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OwenBloggers: Sam - MBA 2008 |
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« December 2007 | Main | February 2008 »
MBA #1: Actually, my goal is to be in a Harvard Business School case study.
MBA #2: But a good one, right?
MBA #1: No. A bad one. (pause) I want to be Eric Peterson.
Technorati Tags: Business School, MBA, Owen, Owen Graduate School of Management, owenbloggers.com, Vanderbilt
A few weeks ago my wife received a letter from the Davidson County Election Committee informing her that her name, social security number, and address was, along with similar information on many many other people, saved on a laptop that was stolen from a downtown office. At the time I wrote a somewhat irate blog posting that made its way on to Nashville Metroblogs. At the time we decided to post it some place other than OwenBloggers because of its limited bearing on life at business school.
It seems like a week doesn't go by without a story about unsecured data. A quick Google News search for "stolen laptop personal data" reveals a disturbing number of stories, many covering events from the past 6 months. This week is no different, with a piece from the Washington Post about yet another stolen laptop that contained unencrypted personal information. This one was from the Georgetown University Student Affairs office and contained information on some 38,000 students and alumni.
Georgetown finds itself in some pretty esteemed company, including the likes of the British Royal Navy (600,000 people's information stolen), the State of Maryland (10,000 people), Boeing (382,000 people), Home Depot (10,000 people), and ING U.S. Financial Services (13,000 people).
Personal laptops that contain unencrypted sensitive personal data are one thing, but these are all major institutions that, presumably, come with their own IT departments that get paid (or perhaps, got paid) for thinking about this sort of stuff.
I understand that its hard to keep track of every single employee's laptop and, more importantly, exactly what they have on it, but can we not agree that an Excel file with sensitive information on 38,000 people might need to be tightly regulated?
Technorati Tags: Business School, MBA, Owen, Owen Graduate School of Management, owenbloggers.com, Vanderbilt
The case study is a staple of the MBA diet. Most of the classes I've had here at the Owen School have partaken in that age-old tradition - most were in print, but some actually embraced the new media revolution and presented online or video versions of themselves, including my personal favorite (think: dog and checkered hat).
A recent article in BusinessWeek profiles the Dean of the Columbia Business School, R. Glenn Hubbard. In response to complaints from prospective employers that MBA grads weren't good at dealing with ambiguity, Dean Hubbard and his team created the Decision Brief. The key to the Decision Brief is data, or the lack thereof - briefs intentionally contain very little data in an effort to replicate the murkiness of the real world.
Its true that many cases are presented very linearly - by the time the hero/heroine settles into their plush, Italian leather chair and turns to stare at the snow falling outside the window of their corner office, you pretty much know where the case is headed. A couple pages further into the case and you pretty much know which parts you can skip/skim and which parts you should read more carefully. And by the time you get to the exhibits you know which one or two are the most important, neglecting development of the skills needed to sift through piles and piles of junk and pull out the one or two gems of information.
Perhaps what's needed is a progression from the traditional case - which would teach, among other things, how to think about this sort of stuff - to the more ambiguous Decision Brief. Or perhaps we should eventually do away with the traditional case study altogether, throw students into the deep end, and let them figure it out.
Incidentally, anyone who's taken Mike Shor's Game Theory class will find this oddly reminiscent. Shor forgoes the traditional HBS cases (and, as a happy consequence, the accompanying $100 class pack) for short memos of his own composition. Typically only a page long, Shor spends fully half that space extolling the virtues of the leather that covers the chair in the office overlooking the snow (seriously, some of the funniest $%^& you'll read in business school). The problem is only defined in a round-about way, and there's very little data provided. Its up to the team to "make it work".
What do you guys think? Are cases too linear and straightforward? Or is it necessary to learning?
Technorati Tags: Business School, Columbia Business School, HBS case study, MBA, Owen, Owen Graduate School of Management, owenbloggers.com, Decision Brief, Vanderbilt
Overheard at lunch today:
MBA #1:
We could sell them Montana.
MBA #2:
We could ... what's the appropriate discount rate for an entire state?
Technorati Tags: Business School, MBA, Owen, Owen Graduate School of Management, owenbloggers.com, corporate valuation, Vanderbilt
The other day I sat in yet another team meeting. Like most meetings, this one saw a handful of people sitting around a table, each separated from the larger group by an open laptop. As has been the case many times before, this group was trying to do entirely too many things at once. In addition to the multiple conversation threads bouncing around the table (only one of which, I'm sorry to say, had anything to do with the assignment that was the actual basis of the meeting), each of us had multiple things going on our respective computer screens - feed reading, Twitter, IM, online shopping, and the ever present time and attention stealer of email.
The consequence of this, somewhat obviously, is that none of us were paying as much attention to the tasks at hand as we should have been. And although we had outlined a semi-clear agenda for the meeting, at times it felt like we could have made our way through the list somewhat more expediently if we had simply focused on one thing rather than many.
In a world that's becoming increasingly crowded with all manner of gadgets and gizmos that are supposed to help us reclaim our time by making us more efficient, it seems that all we're really doing is becoming more efficient at splitting our attention. Many people I know are not only proud of the fact that they do multiple things at once, they say that its the only way they can get everything, or even anything, done.
Linda Stone at the Huffington Post wrote a nice piece about Continuous Partial Attention. Put very simply, Stone argues that while "traditional" multitasking (the act of pairing one action that requires higher level thought with another that is more routine - walking and chewing gum, eating lunch while filing papers, writing a blog post while listening to music, etc) seeks to create opportunities to be more efficient (aka get more things done), CPA seeks to keep continuously informed. Those deeply immersed in CPA (like yours truly, I hate to admit), are, much like Johnny 5, always looking for input - email, news, videos, or whatever our shiny nifty device can put in front of us right this very second.
On the other side of the proverbial coin we have the idea of "mindfulness," or being fully invested in the moment in which you find yourself. Some people advocate reducing distractions by minimizing or quitting applications, turning off email notifications, putting the crackberry in your bag, and many more. Others say we should remove all possible distractions by making liberal use of Quit and Off buttons. Still other say multitasking makes up stupid and should be avoided at all costs.
For the typical professional-type (including MBA's), there's the constant struggle between focus and not shutting yourself off from the world around you. But understanding that there's quite a bit of situational variance, together with the realization that you can, in fact, go "off the grid," if even for an hour of two, might help in getting us to focus and cross off the to-do's that much more quickly and with higher quality output.
Technorati Tags: Business School, continuous partial attention, MBA, Owen, Owen Graduate School of Management, owenbloggers.com, Productivity, multitasking, puppy, Vanderbilt
John will be chatting live with Business Week at 1pm EST (high noon here at "The Owen").
You can read the Business Week article here or jump directly to the chat room here (there's also a link to the chatroom at the top of the article).
The only topic you might want to stay away from is football ...
Technorati Tags: Business School, MBA, Owen, Owen Graduate School of Management, owenbloggers.com, admissions, Vanderbilt
Earlier tonight the VU men's basketball team hosted the Fighting Gamecocks of the University of South Carolina in the SEC opener at Vanderbilt's Memorial Gym. The 'Dores came into the regular season undefeated and ranked 13th (AP, 12th in the coaches poll). With Ole Miss falling to Tennessee, that leaves Vanderbilt and four other teams (Kansas, UNC, Memphis, and Washington State) with undefeated records.
Shan Foster hit two from outside the arc early in the game to move into the all-time lead for 3 pointers at Vanderbilt and then couldn't seem to find his shot for most of the remainder of the game. Aside from a pretty sweet fading jumper late in the second half, most of the late game scoring was left to freshman center AJ Ogilvy, who delivered 21 in the second half for a total of 25 for the game.
The students (pictured at right) were out in full force tonight. It looked like the entire section was SRO tonight. They made so much noise that at times it was hard to hear the band, which is no small feat.
VU faces the Kentucky Wildcats at Rupp Arena this Saturday afternoon (12:30pm central). The game is listed on CBS and should be a good one.
Technorati Tags: basketball, Memorial Gym, owenbloggers.com, Vanderbilt
Yesterday a friend of mine asked me about graduation requirements for the Marketing Concentration here at the Owen School. As is the case with most graduate institutions, the Owen School is continuously learning and reevaluating itself and its requirements for graduation. This past year the marketing department changed the requirements for the incoming first year class, while the second year class had the choice of following the old or new requirements.
The only problem is that the department's website only lists the new requirements. While it makes sense that most people visiting the department's website are prospective students and therefore need the requirements to which they'll be held, it does make it a bit more difficult to find the information that for some reason I forgot to save on my computer.
Enter the Internet Archive.
Over at archive.org they have a tool called the "WayBack Machine." You type in the URL and hit the conveniently titled "Take Me Back" button and the archive spits out dated links to different versions of the page in question.
Once again, the interwebs save my bacon ...
Technorati Tags: Business School, Marketing, MBA, Owen, Owen Graduate School of Management, owenbloggers.com, Internet Archive
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