms in the MBA center on campus, my American teammate and I ordered (and paid for) pizza, and our Viennese counterpart fired up his laptop and started in on the slides.

Only one of the Chinese guys even brought their laptop. (How can you participate in a team PowerPoint session without your laptop?)

Over the next three hours, we muddled through it. Personalities were further revealed, especially on the Chinese side, and we began to understand why the output from their side was so lacking throughout our project: one was extremely shy and unsure of his English language skills (though he seemed a lot better with his English than we'd be with our Chinese), and the other was a born delegater, which meant that everything about his body language, demeanor, and personality indicated he was a person of great importance, he possessed a natural sense of humor that transcended his broken English, and that somewhere, there just had to be a staff person who would do his work for him. He of course was the one who came to the meeting without his laptop (or even a pen and paper).

I would later learn that this second Chinese teammate had made somewhat of a name for himself by standing up in class earlier in the day and giving an unsolicited 10-minute speech on the downfall of capitalism and how the current economic crisis in the U.S. was evidence that the fallacies of democracy were finally coming home to roost.

The class decided he must be a high-ranking Party official, sent to get his MBA and monitor the rest of the class.

In the end, we cobbled together something akin to a PowerPoint presentation that may actually enable us to graduate. We'll see-- we walked out of that breakout room tonight with a lot of work ahead of us. Our presentation is in five short days.

And So We Meet

2009-05-10T21:05:00.000-05:00

As I've written elsewhere in this blog, one of our biggest projects in the MBA program has been to collaborate with international teams from our sister MBA programs in Vienna, Warsaw, and Guangzhou. The effort kicked off last fall and seemed innocuous enough at the time-- we get to meet four other people from different cultures, all of whom were engaged like us in an MBA program pursuit, and we would work together using technology for videoconferencing and collaboration to create a business plan to introduce an existing product into a new market.

Sounds simple, right? It should have been, only I was not prepared for the cultural and technology barriers our team encountered with our Chinese teammates. It was difficult to tell if they were, in fact, living in the same world as we were. They seemed incapable of using any of the tools we were given (document sharing websites, wikis, Skype, e-mail, even telephones). Apparently one had to walk 10 miles from his house just to get to a computer (these are MBA students, right?). And it seemed every week someone was taking someone else to the hospital, where they would spend days or even weeks just recuperating from what seemed like common illnesses or minor injuries. All of these things conspired against our Chinese counterparts being able to make any team call or meeting, and they claimed to never receive 75% of the materials we'd send them in e-mail.

Soon, we began to think they were lying. Or really really lazy. We learned all about guanxi (or "saving face") in our international relations class, and about how central this notion was to Chinese culture, so we didn't want to call their bluff (for fear of embarrassing them), but round about Christmas things began to get really crazy.

They stopped showing up to all calls, and their turnaround time on e-mails was averaging 1-2 weeks. They would send e-mails saying they could not work on important team deliverables or meet deadlines because they were "busy" (this was the one that really got me).

Then in March, we had the opportunity to meet our two Chinese teammates when we visited their school in Guangzhou. Only neither of them came to meet us. And they didn't call or e-mail to explain. They just left us sitting in our hotel while other teams took their American counterparts out on the town. Later we learned one claimed to be in the hospital for 25 days, and apparently the other was just "busy".

Like all good Americans, we vowed revenge: no special treatment when they came to visit us in the U.S. No gifts. No American tourism package. We worked hard to make sure we too were "busy" (though we hoped we wouldn't need to bring out the hospital excuse).

And so they arrived: from Warsaw, from Munich, and from Guangzhou. Next week they will be walking with us across the stage and our Chinese counterparts will be receiving the same MBA diploma all the rest of us will receive (don't get me started on that, either). Tonight we met them for a dinner in a beautiful restaurant overlooking Minneapolis.

Walking in, I tried hard to swallow my bitter revenge intentions. I met my Polish and Austrian counterparts after so many Skype calls, and it was great to put faces to voices. "Maybe the Chinese won't come after all," I mused, meaning my night had a chance of being redeemed.

Then the elevators opened, and like a pack they emerged. Soon I was spotted by my two "busy" teammates from China. We sat down and ate dinner together. And it wasn't terrible. This was some pretty powerful evidence of the importance of meeting and talking face to face. I'm someone who tends to favor technology for these types of things, but for all its convenience, there is something about getting to know the measure of a person by sitting down and talking with them. You're probably thinking this is all pretty basic stuff, but until tonight I didn't have room for it in my plan-o-revenge.

In the end, I was surprised to find that, despite the fact that they have contributed absolutely nothing to our team efforts thus far, I still liked my Chinese teammates as people. That will probably complicate the work we have ahead of us this week to revise and present our team project (it's easier to just write people off than to come to terms with liking them), but maybe that's part of what this whole crazy project was intended to teach us about in the first place.

Paid in Full

2009-04-15T14:13:00.002-05:00

Now that I've survived the China trip, and now that graduation is just days away, I thought it was a good idea to actually make my final payment to the University. With a single click of a mouse just minutes ago (made from a coffee shop, no less), I moved tens of thousands of dollars and made my final tuition payment. I am now officially paid in full for my masters degree. Hard to believe. In college, I remember ominous trips to the bursar and/or financial aid office to sign ominous documents pledging my life away (hey, what's the rest of your life when you're 19?), but today it's all so much more disconnected. When you're sitting in oak-paneled offices or facing crabby accountants who take every opportunity to remind you of the gravity of the entanglement you're about to enter into, it's a lot easier to feel like you're parting with something of value. On the Internet, paying electronically, it all seems like a video game. One hella expensive video game, but a game nonetheless.

So here's where we stand a mere 34 days before graduation:

Tuition paid: CHECK
China trip: CHECK
Managed not to go insane while working with crazy virtual teammates in China: CHECK
Lectures complete: CHECK
Graduation cap and gown in closet at home: CHECK
Subtle melancholy of leaving academia beginning to set in: CHECK
Feeling a bit like I'm about to get released from a prison where I'm sentenced to do three hours' hard labor every night: CHECK

Now, just one paper and two group presentations left to go. Bring it on, baby!

Re-Entry's a Bitch

2009-04-14T13:12:00.003-05:00

It's been almost a week since I returned from my trip to China with the class. Aside from the usual battles upon returning (re-acclimation to the time zone, food, and hectic pace of family life), I've been increasingly unsettled about things that, until this morning, had baffled me. It has to be more than sleep deprivation, I told myself, and this morning in the shower (where so many insights dwell), I finally received the clarity I had been seeking.

First off, it's lousy being back. Sure, I complained last week how much I wanted to get home, how tired I was of eating dim sum and not being able to drink the tap water, and how I was weary of living out of a suitcase. But it was still travel, and I am a traveler at heart. Now that I'm back home, the only thing I want to do is whisk my family back to all the great places I visited (OK, maybe not Guangzhou unless it's after the rainy season) and show them all the amazing things I saw. This feeling is made all the more intense by the fact that almost half my class is still in Asia on many exciting adventures, and every day I see their photos posted to Facebook and other sites, and I think to myself, "I should have extended too." Even though I'm sure that, had I done so, I would be complaining now about the heat or about having to lug 50 pounds of formalwear into the heart of China or Thailand. It's an odd feeling, this schism that has occurred in our class with half of us back home and already complaining about the routines of work life and with the other half of our class still posting pictures from paradise. Eventually they will come home, I keep telling myself, though their photos still look pretty darn spectacular. Another time.

Second, so much mental energy was invested in simply surviving until China-- for almost 20 months, this is what many of us have held up as the mile marker during the darkest times. "If I can just make it to China," many of us have told ourselves, "it will be worth it." Now not only have we made it to China, we've come back. What next? What are we supposed to use as motivation now?

This second point feeds into the third: this wild, crazy, maddening, mind-expanding, wonderful journey of graduate education is rapidly coming to an end. We have just one more class together, April 24, and even that isn't a typical class day because it will consist solely of team presentations. Sometimes I feel like this whole experience went from 100 miles per hour to zero in the space of a few days. Nobody told me it was going to decelerate so quickly. I've written here before about the nagging fears of not having the forced discipline of team projects or looming class deadlines to keep me focused; now I wonder if I've really changed enough of the dusty synapses in my brain to really sustain anything close to my current level of productivity. And what about all the people in class? Part of the magic of this program has been learning from the diverse experiences of so many smart people. In my daily business routine, I don't encounter anywhere close to this diversity of people (though I am fortunate to work with extremely smart people)-- what to do upon departing the company of so many new friends and classmates? We talk about reunions but time will tell how much of that actually transpires. Personally, I hope we do continue to meet at the Corner Bar or some similarly grand locale.

Lastly, I am haunted by all the opportunity I sensed two weeks ago and which I can even now sense fading into the routine of everyday work life. Many of my classmates enjoyed their visit to Asia, still others couldn't wait to get home, and I looked at everything there as a potential job opportunity. "I want to move my family to this country and live here-- how can I make that happen?" was my frame of reference for everything I saw and experienced. That's putting a lot of pressure on yourself, and now that I'm home and have told all my fantastic stories to my family, I think they are ready to move today. Back in the States, though, I'm struggling to keep up my connections and find the time to do new research (jobs, benefits, apartments, cities, expat options, etc.).

All of this will sort itself out, I know. Perhaps what I need to set about doing once I walk across that graduation stage is to attack the expat relocation opportunity with the same rigor as I gave to my studies. If I can do that, we may yet get to live out some of the dreams I saw as possibilities last week. The good thing, at least, is that I have all those places in my mind now as possibilities.

Think You Know China?

2009-04-02T07:30:00.003-05:00

So you think you know China? Here are just some of the many amazing facts I've noted this week during our visit to Shanghai.

There are about one hundred country-level international technology parks in China. There are 1,000 additional technology parks in the Country that are at the provincial level.

China is the #1 snack and beverage market in the world.

China is the #3 blog market in the world.

China has 738 million mobile subscribers (55% country penetration), while the U.S has just 234 million.

China has 298 million Internet users, while the U.S. has just 225 million.

There are 100 million online gamers in China, and 75% spend more than three hours per day online.

There are 350 million instant message users in China, almost none of which use Western IM services (China has its own service, called QQ).

Chinese issue 700 million Internet search queries per day, and the Chinese search market is growing at 70% CAGR.

350 million people come from single-child families (due to the country's one-child policy, introduced in 1978). These children have been raised with the best of everything and have typically had focused care from four adults (two parents and two grandparents). Soon these single children will be having their own single-child families. This is what makes the China market different from any market in the world.

Since they are single children, Chinese kids have made 50% of their friends online.

Even the smaller cities in China have populations of 3-5 million people each.

Best Buy China is able to have a new private-label product designed, manufactured, and on store shelves in just three weeks.

Local automakers in China are still growing at 14% annually, serving just the China market.

A site that was farmland five years ago now hosts a technology park with 4,000 companies and 12,000 employees. Space will open in 2012 for another sixty thousand employees.

70-80% of companies in Shanghai are now focused primarily on R&D and sales to the internal Chinese market, not on exports.

Last year, U.S. ports were not able to keep up with materials and goods being shipped from Shanghai. Goods often needed to be re-routed through Canada and then shipped by train or truck back into the U.S.

The Shanghai region, about the size of Montana, has 100 million residents (inclduing 2.5 million university students).

Ten years ago, China had just 10 MBA programs. Today there are over 100 MBA programs, and 20,000 MBA's graduate in China every year.

Most Chinese multinational companies now say their primary competition is internal Chinese start-up companies, not Western firms.

Welcome to the Future

2009-04-02T06:56:00.002-05:00

Greetings from Shanghai, China. Hard to believe that all the classes, homework, and pressure has led up to this moment. I'm sitting in the St. Regis Hotel overlooking the city skyline (including the tallest building in the world), and we depart early tomorrow morning for the next leg on our journey: Guangzhou. We left Minneapolis five days ago and so much has changed in that time. I didn't bring a PC with me (hard to believe, I know) so I haven't been able to get much access to a decent computer until tonight (having borrowed the netbook of my classmate Michael), so this is likely to be a long post.

Where to begin? Let's start with sheer scope. There are 22 million people in this city-- that's almost 10% of the entire population of the U.S. So think about how to house, transport, feed, and entertain all those people-- that will give you some sense of the infrastructure that exists here. But it doesn't really scratch the surface in terms of what China means to the rest of the world. I came here with many preconceptions, formed in part from negative impressions from last year's Olympic Games and also from my more recent (and disappointing) work with my Chinese cohort as part of our virtual team project. So I didn't really expect to be blown away by this city in less than a day. Right away, very little was as I'd imagined. There is so much progress here, and the spirit of the people is very akin to the U.S. spirit of colonial or pioneer days. The people here simply believe that anything is possible, and more and more of them are able to see those types of changes in their everyday life. Buildings sprout up literally overnight, and it's obvious that the landscape of this city is changing by the day. They are working now to get ready for the Expo 2010 international event with a dizzying amount of road and other infrastructure construction. And because all of it is funded by the government, you just know it will happen and be ready to dazzle the world when the Expo opens next year. I have to laugh at this unabashed forward push when we are debating so much over marginal infrastructure investments in the U.S. It would take decades to accomplish what is already happening in Shanghai, and that has profound implications.

I came here believing China was the manufacturing center for the world, working harder and cheaper than anyone else to execute on American orders. In the company meetings we've had over the last few days, I now see that Chinese companies are exporting not only products, but also innovation, back to the U.S. (innovation that China owns and which is also being sent to countries other than the U.S.). I came here believing China was getting hit by the global economic downturn; I now see that orders are already ramping back up for many Chinese firms, due in no small part to the fact that the economy inside China is still growing. I came here believing China's core competency was exporting things to U.S. companies; this week I have seen companies growing by leaps and bounds just to meet internal Chinese market demand. Soon they won't even need U.S. orders to keep their businesses growing. I came here believing Chinese companies worked to help U.S. companies maintain their competitive edge; I have seen this week how Chinese companies now consider internal Chinese start-ups to be more of a threat to their business than multinationals. I came here believing the Chinese government made everything happen in Chinese industry, that Chinese industry in essence had no life apart from government support. This week I have heard stories about private ventures cropping up everywhere (solar-powered water heaters being one of them) as models that the Chinese government is now analyzing to see how to better execute in the future.

I have seen entire cities where there was only farmland 15 years ago. I have gone to the top of the tallest building in the world, looked across the street and seen what was formerly the tallest building in the world, and looked the other way across the street and seen what will soon become the new tallest building in the world. I have ridden the fastest train in the world, a maglev train that covers 30km in under eight minutes. I have visited a corporate office park where 4,000 high-tech companies have set up shop-- and where farmland dominated just five years ago. I have toured phase 2 of this office park with its 12,000 resident employees, man-made lakes and parks, and beautiful condos. And I have seen plans for phase 3 of this development, which will add houses, offices, parks, schools, shops, and railroad lines for another sixty thousand people.

And while I have experienced firsthand Shanghai, a city of 22 million people, I have also listened to a lecture on how best to ramp up manufacturing capacity in a remote Western Chinese city-- a city that itself has one hundred millionresidents.

This is China: so much bigger than you can imagine. Growing so much faster than you can imagine. Dealing with (and solving) challenges on a scale you cannot imagine. So much more innovative and leading edge than you can imagine. So much more embracing of change and of the future than you can imagine (and, dare I say so much more than even my country). So well-equipped to meet the challenges of tomorrow. So enabled by its central government (which isn't anywhere as draconian as you think) to execute on any initiative worthy of development (did I mention the country is designing its own aircraft and plans to manufacture 2,500 of them-- one of the largest aircraft manufacturing assemblies in human history?). So ready to surprise everyone who lives elsewhere and thinks they know China.

I've told people back home that I truly feel I have traveled into the future by coming here. I am seeing things this week that I only dreamed about prior, and I am seeing them on a scale that I never could even conceive of. Most surprising? The Chinese, justifiably proud of their achievement, talk about all of these things with a sense of certainty and acceptance to make you think they are as common as the sun rising in the morning. I am simply blown away. Blown away, and also completely enticed.

Real-World

2009-03-23T19:55:00.002-05:00

We leave for China in less than a week. While that's stressful in and of itself, I'm having an opportunity tonight to experience a fascinating real-world example of all we have been studying and discussing in our International Environment and virtual team project this semester. While the virtual team project was, in the end, a highly disappointing experience (more on that later), I'm learning tonight that I've cultivated quite a sensitivity to international team introductions.

As I type this entry, I'm sitting on a call with my sales colleagues from work based in the U.S. as they host their introductory conference call with our sales colleagues in China. These Chinese colleagues are responsible for the China side of the same customer the rest of us work with in the U.S. This call is our first meeting with them.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my U.S. colleagues began the call by launching right into a PowerPoint litany of the customer account as viewed from the U.S. side. They aren't even presenting any of the China-based information, nor have they given our Chinese counterparts the opportunity to even speak up on the call and share information about their side of the business.

As I'm learning, this is what Americans do. I include myself in this characterization by the way. In the spirit of education and partnership (and always with the best of intentions), we tend to speak first and ask questions later. The irony of this particular situation is that I will be on the ground in this very location in less than a week-- I'm already arranging face-to-face meetings with the colleagues on the other end of the conference bridge. It will be fascinating once I'm on the ground in Shanghai to get more perspective on their side of the discussion, and to see where we can take this partnership moving forward.

This is one of the clearest examples of classroom learning applied to real-world scenarios I've yet seen, and it's also great to realize that I have indeed learned quite a bit in this program. Soon, the chance to put it to use!

Our Last Lecture

2009-03-21T13:40:00.003-05:00

It's a beautiful Spring day here in Minneapolis, and it's also our last official lecture of this program. I thought this day would never come, and now that it has, it's amazing how light we all seem to feel in class today. We're still several months away from graduation, and we still have a lot of classwork in front of us (don't forget next week's trip to China as a class), but it's clear we have rounded the bend and are now winding down. We delivered our team presentation this morning for Business Law, we just had a lecture on immigration law, and now we're on a break before heading into the second half of our last International Environment lecture.

More reflections to come on this momentous day, no doubt, but just wanted to check in and communicate how great it feels.

Crossing Over

2009-03-06T21:47:00.002-06:00

Something happened today. It was really strange. Don't get me wrong, the pressure is still very intense to complete our work prior to leaving for China in a couple of weeks, but today it felt like we crossed some great divide and were now heading down a steady path to graduation. Before today, it seemed we were always climbing up the hill; today we crested and it now seems we are headed down the other side. It's a small thing, really-- mostly mental, I'm sure-- but today I could breathe easier.

Maybe it was the graduation toast we had at lunch. The first-year students and our professors toasted us at lunch with moving and funny speeches, and as I looked around the room at my classmates, for the first time I saw them as fellow alumni, almost as if we'd already begun morphing from students into graduates. Again, it's a small change, but it's made all the difference for me emotionally. Today was one of the first times I've had a glimpse backward at all we've gone through and learned together, and it was great to finally be able to have that. We can see the end in sight, though there's still boatloads of work to be completed before we step on that plane to China together in a couple of weeks. And it's immensely satisfying to look back on where we've come from and how we've all grown together.

International Tension

2009-03-01T20:34:00.002-06:00

I've tried, oh how I've tried. I've really tried to approach my international team project with the most optimism possible, to make the best of it. When I first met my teammates from Poland, Austria, and China after Thanksgiving, I wondered how things would go. At that time we had what seemed like an eternity to complete our deliverables, and our Skype calls (when we had them and when a quorum attended) were pleasant.

Then came Christmas. Then came our decision to launch our theoretical product in Poland, not China. Then came Chinese New Year (which apparently results in the largest country on Earth literally vanishing for a full month), and a full month break for our Poland counterparts (sure would have been nice to know that ahead of time).

Now we don't have team calls. We barely e-mail. I don't think anyone has done any tangible work toward completion of our project (which is worth 45% of our grade). And our project is due in 26 days. If that isn't enough to make a hyperactive American like me fill his hyperactive pants, I don't know what is.

Mostly I have been sorely disappointed by the utter lack of interest and participation from our Chinese team members. We heard stories of how they checked out if you didn't pick China as the country in which to launch your team's business. But from the start we had some real problems with our Chinese guys. One claims to have to walk 10 miles to get to a computer; both seem incapable of using a telephone, even for local calls to dial into our team conference bridge. And both insist on holding our calls at 6am U.S. time, when it's most convenient for them. And then they almost never show up (the last time they were on a call was before Christmas).

So this is how it's gone. I'm surrounded by other teams who have their projects all but complete (though to be fair there are also some teams who have had just as poor an experience with their Chinese counterparts as we have).

What am I supposed to think of all this? That the American and Western Europeans scared the Chinese away? That they were just "too busy" to participate in the project? That they lost interest after we selected Poland as our go-to country? Who knows. All I know is that I'm sitting here about ready to do the work of two guys thousands of miles away, and it doesn't sit well with me at all.

You want to know the worst part? The two worst parts, actually, are these: when we visit China in less than a month, we have an evening reception with our Chinese teammates (do I really want to even meet these guys?), and then they come to the U.S. in May to deliver the presentation (they haven't worked on) and graduate with us.

All I can say is: if this was supposed to be an exercise in getting us to learn about collaborating globally, we've learned that collaborating globally can be much more lopsided an effort than we thought. If it was supposed to be an effort in forcing us to work with people who may be difficult and/or unresponsive, all I can say is that, were this a real business endeavor, those Chinese guys would be so firedit wouldn't even be funny.

So the clock ticks away, and again all I can say is: sigh.

Don't Look Down

2009-03-01T20:29:00.002-06:00

Last year I developed the ability to calm myself when faced with a new topic or some subject that I had historically convinced myself I sucked at. Statistics, for instance. When I'd be in class (completely lost) or at home in the quiet, terrifying dark of night struggling through the homework problems, the only way I was able to get anything done was by taking deep breaths and by convincing myself that "you can do this, buddy." It worked-- I learned more last year than I ever thought I would, and in the end subjects I thought would destroy me (again, Stats comes to mind) were in fact some of my favorite classes.

Due to the sheer volume of work on the schedule for March 2009, however, I'm finding I need to tap those First Year anti-panic skills again. Each night I literally have to open my master schedule for the semester and look at the specifics of what I have to do between now and March 27 (when classes end and we all get on a plane to China). It's a crapload of work, let me tell you. At times the panic of "omigodomigodomigod" becomes almost more than I can handle, and it runs the risk of crippling me in my ability to be productive in my job, and it also threatens my peaceful state of mind for evenings with my family.

It's like I'm on a tightrope miles above the earth, making good progress but still with no idea how or if I'm going to make it to that other side. And I keep looking down. I really need to stop looking down. And breathing.

The Stealth Semester

2009-03-01T20:22:00.002-06:00

Last year was brutal-- we knew it would be. Endless hours of pain and suffering when you really didn't understand what was going on in some classes at all, excellent professors that pushed you really hard, and at some point, the dawning realization that you were not, in fact, going to die, that you really might survive first year and someday have that coveted MBA degree hanging on your wall.

Then we had the summer off, which seemed more like four straight months of parole. We were giddy with all the free time we suddenly found ourselves experiencing. Of course there was the dirty little secret that we probably didn't make as good use of that time as we swore we would that sunny day in May at the Corner Bar (I know I sure didn't get much done over the summer), and as the retreat weekend in September approached and we picked up our first half ton of books for second year, we assumed the insanity would resume forthwith.

And then, nothing. It was really easy. Our third semester was much less taxing than either of our first two, and looking back I should have known something was up, that at some point the whole thing would come crashing down just when I was at my most vulnerable. BAM!

This last semester has been much harder than expected, but the strange thing is that it really didn't look all that hard on paper. Nor did the professors seem as masochistic as some of the ones from last year. Hey, this is the semester we all get to go to China together! How bad could it really be?

Well it's turned out to be the most nail-biting of all the semesters. Again, not because the work is particularly difficult, just because we have so much of the work crammed into such a small space of time; we don't graduate until May 18 but three full classes are sandwiched between January 16 and March 27. That's insane. Today is March 1. In 28 short days I will step onto a plane to Tokyo (and on to China), at which point I will essentially be finished with my MBA work. Looking on the calendar that all seems so close, but in terms of work yet to be completed, it seems a million miles away.

Killer of Evenings

2009-03-01T20:17:00.002-06:00

I'm trying to keep a positive attitude when I hear well-intentioned people around me say, "You're almost done!" From where I'm sitting right now, it sure doesn't seem that way. Something's different about second year-- last year the prospect of homework was somehow thrilling, or should I say less revolting than it seems to be this year. Last year I was actually able to commit the three hours nightly to doing the work; this year it's been so much harder to get focused. So what happens most nights is that a dull dread sets in sometime midday (about all the work I have to do in the coming night) and then when I set in to do the work, I can't be productive for very long. My mind wanders. The kids intrude. I find I really want to spend time with my wife instead. I fall asleep and don't wake up until 1am. Little things like that. I've come to really view homework as the Killer of Evenings, because even when I choose to skip it or when I work at it poorly, it's always a dull thudding that rains on all the things I might do in a given night. Oh, where art thou, graduation!?

Wolves at the Door

2009-02-01T19:35:00.002-06:00

It has been interesting, to say the least, to be in business school at the very time America's entire economy and financial industry have been collapsing. Last year the pundits (and even many very smart people in Washington and New York) said it wouldn't be that bad. Then, after it WAS that bad, they said it wouldn't get worse. Then it got worse. A lot worse. To the point where I have come to seriously doubt the judgment of even the smartest leaders watching over our economy. After being in an environment where we actually discuss intricacies of finance and can see the gaping holes in what should have been sound logic, I'm trying to stop myself from thinking this tailspin we're in right now won't have a bottom until every one of us loses our jobs and our homes. Now that'll keep a fella up at night!

Now come the mass layoffs. Last week alone in this country, our economy lost over 100,000 jobs. I don't believe many of them will come back, and that is a stunning problem I don't know if we are even prepared to deal with as a society. My personal belief is that we have been riding high for 20 years or more on free and easy credit, becoming more and more distanced from what we can actually afford. This has given rise to glittering suburbs, large vacation homes, huge SUV's, and a level of conspicuous consumption unseen in U.S. history. Now we're all starting to learn a lot more about what we can afford, and we're finding we can't afford all that much. MBA's and non-MBA's are losing their jobs, and paradoxically the only/best cure is to do the one thing few of us can afford anymore: shop 'till we drop. When 2/3 of your country's GDP is based on consumer spending, and when those consumers can no longer spend, you're in big trouble. I've always considered our country's dependence on its shoppers to be perhaps our biggest weakness-- many of my better-educated friends called me crazy and pointed to sound statistics and rising index funds. Now many of those statisticians are re-evaluating their formulas and many of those index fund managers are either out of a job, or they're in jail.

It's a pretty crazy environment in which to be getting an advanced degree in business. Every other week, we file into a well-appointed classroom and are treated to catered food and thought-provoking lectures. All around us, the economy is falling apart, and it's come to the point where I wonder how many of my classmates will lose their jobs before we graduate. Since 50% of the people in my class have their program paid for by their employers (I do not), they are even more vulnerable.

We're supposed to be the leaders of tomorrow, all taking this step to improve our prospects for future wealth and success. That doesn't mean we're all not still scared as hell, though.

What Makes a Student?

2009-01-18T01:02:00.002-06:00

I've been thinking about what makes a student, or what makes an educational experience. Going into this program, I thought graduate school would be different from college in terms of how I felt about the experience or how I saw myself day-to-day. Lately, though, I find myself (and many of my classmates) reacting, acting, and behaving in much the same way I remember from college. This has come as a surprise to me, so I'm thinking about some of the circumstances that might have come together to create this situation.

Here's some of what I've come up with thus far:

School (in terms of a long-term program in which you're enrolled) is really a solitary endeavor, whether it be grad school or college, because at the end of the day it's really you vs. the learning objective. Friends and family can support you (indeed, you couldn't "do" school without their support) but it all comes down to YOU: your performance on exams, your reading and retention, your commitment and participation.
Whether grad school or college, it's still "you vs. the professor" and "you wrestling with the big ideas." It's been funny how my classmates in this program (in our 30s and 40s) still take on much of the same mannerisms and behavior as college students. We complain about workload, we commiserate about assignments, we debate the gritty details of each professor's approach to teaching, we complain about grades, we meet at the Corner Bar after class, and we're always really tired. Our clothes may be fancier than those we wore in college, and many of us may have since gotten married and have families of our own, but deep down we're still students.
The material is challenging. Learning should push us beyond our comfort zones, and anyone who attended a decent college (or who's attending a decent grad program such as ours) will find their horizons expanded. I've found that this is much more difficult to achieve in "everyday life" when working in the corporate environment.
The "cohort" structure of this program breeds much the same closeness and shared triumph over adversity as college did. Only recently have I realized that my MBA experience would be completely different (and much less memorable or cohesive) if I wasn't experiencing it in a cohort format. I fully expect to walk out of this program, as I walked out of college, with lifelong friends. I don't know if that would have happened in the full-time or part-time MBA program, and it has made this experience much more worthwhile.
The diversity of our class forces each of to see things from the perspective of another. This just doesn't happen much in the business world-- too often we end up surrounded by people who are too much like us. In college, as in this MBA program, that hasn't been a problem. Who knew I'd end up debating (and loving the dialogue) with a stock trader who refused to wear shoes to MBA class? I never would have met that person in my "normal" life, and looking back, I've learned a lot from many of my classmates (beyond what's in the syllabus).

Hopefully I'll have more to add to this list as time goes on, but there you have it for now.

And Through the Wire

2009-01-17T22:45:00.002-06:00

We're getting rolling on our international project, and it's proving more interesting than expected, but not for the reasons I thought it would. On paper, our goal is simple: work with another person from the class, along with two people from sister programs in Europe and two people from affiliated programs in China, to develop a business plan for a new or expanded venture that you'd like to take to a new market. Work together with people you've never met face-to-face, refine your approach and content, and create a 20-30 page paper and a PowerPoint presentation to be delivered in front of the class in May (when everyone from the international programs will be traveling to the U.S. an graduating alongside us).

Although our assignment would seem easy, the implementation of it is hard. For example, how do you effectively collaborate with people in timezones 13 hours ahead of you? (our answer has been to have weekly conference calls at 6am U.S. central time, which is really starting to take a toll on me) Also, what technology to use to communicate? We tried international conference bridges and dial-in numbers, but apparently our colleagues in China don't use telephones, so in the end we settled on Skype (which works fine for the rest of us, as long as we're not trying to use it from work) Next, what technologies do you use to collaborate? Setting up a wiki seemed like a great idea to those of us outside the Communist world, but apparently China doesn't allow access to many of the websites the rest of us take for granted (msn.com, wetpaint.com, etc.) So we are using e-mail for way more than it was intended to be used for.

We began having calls with Skype last month, and we have our first major deliverable coming up in six days: a summary of our topic, our team's approach, and our rationale for selecting the market, product, and strategy we did. Again there have been issues: our Spanish counterpart is on a plane, and our Chinese counterparts seem to always be missing calls due to the need to bring their children to the hospital. Apparently one of our China colleagues also must walk 10 miles from his home to access a computer (these people are in business school, right?)

This really isn't what I was expecting, but I suppose that's part of the genius of the design of the whole project: get us outside our comfort zones and force us to honestly examine ourselves in a cultural mirror.

There have also been the surprising cultural nuances, again largely with our Chinese colleagues. When discussing topics initially, one of them wanted to do a chain of Chinese medicine clinics, because as he said, "everyone knows that Western medicine is poison." (my wife is a doctor, so you can imagine the self-restraint I had to employ on that one)

When it came time to write up our market justification, the Chinese wrote about their country's complete adoption of capitalism and total abandonment of Communism ("Is that so?" I found myself asking in amazement) and about how there was no racism or political strife in China ("Repression of Buddhist monks, anyone?" I wondered). Then I realized that these were people who had likely never traveled outside of China, and who certainly had never enjoyed free access to the Internet or to uncensored news reports. So I've decided to focus instead on fact-based conversations; things like "Can you access flickr.com from China?" that can be verified relatively easily to prove whether censorship is, in fact, in force.

Perhaps the most memorable comment from the Chinese came when one of them saw my Skype profile photo (with my very short hair) and remarked, "You know, you look a little like an American monk." That was how we ended it on our last team conference call-- how can you really hope to top that?

Back At It

2009-01-17T22:40:00.002-06:00

Wow, has it really been over a month since I last posted on this blog? A lot has happened since then (the end of first semester, four blissful (though cold) weeks of vacation, the holidays, a roadtrip with my family to Chicago, and the resumption of classes) but blogging is such a habit-- you either do it regularly or you stop doing it completely. For me, there's never been a middle ground. Same thing with journaling (which I've been doing since 1990) and exercising (which I'm sorry to say has all bit stopped since starting this program): either I do it regularly, or I miss a day or two and the whole thing grinds to a halt.

We're back at it now, having begun the last of our four semesters of b-school, so I figure I need to just sit down and resume typing. Strange to say, but I also think the fact that my classmates started following the blog just this year put extra pressure on me-- last year I could operate in relative anonymity whereas now I write always wondering what people will read into what I write (and, of course, what I leave out). But I feel the need to resume, if for no other reason than the whole experience will be over before I know it, and without some sort of log like this to remember the details, it will all just seem like so much reading and so many assignments.

So, I'm back at it. Let's see what happens in our "Senior Year".

Another Thing I'm Gonna Miss

2008-12-06T21:14:00.002-06:00

Yeah, it looks like it's coming down to me starting to think about all the parts of this MBA program I'm going to miss. Class has been pretty slow lately, so what else do I have to think about?

It's 9:15pm on a Saturday night, and if you're an MBA student like me, that means you're somewhere alone in your house doing homework! Your spouse, friends, and family are either sleeping, watching a cool movie you're never gonna see, or out hanging with people you once saw more than annually or only on Facebook, and here you sit, pouring through some intractable HBR case or tweaking some swanky PowerPoint presentation. I'm doing the latter.

When this is all over, I know I'm going to go back to normal Saturday nights, like any sane person would. That means I won't be doing what I'm doing now, namely drinking coffee way too late in the evening and listening to The Jazz Image on Minnesota Public Radio. The Jazz Image has long been one of my favorite programs on the radio, but in my normal life I'm usually never alone or around to listen to it. Usually I have a life. There have been exceptions in the past, like when I'm traveling or when I'm up way late at night painting a room in the house or something, but for the last 15 months I've been able to catch more episodes of The Jazz Image than ever before because of all the homework.

I'm gonna miss you when this is all over, my lovely little radio program.

Thinking Differently

2008-12-05T10:59:00.002-06:00

I've already begun thinking about what I'll miss most about being in this program. Going into it last year, I knew one of the things I'd enjoy most was being in a classroom environment and having the opportunity once again to focus strictly on intellectual pursuits. Those who know me know I love being verbose and also that I'm all about the intellectual argument, and my expectation was fully proven out as I eased back into class. Even in the most unbearable of classes, I've still enjoyed being in the classroom environment with stimulating discussions, challenging reading materials and projects, and smart classmates.

Now, in my second year, I'm realizing there's a second benefit that I didn't anticipate, and it's one of the things I'm going to miss most. One of my biggest challenges in my workaday world is fighting to remain strategic in my work. This is why I always enjoy attending conferences and why I even enjoy traveling-- doing so gives me "downtime" away from the challenges of work to reflect and recharge. I find I'm actually always thinking about work, so the ability to do so in an environment of reflection allows me to develop new strategic ideas.

In class, thanks to the wireless network and my laptop, I find I'm able to think about work and craft e-mails that are more strategic than my typical missives. Maybe it's the inspiration I draw from lectures or class discussion, but I find I'm better able to advance my concerns and drive key initiatives by "working" during breaks while in class.

So now I wonder how I'll be able to replicate that same unique combination of inspiration and productivity after this program is over. Sounds like a good new business venture....

An Early Holiday

2008-11-30T15:23:00.002-06:00

I'm not quite sure, exactly, what happened, but school seems to have ground to a halt. Or rather I should say that homework has ground to a halt. I always wondered if second year would be easier than first year, but I never thought I'd get such a definitive answer. YES.

Now, of course whenever I'm feeling like "hey, I've got this MBA program thing licked," along comes some totally sobering realization that is actually more along the lines of, "oh no, you moron, you just failed to look at the other half of the syllabus" as I draw perilously close to missing some major deadline, but unless I'm really missing something this time (not beyond the realm of possibility), the work has slowed to a crawl. First year, I really did do three hours of homework, on average, every day (seven days a week) but I'm a bit embarrassed to say I haven't so much as cracked a book in almost two weeks. Part of that is due to the Thanksgiving holiday, of course, but still....

So I'm left to wonder: is this some mysterious break in the action, and will things get really lousy again in January when our fourth and final semester heats up? And let's not forget the virtual Hell that was September and October of this year-- our group had most of its work upfront (owing to our group number: 2), so I'm sure many of my classmates are agonizing over their remaining work even as I type this. But I am getting to the point where I'm almost kind of thinking about declaring the second half of this semester the easiest yet. And it feels really great-- like I've earned it. So I'm just going to let myself sit in this blissful state for a few more days-- class resumes this coming Friday, so we'll see if I'm clairvoyant or just plain oblivious.

Unmoored

2008-11-19T23:39:00.003-06:00

It's funny, how we've all become slaves to routine in our MBA program: we pick up our books, we patiently wait for and then read our syllabi, and we dutifully execute the tasks assigned to us. We listen for the nuance in each class and bend ourselves to the particularities of each professor ("this one looks for detail", "this one wants pretty charts", "this one seems to be barely paying attention"), we hand in our assignments, and we trace our grades on the master curve.

We've all come to expect that expectations will be clearly laid out before us, like a well-drawn map complete with breadcrumbs to follow.

I say all of this is funny because, as working professionals, it is unlikely we find anywhere close to this type of certainty in our everyday lives outside of class. We navigate re-orgs, trans-continental conference calls, ever-changing projects, and shifting management to read the organizational tea leaves; we jump from stone to stone trying to reach the other side of the river without falling in.

There have been classes where our expectations have gone unmet, where they have changed, and where there just haven't been any guidelines. Such is shaping up to be the case in our venture capital class: we have our first major presentation in two days yet no one I've spoken with seems to have the foggiest idea of what it is we will be measured against.

This is causing more than a little unrest among the troops. It's almost midnight as I write this, and my guess is that there are scores of my classmates also up later than they should be, stressing more than they should be, about a little 10-minute presentation coming up Friday afternoon. Blink, and it will be over, and we'll all be on to the next challenge.

Time is Passing

2008-11-14T22:30:00.002-06:00

For only the second time in two years, I met my classmates after class at the Corner Bar near campus. There is a die hard core group that meets every week in this hallowed venue, but my family commitments typically prevent me from meeting up for a drink or two (Stella Artois with olives is my new favorite).

One of my classmates said it well tonight: "I came [to the bar] tonight because time is passing quickly." He's right-- before we know it, January will be here, and soon after that, our trip to China in March, and then it will be graduation in May.

I have a lot yet to learn before I leave, I have a lot more to write on this blog, and most importantly, I have a lot left to experience. Hence the value of taking the time to meet up at the Corner Bar. There's a lot more to this program than the 18 hours we spend in a classroom every other week. Soon enough, we'll find ourselves missing days like today (when we all played hooky from work, we all had lunch catered, we all got to sit and pontificate instead of wrestle in the "real world", and I got to have a beer with friends at 4:30).

Ivory Towers

2008-11-14T22:16:00.003-06:00

Interesting times in Ethics class today. We have a professor with a brilliant mind but one who freely admitted today that he has precious little real-world experience (though he was at one time a consultant for Arthur Andersen).

Aside from the interesting question of "what is the objective of an ethics class in an MBA program?" our professor's admitted lack of practical experience in the business world has put a spin on this class that is making me question its lasting value. Is this class just an exercise by MBA program leadership to blanket us with a foundation in something resembling ethics in the wake of scandals at Duke and other MBA programs? A checkbox, as it were?

Our discussions have ranged much more broadly than in other classes. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if we were operating from a shared framework, some agreed-upon method for analyzing or structuring arguments, but we don't have anything like this. In fact we have fewer textbooks this semester than any other semester to date. We have fat binders full of photocopied materials, including more than a reasonable amount of content generated by the professors themselves, but no foundational elements. A base text in ethics would be useful, as would a book on rhetoric. Lacking these, we have the oddest and meandering discussions about everything from dwarf tossing to the state of the auto industry. I look at the notes I end up taking in each session, and there's little more than the date and a few scribbles.

I question whether this class is giving us much that will be of value to us in 10 years, as we move on to manage companies of our own and as we face ethical dilemmas alone from the comfort of (perhaps) a corner office. Without substantive notes to reflect on, and without a lasting framework to use to analyze our situations, what will we have?

One final and rather humorous spin on the ethics class today: the other class this semester is on venture capital/startup businesses, and today the professor from that class lectured at length about the duplicitous methods he has used during his time as a VC and business owner to surreptitiously survey customers, have his employees shadowed by detective agencies, and lie to customers about true pricing.

What implications are we to draw from having both classes in succession on the same day?

Risk

2008-10-31T16:31:00.004-05:00

Today was the first day of our VC class, and it was one of the most stimulating four hours of the entire program. The professor is a seasoned VC himself, and asked the class today: "How many of you plan to start your own companies or develop a new venture as part of being in this program? And if you don't, what are you doing in this class?" He was only half joking. I wasn't one of the people considering that.

We had a fascinating discussion about the level and type of risk you really undertake when embarking on a new venture. Coming into this program, I have to say I was comfortable in my corporate position. I have flirted with striking out on my own-- it would certainly alleviate much of the frustration I experience on a daily basis as part of being in the gears of a large organization. My father ran his own company, so my experience growing up was that my dad didn't have a boss and pretty much did his own thing. By the same token, my father was also unprepared to be a leader and ended up losing the family business, casting our family into a downturn from which we never fully recovered. The stress of managing that ultimately led to my father's death at age 50 (when I was just 19). So obviously that is also a strong countervailing memory in my mind of the risks of being out on your own (i.e., not having a corporate safety net to fall back on).

I tend to view things pretty simply: I chose to work for a large organization because I like both the opportunities and the protection it affords me: opportunities in the sense of working for one of the most recognized brands in the world, and protection in the sense of my employer having lots of cash on hand and the market share to survive economic downturns. Plus the benefits are pretty good too!

So, when you weigh that against the prospect of being out on your own, with potentially multiple years of low (or no) salary and maybe even needing to put your personal assets up as collateral to make your dream a reality, the cushy (if occasionally annoying) corporate job seems like a fair bargain. Especially when, like me, you have three small kids and a spouse who works.

Our professor told us story today, though, that has me questioning things. "Twenty years ago," he said, "I left a job at a large company and went to work for a VC firm." Many of his big-company friends said he was crazy taking on so much risk.

"Now I look back at those people, and they are all very successful in highly-specialized corporate jobs, but they also live in fear of being one step away from getting re-orged out of a job. And then what transferable skills would they have?" By contrast, he said, "I have played so many different roles in so many different organizations, I feel I could do just about anything."

Then he hit us with the zinger: "So in the end, who actually took on more risk?"

Many of my classmates are planning to use their degrees from this program to strike out on their own-- it is a common situation in many MBA programs I'm sure. Today's lecture has me thinking whether I wouldn't be better off in the long run joining them and forging my own path sometime soon. The company office is pretty comfortable, but I will also admit that rarely a day goes by that I don't worry about ending up like one of our professor's colleagues in the story: experienced, specialized, highly paid, and completely vulnerable.

My task will be how to reconcile that fear with the alternate (and visceral) fear I experienced when I saw independent business consume my father.

Getting Old

2008-10-31T15:50:00.002-05:00

Today in my Venture Capital class, it occurred to me that I am truly starting to get old. The realization hit me in an instant as the professor was making a reference to mainframe computers. He asked if we were old enough to remember working with mainframes in the pre-PC era (I was). I found myself taking pride in identifying with the generation who would remember mainframes. Then it hit me: that's something an older person would do. Young people probably would take pride in not identifying with the mainframe generation, but here I was doing just the opposite. I think that may be the divide (not just for mainframes but for lots of things)!

Always On

2008-10-31T11:25:00.002-05:00

It has been fascinating for me to watch the "always on" state of my colleagues in class. When I was in college, technically there was no public Internet (the HTTP protocol that gave birth to the public Internet wasn't invented until a year after I graduated) and there definitely wasn't anything like wireless access. When you were in class, you were in effect a hostage. No laptops (we took notes on paper), no e-mail, no instant messaging, no web browsers. Now it is a totally different game. None of our professors have even attempted to prohibit us from using laptops-- the closest any has come was our Ethics professor today, and all he could muster was a vague threat to call on us randomly if we appeared to be too heads-down with our PCs during class (hardly a threat).

I sit toward the back of the room this year (last year I was up front), so it's fascinating to glance at the laptop screens of others to see all the various things they are doing with their class time. Some aren't even taking notes, others are typing furiously. Some are on e-mail or instant messaging (myself occasionally included, in truth), but everyone has the ability to look up a new term on Wikipedia or via search in real time. Triple Bottom Line? One second while I become conversant on the topic. It's a bit like The Matrix where become a karate expert was a matter of popping in a disc and inserting a probe into your head.

A bit scary, maybe, a bit distracting, yes, but ultimately powerful and completely unstoppable.

Think in WORDS, Not Numbers

2008-10-27T20:54:00.002-05:00

After so many semesters of having to draw upon the slim pickings related to the part of my brain that works with numbers (there's just not much there) struggling through Finance (two semesters in a row!), Accounting, and the like, I found myself wrestling with the syllabi for my next round of classes (which begin Friday). The reading wasn't making much sense, nor were the assignments, until I realized "OH! I get it, these classes expect me to make arguments, draw conclusions, and do other non-mathlike things." After that, it was a lot easier to do the preparation. Now I think I understand why my science and econ friends in college had such a hard time in liberal arts classes (or when I did extracurricular activities like the campus newspaper)-- they never got a chance to switch their own gears out of mathlike certainty into the nebulous world of the unknown. Time for me to make the switch, and time to dive back out of the frying pan and back into the fire that is the second half of the semester.

What I Need

2008-10-25T08:36:00.002-05:00

So after yesterday's release of stress and (gasp!) two nights of decent sleep in a row, I'm starting to feel like a normal human being again. I've always been the kind of person who needs a lot of sleep-- I'd pick sleep over just about anything else if given the choice. And sleep is precisely what has been training off the most lately. Either there's homework to do, the baby's up at 4am, or I stay up way too late playing Halo or something crazy like that, but in the morning the result is the same: sheer exhaustion. Coffee helps but caffeine only goes so far-- quickly I find I'm back to my original low level of concentration and I'm not really productive. But give me one or even two nights of decent sleep and it's amazing how quickly the horizon opens up for me-- I have perspective today I literally couldn't summon earlier in the week, and it's all because of that glorious sleep. Good to know.

A Moment of Relief

2008-10-24T13:09:00.003-05:00

With the conclusion of the 10th group presentation today, IT class has come to an end. My response in these situations (i.e., post-exam or post-class) is typically the same: way too much internal panic and thoughts of desperation leading up to the event, excitement and high energy on the date the assignment is actually delivered, and a huge sense of relief immediately afterward. Like we all survived some shared horrible experience. Such is my feeling as I type this post-- class is over, my suit jacket is off, I've eaten lunch, and I've settled into one of the conference rooms to wrap up my few remaining assignments for the remainder of the half-semester. We're back again next week for the start of our second half of the semester, and we already met about our first assignment from that class (due on November 1), so the rosy feeling won't last for long I'm sure, but for now I'm going to savor it.

Level of Effort

2008-10-21T22:09:00.002-05:00

Now that we're deep into Second Year, the topic is coming up more and more frequently of: just how much effort do we need to put into "X" anyway? ("X" here could be a group paper, final, or PowerPoint presentation). Not that we're thinking about skipping the work entirely, just that we're questioning how much we really need to put into every little thing that comes up. Honestly, it seems we were all a lot more eager last year to go above and beyond; now it seems like we just want to keep our heads down in the foxhole and not get our heads blown off.

In an instant messaging conversation with one of my teammates tonight, we were discussing the group presentation we have coming up on Friday for IT class. We've had a couple of weeks to size up the professor and feel we have a fairly good idea of how he grades assignments. Plus many of us have memories of busting the midnight oil last year (remember those teams who met two or more times each week for Markstrat?) only to receive.....pretty much the same grade we would have received if we didn't have the 3D animations in our PowerPoints (or the plumber's outfits, the dancing elves, or video montage).

Truth be told, it's a good thing this program is only two years long-- any more and we'd really be phoning it in!

Hitting the Wall

2008-10-20T15:09:00.003-05:00

OK, somewhere in the last two weeks, this stopped being fun. When I saw the Year 2 schedule in the summer before things got rolling again, intuitively I knew October would be a hellish month-- class on three out of four weekends, many overlapping due dates, and general fatigue. But being in it all-- actually down in the middle of it now-- really sucks much more than I expected. Can someone just hand me my shiny MBA diploma and give me an early get-out-of-jail-free card so I can be done with it all?

I was on the road two weeks ago traveling in Las Vegas for a team meeting, and this was where I hit the wall. I've had many work trips over the MBA program period, and all of them involve schlepping extra-heavy books hundreds of miles, reading materials on airplanes, and attending team conference calls in highly suboptimal locations. I've reached my limit. As I sat there in my beautiful Vegas hotel, having once again told my colleagues as they invited me out for the night "no thanks, I need to go back to my room and do homework," I realized I had crossed a point where the returns were lower than the effort I was putting in.

This semester is passing just as quickly as I'd suspected, but the work is taking more of a toll on me than I expected. I'm oh so focused on graduation in May!

No Surprises

2008-10-16T09:30:00.002-05:00

As we continue into the second year of this program, it's become clear to me that one of the most important factors in a program like this (targeting working professionals) is consistency. We expect to get our marching orders in the form of a syllabus at the start of the semester, and we build our weekly working plans from that. After that initial plan is set, even the smallest change (like adding a new case to read) is a huge issue. Almost no professor we've had seems to fully comprehend this. During first year, it was common for us to receive notes mid-week before a class weekend changing an assignment, adding an assignment, or extending the due date on an assignment (which of course only penalizes those of us who actually stuck to the original schedule).

Even in second year, and especially with our IT class, things are still much less predictable than I'd like. The professor has frequently added work, changed work, and created distractions in the form of optional exercises to the point that it's very difficult keeping up. I think many of us have just checked out-- I know I've come close. As results-oriented professionals who seek clarity in other areas of our lives, it is been extremely frustrating to deal with these distractions. E-mails from the professor announce new activities and we constantly have to re-assess these in the context of our other work for the class, in the context of our potential grades, and in the context of the rest of our busy lives. This may work for undergraduates (unmarried, no kids, no jobs, lots of time on their hands) but it's driving me absolutely batty.

Second Years

2008-10-04T21:52:00.003-05:00

Halfway into my third semester (of four) in this program, I'm amazed at how the politics of experience works. We are second years, and we are so much more laid back than we were last year. We feel we have conquered some challenge, we feel we have survived, and we have much of the confidence that goes with that.

At this time last year, we were scared new students to whom the second years probably seemed arrogant and disconnected. I know I thought they seemed like upperclassmen-- and I mean that with all its intrinsic envy and resentment. Who did they think they were, anyway? Well, if they were anything like we are, they were probably just happy to be finished with their first year. And also like us, they probably looked on the first years with sympathy.

It's interesting to see how much of this type of behavior relates to experience rather than age. In college, everyone's pretty much the same age, so it's easy to attribute the upperclassman syndrome to age, but in our little experiment now, I'd have to say it has more to do with experience. We've been through things (like Markstrat, like Charlie's accounting class) that the first years can't even dream about. And we've survived, realizing (maybe a little too late) that in the end we're all going to be just fine.

I see it on the faces and in the attitudes of my classmates now: we all come a little later to class, some of us are even (gasp!) missing a class or two, fewer of us are asking questions or keeping up with the reading. Call it our own version of the senior slump.

What's most interesting is that this has nothing to do with age-- some of the first years are older than some of us (just as some of us were older than the second years last year). Being a second year is more a state of mind than anything else: a little less panicky, a little wiser, a little more anxious for the whole thing to be done already, and also a little sad that it's all passing so quickly.

Such is probably the case for any challenging time in our lives. The actual experience of it all is way too complex to fully describe in words. In order to experience it, you have to sit in that chair every other weekend for a full year, vacillating between terror and insight.

Working Below the Line

2008-09-25T08:49:00.002-05:00

For several weeks now (ever since school began looming large on my horizon at the tail end of summer) I've been on a downward spiral: more and more tired every day as I returned to my late-night homework schedule combined with the early-morning routine that comes from having a baby at home in addition to three very active school-age children.

"How did I do this last year?" I asked myself, unable to focus my eyes to read much beyond 11pm.

I think I've finally crossed the line, dipping below "zero" on the Cumulative Sleep Index, and that's a good thing. I'm remembering now that things really start picking up once I've exhausted all my stored-up energy and I begin, in a sense, running on fumes.

Once I reach terminal tiredness, tiredness itself falls away. I'm operating on just five hours' sleep last night and I'm feeling great. During the summer, any less than eight hours a night would leave me groggy the next day. Clearly I'm into a new zone right now. This is where I thrived in college, where I lived on something close to 3-4 hours of sleep a night with fantastic results.

Of course, I could just be delirious, like the man walking toward the oasis in the desert anticipating a long, tall drink of water.

It Gets Harder

2008-09-24T09:29:00.003-05:00

I always wondered whether I was crazy to attempt this program at my particular stage in life (three kids including a baby, busy sales job, working spouse), but decided this was one of those "there's never a perfect time" kinds of things (putting it in the same classification as starting a relationship, falling in love, and having a baby). And I've always known that I'm the type of person who performs better the more he has to do (left to my own devices, I would easily squander days, weeks, months).

Overall, my hypotheses have been proven out: I have been more productive than at any other time in my life, and somehow I've managed to keep the other parts of my life together as well (no pets have died from neglect, laundry and dishes always get done, food on the table, etc.).

But now that the reality of the middle of the semester is setting in (on a timeline where midterms come just two weeks into the semester!), I'm struggling with a new challenge. Last week I learned that, due to a reorganization at my company, the number of accounts I cover has doubled. I was so good about my planning this year, I thought I had everything planned out and under control to a degree that would allow me to have a challenging but attainable year (remember, as a sales rep I get paid on my attainment). Now my account list has doubled, and these aren't small accounts either! So it's back to the planning table and I need to assess how my risk profile has been irreversibly altered with the past week's changes.

As I face two looming deadlines for midterms and the meeting invitations continue piling up in my inbox, I'm trying to keep the old maxim in mind: God doesn't give you more than you can handle. Or at least He's not supposed to! :-)

Two Weeks Isn't

2008-09-20T22:59:00.002-05:00

Inevitably, right after class when I rush home to be with my family (lest they forget who I am), I am overwhelmed by a deep sense of peace. "I made it through another class weekend!" I shout inside my head, quite proud of my endurance.

Then, suddenly, it's Saturday night, my family's in bed, and I'm faced with a daunting choice:

Get a leg up on reading for the next class weekend
Go to sleep to catch up on my rest
Completely veg out, either a) browsing the Internet (usually getting sucked in to some random YouTube video thread) or b) watch Tivo until my eyes dry out and/or the sun peeks over the horizon

Do you want to take a guess as to which choice I usually make? Let's just say it's >2. This happens on a regular enough basis that I know there must be some reason (it can't be me, after all, can it?).

I think it has a lot to do with exhaustion combined with the false belief that "two weeks is plenty of time to get my reading done for the next class." As I've seen time and time again, two weeks will pass in a flash, so I'd better get off this chair right now and crack a book if I know what's good for me.

The jury's still out on which decision I'll actually make. And hey, is that ice cream I spy in the fridge?

Emerging

2008-09-20T17:04:00.002-05:00

I'm consistently amazed at how much more quickly everything moves when you're in a program like ours. We make friends faster, exams come up much faster, and time passes much much faster-- just about the only thing that doesn't move faster is the actual time spent in class.

I just got home from class and realized I've spent eight of the last eleven days in all-day sessions (that's 10-12 hours/day for those of you keeping track). Throw in a trip to Florida for work this week, a ton of reading, and two group projects already done, and it's amazing none of us have committed ourselves to the nearest padded cell.

One other thing I'm also remembering about this experience is how quickly we regain that stamina I spoke about last week (was it really just last week?). I was happy get most of my reading mojo back this week (hopefully along with some of the retention), and as long as the coffee holds up, I seem to at least be able to stay awake in class.

Nonetheless, it's pretty amazing that we already are getting our midterm exams and that we're almost halfway through our first round of two classes. Before we know it, finals will have passed, the semester will be over, and we'll be catapulted into our last semester together.

That was a good reminder to me today as I sat talking with classmates at lunch: although you can't imagine it now, this time will be over before we know it, so amidst the chaos, at least make an effort to savor the relationships, laughs, and even the humiliations (thank you, Advanced Financial Management!) that are part of this quick, strange, wonderful journey.

Fact Check

2008-09-19T09:14:00.006-05:00

So we continue to have issues with some of the facts being presented in our IT class. I don't think it's beyond reasonable to expect that our professors will have the latest and most accurate information. Sure, in our Strategy class last year, we may have had older information and cases (some dating back to the 1970s) but the information was included because it had retained its relevance over time.

Not so for our IT class. This is our third session and already the professor has based his lectures on information that is not only dated but also inaccurate:

He claimed the total sales at Wal-Mart were in the neighborhood of $175 billion. In fact it was $397.3 billion.
He claimed that Apple had the largest market capitalization of any technology company. In fact, Apple is #3 behind Microsoft and IBM.
He claimed you could only buy Dell computers online, using Dell's direct model. In fact, Dell now sells PCs through Best Buy stores as well.
He claimed you couldn't buy M&M's online. In fact the company has offered custom-printed M&M's on its website for years.
He asked, "Who ships anything via next-day shipping anymore?" Um, how about just about everyone in business?!?
He claimed, "everything Microsoft has, Apple had years ago." I'm not even going to touch that one, it's so uninformed.

It would be different if he were espousing items we couldn't easily check online, but this is pretty basic stuff.

Sigh.

Blogging Professors

2008-09-19T09:14:00.005-05:00

As I've written before, we have all kinds of fancy new technology in our classroom this year (but only this morning did we get blinds on the windows-- a story for another time).

Further bringing us down the rabbit hole of technology, I found this morning that our IT professor has himself been blogging about us.

http://magicbazaar.blogspot.com/

Is it possible to create a blogging feedback loop? Or a blogging Hadron Collider?

Should be fun to find out.

Know Thyself

2008-09-11T18:03:00.002-05:00

How well do most people really know themselves? There are the typical personality or strengths tests to take, but I'm talking about knowing what kind of work will really produce a life of meaning.

Going into this program, I dreaded the thought of classes like Statistics and Accounting. OK, Accounting was pretty hellish, but the classes I enjoyed most from first year were Managerial Accounting and, yes, Statistics. That fact still surprises me. We had a full roster of more "touchy-feely" classes last year: classes like Organizational Behavior, Strategy, and Marketing, and while those were enjoyable, what stands out for me are the more analytical classes.

If you know me, you know that's pretty much the opposite of how I view myself. I'm an English major by training, though I'm also a bundle of contradictions. Growing up, I loved electronics and taking things apart to see how they worked; throw a computer into the mix and I was in heaven. I'm pretty sure my path to dot-com greatness was first averted by a spate of math teachers in high school sent by Satan himself; this is when I gravitated to the school newspaper (later to become managing editor) and it's also when I first read a work of literature (my parents had books, but it would be a stretch to say there was much reading going on in our house growing up).

All of this led to a liberal arts degree, though I was almost a joint English and Environmental Science major. And looking back to my college experience, I think I enjoyed my junior year class in Geology more than any other class. Again, totally out of the realm of what I assumed to be my "style". The professor even approached me and asked if I'd consider changing my major to Geology, so there may also be a lost opportunity of Geologic Greatness in my past as well.

And here we are, circa 2008. I work in sales which is a lot more about art than science, I've managed magazine publishing endeavors, worked in nonprofit fundraising, and explored the higher education market as well.

More and more, I'm wondering how much opportunity I'm not noticing in both my personal and professional life because of my self-notion as someone who doesn't (or shouldn't) be drawn to topics like Statistics. Yet I am. Could there be a little patch of untapped Statistical Greatness in my future?

For the rest of this academic year, I'm going to try viewing my tastes and attractions in a slightly different light.

Finance, anyone? Coming from an Engligh major, that's pretty radical talk.

Baking

2008-09-11T16:34:00.002-05:00

So I think I really picked the wrong place to sit in class. They spent the summer remodeling the rooms and we walked in on Tuesday to sparkly, high-tech classrooms with sleek new chairs and fancy new tables. Only they forgot to install blinds to keep out the sun, and apparently the air conditioning isn't working, so today was yet another coma-inducing day of baking in the sun in my seat next to the window. They brought in fans, but we couldn't hear the professor over the fans, so we're back to baking.

You can see how it's going.

One funny thing I did want to share was a Yogi Berra quote from yesterday (related to us by our Finance professor):

The story goes: One day, Berra ordered a pizza. When asked whether he would like his large pizza cut into four slices or eight, Yogi replied: "Four, because I don't think I have enough appetite to eat all eight."

Stamina

2008-09-10T21:57:00.002-05:00

As I sit here in my hotel room on our 5-day domestic residency retreat after a full day of class and after completing the first of our group assignments for Finance, I'm reminded of something a classmate said earlier today, something that sums up the force that drove us last year and which for many of us atrophied over the summer.

Stamina.

Simply stated, it takes pure stamina to power through a day of work at our regular jobs, followed by evening personal lives that include families and small children for many of us, and then to pick up a book or do homework for three hours each night (7 days a week) while class is in session.

I thought I was tough. I thought I'd retained much of my edge from first year. What I'm learning this week while on retreat (where the work just doesn't stop, even at night or at 6 in th morning) is that I am sorely lacking in stamina. Somewhere between the early bedtimes and homework-free days of summer, I lost it. Time to build it back up!

Right after first year began, I remember going to the zoo one Sunday morning after class with my family. I'd been up the night before until 2:30am and was up again at 7 with the kids-- all in all, a respectable 4 1/2 hours of sleep, but some additional factor (the accumulated fatigue of a weekend of class) made me literally fall asleep standing up at the zoo. I feel like I'm right back there tonight! That's what the Pepsi and Red Bull was supposed to counteract an hour ago down in the hotel bar. Now I'm facing a mountain of reading for tomorow morning ("tommorow" being the class period that begins in 9 1/2 short hours). Time to push the limits and rebuild that intellectual stamina.

Notational Value Add

2008-09-10T16:44:00.005-05:00

You heard it first here: Notational Value Add (NVA). What is it? I've been thinking about this for a long time, and finally think I've got it. When taking a class (or attending a corporate or training presentation), how often do you find yourself asking, "what is the benefit of this class? Is the instructor adding value?"

We look at value add all the time in our jobs: economic value add (EVA), market value add (MVA), and other methods look at finance impacts of various activities. But what do you do at the end of a long class day in a classroom that doesn't have working ventilation and you're trying to assess the value-add of the class you're sitting through?

Here's my formula-- see if it works for you. It's not a numeric formula (though you could measure quantitative items like number of slides or lines of notes), but you get the gist.

Step 1: Consider the assigned readings (books, articles, cases, etc.). Do the assigned readings.

Step 2: Consider the PowerPoint slides the instructor has prepared for class. Review them online. Note: if an instructor doesn't post the slides in electronic form before the class, it may be fair to ask yourself what they're trying to hide (you know the kind of professors I'm talking about).

Step 3: Come to class, and take notes.

If you do all this, NVA will be a measure of net new insights or information you gain by coming to class and taking notes. I have captured all notes from all classes in the last 13 months electronically, organized by date and class, and I find that I take copious notes in some classes and almost no notes in others. Sometimes this is due to having firsthand experience with the subject matter (i.e., less need to take notes), but sometimes it's due to a professor just "phoning it in" during class and reading rote from the slides (or, worse, reading from slides his/her TA prepared for them).

Classes with high NVA will generate lots of meaty notes because attending them will be a worthy investment of your time and because attending will increase your knowledge by giving you things you couldn't glean from either the readings or the PowerPoint slides. Classes with low NVA will be have few if any notes (or, worse, just doodles in your margins) because the professor is largely regurgitating what was in the book or in the slides. In low-NVA cases, you could get just as much by staying home and reading the information for yourself.

In addition to the three variables above, NVA results can be augmented (or decremented) by two additional factors:

1. Guidance and coaching ("help") you receive from the professor on assignments or in-class exercises (higher values here imply marginal NVA even when the other factors may be low)

2. Number of random web pages you find yourself visiting as a distraction during class (likely because you are suffering from bone-crushing boredom). High numbers here translate to lower NVA (unless you have a diagnosed attention deficit disorder).

So, working toward a formula, how about:

(in case you're wondering, yes, I put this together today while sitting in a class with pretty low NVA!)

Learning

2008-09-09T18:19:00.002-05:00

As we return to class and as the familiar old anxiety starts to return (Did I read everything? Am I behind? Did the other group complete their case yet?), I realized something today about how I learn.

Learning, for me at least, only (or best) seems to take place when I can suspend the nay-saying voices in my head that shout out, "Who do you think you are, taking a finance class? You're an English major, pal!"

As I learned last year, it takes conscious effort for me to keep those voices at bay, but when I can, what arises in the space between "what I know" and "what I'm being exposed to" can indeed be called learning.

Creepy Technology

2008-09-09T14:32:00.002-05:00

OK, so the fancy new classrooms we're in are really creeping me out. Sure, they have all the latest gadgets-- cool chairs, handy electrical outlets, slick desks. But they also have microphones at each seat, complete with little "push to talk" buttons. And when you actually are brave enough to push that button, one of two video cameras in the front of the room pans and zooms right in on your face. Just so your humiliating moment of trying to answer a question is captured for all eternity on video as well as audio. I'm sure that will help many people decide if they really want to step up and answer that Finance question.

It could be worse, though. There are also two cameras aimed at the professor, and they follow him/her around the room via some mysterious auto-humiliating technology.

So now we have even fewer places to hide. Look for videos of us on YouTube soon, I'm sure.

The Same, But Different

2008-09-09T13:00:00.002-05:00

Greetings from along the beautiful row of windows in our shiny new classroom. Our first class of second year begins in 30 minutes and we're all trickling in and finding our seats in the newly-remodeled room. All kinds of stories of summer are being swapped, and slackers like me are feverishly reading the assignments for our upcoming Finance class. Most of us have checked into our lackluster hotel and we've seen the first year students milling about, also about to begin their classes.

I think there's something primordial in all of us that kicks into gear each fall. Decades of "first day of school" have worn their paths in our psyches and some part of us still thinks about getting books, school supplies, and new clothes when the beginning of September rolls around. For the second September in a row, it's been great to get back into these rhythms. There's an anticipation about the first day of class, whether that's kindergarten, high school, or graduate school.

Enough for now-- I'm so behind on reading, I need every minute I can get!

One Week

2008-09-02T08:56:00.002-05:00

I remember sitting on the porch of a bar in downtown Minneapolis with my classmates on a sunny day in May, right after completing our final exams. We basked in the glory and new-found freedom that came from completing such a monumental milestone: one year down, one more to go. As we sat there drinking beer on that warm day, we pontificated about the day-- so distant in the future-- where we would all reconvene and pick up where we left off. We relished in the realization that that day was a full FOUR MONTHS in the future. At that time, four months seemed like a bazillion years-- it was just that abstract.

Well, now it's a pretty concrete notion-- FOUR MONTHS has dwindled down to ONE WEEK! One week from today we will reconvene in downtown Minneapolis at a really ugly-looking hotel and resume classes. I have cracked my books for the coming semester, but only slightly-- clearly I am still in a stage of massive denial.

My Tired Self

2008-08-19T09:12:00.002-05:00

Oh, have I gotten sloppy over the summer. I had suspicions all along, but they have only been confirmed over the last few days as I've been up nights working until 12am or 1. This is the start of our fiscal year at work, and the planning work is taking up so much more time than expected-- it feels like I'm back in class, but class hasn't even begun! Maybe this is my "on deck" moment for class, getting me sufficiently tired and conditioned for the months of solitary late-night endeavor that surely lie ahead. Regardless, I can tell it's time to start brewing a second pot of coffee each morning!

Dreams

2008-08-11T12:38:00.002-05:00

Remember those childhood dreams about school? The ones where you imagine yourself coming to school on the morning of finals and not being able to remember your locker combination? For me, these dreams (which still happen about twice a year for me) have always involved skipping an entire semester's worth of classes (something I never would have done) and then showing up scared to death on the day of finals.

It must be a sign that MBA season is about to begin again, because I'm having a whole new set of classroom-panic dreams, this time involving my MBA classes. It started almost a week ago, and I've had three of them so far, all equally detailed and terrifying. Last night's dream involved an open-book exam for a class (I think it was Strategy or Marketing) that involved a childhood book about Clifford the Dog. No I am not making this up-- you needed a copy of Clifford the Dog to take one section of the exam. I had brought all of my traditional materials with me to class- the textbook, my notes, and all handouts. But apparently I missed the part on the syllabus where I needed to also read a copy of Clifford. The dream ended with me scurrying around the classroom trying to bum a copy from one of my classmates; none of them could help me.

Clearly I'm not getting enough sleep. Either that, or I need to start reading something else to my kids.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2008-08-10T21:41:00.002-05:00

Has it really been almost two months since I posted to this blog? Isn't that how most blogs go? ("omigod has that much time really passed?")

In fact it has been a whirlwind summer, most of it spent blissfully unaware of things like weighted average cost of capital, the "four P's", and balance sheets. We just returned from a weeklong trip with the kids to Wisconsin and Illinois, and we've had fun events, kids camps, sleepovers, movie nights, and all the other fun things that make a summer a summer.

At the same time, as I think I hinted at in my last post, I have really been missing the rigor, intellectual engagement, and quite honestly the sheer insanity of being in school while also juggling (or at least trying to) all these other aspects of my life. So sitting here at my computer, perched on the edge of summer, I can also say I am ready and eager to resume the madness. Does that make me somehow mad myself? Very likely so.

One of my most vivid memories of last year was at the September 2007 residency, at an executive center just outside Minneapolis, where we all had gathered after two weeks in class to really dig in. We were still getting to know each other then, and I remember looking upon the second year students with a kind of awe and reverence. They were learned. They were experienced. They had survived. What would it feel like to be in their shoes? I wondered.

Well, now I am in their shoes. Somewhere out there are 60-75 nervous adults like me, all with at least seven years' work experience, getting ready to head into a classroom environment that scares the hell out of them, even if they are already experienced and even if they already have their PhD. Because no matter how old or experienced you are, no matter how many times you've rounded the ol' academic bend, walking into a new program still makes you a little sick to your stomach.

In just under four weeks' time, we (the now-proud second years) will greet these scared newbies, and they will wonder what it feels like to be in our shoes. I can tell you it feels nice to know (or at least to believe) that the worst of it is behind us, that second year won't be as difficult as the first. And I can say at least it feels good to know something about what the bone-crushing rhythm of it all will be like-- if you know the process will crush your bones, at least you can put on shoulder pads, right?

All in all, I am very excited to see my classmates (indeed, my friends) again, to pick up the books and fire up the financial calculator, to gather at obscene hours in the morning every other Friday and Saturday, eat little sandwiches and drink Coke Zero, and be pushed beyond my limits.

Because, truth be told, that's really the only place it's any fun to hang out anyway.

Don't Mind Me, I'm Just Insane

2008-06-20T09:25:00.003-05:00

Here I am, almost two months into our 4-month hiatus from MBA class, and clearly I'm starting to come off the rails. How do I know this? Let me share just two examples.

First, I've been reading (and thoroughly enjoying) Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence. Who knew economic history could be so eminently readable? So two of the people Greenspan respects most (as he describes in the book) are John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith. As I'm wrapping up Greenspan's book, I ordered both The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money and The Wealth of Nations and have those lined up to read next. The Wealth of Nations (all 1,200 pages) as light summer reading? That's just crazy.

Second, I caught myself feeling something akin to "missing school" earlier this week. The feeling caught me by surprise: why in the world would anyone in their right mind miss something as demanding and crazy as MBA class? I realized that my overall productivity (in life) was so much higher when I was running on the caffeine-and-stress-infused pressure of class, and that's what I had started to miss. On an average day lately, I can get my work done and also fit in some pleasure reading, but it's nowhere as productive as I experienced at the peak of the MBA madness earlier in the year. While I'm not yet ready to return to class, I will say that I do miss the intensity and the overall beneficial effects it had on other areas of my life.

So there you have it, I'm spending my summer in a questionable mental state. How's things with you?

Oh, So THAT'S What Personal Reading Is Like

2008-05-20T09:18:00.002-05:00

With all my free time in the evenings this summer, I've begun reading a stack of books-- books I picked because they looked interesting. Many have been sitting on shelves for months while I toiled away at classwork-- being able to dive into them now on my own time seems like a gift.

I'm reading Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence, and really enjoying it. Mostly, I'm amazed at my ability to devour whole chapters without my mind wandering-- normally I find it difficult to remain focused on reading no matter the subject. After digesting two Accounting textbooks and one Statistics textbook, maybe Greenspan seems like a sweet dessert, though I do also have to wonder about my sanity when I find books on economics and finance to be this compelling (clearly, my MBA work has already altered my consciousness).

The Little Things

2008-05-13T16:43:00.003-05:00

Now that I'm getting more and more distance between myself and school, certain things are starting to re-emerge. Things I'd forgotten, that were nonetheless really important. Things, for example, like having evenings free. I mean, free to do with them whatever you want: sure, you can keep working if that's what you want to do, but if you don't want to keep working, you can do whatever you like. I just didn't have that option during the last two semesters, and I'm only now realizing how much not having the option affected me.

I've been sitting on a complimentary one-month XBOX Live subscription for almost six months-- I finally activated it last night and it was great to be polishing my gaming skills against others playing my favorite game, Burnout Revenge. In school, I just didn't have the option of doing something like that. All I could see was an endless, barren field of homework assignments, tests, and wireless clickers (you know what I mean, classmates).

Of course, that's what programs like this are all about: putting much of your life on hold for a concentrated period of time so you can work like a rabid ferret in the pursuit of a lofty goal. Then, if you don't go ballistic and hurt someone, and as long as you keep your grades up, they give you your degree and you can re-enter decent society. I'm getting a glimpse of that now, and boy it sure feels nice. In fact, I think I'll crack open a bottle of wine with dinner tonight and not give a second thought to the prospect of getting overly sleepy.

Coming Back to Life

2008-05-11T22:52:00.002-05:00

Well, I survived both of my finals on Friday. Eight hours of much harder work than I expected, but at the same time, all of us were pretty much ready to be done with the semester so we all had an attitude of "bring it on, whatever happens will happen." There was a great feeling of relief as we all staggered from the classroom and across the road to the Corner Bar for a celebratory drink-- it occurred to me that I hadn't felt this feeling since college way back in 1991. There is something to be said about conquering your classes and living to tell the tale.

So, now it's Sunday night. We've had a busy weekend so I'm only now getting time to unwind and let the enormity of being done really sink in. I went to see a chiropractor on Saturday who said the tension in my neck was similar to that of a person who'd been in a car accident-- chalk that up to my first year of graduate studies!

It is strange, not having books to crack open, problems to work, or case studies to dissect. And it will be odd this coming Tuesday night, when our team won't be having its weekly team call at 8pm. My wife was complaining that I'd dropped out of the family in recent weeks-- tonight she just commented that it seemed like I was unemployed and just sitting around. It's going to take awhile to re-adjust to not having class, homework, and pressure coming from school, and only now am I really understanding the toll all the work has taken on me. As they say in the program literature, this year truly was "harder than I think, but easier than I fear."

Most importantly, the box of books I ordered from Amazon has arrived-- my summer reading list! When was the last time I actually had the ability to read for pleasure? What does that even really mean, anyway? I'm going to find out! I figure I've honed my brain into a super reading and knowledge-absorbing machine, so why not make use of it? It's just going to be so nice not having to read anything related to finance, statistics, strategy, accounting, or operations for the next four months.

I'm sure I'll continue updating this blog during the summer, but likely on a less frequent basis. For now, it's time to go to bed before midnight-- for a change!

Getting Closer....

2008-05-08T21:44:00.001-05:00

After an 8-hour marathon session yesterday, I was able to complete the take-home portion of my Finance final exam. All told, I spent close to 15 hours on that thing! Insane, but toward the end (just as I was losing consciousness) it all actually started making sense to me, which I suppose is the point of crazy deathmarch exams like this.

Now it is almost 10pm on the night before the other finals still ahead of me (two more parts to Finance and one 2-hour portion of Strategy). I'm studying a little tonight (mainly just reviewing materials), but overall not much. Both tests are open book, and they're the kind of tests where open book won't really help you if you don't know the material. So I'm just at the point where I assume I know what I'm going to know by the time I start the exams, so why not just call it a night and get some decent sleep? That's where I'm headed in about 30 minutes.

Hard to believe it's almost over-- my first year of graduate school. It's been an amazing, crazy, exhausting ride. I'll have more to say about it tomorrow after walking out of that Strategy exam, but for now it's another quick run through some cases, and then off to dreamland.

Small Progress

2008-05-05T09:03:00.002-05:00

Some progress last night on the take-home Finance exam: another section completed. That makes two of five sections done, with four more working nights left until Friday when the exam is due (and when the other two portions of the exam will play out in class).

I just don't consider myself a math person (even after loving statistics and management accounting), so there are certain core elements of this work (things like the time value of money and net present value of bonds) for which I have inbuilt resistance. Plus I really don't like word problems, so when I see all these things in a single place on an exam, I tense up. Getting beyond the tension and seeing through to the solution is one of my biggest challenges-- I had good results last night and I'm hoping to get back at it tonight. We have a busy week of evening activities for Lindsey's school so I want to get as much of this out of the way as possible, as quickly as possible.

Now, This is Hard

2008-05-04T22:06:00.002-05:00

So here I sit, alone and at home, working on the take-home portion of my final for Finance. And there are 63 other people scattered around Minnesota likely doing the same: suffering in silence. Because this is a hard exam! Man, is it hard. Our professor took the approach all semester of gently walking us through the material, making sure we understood everything, and WHAM! then he drops this bomb on us yesterday and says "good luck, see ya Friday."

The take-home portion of the test (in itself just one of three parts to the final) is 11 typed pages long with scores of questions, charts, and exhibits. It was written for someone who, unlike myself, really understands Finance, so I'm sweating pretty mightily. I've been putting it off and putting it off all day-- now I need to give at least 90 minutes to it and I'm trying to give two hours each day between now and Friday. I figure if I can't finish this thing in 12 hours, forget it!

Wish me well.

Transitions

2008-05-03T16:26:00.002-05:00

Class is over, and we're just six hours away from the official end of the first year. Class has wrapped up and I now have the take-home portion of my Finance exam. Now the long week of solitary suffering begins!

We got our new groups at lunch. I've had a great group this year, but against our wishes the admin staff has continued their new practice of breaking up our First Year groups and creating new groups for next year. Of course everyone was nervous at lunch when the new assignments were distributed-- I was surprised by how nervous I was. We've had some pretty long nights as a group this year, and we've formed some "norms" that we all expect to carry forward into our new groups-- of course the new groups will eventually form their own norms and practices but it's hard to imagine what those will be now. We also have two new people joining the program next year (an anomaly for a cohort program like ours), and one of them is in our group. We met him today and he seems extremely professional and energetic-- probably the same way we all seemed back in August on that first day of class! Now, we all just want to go home and begin the mad rush to next weekend when our exams will be over.

Last Day!

2008-05-03T08:41:00.003-05:00

Here we are, the last day of class in the first year of the MBA program. One week from now, we will truly be done-- just two exams sitting between now and the dog days of summer. I actually went to bed last night at 9pm-- a rare event since starting the program. It feels nice actually being somewhat well-rested in class this morning. Strategy is coming up after lunch, but now we're still mired in Finance learning about WACC, FCF's, hurdle rates, and risk. Just a little further....

Are We Done Yet?

2008-05-02T10:36:00.002-05:00

We have one more week left in this first year of graduate school, and judging from the looks on people's faces this morning, we're all ready to be done. Commitment levels have waned, and people are having a hard time completing the remaining reading and assignments for the two final exams we have on May 9.

It's also hard to believe we've come through this first year. Looking back, this has been one of the best decisions I've made-- I have no regrets except for maybe the sleep I've sacrificed. I've come to view myself as a student again, I've gained insight that has already changed the way I think and look at business and my career, and I've regained confidence in my ability to digest and absorb immense amounts of information and to stretch my limits. Getting exposed to the rigor of academic research and writing has also been interesting-- being in the business world for 16 years has exposed me to a lower bar than I was used to in college and it was nice to have a mental tune-up this year.

Now I just need to keep up the rigor over the summer! What will I do without our weekly Tuesday night team call? What will I do every other Friday and Saturday? I think my wife is more than a little worried about what I'm going to do with all my spare time. I have a stack of books ready to read, and I am very much looking forward to seeing my family on nights and weekends again.

Upping the Ante

2008-03-22T10:20:00.002-05:00

So we're in our second day of Strategy Management, and it's clear from the professor's approach that this will be much more difficult than it first appeared. The syllabus was light, the reading seemed easy, and the topic seemed digestible-- we should have realized it was a trick! The professor is the chair of the Strategy department and he is clearly one of the most disciplined thinkers we have had to date. His exacting approach to lecture, his tendency to call on random people in class, and his breakneck speed of delivery have shown us very quickly that we need to rise to the occasion and ratchet up our thinking. Yesterday we were all in shock, and today I'm finally starting to appreciate the challenge. This is much more like what I expected in graduate school.

One of the maxims that has held thus far is that you can measure the value-add of professors and classes by at least two factors:

The delta between the number of PowerPoint slides in the handouts and the amount of material covered by the professor in class (being able to spend 20-30 minutes per slide while speaking "off the cuff" is a sign of preparedness and intellect).
The amount of notes taken in class represents the net new knowledge delivered. The more notes I take each session, the more "learning" that's taking place to justify the class time spent.

We'll see if the trend continues, but right now this class has the best numbers for both measures above. It's also been very interesting to see how this professor's approach has elicited comments and contributions from every member of class- something that hasn't been true in any other class we've taken.

Accounting Jokes

2008-03-22T10:04:00.002-05:00

How many accounting jokes are there? Probably move than we need, but I heard one yesterday from our Finance professor. Like all our professors, the Finance prof was lampooning his peers in other departments and used the joke to diminish the value of other disciplines.

Here goes.

Two Finance professors were floating over a university campus, lost and riding in a hot air balloon.

They spotted a man walking on the quadrangle below, and asked him, "Can you tell us where we are?"

The man answered, "You are in a hot air balloon."

The second finance professor m the balloon looked at the other and said, "Must be an Accountant."

"How do you know?" asked the other.

"He gave us information that was factually correct, but absolutely useless."

Expanding Horizons

2008-03-21T10:28:00.002-05:00

As I continue to progress through the curriculum in this program, many of my long-held conceptions are falling away. I suppose that's one of the main advantages of continuing education. Thus far in the program, I have re-oriented my preconceived notions of statistics and management accounting, both of which I have ended up thoroughly enjoying.

So today we began Finance. My roommate in college was a finance major, and everything I remember from watching him study was that finance was about as exciting as eating tape. SO I went into class this morning with more than a little trepidation: would it be as much of a deathmarch as I feared? Would I even find it compelling?

I'm happy to say that we're not even through the first class session, and I'm finding it one of the best experiences in the program to date. Much of this comes down to the professor's teaching style: unlike several of the other professors we've had, the Finance professor is humble, inquisitive, and he's working hard to take us on the journey of the concepts he's building over time. This is precisely how I learn, and knowing the professor is our guide in this vs. our dictator makes a huge difference.

So there you have it: I'm actually excitedto go home tonight and read more finance.

Back to It

2008-03-18T21:36:00.002-05:00

Because I took my Accounting final early, I've had a bit of a break from class lately with three consecutive weekends "off" from class. It's gotten to the point where my wife asks "hey are you still enrolled in that MBA program, anyway?"

While it has been nice, it all came crashing down to reality for me this week as I realized just how much reading I've been shirking during those precious "off" weeks. The semester is split this time, so we finished Accounting and Marketing and now we're preparing to begin Strategy and Finance. We're on the road this week but I'm having to burn the midnight oil to catch up on my reading for class on Friday-- the official beginning of the second half of our second semester. I'm making progress on the mountain of reading, thankfully.

Truth be told, I've missed the pressure and constant feeling of being behind in my work, so it will be good (in an odd sense) to get back into the groove of class this Friday.

Another One Down

2008-03-01T09:20:00.002-06:00

I'm done with Management Accounting. Because of a scheduling snafu, I won't be around next Friday when the final was scheduled, so I took it yesterday, a week early. It was actually much better that way-- I used this past week for disciplined study and I felt ready Friday morning to take the exam. Had I taken it with everyone else next Friday, I would have just pushed my studying back one week and not started until tomorrow anyway.

I also got to take the exam alone in a big conference room, so I could look outside big windows, spread out on a big conference table, and most importantly, I could talk to myself during the exam ("Now, does that make sense?"-- yes I talk to myself quite often).

We were allocated four hours for the exam and I completed it in two and a half hours. It was an excellent mental exercise but it's obvious how much I've adjusted to preparing for these types of exercises since starting class. I'm happy to see that my mind is at least a little sharper than it was in August.

So, another class down. That's five graduate courses completed-- who would have guessed I'd be able to say that? I feel good about the accomplishment and I really feel I'm hitting my stride with the program: less stressed about every week's assignments, better able to absorb material and call out the key points, and better able to take tests.

Most importantly, I'm starting to see that, contrary to the self-image I've had since high school, I may not suck at math. My two favorite classes have been math-related: statistics and management accounting. What's up with that? Going into the program, I would have expected the touchy-feely classes (like organizational behavior or marketing) to be my favorites, but I'm really liking the math challenges. Of course it all takes good teachers, and I've had math from some bad teachers too (like financial accounting last semester) so clearly it's a mix. Still, it's odd to find myself actually looking forward to engaging in a math exercise.

Markstrat Blues

2008-03-01T09:14:00.002-06:00

Well, our 7-week Markstrat marketing simulation deathmarch is over. And we came in third. Third out of three really, since the other two teams were so far below everyone else that they didn't really pose a challenge to anyone. We're still digesting the sad news, and wondering what we all learned about marketing as a result of doing the simulation.

I think part of the whole thing was to demonstrate how difficult it is to make informed business decisions without a solid information dashboard. The user interface for Markstrat was arcane and almost impossible to digest, so it was kind of like flying a plane wearing glasses covered in wax paper-- you could kind of see things, but in the end you never knew if you were going to crash into something or not. Every week, we'd submit our decisions and cross our fingers until the results came out the other end.

For the first two weeks, we were flying high on top of the other six teams, but everything after week two was pretty much downhill as the other teams figured out how the internal Markstrat machine worked and we continued experimenting. Overall I think we did the best we could-- how much time can you really spend on something like this when you also have a family, full-time job, and all your other coursework to do? Some of the winning teams spent 4-8 additional hours per week in Markstrat-specific meetings. No way we were going to do that.

So in the end, it's 25% of our grade, and we'll chalk it up to experience. But I warn you, beware the seven-week madness that is Markstrat!

Value for the Money?

2008-02-09T22:22:00.001-06:00

Going into this Executive MBA, I always wondered what the real value of the exercise would be. Pitted against a "traditional" MBA grad, how would my part-time program measure up? When I've mentioned my intentions to older, more senior people, they always ask things like "what are you majoring in" (there is no major in an executive MBA), and they tend to look on the exercise as pursuing an MBA lite.

The degree is the same as the part-time and full-time MBA programs, so what, really is different? Are we somehow getting away with doing less than our part-time and full-time peers?

First semester I would have said "no", since our stats class was a full-semester class (delivered in just 9 class periods, mind you) and the other classes, though they all suffered from "compression" to some degree (i.e., having to do a full semester's work in 9 weeks), we still felt like our money was well-spent.

Enter second semester. We have a marketing professor who is in the hospital due to unexpected surgery: what can you really do about unforeseen events like that? To fill in, we have a lecturer (not a PhD), someone from the world of corporate sales who is very polished and generally a very nice guy, but you can tell the substance just isn't what you'd get from a tenured professor. And it's really starting to irritate me.

This morning we had a guest lecturer (a PhD Associate Professor) on pricing strategy, and his talk was full of insights and commentary, all delivered without the aid of PowerPoint or notes (something I consider amazing and proof of his intelligence). Then came our lecturer to cover the remaining three hours, and you could tall almost immediately that the substance went out the window. Do I really want to pay $5,000 to hang out every other week with someone who's just basically a really nice guy? I find myself craving more, and even a guarantee of an excellent grade this semester won't really keep me more engaged than I am now.

Finally Catching Up

2008-01-26T10:27:00.000-06:00

It was hard last week, being out of the country on vacation and not completing all the reading and practice problems I had intended to complete. Coming back this week has been harder than anticipated, and I've essentially had to complete two weeks of work in four days-- plus I've had to study for the one-hour quiz we just took.

At some point Thursday night, I finally started to believe the Accounting world wasn't in fact coming to an end, and last night I really hit my stride. Walking into the quiz this morning, I felt I had picked the right things to study, and the quiz was time-consuming but I felt I knew the model into which to plug the numbers. We'll see how accurate my calculations were (we weren't allowed to use Excel for this quiz, which was a undesirable throwback to circa 1987 manual calculations), but it feels good to finally have all of this "click".

Fear

2008-01-25T17:48:00.000-06:00

We're well into our second semester now, and we have a new set of professors (two classes) and we're all getting used to each other's styles and approaches. As expected, Managerial Accounting appears to be the hardest of the two classes, the one you can expect to give the most heartburn. Why does Accounting need to be so evil?

One thing that's interesting to watch has been the differing teaching approaches taken by our two accounting professors (Financial Accounting last semester and Managerial Accounting this semester). Last semester the professor used trickery to teach: apparently he felt we would learn best by looking for little tiny discrepancies or tricks in exam questions. All this ever did was teach us we couldn't trust our professor.

This semester, the Managerial Accounting professor is using fear as his prime motivator: he told us on the first day that he took a 10-sided die (10 groups in our class) and a 6-sided die (6 people in each group) and rolled 20 combinations to see who in the class he would randomly call on to answer case questions. He said our entire team would be evaluated based on our responses to these random questions, and we would have to present them when called upon in front of the entire class.

My first thought was, "what is this, eighth grade?" Now we're all just mad, just as mad (but in a different way) as we were with last semester's trickery approach.

What's the point of these misguided motivators? While they might work fine for 19-year-old undergraduates, they're really just noise to us. What's happened is that we now find ourselves focusing obsessively on being ready for every question on every case, and we're not doing much of the reading. So there you go: another totally ineffective tool for learning.

Balance of Power

2008-01-11T22:08:00.000-06:00

Well, today was interesting. Our first day back in class, and we met professors for two new classes: Managerial Accounting and Marketing. It was interesting to see their approach to each class compared to the approaches of our professors from last semester: these profs seem to be more serious, more intent on exerting their control over us.

Last semester, our class ended up gaining a fair amount of dominance over the structure and flow of the classes: we were able to get exams rescheduled and/or converted into take-home tests, we got presentations postponed, and we got online assessments restructured. It doesn't look like we'll be as successful this semester, though it will be interesting to watch how things all play out. One of the profs commented today, "the final will be a 4-hour in class exam, closed book. And no, this is not open to discussion."

It's got to be hard, standing up in front of adults paying $20,000 per semester, and telling them what to do. We're not 19-year-olds. 14% of the people in my class even have PhD's of their own. So this is a balancing act for the professors, and we have shown ourselves to be a strong-willed group who has no hesitation about complaining about every little thing-- if you let us. Today we were all like jackals in a way, watching our target and looking for weakness. The good thing is we also learned a lot about our subjects today, so as long as the "give/get" relationship continues equitably, we should be ok.

Still, it's funny how much we've all come to detest and even be offended by the standard evaluation methods like in-class exams, closed-book exams, and essay questions. Hey, it's the 21st century, and we're all in our 30s and 40s. Give us a break, professor.

Back at It

2008-01-11T07:15:00.000-06:00

Here we are, back in this windowless room, ready to resume the fun and exciting world of part-time graduate school. Today is our first Marketing class, and we're all both excited and exhausted to be back. Through herculean effort, caffeine, and a willingness to not see my family, I have been able to catch up with the mountain of reading that was required for our class today. I feel good about that, and I feel ready to resume this crazy intellectual pursuit. Bring it on, and bring me a coffee.

That Old Sinking Feeling

2008-01-07T21:57:00.000-06:00

Just when I was almost forgetting what it was like to live without panic in my life, along comes the resumption of class. After a nice 3-week break for the holidays, here we are again, at the beginning of another class week, mountains of reading and assignments in front of me, in a panic.

That little voice in my head that used to shout "are you sure you haven't forgotten to read a chapter?" every Sunday has returned. That other voice that whispered "Hmm, I wonder if your other classmates are doing as little reading as you are?" is also back. I missed you, fellas, but really, couldn't you have given me a littler longer to recover?

Sleeping Efficiently

2007-12-26T23:09:00.000-06:00

I just saw an article in WIRED magazine today that discussed how you could train your mind to maximize your awake time and alertness and get just two hours' sleep each day. How? By training your mind to quickly go into REM sleep and take one 20-minute nap every four hours. People who have done this report better quality sleep than those of us who take the normal path, and they get 22 hours of awake time every day on top of it.

Why mention this here? One of the things I noticed while in the thick of first semester was that I was developing (or re-developing) the ability to catnap. This was one of the things that saved me in college and allowed me to operate on about 3-4 hours per day (night) of sleep-- something that seems totally unimaginable today. Looking back, though, I took naps almost every day (during breaks from class) and I got very good at napping. During the semester just passed, I'd started taking a quick 20-30 minute nap after dinner and after putting the kids to bed, and found that I started dreaming almost as soon as I closed my eyes. REM sleep? Maybe. But it sure made a difference. Now I'm curious-- I'll have to experiment a bit more with this during second semester and see if I can hone my sleeping skills even further.

Stunned, and Done

2007-12-26T23:06:00.000-06:00

I can't believe it: checking my university grades tonight, I see all my grades from first semester have come through. And I am stunned by my accounting grade-- really, I thought that one was a goner for sure. As it turns out, I placed above average, which is waaaay more than I expected. I completed the first semester with a better GPA than I carried in college, which is proof that maybe I've learned a little since the 1990s. Or maybe it's just that I'm a beneficiary of the university's bell curve policy. Actually, that must be it. Either way, I'm doney-done-done fellas, and I've got solid grades to show for my first quarter of my master's program.

That's about the nicest Christmas gift I could have asked for. Now it's time to crack a whole new set of books and get ready for second semester, which starts in less than three weeks!

Gap of Time

2007-12-18T12:19:00.000-06:00

I had an odd sensation last night. Sitting at home, e-mail up to date and the kids in bed, Katie was painting the upstairs bathroom and I was sitting there saying to myself, "now, isn't there something I should be doing?" For almost the last five months, the answer to that question has been YES! Either work for work, or work for school-- there was always more of it than I could reasonably expect to accomplish, so I never had to ask myself questions like, "should I clean the basement?"

Last night it was nice to have that freedom to select the things I wanted to spend my time doing, without having to worry about falling farther behind in either my schoolwork or my work work. I did end up choosing to clean the basement, and it was nice to be in that work, feeling the pace of it, without thinking I should be doing something else. But it was also a little strange-- I've become so conditioned to the trauma of nightly homework sessions, part of me still felt like I should be doing some other work.

Soon enough-- I already have my textbooks and homework for next semester, and classes begin in a few weeks, so I'll enjoy the time I have.

Put a Fork in It; It's Done!

2007-12-15T14:45:00.000-06:00

Well, it's over. Our team just completed our final presentation for our three professors and our 55 colleagues in class. It still seems like a blur, and my pulse is still coming back down to earth, but initial impressions are that our team did not, in fact, crash and burn. In fact I think we did pretty well. We'll see how the peer evaluations come back, and I'm sure our professors will have more than a few nasty things to say, but hey, we're outta here, baby. Hasta la vista.

The punchline from this day of torment and suffering?

They gave us the books for our second semester classes in a giant black bag, along with our first homework assignment which is due at the start of our first class on January 11. So much for having time to kick back over the holidays-- time to get ramped up on Marketing Strategy and Managerial Accounting.

Just thinking about those classes fills me with dread, but right now it all seems like a lifetime away. For now, it's one more team presentation and then it's on to the bar for a class celebration!

Day of Reckoning

2007-12-15T07:27:00.000-06:00

So, here we are, the last day of class in my first semester of graduate school. So many hours of pain, suffering, sleep deprivation, learning, and stretching my mind to get to this place.

Today's schedule: 10 straight presentations for eight hours. My group is #9 out of 10 so people will likely be in a coma by the time our group goes. I feel good about our content and it's wonderful to know that, either way, today it will be over!

Done-y-Done-Done (with Accounting)

2007-12-12T22:45:00.000-06:00

Sometimes it's best just to be done, no matter how painful it was or how crappy a final product you end up turning out. Such are my feelings tonight after completing my accounting final-- we had 2 hours to complete the test and I just couldn't work quickly enough to get it done in anywhere close to that time, so much of it will be turned in undone.

How do I feel about this? On one hand, this is the first time I've turned in an incomplete test in probably my entire academic career. On the other hand, I heard one guy in our class actually handed in his midterm exam BLANK, so I guess I could have done less on this final than I did. In the end I gave it a solid two hours, and I produced some good work, but no additional amount of studying, time spent on the exam, or acts of God were going to get me through that mess with much better than I ended up doing. And you know what, I'm OK with that.

Mostly I am just exhilarated to be done with accounting. All of my classwork is now officially complete. Just one more "rock" to climb: our final team presentation on Saturday. That will be a breeze compared to the Hell that was accounting. I say it again: why anyone chooses this profession of their own free will is completely beyond me.

Salvation

2007-12-01T21:43:00.000-06:00

Remember when you were a kid in school, and you went to bed the night before a forecasted snowstorm hoping really hard that school would be canceled in the morning if enough snow fell? Some mornings you woke up and, sure enough, there was a ton of snow and school was canceled; just as often, you'd wake up to find the storm had missed your town and you'd trudge off to school.

Today there was a 6-10" snowstorm forecast to hit Minneapolis, and I was hoping against all hope it would be enough to forestall my accounting final. In the morning school still hadn't been canceled, so I drove to school and we had our first class. The snow began to fall right before lunch, and our accounting professor came into our other class and made a stunning announcement: in consideration of the weather, the final would now be a take-home test and it wouldn't be due for another two weeks! Amen, we all said, and the day was altered. Suddenly we could all breathe again.

I'm not going to wait two weeks to do the test-- I'm still stressing about it and I want the pain and suffering to end as quickly as possible. But it was so wonderful not to have to take that damn test today. I came home early and had a fantastic day with my family, enjoying the snow which in the end did actually turn out to be about 8".

All in all, a great day. And hard to believe we are officially finished with all our classes as of today. Just the final group presentations in two weeks, and we're done with the first 25% of our battle.

Time to Pay

2007-11-30T23:53:00.000-06:00

Here I am, the classwork from my first semester in my MBA curriculum all but done. It's almost midnight, which means I'm just about 12 hours away from perhaps the most dreaded exercise of the entire semester: our in-class final for Accounting. It's worth 20% of our grade, and all of us are predicting mass failure. The biggest surprise this semester has been that Accounting was much less enjoyable and much more difficult than Stats-- going into the semester, I had assumed the opposite would be true. In the end, I really enjoyed Stats and learned a lot, but Accounting has been sheer punishment at every turn.

Much of this is due to the fact that accounting is, as a general profession, torturous. Why anyone goes into this field voluntarily, I'll never know. They clearly possess a mindset I'll never grasp. I think it takes a certain--maybe a sick--mind to actually enjoy accounting. All semester I've struggled through quizzes that make me more angry than learned, more frustrated than eager to learn. Maybe that motivation works for undergraduates, but for people at my stage of life, it just makes me want to smack the professor.

Today in class, the professor said he assumed we'd all spent 10-15 hours studying for tomorrow's final. That sounds like something an undergrad might have time to do, but I gotta tell you, I sure as hell don't. So I gave studying a shot tonight, reviewing the book and trying some cash flow statement construction, and I'll study bonds and shareholder's equity for another 30 minutes tomorrow, but more than that I just can't do. I've long since ceased enjoying the class, and I'm mad as hell about having to take a traditional in-class final tomorrow, so at this point I'm just like "bring it on, pal."

The question is: will I be mentally prepared to face the music tomorrow? Will I be able to confront an exam I likely will not finish, and be ok walking out once time expires? It's something I would have lost sleep over in college, but at this point, life is way more important than this little Accounting class.

B's are......Bokay?

2007-11-06T22:30:00.000-06:00

Well, time to put your money where your mouth is. All along I've been telling myself I'm not in this MBA program for grades-- I'm in it for the degree and the experience. Well, I seem to be stuck writhing beneath the thumb of a devious Accounting professor who thinks trickery is more important than actual learning, so after taking the midterm 2 of 2 allotted times, my highest score is an 83.3%. Pretty good, given the hell the professor put us through.

Now, seriously facing a "B" in this class, I need to remember what I've been saying to myself all along: that I'm not in this program for the grades. In all things, I try to use the 10-year test: in 10 years, will really matter? My Accounting midterm score won't matter, the Accounting class itself won't matter, none of my grades will matter (assuming I still graduate), and even the MBA itself will only matter in the most indirect of senses. So why sweat the small stuff?

Thankfully, as with most things these days, I'm almost too tired to care.

Entering Hell

2007-11-04T21:47:00.000-06:00

Remember about how I've said when you feel peaceful and like you're caught up with your classwork, it usually means you've forgotten something or that you're not working as far ahead as you need to be? I'm in that very situation now-- it's been weeks since I used the part of my brain dedicated to my Accounting class, and now that's all coming back to bite me. Although we don't have class again for two weeks, tonight is the official beginning of Accounting Hell Weeks.

Check it out:

Take-home final due in four days, covering seven chapters (only six of which I've read as of tonight). Two chances to take the final, each 60 minutes. 30 questions. Immeasurable pain and suffering.
Take-home questions from the final. Due November 16. Seems easy, but the questions themselves are impossibly difficult, and wait until you read all the rest of the crap that's due on the 16th and 17th as well.
Textbook chapters 8-9, along with homework problems, both due November 16.
Textbook chapters 10-11, along with homework problems, both due November 17.

Normally this would be a bone-crushing load, but to add to it, we've also got Organizational Behavior reading and homework to do-- including reading an entire book! And there's also a session of Ops Management, with homework, due that same weekend.

I think I may slip into a coma at 4:30pm on Saturday the 17th, when all this crap is done and handed in. Stay tuned, and please say a prayer for me if you have a little Altar of Accounting anywhere in your home or office.

Taste of Pain

2007-11-04T21:37:00.000-06:00

They treat us pretty well at this executive MBA program: catered breakfast, lunch, and snacks at every session. Along with that comes mountains of soda-- all you can drink, in fact. Since the school has an exclusive contract with Coke, Coke is what we get. Right after the program began, I tried my first Coke Zero. For those of you who don't know, Coke Zero tastes just like regular coke but it's like Diet Coke (no calories, etc.). Only it doesn't taste like Diet Coke (I much prefer Diet Pepsi over Diet Coke)-- apparently there is a Diet Coke taste and a diet-but-tastes-like-normal-Coke taste. Coke Zero is the latter, and I liked it so much that I've since stocked up at home.

Only problem is, I've come to associate the taste of Coke Zero with the taste of pain: the pain of homework, the pain of impossible questions, the pain of utter sleep deprivation. So now I have all this Coke Zero in my fridge and I hate the taste of pain!

Nap-o-Rama

2007-11-04T21:33:00.000-06:00

Once I graduated from college, I wondered how I was able to accomplish so much with so little sleep (informal analyses indicated that I plowed through college on an average of 3-4 hours' sleep each night). I realized that napping was the answer. There were numerous breaks in my college schedule, enough time to walk back to my dorm (later, off-campus housing) and catch a few Zzzzs. In the workplace, of course, you can't do this, but even Winston Churchill at the height of WWII was rumored to have taken a one-hour nap every day, so there must still be hidden value here.

While I still can't just conk out for a nap midday at the office, I am getting much better at taking shorter naps in the evenings (just before dinner) or on weekends. 20-40 minutes is enough for me, and it works much better than trying to make it through a late-night study session on caffeine alone.

My Brain is Full

2007-11-03T08:55:00.000-05:00

Here's a good indicator of just how jaded we're all getting: today in a breakout session to work on a financial model, one of our team members worked with us to run the model twice, then proudly declared, "OK, I get what we're supposed to learn here. I'm done." That was about 10 minutes into our 75 minute exercise. Rock on.

Let Me Listen

2007-11-03T07:32:00.000-05:00

Higher education has to be one of the only environments were you can have a professor walk up to a group of students arguing in the hall an offer to moderate their argument. This morning while getting my second cup of coffee, our Ethics professor walked up to a group of students from the other class who were arguing and said, "if you two are arguing, I would like to listen in to observe and maybe help mediate."

Wouldn't it be great if we had people like this in our offices, offering to help us resolve our differences?

On Language

2007-11-02T14:47:00.001-05:00

Today in our OB class, the professor used the word "irregardless." I really don't think that's a word. Do you think I'm entitled to a refund for a portion of my tuition? Shouldn't we have the right to expect that our professors will at least use proper English?

As dictionary.com says:

Usage Note: Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.

Kinda makes you wonder, huh?

Coasting

2007-11-02T11:49:00.001-05:00

This is the first week I've basically phoned in this class. Until now, I've been luck enough not to have had significant amounts of "work" work to do at night, which is why I've been able to do my classwork at night. Lately, though, work has picked up significantly, to the point that I wasn't able to do any reading for the classes today. I'm having a conversation right now, in fact, with other classmates, many of whom apparently have also skipped the readings. And others are even debating skipping out on the afternoon class. So I think we're all reaching a point where we know what's required, we know the flow, and we know what we can let slide.

It's evolving into the art of minimum contribution!

Old

2007-10-23T23:33:00.000-05:00

OK, it's official: being in school has lost its luster (if you could really say committing yourself to 3 hours of homework every day and locking yourself in a windowless room every other Friday and Saturday ever had "luster"). Now it's just getting long and unrewarding. I suppose I knew this point would come. Now that I'm here, what do I do about it?

I went grocery shopping tonight, to clear my mind, and I thought about how in two years, none of this is really going to matter, and I'll be able to do anything with my career that I want to. It is very easy to get bogged down in details, like "I don't like this professor" or "that classmate really annoys me" or "is he/she pulling his/her weight on our team?" But in the end I'm getting out of this experience what I put into it, and what I put into it is completely up to me.

Sure, on nights like this when it's 11:30pm and I'm the only one awake in my family (hardly a rare occurrence), that's a tough pill to swallow. And I'm starting to run into energy walls where I literally can't imagine crossing over (bed is so tempting). But the thing is, I am making some pretty damn good progress, and overall I'm finding I can do the work. I cancompete in an academic setting. And most of all, this is my choice and I'm the primary one funding it, so what good is it to have anything less than the best experience possible?

And so the bitter pill goes down, and I turn back to my mountain of books.

One Down

2007-10-20T14:05:00.000-05:00

Well, I survived my first Statistics class. Today was officially our last day of stats. As someone who only had one financial class prior to embarking on this MBA journey (and that was a pass/fail macro economics class in college), I was more than a little nervous about jumping into stats. Thanks in part to a brilliant and very approachable professor, and thanks to advanced statistical software (saving us from the pains of doing manual calcs), I have to say it was actually a great experience.

One course down, something like 85 to go. :-)

Just Get Through It

2007-10-20T07:11:00.000-05:00

Today we have two group presentations to deliver. I'm dreading the whole thing, actually. There are 10 groups in our class, so that's 20 presentations I need to sit through in the next eight hours. Can you guess how many other places I'd rather be today?

This is just one of those days you need to power though. You know it's not going to be fun, but you also know you can't avoid it. I think I had days like this in college, but of course I only remember the good days from college. This semester is getting very long, and truth be told, I'm about burned out with this MBA program. And it's only the first semester! Time to look a little harder for some balance in my life.

Burning the Oil, Back in the Zone

2007-10-19T12:29:00.000-05:00

Here I am, once again, the night before class and I'm up late writing a paper. I'm absolutely exhausted, I haven't spent a night with my family in almost a week, and I know I'll be even more tired tomorrow for class (when I'll need the energy the most). Writing this particular paper for Organizational Behavior has been difficult, but since I'm down to the wire, there is a certain clarity in knowing that, come hell or high water, this thing needs to be complete in about two hours.

Although I'm not proud of it, secretly this is how I work best. In college I always did my best work at the last minute, usually late at night, sometimes under the influence of fruity alcoholic drinks (I could go for one of those now, actually). I find that deadlines produce a clarity and focus you just can't get anywhere else. Again, not sure that is a good thing, but hey, whatever works!

Hasta La Vista, Stats Homework!

2007-10-17T22:59:00.000-05:00

Ah, I never thought this day would come, but I have finally finished my last statistics problem on my last stats homework assignment. This was some of the most meticulous work I have ever done-- literally one hour PER PROBLEM and there were 15-30 problems per assignment. In total I produced 58 typed pages of XBAR charts, statistical formulas, p-charts, and just about everything else statistical. Good riddance!

Controlling my Mind-Brain

2007-10-16T09:18:00.000-05:00

Historically I have a fairly poor record for being able to bring any lasting discipline or order to my thoughts. I have a short-term focus level that is tragic: historically I haven't been able to read anything for more than 20 minutes at a stretch, and I've considered myself an extremely slow reader. I just can't keep focused. Everyone has a million things running through their minds, but I follow my million things, meaning that there isn't much if anything that can keep me focused for any length of time.

Now, with all the work and reading I need to do for school, I am starting to develop some mental focus. I simply have no choice but to read for periods longer than 20 minutes, and I have a vested interest in noticing if my mind strays. Like with meditation, I've noticed the development of an inner consciousness that reminds me "hey, your mind is straying," and I'm able to bring it back. I never used to be able to do this before. It's pretty cool, actually. In the past, entire paragraphs or pages would float by my dreary consciousness before I noticed; now I'm able to tell pretty much within a sentence or two if I'm really paying attention. This is an exercise in wakefulness itself, and it's enabling me to read much more (and remember it) than I ever thought I'd be able to.

Marching, Marching

2007-10-14T00:26:00.000-05:00

There are some days (ok, more than a few) when being part of this class is a vicious mental game. "Did I forget to do an assignment?" "Am I really actually ahead in the reading?" "How long will my three remaining Stats problems take?" "Should I go to bed, or pound a coffee and burn the midnight oil?" "Am I the only one in the class who feels this lost?"

Today was one of those days. It's the weekend, I just returned from a week long business trip, and I should have been enjoying the day with my family. Instead, I was semi-obsessing about Stats and about the meeting I have coming up with my team later today. It's an unusual Sunday meeting for us on an off-class week, but we have two group presentations due in the next week so we need time to prepare. I feel lost, and just about the last thing I want to do is go back to campus on a Sunday, spend yet three more hours away from my family, and do yet more work.

Some days you really never get a break, even when every fiber of your body wants to lay down and just sleep. Or play with your kids. Such is the evil game of trade-offs I find myself in with this program. A good day is when you just ignore the mental demons; a bad day is when you let them set up shop in the dreary cobwebs of your little mind.