Category: Sloan

There’s a nice article in the current edition of The Tech about ego surfing, although the writer didn’t do enough research about it to mention that term.

Where’s the irony? Why, the fact that the article isn’t on the Web edition of The Tech yet! No wonder it took years for the author to get his name to # 1 on his search engine of choice (which I assume is Google, though he doesn’t specify).

Here’s my obligatory ego surfing link. Note that all of the pages except one are by or about me.

Update 22 Feb: Now the article is available on line. Interestingly the site says “last updated Feb 19” on the main page, though the content wasn’t there until today…
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Today at school I ran into Steven, an old friend from AMS, my pre-business school employer. He’s in his first year at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, and through sheer coincidence was cross-registered in the same systems dynamics class that I’m taking. A strange feeling to see such a familiar face as we’re handing in homework assignments.

This article on CNET talks about the work of Loren Hitt, who co-taught my course on E-Business. I knew it was him even before I read the article; as he told us, “If you see anything about poaching, shirking and opportunistic renegotiation, you know it’s from Wharton and from me or one of my students.”

“Clemons and Hitt conclude that poaching offers new and formidable challenges as the global economy becomes more knowledge-intensive. According to Clemons, it is ‘a newly significant form of opportunism’ and it represents ‘the growth opportunity in e-commerce white-collar crime.’ Poaching requires different analytical models and remedies, many of which still need to be developed. Only partly in jest, he quips: ‘Maybe companies should actually encourage poaching of their own intellectual property–but figure out a way to get paid for it.'”

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Good article at the New York Times describing the research of one of my marketing professors, Ely Dahan, using trading simulations to determine consumer preferences for features of goods or services.

“The closing prices were generally consistent both with consumer sentiments culled from more traditional market research and with previous trading experiments at M.I.T. In just minutes, for example, the trading echoed the disappointment with the Aztek and enthusiasm for the MDX demonstrated by car buyers over the last year. ‘General Motors might have been able to save itself a lot of pain if it had run trading like this a couple of years ago,’ Professor Dahan said.”

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From the New York Times: “Two members of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals were accused of embezzling about $91,000 from the 207-year-old student group for drugs, a party and entertainment equipment.”

Two thoughts spring immediately to mind:

1. $91,000? And it took the club that long to notice?
2. I’m attending the wrong university. If you multiplied the annual budget of the two clubs I’m involved with by each other, it wouldn’t be a tenth of the amount that these two jokers embezzled.

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I think my blogging habits will be changing this semester. Last semester classes were 1 to 4 every day, leaving plenty of time to wake up, blog, do reading, and eat lunch before classes. This semester my classes cluster from 10 to 2:30, so it’s a very different dynamic. I think I’ll be blogging mostly in the afternoon.

… for the last semester of classes. It’s interesting and scary–I’ve gotten very accustomed to being in a learning and growing mode over the last couple of semesters. It’ll be quite a transition getting out into the real world.

I’m in a workshop on distributed leadership for the next three days, so there won’t be a lot of blogging. (Famous last words.) I already have some things I want to try to write about. For instance, is creation a fundamentally selfish act? Or is it only selfish the way I do it? 🙂

I keep forgetting to post the results of last week’s IAP College Bowl. I’m sorry to say that the omission is probably Freudian. Yes, we lost, but we were the winners of the “losers’ bracket,” and I got invited to join the team. Maybe, in my copious spare time…

Interesting article in the New York Times on Amazon today, regarding the importance of their operations management capability in making profit. I’d like to point out for the record that Jeff Wilke isn’t just an MIT alum, he’s an MIT Sloan alum. You don’t read stories like that about Harvard Business School grads, do you? 🙂
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Well, here I am. Sitting back in the Sloan lobby, waiting for some trivia folks. We’re off to battle the real MIT brains, which is anyone not involved in the business school program. That’s ok, I’ll take old age and guile over youth and enthusiasm every time.

I’m really playing catch-up here, looking over my blog for the last three weeks (which have been pretty crazy) and going back to highlight things that have happened that I haven’t written about.
Thing #1: The MIT Sloan talent show. The show concluded with a slide show of “Separated at Birth” headshots. It was pretty funny, especially the one of yours truly and Jim Nabors. Okay, so I look a little like the guy. The real irony is that he had a heck of a singing voice too.

One more down. I finished the Finance final yesterday afternoon just in time to run to the first of a series of meetings.

I looked over the day’s updates late last night and was surprised to see how calm I was yesterday morning. By last night I was a mess. I finished the first pass at the final E-Lab slides, took the Finance final (a take-home) for about three and a half hours, and headed in to our team meeting. That necessitated a redo of my slides, and ran until E-52s rehearsal was to start for the talent show. I grabbed a plate of food from a reception that was going on (hey, I was invited), ran rehearsal, and then we split for the auditorium.

The talent show was a lot of fun. The Sloan Hanukkah Song was cute, although it’s a shame it took three guys to do what Adam Sandler could do by himself… A few of the Italians from our class performed the Three Tenors (with pillows under their tux shirts) singing “O Sole Mio”–and followed with a singalong. I had a lot of fun bellowing in my best Pavarotti. Maybe there’s something to the concept of learning some of those songs like Lisa keeps asking. The group did really well with our three songs–got a lot of compliments. The highlight, though, had to be Bob, Barry, Chris, Juan, and Sam performing a plugged in “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as the Jack Tang Orchestra, looking a lot like G’n’R and sounding really really good. I guess everyone’s as happy to be done with the semester as we are…

It’s a quiet morning. I have a few things to work on today: a few last slides for my E-Lab project, a take-home final for Finance II. And a thick fog outside that blots out the top of the tall buildings normally visible from outside my window.

No classes until February. Kind of nice, actually. I’ve spent–I think all my classmates have spent–the entire semester since 9/11 waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now it’s going to be all done in less than a week. What have I accomplished?

Well, the out of class things spring to mind first. We found some great first years to run with things for e-MIT–starting with rebranding it, to Sloan Entrepreneurs. Which just makes so more sense. And the E-52s got past a rough start to be a really cohesive group. We have our final gig of the semester tonight, and I’m just going to enjoy it.

Reaching the end of Finance II is a big deal… We wrote a really great paper for eBusiness…. I think it’s too early to decide the accomplishments for the rest yet, but somehow just getting to the end feels like an accomplishment.

Well, almost to the end. Gotta go hit those slides…

Ugh. Three courses down, three to go. I just delivered the final paper for my eBusiness course (more on that in a second). Now I need to catch my breath and turn around a take-home final, write a final paper for Literature, Ethics, and Authority, and finish our group presentation for eLab. (By the way, all of the above is why I haven’t blogged much lately.)