84

OK, so most of my classes, while they are impossibly difficult and time-consuming, at least take into consideration that we're busy, working professionals with families and lives outside of class. As a result, most of the classes don't have traditional in-class final exams, favoring instead a series of homework, essay, and group project work.

And then there's accounting. This devil of a class is killing me. I thought statistics would be my hardest class; instead, accounting is brutal. The professor seems to take particular delight in requiring us to take not one but TWO exams plus a series of quizzes. In the "old days" of undergraduate education, I'd be OK with this, but in my current situation I'm rebelling. Today I took the first online quiz. Twice (the maximum number of times you could take it). An hour each time. And the best I could do was an 84%. Still pretty good, but not what I was used to producing in college. I'm having to re-invent my concept of an "acceptable" grade in light of the fact that I'm primarily here to get a master's degree, not to get a GPA. Does anybody ask what your MBA GPA was? Maybe if you're applying to work for Goldman Sachs, but I think we all know that's not me, so why should I care? Truth is, I'm too tired to care a whole lot.

What really gets me is that the quiz had a large number of tricky questions, items where it was easy to miss the obvious and/or to fall into a trap. Judging from the personality of the professor, he delights in inflicting this type of pain on his students, but I'm sitting here thinking, "hey, buddy, I'm paying you like $1,000 per session for this class, so can we let go of the need to answer to your crazy level of detail and just focus on testing the fundamentals?"

Maybe this is all some clever little mental experiment for the professor, but in 10 years I don't think much of what I agonized over on the quiz today will really determine whether I'm an insightful business professional or not. And yeah, I'm still pretty pissed that I got an 84.

Stepping off my soapbox now....

Switching Gears

We're taking four classes at once this semester, and one of the hardest things for me to do is switch gears from class to class and focus on that particular subject area for any period of time. The classes are staggered just enough so as to induce amnesia, so when you walk out of a stats class on September 7, you feel like you're on top of the stats world, but when you go to do the homework on September 26, it's like aliens have replaced your textbook with some instruction manual from the future. None of it makes any sense. So you cram again, reviewing your notes and re-reading some of the chapters, and just when you get back into gear for that particular class, BOOM you've got homework for another class due and you need to start all over with that other class.

Basically I'm still getting used to the fact that I'm not going to spend much time in my comfort zone for about the next two years.

Overwhelmed, Again

We had our weekly team conference call tonight, and once again I'm pretty freaked out. More than once I've gone into these calls feeling pretty good about my pace of work: that I'm keeping up, that I'm making progress, that I might not get every bone in my tired little body absolutely crushed by the workload of pursuing this degree.

Then, as happened tonight, something comes up and I feel totally behind again. Tonight it was just listening to my teammates recount the list of assignments that were due in the next four weeks. Seeing it all on paper tonight, I can't see any way (short of not sleeping) that I'm going to get it all done. So here I am, up past midnight once again, slowly chipping away at the mountain.

I need to make a T-Shirt that says, "holy crap! What have I gotten myself into?" That pretty much sums up my life these days.

Mixin' It Up

Are Red Bull and Sudafed compatible? By "compatible," I mean: will taking both at the same time kill me? We'll see. That's the solution I needed tonight to persevere through this evil stats homework. I've had allergies for a week that are causing me to consume more Kleenex than the patients in an average hospital wing, and I'm wiped out tonight yet face a mountain of stats problems, so what else is there to do but chase my Sudafed with a can of Red Bull?

Ah, it feels like college again.

I Like People More Than Numbers

Back again for Day 2 of Organizational Behavior. I find this topic fascinating. Maybe it's just because there is almost no math in the class, maybe it's because most of the work consists of writing and essays (which I love and which are challenging me to rediscover my academic writing side), or maybe it's just because I believe people influence the organizations they work for more than the rules those organizations try to enforce on people.

I've always been fascinated by the unseen elements that make organizations tick-- not the rules, not the HR values, but the people. The messy, political people-- to me an organization is nothing without its people. And things don't get interesting until you really start unpacking the baggage people carry with them into meetings, interactions, relationships, and work effort. The best organizational plan can be subverted by people who don't buy into the vision.

One of the exercises I completed last night was an assessment of my own company's values, and it was surprising. I've long taken pride in working for a company that makes a big deal about its values, and I really thought my company's values were differentiators, but after comparing them to some objective cultural analysis, I was surprised and disappointed to learn that many of my company's values are "permission to play" values or "aspirational" values. P2P values are values almost every company has-- they don't provide market differentiation and any company would be foolish to hire someone who didn't have the P2P values. These are values like integrity and honesty-- they look great on a boardroom wall but at the end of the day, what do they really mean? Aspirational values are those a company believes it espouses, but that on further examination are lacking or have yet to be fully implemented. I was dismayed to find how many of my company's values fall into this category.

One of the most interesting comments has been the fact that to have true meaning, values need to inflict pain on an organization. They can't be platitudes. How many of us can say that our companies are actually willing to tolerate an amount of pain to live their values? I was surprised to find that most of the pain in my company flows down to the employees-- that's not where the pain should reside. To transform the aspirational values into core values, my company would need to change and be willing to "own" a lot more of the pain at the corporate level that it currently lets flow downstream to its employees.

So, very interesting conversations today. This is the kind of class that can get me up on a Saturday morning.

The Punchline

As I was driving in to class in the dark this morning, it occurred to me that I was in some way the living punchline of a very cruel joke. Something that ends in "Sitting in an Accounting class that starts at 7:30am...."

I realized this morning that I've crossed a threshold: I'm rediscovering the "student mode" I used in college to get through the experience. I find myself able to subsist on far less sleep than I once was, I don't get alarmed at the prospect of reading 100 pages a night in a textbook, and I'm again able to churn out academic assignments that seem at least moderately well-done.

This is all very encouraging, but the truth is that I just don't have a moment to stop. The work continues coming at such a furious pace that you either keep swimming or you drown. It's actually compelling to a degree-- at least that's what I tell myself when I'm not whimpering in my home office at 2am struggling with yet another homework problem. The reality of day-to-day corporate life is pretty unfulfilling in many respects, but there's nothing that'll get your juices flowing again faster than the raw fear of four graduate-level courses!

OK, Now I Get It

After my first full day at home caring for my baby son, I think I'm getting a handle both on childcare and also on how I'm going to be able to manage this MBA program. Last night I was pretty freaked out about all the mounting reading, assignments, and deadlines and I just didn't see a way I could make everything work without putting my family and life on auto-pilot and locking myself into a room.

Today was good-- Peter's operating on a fairly regular schedule (thanks to my wife Katie for that!), so I was able to sneak in the remainder of my Operations Management reading during the day while he was napping. We also got our fair share of shopping done, so overall I'm reassured by how much it seems possible to accomplish in a day. Don't get me wrong-- it could all go differently tomorrow, but today at least it was reassuring. I'm caught up in my reading for OM and tonight I'm working to hammer out my part of our next group assignment which is due on the 21st. Hopefully I'll be able to make a dent in my accounting homework tomorrow.