Independent Study – A Business Education Option

As an Evening MBA student the curriculum is somewhat pared down to ensure that you are only taking classes that are essential. This is how an individual is able to complete two years of schooling at ½ the pace in only 50% more time (That’s 2 classes at a time instead of 4 in 3 years instead of 2). Since the schedule is pared down, I have made every attempt to take classes that I really feel are worth the ~$3000 each that I pay in tuition. This quarter I am doing something that I considered to be a waste of that $3000 only 2 short years ago… an Independent study course.

So, why am I choosing to steer my business education in this direction? Especially when I am in the last quarter of my program? Well, because I wanted an opportunity to use all of the different things I have learned across disciplines on one project.

The Independent study project that I will be completing this quarter is a farm to table delivery service. I made sure to include a full fledged marketing, operations, and financial plan as part of my project requirements. Obviously a certain amount of business strategy will also be involved in the project. I am doing this because the Evening Business Education often lacks a capstone course. Full time students usually have an internship and also complete large projects at the end of their program- there are no real equivalents for evening students unless you make your own way- hence the inspiration to do an independent study.

I look forward to keeping you updated on the project throughout the quarter in addition to my classes. Hopefully the lessons I’ve learned while spending the last two years in classes and close to $60,000 will prove to be valuable. Looks like we are going to find out together :)

Heading Back to Business School – One Last Time!

Hello, it has been almost a year since my last blog entry! First, let me apologize for taking so long to write- it has been a crazy year. Since my last entry, I was hired on permanently at the hi-tech company I mentioned interviewing for in my last entry. Then I got a taste of the 60 hour work week. This combined with business school worked out to a temporary hiatus for this blog.

So, here’s what happened this past year... I moved from core classes to electives, which has allowed me to concentrate in Finance. I’ve taken classes like Entrepreneurial Finance and Problems in Corporate Financial Planning as a part of that emphasis. In these classes, I focused on things like establishing a healthy growth rate, financial forecasting, capital structure for corporations, venture capital, and more. Most of this work was case based and a solid challenge. Another highlight was a leadership course centered on the 6-domains leadership model. The class was half academic and half workshop – very practical.

So where does that leave me? Well, it leaves me with 1 quarter of business school remaining! I graduate in about 11 weeks. Amazing. It seems like just yesterday I was blogging about my experience taking the GMAT. Now, I am ready to hit the road – MBA in hand. So, look forward to some more entries this quarter. Topics will be centered around pricing, a business idea that I am pitching as an independent study, and as always current events in the business world.

So stay tuned… there is a lot to say as I head back for my final quarter of business School.

7:45 AM Tomorrow

I think I wrote in a previous entry that I recently interviewed for a permanent position with my current employer. I have been a contractor for the last 10 weeks or so...

Well, I received an e-mail today from my manager asking that I meet with her tomorrow morning at 07:45 AM. This is 5 days before she said I would get an answer on the interviews. As soon as I got the e-mail I felt nervous. I started immediately going through a mental list of possibilities.

Here is what I came up with....

1. The other candidates that were interviewed for the position weren't up to par and I am going to be offered the position.

2. The other candidates were far better than me and I am going to be told that I am no longer in the running.

3. The number I put in under "expected salary" on the pre-interview questionnaire was too high.

4. Something completely unrelated to the interviews.

I have gone over this list several times in my head and have come to an extremely novel conclusion... Are you ready for this?

I can't change the interviews and there is nothing I can do about what will be discussed tomorrow, so I need to let it go. I have tried very hard to do this and have mostly succeeded as of about 3:00 this afternoon.

Now, back to the business of preparing for school to start up again in 2 days!

My schedule this quarter is a bit weird. All of the classes are 2 or 3 credits so none of them meet on consistent days. One Tuesday I may have Spreadsheet Modeling and Business Strategy while the next I might have Ops management. This is instead of having 2 of the classes split the quarter. It is very confusing...

Well, I have a few chapters to read for my first day back. See you on the flip side.

Business School Favorites. IDEO!

Over the last several days I have been reading syllabuses, putting old school work in binders, buying outrageously expensive books, and getting my mind ready to start another quarter in business school. However, tonight I want to reminisce a bit about one of the best things I have seen in business school. It is a video about a firm called IDEO.

IDEO is a consumer product design firm that is located in Chicago (they recently moved from the silicon valley). That isn't the interesting part though. The interesting part is how IDEO develops new product designs and how they run their company.

They develop new product designs by putting together small teams of people with extremely diverse professional backgrounds. You might see a team with an ex-school teacher, an aerospace engineer, a paleontologist, a dentist, and a CFA on it. For the most part there are no hierarchical rules on the team and everyone is expected to come up with their own quirky ideas. They have a specific process for designing which involves a research phase, brainstorming phase, building phase, and refinement phase. During the whole process, the "adults" guide the group and insert deadlines. The adults are a few people picked to ensure projects stay on task.

The company culture is also very interesting. If you walk inside IDEO's offices you will see the wing of a DC-3 pertruding from the wall, bicycles strung up on the ceiling, and umbrellas blocking the glare on computer screens. Employees at IDEO are encouraged to build their workspces in a way that suits them. This produces the aforementioned decor and lots of other crazy stuff. It also gives employees a sens of ownership, and a say in how their company works.

The interesting thing is that IDEO is not only a design shop... they have also been tapped to offer advice on transforming company culture. The video that I link to above says that IDEO may be the workplace of the future. Well, it has been a few years since the video was filmed and I still don't see an airplane wing in my workplace, but maybe we have headed bit more in that direction.

Enjoy this business school favorite!

Business School at Work: Project Management

I recently had the opportunity to interview for a permanent position at the place I have been a contractor for the last 2 months. During one of the interviews, the hiring manager (my current boss) said that she would like the person who fills the open role to design a road-map for the team to use as a development guide. She shared her goal for our team, which manages the supply chain of high value IT assets, to become 1st class and then world class. I thought her definitions of both of these were interesting. By her definition...

1st class means that your customers trust you more than themselves.
World class means other groups model their teams after you.

Anyway, owning something like this sounds a lot like project management to me. And although there are many certified project management professionals, I am finding more and more that it is something many of us have to learn OTJ (on the job). It's real life Business School.

My ideas feeding into this road-map mainly center around data acquisition, vendor management, and supply vs. demand analysis.

1. The data acquisition piece has to do with ensuring systems are in place that deliver accurate and timely data about the supply chain. Currently we have some of this, but the systems aren't always reliable. Hence, some of the data is outdated and some is just plain wrong. In other cases, the data we want measured and recorded might exist somewhere, but systems still need to be developed to deliver it to us.

2. The vendor management piece is something that has already been a big focus, but a supply chain team should be able to make strong recommendations to the group procuring assets on why they should or shouldn't choose a particular vendor. We should also be able to inform the contract creation process by providing specific terms for inclusion.

3. Analysis of supply vs. demand is the last piece. Basically, this one is making sure the internal customers are ordering the product in the right amount and at the right time to meet their demand while allowing some flex for unexpected business.

In all of the above items, whoever holds the new position will be driving the processes and tool development. Seems like a great opportunity to extend business school into the work place.

Business School in Real Life: A little bit of Customer Service Goes a Long Way

I just got back from a very productive and pleasing trip downtown. I was able to get a new watch that was recently given to me adjusted and come home wearing it.

My experience doing this involved a store that that has a strong emphasis on customer lifetime value and showed me that through good customer service. This is a real life business school lesson. Let me explain...

Nordstrom and the Watch Adjustment

Nordstrom's customer service is the stuff of legends. Everyone has heard the story of the elderly woman who successfully returned a car tire there or of the scores of people who have returned shoes after years of wear. Although those things sound extraordinary, what impresses me is the small stuff. Today was an example.

I walked up to the men's watch counter with a brand new Seiko watch and asked if they could fit the watch. The young lady behind the counter very politely said that she would and measured my wrist. She then took the watch and the box and told me she could have it done in 5 or 10 minutes. I browsed the men's department while I waited and returned to find the watch fitting perfectly. I asked the young lady how much I owed and she said not to worry about it.

Wow! What is free in this world anymore? I walked away very impressed and in Nordstrom's debt. As a result, I will be much more likely to make a purchase there in the future and I will be telling everyone I know how great Nordstrom is because they helped me out with my new watch. Maybe someone I know hear's this and goes to Nordstrom to purchase their next watch. Maybe someone who had a bad experience at a lesser department store decides to give Nordstrom a shot because they just want to go to a place with good customer service. Remember, the watch was not purchased at Nordstrom. To them, it doesn't matter. They had an opportunity to make an impression on a customer and they know a positive impression is worth more than a $10 service fee. Kudos Nordstrom, and thanks for the real life business school lesson.

The Economics of Gardening

Harvest season of the summer's gardening escapades has begun at my house. Today, as I was chomping away on some rainbow chard, leafy greens, and tomatoes that I grew in my back garden I began to think about whether or not the DIY project was cost effective.

Here is what went into the garden this year.

-4 boards (2"x10") for above ground planter

-8 self drilling screws for above ground planter

-30 square feet of water proof liner for under above ground planter

-60 lbs of organic soil

-seeds for 3 heads of lettuce, 3 rainbow chard plants, 4 beets, 2 snap pea plants, and 1 giant leafy green plant

-a starter tomato and cilantro plant

-organic fertilizer

-approximately 15 hours of planting, watering, and trimming labor

Assuming the labor is free, the total cost of the project was approximately $118.50. From the garden I have harvested and have yet to harvest approximately 12 salads worth of leafy greens and heads of lettuce, 90 cherry tomatoes, 30 snap peas, 4 beets, 0 cilantro (died), and 10 rainbow chard leaves.

Allocating this cost in a completely non-systematic way that is...

$8.25/ salad ($100.00 total)
$0.10/ cherry tomato ($9.00)
$0.10/snap pea ($3.00)
$1.00/beet ($4.00)
$0.25/rainbow chard leaf ($2.50)

This makes the vegetables look pretty good, but the salads quite expensive. The one thing to consider is that the cost of the boards, screws, liner, and soil is a one time cost. I guess we could make the salads about $4.00 each then.

Well, the point is that I have discovered that if you garden it is not to save money. It is definitely because you enjoy fresh vegetables and enjoy trimming tomato plants. I actually discovered the latter to be true of myself. Conclusion? Gardening is not an economically sound practice for the average Joe, but it is worth it!

Bon Appetit

Business School (Part II)

It has been several weeks since I gave my final presentation in the summer management class and I am again gearing up to enter the hellish schedule, arduous rigor, and delightful experience that is business school.

I'm no longer a new kid on campus, I am now a much older and wiser second year. I will be starting this year off with three courses...

Quantitative methods

Operations Management

Business Strategy

I have to be honest that I really don't know a whole lot about what these courses will entail. I have been putting off reading the syllabuses because once I know what the courses are about I will feel like I am back in school. Not quite ready to leave my vacation.

The one thing I do know is that the quantitative methods class is centered mainly around Excel modeling. This is particularly exciting for me because the job I recently started has involved a lot of work in Excel. This means that I may learn some useful things... but hopefully it also means that the class will be a light load for me. I guess I will confirm that soon.

In the mean time, I plan on enjoying the time I have left to be a normal person. I will continue to pretend that having nights and weekends off is normal and that reading books for fun is actually something I can do. I have only a few more days of bliss where I just have to work so I am going to soak them up. I will wrote again once I begin preparing for class.

Until then...

Is Business School Worth It?

What do Bill Gates, Howard Schultz, Jeff Bezos, and Oprah Winfrey all have in common? Well, besides being some of the richest people in the world, these four also share a statistic. There highest level of education is a four year degree.

All of these people showed promise from a young age and some would even say that they were "born to lead". That begs the question... Is business school worth it? Can leadership be taught? Is B-school just a place for smart people to network themselves to slightly more money and marginally more interesting careers. Would the successful ones be successful anyway?

My hunch is that the answer is "it depends". It really depends on the person. Yes, Oprah and Bill were ready for the world, but these people are both extraordinarily lucky and extraordinarily driven. For the vast majority of us we can benefit from the education that business school provides. In fact, if you were to ask Oprah, Schultz, Bezos, or Gates if they would trade some of their lessons in the school of hard knocks for ones taught in a lecture hall, they would probably say yes.

So is it worth it to me... I think so. I think that I have the raw stuff it takes to be a leader and I am confident that when I graduate I will be a different, less confused, developed professional. I wouldn't trade the experience and I've already grown to value it a great deal. That's a good thing, because I will need to remember that as I begin paying back the loans.

Is Amazon Taking Over the World?

I was recently reading the Wikipedia entry for Amazon.com. Turns out that Bezos' Seattle army has been very busy...

In addition to becoming the world's largest online retailer, swallowing Zappos earlier this summer, and beginning to sell everything from ATV winches to Platinum Ruby & Diamond sets, they have set up a cloud computing business and a grocery delivery service.

Not bad for a company that frustrated early investors by not earning a profit for several years after its IPO. But is Amazon getting too big for it's own good? Well, let's look at the previously mentioned cloud computing and grocery delivery business to evaluate this question.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) began in early 2006 and offers several remote IT infrastructure services like data storage, a Query service, dbsase management, and even a web driven market for human computer labor called mechanical turk. At first glance it seems that Amazon is stepping a bit outside of its "core business", decidedly retail, to offer a very lucrative product like web services. But upon further investigation it begins to make sense. Amazon has been providing IT infrastructure of every sort for its internal customers for 13 years. Along the way they have figured out how to manage IT assets efficiently and keep them very reliable. So why not take that expertise and sell it to a market full of companies that really don't have any expertise in or desire to run their own IT infrastructure? Maybe not so far off course after all.

But what about groceries? Well, Amazon Fresh is still restricted to select areas of Seattle for the time being, but it also appears to leverage some of the core business strengths Amazon has developed over the last several years. Amazon fresh requires expertise in wherehouse management, delivery logistics, and customer service. These are all strengths that Amazon can pul out of its Fulfillment center human resources. Add in a little outside grocery talent like a wine guy and produce guy and your in business. It also doesn't hurt that Amazon has been offering non-perishable goods in their retail store for some time now.

The truth of the matter is that Amazon has developed an expertise at business operation over the last decade in a half and very few things are truly outside its core business anymore. So maybe we are asking the wrong question. Maybe the question we should be asking is "What is the next logical step for Amazon?". It seems this young behemoth is just getting started and if Bezos has his way we will see a lot more of Amazon in all kinds of industries. I wonder what's next...

On Break from Business School... Mac vs. PC ads

I was surfing the series of tubes today and decided I would check out apple.com. To fill in those of you who haven't been following the OS wars... Apple is due to release Snow Leopard in the next week and windows is planning the Windows 7 release in October (although the RC version has been available for months). Anyway, it was a web page talking about snow leopard that got me to think about Apple and head to their site.

Once I got there, I started poking around and ended up watching some Mac vs. PC ads. Having just completed a marketing class a few months ago I have a new appreciation for the genius (pardon the pun) of these ads.

First, Apple does an amazing job of constructing the two characters that are featured in their commercials to speak to their audience...

The PC guy (left above) is a slightly out of date guy that is trying really hard to be cool. He is unsure of himself and often over compensates and exaggerates. The Mac character (right above) on the other hand is laid back and cool.

Second, the commercials usually center around a particular flaw that Apple is trying to point out to potential switchers. They do this beautifully. Items like security, dependability, and ease of use have been highlighted. These have all been good points of difference for Apple to discuss, but in their latest ad they hit the motherload when they have a consumer ask the PC guy what kind of PC she should get if she "just wants it to work". This is obviously the voice of the customer and the PC responds that all PCs have issues like viruses. Her response... "I guess I will get a Mac". Great!!!

This series of commercials has largely gone uncontested by Microsoft (the obvious target of the ads) and they seem to be working as Apple's market share has been increasing for the last few years.

If you've got some spare time and want to catch a real life business school marketing lesson, check out the ads in my link above.

Happy watching...

An MBA Degree in Relationships

A few years back, while working for the sales division of Maersk Line, I had an interesting conversation with a business owner that changed my opinion of what it takes to be successful in business.

The gentlemen's name was Mel and he owned an animal feed trading company that sold most of its products to Japanese customers. Mel was telling me about a group of young men that were preparing to start an import/export business in the US and they were planning on having customers in Asia. Mel's first question to these guys when they came and asked him for advice was "Do you know someone over there?". The question wasn't how much experience do you have in this type of business or do you have any international experience. He was asking if they had an existing relationship with people that would be their business associates or customers.

This "old school" mentality flies right in the face of the "big idea" philosophy that is so popular among young business people these days. The "if you build it and its really cool, they will come" crowd. Companies like Google or Zappos seem to be very successful because of one really good idea. The part that is invisible is all of the relationships (the network) that existed when these companies formed.

So what does this mean for someone getting their MBA degree today? Well, I am taking it to mean that it is really important to build as diverse a network as possible... Not because its good to know people or because I want to use them for something some day. The point is that the more groups and individuals I interact with, the more people I will be able to connect and engage in favor exchanging with. I guess what I am trying to say without using the s word (synergy) is that building relationships with several diverse groups is beneficial for all of the parties involved. It's a win-win.

So, yes one hit wonders do happen, but most successful enterprises are forged through careful steps involving key individuals from the founder's(s') network.

Thanks Mel.

Caught up in the Pace During this MBA Vacation

For the last year I have been writing about the challenges of balancing family, work, and school while pursuing an MBA. Today, I am struggling with the challenge of balancing a new job with anything else...

For the last 2 weeks work has been insane. My day starts around 7am and I am usually not leaving until close to 6pm. Then when I get home, I am often on the laptop for another couple of hours. I know I have to remember that I am still new at this job, but I honestly don't know how I am going to survive once the school year starts. So, I understand that I probably won't have the work-from-home time after a few more weeks, but I will have 8 hours of class, 4-8 hours of group meetings, and an ever occupied mind. I guess I can always think back to when I was working 13 hours a day over night when I was in operations management and be grateful, though. It could be worse.

Yes, that's it. A positive attitude goes a long way. I'm sure in 5 weeks when I am back in the swing of things with school I will be well settled into work. Then the next 15 months of school and this challenging position will prepare me for the beginning of my climb up the ladder in the corporate world. Are you convinced yet? Neither am I...

Looking Back Over Year One of Business School

Since I am now officially a second year B-School student, I am ready to impart my wisdom regarding some of the key take-aways from my first year experience. Well, not quite, but I do want to share some very "high level" summaries with you.

Let me explain...

At the end of the quarter it is customary for the professor to do a course wrap up. During this wrap up it is to hear something like, "If you remember one thing from this course, it should be...". Well, those "one things" are what I want to share with you tonight.

Here you go...

Financial Accounting - If an organization or a person says something, try and think about why they would say it and how they benefit from saying it

Microeconomics - Incentives change behavior.

Statistics - Numbers can be manipulated to tell any story... and beware of averages without standard deviations.

Corporate Finance - NPV, NPV, NPV, NPV... oh yeah, and it's really hard to predict cash flows, establish a discount rate, or beat the market.

Open Innovation - The user community can sometimes be a company's best and cheapest form of R & D.

Managerial Accounting - You get what you measure... and ROI is a pretty good measure of performance.

Marketing - If your going to make a reccomendation about marketing strategy, you better have numbers that tell you the size (units/$$$$) of the opportunity. If you don't, you better be very good about making it up... and thank your customers.

OK, so a few of them were two things... but you get the picture. That's the first year of Business School in a nut... walnut shell. Enjoy!

Summer Installment of Business School comes to a Close

On Wednesday night my group gave our final presentation for the management class we have been taking all summer. We are finally done!

The presentation was on an HBS case about a P & G employee by the name of Lisa Benton. She had turned down a lucrative offer at a small firm in return for some classical marketing training from P & G. However, after 4 months in the program, a rookie boss, an abrasive colleague, and a cultural misunderstanding later she is less than satisfied with the training and the future potential. The presentation centered around the problems that had come up in her short tenure and a recommendation for a path to success. The short version of that recommendation was, "buck up and use your network". After all, Lisa was a graduate of Harvard Business School.

The professor seemed to like it so we all went out for drinks afterwards to celebrate. It was a long summer.

Now, I am looking straight ahead to 6 weeks of freedom from school. It will be a chance to really turn a corner with my new employer and get some rest in general. My wife and I are already planning our weekend get away.

I will return in the fall for a business spreadsheet modeling course and a macro-economics class. Then it's back to the grind. Hopefully I will recharge adequately over the next several days in order to handle it. The vacations never are long enough...

But this is what I signed up for when I decided to do business school at night. I knew about all of it, the 16 hour days, the forgetting what your wife lookes like, the endless projects, papers, and group work. The first 12 months have officially ended and I'm a bonified 2nd year. 16 months and counting...

Business School: Summer Session is Wrapping Up

Thursday marked the end of one of the most interesting classes that I have ever taken. The course was called "Rationality and Irrationality of Consumer Choices" and was Taught by Eric Uhlmann.

The first question that he asked the class (a group of business school students taking a Psych class) was, "Do you guys general consider consumers to be rational actors?". I didn't quite get what his point was, but after 8 classes with him I now understand that he was calling into question how rational human behavior really is.

This basic question forces you to look at your own decision making process. From behavior it is logical to work backwards into what drives behavior, that is judgements. Social judgements was really the crux of the course and also the name of Eric's website.

We covered things like associations and the automatic thin-slicing that our brains do when we see an individual. This thin-slicing causes us to associate people of color, white people, Puerto Ricans, women, muslims, jews, tall people, fat people, or engineers with certain characteristics based on our past experiences. We are wired to do this because thinking through every judgement we make would cause the simplist of decisions to be very complex.

We also covered moral outrage. An example of moral outrage is evident in primates and humans when a realatively unequal payment is made for services. In primates this is tested by giving the chimp a piece of fruit at regular intervals for doing a task. After doing this for some time another chimp is brought in and given more food for doing the same task. This experiment has resulted in the original chimp throwing the food at the handler and stopping the task.

So the question is asked, is this rational? If the food was payment enough, why is the chimp upset when he is contuing to get the same reward (which he deemed adequate) for the same work?

Not that people are chims, but the parallels that can be drawn here are obvious.

Eric challenged us to think of consumers as irrational and biased creatures that are subject to the whims of their own mind tricks. He also showed us that we as leaders are succepptible to the shortcuts that our mind takes as well. Not all of the parallels are as obvious as the moral outrage example given above, but we could usually apply the conepts in a marketing or management context.

This will probably be the only Psych class that I take in business school and I'm glad I took it. Besided the substantially lower work load, the class offered me an opportunity to pull the logic out of business and view it through the lens of someone who has dissected human behavior. I'm sure I will call up things I learned in this class throughout my professional career.

Business School Makes it Easier to Drink from a Firehose

Drinking from a fire hose is a common way that people describe the first few weeks with a new organization. The idea is that it's hard to process everything your learning with the crazy amount of information about the company, the building, the business, and new colleagues/networks all coming at you at once. As with drinking from a fire hose... you get just a little bit while a lot spills off the sides of our face.

Today was day 7 with my new employer and I am definitely still spilling a lot of water onto the pavement. However, I have noticed that the time I have spent in business school is helping me process a lot and just cope in general. Whether it's the jargon or a deeper understanding about the metrics that directors are ultimately looking for, the hard work is beginning to pay off.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am on a team that is managing a server supply chain. Prior to a few weeks ago, no one was tracking the day to day movement of the individual server racks. Due to a lack of man power and some systems inefficiencies it was a bit of a shotgun approach. Now, the team is focusing in on the just landed and near term shipments. It is becoming a daily management task combined with a longer term control piece. The problem solving aspect of what is really an ambiguous assignment is easier given my training in business school. This is actually something I didn't realize. I think it comes from the exposure to the wide variety of subjects and case studies within those disciplines. Essentially, you get very good at gearing up on a topic and building a framework to solve problems within that topic. It's a type of brain work out that requires a lot of reps.

Anyway, the job is going well. Still very challenging and I'm still a contractor, but the team is full of great people and b-school has definitely prepared me for this challenge. So keep the pressure up on the firehose... I'm still thirsty!

Business School and Jargon

Where is the value proposition?

Are you part of his org?

How high is the Gross Margin?

What was the EBITDA in Q1?

Let's start reporting up with a more consistent cadence.

Have you socialized that idea?

Plug that into our free cash flows to recalculate NPV.

Is that a balance sheet item?

If we sell that much inventory will we hit a LIFO layer?

All of the above questions and comments represent statements that influence my decision to attend business school. The issue is this, if you can't speak the language, then you don't have a chance at moving up.

Now don't get me wrong, there is more to business school than just understanding jargon, but it is one of the most useful things that a graduate leaves with. Another real life example of jargon is the world of accounting acronyms. I recently came across a list of accounting acronyms that required scrolling to reach the bottom of the page.

All of this confusion begs the question... why so many acronyms? Why the jargon?

From what I can tell so far there are two reasons for this:

1) There are a unique set of ideas that as you grow in your understanding of business require new terms. An example is the term "value proposition". This refers to the trade off a party will incur if they take an offer (or proposition). If the trade offs result in a gain for the party than the value proposition is said to be a good one.

2) Some business people, particularly some MBAs like to engage in class warfare. The general attitude is that using jargon communicate superiority and ensures a higher "barrier to entry" (pardon the jargon) for someone who hasn't had a formal business education. This is half insecurity and half pride in my opinion.

Do you buy these reasons? Maybe the first one is a bit naive. In any case, learning jargon is one of the most valuable things you get from business school. Once you speak the language it is much less intimidating and the glass ceiling seems to retract. Is $18000 a year too much money to pay in order to add 350 words to your vocabulary?

I guess it depends on our perspective. Think on it.

A Working Stiff

First of all I have to apologize for not writing yesterday evening. I actually had a class immediately after my first day at work and got home pretty late, so I didn't write. Hopefully I am redeemed with this entry...

The last two days have actually been very good. I joined a team at my new company that has only been recently formed. As a result there aren't really any experts and I can enter the conversation and make some meaningful contributions. Not to say I'm pulling my weight yet, but it's nice that the norms haven't quite been set.

I found out soon after I started that a major firestorm had been brewing during the time of my interviews. Turns out a major supplier decided to drastically increase the lead time on new orders. As a result, the team has had to find other vendors to fill the missing units and adjust the entire supply model to match the lengthened lead times. Apparently this whole problem and resolution has played itself out in a series of meetings taking place from early in the morning to late at night in the offices around where I sit. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Anyway, my first day was actually quite slow. I started off by going through the security badge process and then I was issued a backpack and a laptop. No one really gave me any rules for the laptop, so I'm just assuming its ok to take it home. The new place seems to have a lot of ambiguous "don't ask don't tell" policies.

I also haven't heard anything official on when I am supposed to be at work and whether or not its ok to work overtime. Yes, as a contractor I get overtime :) And to boot I won't meet my manager until the week after next.

Its great though. the ambiguity may wear on me at some point, but right now its nice to just plug in where I can make an impact and run with it. It's giving me a chance to prove that I can handle autonomy well. Hopefully, I will be able to retain it as I spend more time there.

I will keep you posted.

Here We Go! Riding on the coat tails of my future MBA Degree

In 9 hours and 20 minutes I will walk through the doors of my new employer. When I clear those doors I will put to rest the last 3 years of labor management and become a business analyst for a technology company. I won't wear a safety vest, hard hat, or ear plugs. I won't hear 15 explitives before 6 AM. I won't even be awake for 6 AM. I will have to watch my posture, be sure to take walking breaks every few hours, and get a chance to talk to some folks around a water cooler. I will get to try new lunch places. I am moving from an industrial work-place to a downtown office and getting a raise in the process.This kind of leap is only possible for someone pursuing their MBA degree.

As I prepare to go to work tomorrow (in jeans), I am taking the first step as a different kind of professional. I am slowly becoming the person I envisoined I would be before I entered business school. I have a stronger acumen, wider network of contacts, more confidence, and mounds of student loan debt. I still have a lifetime of learning ahead of me, but I am beginning to get some use out of a few new tools that I have picked up over the last year.

It feels good to be approaching a major change, but it is also nerve racking. A lot of questions are swirling. Can I do this job? Will I learn the new industry fast enough? Can I do solid work wearing jeans? Will my alarm wake me up tomorrow?

This is an opportunity that should have required me to quit my job. Luckily, I was forced into making the transition otherwise I may still be wearing high visibility yellow. Only by God's grace will I be wearing non-reflective clothing tomorrow.

I think I will wear Blue, actually.

I will post again after the day is over, so stay tuned. Hopefully me and my half finished MBA degree will thrive tomorrow.

Here's to leaping and bounding!