Category: Sloan

Boston Globe: MIT set to pick its first female president. If highly qualified scientist and Yale University provost Susan Hockfield rises to the presidency of the greatest science and engineering school in the world, she will set a gold standard example to women in science and engineering everywhere—not to mention helping the reversal of the systematic marginalization of female professors at the Institute that was first documented in the 1990s.

…are in order to Sloanblogger Shades of Gray, whose recent blog hiatus is explained by today’s posts…about his wedding. Congrats to S. and S. of G., and may they have many happy years together.

I had to point to this item about MPAA chairman and anti-DVD-piracy bigmouth Jack Valenti being interviewed by the savvy staff of The Tech, the student newspaper at MIT. As one might expect, Valenti came away… schooled, but there’s no evidence of forward motion:

TT: No, you said four years ago that people under Linux should use one of these licensed players that would be available soon. They’re still not available — it’s been four years.

JV: Well why aren’t they available? I don’t know, because I don’t make Linux machines.

Let me put it in my simple terms. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, that’s wrong. Number two, if you design your own machine, you can’t fuss at people, because you’re one of just a few. How many Linux users are there?

TT: About two million.

JV: Well, I can’t believe there’s not any — there must be a reason for… Let me find out about that. You bring up an interesting question — I don’t know the answer to that… Well, you’re telling me a lot of things I don’t know.

TT: Okay. Well, how can we have this dialogue?

JV: Well, we’re having it right now. I want to try to find out the point you make on why are there no Linux licensed players. There must be a reason — there has to be a reason. I don’t know.

[Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the MPAA, later pointed to one company, Intervideo, that has a license to sell GNU/Linux DVD software, although the company does not actually sell a product that Linux users can purchase. Linux users who want to watch DVDs should “perhaps buy a DVD player instead,” Taylor said, or “write to Intervideo and others, encourage them that they’re the market,” he said. Will Linux users ever be able to view DVDs on their computers without breaking the law? “I’m sure that day is not far away,” Taylor said.

A spokesman for Intervideo, Andy Marken, said the company’s product is only for embedded systems and that Intervideo has no plans to release a software player for end users.]

Link credit: Pho, Creative Commons blog, others.

I have put together an aggregated list of known bloggers who are either students at or graduates of the MIT Sloan School of Management. The listing, modeled after Hooblogs (my list of UVA bloggers), is currently rather short; my hope is that having a home will encourage more Sloan folks to send me their blog address (or even start blogging!).

New feature for Sloanblogs, to be added to Hooblogs shortly: an aggregated view of all Sloanblogs activity courtesy of Kinja. You can get updates via RSS as new Sloan bloggers are added to the list, and you can add a Sloanblogs blogroll to your site courtesy of Blogrolling.com (see the Sloanblogs page for details).

Good article in the Times today about MIT’s program to bring the culture of entrepreneurship to the UK via a partnership with Cambridge University. They focus on the biotech context; I know that in general the Entrepreneurship Center has been active in this effort regardless of discipline.

It is kind of funny to see an article about entrepreneurship at MIT without hearing about the Sloan School. The PR agent must be slipping. (For the record, my management track at Sloan was in New Product and Venture Development.)

Thanks to Orkut, I learned tonight that Shades of Gray, fellow 2002 Sloan MBA, has a blog. Subscribed (note: may take some time for the crawler to pick up my updates). Now, if S. of G. would just post more than once a month…

Looks like George and Becky had a great ski weekend. I’m envious of all the powder and the empty mountains, but not the drive. So far we haven’t had to do chains on our cars to get up to the slopes, even at Whistler.

Good crowd out last night at the IAP young alum gathering. True to the title, most of the folks there were young alums—folks who had finished their undergrad degrees in 2002 or 2003. But I had some nice conversations with a few of them.

I also had a chance to talk with Don, Kumar, Peter, and a few other Sloan folks. Don is apparently “living the dream” and working on the startup thing. It was good to see everyone.

Looks to be a busy few weeks at work. I am, however, going to take time out to go to an MIT alumni gathering in Seattle tonight. Hopefully I’ll get to see some of my friends from Sloan—for whatever reason we don’t get together nearly as often as we should.

According to email I received from the alumni office this morning, Charles Vest has announced his intention to retire from the presidency of MIT (link to letter).

I didn’t get to see Mr. Vest in action very much in the two years I was in my graduate program, but he certainly presided over a lot of change. It will be interesting to see who follows him in the office; only one other person has served longer as Institute president.

I found on Tuesday night that MIT Sloan had turned off WiFi access for unknown laptops. In olden days (as recently as last year), using a WiFi card with an unknown id number would redirect you to a page where you could register as an alumnus. Talking to the students, I learned that the IT department had shut that door to prevent Blaster from running wild.

This morning I went to one of the main campus MIT libraries and went to the IS pages, and found no mention of turning off alumni WiFi access. Opening my laptop, I found that I actually could still access the network while on MIT’s main campus. I registered my laptop and am now happily surfing in my favorite main campus location, the Lewis Music Library.

This all raises a question: did MIT find that the b-school students were less likely to patch their systems than the main campus engineering students? Or did the IT department at Sloan (which is partly independent of the main campus IS group) decide on their own to save themselves headaches by pre-empting the problem? The fact that Sloan is mostly a Windows shop while the rest of the campus tends to be pretty heterogeneous may also have something to do with it. The end result, though, is that laptops are less trusted at Sloan than on main campus.

New York Times: Franco Modigliani, 85, Nobel-Winning Economist, Dies. The great man’s presence at the Sloan school was always felt, though I don’t believe I ever actually met him.

The obituary emphasizes his economic research in life-cycle theory, but my corporate finance professor structured much of the theoretical side of our class around the Modigliani-Miller Theory, which said that, except in certain edge cases, a firm’s choice between financing growth with equity or debt is largely meaningless because the specific capital structure (ratio of debt to equity in a firm’s balance sheet) is irrelevant. The theory says that certain common modes of corporate thought are fallacies, including “debt is cheaper than equity,” “taking on debt is better if your earnings per share growth is up, and the weighted average cost of capital should be higher for highly leveraged companies because of the risk to equity. (You may still see some of these fallacies in business journalism or hear them from your boss.)

Of course, this being MIT, we then spent the rest of the semester exploring cases in which Modigliani-Miller ignored certain frictions of the market, including the effect of debt on a firm’s tax burden (it decreases it) and the potential costs of financial distress should a firm be unable to repay its debts.

Hysterical FedEx commercial reflecting how so many young MBAs enter the business world: snotty, arrogant, and with very little grasp of reality.

Transcript:

Woman: Hi, Tom, I know it’s your first day, but we could really use your help.
Tom: (with slightly smug smile, pulling on suit jacket) You got it.
Woman: (walking) We’re just in a bit of a jam.
Tom: (squirts breath spray)
Woman: (continues, gesturing to roomful of FedEx boxes) All this has to get out today…
Tom: (look of astonishment, smug smile returning) Yeah…uh…I don’t do shipping…
Woman: Oh, no no no, it’s very easy. We use FedEx.com (sitting him down at a computer open to the FedEx.com website). Anybody can do it.
Tom: (smug smile wider, he can’t believe she’s asking him to do this) Uh… no… you don’t understand: I have an MBA.
Woman: Oh, you have an MBA…
Tom: Yeah.
Woman: In that case I’ll have to show you how to do it.

Of course, no one from Sloan would ever be that arrogant. Right?

Just one last item and I will get to bed. I was at a Sloan info session in downtown Seattle tonight, as I alluded in my previous post. Great alum turnout. There were probably about twenty alums there (to about thirty prospective students!), including a few LFM friends from my class (Brent, we definitely have to do dinner sometime) and some friends from 2003 I hadn’t seen in quite a while (Kumar Doshi—it’s definitely time to do a Sloanies at Microsoft lunch; Don Hyun, maybe we’ll get an evening out to catch up).

In addition to old friends and lots of prospective students, I also got a chance to talk to a ’94 alum, Jason Farris, who is VP for Services for a Microsoft partner, Fincentric. His company supplies enterprise software solutions to the financial services vertical market. He notes that while Microsoft has provided co-marketing funds, technical sales support has sometimes been less forthcoming. IMHO (and needless to say, this blog is my opinion only, no warranty is implied), this is an area where we could do better.

George leaves some notes from San Francisco, having (quite sensibly) not blogged his way across country. And somehow I missed his post from August 1 about getting XM Radio. Jealous=me.