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.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Unmoored
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.
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.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Time is Passing
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).
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
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?
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?
Friday, October 31, 2008
Risk
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).
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
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
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
