OwenBloggers: Sam - MBA 2008

My weekend in the House That Jack Built

Ahhh ... Thanksgiving.  A time for rest, a time for reflection, a time for food, football, and friends, a time to catch up on all that studying you just couldn't seem get done over the past few weeks ...

While many of my friends jetted off to exotic locals or the comforts of home, I spent the first three days of my break traveling on The General's dime.  As I've mentioned on other pages of this blog, next year I'll be joining The General's own Experienced Commercial Leadership Program (and because no title is complete without a semi-inscrutible 4 letter acronym, it is more commonly referred to as ECLP).

Over the past few weeks The Program (as I will often call it) has extended offers to a handful of US-based MBA's (I don't know the schedule for international interviews off the top of my head).  Those that received offers, as well as those of us that went through the 12 week interview process called "summer internships," were invited to spend the weekend in New York at the John F. Welch Leadership Center.  Known more commonly as Crotonville, the place is a sprawling complex built into the upper New York countryside complete with 24 hour kitchenettes at the end of every residence hallway stocked with all the ice cream sandwiches you can eat (what can I say?  I'm a simple guy with simple needs).

Aside from the endless supply of ice cream, what really struck me about the weekend was that a handful of the top brass-types took the time to come out and pitch The Program and The Company to us.  They were trying to convince us.  Apparently even Jeff (I've noticed that everyone just calls him "Jeff") wandered by the reception Friday night and spent a few minutes talking.  The fact that I missed it pretty much guarantees that I'll never ever fly Delta again.

And although the trip did very little to dispel my distaste for for all things air travel, it did go a long way in helping me better understand The Company, The Program, my peers, and how all those things fit together.  That, together with the ice cream, made for a pretty good weekend.

Technorati Tags: Crotonville, ECLP, GE, Healthcare, internship, MBA, Owen Graduate School of Management, owenbloggers.com, GE Healthcare

Corporate Ipsum, Game Theory, and the end of the day

This mod I'm taking two classes from the Owen School's own Mike Shor - Pricing and Game Theory (they both have much longer titles, each of which include the perfunctory allusions to strategy and management, but you will, I think, get the gist of the class from those highly abbreviated names).

Both are good classes and Professor Shor is an incredibly engaging professor.  Neither of these are in question, nor are they the subject of this post.

OK?  OK ...

So what, then, IS the subject of this post?

During the opening minutes of our very first Game Theory class, Professor Shor showed us his homage to the ever-popular verbal wasteland that we like to call "Corporate Ipsum" (for those of you not familiar with the inimitable Merlin Mann, I will mention that I remorselessly stole the name from the pages of his blog 43Folders).  Professor Shor, on his personal website, has posted an applet that allows you to generate a grammatically complete sentence that is devoid of any meaning whatsoever.  This, as it turns out, is the perfect tool with which to ... er ... fill out those MBA assignments that don't quite reach the page limit.

My own submission to the database is copied below:

Net-net, by drilling down to hit the fat part of the curve we can leverage the cooperative synergies inherent in the seamless revolution of vertically and horizontally integrated real world business processes.  By combining organic growth with client-centric, future-proof best practices, we will efficiently and dynamically open the kimono to reveal both sticky core competencies and viral conceptualizations delivered in real-time, enthusiastically distinct channels that capture all matrixed and managed relationships in a very unique manner.  At the end of the day, by employing strategizations that parallel simple talk and complex thought we will facilitate the in-sourced, proactively empowered solution generating process.

** some help co-opted from the "Corporate Ipsum" dashboard widget.  Again stolen shamelessly ...