The MBA Chronicles: Strategery
After weeks of deliberation, I finally decided on my Fall 2010 class schedule. I am taking Strategic Brand Management, Negotiations, Game Theory, and Financial Modeling. I’m most excited about Game Theory, although my Negotiations class has gotten off to a great start.
Selecting elective courses is quite an ordeal. I consider myself a pretty decisive person, but I couldn’t commit on my final class. My classmates must have grown tired of my wavering too. On one hand, there was Supply Chain Management, a class that I have always wanted to take since I started school. My experience in retail and consumer products gave me a good impression of operations– I viewed operations as the backbone of a company. I do openly admit that I used to loathe operations early in my career. The class was cross-listed with the Engineering department, so it would’ve been interesting to have a non-MBA perspective in group project. Essentially, Supply Chain would be a class that would complement my marketing background.
On the other hand, I want to learn brand management from an MBA perspective. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of cursory marketing courses– advertising, market research, high-tech marketing– but never brand management. While those courses covered aspects of brand management, I never had to think about a brand holistically, from product development to go-to market strategy.
In short, I had to choose between rounding out my skill set or getting formal training in a familiar topic. When I posed my dilemma to MBA graduate friends, most of them started with a simple question, “What do you want to do in the future?” If I want to continuing working at a small company, then I should take Supply Chain because the operations expertise is more scarce and there are more opportunities to contribute. However, if I ever decide to pursue brand management in a mature company like Proctor & Gamble, then the consensus was to gobble up any and all things brand management-related.
My thoughts never stopped swirling. Even with the add/drop deadline looming, I did not have an answer. For the first time in a long time, I felt really lost. Then, someone told me today about a good elective class strategy. When there is a fork in the road to two equally satisfying places, take the road that is more enjoyable. If you study what you love, then things will fall into place. Given my heavy workload this semester, I decided to stick with brand management. (Also, I want to wait until my favorite operations professor teaches Supply Chain.)
Now that my schedule is set, I began reflecting about my passion and career path. This exercise gave me a not-so surprising revelation: I really, really, really like strategy. This semester will be chock-full of strategy. I think by taking an intense course load on strategy, it will help me squeeze out all the fat in strategy. I want to learn so much strategy that I get sick of it (in a good way). Then, when Supply Chain comes around again, I’ll appreciate it even more.
Anyway, there isn’t a profound point in this entry. I just wanted to document my thought process. If you find this even remotely applicable, that’s just icing on the cake.
The MBA Chronicles: Confidence Without Attitude
It’s always a bit self-indulgent to promote your own school when there are many great programs out there, but this video is a great setup for my topic.
Earlier in the month, I attended the welcome orientation for the incoming MBA class. It brought back fresh memories of anxiety, insecurity, and confusion. I got the usual questions, “Is it really that much work?” “How many activities can you realistically juggle?” “How does the class bidding process work?” It was pretty amusing. The best part of the evening was a speech from our dean about what makes our school different. I don’t want this entry to become “mine is better than yours” so I’ll get straight to the main point of his speech. He believes that the best types of leaders are confident without an attitude.
In business school, you are hammered with leadership philosophies and paradigms. You learn about hokey terms like “situational leadership” and “management by objectives.” As I wrote in a previous entry, self-reflection becomes a routine exercise. As I begin my second year, I am starting to see that confidence without attitude is a very high standard. On a deeper level, confidence with humility is exceptionally difficult. All of the people I admire in life are able to strike that balance– I hope I can one day.
I just came back from a two-week vacation in Italy with the wife and had an interesting thought. I had put digital copies of my favorite movies on an iPod to watch on the train. I saved one in particular for the end of the trip, Wall Street. I guess you could say that I wanted to get back into the capitalistic mood right before I started school again. When I was a teen, I watched Wall Street and even memorized Gordon Gekko’s famous monologue. At the time, I didn’t think I would ever become a businessman– I just liked his confidence. Well, after watching the movie again, I am a bit leery of his type of confidence– a type that I once admired. After countless case studies on ethics and the news in WSJ/NY Times, I am quickly learning that those who fall– Eliot Spitzer, Enron & WorldCom execs, and most recently, Mark Hurd– all had a mentality of writing his or her own rules, much like Gordon Gekko. I don’t want to generalize and say that these individuals are all bad people– I just think that it shows that even the best can fall into the trap of overconfidence or egotism.
I won’t really know how I’ll end up until it actually happens, but I am sure of one thing: going to business school has been transformative.
Good luck to the new MBA classes out there.
The MBA Chronicles: If
One of my professors loves to quote poetry, so being the pliable student I am, I’ve gotten back into poetry. In high school, I used to think poetry was overindulgent and impractical (some people who know me in person recall my inexplicable hatred of haikus). However, in college, I took a writing class that really changed my perspective on poetry. I learned about the lives of certain poets and the evolution of the poetry canon, and much like taking a class in art history, I started seeing the symbols and subtle references that the poet buried into the poem. Instead of taking the poem in a vacuum– focusing on overly complex syntax and oblique allusions– I started to understand and appreciate the underlying point of poetry (and other forms of high art): to provoke thought. And after attending/teaching Sunday school for over ten years, memorizing poems, verses, and parables aren’t as painful as it once was.
I don’t have a favorite classic poet, but I do like Yeats, Kipling, and Whitman. Unfortunately, the main reason I like the those poets is purely superficial: they are often quoted in movies. One of my favorite poems comes from The Dead Poets Society, where the students stand up and quote from Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” The scene is pretty cheesy– they all stand on their desks reciting the poem to their captain, the teacher– but the buildup is so good that the poem takes on a new form. You understand why the teacher is the captain and why the poem is an allegory of their experience.
Okay, this entry is bit heavier than I intended it to be, so I’ll finish with my favorite poem of the moment, “If” by Rudyard Kipling. I especially love the part about gaining everything and losing it without breathing a word. Beautiful.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!
-”If” by Rudyard Kipling
Entrepreneurship
You know how old you are when a publication interview is comprised of people you know. I just read an evocative interview by my old college roommate, a recent MIT Sloan graduate, about entrepreneurship. He interviewed our friend about his business, JetPens.com. The interview is a great read, especially if you want a practical perspective on entrepreneurship. I admire both my old roommate and my friend a lot. They are two of the smartest people I know, yet they are extremely modest about their accomplishments. They are also very deliberate in their actions which makes them both awesome people and great leaders.
I love how life gets really small, really quick.
My favorite quote from the interview:
With the benefit of hindsight, I’d highly recommend understanding psychologically why you want to be an entrepreneur, because there are several good reasons. Do you primarily want to gain financial freedom, to make a big impact, to become a billionaire, or to create your ideal work environment? You want to gear your business decisions to reflect this, and good decisions should flow out of your core psychological desire – especially the type and size of market you decide to pursue, decisions about raising money and setting your company’s level of aggressiveness. – Adrian Mak, co-founder of Jetpens.com
Inception
We finally saw Inception this week. Boy, was it a good movie. There’s so much to say about it, but I don’t want to spoil it for my five readers. Instead, I wanted to write a little about dreams.
I used to have lots of fantastic dreams as a kid. While I thoroughly enjoyed my subscription to the Scholastic Book Club (they would mail us books every month), my imagination always soared after watching a movie. As I got older, my dreams somehow dissipated. I’m not really sure why that came to be. Even as an adult, I would occasionally fall into a deep sleep and have marvelous visions. I remember one dream quite vividly– I was trying to escape a hitman and I had an unidentified girl with me that I swore to protect. I don’t remember much about her, but I knew she was a brunette and wore a brown tank top. I had this dream several times. The weirdest part of the dream was that I was my actual age (about 20 years old), but the scenery and motif reminded me of cartoon action. Years later, I remember watching Last Action Hero and I said to myself, “Hey, that’s my dream!” I wonder if I had seen the movie and stored images in the deep recesses of my psyche only to have it disguised as a dream.
In high school, we read Don Quixote and numerous other books on dreams. I remember one of my classmates bringing in a book, a type of dream dictionary–I think it was Dreamer’s Dictionary– and began sharing some common dream figures and its symbolic meaning. All I can remember is that black cats, hair loss, running from villians, and over-eating all mean something.
I’d write a bit more about dreams, but I just can’t wait to go to sleep.
The MBA Chronicles: Game Theory
As a kid, I remember playing lots of American and Chinese chess. My grandpa and uncle would play with me until my dad came home from work and we’d even do doubles every so often. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time playing Starcraft, a real-time strategy game that every kid in high school played. In college, my suite would organize triple- and quadruple- team chess games. I remember staying up all night playing chess and a nice piece of Fat Slice to keep me warm. It wasn’t until I was several years into my job as a marketing manager when I realized how much game theory and strategy affected me. I found myself drawn toward projects that dealt more with strategy rather then operations. Whenever I talked about what a competitor might do and how we had to position ourselves differently, it fired me up. I could not generate the same type of passion for other disciplines like operations.
One of my favorite lessons in my entire first year was “Game Theory.” Our microeconomics professor was from Princeton and a product of the Nash lineage, so he naturally gravitated toward a game theory perspective on economics. Ever since his lecture on all of the common game scenarios in business, I began reading more about the topic. Last week, I read an article about BP’s cleanup effort and I immediately thought, cooperative gaming! Then, I read about the tablet wars and I thought, simultaneously play! Today, my classmate passed along an article that covered a great example of game theory, Lebron’s choice to play for Miami.
The writer sets up the game particularly well. He did oversimplify some of the decisions and made some assumptions about utility, but it all gelled together. After reading the article, I couldn’t help but agree. Lebron would’ve probably ended up in another city had Wade and Bosh announced their decisions later. I wouldn’t go as far to say that Bosh and Wade colluded just to get Lebron, but that’s the beauty of game theory. Many times, we don’t know we are in the game.
I often wonder how much I am influenced by the “game.” If I had gone to a school with less techies, would I pursue a career in technology? How many of my decisions are defensive, where I jockey for position against an impending action? Do I ever choose a sub-optimal outcome due to timing? These are all the things that are going to keep me up at night. At least Lebron has his millions. Then again, I can still visit Cleveland.
The Elderly Recycling Couple
Every week or so I see an elderly Chinese couple picking at our garbage bins. Our condo’s recycling bins are outside of our facilities, so it’s a bottle collector’s gold mine. Today, I happen to exit out the back and saw them digging through piles of plastic bags for all things recyclable. The man was probably in his 70s. He had a plaid, beaten-up blazer with a paperboy hat and looked like one of my grandpa’s old friends from Chinatown. The woman was dressed in some 80s-inspired (probably actual 80s) vest with dark brown sweat pants with black stains on them. After all the times I’ve seen them, today was the day that I noticed what they wore.
I parked my car in the garage and brought them some plastic bottles that we had lying in our trunk. They only spoke Cantonese– they seemed surprised that I spoke to them in their native tongue. At first, the man looked puzzled, as if I had said something in English that sounded Chinese. When I handed over the empty bottles, both of their eyes lit up. They kept on repeating “thank you” and bowed repeatedly. I felt really uncomfortable, so I did what I naturally do– I just started talking. I asked them how often they pick up the bottles. I also asked where else they go to find recyclables. In those short moments, I felt a human connection that I haven’t felt in a really, really long time.
The point of my entry is to remind myself of my place in this here world. I would normally write a reflection about how this experience opened my eyes or affected me in some fabulous way. However, in this instance, it seems very self-centered. It sounds really cheesy, but their diligence and modesty was extremely refreshing. I wanted to give them a hug on the spot. I really do hope I get to chat with them again.
Motivation
I’m sure everyone has seen this by now, but I wanted to post it on my virtual time capsule. I don’t really have a lot of commentary other than the fact that the video explains the mechanics of motivation well for an overwhelming majority of Millennials (people born after 1980). However, I don’t think everyone is motivated the same way (it doesn’t break down into simply purpose and profit-maximizers). I know many people who aren’t moved by purpose– it’s too complex and abstract. In Myers-Briggs speak, these people lean more toward the “S” rather than the “N.”
Anyway, it’s still a good video that makes me think about how to lead others.
Warren Buffett
I guess this Warren Buffett article has been floating around the internetz. My favorite quote:
Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner.
It’s kind of like my life motto, “A rich man is not one who has the most; but one who needs the least.”
The MBA Chronicles: Year #1 – DONE!
I’m a few weeks late, but I wanted to write an eloquent entry about my first year of business school. I had grand ideas– maybe write a limerick, a haiku, or even a sonnet. Well, apparently there isn’t much to say, so I’ll stick to three key thoughts:
It’s About the Experience - Sure, I learned a ton this year. I can now follow my investment banking friends when they spew out their jargon. I can also implement rational models on operational processes– a skill I lacked at my time in Wal-Mart. However, the most important part of business school, as many of my friends have said, is the experience. It’s all about the people you meet and the activities you do.
Despite my crazy schedule, I somehow found time to participate in activities that I’ve had an eye on since I was accepted. First, I took part in our school’s Digital Media Conference. It was a fantastic event. I met some really interesting people and even sat in on panels from the world’s top leaders. You can’t beat that as a wide-eyed first-year. In Spring, I helped out with the Global Social Venture Competition. That was also a rewarding experience. I helped organized two panels, which made networking really easy. I highly encourage being a panel organizer because it gives you an excuse to reach to the extraordinary people. Lastly, I got to work with my favorite airline, Virgin America. Our school has a program called Haas@Work where we provide real, high-impact solutions to world-class clients. Overall, I couldn’t have asked for anything more in my first year.
Leadership Style - I’ve always been drawn to leadership development programs. In business school, you get put through an onslaught of leadership frameworks. By the end of all the workshops, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re good at and what you need to improve on. On the positive side, I am characterized as an Authoritarian Leader, ENFJ (Teacher)/ENTJ (Field Marshal), Influencer, and Dynamic Communicator. Unfortunately, I still have some major opportunities. I still struggle with communicating complex ideas in a short period of time. I also need to work on letting things go and not trying to accommodate everyone. It’s a little scary to put those opportunities on the internetz, but it’ll come out sooner or later. (Hi recruiter!)
I also know what type of leaders I dislike. I abhor selfish, ego-centric, negative, and mean-spirited leaders… and I’ll leave it at that!
Purpose - I enrolled into business school hoping to hone my general management, strategy, and finance skills. I knew that I ultimately wanted to become a CMO, so I didn’t give the “Career Switcher” scenario much thought. However, after participating in all of the conferences, speaker series lectures, and panels, I discovered that my passions lie outside of marketing. At the core, I am still a marketer– a CRM-centric one–but I also rekindled my passion for education and technology. I have been giving a lot of thought about trying another start-up and entering in next year’s business plan competition. I have very fond memories of our three-year jaunt trying to get Vergence Media off the ground. Now that I’m better equipped with a stronger network and operational processes, I just might scratch my itch.
I think what intrigues me about a non-marketing career path is that of purpose. At the end of the day, I want something that creates a lasting impact here on earth. And it’s not because I want my name on a building or anything. I just want the world to be a better place. My wife calls it the “Save the World” disease. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cure for it. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the Silicon Valley and all my friends are doing their own thing to save the world. Well, maybe it’s my conscience telling me that I really need to start recycling more.