and in more ways than one!

Sorry for the long and slowness on the update. Since coming to London I’ve had…

• Long hours
• Long commute
• Limited Internet access at work (it’s an investment bank…)
• Super-limited Internet access at “home” (Imagine a 64K ISDN line shared by a 100 unit apartment building with DNS servers powered by hamsters on wheels. The line is, seriously, *that* slow, and when it’s up, there’s no name resolution…)
• And, to top it off, the hard drive (or something) in my laptop died. Yay, backups.

So that’s that, but I am updating now.

Warning: no obligatory picture (not even food porn) due to aforementioned hard drive dying. The IT manager in me excluded pictures from my backups. What did that blank DVD cost me? Oh. Yeah.

Update: Jobsearch

There isn’t really one of these at the moment. It’s going onwards. There are a few things that I’m really excited about, and a few things I’ve turned down because it’s not really the sort of thing that I’m looking for. Plus, as I don’t fit so well in boxes, people don’t quite know what to make of me.

I am completely OK with that. Broadly. The source of some stress, but as my friend says “Boxes are for s”…

Update: Project

Working on this project, and it just gets more and more interesting. It’s really great having people who are working on OB issues who are really data- and results-driven. We even managed to take transcripts of 70+ interviews and compile them into a quantitative format, so we are blending qualitative and quantitative data, which really helps, as Man is very quant-driven.

I am remembering my love for technology (hard drive failures notwithstanding), and seeing great fruits of my year at Oxford soaking through. It’s hard to describe exactly what the difference is, but I’m fundamentally approaching problems in a much more structured way, with a much deeper understanding of what’s going to keep the execs (myself included!) awake at night worrying.

Sharepoint

So what I’m doing is, largely, heading up the knowledge management part of the project. The company’s using Sharepoint, which has come quite a long way in the last couple of releases. I expect that it’s been significantly rebuilt. It’s faster, has better usability, and integrates with Office.

Sort of.

So here’s my open letter to Microsoft. (warning:tech-geeky heavy)

Dear Microsoft,

I love you. I really do. Despite years of slagging you off, touting the benefits of AIX, Linux, Oracle, Solaris, and Java (not J++), you do some great things. And I started out my IT career managing windows systems! The clustered system built on .NET that I worked on was a dream, and it really was better than Java, most of the time. Some of the slagging off comes from frustration about stability or customisation, but, really, much of that is just a difference of opinion. And often you’re addressing most of those problems.

But there are a few things you’ve got to get straight.

Please stop assuming that everyone upgrades to the latest release of everything as soon as it comes out.

Seriously. There are all these great features in MOSS (Sharepoint 2007) but they don’t work so well if you’re running, sa, 2003. Even though it was state of the art less than a year ago. Don’t get me wrong! 2007 is great. Except that it’s slow. Especially Outlook. But when you’ve got a thousand (or ten thousand) seats, you only want to move one thing at a time. The MOSS upgrade is a significant, architectural change. Office is going to wait. So half of the features won’t work. What about backporting some of those features? Even cut-and-paste from Word 2003 into MOSS wiki doesn’t quite work. Almost… but not quite.

Please stop writing software for future releases.

Even with Outlook 2007, Sharepoint 2007, and Microsoft UC server:

• You can only access past chats and message boards as read-only. Write access is coming in Outlook 2009. Or you can buy a third-party app to fix this.
• Authenticated RSS requires 2003 server and an upgraded 2003 AD installation.
• Probably some other things… That’s as far as I got.

Please support other common software!

Oracle. PeopleSoft. DB2. SAP. They don’t really compete with you, do they? No, no they don’t. There are lots of reasons why companies use these packages and other software… not the least of which is organisational inertia– “We have it, it works, why change?” So please stop making me write connectors and jump through hoops to make it work.

Please make core features work out of the box… especially when we *are* using all MS products!

I really appreciate your new decision to lock down the boxes so that they’re closer to “secure by default”, but I should, really, be able to punch up a Sharepoint installation to test it and have the people search, skills, blogs, wikis, etc. work right after turning them on, without having to write any code to do it. We had to get a senior developer to work on that.

Please support this year’s open standards… or at least last year’s?

You’ve put blogs, wikis, forums, and other “Enterprise 2.0″ functionality without tagging? Really? Is it that hard? And on that, why on earth can I get read access to ical servers (google calendar) in Outlook, but not write?

That’s pretty much my list, at least for now.

I do love you, I really do. SQL Server is great. It’s not Oracle, or DB2, but then it’s not meant to be, is it? It does a great job as what it is. 2003 Server, loves it. Excel… I want Excel to have my babies. Word: Fantastic (except when I alt-tab and the system just hangs for no reason). I’d love it if you wrote a lightweight PDF viewer. XPS is OK, but you’ve sort of lost that battle, haven’t you? Silverlight looks really cool, and just the thing to keep Adobe moving and innovating. Yay!

Just try to remember the poor schlubs who are… well, I guess you do keep us in work, don’t you? If everything were easy… less of us would have jobs. So keep up the good work, and keep Project Managers, Developers, and Sysadmins employed.

Love, us

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I have been reliably informed that I’m waaaaaaaay past due on my blog updates. So.

Leonard Cohen

OK, first of all, I got to see Leonard Cohen, because the giant investment engine I’m working for has a box at the O2.

And there was much rejoicing. Seriously. The man is so humble it’s humbling. And I don’t humble easily. It was an honour and a pleasure and just generally awesome to get a chance to see a living legend on stage. He sounds better in real life, mostly just gets up there and does his job, and gives lots and lots of credit to his peeps.

SCP: Man Group, PLC (the biggest company you’ve never heard of)

At Oxford, part of the MBA is doing a Strategic (or Summer) consulting project. We get in groups of four and try to solve a problem or three for a real live company. We get to see that all the frameworks and theory and best practices go out the window in the fae of reality, and that’s OK.

So there’s this company, the Man Group, which is the world’s largest publicly listed hedge fund. Which it’s not, really, but sort of is. They’re big and growing fast and they need a hand with their organisational design and organisational culture to find and keep what it is about the “stuff” that makes them so successful.

It’s really interesting, and the people are really great. Will it turn into a job? Who knows? Possibly.

This means I get to live in Stratford (not upon Avon), in what is kindly called “Greater London”. I was less-than-enjoying the Tube, but am now commuting by bike to work, which is… exciting, to say the least.

Yes, I’m wearing a helmet. And the wrong-side-of-the-road thing isn’t really that hard… mostly.

And I get to go to Switzerland next week! For about ninety seconds. Carbon footprint: Ho!

Future plans

Just. Don’t. Ask.

Though I all know that you want to know. Or some of you do. Or maybe you do. I don’t know who all reads this thing, but it’s a fair number of people, from all over the world.

I’m applying for jobs all over the world, although I’m treating it less as a numbers game and more applying very specifically to companies and positions that are really intriguing to me. My background is fairly unusual, and I don’t fit very neatly into many boxes, which I think is a strength, but difficult for someone who’s a career and location jumper (and I am finding, on my SCP, some less career-jumping prospects that may make sense for me… we shall see).

And I do continue to consider starting my own business. That would mean, probably, SF, New York, or London, but could happen a number of other places as well. So.

Obligatory (food porn) picture

Glen fails to look coy while drinking British sparkling Rosé

Went to A Taste of London, which was really great. Food porn. Knife porn. (I very nearly spent £100 on a Santoko knife that I could not afford but which cut tomatoes like… like air, really. The butter wouldn’t have sliced that thin). Pig trotters.

Very soon, an update from St. John’s Restaurant. I cannot wait.

all, for now.

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I have been reliably informed that I’m waaaaaaaay past due on my blog updates. So.

Leonard Cohen

OK, first of all, I got to see Leonard Cohen, because the giant investment engine I’m working for has a box at the O2.

And there was much rejoicing. Seriously. The man is so humble it’s humbling. And I don’t humble easily. It was an honour and a pleasure and just generally awesome to get a chance to see a living legend on stage. He sounds better in real life, mostly just gets up there and does his job, and gives lots and lots of credit to his peeps.

SCP: Man Group, PLC (the biggest company you’ve never heard of)

At Oxford, part of the MBA is doing a Strategic (or Summer) consulting project. We get in groups of four and try to solve a problem or three for a real live company. We get to see that all the frameworks and theory and best practices go out the window in the fae of reality, and that’s OK.

So there’s this company, the Man Group, which is the world’s largest publicly listed hedge fund. Which it’s not, really, but sort of is. They’re big and growing fast and they need a hand with their organisational design and organisational culture to find and keep what it is about the “stuff” that makes them so successful.

It’s really interesting, and the people are really great. Will it turn into a job? Who knows? Possibly.

This means I get to live in Stratford (not upon Avon), in what is kindly called “Greater London”. I was less-than-enjoying the Tube, but am now commuting by bike to work, which is… exciting, to say the least.

Yes, I’m wearing a helmet. And the wrong-side-of-the-road thing isn’t really that hard… mostly.

And I get to go to Switzerland next week! For about ninety seconds. Carbon footprint: Ho!

Future plans

Just. Don’t. Ask.

Though I all know that you want to know. Or some of you do. Or maybe you do. I don’t know who all reads this thing, but it’s a fair number of people, from all over the world.

I’m applying for jobs all over the world, although I’m treating it less as a numbers game and more applying very specifically to companies and positions that are really intriguing to me. My background is fairly unusual, and I don’t fit very neatly into many boxes, which I think is a strength, but difficult for someone who’s a career and location jumper (and I am finding, on my SCP, some less career-jumping prospects that may make sense for me… we shall see).

And I do continue to consider starting my own business. That would mean, probably, SF, New York, or London, but could happen a number of other places as well. So.

Obligatory (food porn) picture

Glen fails to look coy while drinking British sparkling Rosé

Went to A Taste of London, which was really great. Food porn. Knife porn. (I very nearly spent £100 on a Santoko knife that I could not afford but which cut tomatoes like… like air, really. The butter wouldn’t have sliced that thin). Pig trotters.

Very soon, an update from St. John’s Restaurant. I cannot wait.

all, for now.

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Well, things are winding up as they wind down. One more week of classes, which includes four group projects (one about 80% done, the other three haven’t even been started) and three individual projects. I suppose I know what I’m doing over the rest of this weekend.

Had a job interview, it went fairly well, though they chose someone with more specific experience. My CV is fairly unusual, so people aren’t quite sure what box to slot me into. Which is a strength for my long-term career prospects, but in the short-term, it makes it a bit difficult. Especially as I’m jumping both location and general career path.

There has been a passel of balls and black tie events and interesting stuff… Too much to list, actually. Pembroke had a great black tie event where I was the Sconce master. And drinking and dancing and whatnot.

Sylverster Awards

I was named “Most likely to start a business” by my peers, which was nice.

SCP

One of the (cool and interesting) parts of the MBA is our Strategic Consulting Project. This summer, I’ll be working for the MAN Group this summer, working on their communication strategies. It should be pretty interesting. I’ll be working with another technie-CTO type, one of the advisor’s to Canada’s finance minister, and a Princeton grad who’s worked in law doing private equity transactions.

And a photo to see what’s going on with me… (and how lovely England is in the spring/summer… it almost makes up for the winter)

Me and Naa Aku getting ready for dinner on “…one of the most beautiful Quads in the University“

Otto died today (last night in SF).

Eat some bacon and have a drink. And stay positive.

Everything tastes sour I have no power I cannot sing I hate everything.

Trinity term is now in full swing (we’re in the fourth of eight weeks!) and it’s taking its toll on all of us. Everyone has said so far that this is where it lightens up– I must disagree. This term’s hit like a ton of bricks. There’s assignment after assignment and it never seems to let up.

Though I guess that’s why we’re here, after all.

The work is really good and interesting. And it seems like it’s all about valuation.

And there’s the looming need for a job up-and-coming.

Ball Season

And it’s Ball season! We had Exeter ball a few weeks ago which was the victim of scheduling — cold (6 centigrade) rain and springtime dresses don’t mix well. Still and all fun, though:

Making friends with the vodka-dealing dragon.

Me ‘n Anne

Much nicer weather (and a better theme and job overall) was had at the Keble Ball. The temp was up 10 degrees C and it was clear. And the ball was just well done.

Does it really look all that different? Except that we’re outside…

Punting for birthdays

Mariah and Noor had birthdays and we had a punting picnic before going off and working our stressed little MBAs off.

Punting Mariah

If Anne and I turned into Brett Easton Ellis characters…

MBATs

Just came back from four days at the MBATs, where we played a lot of sports. It was a bit of a mixed affair– some serious scheduling snafus but fun overall. I was a bit disappointed to be 30km from Paris but not really get there. And to have so much really terrible food in France. But a cafeteria there is a cafeteria anywhere.

And we broke everyone in Rugby. Badly.

INSEAD says “ouch”… right before going down 5-nil.

Other stuff

I have a job interview! And about a dozen other jobs to apply for. Will update on the interview after it happens (end of the month). It’s crazy because I just physically don’t have the time to get this stuff done. I’ve awoken fully clothed more than once at my desk with my books open in front of me. Assignments galore.

I occasionally have a bit of fun, though…

Prepping for the Wig Bop

Saw Alan Rickman at the Union, along with Gina Carter, who were pretty amazing. Go watch the film Snow Cake. It is good.

Headed out tonight to do anthropological research on cocktails. And gender. In business school. For which I am proud. Proud that I took the class (Customer Insights). Proud that my group chose cocktails to research.

We get to create something new in the world. That’s pretty exciting,when the product category is a cocktail.

That’s about it. I have about a squillion things to do (yeah, I know, moan, moan, complain, you work *so hard* (said in a whiny David Cross sort of voice) but it’s more or less true.

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After the Skoll Forum, my jet-set life continued. Blew over to Blenheim where we saw lots of nice furniture and Churchill-y stuff. I’d suggest just the grounds, though– touring through the house was a bit much… unless lots of nice stuff in big ostentatious rooms is your thing. Also saw lots of photos of Churchill. He looked like himself– sort of round and baby-like– from the time he was about 24 until his death.

We will fight them in the beaches and the landing grounds…

I have to apologise to anyone in San Francisco that I didn’t see. I told a very few people that I was coming and was incredibly busy while I was there– finishing up my Entrepreneurship Project and my final project for my Financial Management class. So, if I missed you, I apologise. I surprised a bunch of people at Brass Tax First Friday, and had some good booty shaking there. Ali and I had a really nice trip up to UC Davis to see KJ, where we hung, ate not nearly enough, drank far too much, and stayed up way too late. Then back to Pacifica to see Lael and Drei and wee Ms. Sascha. Finally off to Mark’s BBQ and saw the Magicglasses-ish crew. All of which was really good. It was good to visit with friends, to see how little — and how much– had changed. 3 children born since I left, and more on the way (here in Oxford).

Mixed in with that I went off ot the Graduate Business Forum at Cal, and met “leaders of leaders” from all over the world. This turned out to be a conference for MBA class presidents and whatnot– most of the European schools don’t really have that– we have representatives, but not any specific class officers. Still and all, it was good to meet with a bunch of these MBAs from all over the world– to size them up (and be sized up) in terms of ranking, quality, etc. To find out how similar the issues we have may be (knowledge management issues, for instance).

Following that, Luk and Marguerite met me in SF and we drove down to LA (after a fabulous meal at Maverick. (I didn’t get to Delfina this time– a tragedy, but yo ucan only do so much).

Then we drove down the 1 to LA.

Marguerite backlit somewhere south of Esalen.

California Luk

We competed at the UCLA Global Leadership Competition, and took a place in the finals. The competition was broadly a case competition, but with the idea of leadership laid on top of all of it, so there was a Leadership Succession case, a disaster press release, and a post-M&A acquisition plan.

UCLA did a great job putting this on– even more so considering they’d never done this before (one minor hiccup in that there wasn’t nearly enough coffee, but the open bar at the nightclub on Friday night made up for that… and the 6AM bus Sat AM made up for that.) They also did something unique amongst MBA competitions, which was to split up the groups for the second case– I was in a group with people from Queen’s University (Canada), Nat’l University of Singapore, USC/Marshall, and UCLA. We had an hour to respond to a press release situation (a mine collapse), assign ourselves roles (CEO, COO, VP of Safety, etc), and I think we did swimmingly. We did have a geologist on our team, but more important was that, I think, we went in without any ego, figuring out who was good at what, and no one tried to force being the leader– we let the team and the situation lead and it worked really well for us.I got to watch a couple of other groups, and it appeared that that wasn’t always the case.

One great outcome of this is that I now have some idea of what kind of teamwork training these schools get.

These people will run the world.

At the end of the day, it was first place: LBS, second place: Queen’s University, third place: Seoul National University. I didn’t get to see Queen’s or SNU, though LBS followed us. As far as we could tell, we took a very different approach to the case than others did– LBS took a very textbook approach to the case, and did a very solid, detailed operational plan, and I applaud them for it. To my mind, they didn’t speak much to leadership specifically, while we tried to wrap everything we talked about in leadership terms, focusing less on operational details and more on fitting the company cultures together. Our aproach was not a typical MBA approach (we told the company to stick with their 20 year policy of “no layoffs” in order to maintain integrity). and we may not have communicated ourselves very clearly. This may have hurt us in the long run, and we’re a bit disappointed that the leadership elements didn’t seem to give us the win, but that’s life.

We felt a bit vindicated that the company actually followed an implementation plan very similar to ours, despite lots of press and industry naysayers, to great profits in the mid- and long-term.

Global Leader Finalists… before the announcement.

I had to leave early on Sunday to get back and host something I’ve been working on– somewhat quietly– for the whole term: the inaugural Oxford Summit on Business and the Environment. This is something that I hope I can work to make sure continues in the future, as it was (despite my enormous ego) one of my favourite events of the year.

We had several fantastic speakers– Sir David King, lately of the Smith School, Mike Barry from Marks and Spencer’s (he’s their architect of Plan A), Alejandro Guitierrez from Arup, Ella Heeks from Abel and Cole, Charline Browne from IKEA, and Martin Charter, who’s been working in sustainability and sustainable design for 20 years (and who gave an overview of current changes in sustainability, environmental business, and design that was so fast and also so sophisticated that it was literally breathtaking– I’m not sure if Martin took a breath during the whole 50 minutes he spoke.

Green Biz Events and 2 degrees helped us immeasurably in this process, from funding to helping us source speakers. We were lucky to have such great partners to work with.

Takeaways: More time! For everything. Don’t get off of a 12 hour flight at 8AM for a 2PM conference. More business cards! More networking time. You can never start planning too early.

Now: Trinity has started. This is the wind-up (or wind-down) of the year. Branding and Communications. Real Estate. Entrepreneurial Finance. Social Marketing Lab. Customer Insights. Corporate Valuation. Another round of assignments. Another round of groups. The search for the perfect SCP and/or Internship.

And that pesky wait for our grades & our pass list.

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Finished exams which went, I think, fairly well. Or decently at least. Another round of monkey suits and exams, this time in the big posh Exams Schools. I’d been sick for a couple of weeks and the NHS doctors have really let me down so far. Honey and lemon, when you’ve been coughing up yellow and green phlegm for a week, doesn’t quite cut it.

Dang. TMI again.

Financial Management:

This was really straightforward and mostly exactly what I expected, although there was an added bonus of theft which threw me for a loop on one of the questions. I think I did OK, though I really felt like I should have hit it out of the park.

Technology/Innovation Strategy:

This is one of those “would have been great as a take-home exam” exams. I think I did pretty well, but there are so many frameworks– as this is a pretty young discipline– that it’s pretty tough. But only 25% of our grade, so…

Macroeconomics:

A take-home exam, and possibly the most interesting assignment we did. Lots of short-answer questions detailing, among other things, how to find the social cost of pollution (which implies that you could also price it and then charge for it– creating incentives to *stop* it, as you and me are bearing the cost while producers are benefiting…)

Operations Management:

If I didn’t manage to score a decent score in this course after 10+ years in ops, then what good am I? Others seemed to think it was tough; I thought it was really straightofrward– though a bit challenging.

Marketing:

One of my (other) favourite courses on the MBA (Surprise!), the exam was, as suspected, really straightforward and numberful. I think I had some good insights and hopefully it’ll all go well. Who’d have thought that Charcoal could be so interesting? (the case was on Kingsford Charcoal…)

And then there’s the EP… which we’re working diligently on finishing… (HA!)

The Boat Race

I totally spaced (after the last week– see below) that my transcontinental flight was on MONDAY not SUNDAY and was packing through the time to see the boat race… But I got to watch it with one of the Pembroke Philosophy lecturers in the MCR, and …

WE WON!!!!

Cambridge put in their best effort, but our heavier (~10lb/man) and taller (~1″/man) crew ate them alive. They ran out of steam about 3 miles in… which is nothing to sneeze at. These guys put in a hard hard hard day’s rowing. I know it’s only 20 minutes– bring me to your gym next time and I’ll set up the rowing machine for you and you can see how much that 20m will burn in calories. These are serious athletes.

Italy (part 2)

I liked Italy before, but going to Tuscany with Antonio and a bunch of MBAs was… just great. It was pretty seriously on the spendy side but we squeezed every last drop of wine out of Giovanni’s wallet.

Not to mention the Prosciutto.

The group of us is now known as “The Fellowship of the Pig” as we ate so much pork it’s insane.

Tetsuya inaugurating the Fellowship

We ate and drank the most amazing food. I can’t really describe it too much but:

Sebastian photographing the best olive oil you will never taste.

Gareth and Francois gettin’ jiggy with the soon-to-be pasta

Tiramisu from scratch

We fried Parmagiana and put chicken salad in the cups. That guy on the left grows the best olives…

Giovanna caught up with us!

Seb and Mariah drinking and eating…

We got shown around this ancient forest by the cute old guy who let us go on the roof… and who lives there and owns it. Marry into wealth!

Trippy MBAs in Lucca

…and drank more wine…

…and ate more food…

…until we passed out on the lawn in front of the rich guy’s villa, in his family since 1610 or so…

Skoll World Forum

Man, it’s been some experiences since I last updated this thing.

The Skoll World Forum is the best thing you’ve never heard of. It’s full of amazing folks fixing the world behind your back… and often doing a damn good job of it.

Met Nederlands folks doing in-country development, which may turn into an internship.

A fascintating Serbian woman running a media centre there.

Bill Strickland and Walter Mosley were telling their stories. Bill’s comment on what he would do in Darfur: “If we could get those people to notice how beautiful the sunrise was, that just might give them hope.” This from a man who’s spent 25 years teaching at-risk youth and adults the power of beauty in ceramics, architecture, and job skills.

Jimmy Carter and Al Gore and Paul Collier spoke, eloquently and… hard to describe.

This conference will make you believe in yourself… or else just give up. So much happens, both in and outside of the seminar rooms. You can read about and see the sessions here.

And now I’m going to bed.

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I have today finished my Macroeconomics and Technology/Innovation strategy work– except for the TIS exam. I think we did a pretty good job with the analysis of Social Lending (Zopa, Prosper) as an emerging market. It’s a fascinating world which, like any innovation, could be world-changing and could fade away. According to the academic thinking, however, it’s pretty well-positioned to act as a disruptive technology. Time will tell, and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out (of course, it’s not just the technology, but the markets and organisations in which they play that make innovation either take root or… not).

Slightly embarrassingly, Samantha Power (who spoke last week at the OU) went off and called Hillary Clinton a “monster” to the Scotsman newspaper. I guess she doesn’y handle jet lag well. I’m getting pretty annoyed at the Democrats– from both camps. It’s their race to lose, but if anyone can f*(! if up it would be the Democrats. And they’re doing a good job of it.

But this blog’s meant to be about my MBA, so…

After the last day of classes last week there was a whole lotta drinkin’ when the school gave us free booze. Which turned into food later, which turned into drinks after that, which turned into my heading with several folks back to Pushpak’s house and we had a late-night wine-fueled debate on the merits (!) and drawbacks on arranged marriage. And it was… interesting. Different. Civilised as well. And pretty much opened my eyes– I’d heard people defending arranged marriage on NPR and Pacifica radio and whatnot, but it’s different when you’re talking to people you know, you trust, who you’re seeing their marriage work.

Yet another benefit of going off and doing this kind of thing. Even in Britain. 49 countries.

In other life-changing news, writing my Macro final paper (”exploring the ambiguities around macroeconomics”), I had to figure out what I thought about the economy, the role of central banks, Alan Greenspan, the business cycle, the weakening dollar, the price of oil, and the costs of pollution. Just to start. And it really made me think. I’ve got to go back in a bit and re-look at the data, and I’m hoping to swap papers with quite a few folks afterwards to see how they approached the question (”Central banks have ‘lost their grip’: Discuss”).

And we did our EP presentation: The Pub-Crawl Poster Company, Inc, is born and was encouraged by the (pretend) investors! Which means that we have viable side business– and excuse to travel and go to bars– for as long as we want to make money.

My team and our presentation: Jakob, Gavin, Johannes, Minori, me

The (non-grade) presentatipon went really well and the panel were very encouraging. So once we expand the 10 powerpoint slides into 25 pages of concise, witty, intelligent, pontificating MBA-speak, hopefully that will carry us over into distinction territory. The only ding was that it was pretty small potatoes for people with our level and value of education, but it was pitched as a side business after all…

So that’s the news. Onwards and upwards! Wish me luck on getting a sexy Consulting Project, as I’m working all angles…

Oh– and go check out Jason and the Lollypops! Maple/Bacon and Absinthe! (no, not in the same lolly). Handmade using craft methods! Yum!
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Hilary term, aside from exams and about 25,000 words of writing, is almost over. It’s flown by in an incredibly short amount of time, filling us all with hope, fear, and god knows what else.

It’s been really good.

Saw Underworld with Ed and Jane last week, and took no pictures, but did get to feel all adult-y and hang out with non-MBA friends outside of the wee world which is Oxford.

Last night, rather than going home and doing more work, I went to three of the events of which there are too many to do in Oxford.

First, went to see a speech at Exeter College, Oxford by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, a book about uncertainty, forecasting, prediction, statistics, surprise, and the lack of surprise. And other things. It was fascinating and difficult to describe. I think I’ll be reading this book on the way to LA. After exams.

Following that, I was going to go get some food, but instead Joe, Alyson, and I grabbed food in the dining hall back at SBS and went to see one of the founders of Innocent Smoothies speak (and try to recruit some of Oxford’s best and brightest undergrads). He and a couple of his friends did their undergrads at Cambridge, wanted to start their own business, but went to work for regular old jobs. They came up with the idea of doing smoothies and decided to give it a go– at one music festival. Partway through, they put up signs over their trash cans saying “Should we quit our jobs and do this full-time” with one bin as “YES” and one as “NO”. At the end of they day the YES camp had its way and they quit that week. Now they’re turning over £185m a year and growing, and doing it all with an enormous social push (Fair trade/high quality fruit, putting profits into charity, pioneering recycling in bottles, etc.) Inspiring. And got me thinking on the entrepreneurship front.

After that, Joe talked me into running over to the Oxford Union to see Samantha Power speak. She’s just written a book called Chasing the Flame, about one of the big go-to guys in the UN who was in Bosnia, opened up Cambodia, talked down Milosevic, and tons of other stuff. It was pretty fascinating, especially as she started talking, spoke for 50 minutes without seeming to take a breath, and didn’t once say “um”. She also serves as one of Barack Obama’s Senior Foreign Policy advisors, and drew a clear line under something that I’d been really keen to hear but hadn’t quite articulated: In one of the debates, Obama said that he would meet with Raul Castro as POTUS, which Hillary attacked pretty quickly. And this was the thing that Dr. Power spoke about: A particular assumption of dignity for all people. Barack suggested that meeting with POTUS was not an honor to be doled out upon our friends, and he got that, particularly, it’s important to talk to your enemies– keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

In any case, enough about politics. It was a crazy night except for the being-up-past-midnight-again part… Alas. And another 6 weeks of Democratic uncertainty…

As of today, I have finished all my Hilary term courses. Here working on my blog instead of my EP, but that’s to be expected.

And that, for now, is all. Except for this picture of me with a giant cheque:

No, the bank doesn’t cash it

And my supercool UCLA team.

Lookin’ good… Workin’ hard

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