...the random musings of an unconventional MBA. » Oxford University

What you learn on the Oxford MBA – 6

glen — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:14:54 +0000

Use who you are & what you’re good at in your teams

Teams are groups that are cohesive. In most of the work you’ll do in business school, in work, and in life will require the assistance and aid of others.

While I can build a financial model, there are others who can probably do it better, and then what I’m good at is talking through the items, finding bits that my financier may have missed, and discussing what an appropriate discount rate should be.

While I can write a detailed marketing strategy, I’m better at coming up with the broad strategy and leaving the details to those who are best at it.

Teams work well when they work together; almost no one works in isolation. Use your strengths and let your teammates shore up your weaknesses.

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

What you learn on the Oxford MBA – 5

glen — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:44:46 +0000

Figure out what you’re good at and be who you are.

In strategy courses, we talk a lot about sustainable competitive advantage-what it is that makes your company better than others at doing what it is that you do-in some cases, you may have companies that compete in markets but don’t directly compete against each other-Starbuck’s, for instance, doesn’t sell coffee, it sells an experience, the “third place” which is familiar and homelike, where you have music and comfortable seating, you can have a meeting, but you aren’t distracted by either home or work needs (except when your BlackBerry starts flashing and vibrating at you). This is why they haven’t made a competitive response to McDonald’s. People will choose one over the other, but McDonald’s isn’t going after Starbucks’ core business-the experience.

On the other hand, lots of people go to business school to give them new opportunities in their lives. One of my friends had worked extensively in technology (as had I), and we were looking for a change. We went to speak to our strategy lecturer about it, and he advised us that, strategically, if you were throwing away IT and tech skills in this market, you’d be unwise.

This caused us to look back at ourselves and really try to analyse what it was that we were good at.

I’d already been on my second career-I’d shifted from performing arts and nonprofit entrepreneurship to technology work in Silicon Valley-arguably one of the entrepreneurship centres of the world-certainly for IT companies. I turned down very good, very lucrative jobs building and running data centres, and I started thinking of myself as an entrepreneur rather than a technologist-defining myself my who I was rather than what I did.

Whereas most of my colleagues in IT had focused on a sector-biotech, say, or the Internet, I’d worked almost exclusively for small, growing companies in a wide range of fields-biotech, Internet services, advertising, security, chip design, theatre, event management, consulting, government services, transportation. Where my colleagues argued for clean, elegant design and tight, efficient code, I’d try to look at the big picture, to understand why it was that Marketing made seemingly unreasonable demands, why it was that the executive management would ignore profitable centres while focussing on money-losing businesses, and why Finance would drop critical line-items from our budgets. I certainly did make a lot of unreasonable arguments myself, but I ended up often being the person who made the connections between those groups.

My self-searching provided me with a list of things I was good at:

· Making connections

· Seeing the big picture

· Translation between groups (how you talk to engineers versus salespeople)

· Developing and mentoring

· Strategic direction, in product, marketing, sales, or overall.

· Choosing which details to focus on

All of which adds up to entrepreneur. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised when I was knocked back from the big private equity houses and consulting firms-while they’d have a use for someone like me, they couldn’t see it.

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

What you learn on the Oxford MBA – 4

glen — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:16:52 +0000

You don’t get to make the rules; deal with it.

This one you hopefully learned in undergrad, but it bears some repeating. You take a top international business programme which requires several years’ experience to get in and you’re quite likely to have a lot of talented people who are used to having their way with things. These are (or have been) important people- important to someone, anyway.

Suddenly, these people are in strange bidding wars, having to jump through hoops and submit assignments and not getting any feedback on them and, in some cases, failing.

There were people who, through the complicated elective-choosing system, didn’t get to have lecturers or courses that they came to Oxford for. Some of the lesson here was to make better choices. Some of the lesson is that you can’t do everything. Some of it is to just pick yourself up off the floor and deal with it.

There’s an economic principle called Sunk Cost, the lesson of which is that, once something is in the past, you can’t get hung up on how much it cost-if the right decision is to move on and trash it, you trash it. You move forward. You look at the situation you’re in and move forward from there-not from before you became the King of Bad Decisions.

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

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What you learn on the Oxford MBA – Part 3

glen — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 06:38:44 +0000

You don’t get to know the rules; deal with it.

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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What you learn on the Oxford MBA part 2

glen — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:12:48 +0000

The most important lessons are learned, not taught.

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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What you learn on the Oxford MBA part 1

glen — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:09:52 +0000

What you learn at Oxford’s Business School

(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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Please Stand by… Technical difficulties

glen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:50:29 +0000

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

Waaaaaaaaay past due…

glen — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:10:32 +0000

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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Waaaaaaaaay past due…

glen — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:09:56 +0000

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

all, for now.

Trinity wind-down

glen — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:55:59 +0000

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“