Burton Simmons’s “Adventures in Business School”

My negotiation class had its final session a couple weeks ago. This was not, however, the last thing I had to do for the class. We still had a take-home final to do, but the professor was going to send it to us electronically later in the week.

Well, that time came and went and we did, indeed, get an email with our final in it. The final was not designed to be especially challenging; our workshops and intermediate papers were where the real work was. The professor even stated in the email that he didn’t expect us to spend more than a couple hours on it.

… and I didn’t. We were given a week to work on it - it was due last Tuesday. Being surprisingly proactive, I even finished it several days in advance (Sunday) and planned to print it out at school and turn it in Monday. (I don’t have a printer at home, since I a) don’t print a lot, and b) don’t have room for it in my 300 square-foot apartment.)

Well, Monday passed and, you know, being in a Master’s program, I got really busy and forgot to turn it in. No big deal, I’ll do it Tuesday.

Well, Tuesday came and, in the hustle and bustle of getting everything done for my other classes and getting ready for Thanksgiving… I forgot. Plain and simple, I spaced it.

Now, I didn’t remember all of this until Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, at which point I desperately penned an email to my professor with a humble apology, an inadequate explanation (how can you not look down upon “I forgot”?), a copy of my final, and of offer to do any extra work I could to complete the class should he not accept it (or just deem it necessary.)

After a night of fretting about it, I woke up Saturday and forwarded that email from his school address to his personal address (wanting to cover my bases.)

To my infinite relief, the professor chose, Saturday evening, to show mercy and accepted my final, late though it was. Words can not describe the worry that was alleviated upon reading his reply.

And that is the story of narrowly avoided tragedy in my Negotiations class.

As I was surfing the web the other day I came across an article titled “Business School is a Joke“, written by a 19-year old sophomore in the Ross School of Business’s undergraduate business program. In many ways, I see what he’s saying in his article, though in many ways I vigorously disagree - perhaps due to my age, experience, the fact that I’m in a master’s program instead of an undergraduate one, or the program I’m actually in. However, here are some of the main points his article:

Here, he’s talking about a local deli’s head of corporate strategy and managing parter.

During her 45 minute PowerPoint-guided presentation, she said the word “growth” eleven times; she talked about deliverables and accountability; she went over their various systems, their management structure, and their mission statement. She didn’t mention sandwiches until I asked her which one she liked the most. She didn’t mention that the owners traveled extensively picking ingredients at tiny farms and bakeries, or brag about their customer service (their founder wrote a best-selling book about it), or describe their massive mail-order sales, or explain the seminars and tastings from which they generate a substantial profit, etc. In short, she didn’t really say anything at all, and yet the kids around me were taking notes.

That’s the root of the problem. That’s what the business school teaches us to do. Not once has a professor told us to “make great products” or “do something people love.”

Here’s a newsflash: the person was probably talking about corporate strategy, and trying to be generic. Corporate strategy doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “products you love”, but about taking someone else’s product and maximizing it. It’s like a chess game; you don’t worry about your individual pawns or pieces, per se, you worry about winning the game. So I think maybe he missed the point on this one.

One of his good points comes from examining the depth of his classes:

There’s nothing wrong with introductory classes. Basic concepts, after all, need to be addressed early on. The problem was (a) the lack of rigor: we were taught to “plug and play” numbers (in accounting, too) rather than understand them.

Now I can say that we are rigorous in my program; we definitely don’t teach “plug and play” numbers here. Depth of understanding can help in interpretation. However, at the undergraduate level (and in the beginning of the program, no less) perhaps the importance isn’t always in understanding how the work is done but what the results mean. I see his point, but I disagree with his viewpoint on this one.

Here’s another gem from his rant:

At business school, it seems, bullshit wins.

Again, I’m going to disagree. For very few professions out there is time irrelevant. So, while striving for absolute quality is perhaps admirable, striving to maximize time and results is a even more admirable. In paraphrasing (and loosely applying) the 80/20 rule, if I can produce 80% of the results from 20% of the effort it otherwise takes, then I can actually do a lot more with my time if I let quality slip a bit. It’s not about bullshit, it’s about optimizaiton.

His concluding paragraph, despite some of the quality of his earlier points, proves to me that he’s missing the point:

Mandatory group work teaches you how to manage, and thus it’s at the heart of a curriculum designed to build professional managers. What this really means, though, is that it teaches kids how to assign tasks to people who aren’t capable of doing them, how to schedule wasteful meetings to re-format and explain individuals’ work, and how to make bad and inconsistent PowerPoint presentations. I’ve read enough Dilbert to know that the b-school model of management is accurate, but that doesn’t make it good.

You see, being an effective manager or even leading people isn’t just assigning tasks to people who aren’t capable of doing them. If I go out there and do little more than schedule wasteful meetings, than I haven’t learned what they taught me here. Instead, effective management is about producing great work from good people. It’s about figuring out the best way to do things, not just a good way. It’s about distilling patterns from unrelated facts. It’s about arranging individual resources to produce the maximum result possible, while taking little to no credit for success and all the blame for failure. That is what business school is about, not producing Dilbert-like managers who consume more than they produce.

And that’s why I think he really missed the point.

The semester is starting to wind down and it’s time to register for classes for my final semester. In this last semester I’m only going to take three courses, which is technically part-time but it’s all I need to graduate. I assure you, I’d love to take more but, since I paid to take two courses over the summer, I can’t afford to go full time now.

Such is life.

In any event, the schedule of classes available has been posted. I’ve managed to narrow down my list of classes I want to take to 8:

Strategic Applications
Sales Force Management
Not-for-profit Management
Net Enhanced Organizations
Data Mining
Operations Management
Value Chain Management
Leadership

Now, I definitely want to take Leadership. And, if possible, I’d like to constrain any daytime classes to Tuesdays and Thursdays (so I can do job-hunting stuff the other days.) Finally, and I’m a little flexible on this, I’d really rather not have an 8 AM class since I’m NOT a morning person and I learn better with good sleep.

So what shall I do? It’s a conundrum.

I’m enjoying my public finance class.

We’re learning a lot about the State of Oregon budget process – more than about local or federal systems. This is great for me; I have a real interest in how my state works. Furthermore, since we’re so close to the state capitol, we have access to people (who come in as guest speakers) who really know how this works. For instance, we’ve had someone from the state Office of Economic Analysis come talk to us. We’ve also had a speaker from the Legislative Fiscal Office. These speakers help make real an otherwise merely conceptual topic.

Some of the more interesting points in the class are our discussion of taxation theory; what constitutes progressive versus regressive taxation and the idea of taxing wealth versus taxing income. (For the record, I wholly and completely oppose taxing wealth, which includes the taxation of property.)

I’m glad I’m taking it.

I spent all day in a mock negotiating session today. I was one of a team of four people, and what I learned about negotiation is that there are unreasonable, stupid people out there. People who – when theoretically on your own team – do not seem to understand basic math or be able to clearly communicate an idea. The worst part of this is that these people may someday be in charge.

In my specific instance during all this, I left the negotiation frustrated beyond capacity for reason. There are people on my team that I now know I will never work with, because my interests (win/win scenarios) are not aligned with theirs.

So be it.

A hypothetical that I posed:

“Would you ask someone to pay for 50% of your car so they could use it 30% of the time?”

If you can, I salute you. I can tell you, however, that if someone asked that of me I’d be incredibly insulted. (And let me assure you, we talked about the “zones” in distributive bargaining – those zones being reasonable, credible, and insulting offers.)

Anyway, I’m ready to be done with this class. I’ve learned a lot, but it just cost me a Saturday that was supposed to be an otherwise great day.

It’s time to start playing games. Seriously.

At this point in the semester, most of the work I’m going to be doing on a daily basis will be for simulations. My marketing strategy class will be working with something called MarkStrat. We’ve divided into teams and we will be competing in a strategic simulation as we fight for market share in a growing market, working on innovation, customer interaction, market definition, etc. Thus far it’s a lot of fun, but I also enjoy strategic game.

The other game is SimProject, for my project management class. It’s a project management simulation where groups will be bidding on resources, assigning those resources to tasks, and managing the group while trying to complete the project (and competing against other groups based on total project duration, project cost, and a few other variables.)

Both are going to be a lot of work, but I’m going to do whatever it takes for my teams to win. Not that I’m competitive…

So here’s a story for you:

It starts, like many stories do, in the past. The setting is our Marketing Strategy class, where we had divided into three-person teams for a case analysis paper and presentation. We had chosen to do an XM Satellite Radio pricing strategy case.

My group, upon getting our case assignment, looked at the syllabus and said “Ah ha! XM Satellite Radio… presentation on October 16th, analysis due the 14th. Cool, we’ve got time.” And we promptly got off to a slow start and planned on doing the work later.

Fast forward to last Sunday, the 30th of September. We had planned a 6 hour group meeting to really start getting some traction early and figure out what we needed to do for the case. Yes, we felt like we were being pretty proactive about it.

At 10:00 AM - two hours before our meeting - the professor sent out an email saying something to the effect of, “the three teams presenting on Thursday the 4th are [group 1], [group 2], and XM Satellite Radio. Remember, your analysis is due on Tuesday the 2nd.” Despite the fact that we weren’t listed on the syllabus, were we going to waste time trying to ask the professor about that on a Sunday?

Very not good.

So we did what any self-respecting MBA students would do and got to work. The challenge was to come up with a profitable pricing strategy - but also to be able to predict what the future revenue might be. And while we’d just read another case that gave us a great deal of information on predicting XM’s growth compared to other new products, I’d never done a Bass model.

I took the lead and assigned one of my teammates to write up the background and create a value proposition, another team member to detail the product mix, and - being the most analytically gifted of the group - I took the forecasting and actual pricing strategy on myself.

Sunday night: Work until 4 AM, sleep, get up and go to class.

Monday night: Collect the parts from my team at midnight, start assembling…

And, Monday night (at 1:30 AM), Comcast decided to do maintenance on my internet connection. I called, frustrated, because I would need to send a draft back to my team. “We should be done by 6 AM your time.” That didn’t work, so - like the true rock star that I am - I hopped in the car and drove over to the school, where I worked until 3:30 AM coming up with a solid draft, emailed it out, and went home and to bed at 4 AM.

Up again on Tuesday, and to Marketing Strategy at 11 AM, draft in hand. After class I approached the professor and explained our curiosity at the fact that we weren’t listed on the syllabus. He was surprised as well, since we were on his copy. And, it turns out, that the syllabus he was working off of was NOT the same as the one the students had - despite having the same filename. In fact, probably the most significant difference was our presentation date.

He was dismayed.

We were given a choice. We could push our presentation off a week (to be fair) or - if we were actually ready - we could continue to go on Thursday. My biggest concern was the fact that we hadn’t had a chance to run our numbers past him and get at least one round of mid-development feedback. He agreed to look over our paper in the hour following class (1:30-2:30) and get it back to us. It would be due at 5:00, though he also said we could email him at that time and decide to go next week.

I launched into revising our paper with his guidelines. I put in more forecasts and was just in the middle of some analysis, at 3:00 (two hours to the deadline), I realized that I had made what I call a “Mars Surveyor” error: I’d been directly comparing monthly revenue to annual revenue - without conversion.

That I was able - in two hours - to completely revise our analysis, graphs, charts, and conclusion is a testament to - let’s be honest - me. I was awesome. I’ll admit it. We turned in a 5 page paper (with 6 pages of appendices) that, while I’m not overly proud of it, I’m not ashamed, either.

I slept like a baby Tuesday night.

Wednesday (yesterday), after my public finance class from 6 - 9 PM, my group met again at the school to develop the presentation we’re about to give. In four hours we manage to put together a nice-looking presentation (using Keynote) that would concisely convey our point. Then we practiced it three times and went to bed.

And now I’m sitting here in my suit, and we’re about to give our presentation.

We’ll see how it goes.

School is done. I have, for better or for worse, turned in my last final.  (Finals were actually the LEAST stressful part of this semester!)  PaCE is over.  I am, officially, on summer break.  I’m really hoping for a 3.3-ish GPA this semester… finance was definitely my weakest class, though I think I did all right in Statistics, Information Systems, and “Managing Organizations”.  We’ll see.
Now I have to find an internship for the summer.  Yes, I’m looking.

Because my life is awesome, it’s 2:15 AM and I’m at school.  I’ve been working with some of my favorite classmates on a final review for tomorrow as well as a write-up for the IKEWs we have next week.  Yes, I have class in 7 hours and 45 minutes, and yes, I have a final in the morning as well.  Did I mention my life is awesome?

So I’m currently struggling a lot with a case write-up for my finance class.  I feel lost (just as I did last semester) because there’s all this talk about stock valuation and corporate models and all that and we’re NEVER taught any real way to connect that to the real world.  Nowhere can I find a simple “take these 10 variables from the 10-k, plug them into this equation, and here you go.”  As a result, everything I’m reading uses terminology that I can’t actually relate to the real world.  Oh, discounted future cash flows?  As of when?  It’s all a guess anyway.

So yeah.  Finance is a joke.  It really is.  Understanding things like opportunity cost and the time value of money are important, but obscure arcane things like “stock valuation” which have little or no effect on things like “stock price” are irrelevant and stressful.