Dylan Salisbury’s weblog

Elevator pitch contest

December 12, 2008 · 2 Comments

This is a post about what I learned from participating in the 2008 EC Elevator Pitch contest organized by Entrepreneurs’ Connection at Santa Clara University.

First of all, huge thanks to the team that organized the event, which included Venkat Jonnalagadda, Meher Shah, Swetha Sirupa, and other members of the Entrepreneurs’ Connection.  Thanks also goes to the contest judges, B.V. Jagadeesh from Inventus Capital Partners, and SCU Professors David Weir and Carl Steffens.

Most of what I learned came from preparing for the contest and including recent lessons from Professor Desmond Lo’s Marketing Strategy course.  What I gained afterwards was mostly a confidence boost and some contacts, because I won the contest (woo hoo!)
This contest required a pitch for a company or contest that hadn’t yet been launched.  I had to consider some of the most important aspects of a new venture such as

  • Identifying a large market opportunity
  • How a small company could build a sustainable competitive advantage
  • A first offering to use to lanuch the company from seed capital

But I didn’t deal with some other real-world concerns, particularly:

  • How I would recruit a founding team.
  • Appropriate amount of primary research or prototype to do before launching or asking for venture capital.

For this contest, I started with a couple of product ideas that had been kicking around in my head.  I looked for marketing research to support their viability, until I hit on a larger market opportunity that I could articulately defend — a difference between how.small and medium-sized companies spend on IT, and a new category of products that could save one of them money.

From there, I worked backwards to define a strategic competitive advantage that could support the survival of a new venture, and reworked one of my original product ideas — now instead just being an interesting idea, I could pitch it as a way to enter a multi-billion dollar market!

Putting a 2-minute speech together was another difficult task.  I also worked backwards in the final pitch, from market opportunity to copmany competitive advantage to product.  It barely worked as a 2-minute speech, I ran out of time and almost missed an important part of the product description.

If I make a similar pitch, I think I will omit a lot of the competitive discussion, because it’s extremely likely to to be the subject of follow-up questoins.  I would try to have a few great twenty-second answers prepared to those follow-up questions.  That way I would come to a two-minute presentation armed with three minutes of pitch.

And before I would pitch for any serious money, I hope I would remember how much I gained from the focused prep for this contest, record myself practicing, get feedback from colleagues, and get delivery ideas from other elevator pitches such as the TechCrunch elevator pitches that can be found on YouTube.

→ 2 CommentsCategories: MBA

Osmotic communication - now with photos

October 21, 2008 · No Comments

Software engineering guru Alistair Cockburn found that one property of most successful small co-located development teams is osmotic communication.

Here are two photos of work spaces that allow for osmotic communication:

1. Tellme, a Microsoft Subsidiary (where I work) - See http://www.tellme.com/about/careers and click on the second photo.

2. Noop.nl, home of prolific software management blogger Jurgen Appelo - See http://www.noop.nl/2008/10/how-to-do-many-projects-with-few-people.html

Which development teams achieve osmotic communication on their projects? Fortunately, Jurgen explains how they run their projects — trying to keep everyone working on one project at a time, seating the project team together, and having a project manager help keep distractions away from the team (although I bet the seating arrangement accomplishes 80% of that job).

You can’t see it from the photo, but at Tellme, we have longer projects that require deep involvement of more people, and for a number of reasons many engineers spend time on two or more projects each week. We also have an remote work culture that accommodates certain key engineers who work from home in remote locations, and some other engineers who work from home a portion of each week. So the flow of information is probably a lot different than the Noop.pl office even though we reap many benefits from the open seating arrangement.

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MBA project teams: Roles and schedules

October 21, 2008 · No Comments

This is the first in a series of posts about learning and working effectively as a member of an MBA class project team. In the gradute business programs at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, group project work is fundamental. This started with some feedback I provided to Professor Terri Griffith who quoted me in a blog entry of hers recently.

Roles

The effective teams I’ve been on have had the following well-defined roles:

Team leader: Responsible for making sure work is fairly divided, meetings happen, members are aware of what’s expected of them, and any executive decisions that need to be made. Of course it’s still great when decisions are made by consensus. I’ve seen the team leader role can handed off during the quarter, either by plan or because the current leader is overwhelmed — both times it was effective.

Document editor (one per major document): This person is responsible for assembling everybody’s work and for high and low-level consistency of the document. This person needs to be very quick on communication and editing near the document due date. In a time crunch, this person has authority to make editing decisions or rewrite someone else’s work.

Schedule

Most projects I’ve been on go through the following stages:

1. Defining who’s in and out of the team.
2. Reading the project material and thinking about the key problems.
3. Writing phase I: Splitting up and working on research or background writing tasks (for example, analyze the competition).
4. Debate and agree on the project’s main conclusions
5. Writing phase II: Write the supporting text and conclusions (for example, describe the recommended marketing mix).
6. Final editing

This has worked well enough so far, but I wonder if there are major alternatives to this two-phase approach. This structure doesn’t guarantee equity of intellectual contribution, but the writing assignments in Phase I and Phase II can be assigned in a way that adds to an overall balance.

Challenges

If a participant has particularly poor writing skills, this isn’t noticed until the end of step 3. The work of improving the writing falls on the document editor by default, and the group doesn’t have an obvious way to allow this person to “redeem” his or herself by taking on a helpful role with less writing responsibility. With the project schedule described in this article, the only way a poor writer can avoid causing a big problem would be to self-identify himself or herself and ask to be paired up with somebody else for writing assignments.

Possible improvements

Professor Griffith recommends that the group get to know each other early over coffee or a beer. That sounds great but with everyone busy, this needs to be scheduled right away! Her post also suggests some alternate facilitator roles, but I’m not sure if a typical project team (4-6 people working over a 10 week quarter) allows for this.

I would really like to identify an alternative schedule to what I described above (which probably has different key roles), so that my next team can explicitly choose methodology A or methodology B based on the project requirements and team members’ interests.

So, I would like to hear more suggestions and I hope to follow up with alternative structures.

Look for another post on tools and technologies.

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MGMT 538: Managing Teams and Projects, Bo Tep, Spring 2008

October 20, 2008 · 1 Comment

Introduction

I took Managing Teams and Projects from Professor Bo Tep in Spring 2008. This is an elective course in the MBA program at Santa Clara University. I took it as a late-night class, starting at 8:30 PM, before the business school eliminated that schedule spot.

Instructor profile

Professor Tep had a career in the telecommunications industry before moving recently to academia as a second career.

Classroom experience

The most important thing to point out is that half of most class sessions was spend on presentations and activities led by a student team. Each team was responsible for planning two group presentations that taught something substantial while keeping the class interested. Most of these involved some traditional talking over PowerPoint slides, a teamwork-related game, and a follow-up discussion relating the game experience to the topic in question.

Professor Tep made a few things clear at the start of the course. First of all, the course is all about teams, and not about projects. Second, Professor Tep tries to improve the course from quarter to quarter, so some things students have heard about previous sections may or may not apply to this section of the course. Of course, every instructor should make conscious improvements. When I started writing this series of course reviews, this statement influenced me to be sure to phrase my essays as reviews of specific course sections, not as timeless reviews of the course or the instructor.

Another thing to note is that Professor Tep used some of the course’s main themes about adult learners to structure the course itself. Students were assigned to teams by Professor Tep at the first class. The teams lasted all quarter, and most of the course work was done within these teams. Each team was responsible for two in-class presentations and two group papers during the quarter.

Each class had a topic corresponding to a chapter from the textbook, Joining Together by the Johnson brothers. Some chapters were split into two classes. As I noted above, about half of each class session was taken by a presentation led by one of the teams. The remaining time was spent with a short prepared lecture and general class discussion moderated by Professor Tep.

Coursework, exams, and grades

Each team was responsible for two group presentations, a mid-term paper, and a final paper. Each topic was expected to be 8-10 pages on one of the course topics. Groups had considerable leeway to define the subjects of their paper. Two individual papers were supposed to account for a total 15% of the course grade, but midway through the course Professor Tep made the second individual paper optional.

What I learned

I took a deeper dive into some of the topics that I learned about in MGMT 501. Most of this learning was about topics chosen for my individual and group projects: Sources of power and status within groups, positive and negative outcomes of intergroup conflict, and conflicts arising from mergers and acquisitions.

I also learned some things about effective presentations, spurred by Professor Tep’s high standard for keeping the whole class engaged in the class presentations, and a healthy competitive spirit between project teams.

Professor Tep’s lectures emphasized the importance of building trust within a team and the group leader’s responsibility for candid 1:1 communication outside of group interactions. I learned several group work techniques that were immediately applicable to MBA course projects — so I’m particularly glad that I chose to take this course early in the program.

Criticisms

It was too easy to skim through many of the topics, and because some of the topics were not discussed deeply in class, I missed some of the core material. Part of this is due to the fact that group presentations and group-led activities - a major component of this course - took up almost half the total class time.

I think it the course could have been structured for more breadth if Professor Tep required individual papers to be on specific topics, or planned lecture time with a bit more structure.

Recommendation

Once you visualize yourself engaging in an hour or two of games during the quarter, and planning and leading two of these activity sessions, you may have an easy time deciding whether you want to take this Professor Tep’s MGMT 538 class! I believe that every MBA student at Santa Clara should consider this course as an elective. If you have your heart set on a career that does not involve any work in permanent or temporary teams, or influencing external teams or assisting them in conflict resolution, an MBA might not be the right degree program for you anyway.

Trailer

This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

Allan Chen posted a review of this course from Winter 2007 on his blog.

→ 1 CommentCategories: MBA · MBA Course Reviews

Tool Naiveté vs. Tool Fetishism

October 9, 2008 · No Comments

I was thinking about Seth Godin’s post today about some essential knowledge worker tasks. Obviously he has been running into some people who have not been able to keep up with modern standards of information worker productivity.

For me, someone more deeply involved in information tools, I have a problem of needing to get better at the right tools and keep current on what’s available, without wasting too much time learning about the new stuff.

Know the tools or own them?

Seth asks if you can imagine a metal worker not knowing how to use a blowtorch. But master craftsman go further and own their own tools (see Professor Terri Griffith’s post about this)… If you’re in this camp, you’ve figured out how to tweak your editor and be very productive with it, but then you will naturally be more reluctant to invest in a new way of doing things.

I heard a story lately about somebody who had worked their way up through a large engineering organization with an old-school Unix background. After 10+ years she was a vi master, but had never even heard of emacs. An extreme example which leads me to…

The challenge of staying current.

A big part seems to be to find a sweet spot of competence with tools that work for me and those I collaborate with, and still stay current on new developments.

For me, the RSS reader is a big part of keeping current. Another part is to have a few friends who are crazy about this stuff.

No — Let me back up — an important competency is to take in a bunch of new information and filter it effeciently. I’m gained some skills in managing my inbox and RSS reader, and now those seem very important to me.

For my own personal version of the Emacs-VI example, after reading Seth’s post I added something to my task list… “Learn how to publish a simple Google Spreadsheet”. Although I’ve been building competence in Excel to support my career at Microsoft and my journey as an MBA student, his post was an eye-opener to me that I’ve got to open my eyes to Google Docs too.

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Today the automobile, tomorrow the men’s room

August 29, 2008 · No Comments

Well, Californians have bought their bluetooth headsets and improved their in-car mobile phone practices. But the work world (at least the slice that I experience) still has a problem with etiquette somewhere else. These are the top ten worst actions that I have seen. (I won’t admit to which ones I have actually done).

10. Allowing any mobile device to make any sort of noise whatsoever. This could have been avoided with some planning, unless an emergency brought you into the bathroom. If your devices are all silenced and untouched when you’re taking care of business, consider yourself a silent hero. There’s not a lot of glory in this position, but pat yourself on the back… but AFTER you wash your hands, OK?

9. A phone rings with a customized ringtone. A unique ring sound pierces any sort of feigned anonymity between you and others. You’re in the unenviable position of deciding whether to fumble around to silence the phone or to let your co-workers or business associates enjoy 30 full seconds of Groove Is In The Heart.

8. Carrying a laptop into the room and leaving it at the sink. This seems to happen when a busy person is hurring in between meetings. But, is this really the best place to leave it? If I spash your computer while I’m washing my hands, nobody’s going to want to explain the situation to IT. This action is even worse if the laptop is opened up because it’s configured to sleep or hibernate when shut. IT’S STARING AT ME!

7. Answering a call at the sink. Here’s where the list stops becoming funny. You may have a relationship with your caller in which the subject of this call is perfectly appropriate to discuss in a public restroom, but everyone else in the room will be threatened or tempted by the idea that their potty noises will be exposed to an unknown caller.

6. Answering a call in the stall. Now the hygiene axis comes into play, and we’ve clearly crossed over the “yucky” line. Once you experience this happening in a public restroom, you may think about it any time ANYBODY presents you an opportunity to touch his or her mobile phone.

5. Walking into the restroom while on a phone call, and proceeding to do one’s bathroom business. This is a show of audacity that is visible to co-workers on both sides of the restroom door! You have basically told all of co-workers that you view the work environment as a big college dorm, or something. Even worse if you were just listening in on a conference call and surprise everyone when you start talking at the stall or urinal. Hey buddy, two minutes ago when you were quiet and I was making a loud noise, did you have your phone on mute?

4. Placing a call from the stall. OK, you knew you were going to be there for a long time and your wanted to knock a couple items off your to-do list for the day. But did you have some other item on the list marked MAINTAIN CIVILITY WITH THE REST OF THE HUMAN POPULATION?

3. Answering a call at the urinal. OK, so you’re multitasking and ambidextrous. Yuck.

2. Placing a call from the urinal. I wouldn’t have even included this if I hadn’t witnessed it myself. Of the six billion plus people in the world, does any one of them really want to receive this particular phone call?

1. Walking into the bathroom stall with one’s laptop. Do I really want to know what’s going on here? I’m just going to assume that you need to see the PowerPoint slides to follow along with the conference call you’re listening to.

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Kicking off a software development project

August 27, 2008 · No Comments

(cross-posted to skunkworks site scusoftware.org

I started a new software project recently. In this project I’m the technical lead of a small group of programmers, but not their manager. We’ve all worked together to some extent in the past, so we have some trust and group cohesion early on as well as a shared understanding of the normal development methodology followed by our organization. This is the largest project I’ve led, so I spent some effort learning about the “right” way to kick off a development project. Here’s a few things I’ve learned so far.

Do your homework: The most significant challenges of the project need to be “sized up” before much work can begin. If you are the technical lead, your challenge may be to how to do this without taking all the interesting work from the rest of the team. There’s a different challenge if you are a project manager who is relying on your technical expert for this homework.

Get sign-off on an initial project plan: This is a lot harder than it seems if you don’t already have a single sponsor who clearly wants you to write a project plan. If your organization has a copy, IEEE Standard 1058-1998 is a great format because it forces you to address topics that might otherwise go unspoken at this stage such as risk mitigation and the external interfaces of the project team.

Hold a kick-off meeting: The best template I found for a kick-off meeting was actually from this article on a construction industry-focused website - check it out! I have a whole other article in mind about this meeting.

Choose a software development methodology with your team? Not so fast…

There are a lot of exciting ideas in the world of software development, and an egalitarian leader may want to set the tone right by letting the team democratically decide how they want to work. But this will only work once your group has trust in each other and confidence in you as a leader.

If this is a brand new project, keep the focus on your organization’s current practices. Show your team that you have some understanding of the best and worst aspects of the current process, and assure them that the team will figure out ways to avoid the pitfalls of the process that other projects may have fallen into.

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MKTG 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making, Ling-Jing Kao, Spring 2008

July 19, 2008 · No Comments

Introduction

I took this course from Professor Ling-Jing Kao during my third quarter in the MBA program at Santa Clara University. This is an introductory marketing course that all MBA students must either take or waive.

Instructor profile

Professor Kao is a recent Ph. D. who began her teaching career at SCU in 2006.

Classroom experience

Most classes began with Professor Kao handing out lecture notes and other material (already stapled and 3-hole-punched) then a student summarizing the main topics of the previous lecture. The class was structured as a lecture with a reasonable amount of in-class discussion moderated by the instructor. The content followed the pre-published lecture notes closely.

During a few classes, we watched videos (two video split over three or four classes) that described marketing strategies undertaken by two consumer companies. After the videos we discussed them briefly in class and tied some future lecture topics back to the videos. These video cases were the subject of some mid-term and final exam questions.

The basic framework for the material was provided by the Harvard Business School publication “Note on Marketing Strategy” describing on overview of the marketing process. We referred back to this again and again as we moved through the lectures and homework.

Professor Kao kept class time well balanced among lecture and discussion, and rarely let the class go very far off topic. Some of the discussions went very well, but there were a number of subject areas where she just didn’t seem to be able to answer students’ questions for one reason or another. Some of it may have been due a language gap, but I also suspect that Professor Kao is very well versed in certain areas such as consumer market research, but less comfortable fielding questions on other topics.

Coursework, exam, and grades

There were two exams and two group papers. Each was roughly 25% of the final course grade.

The exams mostly drew on lecture material and the video cases discussed in class. The exams were each part multiple-choice, part short essay question. A few of the multiple choice questions may have been on topics covered in the required reading but not in class.

The projects each involved producing a concisely-written 4-page paper that follows the marketing strategy model from the HBS paper. 4 pages isn’t a lot of text, although we were allowed unlimited exhibits, which could themselves be somewhat wordy. In the editing process my group critically evaluated which ideas and recommendations were relevant and which didn’t fit. I didn’t get much insight into how closely Professor Kao followed her own grading guidelines.

I came into this course not really knowing what marketing was, and by the end I had a solid understanding of the scope of marketing activities, where they belong in the business planning and execution cycles, and a very strong concept of appropriate and inappropriate uses of the basic types of market research. I used this knowledge right away to ask intelligent questions about marketing and strategy at my own workplace and in a start-up venture that a colleague embarked on.

Criticisms

Professor Kao didn’t add as much real world insight into marketing topics as I had hoped. I suspect that this is because all of her expertise is in market research and she has only a few quarter’s experience fielding discussions with graduate students.

Although there was regular required reading from the textbook (Kotler and Keller), it was easy for me to skip the readings and keep up with the class until I hit those few exam questions that relied on the text. Professor Kao indicated that she thought the text was difficult to work with, but she expected us to read it because it is a widely used textbook that almost every MBA student is familiar with.

Another student described this course in general (not just Professor Kao’s section) as being an simple undergraduate Marketing course packaged as a graduate course. That might be somewhat valid, but for the group of students in my course, starting an MBA program without this knowledge, the content seemed appropriate.

Recommendation

I would recommend taking this course from Professor Kao because it was well structured and covered the basic marketing model and market research techniques thoroughly. Because Professor Kao doesn’t have industry experience, a different instructor with a professional background may add a lot of value for many students. Also, if you are a new MBA student who already has some marketing education you should consider waiving this course altogether.

Trailer

This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

→ No CommentsCategories: MBA · MBA Course Reviews

Ian is the Empire

July 15, 2008 · No Comments

Ian <i>is</i> the Empire

Ian is the Empire

This Microspotting promo T-shirt has been happily relocated to sunny California — as promised. Here’s a shot of it outside the Tellme NOC with Ian Bone, Platform Engineering intern. Thanks, Ariel!

→ No CommentsCategories: Microsoft

ACTG 302: Managerial Accounting, Ahmad. Hosseini, Winter 2008

July 12, 2008 · 2 Comments

Introduction

I took Managerial Accounting from Ahmad Hosseini in Winter 2008, my second quarter in the MBA program. This was the first quarter that introductory managerial accounting was taught as a separate course to graduate students. Before this, ACTG 301 combined financial and managerial accounting.

Instructor Profile

Professor Hosseini has an extensive international academic career in accounting that includes rising to Dean of Sonoma State University’s business school then going to Africa as Founding Dean of the American University of Nigeria’s business school. At Santa Clara he runs the Certificate in Advanced Accounting Proficiency program in addition to lecturing.

This course covers the basic concepts of Managerial Accounting, and Professor Hosseini kept the class focused in this content.

Classroom Experience

The majority of each class was a prepared lecture. These lectures were based on PowerPoint slides provided by the textbook publisher, but they had been edited somewhat by Professor Hosseini, who also added on some other examples.

Before each homework assignment was due, Professor Hosseini walked through solutions to practice problems which were generally very similar to the homework problems. These were presented on the computer display and were pretty easy to follow.

Before the first day of class, Professor Hosseini organized the class into 9 groups of 4 or 5 people by order of last name. These were teams who did two brief class presentations during the course (more on this below).

There was not much Q&A or student interaction during the class except during the team presentations. I think this was mainly Professor Hosseini’s style, as he wanted to fit a lot of the core content into the course and already had enough structured presentation material to fill each course. Professor Hosseini did call on students to answer questions during the class, but there wasn’t much open-ended discussion or exploration of other aspects of accounting.

Coursework, exams, and grades

The almost-weekly homework assignments took a bit of time, but they were not too hard because of the sample problems that were covered in class. Many students, including me, spent a lot of time lining up tables properly in Excel. The wiser students did the homeworks using pencil and paper, which helped them prepare similar tables during the exams under time pressure.

Two mid-terms and a final exam made up the majority of the class grade. Individual problems were not very hard, but all three exams presented a time crunch for most students. Each exam had a lot of low-credit multiple choice questions. To me, some of these questions were easy but others took as much time as the non-multiple-choice problems.

Each team prepared two 15-minute presentations for homework problems that were somewhat open-ended and subject to interpretation and opinions. These could generally be prepared with one or two in-person meetings the week before, and a little coordination over e-mail. These were good learning experiences for me, and the Q&A sessions between other students and the presenting teams were also useful.

What I learned

I learned the core concepts of managerial accounting. Not having any experience with any kind of manufacturing company, I got some initial insight into the financial and planning considerations faced by a company with a multiple stage production system.

Criticisms

Several students in my section were unhappy with Professor Hosseini’s lecture style. I beleive this was due to the speed of his lecture and the fact that he was not very interactive with students during the class. There might be other reasons that I misunderstood.

As an MBA student who is probably never going to work directly an accounting or finance, I would have preferred a class experience that tought me more about the practical impact of accounting principles on decisions faced by managers throughout a company (something I got a lot of insight into from Paisley’s Financial Accounting course). In other words, I think I wanted to learn how to work with managerial accountants rather than how to be a managerial accountant.

The course syllabus was revised several times during the quarter, and from the start it was not very clear exactly what day each homework set was due until a class or two beforehand. This was distracting, but because it was the first quarter ACTG 302 was ever taught I expect this will not be as much of a problem in the future.

Recommendation

If you are considering a professional or academic career in accounting, you should get to know Professor Hosseini. It is clear that he has a tremendous amount of knowledge and contacts about the accounting and business worlds that we barely touched on during this class. I suspect that he would also be a good instructor to take an advanced accounting course from.

For an MBA student who is looking at ACTG 302 as a required course, you can expect to learn the fundamentals in this course with a predictable class structure and amount of work required.

Trailer

This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

→ 2 CommentsCategories: MBA · MBA Course Reviews

MGMT 503: Organizational Analysis and Management, D. R. Palmer, Winter 2008

July 10, 2008 · 1 Comment

Introduction

I took Organizational Analysis and Management, a.k.a. Organizational Theory, from D. R. Palmer in Winter 2008.

This course is currently required for all non-executive MBA and MSIS students at Santa Clara.

Instructor Profile

D. R. Palmer, not to be confused with the tenured management instructor who is also named David Palmer, is a lecturer at Santa Clara University and management consultant. He also leads workshops through Santa Clara’s Executive Development Center. Palmer has a range of academic credentials including study under Peter Drucker.

I’d better get the main theme of this course review out early: Dr. Palmer is passionate about giving career advice and coaching on career growth, but perhaps not so passionate about Organizational Theory. There was a strong emphasis on practical career advice throughout this course, and generally that is appropriate for a class full of working students who are near turning points in their careers. But that emphasis came at some cost to in-depth coverage of the core course content.

Classroom experience

Class sessions were generally structured as a combination of lecture and open discussion. Typically Dr. Palmer discussed something related to the homework or a career management topic then went into the chapter’s material. For some classes the chapter material review didn’t start until more than halfway through the class period.

Coursework, exams, and grades

The course grade was comprised from five short in-class quizzes, and individual project, a group project, and a class participation factor.

The individual project, Process Map Analysis was a project for each individual to research and map out their own work group in a number of different ways. The idea is to give the student new insight into their own work situation and opportunities for increased effectiveness and advancement. This was a valuable activity for me. Students whose employer had a “no public org chart” policy had a much harder time finishing this assignment than others.

The group project was the major work effort of the course. The class self-organized into groups of about six, and chose one of our employers’ divisions to do the project on. The project involves interviewing around six members of the chosen organization and producing a paper that analyzes the current structure and recommends structural changes.

My class generally found that some of the quiz questions were ambiguous. Students argued about a couple of them in class and won Palmer over. In Palmer’s defense, the entire cohort took ACTG 300 the previous quarter from Chris Paisley, who intentionally put tricky true/false questions on his exams that required careful parsing. Palmer was trying not to use tricky wording, but when the wording was slightly ambiguous we suspected a trap.

What I learned

I had a great experience with the group project, because I had a smart hardworking team and one of our team members got high-level buy-in from his organization to support our project. I probably learned the most from just exploring the current challenges faced by the organization and the historical and structural factors that led to them. My whole career has been in software development organizations, and it was great to see similarities and differences faced by an organization full of knowledge workers in a different industry.

From the individual project I got some good insight into my place in my company. Particularly, I started differentiating between direct power over resources and business plans and indirect power such as dependent work relationships. My work group is high in informal power — people throughout the organization rely on us to help meet their goals, and we have specialized experience and knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Yet we do not have a comparable amount of direct power over financial resources, large-scale hiring, or setting business plans. This changed some of my long-term career thinking, which is the whole point of the project.

I don’t think I became too well grounded in Organizational Theory itself, but I learned many of the key concepts and terms and I’ll be able to use the text and other resources from here to keep talking the talk as I continue in the MBA program.

Criticisms

Not enough class time was spent on the core OT topics. Although Palmer’s emphasis on career planning was very appropriate for the SCU graduate student body, he could probably have cut the amount of lecture time devoted to this by half and had a more effective course.

Recommendation

I got a lot of value out of this course and the workload was manageable, yet I’m hesitant to give it a blanket recommendation because some students will be put off by Palmer’s lecture style. If you’re ready for some introspection on your career growth, think ahead about a project group you’d like to work with and a company you can do the project on, and take this course.

Trailer

This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

Update 2008-08-17

Allan Chen posted a thorough review of this class from the previous quarter on his blog. Although his review is more critical than mine, I think our reviews are very consistent.

→ 1 CommentCategories: MBA · MBA Course Reviews

MGMT 501: Managerial Competencies and Effectiveness, James Hall, Fall 2007

July 10, 2008 · 1 Comment

Introduction

I took Managerial Competencies and Effectiveness, a.k.a. Organizational Behavior, from James Hall in Fall 2007, my first quarter in the MBA program. This course is currently required for all non-executive MBA students to take during their first quarter in the program.

Instructor Profile

Professor James Hall is a professor at Santa Clara University and management consultant. He served two multi-year tenures as chair of the Management department, a fact he weaved into his lectures for this course.

Classroom experience

Class sessions were very well balanced between discussions of the current topic and a variety of structured activities. Many of those activities were smaller group discussions about the course readings. There was one role-playing exercise. Some other activities included self-assessments of leadership and conflict resolution styles.

Professor Hall was very good at answering students’ questions thoroughly while keeping the class moving. I got the impression that Professor Hall has broad knowledge of the research grounding the various topics covered in this foundational course. Why? Because many of his answers to student questions were prefaced with something such as, “the research in this area suggests….”

On a Saturday near the end of the quarter all students participated in a day long management simulation exercise, along with students from other MGMT 501 sections.

Coursework, exams, and grades

The course grade was comprised of two in-class written exams and a paper based on the simulation. Professor Hall provided study guides for the exams and was very clear on the grading criteria for the paper.

The grading criteria for the exams were mainly around being able to clearly explain the core concepts of the course or apply them briefly to example situations. In-depth writing or analysis of any particular topic was not required for the exams or the paper.

What I learned

Primarily, I learned a lot about my own work styles and preferences from the class discussions and exercises. I was also grounded in the basic concepts and lingo around organizational behavior.

The effective way that Professor Hall ran the classroom contributed to healthy norms and trust within the class cohort that started forming during this quarter.

Criticisms

I’m not sure if I learned enough from the management simulation exercise to justify the amount of time it took up. That’s about the only negative thing I have to say about this course.

Recommendation

Because this is a required first course, it seems unlikely that someone will find this article before choosing a section for MGMT 501. Based on my experience in this class, I would recommend taking Professor Hall for any course or workshop he teaches.

Trailer

This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

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ACTG 300: Financial Accounting, Chris Paisley, Fall 2007

July 9, 2008 · 1 Comment

Introduction

I took Financial Accounting from Chris Paisley in Fall 2007, my first quarter in the MBA program. This was the first quarter that financial and managerial accounting were taught in separate introductory courses to evening MBA students. Previously a single course covered both subjects.

Instructor Profile

For someone hoping as an MBA student will to learn the fundamentals of financial accounting along with a understanding of how the concepts impact board room decisions, there could hardly be a better instructor than Paisley. Beyond his former role as CFO of 3COM, he continues to serve on boards of private and public companies, including chairing audit committees. He teaches the fundamentals of accounting to undergrads, graduate students, and corporate executives.

Classroom experience

Each class followed a simple lecture format. Lecture outlines were available beforehand on ERES, and also displayed on overhead projector during the lecture.

During the first class, Paisley distributed the Brocade 10-K and presented an overview of the document. He referred back to specific parts during many lectures.

Paisley’s lectures covered the fundamentals principles and rules of U.S. financial accounting while tying them to Brocade’s filings and relevant stories of real-world situations he has experienced.

Paisley had a few particular points where his opinion differed from the textbook. If you take his class you will learn which technique for “managing earnings” is frowned upon by the text but considered completely legitimate by this experienced CFO. He was very clear that these opinions were part of the course content, and they were mentioned in his lecture notes and reflected in the exams as well.

Several classes ran late, including one that was interrupted by a medium-intensity earthquake! After each midterm, sessions were scheduled after regular class time to review each problem.

Two classes were devoted to presentations of the group projects.

Coursework, exams, and grades

Course grade consisted of two midterms, a final exam, and a group project.

Each exam consisted of true/false questions and a number of accounting problems. Many students felt that the true/false questions were trickier than they expected – some depended on carefully evaluating details of the sentence.

The group project involved digging into the public filings and earnings calls of a public company and producing a powerpoint slide with summaries and recommendations for investing in or lending to the chosen company.

Homework problems were assigned but not collected. Paisley monitored the ERES discussion board for questions about homework and responded promptly.

What I learned

I definitely learned the fundamental principles and rules of accounting and I got a sense for how they play out when company leaders make decisions and approve financial statements. The group presentations gave me some interesting insight into the different practices followed by some companies in particular industries.

Criticisms

Paisley’s lecture format and style is not well suited to a student who is falling behind. This is because the content moves quickly and he does not use alternative presentation styles to illustrate a concept that some students don’t “get” the first time. That being said, the core concepts of financial accounting are fairly standard and many resources are available to students who need extra explanation and examples, including free tutoring at SCU.

Recommendation

If you consider yourself to be a smart student and you see yourself in the board room someday, go out of your way to take this course from Paisley. If you have reason to think accounting may be a difficult subject for you or if this course description sounds intimidating, there may be another instructor with a style that works better for you. Like many graduate courses, you will need to do ungraded homework with discipline in order to keep up with the course.

Many students will benefit from recording the lectures and having them available for reference when studying for the exams.

Trailer

This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

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MBA course reviews

July 9, 2008 · 3 Comments

This is a series of posts reporting on the courses I have taken in the MBA program at Santa Clara University. I plan to keep this series going throughout my tenure in the program.

ACTG 300: Financial Accounting, Chris Paisley, Fall 2007

MGMT 501: Managerial Competencies and Effectiveness, James Hall, Fall 2007

MGMT 503: Organizational Analysis and Management, D. R. Palmer, Winter 2008

ACTG 302: Managerial Accounting, Ahmad. Hosseini, Winter 2008

MKTG 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making, Ling-Jing Kao, Spring 2008

MGMT 538: Managing Teams and Projects, Bo Tep, Spring 2008

I intend these to be articles public records and choosing my words appropriately. Keep this in mind as well if you comment.

If you are using these articles to learn about the experience you will have in the course, note that these courses simply describe a particular section during a particular quarter, and many instructors change their class structure and teaching methods from quarter to quarter. Also, I don’t have enough information to compare how two different instructors teach the same course, or even how the one instructor teaches two different courses.

Some of my reasons for writing this series of articles are to:

1. Critically analyze my experience in the MBA program.

2. Contribute to the public record about the courses and instructors.

3. Along with other articles, produce an account of my experience in the program that demonstrates that I was paying attention.

I’m publishing these on my blog instead of the SantaClaraMBA mailing list in order to allow myself to correct mistakes, add more information or even take them offline later on, and also to try to get more colleagues and friends reading my blog.

Here are other posts about my major experiences in the MBA program:

Elevator pitch contest in Fall 2008.

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Exclusive is better than free

June 19, 2008 · 2 Comments

I’m getting pretty good at resisting “free” offers, but I found myself compelled to write this post in exchange for a first edition Microspotting T-shirt. It seems like a very difficult task for someone to take on a job that involves “marketing,” “recruiting,” and “Redmond” in the description and produce something that strikes of sincerity and (from a Silicon Valley perspective) “street cred,” but Ariel’s done it with the Microspotting blog. And that makes the idea of getting one of those T-shirts pretty enticing.
So Ariel, when are you going to visit the Tellme campus? Kara Swisher did a nice profile of the company and the office following the acquisition, but only profiled our fearless leader.
Now, the “I am the empire” shirt is really cool, but if I get one I think I’ll give it to one of our interns who might appreciate the irony a little more then me. Now that I’m in my thirties with kids, a mortgage, and everything, a steady job working for any empire doesn’t sound too bad.

→ 2 CommentsCategories: Microsoft

Essential concepts for day-to-day negotiations

April 10, 2008 · No Comments

In MGMT 503, Dr. Palmer advised all of his students to seize any opportunity to get sales or negotiations training, or for people not working in sales to go along on a sales call. Not much after that, I had an opportunity to attend a negotiations course offered by Microsoft to employees. The Microsoft course material is company confidential, but I realized that after combining the material with some basic organizational behavior material from MGMT 501, I understood a few key concepts that I can start applying right away.

You are negotiating all the time, whether you realize it or not.

I can thank Dr. Palmer for this “Palmer point.” If this weren’t true, a software developer wouldn’t get much use out of a negotiations course. But in any learning organization where role boundaries are relatively flexible, a lot of negotiation goes on. Objects of negotiation may range from deciding whether and when a bug will be fixed all the way to setting individual goals and plans. More importantly, the parties negotiating are usually part of the same organization, and it’s likely that they will continue to work together, collaborate, and negotiate for years in the future.

Intra-company negotiation is an environment where it is essential to use collaborative methods and achieving outcomes that are aligned with each party’s interests, or at least those interested which are properly aligned to the organization’s goals.

Be aware of negotiation styles and your preferred style.

In the “Conflict Resolution” lecture in MGMT 501, we were presented with the following chart, which is an important framework for talking about negotiation and conflict resolution:

^
|  Yielding    Collaborating
|
|       Compromising
|
|  Avoiding      Forcing
*---------------------->

The vertical axis is “Concern for the Relationship (relational outcome)”, and the horizontal axis is “Concern for self interest (substantive outcome)”.

For example, if you are negotiating for something important to you with a party that you will never deal with again, a forcing or “hard” style may be appropriate. In a typical work situation where both outcomes are important, a collaborating style is ideal.

In Professor Hall’s MGMT 501 course, I took a self-assessment which produced a score for each of the five styles. That was useful to me because it showed me a high score for Collaborating but low for Compromising. I learned that when I can foresee a real win/win outcome I am eager to dive in with a collaborative approach but when I expect that a compromise will be necessary I tend to avoid the situation entirely. For example, I really enjoy the goal setting process at work because I see it as an opportunity to get clarity on what I can should do help the organization while advancing my career. But during a project when I see my work headed towards a resource conflict with another project, I am much less excited about advocating for my project in a compromise on resource allocation or schedule adjustments.

Preparation is the most frequently neglected step of the negotiation process.

Simple preparation may include identifying the interests of both parties, the best alternative each has if no agreement is possible, and what my own minimum requirements would be to consider the negotiation to be a success.

This lesson along with “you are negotiating all the time” are the key takeaways from me. I expect that by being more aware and prepared for informal negotiations that I engage in on a day to day basis, I will be more effective.

Be aware of negotiating strategies.

Many strategies can be used to increase one’s control of a negotiation session by setting the time and place or coerce the other party into a procedure he or she does not want to participate in. To deal with day-to-day situations with integrity, it is probably most important to be aware of strategies that may be used against you and avoid being distracted by them.

One example of a high-pressure strategy is to agree to a compromise, then follow up with more requests as if the original agreement was not final or not completely understood. This puts pressure on the other party to give into the request rather than deal with an uncomfortable process of either asserting the finality of the agreement or re-entering negotiations and potentially putting everything back on the table.

Obviously, following up on an initial agreement with quick documentation is something that can prevent this kind of pressure technique. But if it happens anyway, the most important thing is probably to realize that it could be an unethical negotiating technique rather than actual confusion about the original agreement.

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Jen-Hsun Huang speech at Santa Clara University

April 3, 2008 · 1 Comment

Does your company have different functions in different geographic locations, or will it hire the best people it can find regardless of where they live and let the geographic structure of the company follow?

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA, presented many of his thoughts on running an international knowledge-based company the Spring 2008 Leavey Lecture on Monday. Priya Natarajan, President of the student International Business Network interviewed Mr. Huang in a casual conversation dubbed a “fireside chat.” The primary theme of Mr. Huang’s remarks was that NVIDIA let a rather organic worldwide structure form as a result of its early formation as a networked organization and its subsequent pursuit of great talent around the world. Some notes and quotes on the main topics that were discussed are below.

The format for the talk worked really well - Congratulations to the International Business Network for setting this up. At the time, it seemed too much of the limited time was used up at the start by showing a video produced by company employees for a company meeting. But in hindsight the video helped to set the atmosphere for the conversation about the company structure and culture, and this was the most substantive of the three Leavey Lectures I have attended.

Notes on the main subjects of the conversation:

Comparing the role of CEO in a start-up to his role today: There’s no management in the early days of a company because there are no resources to manage. A big part of the job is continually raising money. Another part is leadership. (”Lead. Compel. Evangelize.”) Now that the company is large, leadership remains an important part of his job.

NVIDIA as a networked company: When the company was started in 1993, they found that the only way for everyone to their own e-mail client at their workstation was to use a network of Sun workstations. NVIDIA was started at exactly the right time to be a networked company from the start. NVIDIA started its remote offices in response to finding and hiring people who happened to live in a particular area. Some of these remote offices were, and still are, one or two people working out of their homes.

Cultural differences: Over time, the company acquired what Mr. Huang called global “sensibilities” - an understanding of how to operate in different cultures (countries). This was a recurring theme of Mr. Huang’s talk. These sensibilities apply to developing products that resonate with the culture, managing people working in the culture, and working with customers and business partners in the foreign culture.

Indian parents: Mr. Huang (born in Taiwan and raised in America) got a spirited positive response from the audience after comparing how to deliver an “average” performance assessment in America and how to do it in India. He said that if you simply tell a worker in India that they are doing an average job and meeting expectations, the worker will be very upset and their parents may call you to ask what the problem is. “I have met more employee parents in India than in all other countries combined!”

He recommends delivering an evaluation in China with a speech such as, “I’m really disappointed, because you can achieve such great things, and I expect much more from you than this.” This will be more readily accepted because the worker is probably used to hearing this kind of nagging from his or her parents all the time! [Editing note: I thought he was still talking about India here but another student corrected me.]

Outsourcing: Mr. Huang was rather frank here. First of all, he criticized the culture of other countries for not being aware of why many Americans feel threatened by the effects of globalization on the work force. “In a way, they are taking our jobs.” However, like any modern CEO he believes that by using all of the company’s resources efficiently the company will grow more rapidly and benefit everyone. He used the US health care system as a counter-example of a system in which inefficiencies in the system cause everyone to suffer.

How to best use the workforce in each country: Mr. Huang turned the table on a question of how NVIDIA is able to use the strengths of each country in the overall operations. He presented the examples of coworkers from America who have recently returned to their home country of India or China. Did the Indian suddenly change from a computer architecture expert to a software QA engineer when he got to India? Should the Chinese programmer start working on PCB boards?

The network is the computer, or the display is the computer? Mr. Huang presented a vision where the network becomes to ubiquitous as to disappear, and the only part of a computer that the user is conscious of is the display.

The loosely connected organization: Mr. Huang believes that NVIDIA has an “organic architecture” as a company without a well-defined org chart and little emphasis on strict direct reports. He himself has 16 direct reports and is comfortable not having weekly 1:1 meetings with each member of his staff. He believes in using informal e-mail updates to make sure everyone is working in the same general direction, but also having them work towards a few important KPIs (key process indicators). He emphasized that the company relies on innovation and serendipity, which cannot be clearly predicted.

Contributing to multiple products: In an after-speech conversation with some students, he said that the company is able to produce more products than its competitors, but because each employee contributes to many products, an employee may not feel the same sense of craftsmanship that he or she would have from a larger role on one particular product.

Those are the main things I took away from the speech, aside from the fact that Mr. Huang is a very comfortable extemporaneous speaker with a healthy sense of humor. I left out some of the personal stories and I probably missed a few important points.

Altogether, this was a good event to start out the quarter with, and as far as I hope the next lectures are as interesting as this one.

[Editted 2008-04-04 to say that the parental-lecture style of performance evaluation was about China rather than India.]

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The part-time MBA is not obsolete

October 24, 2007 · No Comments

Recently a student sent around the article “Business Schools May Be Obsolete” to a Leavey student mailing list.

Actually this article reinforced many of my reasons for choosing to go to Santa Clara, and the logic probably applies to many Leavey students:

1. Most of the “MBA is not worth the cost” logic is true but it includes the assumption that the student is taking two years off from a decent career and paying full MBA tuition. Almost all part-time students have chosen to either keep their jobs, allow for the possibility of working while in school, or remaining primary caregivers for their children. As a recent thread on the SantaClaraMBA mailing list has shown, many have employers that are paying a significant portion of the salary as well. Part-time MBA students are paying a cost in lost spare time, increased stress, and short-term career opportunities, but it’s nothing like the assumed cost of putting a career on hold to go full time.

2. For the most part, Leavey students have decided to forgo enrolling in a program with a strong recruiting machine in return for not moving or traveling. Note that there are plenty of part-time students who are willing to travel, I know several accounts of people who’ve flown into Berkeley on the weekends or commuted out of the bay area to attend schools like Duke and UCLA. (Also note that’s a separate group of highly ambitious people who decided not to go full-time). I think this means that we’ve started out the program having put more though into career planning and whether/how our MBA education fits in.

The best thing I saw in the article was actually a link away in another article by the same author which said: “Grad school is a bad way to deal with uncertainty [about your career goals].” I think this is very true with the major exception being an MBA program at one of the top-ranked schools in the world.

But the worst thing in the article had to be… “[if you want to be a CEO] you should be an investment banking analyst first. That’s because being a CEO is really about making decisions with limited information, and that’s what analysts do best.” But aren’t top CEO qualities also being able to influence people, and being willing and eager to accept the consequences of your actions? Being a competitive sports coach or a professional poker player sounds like better preparation, quite honestly. OK, I-bankers also meet influential people, and they spend a lot of time selling things, which are probably also important. Is there a string of investment-bankers-turned-successful-CEOs that I’m not aware of?

A related post is What I learned about business school before starting.

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A year of getting organized and getting things done differently

September 18, 2007 · No Comments

Around the start of last summer, I took on a project of figuring out a better way to prioritize and manage my time and tasks. When I look back at what’s changed, the results have been pretty profound and very positive, but rather different from what I expected. I hoped to have day-to-day task management “wrapped up” with one organizational system, and also have an organized way to plan for the future. Here’s how things actually changed in my life, as far as I can tell:

  • I found a couple more hours in the day! It sounds kind of silly, but even though I don’t plan every hour of the day, I’ve found myself spending more time doing the things that are important to me. This is most notable during my train commute. I still don’t schedule that time, but now I always have a task at hand that I can spend an hour on and will give me a sense of accomplishment towards one of my goals. So I just do that task. Outside of work it feels like I have more family time because I’m less conflicted about my priorities, and my week-to-week planning is more realistic.
  • I worry much less about projects I’m not getting done, because I’ve rationalized why they’re low priority or else I’ve just planned or done them.
  • My dreams about the future have become focused. I’m one of those people who can be watching a movie or something, and for a half an hour I’ll zone off thinking about “what do I want to do when I grow up.” (OK, I have a successful career and a family and all that, but you know what I mean — I want to think about all the possibilities the future can bring and how I can reach them). Often this daydreaming would follow the same pattern over and over again. But in this past year it’s really changed, because I’ve found myself more likely to follow up each daydream with some research and actions. In the most extreme example of this, I researched and applied to an MBA program, which starts today!
  • My calendar is totally together. I used to have separate work and personal calendars that were mostly up to date, but now everything’s unified and current and I love being able to rely on it. I still don’t quite understand why I love interacting with my calendar but have mental blocks about maintaining a task list, but if I can “crack” my task list like this that will be another breakthrough.
  • Tasks, inbox, personal organization: I figured out much better systems for these, but I also don’t keep up with them on a daily basis. Although I feel like I should be more vigilant about these, practical problems with these being out of control pop up much less frequently.

My first source of inspiration was the PersonalMBA reading list. The reviews of the self-improvement books just sounded like a call to action for me. I decided to read a few books as slowly as it took to apply the advice.

I started with Getting Things Done. The top things I learned from this book are:

  • Come up with one system to track all my open loops. The system doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to exclude reference material and unprocessed inbox input.
  • Organize reference material with a simple unified system. I don’t quite have this mastered, but now I DO have a file drawer filled with manila folders in alphabetical order. 99% of my important papers are there, easy to find. I am still amazed that it took reading a self-improvement book for me to figure out how much better this is than the clutter I had before.
  • Making serious progress in bottom-up organization may naturally lead to improved top-down planning. I think this is basically because the target of audience of the book is smart high-achieving people who have a practical organization problem. I think I was part of that group.
  • Develop a habit of processing input (incoming e-mail, papers, whatever) into tasks, reference material, etc. This took time for me to develop (and I’m still working on it). The main exercise that helped me was to sit with an incoming e-mail long enough to turn it into a verb. Instead of just flagging it (”to deal with later”) I tried to figure out the right active sentence to describe the necessary task, (”Send release notes from November to Joe”). For me, an undone task carried much less psychic weight once I’d turned it into the right sentence with a verb in the imperative form!

I also read the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The main things I took away from it on this reading are the importance of planning important non-urgent tasks, and scheduling them out with dedicated calendar time a week or so in advance. Personally I realized I was already good at working on “Quadrant 3″ activities… but only in certain areas that I enjoyed and where the tasks gave me a certain sense of accomplishment.

One thing both of these books had in common (also shared with How To Win Friends and Influence People!) is a discussion of the value of dedicating time every week to evaluating what happened last week, where I am now, and changing my plans appropriately.

The book I spent the most time with was Now, Discover your Strengths. But, I am completely out of writing time now so I’ll have to delve into that in the future!

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What I learned about myself before starting business school

August 28, 2007 · No Comments

This is the sibling of my what I learned about business school post. Just in case I drop out, I won’t be able to say I didn’t learn anything! At least I got some clarity on:

My goals for business school.

Which include:

  • Get business knowledge that well help me progress on my current career path.
  • Decide which fork to take on my current career path during the next several years.
  • Evaluate and prepare for alternative long-term career paths including entrepreneurship in several different industries.

Unlike many B-school students, “build my professional network” isn’t one of my top goals. I expect improved networking to be a valuable a side effect of reaching my goals. This is because I already have a small network of smart, connected people. I expect to learn things that will let me provide more value to people in my network, and focus my career goals to understand how to better use my network. I do expect my network to grow to include more great people, but that’s not reason enough for me to go back to school.

My reasons for choosing an MBA program to reach those goals

I read some of the literature challenging the value of an MBA program other than as a filter for identifying ambitious career-minded people. Many people start from the point I’m at and achieve similar goals without school, usually by simply deciding to become an entrepreneur and using their network to recruit the best people they know.

I decided that I really wanted to achieve the goals I listed above, and a part-time MBA program is a good match for my personality and career situation. I believe I’ll use my experience in each environment to enhance the other. I’m also counting on my school adventure to be a healthy, satisfying outlet for the intellectually restless and self-driven sides of my personality.

Understanding these reasons helped me understand that it wasn’t important to get into the most prestigious program possible at the risk of stressing my family/work/school life balance. It’s not just that I’m susceptible to burning out so I’m choosing a less-than-ambitious school plan. Keeping my time in balance enough to thrive in all three settings is part of my personally ambitious plan to make the most of this school experience. On the other hand, if my goal had been to land a job at Goldman Sacs, I would not be satisfied going to Leavey and I would not seem so important to continue working as a computer programmer either — one of those future annual bonuses would be more than enough to pay off my massive school debt.

A reason to blog.

A while back I read Seth Godin’s booklet “Who’s There” in which he listed three types of blogs (just checked, now there’s at least a fourth. But I’m trying to create a first impression blog. I’ll be meeting many new people in a professional context during the next few years. When new acquaintances look for me on the Internet would I hope they first find my Usenet post to rec.gambling.poker in 1996, or would I rather have them directed to something that showcases my professional communication and presentation skills?

Beyond the first impression, a blog like this is also a way to keep up my impression with people I “kinda know.” (Wait a minute, these are the same people in whom Safe Side Superchick is warning my children not to place trust?)

Blogs can be an effecient medium for keeping in touch with friends and family. But quite honestly, most of my friends and family news items are things I don’t want to post on the public Internet. It works out pretty well to distribute them using a century-old worldwide real-time voice communication system. And it’s part of my professional first impression to let you know that I have a family that’s very important to me without putting pictures or too many details on my web site.

* Thanks for putting up with my feeble attempt at giving myself some pre-boom Internet and pre-WPT poker credibility.

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What I learned about business school before starting

August 27, 2007 · 2 Comments

This is a sibling to my what I learned about myself post.  Orientation is done and the first day of classes is three weeks away. Before I’m distracted by actual coursework, I’ll note some of the things I learn during my research, application, and preparation processes, such as:

Greed is bad, creating value is good

When I started to read MBA program literature, I thought the phrase “creating value” were code words for “it’s OK to get rich.”
But, eventually I realized that companies and industries grow, they’re players in a positive sum game. In general, ethical business success moves the game forward and creates opportunities for others.

Although newspapers lay off workers as eBay and Google continue to hire, it’s not just a case of money and jobs relocating from one city to another. New businesses are able to start up and survive due to relatively frictionless marketing opportunities. (It’s a little more complicated the see journalism work shifting from large established newsrooms to amateur blogs and professional boutique operations, but that’s a subject for a future blog post or two).

A company CEO isn’t just the lucky guy who scored a job that pays 1000 times as much as the factory worker. The board chose this person as the company’s best chance to increase the value of the shares, possibly even as an alternative to selling the company, and paid the price it took to secure him or her. If the board did a good job, paying a different CEO less money would have been a bad choice, possibly impacting employees and customers.

Also, creating value is key to networking. Although it’s rather obvious, it’s easy to forget. Achievements on a resume can be impressive, but my most valuable contacts remember a positive experience working with me. They might want to recommend me not to repay a favor, but because the recommendations will reflect well on them.

Creating value is also one of the keys to successful blogging. It’s so easy to unsubscribe from a blog – I do it all the time!

There are no books on “surviving business school.”

Browse through the Test Prep section of Borders, and in addition to test prep you’ll see two types of books about law school: How to get into the best law schools, and how to succeed in law school. But for business school, it seems to be all about getting in.

Is this because business programs don’t have academic standards? Not really, but Master’s programs in aren’t supposed to have such high barriers to completion as doctoral programs.

The value of an MBA is often misunderstood

Although a bookstore might categorize them together, an MBA is not the same kind of professional degree as an MD or a JD. Those last two are necessary and sufficient (more or less) qualifications to enter a certain professional field. A PHD is necessary for academic jobs.

But for an MBA degree, where there’s some value in the degree itself (influenced strongly by the school’s reputation) there really isn’t any job that an MBA is a required or sufficient credential for. In business it helps to have knowledge, connections, and experience. An MBA program can be a structured way to progress on all three.
The top schools are part of the MBA recruiting machine, so in a sense an MBA degree can be a ticket to a job interview with certain companies.

Our nation’s current President, its only chief executive with an MBA degree, is widely regarded to have poor leadership and management skills. However the conclusion I draw from his story is one about nepotism in the admissions process, not one about business education.

Business School research is different.

I’m still trying to figure what B-School research is all about, and I guess the academic community is too (Businessweek article). However, I might have been drawn into a PHD program earlier in life if I ever found Computer Science or Math research to be as engaging, readable, and relevant as Professor Erik Lie’s web page summarizing his influential research into stock option backdating.

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I would never use a mobile phone while driving a motorcycle

July 29, 2007 · Comments Off

because WHERE WOULD I PUT MY COFFEE???

[2008-04-04 Update: A reader who wishes to remain anonymous pointed out that there is a company that makes a cup-holder accessory that fits a Harley Davidson.  I guess one man's humorous imagery is another man's unmet market opportunity!]

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Choosing ideal buffer sizes

February 24, 2006 · 2 Comments

From time to time, the question arises of what size to use when allocating a fixed-length buffer of some sort. A typical example is for a program that reads in a large file one chunk at a time, processing and discarding each chunk. What size should the chunk be?

This is really a twofold question. The first part is, “what order of magnitude should the buffer size be?” In this situation, does it make more sense to read in 8 kilobytes, because that is the block size on the disk, or 8 megabytes, because there is plenty of memory to go around and those other 7.992 megabytes might otherwise remain available or be squandered by some less deserving process.

But the second question is much more critical. It is about hard numbers: exact numerical constants. The question may be: “Should the size of my 8 megabyte buffer be 8,000,000 bytes or 8,388,608 bytes (8 times 1024 times 1024)?” Or if you need a 1k buffer to hold a C string, “should the allocation be 1024 bytes or 1025?” This second question has more importance because you are much more likely to waste time trying to figure it out.

First Principals

The fundamental principal behind this kind of decision is that your choice is not going to matter. You should have chosen an order of magnitude that is larger than necessary, and the platform you’re writing for has a few extra bytes and CPU cycles to go around.

You should probably stop right here if you’re writing code for a Timex Sinclair, a 1990’s era refrigerator, or a CIA cranial implant from the 1960’s, because those are the cases where you might have a resource limit that matters to your little program. (Ok, I’ll admit that I don’t really know the details of CIA platforms for mind-control devices but I figure that if my iPod can hold a THX-quality recording of every speech Joe Biden has ever delivered, whatever thing the spooks put in my head can do something almost as impressive. But who knows, maybe Steve Jobs worked out some kind of deal with Langley, God, or Satan so he’s the only one who gets a really cool implant grafted directly onto his synapses and the rest of us are stumbling through life with the equivalent Casio calculator watches monitoring our thoughts).

Code Reviews

I’ve found the most common case where a decision about a buffer size gets discussed is in a code review. As the author of the program, you may be presented with comments such as:

“I think you should use a buffer size of 1025 instead of 1024 so there’s room for a C string with 1024 bytes and the terminating character.”

“The program will be more efficient if you use a size of 1024 instead of 1025 because it’s a power of 2.”

“Three thousand bytes? I don’t know how your momma taught you back in Hicksville but in the army we don’t just pull numbers like that out of our heineys, we use powers of ten or macros already defined in the system header files. Fix the code, Private!”

When faced with comments like these, it’s important to go back to first principals and remember that the number you choose hardly matters. So here are some possible actions you can take and the outcomes, regardless of the substantive nature of the comment:

Action Result
You accept the suggestion and make the change. The code review moves on to something more important.
You argue and lose the argument. Review time is wasted, and you have a bad day.
You argue and win the argument. (A) Review time is wasted, and the code reviewer doesn’t like you.
You argue and win the argument. (B) Review time is wasted, and you assert yourself as the dominant male (or whatever) of the pack.

As you can see, with the possible exception when some kind of canine tribal reorganization is happening within the company, the optimal response to all such code review suggestions is, “good point; I’ll do that.”

Edge Cases

Admittedly there are a few real world scenarios where the number you choose actually matters and the best choice is not obvious. Usually this happens when you are establishing a limit in an API that someone else is going to use, and requirements are not clear. Does your function need to support a maximum URL length of 1024 characters, or should you copy the results as a C string into a 1024-character buffer, allowing for 1023 characters in the URL?

Fortunately, I’ve again prepared a chart that breaks the situation into well-defined cases that make me feel pretty smug. Here they are:

Situation Result
You impose a smaller limit than what the user expects, and it turns out you’re correct. Something doesn’t work. You waste an hour debugging the problem. You were right; you feel mad.
You impose a smaller limit than what the user expects, and it turns out you’re wrong. Something doesn’t work. You waste an hour debugging the problem. You were wrong; you feel ashamed.
You impose a larger limit than what the user expects, and it turns out you’re correct. Everything seems to work fine.
You allow a larger limit than what the user expects, and it turns out you’re wrong. Everything seems to work fine, but in fact the code that you wrote has allocated more memory than it strictly necessary. Somewhere in Heaven an angel is crying over the memory you’ve wasted. This may have been memory allocation of a single byte, or maybe a kilobyte, but it could have been used for something better in the little world of your software program. Or maybe, just maybe, those bytes could have been put to use towards something with real meaning, like social justice or a reduction in childhood poverty. Now that’s something for you to think about next time you flippantly fire off a line of code and move on to the next function.

Obviously, this one is pretty much a wash any way you go.

Conclusion

If there’s one thing I want you to remember from this essay, it’s how much time you wasted reading it. Because soon you are going to be faced with yet another buffer size decision, and you will have to try to find your reflection somewhere in your flat-screen monitor and ask, “am I going to squander any more of my precious time on Earth doing mental gymnastics about buffer sizes, or am I going to choose the largest possible value that could possibly be correct — or simply any value that is going to get me through the next code review — and move on with my life?”

→ 2 CommentsCategories: Humor

Agggggggggh!

January 19, 2006 · Comments Off

The Unix command-line program “yes” is the worst piece of software ever written.

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Not a visionary

December 23, 2005 · Comments Off

I’ve spent a bit of time on LinkedIn recently, updating my profile and adding former co-workers as contacts. I’m pretty impressed with LinkedIn these days — how it’s grown, and simply the fact that so many people are using it seriously (as opposed to abuse, silliness, or just trying to add everyone in the world as a contact).

In fact, the endorsement feature is making it start to look attractive as a general resume format. If your LinkedIn profile is at least as up-to-date as your resume and it also has endorsements, why bother keeping your regular resume updated?

OK, here’s where I start complaining.

Would you include a word like “visionary” in your resume? What kind of job would you ever apply for where calling yourself visionary, in writing, is going to help you out? Either you’re going to look arrogant, or you have accomplishments that clearly prove that you are visionary. If it’s the latter, you probably don’t even need a resume any more, do you? Your perceptive feats must speak for themselves.

So I did a keyword search and I have 39 1st or 2nd level contacts with the word “Visionary” in their professional profile — mostly right in the summary! And most of these use visionary as a NOUN! Here are some examples:

“Visionary, problem solver, …” (Very first text in summary)
“Angel Investor/ Technological Visionary” (Job title)
“Recognized as a … visionary”
“Visionary Entrepreneur”
“I see myself [as a] true visionary/entrepreneur” (from a 3rd degree contact)
I probably shouldn’t be complaining too loudly because most of these people have had more success following their professional dreams than I ever will. But I can’t see myself ever using the word “visionary” to describe myself with a straight face.

By the way, here’s the first definition of visionary as a noun from m-w.com:

one whose ideas or projects are impractical : DREAMER

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Every working piece of software…

November 2, 2005 · 1 Comment

…begins with the vision of a single programmer…

…who completely underestimates the amount of work that will be required.

→ 1 CommentCategories: Quoteme

Bugzilla, my first wiki

October 23, 2005 · Comments Off

Bugzilla introduced me to the world of wikis.

It took me a while to understand the power of wikis. But I remember years ago when I first used Bugzilla, it seemed to possess this great quality that was difficult to describe. The impressive thing was that it fostered this extensive written communication among developers, testers, managers, and everyone else who needed to know what was going on or could help solve problems.

I didn’t realize exactly why Bugzilla contributed to this environment, but it seems obvious by now. Everything is done from a browser, each individual operation is fast, and when you’re not sure exactly what to do you just add a comment and use the bug as a quick and dirty bulliten board. And the simple e-mail integration is also, well, wikirrific.

The most important problems get solved more quickly because more people can help.

OK, so maybe Bugzilla isn’t really a wiki, but it contains many of the same elements that make wikis great collaborative tools.

Meanwhile, in something like the Bizarro universe, some of us actually worked on significants project with no formal bug tracking system. Forget about a bug tracking system helping with the important problems, the real problem is keeping tracking of all the problems that don’t need to get fixed yesterday. What to do?

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