For most of my academic life, I had some idea of what the grading policy would be for my work-I always lost all the penmanship points, but got most of the rest of them. You could, of course, use this to game the system-you’d get to know your lecturers, what they liked or didn’t, and you knew what to focus on.

The Oxford system, like life, is much more complicated and difficult to navigate. To start with, we had to tread a fine line between business writing and academic writing. Secondly, your papers are all double-blind double-marked. You hand them in at the exams schools with only a number on them, and you receive them back, without comments, with only a mark on them. You had to read others’ papers and intuit what you may have done wrong. Third, you didn’t get to know who marked them, so you couldn’t ask. The lack of a grading scale meant that it was that much harder to deconstruct what you didn’t know.

Yes, it’s unfair. And frustrating. Welcome to life. It’s a little glib, but it’s also a bit of a dose of reality.

Just like you might go out and start a business or get a job and it’ll turn out wrong, you’ll fail, lose all your money, your grandma’s house, and whatever else, so it is with work.

On the flip side, you might end up with a great mark for something that you thought was terrible. Maybe you hit on some nice insight, or maybe you just got lucky. Sometimes overanalysis is worse than underanalysis. Sometimes you just manage to start Friendster and have a decent run on VC money while you figure out what to do with your life.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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You can only be taught so much in life, but most of what’s important you’ll have to learn yourself.

A lot of people were frustrated in our core Financial Reporting course-the accountants were upset that the course was teaching that their science was all tricks, smoke, and mirrors. The poets were terrified that the final exam was a detailed review of the mechanics of accounting standards.

The lectures consisted, for the most part, of a Japanese and Italian man making jokes and examples about how the science of accounting is really a grey area, as the values of things change depending on the business operations.

The lessons learned were to think critically about everything-especially the hard numbers on a balance sheet. What is your inventory really worth, when it was purchased at different prices at different times? What does “goodwill” really refer to? Define revenue (you’d think that one would be easy). The other lesson learned was the bootstrapping-you had to learn all the mechanics of accounting yourself (there was an evening class for those with trouble), but Tomo wasn’t going to sit with you each week and go over adding and subtracting columns of figures-his work was on strategic accounting-what a manager needs to know about what his accountant is doing.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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(The most important parts of which they don’t teach you)

In my final set of posts about Oxford, I take a look back, six months out, and reflect on what I learned at Oxford.

I suspect that some of this applies to all business schools, though much of it will certainly only apply to Oxford. I feel very fortunate to have the gall to apply, raw intellect to get in, persistence to succeed, and perhaps the wisdom to let a little of what I’ve learned sink in, not to mention a great heap of humility in the face of so many talented and fascinating classmates.

Business school – like any school – is an experience, not a lesson or a set of skills. If you want to learn the skills of an MBA, you can do it on your own, with books. I’d start with a good micro- and macroeconomics primer, an accounting book, the McKinsey book on valuation, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, and then start working through the Personal MBA.You can teach yourself strategy, operations management, valuation, management, statistics, economics, and marketing all on your own. What you won’t get out of that is the experience of others’ experiences, the network, and the time off/huge student loans. It’s up to you.

Some of what you’ll have the opportunity to learn at Oxford is here. This is beyond all the cool guest lecturers, the Oxford Union, the speakers, conferences, and amazing professors you would encounter there.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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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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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“

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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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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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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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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First, we left our potato economy in Macroeconomics and invented money.

See, to understand a few things, it was easier if we had a single market, a single unit of currency, and a single product of production: Potatoes. Yes, folks, I took out $80,000 in loans to study potatoes. One of the principles of Economics is to move only one variable while holding others steady so that you can understand what the effect of that is. Money is, actually, pretty complicated. So my brain got hurt in Macro, as usual.

And no, KP, I haven’t even cracked the spine on my Ecological Economics book. Stop moaning. Up to my eyeballs.

Then I spent all day Saturday competing against my classmates for a slot at the UCLA Global Leadership Competition and… I won! Though I think I seriously disturbed one of my teammates. She was confused at how I could turn anything around to actually be supporting our position in our mock press conference. So I get a free trip to LA in April to UCLA.

Then scrambling to get done all the work for the week as well as having a somewhat raucous Saturday night filled with wine, dancing, and 2-on-a-bike drunken riding around the town.

Tuesday night I competed in the Idea Idol competition, judged by Dragon’s Den Dragon Deborah Meaden, Sebastian Grigg, an MD from Credit Suisse, Katherine Mathieson from NESTA, and Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp. I won first runner-up and had very nice things said about me, my plan, my presentation, etc. It was an honor and a pleasure to meet and chat with Katherine as well and talk about her work figuring out the process and drivers of innovation. And Deborah Meaden is really not at all scary, even if she looks so on the show. Alok and I ended up with £500 and an exhortation to take the technology to fruition, so that keeps that on my radar screen as a possible future technology.

And I got to get one of those giant cheques. Unfortunately, I don’t see the photo up yet. I’ll update it later if it does go up.

Me looking all suited and full of Ideas.

The 6 Finalists, from over 100 starters.

Someone else came up to us afterwards and asked us to make his invention a product and reality. It could actually dovetail quite nicely with what we’re looking at doing so more on that as it happens.

Earlier– a couple of weeks ago? I forget– Sir Tom Hunter came and spoke and was warm and engaging and had a simple message about entrepreneurship and philanthropy and all kinds of things. This guy was really inspiring. He started selling trainers (tennis shoes) out of the back of a van and ended up with £.25Bn after selling his business. After looking around for something to do, he decided to take his cash and start a foundation, which has worked with the Clinton foundation among others, including funding the Make Poverty History/ONE campaign/Live 8 shows.

As he said, “I was looking for something to do with my money. These guys came up and said ‘We want to make poverty history, here’s how, and here’s how much money we need. Could you help us raise the cash?’, so I paid for it.”

Another real pleasure.

It’s MacroEcon again tomorrow, where we continue with money and all that it brings, and I expect my head, again, to break. I’ve got to clean my room and do my laundry and read about 40 pages of a dense yet engaging text, so I’m gonna split on outta here. Thanks for paying attention…

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