An excellent post by Valeria Maltoni discusses the importance of realising when you’ve lost sight of your customers’ interests and feelings. This reminded me of an ongoing struggle I’ve had with United Airlines, and how they’ve shifted significantly over the last ten years– to their employees as well as to their end users.

The United Experience – 1990s
To be fair, it’s hard running an airline. I wouldn’t do it, but someone does. I flew United a lot in the 1990s, and the experience was as I recall a pretty good experience out of a series of terrible alternatives– the difference seemed to be in the individual pride and power of United employees– they answered the phone as “employee-owners” and would often go the extra mile for you, particularly if something had gone wrong that was clearly their fault.

United in the 2000s
The Noughties brought some slippage– and, to be fair, we had an enormous overall price hike in oil, the troubled aftermath of 9/11, and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Depending on when and what desk you called, you were likely to be handed over to an outsourced call centre which would have mixed rates of effectiveness. I had a couple of really miserable experiences when I missed flights, but– and here’s the interesting bit– the employees at the gate still had the visibility and ability to make the right changes and sort things out. If you got a bad agent on the phone, you could turn up at the airport 30 minutes or so early and get things sorted.

That, unfortunately, is no longer the case.

United at the start of 2010
I recently flew United from London to Sydney via LAX, four flights in all. I booked upgrades on three of them, and was re-downgraded on two of those. Two of the four flights had bad entertainment systems, and the flights had different baggage allowances (I had 2 bags from Sydney to LAX, but then had to pay USD$50 for my second bag from LAX to London).

Now, there was a terrorist attack. I am 6’3″, so flying in regular coach is a bit of a nightmare, but it’s not the end of the world. I spoke to everyone I could– the boarding agent, the gate agent, the ticket desk, the reservations desk, and the phone-in reservation system, spending, all in all, several hours trying to figure out how to simply get the upgrade difference refunded.

Several of the older United employees were very nice and understanding, but they had neither the time nor the ability to effect the refund. The general feeling was rushed and overworked, and in every United queue I’ve been in there’s been low staffing levels, so everyone is a bit overwhelmed. The only interface to refund this money is a web portal, which promises a 7-10 day working time (at this point, it’s been six weeks for two different requests with no return contact. I’ve contacted my credit card company to request a refund from them).

The dangerous side of customer aversion
1) You alienate your customers — you make it less likely to keep customers coming back. I have a lot of miles on United and generally would book through them on US-based flights. Keeping customers should be easy, unless you kick them out.

2) You undervalue (and devalue) your employees — I’m sure that each anti-customer decision made economic sense when doing it– outsourcing, driving customers to the web, etc.– but the employees– especially the ones who are on the front lines– are the ones who your customers think of you as. When they don’t have the tools to do the right thing, are disempowered, and are the ones that the angry customer will shout at (something I try really hard to do, as I know what it’s like to be an exposed cog).

3) You stop being able to hear your customers — The biggest danger of becoming customer tolerant (rather than customer seeking), is that you cannot engage your customers in a conversation and you stop knowing what’s going on. Once you route calls through an external call centre, you have to spend more time, money, and energy to understand your customers, and you lose some organisational memory and networks which inform you about how your customers feel towards you. You’re probably going to forget to do it (as outsourcing is often cost-driven rather than customer-focus-driven).

If you’re an airline, you’re likely one of the few games in town, and you’ll still get customers. It’s funny, however, how Southwest, JetBlue, and Virgin America can come up from nowhere and gain so many customers so quickly– mostly by listening to customers and treating their employees well.

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Friendster: New thing, what do you do on here? Is it for dating? Oh, this is kind of cool– you can see the web of how your friends are connected. How long has it been since I logged on? What? They got a seven figure round of funding and they need someone to run their internal IT department? Do I really want to go to Mountain View every day? What’s to stop me or anyone from duplicating this in six weeks’ time? When was the last time I logged on?

MySpace: My nephew wants me to get on this so he can myspace me. OK. Man, this is slow. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do here. I get lots of spam and lots of comments from one particular ex-girlfriend. OK, whatever, this is an also-ran.

Tribe: I feel like I’m on the Friendster all over again. Ooh, I get to go through all my friends’ friends and add them as friends and… well, what do we do on here? <poke poke> There must be something interesting. Recipes… whatever. OK, local posting among my friends, but Craigslist seems like a better bet? Maybe? Maybe when I rent my apartment?

Facebook: I don’t think I buy it, but I’ve been told that, now that I’m back in graduate school, that Facebook will be at least as important to my social life as my mobile phone. The picture app is cool. I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do. Oh, look, students getting sent down from university due to photos on facebook. Make sure you don’t friend your parents on facebook! OK, job search coming up– anything I need to de-tag? OK, probably one or two. These apps are annoying– not really sure what they’re about, and anyway, I don’t really have time for them.

LinkedIn: Not really social networking, seems like a good idea to have places to go to keep track of changing emails and whatnot. Job search functionality is good. Man, I really do know an awful lot of people. I can see how this might be useful, though– this whole going-through-the-network thing– exploiting weak ties and whatnot.

Six months later, I may have discovered what social networking is for: It’s for a) reconnecting with “lost” people, and it’s particularly useful when living in remote, strange places where you don’t know a lot of people. Facebook is pretty well-executed, but I still don’t see the profit potential (well, I see the disruptive potential of the medium, and I’m sure that someone’s going to find a way to make sense of all that data, but I think that the use is going to come from other sources).

The real value:
Actually, I think there’s huge and unexploited potential to use social networks in companies– to analyse and manage distributed networks of people.

Lots of companies use them to capture information, and even the aggregate information can be used to identify power brokers and communications networks inside of organisations. (seeing who is communitcating with whom).

The real value comes from supporting and enabling discussions and communities of practice.

Enormous value comes from building networks that aid in organisational resiliance, and helping to achieve collaboration.

Further real value comes from status updates, sharing of information, and capturing IM conversations.

Work can actually be fun. Keep it interesting, keep your employees motivated, and it will be.

Geeky bits – How do I do it, and what else can I do?
As search technology gets better, as communications technology gets better, it’s becoming more integrated*; as it’s becoming more integrated, it becomes easier to capture information.

Information overload
We’re suffering from information overload. There are two ways to deal with this: Strucutre and control that information, including all kinds of granular access controls, which runs the risk of losing information you need, missing opportunities for collaboration, user indifference, and perhaps most critically, users end-running around you and installing their own whatever– whether it’s USB drives, internal file servers, ipods, or whatever. Yes, you can limit all of those things with security policies, but it’s just more work for yourself and more difficult for you to do your job.

Think about the situation where you use your desktop search app to find the email or IM you can’t dig up– gmail’s search functionality is excellent for this (although I use Thunderbird to read/write email generally). Now imagine that it’s across your Intranet, and you can access your IMs, emails, wiki postings, blogs, Sharepoint (or other posted) documents, etc.

Imagine going to your email client, finding a voicemail, clicking to call, switching to IM, searching up a past conversation, popping up a desktop control session, all from one place. It’s kind of the holy grail, and we’re almost there.

Imagine that someone’s out of the office (vacation, redundant, fired, quit) and you need some piece of information that’s in their head. They don’t answer, or, in a bad case, demand renegotiation of their redundancy package or want consulting hours to come sort it out. Imagine that same enterprise desktop search across their work email, IMs, etc.

Preparation versus control for floods
We can do a couple of things to prepare for this flood: Set up a lot of arcane strucutres and control it, or understand that it’s coming and have a good boat (along with some fishing nets, water supplies… OK, the analogy is breaking down). I’m suggesting go with the flow. Make it fun, make it interesting, enable good search across that range of information, and let people get back to work.

Sharepoint 2007/MOSS is great at this (remember, I come from a UNIX/Linux background, so that’s quite the statement) and it functions (with some twiddling and expensive consulting) with Microsoft’s UC. There are some promising open source alternatives (I’m looking forward to trying Unison which looks quite promising myself, as when you start up a business, setting up Exchange is a bit much). Zimbra does much of what Outlook does as well. Alfresco claims to do what SharePoint does (and at a much lower cost), and it supports SharePoint’s protocols. Google’s had some success with their search appliance (but I’ve heard about some growing pains as well).

Opportunities versus problems
Fundamentally, when you run into a challenge, you can view it as an opportunity or a problem. The world moves awfully quickly, and if you start to see things as opportunities– for learning, growth, experimentation– you have the chance to innovate and create. See what happens when you crowdsource internally. You enable collaboration. You can build communties of practice.

Make work fun. Keep it interesting. It’s a much bigger motivator than money or prizes. Build relationships over the long term, and people will think you’re a great place to work– you’ll have access to a bigger talent pool.

Notes
*although hopefully built as small, separate pieces and integrated so that it doesn’t become too heavy and bloated… Much as I love Outlook’s capabilities, I’m often stymied by its resource requirements and heavy disk swapping– I just want to send an email! This isn’t so bad on a desktop, but my thin-light 4200rpm laptop makes it… painful)

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Without, hopefully, making strong generalizations, (Africa is, after all a continent comprised of 53 countries, larger in area than the USA and all of Western Europe combined, with over a thousand languages, spread over six distinct language groups-by contrast, the Indo-European languages span all of Europe, through half of Asia.), Africa is a land full of very spiritual people-you see it everywhere, from the surfaces of Mtatus (combi-taxis) and Boda-Bodas (100cc motorcycle taxis), to the ever-present music and dance, to the rise of evangelical “Born-again” Christianity and Mormonism.

President-elect Barack Obama
is, as you might imagine, enormous across Africa. Kenya took off the day after the election. Nigeria (with much less connection) took off three or four days. Uganda, less so, but there’s an Obama club in Kitintale, a shop in Makindye, and. People who speak only Luganda or KiSwahili here offer me a fist bump, chanting “Obama” as I walk to work.

(I’m one of the few Mzungus here who walks anywhere over 500m. Everyone else takes taxis…)

Aside from the obvious link with the neighbouring country and the African origon, there’s no apparent direct reason to support Obama. Additional aid is a possibility, but not a certainty, particularly in this global economic climate.

Which brings us to religion
As many of you know, while I’m interested in religion generally and historically, I’m not a particularly religious person; I used to describe myself as an atheist, but that seems almost like a religion to too many people– very anti-lots of things, and not really worth the energy. I’d rather do things with my energy. I don’t really think I’m much of anything, to be quite honest. However, my view of religion is changing after seeing it operate in Africa.

Religion and spirituality cut across much of daily life in Africa. Family and religion are the centres of people’s lives, and it shows, whether Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or traditional/animist.

The Christian religions have adopted many of the traditional ceremonies– the Baganda wedding ceremony is now the “father’s giving-away” ceremony, for instance, and takes place a week or so before the Christian wedding.

There is strong take-up of Mormonism and Pentecostal or Evangelical Christianity (referred to locally as Born Again Christianity) in recent years, much of which is in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Mormonism’s strong sense of community aligns itself well with traditional community values– where, for instance, children are often adopted by locals or the extended family if something happens to the family. Islam also promotes strong community and family bonds.

The rise of the Born Again movements coincides both with the rise of the same movements in the United States as well as the coming to a head of the HIV/AIDS problems (including government’s finally recognising these as problems) and economic problems over the last twenty years.

…and its role in society
For many people, the coming of the church (or the church-based NGO) means the buliding of a community centre, or a kitchen, or mosquito nets, improved stoves, or an actual school.

One man that I met, Moses, is the head of a programme that has been building schools in Mbale for a decade. At the below school, when he arrived, “The mango tree was the headmaster’s office, the primary school was the Magnolia…”

A school built by a community, a community built heavily on religion.

Alcoholism
Alcoholism is an enormous problem in much of Africa, whether it manifests in fathers drinking away their problems in cities while their children starve or “Evening Class”– where men gather at the end of the day and drink locally brewed beer made from Sorghum, Millet, or Cassava, sold in buckets, and drunk in the last light of the night until it runs out– typically resulting in falling-down-drunkness.

Alcohol is linked in many minds as equivalent to idleness, lack of development, crops failing, insufficient rain, malnutrition, and a whole host of other problems.

The puzzle of Sub Saharan Africa
Economists are pretty good, over the long-term, at figuring out what will happen. They’re often even better at figuring out what happened and why (especially when they were wrong in the first place). The Solow model would have most of Africa in better shape than it is.

Sub Saharan Africa, however, resists all of the Macroeconomic models. There are many issues that point to reasons for these problems– HIV/AIDS (and other disease), changing weather patterns, distorted effects of aid (often brought in in incomplete packages, so building less Capital Stock than expected), corruption, etc.

Sociologists point to arbitrary land barriers, the difficulty of integrating cultures (Tanzania, with its dozens of tribal groups) seems to have had an easier time than places like Nigeria or Uganda, which have a few distinct groups), corruption, etc.

African Ingenuity and entrepreneurialism
Africans as a whole are amazingly adaptable and ingenious. The uses of trash- plastic bottles and bags– for other purposes is something that people see here regularly. Much of this is driven by necessity. Anyone who’s seen a bush mechanic work knows how much he can do to fix a 30 year old Land Rover with only a ball peen hammer and a pair of pliers.

I passed a guy just yesterday who’d rigged up a grinding wheel to his bicycle, with a stand, so that he could be a mobile knife grinder.

A little loud, but it works…

…and if you can’t fix it, live with it
Also, if you absolutely can’t fix something, then you live with it in its broken state. This applies to being on time for (or even remembering) appointments as well as selling parts off of your broken down car.

Huge swaths of Africa live on used things– whether it’s shopping for used American clothes (with goodwill tags attached) at Owino Market or importing vehicles from Japan (who have to get rid of them at 100,000 km on the odometer), Africans make do with a lot of things, passing them down and down until they’re completely used up.

The role of hope and opportunity
At the risk of sounding a bit too pie-in-the-sky, I would suggest that hope and opportunity play important roles in development.

Religion provides hope. It may not work for everyone, but it works for some people– and for many, it’s the strength (or community pressure) they need to keep out of the bar and go home to their kids. Religion also provides a thought for future planning– important in a country with a life expectancy of 47. Many of the poorer people I’ve met here who are religious are looking at their children’s welfare, trying to get them through Secondary, their Highers, or University– at the very least, a step beyond where they went.

The critical things that religion provides are hope, community, and opportunity. The role of a direct link with God breaks down sociological and tribal barriers, while allowing pride of self to remain. All over Rwanda I see people from Kenya, Ethiopia, and other tribes working– whether for religious or secular NGOs, for the betterment of the country and region.

Opportunity is interlinked with hope. For many people, scraping out a living is the best they can do, and they find opportunity everwhere, whether it’s driving people around on a motorcycle, selling phone cards in traffic, or buying and selling whatever you can.

These guys spent all day to make about $2.50 for this wood. They said it wasn’t worth it, but they had to do something.

Business and government
If you’re a government minister, you’re in good shape. You have access to a car, driver, a house, and cash beyond the dreams of nearly anyone else in your country. There’s nowhere up to go, except to PM/President or head of the Army. There’s also no reason to leave office.

If you’re the President, it’s even worse. To step out of office is to step into relative poverty from Armani suits, limousines, and private jets.

Large businesses, in Uganda at least, are run by foreigners. The situation was the same in Mozambique during the revolution, and the economy was crippled when the management skills left. Zimbabwe, similarly, has a shortage of management skills.

The role of entrepreneurship and aid
There’s a growing trend thinking that aid is Africa’s problem. I personally don’t agree, although it has been (and in some cases continues to be) part of the problem. My colleague down here Arthur and I talked about the difference between MIT thinking and Local thinking. You have these MIT engineers who design some widget that will help the local people, without taking into consideration the habits and adjustment factors that need to change, without looking at the problem as a whole and finding a whole solution (which may be less effective on paper).

Aid workers must do sonmething beyond just coming to a country and hoping to find a solution. Throwing resources at a problem can often make things worse over the long run.

Tntrepreneurship will be critical to Africa’s development– growing businesses from the ground up, building management skills, and honing the skills that people have into thinking bigger about problems, approaching them in a structured way, and solving them for themselves. Businesses need to learn how to hold money, track what they’re doing, and market effectively.

My step now is to spend the next five months (one down! Five to go!) figuring out how to support that kind of work, how (and if) I can do it on a large scale, and how I can make lives better while doing it.

Postscript: Just as I was struggling to get this posted over sketchy Internet, one of our partners sent me this, which seems to support much of what I’m thinking…

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Think of the Black Rock Desert, not nearly as hard, far more salty, and surrounded by arid savannah with a few water holes. Here there are a wide variety of antelopes, from teeny tiny Steenboks up to the Oryx and Eland Antelopes, Lions, Hyenas, Leopards, Wildebeest (AKA Gnu or Nature’s Nachos), Black and White Rhinos, Giraffe, Elephants, a variety of great African Eagles, Owls, and more.

And we saw loads. Much of the game in Etosha has adapted to the local environment and don’t migrate as game in other areas do. The game is focused around the watering holes, which means that lots of it can be seen, along with fascinating interactions. Additionally, there are floodlit water holes at all of the major campsites, which means that, although there is a lot of game driving, much of the big game comes to you.

Nature documentary fans will know what the water hole means– action! although I didn’t see anything get eaten, I did get to see a bit of interaction!

Unfortunately, the USB ports on my machine have become pooped, and I can’t get the photos off for Etosha, so you’ll have to make do with descriptions.

Lions
Our guide tells us we were lucky– we saw lions on each game drive and on the second night at the campsite. Mostly males, but we did see nine lions, including six lionesses on the final morning game drive out. The first time we had a Near Dark-style run for the gate at sunset– they lock the gates to the campgrounds at sunset, and woe betide the traveler who doesn’t make it– apparently, you sleep in your car at the gate.

Black Rhinos
One of the only things that doesn’t fear the lion– quite the opposite in fact. We saw rhinos several times, but they were most interesting at the watering holes– they came by late at night. The last time we saw them, there was a family of three (bull, cow, pup) joined by another cow. The second cow left, and then a lion came up to drink.

The Rhino has little to fear from any predator save man. They are huge, thick-skinned, fast, and strong. The old, the infirm, and the young, however, do. And they are protected fiercely by their parents.

When the lion came to drink, at first, he was ignoring the rhinos, who formed a defensive ring with the bull between the pup and the lion, snorting at it. The lion drank for a while and then finally stopped, staring at the rhinos. After some time and more snorting, the bull rhino did a mock charge– ran about 10m towards the lion, who turned and walked away. Amazing.

Elephants
Elephants are one of southern Africa’s success stories. A huge group of these giant beasts hogged the watering hole one evening, playing, drinking, and spraying themselves in the 40 degree heat while the other animals waited, very patiently, to drink. Elephants get to do whatever they want to do.

Hyenas
Unusually, we got to see a couple of hyenas, both the brown and the spotted variety. These guys typically hide away from everyone, but in Etosha, the lack of human hunters has them somewhat less fearful. Elsewhere, they’re considered pests and killed on sight, as they will hunt and eat anything, pretty indiscriminately, and are quite fierce.

The Pan
The Etosha Pan itself is the remnant of a prehistoric lake bed. It’s a salt pan that coveres nearly 5000 square kilometers (110×60 at its widest point). The name of the park comes from the pan itself, which means “Great White Place”.

Next
Onwards and upwards– to the Okavango Delta, hippos, water buffalos, more elephants, and who knows what all…

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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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(Long apologies to William Shakespeare. This is about how I’m feeling about the return to classes tomorrow).

Tomorrow I start off Hilary, or HELL-ary, term. This is when we have 5 classes (I’m also auditing Finance II, but only because they won’t let me actually take it), our Entrepreneurial Project, where we do a business plan, try to find a job, as well as keep up with the stuff we started off. This is where it all comes to a head and I find myself, once again, procrastinating.

I closed the book on my final between-term reading. I’m pretty lucky to have had a bunch of winners, no small thanks to Sara and Steve on Co Clare. They gave me a pile of books after I’d blown through all of my books in the first few days. Reviews at the end for those who are interested/care.

One upside to this term: Fewer books (to buy and carry around). Many, many more assignments, however. And there are four groups to work with (and schedule around) instead of one. It’s all going to be exciting. I’m filled with some trepidation (I fell asleep three times doing my OM reading) but I’m excited about the prospect of being back to work and in the swing of things. I don’t slow down so well, really.

The past week was filled with a lot of noise around the upcoming EP project and presentations about our electives for Trinity term. It’s a little scary that I’m choosing the last courses I’ll do on my MBA and I haven’t even gotten my grades from my first term yet… I am, however, very excited about the classes offered. Doug Holt is teaching two classes on branding. There’s a course on “High-impact Social ventures”– basically, profitable entrepreneurship with a social focus. Entrepreneurial and Social finance. Loads of stuff– and, interestingly, stuff I wouldn’t have asked for, necessarily, but probably more directly appropriate to the work I want to do.

A small group of us did a few mini pub crawls– Several of us are trying to hit all the pubs in Oxford this year– there are about 65 of them, so it’s a quite reasonable goal. And we finished “Nought week” with a Pembroke Pink Pub Crawl. My college‘s colors are navy, grey, and cerise, an awful colo(u)r we wear with great pride. We pub crawled with about half Pembrokian grads and half MBAs (where there’s drink, there are MBAs). A good time had by all, though I had forgotten that the average glass of wine (and generally not particularly good wine) in Oxford is £4. Ouch! Reminds me why I stick to beer. Though, by the end of the night, I was desperately trying to get hit by a truck loaded down with Campari and soda. Typical.

Book Reviews

What I read over my break, if you’re interested, in no particular order:

A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon. This is the guy who also wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the night-time, which is a good follow-up. The theme this time, rather than getting inside the head of a child with Asperger’s, is a somewhat soap-operatic story (there’s a family, wedding, the meaning of love, etc), but the trick here is that one of the players is going quietly and very British-ly mad. You get inside the heads of all the characters. A real page-turner, but one that doesn’t leave you feeling dirty at the end of it. This is probably, for me, a pretty close example of a perfect airplane book. You can pick it up and put it down, and it keeps your attention.

Redemption Falls, by Joseph O’Connor. I read Star of the Sea a couple of years ago, and enjoyed it. It was a good page-turner but with a bit of weight, and I was definitely interested in reading more work. O’Connor did journalism and non-fiction before turning to fiction, much like several of my favorite and most well-respected authors, such as Neil Gaiman, Tom Wolfe, Martin Amis. I think that does something good to these guys– gives them the experience and the skill to churn words out with accuracy, conciseness, etc. In any case, Star of the Sea was very enjoyable, but I fell in love with Redemption Falls. I was starved for literature and sweeping description, but O’Connor here is an Irish author writing about a wide range of people in the aftermath of the US Civil War. He paints vivid pictures and brings in stylistic tricks from Southern American writers while making them his own. It’s another broad story that takes in a wide range of people, and tears at your heart while it makes you proud of these forbears. I generally don’t seek out historical fiction, but this one really grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

Belfast Confidential, Colin Bateman. Page-turner, in the style of Christopher Brookmyre or Carl Hiaasen. Fun to read, especially when you just want something to read. And perhaps you need to escape from the blood, limblessness, smoke, death, and poverty of the pre-reconstruction time.

Human Traces, Sebastian Faulks. This was one that Sara (now pregnant! Congrats!) gave me. I put off reading it at first but got completely sucked in to it on the train from Udine to Milan. Another historical fiction novel. Two young men working as early psychiatrists, trying to discover what it means to be human. They don’t, yet at the same time they just may. This is a beautiful book and even got me a bit misty. One of my group members for Financial Management mentioned to me that Faulks was one of his favourite authors. I’m very much looking forward to other works by Faulks. Particularly On Green Dolphin Street.

The Undercover Economist, Tim Hartford: This is a really good look at economics. It also clarified a few things I was a bit fuzzy on just before the end of last term (and my econ exam). Written for the layperson, it generally helps you get a handle on why, for instance, Apple can charge so much more for its computers and still gain market share. It’s cool stuff.

Bonus: This interview by the FT with Jeffrey Eugenides (who wrote the excellent Virgin Suicides and the even better Middlesex). My favorite bit is the first question, as I think my answer may be the same:

FT: What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

JE: The Information by Martin Amis.

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There were a few amazing lecturers, a few average ones, and a couple of really, unconscionably bad ones. I’ve shared my thoughts on the bad ones with the course reps and the school in general, so I won’t rehash too much of that here. However, a few points are worth noting to those of you who may be teachers:

• Start on time, end on time.
• Don’t shout. Your students’ ears shut down.
• Answer questions in a different way. Anyone who needs a repeat will ask for a repetition.
• When answering questions, it helps to listen first, then answer. That way, you’ll answer the question asked.
• It’s been proven that powerpoint makes your brain glaze over, if you’re saying the same thing that’s on the screen.

On specific courses:

Financial Reporting:

Accounting is hard and different, from company to company, from country to country, and you have to be skeptical about the numbers. Then, there are lots of convoluted calculations and ratios that could tell you something if you could trust the numbers, but a skeptical nature helps, always.

The lectures were all around issues in accounting (you’d be surprised at how different and, actually, interesting and important most of the changes are, and how it can affect your life. And how rules are less good than principles). The problem sets were what we were heavily tested on, which was something of a shame as (most of us) just ran out of time to do them. We had one large group assignment which was an analysis of a company’s most recent financial statements. This was actually pretty cool. Most of the other group assignments were cases from ages ago and, by their nature, filled with the kind of information that pointed us in the direction to go. With this, we just had numbers, ratios, and trends, and had to analyze the statements ourselves. And that was more interesting, though fairly difficult.

Overall, this was pretty good. I felt like I learned a lot and continued in my belief that everything, always, depends.

Developing Effective Mangers:

This was a really case-based course. Some of the stories were interesting, and much of it left you with the sense that if you hire the right managers (and workers), motivate them properly, and set up the right type of teams, then everything will work out just fine.

This is one of the soft subjects, and it’s hard to pin down. I/We did fairly well on the group and individual papers (as well as me– finally– figuring out that the type of writing demanded in the UK is a much more subtle, fair, and balanced type of argument than the strong arguments favored in the US.) It’s something of a fairly frustrating course to take as you get the sense that it’s really critical but that there aren’t many hard lessons you can take from it. I’ve always enjoyed watching the power and group dynamics in my workplaces, though, and having some language in which to frame it was pretty cool. Switching lecturers midway through, however, was somewhat problematic.

Decision Science:

Stats. Back up your arguments. We didn’t do much of the had math behind the stats (hard as in “work” rather than “difficult”) but focused on the aplication of statistical models, which at our level makes sense: At the end of the day, the software will do the heavy lifting for you, though it did point out to me the flaw in every high school/undergraduate’s whining: When you learn the deep math, you get the higher concepts much faster.

Many useful tools came out of this. The best parts were, actually the assignments which, while frustrating, actually concretized the work we did in the class. I’d have preferred to have more assignments with smaller grades, but it’s definitely not the end of the world.

I suspect that decision trees will play a useful role in my life. And now I actually understand Bayesian filtering. And I kind of wish I’d taken stats instead of Trig and Precalculus in undergrad.

Strategy I:

This course, like DEM, was case-based, and somewhat frustrating. I feel like I learned a lot in the course, but didn’t get particularly good marks. I’m not too concerned about the marks (as long as I pass and feel like I learned stuff) but it always leaves me with the niggling feeling that I didn’t actually learn something. Also frustrating as the work I’m heading into involves strategy quite a lot.

However, as our lecturer told us, it’s another soft subject, and most strategy directors move out of their jobs before the fruits of their labor ripen (or sour, as the case may be). And for every rule, there’s a Richard Branson breaking all of them and making out like a bandit (or a Michael O’Leary, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs).

It’s a tough thing to teach, and all case-based, but I suppose there’s not much better way to teach it, other than to send us out into the world to start businesses and see who zags when everyone else zigs. If we could understand why Goldman Sachs was ahead of the game in getting out of the subprime fiasco before it collapsed, taking Finance CEOs with it, etc, then we could all make loads of money and never lose it. But then markets would be more efficient and we’d have trouble making money, so…

Anyway. Learned lots. Not too bad. Sometimes frustrating.

Managerial Economics:

I was really looking forward to this. I think Economics is a fascinating subject, but I just wasn’t really into it here for some reason. The stuff was interesting– I think it may have just been a lecturer/student clash, but I didn’t feel like I walked out with a whole lot of really good information. Except the stuff around pricing. Or maybe I just knew more Economics than I thought, but I felt like I went about 10% further in all the main areas, though quite a bit further in pricing. And after that it was just learning jargon.

The assignment, however, was pretty interesting. We took a market and did an analysis of it, which was much bigger and hairier than I initially thought– the market (ebay and internet auctions in the US) kept growing (when you dig into ebay, it’s a *lot* more than beanie babies and overstocked mobile phones). I think, on the assignment, that I didn’t have any deep insights that I wouldn’t have had before I came here, but I feel like I was more clear and concise in communicating those insights than I would have been earlier.

Bearing up my thesis that an MBA above all else teaches language.

Finance I:

This was the other big surprise: This was actually not nearly as tedious or difficult as I thought it would be– and was quite interesting to boot. This was at least a little bit due to the lecturer, who is not just intelligent in the extreme, but also a really amazing lecturer, making excellent use of socratic method and patiently explaining and reexplaining concepts. If it was a question that had to do with a prior week, he had one of us explain it. He knew the course backwards and forwards (“I will answer that question in the second half of the Week 3 lecture”") and just took it on.

I’d taken part of a Finance I course before, though I had to drop it when my dad died. The lecturer there was not good at all and the concepts weren’t all that hard, but it was just tedious.

Overall:

I’m happy with my choice to go to SBS. Very much so. The students are amazing, and the experience of being in Oxford is unparalleled anywhere else. I feel challenged (I haven’t received my grades yet, though I feel like I did fairly well), and I think that getting a distinction in a class here is quite a step up from getting an A in a class in a US college. There have been some speedbumps, but we the students are filling in gaps and holes in the teaching or in the course.

There are definitely some rough spots to SBS’s degree: Some of the lecturers are iffy at best. With the one-year timeframe, we don’t get quite as deep into some of the actual work, and the careers search is definitely compressed. Many of the “classic” MBA jobs are really geared to getting you into an internship between years and hiring you 9 months later; this presents challenges to the SBS student (or indeed any one-year MBA student). The careers service is too small, not particularly responsive, and doesn’t have the relationships with major investment banks that you’d get at INSEAD or LBS, but, then, if that’s your goal, you should go to LBS. They made the curious decision this year to not do careers events with Cambridge.

However, the school, once you understand the power structures (hey, there’s my DEM class talking!) becomes very responsive. We (the Social Entrepreneurs OBN) grabbed one of the bigwigs one day and expressed our unhappiness at the lack of a dedicated career rep for us social entrepreneurs: We had one within a week.

Coming up: Lots of “I’m so tired, no time to write, I’m so busy”. We just got our schedule for this term, and between Financial Management, Macro Economics, Operations Management, Marketing, Technology and Innovation Strategy, a business plan, preparations for the Skoll World Forum, our own attempts to set up an Oxford conference on business and the environment, and our attempt to align ourselves with Net Impact, it’s going to be a seriously crazy term.

Wish me luck!

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I’ve never been terribly bad at exams. They generally don’t stress me out, and I test pretty well. Which is fortunate, due to my extreme procrastination. However, the Oxford exam experience is pretty different. Much more stressful.

First of all, exams are all unidentified. You put a number on them. You do everything in pen (anything in pencil aside from diagrams is considered “rough work”), including math (where it’s important to show your work so you can get a few marks if you forget to carry the all-important ’2′). Then, they’re double-marked– two people get an answer key and mark your exams. If the marks are close, they’re averaged, and if they’re far, then the individual goes to a third examiner. It’s all very important and secretive and Oxford. It also takes a hell of a long time, which is frustrating as we’ve no feedback from two of our courses as the exam schools didn’t get them marked in time.

Second of all, there really isn’t that much time. I’m pretty used to having time to finish up my exams and go over my work. Not so here. The exams were pretty short but in most of them we had a very short amount of time to work, particularly when compared with the amount of information in my head poured out on the page. Crazy.

And when I got to Finance, I looked and had no idea what to do with the first question. I could see the formulae sheet in my head but none of them made any sense compared with what was the question was asking. Fortunately, several of the finance-y heads seemed pretty unsure and drew blanks so I don’t feel like quite such an idiot.

Finally, if the examiners feel like there are “too many distinctions” then they take marks off from everyone. And then remind us that we aren’t competing with each other.

Overall, though, I think I did fairly well. But I also thought I nailed one paper and only got a “good job” mark (65) on it. But I’m fairly sure that I won’t have to resit anything. I hope.

Stressed MBAs finished with exams. There’s champagne and, in my hand, a paper cup filled with 40 year old Macedonian moonshine.

We finished our final exam at 1030 on Thursday, then started drinking (pausing only to meet, after several shots of aged hard liquor, with the head of the Entrepreneurship project where he told us, nicely but basically, that our ideas weren’t all that good but we might be able to squeeze out a distinction if our later-that-day meeting with the Engineering school went well. It didn’t. They aren’t really ready for us.) and I didn’t stop until the bad DJ at the club at 2AM or something put on “Uptown Girl” which told me it was time to get the fuck to bed.

The next day I watched The Golden Compass, which was good, and cool to see bits that were filmed in Oxford, but left me feeling a bit not-quite-satisfied. Hard to place why, but there you go.

Ireland

After a few days picking up books I ran off to Ireland. Spent a few days wandering around Grafton street and shopping, then off to the West coast to see Steve and Sara, who is growing something besides art inside of her body. Very cool. Back in Dublin for 2 nights instead of one (I changed my trip to go visit Emilio from the Pembroke MCR and his family in Udine, Italy). Spent one night going to see Kìla, a Irish Trad meets world music band. They were really quite good. That morphed into drinks out with a bunch of the (now ex-) SF Irish Mafia which morphed into a good old-fashioned open bar house party. Except that it was in an office. It was random and goofy but also plain fun.

Italy

Saw some Italian cities, including Treviso, Trieste (the coffee there is way better than it is in Sausalito), and Venezia. Lovely towns, all. Good pace of life in Italy. Really good food. Cheap trains. Fashion and style– from everyone. There’s a lot going for this place.

Emilio’s family is absolutely wonderful. They welcomed me and feed me and won’t let me pay for anything, though they did accept the Italian wine I brought them, insisiting that it’s quite good. I’m fattenning up for the Rowing on Salamis and pastas and wine and walking and traveling and that’s all just fine with me. If you have a chance to spend Christmas with an Italian family, I suggest you do so. Even in the North, where it’s cold cold cold.

Artsy shot in the mirror from the vaporetto in Venezia.

(For those of you mostly interested in looking at my pictures and seeing how my life’s going, this is mostly a rant. Ignore it or else just bear with me. I’m trying to get some time to try to capture week 2, though I’m nearly halfway through week 3…)

It is, in a word, unusable. So much so that I’ve ended up ordering a Thinkpad T61 with Windows XP Pro on it. The machine spec is pretty similar (1.8ghz instead of 1.6 ghz) but it’s actually usable. Better than usable, in fact. Pretty good, even.

For instance: Power button to logon:

• Vista: 2 1/2m
• XP: 52s

Logon to functionality:

• XP: 36xs
• Vista: 2m+

XP does not:

• hang for no reason
• crash on login
• go into infinite loops when trying to delete files
• randomly crash explorer
• randomly crash Microsoft software (OneNote 2007, designed for Vista!)
• randomly deinstall software
• randomly try to reinstall software (vista edition of Symantec Antivirus)
• randomly disable my software (Nero, Dreamweaver, Adobe Acrobat)

I have absolutely had it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have been a UNIX (linux/AIX/Solaris) administrator for the last 9 years. For much of that time I’ve been pretty anti-Microsoft, and some things still annoy me, but I have reached the point where I want stuff to “Just work”, like my BlackBerry. I’m tired of recompiling kernels and mucking about in /proc to make stuff work. I’m tired of reading MAN pages and downloading beta software patches every time I want to do something wacky and out there like, say, watching a DVD (I was doing this on my Debian box back when it wasn’t really supported and, yeah, it was fun). But I just want the machine to work.

XP does, more or less. It should work a little better than it does, and Outlook shouldn’t be such a pig, but the GTD plugin works and helps me manage my very busy life and I no longer have time for Vista.

I think I’ll probaly be able to sell the X61 tablet for close to what I paid for it. I guess I’ll be out the $90 I paid for Symantec AV and the $70 I paid for the Vista upgrade for Nero. Oh well, I should have followed my own advice: wait for the first service pack.

I have not, however, seen a system this unstable than Windows 95. It reminds me of a ’98 installation after a year. This is unacceptable. There’s a lot of stuff that they got right but it just doesn’t ultimately work, and I’m unfortunately too busy to try to make it do so.

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The X61 Tablet:

I want to love this, and I almost do. Almost. The tablet functionality is great. The handwriting recognition is as close to perfect as I could expect. The system is well-thought out in terms of switching, power, functionality while in tablet mode, and it’s completely intuitive. There are a boatload of reviews online which talk in in far greater detail about each and every option which I’m not going to try to re-do here, so I’m only going to touch on things that are great, niggles, or outright annoy me.

I love the manual switch for the wireless. It hasn’t thrown Vista into any spinning fits of insanity like some of the other functionality.

The pen is flawless, intuitive, and the “pen flicks” is a really cool feature.

Switching to tablet is well thought-out. It’s easy to figure out and everyone I’ve shown it to was using the handwriting in minutes with good accuracy. There’s also IBM’s shock protection thingy which parks the hard drive heads when it feels like it’s being shaken. This was FAR too sensitive as shipped but easy to adjust the sensitivity level.

As a geek, I feel like I should figure out whose fault this is, but as an up-and-coming MBA student, I’m really annoyed by the Vista/Tablet integration. Switching to (or from) tablet mode results in about a 10% chance of the system just going haywire, often involving a reset. In all cases, I have to let the thing sit for a couple of minutes after I do it to let it figure out where it is– as though I’ve just banged it on the head and it’s got to figure out what it’s doing. I don’t really care whose fault it is, from some perspective I feel like I just bought the most expensive, top of the line laptop at $3000 and it just doesn’t work.

Speaking of cheap: Dear IBM: If someone buys a $3000 laptop from you with a DVD burner, please for god’s sake give them some DVD burning software. It’s $80 retail and just a bad experience. I’m getting sort of tired of paying top dollar for stuff that’s about 98% finished. I don’t even mind installing it myself. I’ve been advocating and buying ThinkPads since the days of the 760EL– almost ten years now. I’ve probably (as an IT manager) been responsible for the purchase of several hundred of your laptops, not to even count the P-series dollars and IBM Global Services dollars. We’re talking significant 7 figures. Don’t cheap out on me now. (I know it’s Lenovo now, though it still says “IBM” on my support page and my laptop).

The docking station docking/undocking is flawless and works and I couldn’t really ask for much more. You push the button, it docks and undocks. yay.

Windows Vista:

I’m having a fairly large love/hate relationship with Vista at the moment. I’ve got Vista Business on this which has almost everything– I have the upgrade to Vista Ultimate which I’m somewhat tempted by although I’m a little afraid to actually do the upgrade given Microsoft’s track record with upgrades and my experience so far with Vista. I do have some backup DVDs which might help me out of a pickle.

Interface: The interface is great. I love the mini windows when doing alt-tab switching. I love a number of the little shortcuts– like in the top bar of Windows Explorer, where it’s suddenly so easy to get around, in a smart, intuitive way. I love the start->search functionality. Windows Desktop Search seems to work really well. However, despite having a 3.4 as my “windows experience” score, the system is simply unusable with all the stuff turned on. It became usable (though looking much like XP) after I went in and disabled all the Aero bells and whistles. I don’t know if the hardware (this is a “thin and light” laptop after all) isn’t up to it or what, but I don’t think that they’re doing anything specifically difficult.

Even after disabling all the bells and whistles in the interface, it’s still better than XP. A lot of things have just become really intuitive, though there are still way too many (though fewer than before) clicks to get to a restart/shutdown/hibernate/sleep prompt.

Stability: In a word, this system is unstable. Explorer crashes quite a lot. Suspend/resume is iffy. Switching to tablet (above) makes it crash. Acrobat Reader is really unstable, to the point where if I suspend/resume I have to make sure that I have no Acrobat Reader windows open or the system will crash, hang, etc.

Performance: Here again we’re totally unacceptable. If I were to put on my developer’s hat I’d say “memory leak”. The system, after running for a while, hangs for a bit. It’s still extremely disk-intensive– for what, I don’t know– so make sure, if you’re getting Vista, that you spring for the fastest disks with the most cache onboard. Also get a lot of RAM. But even with 2GB of RAM and a Core2 Duo Vista will crawl.

Overall: I like the way it’s going, but it feels more like a final beta than an actual product. The old adage “wait for SP1″ still applies, sadly. I’d say that XP is probably a 7/10, OSX is probably an 8/10, and Vista I’d put at about 6.8/10. If they could get the stability and performance issues sorted out I’d probably put it closer to a 7.9.

(Why didn’t I get a MacBook? I wanted, but was willing to live without, the tablet functionality. I do hate hate hate TouchPads. The little joystick thing on the ThinkPads (though not really anyone else’s) work really well for me. That’s still something of a niggle. Ultimately it came down to Apple’s inability to put out a laptop that weighs less than 5 pounds. I’ll go on record as saying that I’d pay probably $400 (on top of the Microsoft tax) to Apple if they’d give me a DVD of OSX that I could run on my ThinkPad. That would be perfect (plus having the 3 buttons on my ThinkPad would work well with the X server I could run on OSX).

(Why not Linux? I love linux. I’ve been using it for 14 years now, since before the release of the 1.0 kernel. It works really well. It also doesn’t talk to SharePoint, it doesn’t really talk to Exchange, and it doesn’t sync with my BlackBerry. And got tired of reinventing the wheel every time I wanted to do something. I do run it in a VM when I need to do some types of things. And on this server. But it doesn’t serve my needs. I continue to consider running the operations of future companies on it but it’s still not quite there for the desktop. And after 10 years working as a Unix admin I’m a little burned out and ready for stuff to just work. Ideally with the reliability of my old 32 cpu P-series box. Hey, IBM: P-series laptops anytime?)

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