Category: Sloan

Free a cappella in Cambridge

In concert tonight, in the lobby of Building E-52 (50 Memorial Drive in Cambridge for the MIT-impaired), the Sloan E-52s. Featuring lots of fine a cappella stylings. And stuff.

This is by way of apologizing for the lack of blogging today. I have things to say, but I’m saving them for my group.
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Hating your professors? Madnick on the stand

Slashdot: Microsoft Expert Witness Stumbles. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was Stuart Madnick, legendary Sloan School of Management IT professor. He is an institute professor. It’s interesting how many main campus (i.e. non-Sloan MIT) people on Slashdot jumped up to disclaim any knowledge of him when his testimony went awry.

Actually, reading the direct testimony, he did point out some interesting things. Does removing “the browser” mean removing the IE user interface? the HTML renderer (which is now used by substantial portions of the Windows explorer UI?
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A cappella in the NYT? Quick, call our publicist

New York Times: Campuses Echo With the Sound of a Cappella. It’s true, it’s all true.

But it’s not new. I graduated from Virginia in 1994, and in the time I was there the scene went from four groups (Virginia Gentlemen, Virginia Belles, Hullabahoos, and Sil’Hooettes) to six with the addition of the New Dominions and the Academical Village People, not counting the “graduate and professional school groups” (there was a group at the Med school whose name, shamefully, I can’t remember).

Now I’m directing a young group at the Sloan School of Management, the E-52s. In many ways our group is more typical. We don’t have 50 or 60 people trying out; we don’t sing in championships or Avery Fisher Hall. We just hang out and sing and have fun. And joke about singing songs like Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army” or the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll” a cappella. And occasionally we stop joking and start learning a song or two.
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Not too busy to rock

I’ve been a bit quiet the last few days because I’ve been getting the Sloan E-52s ready to rock the house. Our Spring Jam is May 9 and we just signed one of the best MIT a cappella groups, the MIT/Wellesley Toons, as our guests.

I’m really excited about this show. It will culiminate more than a year of hard work for me as director of the group and a lot of sweat on the part of the group members. Plus we’ll be doing an a cappella arrangement I did of a Velvet Underground song…but I won’t tell you which one. (Hint: you’ve seen it on this page today.) After I graduate I’ll have to start making some of my arrangements available over the web; a lot of them will never be performed because they’re too weird.

Eccentricity’s reward

It’s a beautiful day at Sloan this morning—cold but clearing, wet sidewalks from yesterday’s rain (badly needed), and quiet.

Today’s thought, from David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy and Mather: “Develop your eccentricities early, and no one will think you’re going senile later in life.”

Getting Sloan on Radio

John Robb, UserLand’s President and COO, graciously pointed to me after I gave him a little grief yesterday for pointing at a Kellogg student’s weblog. He also raised an interesting question: what would it take to get MIT Sloan on Radio? (That’s Radio UserLand, not AM or FM, for those of you playing along at home.)

Good question, John. There are three ways to do it that I can see, each with its own merits and disadvantages:

  1. Centralized push. Have Sloan’s IT services folks set up a Radio Community Server and put Radio on every first year MBA’s laptop.
  2. In the classroom. Have a few professors start using Radio as a knowledge sharing mechanism and put part of the class participation grade for their students in how well they use their weblogs.
  3. From the grassroots. Have a few bleeding edge folks get their sleeves up and evangelize it.

Approach #1 is how our last “knowledge sharing” system, a custom version of the open source ACS from the late lamented ArsDigita, was implemented. People are using it for calendaring, surveys, and file storage. That’s about it. There is a little bulletin board traffic, but for the most part outside of course websites and maybe the shared calendar it’s not part of the Sloan academic culture of idea sharing.

Approach #2 might have some legs. There are some classes, including the introduction to IT class, a few of the marketing classes, and a class being taught on virtual communities, with which Radio is a natural fit. You might get the professors on board pretty quickly, with the students doing exercises in Radio for a semester.

Approach #3 is where we are right now. By virtue of my getting out and talking about my weblog, I’ve got George and Adam on board. But that’s three, with no faculty.

I’d love to know how many people at Kellogg are active bloggers, and how they’re using Radio—for personal weblogging, academic reflection, industry commentary, or some combination of the three.
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(phew) for a minute there I lost myself

Currently playing in my skull: Radiohead’s “Karma Police.” I dropped a course on Friday that I thought didn’t look promising, and that I thought I didn’t need. Over the weekend, I got paranoid and checked my requirements again. Good thing; it turned out I needed the course after all. I got in early Monday and was able to pick up my drop form and shred it before it got processed. Score one for paper-based processes. I complain about them being in place, but there aren’t many information systems that are designed to allow that much time for second guessing.

I never really understood “Karma Police” and am not sure I do still, but yeah, for a minute there…

Moving slowly

Spring break is here. I’m taking the advice of one of my professors; in a group meeting yesterday, she told us, “You all look really tired. Go home and get some sleep.” Yes ma’am. Well, some sleep and some EV Nova…

Welcome aboard, George

Welcome to my friend George, who is just starting his blog. George, welcome to the blogging life. It’s more fun and more engrossing than you think.

Confession: I found George’s blog by looking at my referral logs. OK, so I’m happy with my writing again and looking at my referers. But I’m not obsessive about it. I’m only obsessive about my news page on Radio.
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Other people’s water, and new readers

Just finished a gig with the Sloan E-52s for admitted MBAs at a lunch at MIT Sloan. I sing harmony with the soloist on one of the songs, REM’s “Superman,” and I got a chance today to do something I’ve always wanted to do. There’s a section in the song where the soloist is by himself for four measures while I lay out after hitting a couple high notes in a row. Today, after the second high note I leaned over to the table to my left, asked “Is anyone drinking this?”, took a big sip, and got back in time to make my next entrance. Look on the soloist’s face: Priceless.

After the gig, I had my first face to face meeting with a new reader to whom I’m not related. One of the admits introduced himself and said he found my site while searching for weblogs by Sloan students. (As far as I know, I’m the only one.) He’s a Seattleite who’s “99.9% sure” he’ll be at Sloan in the fall. He’s also introduced his fiancée to blogging, but his own blog is currently in design paralysis and he hasn’t written anything yet. Well, here’s your public push: Get writing! A weblog isn’t a weblog without content!!

An explanation for the diagram

I fell down when I posted this diagram. I should really have written a brief explanation. I’ll restrict myself to describing the main loops. Of course you can substitute whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing instead of blogging for “schoolwork effort” in the diagram:

  • B1: “Oh crap” As schoolwork effort decreases, guilt increases, leading eventually to more schoolwork effort.
  • B2: “Burnout” As schoolwork effort increases, boredom increases, which decreases schoolwork effort.
  • B3: “Waste time” As boredom increases, web surfing increases, which leads to an increase in blogging effort, decreasing schoolwork effort.
  • R1: “Show off” As schoolwork effort increases, intellectual curiosity increases, spawning original ideas and increasing blogging effort… this gets eyeballs and leads to more blogging. (This may be either a balancing or reinforcing loop, I’m not sure.)
  • R2: “Addiction” This is the simplest closed loop. As you put more effort into your blog, you eventually get eyeballs. This feels like a reward and encourages you to put in more effort.

The last loop is the most vicious. It’s why I had to stop looking at my referer logs; I wasn’t doing much schoolwork any more, I was blogging so much.

Reading the entrails

Eric Norlin takes a stab at the current economic situation and doesn’t like what he sees:

I’ve been doing some thinking about the contraction in the commercial paper market and the possible ripple effects on any economic recovery…diagnosis: all of the predictions for the Q3 turn around are wrong. It’ll be at least Q4 and maybe Q1 of 03 before this ship really turns. This, of course, means the stock market will tread water until at the very least April — and more likely June.

Eric’s thesis, briefly, is that massive debt overhang problems is about to hit a generation of managers raised to believe that debt (commercial paper) is cheap, which will create totally unexpected liquidity crises (cash shortfalls) and cause another rash of bankruptcies. This is consistent with my Finance II class: the main place (other than taxes) that the Modigliani-Miller theorem breaks down is in the frictions created by large amounts of debt in the capital structure.

BTW, Eric, your site navigation leads something to be desired. I had to work really hard to find a permalink to that article.
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