Burton Simmons’s “Adventures in Business School”

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 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…

The presentation is given. I got to say things like “and we derived this number using math” and “using a regression analysis of advertising revenue in the radio broadcasting industry”. I think we did well.

In fact, the professor even challenged us on our pricing strategy. “What if your competitor lowered their prices? Could you lower yours?” “Yes,” I replied. “What would that do to your break-even time?” Feeling a challenge, I said, “I haven’t done that analysis… but I could get that for you in a few minutes. I’ll even do it on screen (my laptop was hooked up to the projector) for an ‘A’!” He laughed and replied, “I can’t promise the ‘A’, but I’d like to see it.”

And, as my team fielded a few more questions, I whipped out Excel, ran a new product adoption model given a new market size, plugged that in (and changed the price)… and had an answer in about 5 minutes. I felt awesome.

The professor - known to the students as being skeptical and challenging to present to - simply said, “Good job.”

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.

Of all things, the accounting professor has asked me to be one of two graduate teaching assistants for the first-year accounting class. Because I have difficulty saying “no” to anything, I agreed, and have starting putting in the hours to help ensure that the incoming students have an easier time of it than I did.

As I said, I’m one of two. The other assistant was a fantastic accounting student. She won the oral exam competition we had (I was in the bottom 20%) an got a perfect score on the business case write-ups (where I earned one “A” out of several tries.) The thing is, I have certain skills which would be handy when helping the students, and - according to the professor - I was someone who was reasonably successful in accounting (I did manage to end up with an A-) despite having no background in it whatsoever.

So now, for the first time ever, I have “office hours” (though don’t let the plural there fool you) and I’m getting paid a mighty $11/hour to help out. Which is fine, I’d probably actually do it for free.

Now that classes have started (indeed, it’s already day two) I figured I should share the courses I’ve chosen to take this semester.

Negotiation

Project Management

Marketing Strategy

Business and Economic Forecasting

Public Finance

Why, you might ask, have I chosen to take these classes? That’s a fantastic question. I signed up for Negotiation because I a) want to work on my negotiation skills, and b) I’d heard rave reviews of the course. Project Management interests me greatly, is being taught by a professor I like, and it meets some arbitrary requirement set by the university for “integrative electives.” Marketing Strategy is also taught by a professor I like (and learn from) and I’m enjoying his view of marketing. Business and Economic Forecasting is taught by a professor I admire and pretty much everyone wants to take his class. Finally, Public Finance I’m taking because I a) needed a fifth class, b) have friends taking it, and c) want to give finance another try without having to stress about “corporate valuation”.

So that’s that. I’ll keep y’all posted as this semester unfolds.

So as I mentioned in my previous post, summer classes are over.  I actually ended up taking two classes over the summer which was occasionally stressful (and certainly not inexpensive) but the advantage is that, if all goes well, I’ll only need 3 classes my final semester when the job hunt really picks up!

As I also said, I took a class called Enterprise Architecture over the summer where we looked at how businesses (and IT systems) are constructed to be in alignment with a business’s goals. I also did an “Internship for Credit” course where I was able to take what I worked on and learned in my internship and, with the addition of a paper or two written, get course credit for it.  Fantastic, I’m telling you.

Anyway, I’ll post the grades for these as soon as I get them.  Stay tuned!

Well, I’m working now.  In the span of just over a week I applied for a PROMISE internship at the State of Oregon, interviewed, was offered the job, accepted it, and started working.  Wow, that was fast.  I’ll be making enough to pay my bills for the summer, which is good.  I’m just trying to keep up.  I’m helping at the Department of Revenue as they develop a strategic plan for technology within the agency - it’s far more interesting than it sounds, trust me!

… and I’ve started my summer class.  I’m taking a class called “Enterprise Architecture”, which deals a lot with managing information and databases within an organization.  Our topics of study will be database design with relational databases and decision support systems. It’s going to be interesting; 3 projects over the summer, but not a whole lot of class sessions (since the professor will be jaunting around Europe for a month) so we’ll be doing a lot of stuff online - a good thing, since I’ve had enough classrooms for a while.